Maniac (1934 film)
6.2 /10 1 Votes
89% Genre Horror Music director Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Language English | 3.4/10 IMDb Budget 5,000 USD Duration Country United States | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Writer Hildegarde Stadie (story) Release date September 11, 1934 (1934-09-11) Cast William Woods (Don Maxwell), (Dr. Meirschultz), Ted Edwards (Buckley), (Mrs. Buckley), Theo Ramsey (Alice Maxwell), Jenny Dark (Maizie)Similar movies A Serbian Film , I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine , Knock Knock , Turkey Shoot , Halloween , The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) |
Maniac, also known as Sex Maniac, is a 1934 black-and-white exploitation/horror film, directed by Dwain Esper and written by Hildagarde Stadie, Esper's wife, as a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Black Cat", with references to his "Murders in the Rue Morgue". Esper and Stadie also made the 1936 exploitation film Marihuana.
Contents

The film, which was advertised with the tagline "He menaced women with his weird desires!", is in the public domain. A restored version was made available in 1999, as part of a double feature with another Dwain Esper film, Narcotic! (1933). A full length RiffTrax for the movie was released on November 25, 2009, with commentary by Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame. John Wilson, the founder of the Golden Raspberry Award, named Maniac as one of the "100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made" in his book The Official Razzie Movie Guide.

Plot

Don Maxwell (William Woods) is a former vaudeville impersonator who is working as the lab assistant to Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter), a mad scientist attempting to bring the dead back to life. When Don kills Meirschultz, he attempts to hide his crime by "becoming" the doctor, taking over his work and copying his appearance and manner. In the process, he slowly goes insane.

The "doctor" treats a mental patient, Buckley (Ted Edwards), but accidentally injects him with adrenaline, which causes him to go into violent fits. In one of these fits, Buckley kidnaps a woman, tears her clothes off, and rapes her. Buckley's wife (Phyllis Diller) discovers the body of the real doctor, and blackmails Don into turning her husband into a zombie. The ersatz doctor turns the tables on her by manipulating her into fighting with his estranged wife (Thea Ramsey), a former showgirl. When the cat-breeding neighbor Goof sees what's going on, he calls the police, who stop the fight and, following the sound of Satan the cat, find the body of the real doctor hidden behind a brick wall.
Cast
Production
The footage that is superimposed over the scenes where the actor, having shot the mad scientist, is descending into madness, and while he is bricking the mad scientist into the wall, were from the 1920 Swedish film Witchcraft Through the Ages by Benjamin Christensen and Siegfried, a 1923 silent film by Fritz Lang.
Several key cast members in the film are uncredited and their identities remain unknown, most notably the cat-farming neighbor, "Goof", as well as the detective, and Maria Altura, the woman who Dr. Meirschultz brings back to life. The identities of the actress who doubles for Altura for scenes that require nudity has also not been identified. In the scene where a cat's head is squeezed and its eyeball pops out, the cat actually only had one eye; a glass eye was inserted into the empty socket before filming, and that was what popped out.
References
Maniac (1934 film) WikipediaManiac (1934 film) IMDbManiac (1934 film) Rotten TomatoesManiac (1934 film) themoviedb.org