FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

azathothpwiggins 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"!...

Stevieboy666 Despite being a life long horror fan I have only recently come across this movie from 1934. The plot, if you can make sense of it, involves a mad doctor who wants to bring the dead back to life, but also throws in some Edgar Allan Poe, in particular his "The Black Cat". Bare breasted women, sexual assault, animals fighting plus an eye gouging & eating scene makes this an early exploitation movie. Perhaps worth seeing as a curiosity but a truly awful film, the animals are probably better actors than the humans!

ofpsmith With the foreword and the lines of text that occasionally interrupt the film to lecture us on the conditions of being a maniac, it's pretty easy to see how this is a public service announcement in the form of a feature film. The question is, what exactly was Maniac trying to tell us. The film is just so odd, with so many nonsensical elements, that it's pretty hard to find a message in this film. Well, a message other than, some people are just maniacs. Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) is a vaudevillian who now works for mad scientist, Dr. Meirshultz (Horace B Carpenter) who specializes in reanimating corpses. When Meirshultz asks Maxwell to shoot himself so he can use Maxwell as a test subject, Maxwell shoots Meirshultz, hides his body, and uses his impersonation skills to look like Meirshultz. To be fair when Meirshultz asked Maxwell to shoot himself, he was laughing like a lunatic. When a couple of people come to the lab, Maxwell as Meirshultz prescribes a treatment that turns a patient into (what else) a maniac. So for a film whose only purpose is to show what a maniac does, it certainly is short on the maniac. The plot is (for the most part) coherent and it has a story, but there are some places where the film is just so odd. The acting for the most part is okay. Watching Carpenter as the insane Meirschultz is pretty fun, but as a film I can't really recommend it.

disinterested_spectator As usual with exploitation films, this one presents us with unmotivated spectacle supposedly justified as educational: different kinds of mental illness are described in captions, followed by disconnected scenes of nudity and gore, such as a man popping out a cat's eyeball and eating it as a tasty morsel.The reason the impersonator of a mad scientist ate the cat's eyeball was that the cat ate the heart that was going to be used to bring the real mad scientist back to life after the impersonator shot him because the mad scientist wanted him to commit suicide so that he could bring him back to life and show the world. Of course, the mad scientist had already brought a woman back to life earlier that evening by injecting super adrenaline into her body in the morgue, but that did not seem to be enough for one day.We get to see the woman stripped almost completely naked and raped by a patient who is accidentally given a shot of the super adrenaline while under the delusion that he is the orangutan in "Murders in the Rue Morgue." She was pretty good looking too, which was why the two workers in the morgue were glad to have her body when she was first brought in.