October Horror Challenge 2018 #17: "Maniac (1934)"

The whole time I was watching this movie, I kinda felt like I was on drugs, because it was slow and plodding, headed to a conclusion that didn't make much sense, and all the characters were unlikable and kept behaving strangely, like maybe THEY were on drugs. This is actually the first instance I can recall where seeing a movie's poster actually helped me understand the movie better. They call it an "exploitation classic," and when you think of it that way, in the context of what "exploitation" means, it actually helps to classify the movie, or at least it does for me, since I've seen so many exploitation flicks and I know what they're about.

So this movie is about a mad doctor, experimenting on the dead, and yeah, it's a big old "Frankenstein" RIP off, but also, from the beginning he's exploiting people: his patients, the corpses, and his assistant who he forces to help him with his fiendish plot. Soon the assistant takes over and starts to act increasingly erratic, as other characters are introduced who want to exploit the other characters too (for money, fame, power, sex, you name it).

Basically this is a bunch of unlikable people trying to use and abuse and take advantage of each other, interspersed with voice over narration and walls of text explaining which mental disorders the characters display as they slip closer to madness. It just seemed like a bunch of horrible people doing terrible things for no real reason, but once I thought of it as an exploitation flick, it started to make more sense (or at least seem more familiar) because I've seen many of those movies. This one seems like an early precursor to movies like "Bloodsucking Freaks," (that movie in particular owes a lot to this one). It doesn't make the movie any better, but it *does* place the movie in a context that made me appreciate what it was trying to do. This was a movie before it's time! It belongs in the sleazy 70s, not in 1934!