Exploitation, as the impression of a genre, has always existed. Even before cinema became one of the big pillars of modern media, there was Weird Shit tucked away in the depths of history. Guillaume Apollinaire, regarded as a great hero of Western poetry, wrote 1907's Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, a porn novel where the hero's type as far as women go involves lots and lots of thick hair, all over their bodies, like werewolves. While hailed by some now as great art, there's also Marquis de Sade's 18th Century gross-out 120 Days of Sodom, a book which is madcap in its disgusting and traumatizing rebellion against literary and social conventions. I could go on and on, but I'm full of myself enough as is and so citing all of these references makes me look like a tool. Today we're talking about Maniac, a movie that was basically a '60s exploitation movie thirty years before the '60s. It joins Reefer Madness and Sh! The Octopus as Depression-era schlock that mercifully survived. I live for this stuff--this confirmation that there's always been this magic to the world. Today's film can be a great demonstration to friends if you need to defend your faith in the history of trash--should you have it!
Don Maxwell is a former impersonator who works for Doctor Meirschultz, a Santa Claus-looking motherfucker who apparently saved Maxwell from the law. Meirschultz is obsessed with, what else, bringing the dead back to life. When Maxwell bungles his attempts to fulfill his life dreams, the doc orders Maxwell to kill himself so that he can be the subject of the resurrection. It stands to reason that Maxwell kills his mentor and begins impersonating him, which drives him off the deep end. This leads to shenanigans, like injecting "super adrenaline" into a crazy guy, which makes him start spitting William Shatner slam poetry and kidnapping women. Then, someone eats cat eyeballs. Honestly, this movie is just shenanigans, or more truthfully, shenanigans and misanthropy. I was gonna say sexism, but then I remembered that men get the short end of the stick too. The wife of Shatner-guy reveals that she hated her husband and is happy that he's now an insane woman-grabbing zombie, and agrees to help Maxwell kill more people. An apparent sorority we meet is populated by boneheads who are given fake dubs to make them seem even dumber. But the male leads include a scientist who experiments on corpses, a serial killer, and a man who breeds hundreds of cats to take their skins. In the end, the cat of the eaten eye exposes a corpse walled up in Maxwell's basement, and it's off to cardboard-bars prison he goes.
Filled with random introductions of characters and subplot, Maniac is actually really exciting. It's a movie where the entire gimmick involves topping what we've already seen with something even more improbable. Most improbable of all is the possibility of sincerity behind the title cards, which give outdated medical advice concerning various manifestations of mental illness. These attempts at being intelligent as facades--as educational as the historical exposition in A Clockwork Blue. What's on display here are some forbidden boobs and an attempt to discomfort, an odyssey into the Real World of mental illness in the same way that Reefer Madness is a voyage through the Real World of marijuana. It is a farce, and I love my farces.
Furthering the notion of its duplicitous nature, it plays with dialogue in some fun ways. Meirschultz mocks Maxwell, using pronunciation that shoves all adjacent scenery into his mouth: "Youu, an AC-TOR?!? Once a HAM, always a HAM." He backs this up by foreshadowing Maxwell's destiny by saying, "Study under me, and someday, you too will be a great man." Yet these little meta jabs opposes the production value: this is all framed under the watchful power of home video-vision. Odd cuts, cramped sets, and obvious cue card abuse, along with unlikely statements ("Mr. Buckley is positively mad! He thinks he's the Orangutan Murderer from Poe's Rue Morgue!") make it both a fascinating and jarring movie to watch. There's a sense of real dread in how simple it is. There is barely any music and the acting is, as I've alluded to before, pretty barebones. But it is ambitious, and there are moments of cleverness and genuine originality. It is not a movie that plays by the rules, possibly because it couldn't afford to it. Glory to it for that, I say, because if it can pull off all of these elements I'm rambling about, that's an accomplishment. It shows heart on behalf of the creator. A desire to produce something that is at least entertaining, if not cathartic or good.
I should mention that it does end up imitating a number of classic horror stories. The stuff with the walled-up body and the cat doubles up with the Rue Morgue allusion to create a double Poe combo. At the end, Maxwell also talks about how Meirschultz's eyes made him do it, like "The Tell-Tale Heart." Plus, the orangutan-man's wife deciding to help Maxwell with his work made me think of Mrs. Lovett from the Sweeney Todd story. But it's not an adaptation--it's an echo. It's like a modernization of those stories, with borrowings from Frankenstein. I suppose it's no great feat for this film to be a product of a time when scientists raising the dead was a popular trope--though in my mind, this movie does it better than the Whale Frankenstein. (I'm sorry, but I always found the Boris Karloff films to be tedious...I much prefer Al Adamson or even Jess Franco if I have to.) I guess whether or not you like the echoes in Maniac, though, depends on whether you like references in general. If you think a movie should stand on its own without a literary legacy behind it, you may be opposed to it. Fortunately, it does stand strong on its own legs, and so even if you've never read Poe before, or you think he's overdone, this movie will move you in some way. Poe made and knew good tropes, and this movie inherits them even without prior information.
All in all, a cheap and creepy wonder. There's no reason not to give it at least one watch--it's in the public domain and on YouTube, and it won't steal even an hour of your day (fifty minutes!). It's madness within, madness without. Living proof that we humans have always had a knack for breaking out of our own heads.
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