Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

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"!...

Don Maxwell is an ex-vaudeville ham, wanted by police, who has now found himself as the unlikely assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist in the business of reanimating corpses. Maxwell's gift of impersonation gets him and Meirschultz past the guards and into a morgue where they use a special serum to revive the corpse of a pretty young woman. But that's nothing. Dr. Meirschultz has a heart beating in a jar of solution and is eager to put it into a corpse that really needs it. Meirschultz gives his assistant a gun and advises him to commit suicide, so that he can put the heart in him, but Maxwell shoots and kills the scientist instead and hides the body. People will miss Meirschultz, Maxwell quickly realizes, but no one will miss his lowly assistant; and so Maxwell dons eyeglasses and a fake beard to become his onetime benefactor. The trouble is, he impersonates the mad doctor too well and goes crazy himself. Bleached out sometimes out of focus print, but sound was good.Lots of overacting. Lots of talking. In fact, too much talking. Makes the 50 minute length seem like 3 hours. I didn't see any nudity,, but then my mind was drifting in and out because this is not a good film.

Oh, man! This one was so daft I had to watch it twice. It's like the Great Grandad of bad movies, sitting way out there pre-World War 2, being all disjointed and hilarious. What you have here is a monumentally stupid film which is supremely entertaining for every second of it's fifty minute running time. Maxwell is an actor, but he's not very good, which is why he's actually working as a lab assistant to a mad scientist who is intent on bringing the dead back to life and performing illegal transplants. The mad scientist is all about shouting and laughing and screaming and blackmailing Maxwell to dress up as the coroner, or sneak into an undertakers to steal bodies (a truly weird scene, as we get to see cats fighting each other, and dogs fighting cats…who knows why). Eventually the scientist goes completely nuts and gives Maxwell a gun, telling him he's got to shoot himself so that the scientist can bring him back to life. Quite sensibly Maxwell shoots the guy instead, but rather insanely then decides to become the scientist, mimicking his hair and stealing his glasses (although the professor magically grows another pair on his face later). In a scene that truly must be watched for full effect, some lady brings her husband to Maxwell to have him treated for depression. Maxwell injects him with something that turns the guy mental. After screaming "Burning! Burning in my veins" in one of the funniest acting jags I've ever witnessed, this guy grabs a resurrected woman and runs off with her into the country (where she changes into another woman and we get to see some thirties boobs! Who'd have thought it). His wife is cool with this though (really!) as long as the scientist can do what he was planning to do the dead body the lady finds on the floor (she's cool with that too!). After that, the film just gets weirder…Maxwell goes mental at a cat (who can be seen being thrown into the room by some runner), pokes its eye out (obviously a different cat with one eye), then eats the eyeball. There's a bad actor who has a house full of cats (he keeps the skins after they're eaten by rats…or something) who randomly turns up. At one point Maxwell is fondling a lady for no reason at all. We cut to Maxwell's wife and her scantily clad friends (one with a voice as high a chipmunk) and Maxwell plans to have his wife and the wife of the crazy guy kill each other (because of the 'gleam in their eye'). Then he stands around while crazy imagery from another film (where people look like the devil and breathe fire) is superimposed on top of him. Randomly there are dialogue cards detailing various mental illnesses with music that cuts off abruptly. The moment this film ended I wanted to watch it again. No one can act, hardly anything makes sense, and it's all so entertaining I think it might be one of my favourite bad films. If indeed you can label an entertaining film 'bad'.

Esper's most notorious effort is almost a fiction film; I say almost because while there is certainly a story being told here, there are continual interruptions – sometimes in mid-sequence! – by title cards blandly delineating the nature of various types of mental disorders. The plot concerns a mad scientist and his even nuttier assistant – cue some of the most florid, yet oddly enjoyable, overacting in movie history – who steal a fresh corpse from the morgue (looking more like the basement of Dracula's castle!) in order to revive it by transplanting a beating human heart the doc has somehow acquired. However, the two cannot see eye to eye – especially when the old man asks his pupil to shoot himself so that he will then perform a transplant on him as well! Naturally, at this, the latter kills the scientist instead and, being something of an actor ("Once a ham, always a ham!" Dr. Meirschultz snidely remarks) impersonates him, since he happens to own a personal make-up kit and carries it along with him! Soon, he gets his first patient – a man who thinks he is the killer ape from Poe's "Murders In The Rue Morgue"(!): however, the inexperienced medico 'unwittingly' (hardly since the two needles are so obviously different in size!) administers the wrong medication and he goes berserk, first ranting about how his brain is on fire and then making off into the countryside with the revived girl from the morgue and ravages her (after which he is never heard from again)!! That said, his wife – who had accompanied him to the doctor's – is a schemer and hangs around; more trouble comes the protagonist's way when he is visited by his estranged wife while he is posing as the scientist. So, he has a stroke of genius and sends the two women to the basement of his lab armed with hypodermic needles making each believe the other is dangerous and needs to be sedated! Still, the much-talked about cat-fight which ensues between them does not really involve the syringes as they are dropped practically instantly. Also worth mentioning is the liberal but totally irrelevant use of footage from two Silent masterworks – Benjamin Christensen's HAXAN (1922) and Fritz Lang's THE NIBELUNGEN (1924) – in an attempt to emphasize the lead character's deranged state-of-mind, and also the abhorrent treatment of cats on display – among the film's most infamous sequences is that in which a feline has one of its eyes ripped out and eaten (though a completely different and apparently half-blind animal was used expressly for this shot!) but when it is violently thrown against a sheet of glass, this seems all-too-real!! The film ends with the Police bursting on the scene to find the two women still in the basement and the deceased Professor walled-up a' la "The Black Cat", having been alerted to his presence – as in Poe's tale (and countless other films) by the meowing of the feline which had itself been inadvertently entombed! Had Esper exerted more self-control and infused some real cinematic sense into his picture, MANIAC could well pass off for one of the oddest horror outings of the 1930s…but, as it stands, can only be deemed a relic and an undeniable curio – as both 'Grade Z' exploitation and, for what it is worth, a record of known variations of insanity (and their attributes) up to that time. Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, this film rates higher than BOMB for me because - unlike NARCOTIC (1933) which was a total bore - this actually manages to be so preposterous as to be highly amusing.