Tags:
Film: Maniac
Year: 1934
Director: Dwain Esper
Writer: Hildegarde Stadie
Starring: Bill Woods, Horace B. Carpenter and Ted Edwards
Review:
This was a movie that the poster stuck out to me before seeing the movie. I’ll be honest, I was excited. That was until settling in to watch this movie. Seeing the rating and the runtime made me pause. It is fitting that while settling in to write the review, I noticed that Hildegarde Stadie wrote this, as I’ve seen a movie of hers last year in Narcotic.
Synopsis: a former vaudevillian gifted at impersonation aids a mad scientist in reanimating corpses and soon goes mad himself.
Now this is a hard film to talk about. There are intercuts here of title cards that are talking about different ailments of the mind. The former vaudeville actor is Maxwell (Bill Woods) who is working for Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter). He has this actor pose as the morgue attendant so they can find a body. They’re looking to bring it back to life. They find a woman who died by suicide with carbon monoxide. A serum is injected into her and they steal the body.
Maxwell gets mad at his employer and shoots him. He decides to dress up as the doctor. Before he can hide the body, Mrs. Buckley (Phyllis Diller), shows up with her husband. He is played by Ted Edwards. He isn’t feeling well so Maxwell, posing as a doctor, is going to give him a shot. He means to give him water, but instead gives him a shot of adrenaline. This drives him mad to the point where he steals the woman they brought back from the dead. I believe that he rapes her while they’re out of the house.
We then see Maxwell trying to hide the doctor by bricking him up in a chimney in the basement. Maxwell has visions that are taken from archive footage and overlaid. I take this to show that he loses grip with reality. We also see that he’s married to Alice (Thea Ramsey). She lives with two other women, Maizie (Jenny Dark) and Marvel (Marvelle Andre). A man comes around looking for Maxwell. There’s also an odd neighbor who raises cats for their hinds.
What I’ll say is that this is a wild movie. I had to reference my notes as its been a couple days since watching it before I could write the review. It is one of those films where I know I watched it. Since I can’t remember things, it makes me question myself. The true answer here is that this doesn’t have a coherent narrative. It plays partially like a PSA as we’ll cut over to title cards of explanation of different mental disorders. I take it that they’re supposed to correlate with what we see after them. This is just a bit too ambitious for these filmmakers. Having seen a couple of documentaries about exploitation cinema, it makes more sense why this is as crazy as it is.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, it doesn’t shock me to learn that Stadie wrote this. The other movie from her that I’ve seen plays out similarly. That one had more of a coherent narrative, but also had random scenes that are thrown together as well. She seemed to enjoy making these cautionary tales against drug use. This one doesn’t use as much there, but the adrenaline brings back the deceased woman. It also drives Buckley insane. This is more about the dangers of mental illness and how it can lead to criminal behavior. What they’re presenting is still socially relevant. It just doesn’t work as well as they would like for how all over the place this is. It also had to be this way to avoid censorship. They pose it as a PSA in hopes that when the disturbing things happen, it can be explained. I do appreciate that.
What doesn’t help either is the acting is stiff or feels amateur. I thought that Woods was good as our vaudeville guy. We see him from the start as demented, before he becomes the morgue attendant. He then changes and acts like Dr. Meirschultz. That was good. He is the bright spot. Carpenter isn’t bad either. The problem there is that they focus too long on him when he’s dead and someone can only stay still for so long. There are minor movements I noticed. That falls on the filmmakers. Edwards is funny when he goes mad and attacks the woman stolen from the morgue. I’d say that Diller, Ramsey, Dark, Andre and the rest of the cast are solid enough. No one is good, don’t get wrong there. Also, shout out to the neighbor who is raising cats and using rats to feed them. He’s wild in what he tells the police.
All that is left then is filmmaking. This is hindered by its budget when it comes to the editing. They’re putting in filler which are the title cards. I get what they’re doing, but I don’t know if what is on screen shows that enough. I’ll give credit to overlaying footage from adventure movies to just show how wild Maxwell’s thoughts are. Other than that, the cinematography is fine. It doesn’t do much to stand out. There isn’t other effects used from what I could tell. The soundtrack was also fine. It didn’t stand out or hurt this for me. I did like what they did with the design though with the cat in the basement. That feels like it was borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe.
In conclusion, this isn’t a good movie. It is trying to do things that they don’t flesh out well enough. It also feels like the budget is holding it back as well. I will give credit to being ahead of its time exploring mental illness in cinema. That is still socially relevant today, especially when discussing criminals. The acting has moments of being solid. There are decent aspects to filmmaking. Not one that I can recommend to everyone unless you are interested in the history of cinema and want to see an early PSA/scare film.
My Rating: 4 out of 10