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Maniac (1934) - Directed by Dwain Esper
"The gleam!"
Thanks to James Whale's Frankenstein, horror was becoming a huge hit during the 1930's. Hits like Dracula and more Universal monsters would become staples for Hollywood. But the problem with horror is that it's so hard to come up with any original scares, and they same is true for early horror films like Maniac.
In this apparently "so-bad-it's-good" horror film, a show impersonator is blackmailed into working with a mad scientist / psychiatrist who wants to resurrect the dead. When told to shoot himself for the experiment, impersonator Don Maxwell shoots the doctor instead and impersonates him. The charade leads him into a quick descent into madness.
I didn't get a "so-bad-it's-good" vibe from this movie at all. It had a couple of promising story elements at the beginning, but the problem with those story elements is that they're forgotten for the sake of showing off how insane Don Maxwell is getting. This leads to some loose ends such as the man who went insane when he was shot with "super-adrenaline." I was hoping to see more of that stuff in action during the film. Instead, we get random scenes which really don't mean much, such as the scene where showgirls are chatting with each other and changing clothes when it's obvious the scene was just there for the sake of appealing to hormonal men and barely got away with it.
There wasn't much to offer in the way of horror of plot, either. The plot is really just a man going insane while impersonating a mad scientist, and there's not much depth in that plotline at all. There were a couple of more promising scenes, usually involving cats (one of which was kind of disgusting and surprisingly released during the 1930's), and one involving a plot twist at the end of the movie that resolves... well, it's an ending.
The acting was exaggerated. Was everyone who auditioned for this movie actually a failed Shakespearean actor? The mutating scene (if you want to call it that) was more focused on poetry and growling teeth than it was one the rape that the alternate title of the movie, Sex Maniac, suggested. By the way, there's no sex. You get a split-second shot of half-a-nipple, but no real rape or anything like that. I never thought I'd criticize a movie for having no sex, but that was just pointless on marketing and very misleading. Basically, all this leads up to is a previous point I made: the subplot went absolutely nowhere. And why was the main character talking to himself all the time, and with such hammy dialogue? People don't do that, and I don't need to be the world's greatest peeping tom to know that people don't do that.
And finally, the editing was just horrible. Throughout the entire movie, characters will end up in separate places in split-seconds, different cats are used during the same scenes for "stunts" and it's blatantly obvious they're different, and the movie's loaded with pauses where different mental disabilities and psychoses are described for no reason. These scenes are played to non-horrific piano music which cuts out immediately when the pause ends as opposed to the normal fading out.
Maniac sucked, and not in a so-bad-it's-good way. It's just bad. I was hoping to find some serious enjoyment out of this, but I didn't. I love so-bad-it's-good movies and this just wasn't that kind of movie. I'd rather watch a twelve-hour documentary on how Marcel Proust wrote the first ten pages of In Search of Lost Time, the longest novel written.
"The gleam!"
Thanks to James Whale's Frankenstein, horror was becoming a huge hit during the 1930's. Hits like Dracula and more Universal monsters would become staples for Hollywood. But the problem with horror is that it's so hard to come up with any original scares, and they same is true for early horror films like Maniac.
In this apparently "so-bad-it's-good" horror film, a show impersonator is blackmailed into working with a mad scientist / psychiatrist who wants to resurrect the dead. When told to shoot himself for the experiment, impersonator Don Maxwell shoots the doctor instead and impersonates him. The charade leads him into a quick descent into madness.
I didn't get a "so-bad-it's-good" vibe from this movie at all. It had a couple of promising story elements at the beginning, but the problem with those story elements is that they're forgotten for the sake of showing off how insane Don Maxwell is getting. This leads to some loose ends such as the man who went insane when he was shot with "super-adrenaline." I was hoping to see more of that stuff in action during the film. Instead, we get random scenes which really don't mean much, such as the scene where showgirls are chatting with each other and changing clothes when it's obvious the scene was just there for the sake of appealing to hormonal men and barely got away with it.
There wasn't much to offer in the way of horror of plot, either. The plot is really just a man going insane while impersonating a mad scientist, and there's not much depth in that plotline at all. There were a couple of more promising scenes, usually involving cats (one of which was kind of disgusting and surprisingly released during the 1930's), and one involving a plot twist at the end of the movie that resolves... well, it's an ending.
The acting was exaggerated. Was everyone who auditioned for this movie actually a failed Shakespearean actor? The mutating scene (if you want to call it that) was more focused on poetry and growling teeth than it was one the rape that the alternate title of the movie, Sex Maniac, suggested. By the way, there's no sex. You get a split-second shot of half-a-nipple, but no real rape or anything like that. I never thought I'd criticize a movie for having no sex, but that was just pointless on marketing and very misleading. Basically, all this leads up to is a previous point I made: the subplot went absolutely nowhere. And why was the main character talking to himself all the time, and with such hammy dialogue? People don't do that, and I don't need to be the world's greatest peeping tom to know that people don't do that.
And finally, the editing was just horrible. Throughout the entire movie, characters will end up in separate places in split-seconds, different cats are used during the same scenes for "stunts" and it's blatantly obvious they're different, and the movie's loaded with pauses where different mental disabilities and psychoses are described for no reason. These scenes are played to non-horrific piano music which cuts out immediately when the pause ends as opposed to the normal fading out.
Maniac sucked, and not in a so-bad-it's-good way. It's just bad. I was hoping to find some serious enjoyment out of this, but I didn't. I love so-bad-it's-good movies and this just wasn't that kind of movie. I'd rather watch a twelve-hour documentary on how Marcel Proust wrote the first ten pages of In Search of Lost Time, the longest novel written.