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"!...

Although copyrighted in September 1934, 'Maniac' feels as if it were made five years earlier, both technically and in its extraordinary subject matter; the latter because it was never intended to be exhibited by any of the major theatre chains and thus beyond the reach of the newly enforced Production Code. To watch 'Maniac' is as if the Production Code had never happened, as it abounds with such brazen flouting of the Code as four young cuties sitting about in their scanties discussing current stories in the press in surprisingly highfalutin language, a couple of fleeting glimpses of bare breasts, eyewatering and jawdropping violence such as a scene involving cruelty to a cat lifted (along with much of the rest of the plot) from Poe's 'The Black Cat' and a remarkably energetic, hair-pulling, clothes-ripping catfight in a cellar between Thea Ramsey & Phyllis Diller that escalates from hypodermics to a baseball bat. Crudely made but with a nodding acquaintance with rudimentary cinematic technique, this film is obviously cheap but far from inept. The veteran editor William Austin makes competent use of cutting and dissolves (as well as footage apparently lifted from 'Maciste all'Inferno'), the laboratory scenes are actually quite good-looking and reasonably competently framed and lit by cameraman William Thompson (who also shot 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'!), there's a satisfactory amount of outdoor photography (although the night scenes are far too dark), including exterior shots of the back yard of a Hollywood bungalow, and the climax looks as if it's shot in a real cellar.The script is by the director's wife Hildegarde Stadie, and she plainly knows her Poe, who is actually name checked at one point. Some of her dialogue is also quite a salty commentary on modern life, like the exchange between the two embalmers: "between the gangsters and the auto drivers, we won't need another war to carry off the population. You didn't even mention the suicides". A lot of the humour is plainly blackly intentional, like the neighbour discussing breeding cats for their furs while feeding them on (and to) rats. One narrative device that heightens the film's rather archaic Pre-Code feel is its use of intertitles which periodically interrupt the plot to describe various abnormal mental conditions (all of which sound applicable to the present incumbent of the White House). Plainly fig leaves to maintain the pretence that the film has a Serious Educational Purpose (and accompanied by the only music in the film, apart from the final movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth over the opening credits), normally this medical stuff would have been delivered at some point by an actor pretending to be a doctor, but here it's done with passages cribbed from medical publications. One of these conditions, Dementia Praecox, was a quarter of a century later the condition Elizbeth Taylor was diagnosed with in 'Suddenly Last Summer' and compared by Katherine Hepburn to an exotic bloom ("Night-blooming Dementia Praecox") in a purple passage that wouldn't have been out of place here.

"Maniac" is aka "Sex Maniac" and why "Sex Maniac" is beyond me because neither one of the main characters (Don Maxwell & Dr. Meirschultz) are sex crazy that I could tell. The film is extremely loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat". In all honesty I do not believe this film is supposed to be pure horror. I think it is an early comedy-horror film. Why? The deliberately comical looks on the actors faces, the deliberately bad over-acting, the deliberately bad script with lines such as: "I think too much of Satan to use cats for experiments" etc... it all adds up to a comedy-horror in my beliefs and NOT a real or pure horror film.The film is simply awful and weird but, believe it or not, there are worse "horror" films out there to watch. You don't believe me? The take a look at the movie called "Monster (1980)" it is aka "Monstroid". "Monstroid" makes "(Sex) Maniac" look like a very artful and well done film.Overacting? Yes this movie has it - but some of the other older films are full of overacting as well. It's not unusual for a films during this time era. Would I recommend the movie "Maniac (1934)" to others? Only to the people looking for a terrible horror film to watch or to those that are extremely curious to see just how bad this film really is.Why did I give this film 2 out of 10 stars instead of just one star? Because I did get a couple of giggles out of this awful flick.2/10

Esper's most notorious effort is almost a fiction film; I say almost because while there is certainly a story being told here, there are continual interruptions – sometimes in mid-sequence! – by title cards blandly delineating the nature of various types of mental disorders. The plot concerns a mad scientist and his even nuttier assistant – cue some of the most florid, yet oddly enjoyable, overacting in movie history – who steal a fresh corpse from the morgue (looking more like the basement of Dracula's castle!) in order to revive it by transplanting a beating human heart the doc has somehow acquired. However, the two cannot see eye to eye – especially when the old man asks his pupil to shoot himself so that he will then perform a transplant on him as well! Naturally, at this, the latter kills the scientist instead and, being something of an actor ("Once a ham, always a ham!" Dr. Meirschultz snidely remarks) impersonates him, since he happens to own a personal make-up kit and carries it along with him! Soon, he gets his first patient – a man who thinks he is the killer ape from Poe's "Murders In The Rue Morgue"(!): however, the inexperienced medico 'unwittingly' (hardly since the two needles are so obviously different in size!) administers the wrong medication and he goes berserk, first ranting about how his brain is on fire and then making off into the countryside with the revived girl from the morgue and ravages her (after which he is never heard from again)!! That said, his wife – who had accompanied him to the doctor's – is a schemer and hangs around; more trouble comes the protagonist's way when he is visited by his estranged wife while he is posing as the scientist. So, he has a stroke of genius and sends the two women to the basement of his lab armed with hypodermic needles making each believe the other is dangerous and needs to be sedated! Still, the much-talked about cat-fight which ensues between them does not really involve the syringes as they are dropped practically instantly. Also worth mentioning is the liberal but totally irrelevant use of footage from two Silent masterworks – Benjamin Christensen's HAXAN (1922) and Fritz Lang's THE NIBELUNGEN (1924) – in an attempt to emphasize the lead character's deranged state-of-mind, and also the abhorrent treatment of cats on display – among the film's most infamous sequences is that in which a feline has one of its eyes ripped out and eaten (though a completely different and apparently half-blind animal was used expressly for this shot!) but when it is violently thrown against a sheet of glass, this seems all-too-real!! The film ends with the Police bursting on the scene to find the two women still in the basement and the deceased Professor walled-up a' la "The Black Cat", having been alerted to his presence – as in Poe's tale (and countless other films) by the meowing of the feline which had itself been inadvertently entombed! Had Esper exerted more self-control and infused some real cinematic sense into his picture, MANIAC could well pass off for one of the oddest horror outings of the 1930s…but, as it stands, can only be deemed a relic and an undeniable curio – as both 'Grade Z' exploitation and, for what it is worth, a record of known variations of insanity (and their attributes) up to that time. Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, this film rates higher than BOMB for me because - unlike NARCOTIC (1933) which was a total bore - this actually manages to be so preposterous as to be highly amusing.