I fucking love Archive.org and you should to. Literally the archive of the internet there are so many movies, TV shows, and animations on there together with huge amounts of old software, books, photos, you could spend an entire lifetime working your way through all the content. I have a whole folders worth of movies I want to work through and this was one of them; Maniac. A 1934 black & white exploitation film about a Mad Scientist, largely considered by anyone unfortunate enough to have had to watch it to be one of the worst movies ever made.
Two eccentric mad scientists turned bodysnatchers steal a dead girl from a morgue and bring her back to life... I think? Egged on to do it again by his Master, Dr Meirschultz (Horace B Carpenter), Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) tries but fails to bodysnatch a second victim and after a brief altercation, Maxwell shoots Dr Meirschultz dead and then immediately morphs into a completely different character and starts talking with a different accent... he then decides to actually become Dr Meirschultz; cutting off his own hair and gluing on a beard... Later after botching a treatment on one of Meirschultz's patients, Mr Buckley (Ted Edwards), who goes completely round the bend and abducts a random woman who just sort of emerges from behind a dressing screen in a kind of trance... I think it's the formerly dead woman from before...? The patients wife, Mrs Buckley (Phyllis Diller) brokers a deal with Maxwell that she won't rat him out for shooting Dr Meirschultz if he kills her Husband and then brings him back to life so he will do exactly what she wants. Deciding that now Mrs Buckley has seen the body of Dr Meirschultz, he has to get rid of it, Maxwell drags it to the basement where he is distracted by a cat he starts chasing after. He tries to kill the cat but only succeeds in popping it's eye out which he then eats (no, really)... and then swiftly finishes up bricking Meirschultz body behind a chimney breast in the basement. Meanwhile Mrs Maxwell (Thea Ramsey) literally remembers her Husband exists when she reads he has inherited a fortune and goes to pay him a visit. Maxwell, pretending to be Dr Meirschultz still, tells Mrs Maxwell he never spoke of any rich relatives but tells her to return later that evening. Convincing himself that his own wife wants to murder him, he enlists the help of Mrs Buckley to help him (look, just go with it, ok.) who he also thinks is trying to kill him, leading both Mrs Maxwell and Mrs Buckley into the basement, Maxwell then slams the door shut behind him and both women, believing the other to be crazy, fight and un-necessarily try to rip the clothing off each other. But all of this is seen by some weird bloke who farms cats for their fur (yes, really) who I assume calls the police and they storm the... lab?... house?... and catch Maxwell laughing with glee as the 2 women continue to try and rip chunks of clothing off each other. Dragging Maxwell into the basement and splitting up the fighting wives, the Police are alarmed by a meowing coming from the aforementioned bricked up fire place. Tearing down the fire place they discover the body of Dr Meirschultz with the one eyed cat sitting on his shoulder and in the final scene Maxwell is shown behind bars ranting about being an impersonator.
This is one of the worst movies I've ever watched. This was worse than Reefer Madness. This was worse than Hercules in New York.
This was just a wretched, miserable little movie that masqueraded as a kind of re-enacted demonstration of various stages of mental illness as a person descends into madness, padded out with pointless and needless scenes of women in various states of undress. The acting was bottomline dreadful. Horace B Carpenter overacted the mad Doctor so terribly it made me cringe to watch it and then Bill Woods took over and did an even cringier job; spliced in are various scenes intending to depict Maxwell outwardly verbalising his internal monologue as he grapples with what decision to make next but overacted to a level not thought possible in human expression. Genuinely some of the worst acting I've ever seen, and as aforementioned; I've seen Hercules in New York.
But it doesn't stop there. This entire movie is a trainwreck from beginning to end. There's shots out of focus, shots incorrectly framed, lazy incorrectly composed scenes of dialogue between characters, shots where I had no fucking idea what was going on because it was too fucking dark, jerky and abrupt changes of scene and music, mostly during transitions between a scene happening and a text scene interrupting it, scenes that go unexplained or are just not elaborated on (what happened to Mr Buckley after he ran off with that woman?!), completely unnecessary scenes that did nothing to advance the plot, and I'm not just referring to the ones of women lounging around with their tits out. An absolute spaghetti dinner production.
I'm reliably informed the plot borrows heavily from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat" which might explain it's ability to remain mostly consistent throughout the movie and perhaps might explain the random fixation the main protagonist has with cats. And why there is a fucking character in it who fucking farms cats for their fur?... And why there is a scene where Maxwell eats a cat's eyeball... Is that in the Poe story? I don't know. I fucking hope not. That being said it's not as if the plot develops very far. I went to great pains to literally give you the entire movie plot earlier. That's it. That's the whole film. I didn't miss anything.
