Dwain Esper’s Maniac is one of the more notorious early exploitation films, but it’s still dreadfully boring, even at 50 minutes. And while you can cut it a little slack for being from the 1930s, the story still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Maniac is amateurish in all aspects, from the actors (sometimes gazing in the camera) to Esper’s direction (sometimes the performers’ faces are blocked by props).
An old, eccentric doctor and his young assistant are experimenting with formulas to revive the dead. When the doctor wants to kill the assistant and then bring him back with a new heart, the assistant shoots the doctor dead. Instead of shooting him with reanimating juice, however, he holes him up in the wall of the basement and then changes his appearance to look like the doctor so no one will notice his absence.
To help mask the illusion, the assistant-as-doctor keeps seeing patients, including a shy, topless chick and one man who goes mad, kidnaps a formerly dead girl, strips off her clothes and rapes her. Meanwhile, the assistant’s wife hangs out with her friends in their bras and granny panties. The nudity in this must have been shocking way back then; now it’s simply comical.
The high point comes out of no-where, when the assistant grabs a cat and pokes its eye out in graphic detail, admires it (“Why, it’s not unlike an oyster … or a grape!”) and pops it in his mouth. Bon appétit! Then the cops arrive and find the doc in the wall, thanks to the cries of a cat accidentally trapped in there with him, thanks to a storyline swiped from Edgar Allan Poe. Then you get to go to sleep, if you haven’t already. —Rod Lott