Maniac (1934) 52m
In just the same way that the development of the horror movie, the Western, or the historical epic can be charted on screen, so too can the lineage (I don't dare call it a development) of Z-grade flops be traced back as early as this mess from director Dwain Esper. You have to wonder if the actors, writers, and directors of such laughable 50s efforts as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and ROBOT MONSTER ever saw Esper's film and thought `If I ever make a movie, it'll never be as bad as this!' Did they learn from these mistakes? Of course not. History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce; and there was never any shortage of hilariously awful Trash movies in the years to follow MANIAC.
Like all good Z-graders, MANIAC has its roots in Science Fiction and Horror: psychotic Dr Meirschultz (Horace Carpenter, complete with the obligatory Triumphant Mad Scientist Laugh) and equally psychotic assistant Maxwell (Bill Woods) rob a morgue to revive a corpse using a heart transplant and injections of a reanimation drug. Their relationship takes a turn on the downside when Meirschultz asks Maxwell to shoot himself. For the remainder of the film, Maxwell adopts the role of his former mentor, accidentally turning one of his patients into yet-another-psychotic along the way, and plotting the demise of two interfering women by giving them the ol' psycho treatment as well. There is much evil laughter, eye-rolling and hands grasping at the air to assure us that these people are sufficiently manic enough to warrant the film's title. Esper keeps inserting intertitles that are supposed to pass his film off as a socially informative ‘roadshow' picture (as he was more accustomed to churning out) but instead lump together to present Maxwell as a Paretic Manic-Depressive Paranoid Schizophrenic! That smorgasbord of psychosis might explain his terrible performance in the movie, but doesn't excuse everyone else in the cast. It's impressive how every new player brings their own bad acting technique to the picture (amateur, wooden, ham) and for a while the Worst Actor award is even money among the cast, until Ted Andrews steals the show as a gibbering lunatic and chews as much scenery as possible within his allotted few minutes of screen time (I'm sure his Mom thought he was great). It's easy to make fun of Andrews' histrionics, but check out John Barrymore's similar routine in the 1920 version of DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE and you may wonder how laughable many of these silent films would have been if they weren't stripped of sound. In fact MANIAC looks a lot like a silent movie, leaving us to wonder if Esper might have gotten away with a less ridiculous production if he had made it before the sound revolution some years earlier.
sburridge@hotmail.com
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