azathothpwiggins From the dusty recesses of Dwain Esper's brain pan, comes MANIAC! Mad science enthusiast, Dr. Mearschultz and his eraser-headed assistant / henchman swipe a cadaver from the morgue, in order to re-animate it w/ a secret serum. Said corpse is a young female, allowing for much unnecessary nudity. Back at his lab, Mearschultz resurrects the woman, and decides that he must have another dead person, so he can try out his new synthetic heart. For failing in this endeavor, Mearschultz has his assistant shoot himself. This goes awry and Mearschultz is killed instead. Assuming his identity, the assistant tinkers about the lab. Complicating matters, a woman arrives w/ a man who believes he's the go-rilla from Poe's MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE! "Mearschultz" injects him w/ Adrenalin, causing the man to go berserk, grabbing the recently revived dead girl, and taking her out for an evening of savagery and topless debauchery! Meanwhile, apparently in some other film, a man shows a cop his backyard cat farm, waxing eloquent about his cat-skinning enterprise (!!). Simultaneously, across town, four women are having a late-night discussion in their underwear, when one of them discovers big news about her husband, the fake Mearschultz. Throwing on some clothes, she rushes to tell him, not knowing that he's gone quite insane. A battle breaks out between the wife and the woman who brought in go-rilla man. This all leads -somehow- to the "shock" finale, centering on the whereabouts of the late Dr. Mearschultz, containing a cat named Satan, and another Poe reference. This fine film is so far ahead of its time! Glorious sub-sludge such as this is unparalleled in 1930's-era cinema!... P.S.- Beware of the "feline-eyeball-eating-scene"!...

qmtv This was part of 50 movie dvd horror set. I had no clue on what to expect, except I read the first line of the dvd description, mad scientist. After reading the reviews I discovered that it was one of the first exploitation films. I was surprised to see nudity in a 1930s film. And, I guess it must have been passed off as some type of documentary, with the insertion of definitions of insanity every so often. As other reviewers have pointed out, the story is all over the place. The audio made it difficult to understand what the actors were saying. Most of the acting is garbage. What works is that it is so ridiculous that it is enjoyable. Some would call it "So bad, it's good". Some say "So bad, it's bad". I say if you've seen enough movies and are tired of the cookie cutter Hollywood films, and want to watch twisted scenes, and even fathom what is going on in the filmmaker's mind to make such a film, and can find some humor in the performances, then you should see this movie.Basic story, mad scientist with a vaudeville performer hiding from the police as an assistant, going to the morgue to inject a serum to a recently dead woman to bring her back to life. She is revived. So far so good. Standard Frankenstein horror. Then the Doc wants his assistant to kill himself so that he can replace his heart and also revive him. The assistant, rather than shooting himself, kills the doc, goes insane, and then impersonates the Doc.So far, the comedy is in the performance. It's ridiculous. And may be unintentional. But it's funny. Then we have a woman bringing in her sick husband to the Doc. The Doc accidently injects the same serum that brought the dead woman to life on the sick husband. The man goes insane. The revived woman comes walking in. The insane man carries the woman out the house into a filed, rips her clothes off, and I guess rapes and kills her. So far this thing is a mess. At this point, the wife of the insane man finds the dead Doc. The impersonating Doc tells her it's his assistant and that he killed himself. To keep her silence, she wants the Doc to make her husband into some kind of obedient zombie. We don't get to see this man ever again. Or the revived dead woman, who he chased into the field. Next we see 4 women in skimpy clothes, talking, exercising, and reading something. Now, due to the audio problem, I have no idea what the hell is going on. But apparently from reading the reviews, one of these women was the assistants wife, and she just found out that he has inherited a fortune. This woman goes to the mad scientist's house and meets up with her husband who is in disguise. In between all the mess, we have scenes of cats chasing mice, cats fighting cats, and maybe even a dog fighting a cat. There's a cat far next door, where the farmer states some wild dialogue "Cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I get the skins" - now that's something!The impersonating Doc buries the real Doc behind a brick wall in the basement, and the house cat gets buried in as well. Edgar Allen Poe. Before all that the he actually chased this cat, and ripped it's eye out, and ate it. Renfield anyone? Now if things aren't weird enough. The mad impersonating Doc, somehow instigates a syringe fight between his wife, and the wife of the first insane patient. These two are led into the basement for a full on cat fight. The neighbors alert the cops, the cops come in and free the women, and hearing the cat behind the brick wall, break open the wall to discover the real dead Doc.What a mess. It's a bunch of ideas thrown in. We don't know what's coming in next. Like I mentioned earlier, the only way to appreciate this is if you have some twisted tastes in film. My rating is a C-, or 4 stars.

disinterested_spectator 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.

lemon_magic No amount of solemn narrative justification in the captions can disguise this film's exploitation roots, and the film is so eager to get to the "good parts" that it loses coherence about 10 minutes in and never gets it back, but in spite of this (or even because of it), "Maniac" is a fair amount of fun to watch. "Maniac" is distinctly lacking in polish or professionalism (there's at least one major thread that just wanders off and is completely unresolved (a man the doctor injects with "superadrenaline" carries off and murders the cataleptic revived zombie woman also wandering the premises, and we never see him again)(trust me, in spite of the flash of nipple it isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds), but you can tell it's also funny when it means to be funny -it just doesn't have the soundtrack to "tell us" when something funny is going on. The movie does try to take a hack at being a "comedy of errors" and the payoff at the end is both welcome and deserved. Worth watching just to see how they did exploitation films back in the day and on its on terms as a piece of over-the-top silliness.