Maniac (1934)

Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter) is a mad scientist. Make that a wacky scientist. He yells and leaps around and yells some more. He’s also working on serum for raising the dead. Helping him, due to a combination of debt and blackmail, is Don Maxwell (William Woods), a vaudeville performer with top makeup skills who is nearly as loony as his boss. When their first attempt to bring a corpse to life goes well, the good doctor makes the perfectly rational suggestion (well, he yells his suggestion) that Maxwell kill himself so they can resurrect him. Maxwell takes this poorly, and instead shoots the doctor, and the whole subplot of resurrecting the dead exits the picture. When a mental patient shows up at the door, Maxwell sees no alternative but to masquerade as the doctor and treat him (injecting water, “because that will do no harm”). There’s also something about his wife learning about inherited money and a neighbor who skins cats for fur. And then from time to time we are given a helpful written lesson on mental illness, because… Why not?

Ah, pure sleaze! I don’t mean porn. Porn is wholesome by comparison, and also is more concerned with quality as pornographers want you to see the bits you’re gazing at. Sleeze-makers don’t care and Dwain Esper was the master of sleeze. A conman, he won some equipment so decided to make films that would be shown outside of normal distribution channels, where the production code and religious zealots couldn’t reach him. Often his movies masqueraded as informational, usually on some taboo subject. And it’s one of those that is his legacy: Reefer Madness. Well, if you know the subtlety and good taste in that film, then you know what you’re up for here. But as he is director as well as producer on Maniac, the filmmaking skill is even lower.

With a script written by his wife, Esper offers up whatever he could shove in front of his camera. Acting was of no concern, nor were sets. However, girls exercising in their underwear as well as the occasional peek-a-boo nipple were important. So was a man gurgling and spitting up foam, two women whacking each other with boards as they rip clothing, and our hero eating a cat’s eye. Of note, the last one was fake (something that needs to be specified in a film like this), however, there was a real backyard cat farm that skinned them for fur; It’s unclear if the location in the film is that actual place—I’d bet against it, but, this is Esper, so maybe.

Maxwell has visions throughout the film that look far more interesting and professional than anything else. That’s because they are stolen images from much better silent pictures (variously reported to be from Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, and Guido Brignone’s Maciste in Hell; I didn’t consider it worthwhile to investigate it for myself).

As would become Esper’s frequent ploy, Maniac pretends to lecture on the important subject of mental illness. It does this by having intertitles pop up with textbook definitions of various mental issues, or just to tell us that fear is bad. These appear randomly, sometimes between scenes, and sometimes right in the middle of “the action.”

When Maniac didn’t sell a lot of tickets, Esper retitled it Sex Maniac, after which it did much better. Shocker. With any title, it has been called the worst film of all time, and like most films that acquire that designation, it is more often said to be so bad it is good. I can’t use the word “good” with anything connected to this film, but it is amusing.