Maniac (1934)

the leading man is my tpye

What a waste of my time!!!

Purely Joyful Movie!

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Unbelievably campy and funny. This old slasher film had the worst acting and accents out there. It is in the Top 100 amusingly bad films and rightly so with evil laughs, bad lines, and terrible acting. There is a huge heart suspended in a jar that is beating. An evil doctor with a German accent invents a substance that can bring a recently dead person back to life. He ends up getting killed by his mad assistant, who doesn't bring him back to life, who then impersonates him.This is a 1934 film that contains nudity to my surprise.My only complaint is that this in a full screen edition which noticeably cuts off some of the writing on the screen.Mrs. Buckley was portrayed by Phyllis Diller...okay not the famous comedian, but it is neat to watch it on the credit roll.

As usual with exploitation films, this one presents us with unmotivated spectacle supposedly justified as educational: different kinds of mental illness are described in captions, followed by disconnected scenes of nudity and gore, such as a man popping out a cat's eyeball and eating it as a tasty morsel.The reason the impersonator of a mad scientist ate the cat's eyeball was that the cat ate the heart that was going to be used to bring the real mad scientist back to life after the impersonator shot him because the mad scientist wanted him to commit suicide so that he could bring him back to life and show the world. Of course, the mad scientist had already brought a woman back to life earlier that evening by injecting super adrenaline into her body in the morgue, but that did not seem to be enough for one day.We get to see the woman stripped almost completely naked and raped by a patient who is accidentally given a shot of the super adrenaline while under the delusion that he is the orangutan in "Murders in the Rue Morgue." She was pretty good looking too, which was why the two workers in the morgue were glad to have her body when she was first brought in.

Don Maxwell is an ex-vaudeville ham, wanted by police, who has now found himself as the unlikely assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist in the business of reanimating corpses. Maxwell's gift of impersonation gets him and Meirschultz past the guards and into a morgue where they use a special serum to revive the corpse of a pretty young woman. But that's nothing. Dr. Meirschultz has a heart beating in a jar of solution and is eager to put it into a corpse that really needs it. Meirschultz gives his assistant a gun and advises him to commit suicide, so that he can put the heart in him, but Maxwell shoots and kills the scientist instead and hides the body. People will miss Meirschultz, Maxwell quickly realizes, but no one will miss his lowly assistant; and so Maxwell dons eyeglasses and a fake beard to become his onetime benefactor. The trouble is, he impersonates the mad doctor too well and goes crazy himself. Director Esper was truly WAY worse than Ed Wood. WAY.The film is nearly unwatchable.

When you think of exploitation movies you normally think of the '70's. However as it turns out exploitation flicks have been around a lot longer. This movie features some violence and nudity and would had never got distributed because of that through the normal channels.Director Dwain Esper always distributed his own movies by renting out a cinema so he could play his movies. He advertised his movies by mostly putting up poster with some X's put over it, implying that it were movies for adults only. I don't think he ever got very rich from his movies, though obviously his movies also weren't exactly expensive ones to make.To be honest, the concept of the whole movie didn't seemed that horrible and it also didn't started off that bad. It certainly was comparable with most other genre movies from the same period but let me tell you that things get worse pretty rapidly.It's basically a really amateur like made movie. It's not only horrible cheap looking, it's also really bad written and acted. But lots of blame for this movie also of course really needs to go to director Dwain Esper. It seemed like he at times was just doing something without knowing how it would turn out for the movie. It's funny how in one scene they couldn't even get the camera focus right, when the character that is talking is all blurry since the focus is on something that is in the foreground and they simply did not bother to fix this at all when they must have find this out.I can understand and see what the movie was trying to do with it's story and to be frank, the movie seemed to have some good ideas but it's all being handled extremely poorly. I just couldn't understand and follow this movie at times because it often becomes such an incredible mess. Often the movie simply makes no sense at all.The movie is mostly still 'enjoyable' to watch because of its extremely bad acting. All of the actors go extremely over-the-top and some of them never had any experiences with acting, obviously.Nevertheless, really one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Luckily it's only about 50 minutes short.2/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/