Maniac
About Maniac
Don Maxwell, a former vaudeville impersonator, assists Dr. Meirschultz, who is trying to raise the dead. Don kills him and hides in the doctor's identity. He injects a patient, Buckley, with adrenaline. Buckley abducts and rapes a woman. Buckley's wife finds the body and blackmails Don, who sets her fighting his own estranged wife, Alice, a former showgirl. A neighbor called Goof calls the police. They break up the fight, follow the cries of a cat named Satan, and find the doctor's body bricked into a wall.
Cast & crew
More about Maniac
Dwain Esper directed. His wife, Hildagarde Stadie, wrote it as a loose take on Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat, with bits of The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Esper, Louis Sonney, and Stadie produced it. Hollywood Producers and Distributors handled the roadshow. After a weak start it was retitled Sex Maniac. William C. Thompson photographed it.
Themes
Background
An independent 1934 exploitation feature, made cheaply and shipped town to town rather than booked through the studios.
Making
Esper carried the film himself on the exploitation circuit, outside studio release and outside the major chains, and sold the medical horror as a roadshow.
Reviews
Leonard Maltin gives it his lowest mark, BOMB, and calls it a delirious Esper schlockfest filmed mostly in somebody's basement. Michael Wilmington wrote that voyages into ineptitude like Maniac defy all reason. Danny Peary has called it the worst film made.
Audiences
Early returns were poor enough that the distributors changed the title to Sex Maniac.
Look
William C. Thompson shot it on a budget of $7,500, largely in cramped interiors, and cut in a wall-bricking scene taken from Häxan.
Preservation
The film is in the public domain. A restored version was released in 1999.
Notes
- A scene of a man bricking a victim into a wall is footage from the 1922 film Häxan.
- The picture is known for a shot in which a character strangles a cat and eats an eyeball.
- Esper and Stadie followed it with Marihuana (1936).
- Kino Lorber's 1999 DVD paired a restored print with Esper's Narcotic! (1933). Alpha Video issued it on 18 March 2002.
- RiffTrax spoofed it on 24 November 2009.
- John Wilson put it in The Official Razzie Movie Guide among 100 films he called the most amusingly bad.
Scenes
- Don kills Meirschultz and takes over his patients.
- A character strangles a cat and eats an eyeball.
- Police follow the cat Satan and open the brickwork where the doctor's body is hidden.
Influenced by
- Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat
- Häxan (1922)
Also available
- Internet Archive (Maniac)
- Kino Lorber DVD (1999, with Narcotic!)
