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"!...

The movie must have done something right to get 70 reviews. What it did right was to get everything wrong in terms of filmmaking craft. In short, the results are hilariously bad. There's more ham in the acting than at Farmer John's; the editing must have been done in a darkroom; the script pasted together in that same darkroom; while Esper likely laughed all the way to the proverbial bank. Yes, this is exploitation movie-making from the 30's, replete with snatches of nude girls and textbook psychology thrown in, the latter no doubt cover for the former. Good thing I covered my cat's eyes while we were watching. Likely, Esper's on PETA's all-time list of cat-throwing villains. Yes indeed, movie-making doesn't come more mangled than this. Unless, of course, it's one of those A-list snoozers that Liz and Richard used to make. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to find Maniac's sequel, maybe something like "Maniac Goes to Congress". It's probably buried in the Golden Turkey archives awaiting re-discovery.(In passing—the movie's Phyllis Diller, b.1897, is not the same person as the comedienne Phyllis Diller, b.1917.)

This gets "the turkey of the century" award, an absolutely offensive and atrociously acted drama that isn't even amusing on a camp level. It takes the elements of the classic horror film and surrounds an alleged view of the different types of mental illnesses, but the only thing it succeeds in being is obscene. Outlandishly acted by unprofessional adults who seem to be reciting a script written by elementary school kids, with a bit of pornography added, this is just an absolute shame that somebody had the audacity to even think of it. The basic storyline has a vaudevillian becoming assistant to the maddest scientist ever put on film who somehow kills his doctor boss, takes over his life, and turns even madder, locking two women in a basement where they proceed to get into a cat fight, while a male patient given the wrong drug kidnaps a female patient, proceeds to run through a field with her naked body, and obviously has his way with her. Whether or not she is alive or dead at this point is never determined. Visions of hellish creatures are thrown in at random to show the mind of the mentally ill as some devilish punishment. The only clever element of the plot is a reference to an Edgar Allen Poe tale involving a corpse and a cat. Everything else will just make you wonder what kind of drugs the filmmakers and actors who made this film were on.

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/