Reanimator two-faced Semi-mad Dr. Meyerschultz, who lives in a sinister house with his mentally unstable assistant Maxwell, in the bowels of his basement laboratory conducts shocking experiments to revive the dead and return them to the world of the living. However, quite unexpectedly, Maxwell kills his patron and, having dressed up as the honorable doctor, decides at all costs to continue his research on the resurrection. But for this noble cause, new corpses are simply needed.
American director, screenwriter and producer Dwayne Esper entered the history of world cinema as an extremely scandalous, odious and extraordinary person, although by now unfairly forgotten, despite the huge contribution to the development of the horror genre - development, however, for many had a frankly degrading and devaluating character. Produced the cult horror film “Freaks” by Tod Browning in 1932, Esper with no less zeal and creative potential continued in the following years to create films that caused the then audience a very controversial reaction, filming as a director in 1933 one of the first films about drug addiction, which was called quite trivially – “Drug” and subsequently continued this specific for American cinema of the 30s with the films “Marijuana” and “Smoking Brains”, which had an exclusively preventive function.
However, much more famous Dwayne Esper brought his third full-length directorial work – the film “Maniac” in 1934, entered in the National Register of the Library of Congress. This modest budget and timing tape, the plot of which is based on the story of Edgar Allan Poe, however, quite perverted by the screenwriter of the tape Hildegaard Studi, in fact, became the first truly operational horror film in the history of American cinema, besides, for several years ahead of further genre trends.
As strange as it may sound, but without the tape “Maniac” Dwayne Esper simply impossible to imagine the famous “Psycho” Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the practical majority of slashers and zombie horrors, although, of course, to call the tape canonical language does not turn. “Maniac” is just a diligent atmospheric exploitation of the theme of sinister doctors, with a lot of visual borrowings from German film expressionism, starting with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” by Robert Wien and ending with a cycle about Dr. Mabuz Fritz Lang. Moreover, the artistic connection with Lang’s famous film work in Duane Esper’s Maniac seems to be the closest, but Maniac does not seek to claim the universality and generalization of events taking place in the picture, does not at all strive for a number of strong philosophical inventions; it is just a slightly surreal and very dark and cruel for its time story of ordinary madness, played out in the spirit of classical film exploitation and sharply contrasting itself to the Hayes Code, which reigned in American cinema of those glorious times.
The film is dynamic, concise and extremely expressive both in terms of the rhythmic atmospheric camera work of William S. Thompson (who, ironically, in the 50s, began to work with Ed Wood), and thanks to the maniac8 very convincing play of actors and, first of all, the performer of the role of crazy Maxwell William Woods, who created a vivid image of the villain, rooted in the character of Igor from the Gothic story about Dr. Frankenstein of the notorious Mrs. Shelley. Only this time Igor rebelled and finished off his master, and he himself wished, in turn, to become the Creator, but, unfortunately, if in his patron Meyerschultz was embodied “genius and villainy”, which are things quite compatible, Maxwell is only a fool and a villain, the sad finality of whose deeds is predetermined in advance by the supreme matrix of being.