Maniac (1934)

Maniac (1934)
aka
Sex Maniac

A former vaudevillian gifted at impersonation assists a mad scientist in reanimating corpses and soon goes mad himself.

Maniac, also known as Sex Maniac, is a 1934 black-and-white exploitation/horror film, directed by Dwain Esper and written by Hildegarde Stadie, Esper's wife, as a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Black Cat", with references to his "Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Director: Dwain Esper

From All Movie Guide: There are bad movies -- then there are Edward D. Wood Jr.'s bad movies -- and THEN there are Dwain Esper's bad movies (which, to all intents and purposes, are synonymous with Dwain Esper's movies). From the early '30s until the 1950s, Esper was a bottom-dweller in the field of exploitation movies, a producer and distributor so lowbrow and sleazy (and at times grotesque) in his output and methods that he was an embarrassment to most of his colleagues in the exploitation field, a realm of film making where shame was otherwise virtually unknown.

-- Esper and his designates would blow into a small town or a modest-sized city the way a carnival moved in (and they were sometimes part of carnivals), with lots of ballyhoo about whatever movie they were pushing, usually in an educational context, to be shown either in a tent outside of town or in a theater conveniently rented for one or two days; they would blow out of town just as quickly, before local authorities could act to close him down (based on Esper's having avoided whatever state censorship laws existed, and all 48 states of the period had them).

Horror
640x480
Public Domain