Forget Ed Wood, Dwain Esper is my main man! MANIAC certainly lives up to its reputation as one of the most bizarre films ever made. A mad doctor so over the top that he could outdo both Atwill and Zucco, body stealing, revival of corpses, a sneaky reference to necrophilia, a guy who breeds cats for their fur, hypnotism, bare breasted women fighting with hypodermic needles, and a lunatic eating the eyeball he's just popped out of a troublesome moggy, all intercut with scenes from HAXAN, Lang's SIEGFRIED and an Italian silent MACISTE film! I just sat and watched this totally demented piece of sub-cinema in disbelieve. Partly based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat one can only wonder at the sanity of the people who made it! Rating ****
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This one is so sleazy that it really feels ahead of its time by about 40 years!!!! It's like something that would've been made for a grindhouse in the early 70's.
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