MANIAC (1934): MOVIE REVIEW

No, it’s not either version of the splatter film Maniac, it’s the 1934 bad movie classic. I got an e-mail requesting I review it but since I did already – in 2010 in fact, here is an “encore” version. For more bad movie reviews click here: https://glitternight.com/bad-movies/ 

MANIAC (1934) – Category: A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following        An actor on the run from the law falls in with a mad scientist, Dr Meierschultz. He becomes an accomplice in the good doctor’s dark experiments involving the reanimation of a dead woman (whose corpse he and Meierschultz steal from a morgue) and the transplantation of an independently beating heart the mad scientist keeps in a jar. (A jar?) The actor kills Meierschultz and impersonates him, doing a very convincing job since we realize he’s every bit as demented as the real doctor was.

Fragments of Edgar Alan Poe stories abound in this beautifully bizarre and campy tale which at times poses as a scientific warning about various psychological disorders via overwrought lines that seem like the inspiration for Ed Wood’s “scientific” look at transvestism in Glen Or Glenda? There are even weird bits with a phantasmal devil (really just footage taken from the silent film Dante’s Inferno) just like Ed Wood used in his later film. 

There’s also a syringe fight between two women, a drugged-out maniac who apparently wants to get, uh, amorous with the walking dead woman, a black cat knocking over the jar with the heart in it, the wonderfully deranged “Cats eat the rats” speech (if this was a musical this bit would be the show-stopping number everyone would be humming as they left the theater) and of course, the infamous eyeball-eating scene. (“It is not unlike a grape or an oyster.”)

Don’t miss it!

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