Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9786305396543 Format: Black & White, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, NTSC ISBN: 630539654X Label: Kino International Manufacturer: Kino International Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Kino International Release Date: May 25, 1999 Running Time: 51 minutes Sales Rank: 70978 Studio: Kino International Theatrical Release Date: September 11, 1934
Amazon.com: Dwain Esper officially took the directorial reins in this follow-up to Narcotic, and if anything Maniac is more salacious and unbelievably outrageous than its predecessor. Starting off like a skid row remake of Frankenstein, with a mad scientist reviving the sexy corpse of a dead woman, it quickly jumps tracks to borrow from Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat when the assistant is tormented once too often and kills the doctor, taking his place with greasepaint and wigs. But the plot is really just an excuse for outrageousness: a mental patient is injected with an experimental drug and turns into a raving maniac, kidnapping the revived corpse, tearing off her flimsy gown, and molesting her on the run! Thrown in for good measure are cat fights (both literal and figurative), gratuitous displays of young women prancing around in underwear and negligees, and the doctor popping out a cat's eyeball and tossing it in his mouth like a grape. The script is irredeemably stilted, the acting is either wooden or flamboyantly over the top, and everything about the film reeks of cheapness--especially the hopeless attempts to frame the whole exercise as an educational report on mental disease. But this poverty-row cocktail of titillation and exploitation excess, while certainly not good, has that jaw-dropping 'Am I really seeing this?' quality that overcomes all questions of aesthetics, judgment, and good taste. --Sean Axmaker
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Rating: - A bad movie lover's dream come true
Ladies and gentlemen, the search is over. I have discovered the worst film ever made. This atrocity from 1934 is only 51 minutes long, but there is so, so much to talk about I hardly know where to begin. The sheer impossibility of this film actually makes it important, however. Maniac is essentially the grand-daddy of all exploitation movies, but this goes way beyond simple exploitation. It is paramount that we assign the blame for this movie where it is due: producer/director Dwayne Esper. palmed this film off as an actual study of mental illness-throughout the movie, we are occasionally presented with place cards detailing the types of mental illness our educational movie is about to illustrate. I can't believe this was actually released in the 1930s; there's even some partial nudity in this thing (though, of course, no glimpse of the evil belly button forbade by the infamous Hayes Code). Apparently, Esper ... Read More
Rating: - Basic Education
A necessary part of the basic education of every collector of wackoid cinema. Forbidden Zone, Eraserhead, Begotten, Strangle-Mania, Gimli Hospital, Weird World of LSD - if you've done any THREE of these, you definitely need Maniac on the shelf. This is what great-grandpa drove to town to see after great-grandma found his stash of National Geographics. Indescribable.
Four stars instead of five, because the ending wusses out so disappointingly - the girlfight should've culminated in the participants' rolling around in their step-ins in a mudpit or something, and/or the walled-in cat should've come out chewing on something unpleasant extracted from The Scientist.
Rating: - Ed Wood, John Waters and Russ Meyers - - Envy this !
This one is a real find... I initially rented it at the video store because I love cult films, but this one is a keeper, so I am adding it to my Amazon shopping cart. - Its an orgy of overacting, bad acting, sublime spookiness and just plane goofiness that despite its short legnth goes WAY OVER THE WALL beyond any other film of the cult/horror/exploitation/camp genre ever made. This is Rocky Horror meets Plan 9... Ed Wood and John Waters outdone before their time... You will want to watch some of the scenes over and over again - - and will probably annoy your friends by laying some of the lines on them. And theres nudity too... If anyone can name a film as OUT THERE yet FUNNY as this, please tell me... my appendix will burst watching it.
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