Stometer
Save your money for something good and enjoyable
Forumrxes
Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.
Allison Davies
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Michael Ledo
Unbelievably campy and funny. This old slasher film had the worst acting and accents out there. It is in the Top 100 amusingly bad films and rightly so with evil laughs, bad lines, and terrible acting. There is a huge heart suspended in a jar that is beating. An evil doctor with a German accent invents a substance that can bring a recently dead person back to life. He ends up getting killed by his mad assistant, who doesn't bring him back to life, who then impersonates him.This is a 1934 film that contains nudity to my surprise.My only complaint is that this in a full screen edition which noticeably cuts off some of the writing on the screen.Mrs. Buckley was portrayed by Phyllis Diller...okay not the famous comedian, but it is neat to watch it on the credit roll.
ofpsmith
With the foreword and the lines of text that occasionally interrupt the film to lecture us on the conditions of being a maniac, it's pretty easy to see how this is a public service announcement in the form of a feature film. The question is, what exactly was Maniac trying to tell us. The film is just so odd, with so many nonsensical elements, that it's pretty hard to find a message in this film. Well, a message other than, some people are just maniacs. Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) is a vaudevillian who now works for mad scientist, Dr. Meirshultz (Horace B Carpenter) who specializes in reanimating corpses. When Meirshultz asks Maxwell to shoot himself so he can use Maxwell as a test subject, Maxwell shoots Meirshultz, hides his body, and uses his impersonation skills to look like Meirshultz. To be fair when Meirshultz asked Maxwell to shoot himself, he was laughing like a lunatic. When a couple of people come to the lab, Maxwell as Meirshultz prescribes a treatment that turns a patient into (what else) a maniac. So for a film whose only purpose is to show what a maniac does, it certainly is short on the maniac. The plot is (for the most part) coherent and it has a story, but there are some places where the film is just so odd. The acting for the most part is okay. Watching Carpenter as the insane Meirschultz is pretty fun, but as a film I can't really recommend it.
mark.waltz
This gets "the turkey of the century" award, an absolutely offensive and atrociously acted drama that isn't even amusing on a camp level. It takes the elements of the classic horror film and surrounds an alleged view of the different types of mental illnesses, but the only thing it succeeds in being is obscene. Outlandishly acted by unprofessional adults who seem to be reciting a script written by elementary school kids, with a bit of pornography added, this is just an absolute shame that somebody had the audacity to even think of it. The basic storyline has a vaudevillian becoming assistant to the maddest scientist ever put on film who somehow kills his doctor boss, takes over his life, and turns even madder, locking two women in a basement where they proceed to get into a cat fight, while a male patient given the wrong drug kidnaps a female patient, proceeds to run through a field with her naked body, and obviously has his way with her. Whether or not she is alive or dead at this point is never determined. Visions of hellish creatures are thrown in at random to show the mind of the mentally ill as some devilish punishment. The only clever element of the plot is a reference to an Edgar Allen Poe tale involving a corpse and a cat. Everything else will just make you wonder what kind of drugs the filmmakers and actors who made this film were on.
Joseph Brando
I'm not sure how anyone who would invest the time to watch a movie like this would dislike Maniac. It isn't scary, but really are any of these black and white antique horror movies? What these classics do have that today's horror film's do not are a great sense of atmosphere - and Maniac does have that. It also has some shocking scenes that you won't find in any of the Universal classics. Some people complain that the actors are overacting, but I find that to be the case in almost all of these old films, unlike today's horror movies which boast plenty of under-acting, I find the former much more enjoyable than the latter. At 51 minutes, the story moves along a very quick pace with plenty of twists, turns, shocks, and odd characters to keep you interested. I think all horror movies should take a tip from Maniac and keep the running time to around an hour long as they always seem to get retarded during the final third.
