Maniac

Maniac

Year: 1934

IMDb Rating: 3.7/10

Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi

Directors: Dwain Esper

Cast: Horace B. Carpenter, Ted Edwards, Bill Woods

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.

Maniac (also known as Sex Maniac) is a 1934 American independent black-and-white exploitation horror film directed by Dwain Esper and written by Hildagarde Stadie, Esper's wife, as a loose adaptation of the 1843 Edgar Allan Poe story "The Black Cat", with references to his "Murders in the Rue Morgue". Esper and Stadie also made the 1936 exploitation film Marihuana. The film is in the public domain. A restored version was made available in 1999, as part of a double feature with another Esper film, Narcotic! (1933). John Wilson, the founder of the Golden Raspberry Award, named Maniac one of the "100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made" in his book The Official Razzie Movie Guide. Maniac has received negative reception since its release, considered as one of the worst films ever made.

A failed actor, after killing the mad scientist he works for, decides to take over the scientist's life and continue his work. You can find out more about this movie on its IMDB page . There is an AVI of the movie here .

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