Maniac (AKA Sex Maniac) is technically awful, with basic direction, lousy writing and incredibly bad performances, but it is also every bit as deranged as people say it is, which makes it quite a bit of fun if weird, low-budget trash is your thing.
Bill Woods plays ex-vaudeville impersonator Don Maxwell, who is wanted by the police; he goes into hiding as assistant to Dr. Meirschultz (Horace Carpenter), who treats mental illness but who also has a side project: bringing the dead back to life. Meirschultz sends Maxwell to bring him the body of a beautiful suicide victim, who they successfully resurrect. However, when the doctor tells his assistant to shoot himself so that he can bring him back from the dead as well, Maxwell shoots the doctor instead. Maxwell then uses his handy make-up bag to impersonate the doctor, but succumbs to madness.
This plot sounds like fairly standard mad scientist fare, the kind of thing that would star Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff if it had a bigger budget, but it is the execution that makes this film special: director Dwain Esper is clearly not a talented film-maker, but he adds so much lunacy, with a big helping of exploitative material, that it's hard not to like just a little. In one scene, Maxwell (as Meirschultz) gouges out the eye of a cat and eats it; a neighbour has a wild rant about why he has so many cats ("the cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I keep the skins."); intertitles randomly explain various types of mental illness; Maxwell mistakenly injects a mental patient with super adrenaline, causing the patient to go even madder and carry off the revived suicide victim (the man gives a masterclass in bad acting) ; four girls saunter around their room in their underwear; and Maxwell hides the dead doctor's body behind a wall in the basement in a plot development inspired by Poe's The Black Cat.
Add a little gratuitous topless female nudity (rare for such a vintage movie), and what you have is not a good film but one that definitely has to be seen to be believed.
Bill Woods plays ex-vaudeville impersonator Don Maxwell, who is wanted by the police; he goes into hiding as assistant to Dr. Meirschultz (Horace Carpenter), who treats mental illness but who also has a side project: bringing the dead back to life. Meirschultz sends Maxwell to bring him the body of a beautiful suicide victim, who they successfully resurrect. However, when the doctor tells his assistant to shoot himself so that he can bring him back from the dead as well, Maxwell shoots the doctor instead. Maxwell then uses his handy make-up bag to impersonate the doctor, but succumbs to madness.
This plot sounds like fairly standard mad scientist fare, the kind of thing that would star Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff if it had a bigger budget, but it is the execution that makes this film special: director Dwain Esper is clearly not a talented film-maker, but he adds so much lunacy, with a big helping of exploitative material, that it's hard not to like just a little. In one scene, Maxwell (as Meirschultz) gouges out the eye of a cat and eats it; a neighbour has a wild rant about why he has so many cats ("the cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I keep the skins."); intertitles randomly explain various types of mental illness; Maxwell mistakenly injects a mental patient with super adrenaline, causing the patient to go even madder and carry off the revived suicide victim (the man gives a masterclass in bad acting) ; four girls saunter around their room in their underwear; and Maxwell hides the dead doctor's body behind a wall in the basement in a plot development inspired by Poe's The Black Cat.
Add a little gratuitous topless female nudity (rare for such a vintage movie), and what you have is not a good film but one that definitely has to be seen to be believed.