I'm going to preface everything by stating that Maniac made the list for the top 100 hilariously bad movies ever made. I'll also mention that literally everything written on the DVD cover is an outright lie. Maniac does not conform to any definition of the word "classic." The maniac does not menace women with his weird desires. It's not the most bizarre film ever made. And, at best, it is only loosely related to an Edgar Allan Poe story ("The Black Cat" if you were wondering, although the film also makes a reference to "Murders in the Rue Morgue").
Seriously, Maniac is based on a Poe story in the way that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is inspired by historical events.
As you can see from the above image, Maniac shows some 1934 titties. It's a B-Movie even by 1930's standards, and it's actually one of the last films to get away with so much nudity, rape, and murder before the Hays Production Code of 1934 placed stringent restrictions on what could be shown on film. You see, films like Maniac used to be called "exploitation films." Exploitation films were the precursors to B-Movies and they usually contained lengthy scenes of women standing around in their underwear for no reason.
If you spot your grandmother here, my sincerest apologies. Also, please send me your grandmother's number . . . for reasons that are totally related to film studies.
As for the plot of the film, it starts out like your typical mad scientist story: lab full of vials and beakers, Eastern European Doctor, mentally unsound assistant to said doctor, human heart pumping in a jar of fluids, all the standard stuff. It turns out the mad doctor is trying to prolong human life by . . . transplanting a beating heart from one person to another! GASP! SHOCK! HORROR! Luckily, the world is spared the abomination of a human heart transplant when the mentally unsound assistant guns down the doctor before he can complete the surgery.
Sadly, it wasn't much longer before another madman started playing God by swapping human hearts from body to body . . . the sick bastard.
After the assistant offs the evil heart surgeon and bricks his body up in the basement wall, he decides that the best way to get away with murder is to impersonate his victim for the rest of his life. Because, hey, why not? So he dresses up like the doctor and starts going around injecting people with random syringes and taking liberties with his female patients. He begins to fear that he will be discovered, and eventually he grows so paranoid that he is convinced two women are trying to kill him. He then tricks the women into a one-on-one hypodermic needle fight in his corpse-hiding basement. At which point the neighbors finally have enough and they call the cops. I'm not sure why they chose that particular night to call the cops seeing as their neighbor had already released a raving lunatic out into the streets, stolen a corpse, and shot somebody. Maybe none of those earlier antics registered as suspicious, I dunno.
But, perhaps the weirdest thing about this movie is Dwain Esper's bizarre cat obsession. Cats are all over this movie, even interspersed with scenes that have nothing to do with cats. The next door neighbor has thousands of cats in cages, the maniac walls a black cat up with the corpse of the doctor, and the doctor owns a cat named Satan (make of that what you will. It doesn't make any sense to me). There are also these quick shots of cats fighting that don't seem to serve any purpose in the film until the two women fight at the end in the same place and positions as the cats. The symbolism here isn't very subtle. It's clear that the cats are supposed to represent women, and the way men control and cage up cats is echoed in the way the maniac controls the women he is pretending to treat. It's really not a very positive portrayal of females. But hey, when you're making a film to exploit women for their bodies, you might as well fill it with thematic undertones that dehumanize women too. No reason to leave a job half done, right?
And there you have it, the moral of Maniac: Kill heart doctors; cage women.
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