MANIAC - THE GLEAM IN SATAN'S EYE

By Dr. Abner Mality

"Fear is a psychic disease which is highly contagious and extraordinarily infectious. Fear thought is most dangerous when it parades as forethought. Combat fear by replacing it with faith. Resist worry with confidence."

Dr. Wm. S. Sadler, from the Foreword

Sound advice from Dr. Sadler, but that advice can be found only within the frames of one of the strangest and most outrageous films ever made, "Maniac".

This 1934 movie is so completely outside the Hollwyood norm, so totally beyond the pale of regular entertainment, that it inhabits its own universe. Ostensibly offered as a cautionary tale and examination of mental illness, it is one of the most exploitative and vulgar motion pictures ever created. An indescribable mixture of Edgar Allen Poe, roadshow exploitation and early horror movie, "Maniac" seems to be a movie made about crazy people, by crazy people and for crazy people.

The film was the crowning creation of Dwain Esper, perhaps the world's first full fledged exploitation film-maker. Esper, often with the help of his screenwriter wife Hildegard Stadie, specialized in super cheap and lurid film that were often presented as "educational" warnings against social ills. Esper had his hand in "drug scare" movies, including the legendary "Reefer Madness" as well as "Cocaine Fiends" and "Marijuana, Weed With Roots In Hell". Such high-minded movies often exploited the very things they tried to condemn...Esper knew where the money was. His movies were made outside the studio system, including even Poverty Row, and were exhibited in roadside tents, far outside the usual theaters and movie palaces.

With "Maniac", it was as if Esper and Stadie threw off all conventions of good taste and narrative structure to unfold a tale of insanity unlike any other. The movie can certainly be called one of the most inept ever filmed, with some of the most incredible over-acting of all time. But there is something about its combination of images both shocking and foolish that has a profound effect on the viewer. Logic and lucid thought are strangers in Esper's world. Here, a man can make a living raising cats for their fur...men can believe they are killer orang-utans...and women can batter each other with axe handles and flower pots over mistaken identity.

You can see where Ed Wood got some of his inspiration, for "Maniac" features the same type of crazed dialogue and earnest proselytizing that typified Ed's more notorious films. But "Maniac" predates Wood's work by twenty years. Even today, "Maniac" would be rated "R" for its sexual imagery and violence. For many years after its release, it was shown on the roadshow and "stag movie" circuits, probably right up until the 60's.

I, Dr. Abner Mality, am no stranger to madness and depravity, so "Maniac" speaks to me like an eccentric old friend. Come, let us enter its weird world and plumb the depths of insanity...

***************************SPOILERS AHEAD**********************************

Our tale begins in the cluttered and homely laboratory of the great Dr. Meirschultz. In the long history of mad scientists, Meirschultz may be the most berserk of all. As played by cowboy movie veteran Horace B. Carpenter, Meirschultz is the embodiment of every bushy-bearded, thick-accented crackpot cliche. Carpenter delivers every line with incredible stress and gravity, resulting in an archetypal mad scientist who looks like he's ready to pop a vein at any second. Almost all of Meirschultz' dialogue is an emotional rant of some kind.

Meirschultz's assistant is mousy looking Don Maxwell, played by Bill Woods. With his unkempt hair, staring eyes and quavering voice, Maxwell is one lab assistant who seems even more unhinged than his mad scientist boss. Just how unhinged we will find out shortly...

"Tonight, my dear Maxwell," exclaims Meirschultz with relish, "we are ready to try my experiment on a human being." Much like Dr. Frankenstein, Meirschultz is obsessed with bringing life back to the dead. He has read of a young girl's suicide and wishes to visit her in the morgue to see if life can be restored to her. To do this, he requires Maxwell's help. It seems Maxwell has a very special talent...he is a former vaudevillian and actor who is particularly good at impersonations. Meirschultz wants Maxwell to impersonate the coroner, in order to gain access to the corpse of the girl.

The idea fills Maxwell with fear. "The morgue...dead people! It isn't natural, I tell you!"

Meirschultz will have none of it. It seems that the good Doctor has helped Maxwell escape the law and has been shielding him. What Maxwell's original crime was, we never learn, but Meirschultz is able to coerce his assistant into helping him. "Once a ham, always a ham!" sneers the doctor. Well, it takes one to know one, I say.

Maxwell's impersonation of the coroner works and soon he and the Doctor are in a dark and dingy morgue, uncovering the lovely young body of Maria Altura, age 24, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. In a surreal moment, Meirschultz actually pulls out his stethoscope to try and find a heartbeat in the corpse. They inject the body with Meirschultz's secret potion and amazingly, life returns to the dead girl. The duo quickly spirit the still unconscious girl back to their lab.

The body snatching comes to the attention of the Bureau of Missing Persons, who interrogate drunken Mike, the Embalmer. This pot-bellied balding old goat seems to be deep in his cups on screen, reminding me of my Grandpa's old poker buddies with a snootful. "These stiffs are gettin' heavier every day," he complains to another old boy who helps him at the morgue. He also tells his partner, "Hey, did you see that beaut who came in today?" "Sure," replies the other man, reading carefully from a cue card. "Why do you think the coroner's pulling night duty?" This underhanded reference to necrophilia only emphasizes the unhealthy atmosphere of "Maniac".

Dr. Meirschultz is overjoyed by the success of his experiment. "This is but a step," he tells Maxwell. Next he wants to implant the artificial heart he has created in another body, one with " a shattered heart". He wants Maxwell to acquire the new body as well. When the assistant reacts with fear and trepidation, the Doctor explodes into a rage. "I don't care where you get it! From the morgue...from the street...from the undertaker! GET ONE!"

The terrified Maxwell is soon crawling through an air vent to the morgue, where the body of a recently shot gangster is his target. As he prepares to get the body, two cats who have been chasing mice in the underground room suddenly collide in a titanic feline tussle, complete with screeches and growls. This theme of cats reoccurs constantly as one of "Maniac"'s main motifs. This scene is uncomfortable to watch, because the cats really are tearing into each other violently. It presages a different kind of violent catfight at the end of the film.

Spooked by the racket, Maxwell runs back to Meirschultz's office. On the way, a dog jumps out into the street and savagely attacks a cat. When Maxwell tells Meirschultz that he has failed to get the body, the Doctor's tenuous grip on sanity is completely relaxed. He blows up into a screaming, hair-pulling fit of rage that threatens to chew every inch of scenery to a pulp. "YOU FOOL!" Meirschultz screams. "At the greatest moment of my life!" He violently shoves Maxwell to the ground and then starts cackling wildly. His trembling hands pull a gun out of a drawer.

"I have it!" the mad Doctor laughs. "You have seen my powers! You know what I can do!" He hands Maxwell the gun. "Take your life! And I will give it back to you! I will put my heart into your body! Take your life! You will live! You will live!"

Maxwell's response is a bit different than what Meirschultz would have liked. With a glassy stare in his eye, he shoots the doctor dead. Unbelieving, Maxwell laments "He had so much to give the world!" But then he starts to ruminate. "Isn't the spark that moves the maggot the selfsame spark that moves the man? Preserving that spark in the individual is not important. What we do with the spark while we have it IS important! In Meirschultz, the spark is gone. In Maxwell, it lives! " A great idea has taken hold of Maxwell's fevered brain. He runs over to the make-up kit he used for his vaudeville impersonations.

"Meirschultz would be missed. Maxwell never would!"

While all of this bizarre mental breakdown is taking place, the screen is bombarded with superimposed images of clutching hands and satanic demons. These vistas will now appear when Maxwell's insanity is particularly strong. The images were taken from two famous silent movies, the Italian "Maciste in Hell" and German Fritz Lang's "Siegfried". How Dwain Esper acquired these images is unknown but their addition here adds a further layer of surreality to an already supremely out of whack film.

Maxwell intends to become Meirschultz, making it his "supreme impersonation". But before he can make that transformation, the doorbell rings. A dishevelled Maxwell answers the door, finding Mrs. Buckley(played by an actress named Phyllis Diller, who is NOT the comedic hag with the same name). It seems that Mr. Buckley's mental delusions have taken a turn for the worse recently...he now thinks that he is the killer orang-utan from Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue"! Mrs. Buckley has heard of Meirschultz' prowess with psychotherapy and would like him to treat her husband.

Maxwell tells Mrs. Buckley that the Doctor is not in at the moment, but he should be back shortly. He suggests that she return with Buckley in an hour or so, which she agrees to. During this period, Maxwell uses his make-up kit to transform himself into Meirschultz, complete with bushy white hair and beard. He takes the thick-lensed glasses off of his benefactor and closes the staring eyes, muttering "the gleam, the gleam". Maxwell will see this "gleam" in other eyes before the end of the movie.

His metamorphosis now complete, "Dr. Meirschultz" invites Mr. and Mrs. Buckley into his living room. Mr. Buckley is a thin, mousy man who does not speak. Maxwell goes back into the lab, with Meirschultz' body still on the floor, and thinks about what sort of medicine to give Buckley. He finally arrives at plain water, but by mistake, he uses a hypo full of "super-adrenaline"!

With a strong, grueling jab into the arm that had me cringing in my seat, Maxwell injects Buckley with the solution. The result is a scene of outrageous and unrestrained acting that surpasses anything I have seen in 42 years of watching bizarre and unusual movies. The formerly sedate Buckley wildly grimaces and then finally jumps to his feet with a groan.

"Why, Doctor," notes Mrs. Buckley, "he seems to be getting worse, not better!"

One of the great understatements in cinema. Buckley, played by the off-the-hook Ted Edwards, unleashes a crazed, raging soliliquy that runs as follows;

"Stealing Through My Body! Creeping through my veins! Pouring through my blood! Darts of fire in my brain! Stabbing me! Agony! I can't stand this torture! This torment! I can't stand it! I won't ...I won't!"

That's the last coherent word we get from Buckley. He now degenerates into a shrieking, grunting beast man with a murderous look in his eye. Ted Edwards' physical transformation here is astounding, as he literally becomes a different person. With no make-up, he goes from man to monster and his uncontrolled shrieks are genuinely chilling to hear.

"Doctor!" yells Mrs. Buckley. "What was in that hypo?!" Buckley then stalks her and tosses her into the lab. He then goes on a rampage until he finally sees the sleepwalking form of Maria, the girl Meirschultz raised from the dead. His beastly instincts take over and he grabs the young girl, running with her out into the night.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Buckley has stumbled on the body of the real Dr. Meirschultz. But the result is not what one would expect. Maxwell gives her an abridged version of what happened, saying Meirschultz was the assistant who killed himself. "I think we speak the same language, doctor.", Mrs. Buckley slyly tells Maxwell. "When you revive the body of your assistant, he will do as you direct. When you revive Buckley, he will do as I direct!"

By now, it is obvious that everybody in "Maniac" is insane in one way or another. This is a world where the lid has come off, where people are expected to be crazy.

While Maxwell and Mrs. Buckley are discussing things, Mr. Buckley is still in the grips of his savage insanity and he ravishes poor Maria with violence. This is a jolting scene not only because of the actual nudity of the girl, but because in these scenes, she is played by a different woman than the one Buckley abducted! And Buckley's strangling of the girl is uncomfortably authentic. What happens to these two characters from here? We never learn...they vanish from the narrative.

Believe it or not, there are police in this strange world. A detective from the Missing Persons Bureau is starting to nose around the homebase of Dr. Meirschultz and his assistant, Don Maxwell.After a neighbor tells the cop that "thems who does queer things is up to no good" or something of the kind, the flatfoot asks Meirschultz's other neighbor if he saw or heard anything strange.

The answer he gets proves once and for all just how far off the beam "Maniac" is. It seems that the neighbor (hereafter called Cat Farmer) is missing a couple of cats from his ranch. Perplexed by the huge amount of cats on the property, the cop inquires further and gets a bizarre rambling monologue about how cats can be grown and raised for their fur. "I'm in business," whines the Cat Farmer. Thousands of rats lurk near his home, so the cats come in handy. However, rats also feed on cats. The Cat Farmer has it all figured out: "The rats eat the cats, the cats eat the rats and I get all the skins!"

"Never thought of it that way," admits the policeman. "Say, did you see or hear shots next door last night?"

"I dunno," shrugs the Cat Farmer. "Maybe..."

Back in the lab, Maxwell believes he has come up with a great idea. Using notes left by Meirschultz, he will implant the Doctor's artificial heart in his own body. Once he is back to life, he can track down and use Mr. Buckley for further experimentation, thereby satisfying everybody. But fate in the form of yet another feline has stepped in once again. It seems Dr. Meirschultz' black cat named "Satan" has gotten hungry while all the commotion was going on. Satan has knocked over the jar with the heart and has had a little snack.

"You wretch!" cries Maxwell! Now there is no way to bring the Doctor back. The body must be hidden. Maxwell hauls it downstairs and carefully bricks it up inside a wall. As he is ready to lay the last couple bricks, he sees Satan watching him on the steps. "The gleam..." mutters Maxwell. "I'll get you!"

The next scene will be extremely difficult for any cat lover...or cat hater, for that matter...to watch. Maxwell chases Satan crazily through the lab, at one point throwing him through a glass window. For real! Finally, Maxwell grabs the poor beast and in a scene of horror that will have every viewer questioning his sanity, squeezes one of Satan's eyes out in a gruesomely realistic fashion!

If you can, though, look closely during this scene and you will notice that all-black Satan sudden turns into a much larger Tabby cat during the eye-gouging sequence. It seems Esper acquired the services of a one-eyed "stunt cat" to make the scene as realistic as possible!

After poor Satan has scampered off, we see a loving close-up of his eye laying on the floor. Maxwell has lost it for good. Laughingly, he picks the orb up. "Why, it's not unlike an oyster or a grape!" He pops the eyeball down the hatch and laughs. The devils and clutching hands appear on the screen again. Not in the history of motion pictures have I seen the like of this...

Maxwell finishes walling Meirschultz's body up. He does not notice, however, that Satan has snuck into the space which holds his late master's body...

There is a jarring cut as a new player enters the scene. It seems that Don Maxwell had a wife, Alice, whom he left behind when he took it on the lam. We see four 1930's flappers wearing underwear and cavorting in a hotel room, Alice among them. Back in 1934, a movie showing women in their underwear would have been considered scandalous, but since this one has already featured a topless girl raped and strangled by a madman, it's probably not such a shock.

These four are also pretty off the wall. Jo is constantly jitterbugging while pretty Maizy does one of the best human impressions of brainless Betty Boop that you will ever see. As for Alice, she has a bizarre scene where she is vibrating in a fat-reducing gadget while singing "La Cucaracha, La Cock-a-roacha..." You just do not know what this film is going to throw at you next.

Suddenly, Marvel spots an item in the newspaper. It seems Don Maxwell has inherited a fortune from a newly deceased relative! But nobody knows where Maxwell is since he has run off. "Say," Alice wonders in her best imitation Mae West voice "I wonder if he is still with that goofy Professor."

Next scene finds Alice talking to "Dr. Meirschultz", who is actually her husband Don in disguise. The "Doctor" tells Alice that Maxwell is not around but that if she comes back later, she can meet him and tell him the good news.

Maxwell's paranoia is kicking into overdrive again. The hands and the devils are back as the maniac mutters "The gleam...it was in Meirschultz' eyes. It was in Mrs. Buckley's eyes when she wanted to kill her husband. It was even in Satan's eye. And now it is in Alice's eyes..."

We have a brief and inexplicable scene where "Dr. Meirschultz" coerces a beautiful topless girl (the same one that Buckley strangled) into an examination. The figure veers between Maxwell and Meirschultz as it looks as if the girl will first be kissed, but then is pushed away. This is not only Esper's attempt to add more sex to the story but to illustrate some of the sexual underpinnings of Maxwell's madness. A rather forward-thinking technique but clumsily implemented.

In Maxwell's crumbling world, nobody can be trusted, because they all have "the gleam". He concocts a warped plan that will pit Alice and Mrs. Buckley against each other. He first tells Alice the truth that he is really her husband, but he needs her help to treat a "madwoman" under his care. He gives Alice a syringe of fluid and tells her to wait until the proper time to use it. He puts in her in a side room while he tells Mrs. Buckley the same story about a "crazy woman". He gives Mrs. Buckley a syringe as well and leads her down the basement stairs.

When the two women are in the basement, Maxwell closes the door with a thud. With a shriek, both women attack each other with the syringes, which soon wind up on the floor. After Buckley's indescribable descent into madness and Maxwell's eating a cat's eye, I wouldn't think "Maniac" could do anything else to surprise me. But I would be wrong again.

What now erupts is one of the most violent and brutal female catfights I have ever seen in movie history. These two wildcats...both being rather plump, matronly women you wouldn't think would be so nuts...tear into each other with a vengeance, shrieking and yelling. Soon their clothes are ripped to shreds and then they really start to fight! Alice whacks Mrs. Buckley right in the head with what looks like an axehandle. Instead of dropping unconscious like most normal humans would, Mrs. Buckley is soon right back at it, smashing a ceramic flowerpot on Alice's skull! Meanwhile, we see running mice, flapping birds and scurrying cats frolicking in the basement.

Maxwell has flipped out completely upstairs. Laughing riotously while devils and dragons cavort on the screen, he thinks he has saved himself from two killers. Unfortunately for him, the Cat Farmer is watching through the window and he calls the police, who immediately arrive under the direction of our friend, the Missing Persons Detective.

The cop confronts Maxwell, who laughs "Those are just two of my patients having an argument!" He rambles on. "They are two would-be murderesses! They have the gleam! The gleam!"

"Is this whole place crazy?"the cop asks. His two patrolmen restrain a struggling Maxwell and head to the basement, where they break up the horrendous catfight between Alice and Mrs. Buckley. When both women see the leering, cackling Maxwell, they finally realize they've been had. "Why, he's crazy! " they both yell in unison.

During a quiet moment, the tormented yowl of a cat is suddenly heard. "What's behind this wall?" asks the cop, pointing to where Maxwell entombed Meirschultz. "Tear it down!" he yells. The two cops do just that and the body of Dr. Meirschultz topples to the floor, with poor Satan jumping right off of him.

We then have a long scrolling narration on the screen, explaining all about the creations of manias and psychosis. During the movie, these narrations appear at several odd points, illuminating such mental illnesses as dementia praecox, paresis and depression. Light classical music plays in the background during these "educational" sequences which, despite their melodramatic language, are actually fairly accurate. But the placement of these narrations, with their scholarly tone, seems only to bring another jarring note to a movie completely out of touch with any form of reality we know.

We next see a stark image of Maxwell behind bars. Crying piteously, he informs us that "I only wanted to amuse...to entertain." Suddenly his tone becomes more strident and he yells in triumph. "Dr. Meirschultz...my SUPREME impersonation!" He raises his hands to the sky. The End.

What is there to say about this movie that cannot be better said by watching the film itself? Is it the world's worst movie, as some have said? Is it a daring attempt to portray mental illness on the screen, years ahead of its time? Is it the very first exploitation film, a precursor to lurid fare that would fill the drive-ins years later?

The truth is, it may be all of these things. It is certainly one of the most visceral, jarring and unpredictable films ever made and for that reason alone, a must.

Here, then, complete and unedited, is the final narrative title of "Maniac". You must judge for yourself whether it fits the film or not:

"Manias are created by an inability to adjust to the world as it is. Insanity is our defense against a world which is not of our making and not to our liking. The normal person can make such an adjustment. It is not always easy but it is being done constantly. The person of inferior mental capacity cannot do this. He therefore creates a world in his mind which is his own idea of the world of his choice. He retreats to this world whenever the outer world becomes unbearable. This explains the periods of rationalism which all mental cases have. The periods of rationalism depend on the unbearableness of the real world. There are many people of sound mind who find one particular thing unbearable. When this is the case, he is said to be the victim of such a complex."

"Maniac" should be considered a Bible for all future explorations of mental illness! And when Dr. Abner Mality talks to you about mental illness, I know whereof I speak!

Albatross!