Maniac (1934)

Sex Maniac

Cast:

Bill "I was Seniors in the 70s?" Woods is Don Maxwell
Horace B. Carpenter is Dr. Meirschultz
Ted Edwards is Buckley
Phyllis "I wasn't in the Fat Spy" Diller is Mrs. Buckley
Thea Ramsey is Alice Maxwell

What the box says:

An ex-vaudeville actor is the assistant to a doctor with Frankenstein aspirations. After murdering the doctor, the would-be actor finds it necessary to assume the identity of the dead physician. Edgar Allen Poe's THE BLACK CAT is written into the storyline.

Plot:

The scrolling text informs us how great the brain is.

Dr. Mierschultz is at work and ready to finally test on humans.

Why would you think SCIENCE is going on here? He has his assistant, Don Maxwell; prove his loyalty by impersonating a coroner to get into the morgue. Refusing at first, Maxwell eventually relents.

At the morgue, Maxwell and Mierschultz find a suicide victim to use for experimentation and take her body.

Why you should always look where you're stepping

Later, the cops investigate the body that disappeared.

At Mierschultz’s lab, he’s wants to replace the victim’s heart with the re-beating heart. Maxwell is ordered to get the heart. Mierschultz gives him a gun and orders him to kill himself and then will be bring him back to life. However, Maxwell shoots his boss.

Ranting, Maxwell will continue Mierschultz’s work.

Ms. Buckley wants Mierschultz to check on her brother. Maxwell stalls her off.

Later, Maxwell decides to disguise himself as Mierschultz. Disguised as the bushy-bearded scientist, he checks on Buckley. Giving him a placebo, Buckley is rambling.

Ms. Buckley finds Mierschultz’s body. Maxwell explains how his assistant killed himself. She wants him to lobotomize her brother so she can control him.

The cat knocks the heart container on the floor. Maxwell decides to hide the body as cruelty to cats ensues. Maxwell bricks the body up in the basement wall.

Maxwell has left his wife, Alice, behind. Alice decides to pay Mierschultz a visit and claims Maxwell inherited a fortune.

Bushy bearded Maxwell is around a bunch of burlesque dancers.

His narration reveals he is sure that Alice wants to kill him. He convinces Ms. Buckley help him catch Alice.

Alice learns of Maxwell’s inheritance. He explains there’s a crazy lady in the next room and how he needs her help to take her into the basement.

They all go downstairs when Ms. Buckley and Alice get into a fight. Cat-fight that more realistic than a WWE Divas match. Giant superimposed hands as Maxwell is laughing maniacally.

Dance for your puppet master

Cops show up and separate Alice and Ms. Buckley. Cops search the house, tearing down the wall, and find Mierschultz’s body.

Dead mad scientist is almost as gamey as an unchanged litter box.

Psychology fu ensues about maniacs.

Maxwell is in a jail cell and is nutty as a fruitcake.

What I say:

Time makes us lose perspective. We keep getting more jaded and thinking that the current day entertainment is always more and more explicit. Compare say the original Friday the 13th to Hostel. In 2008, it gets even harder for us to realize how some movies in the 1930s were considered graphic and explicit. Nowadays, it is easy to find the unrated director's cut of a movie. The MPAA may be saving us with their ratings.

I'm trying to actually be informative along with throwing my own special brand of juvenile feeble attempts at humor. The 1930s saw the birth of infamous Hays Code which was determined to enforce some moral code into movies. However, there were loopholes if one tried hard enough to skate through them. Claiming or showing all depravity back in the 30s, calling the movie a documentary or "this is why you shouldn't do these things" was the loophole. While Child Bride reported to show the dangers of child marriage, it was best known for its infamous skinny dipping scene.

This is embarrassing to admit not to have heard of Dwain Esper before. He sounds to be cut from the same cloth as Kroger Babb. With a resume of directing and producing films like How to Take a Bath, How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, Marihuana, the Weed with Roots in Hell!, Reefer Madness, Sex Madness, and The Strange Love Life of Adolf Hitler. Those few titles almost make Roger Corman sound tame.

Does a ex-actor who is working as a lab assistant who murders the mad scientist he's working for and assumes his identity sound like an educational movie? I'm still not sure how the Edgar Allan Poe story of the "Black Cat" was written into this movie. Cats pop up and disappear throughout the movie. With movies like this, drugs are unnecessary. Scattered throughout the Maniac are bits of text explaining different psychological disorders like this one.

"DEMENTIA PRAECOX
This is the most important of the psychoses, both because it constitutes the highest percentage of the mental diseases, and because recovery is so extremely rare.

Dementia praecox patients show blunting of the emotions, serious defects in judgment, development of fantastic ideas, belief that they are being forced to do things or are being interfered with. "

I'll be the first to admit that this is a pretty painful movie. I've run across some bad movies like the in-action movie, Massacre. Maniac is insane. In fact, the movie it were just a few degrees more insane, it'd circle back to the land of sanity. It's never boring. How could it boring? Whenever things look dull, the Hays Code is broken with the glancing nakidity or what would have been considered explicit back in the 1930s. The acting actually makes William Shatner look like the second coming of Orson Wells. Think about that, picture the most overacted bit William Shatner has ever done and triple it and that's about the acting scale in Maniac.

Quotable Dialogue
"Once a ham, always a ham."
"He thinks he's the orangutang murderer."
"Oh! Stealing through my body! Creeping though my veins! Pouring in my blood! Oh, DARTS OF FIRE IN MY BRAIN! STABBING ME! I CAN'T STAND IT! I WON'T!"
"Here's one for the books. 'Sandwich man walks onto a wallet with forty-two grand in it.' "
"A rat eating cat? Why, that is news!"
Morals of the Story
Mad scientists are required to have bishy beards and German accents.
Fear is a contagious psychic disease.
Morgue workers think corpses are hot.
Dementia symptoms need to be told in movies.
Water can turn you into the mental equivalent of an orangutang.
Cats love to eat human hearts.
Vivian Vance shouldn't be in burlesque shows.
Women will automatically start pulling clothes off in a fight.