Maniac (Dwain Esper, 1934)

Husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Dwain Esper and Hildegarde Stadie (Esper directed, Stadie wrote the screenplays) worked in the way-off-Hollywood indie exploitation circuit, often traveling the country with their films and fighting local censorship boards along the way. These movies amped up the sex, drugs, violence, perversity, and nudity while their creators not very convincingly presented them as educational films (the dangers of drug abuse, the definitions of various mental illnesses, life in a nudist camp, etc.), though Stadie reportedly had a gift for charming censors and getting her and Esper out of legal trouble.

Stadie grew up in the world of the snake oil sales grift, and Esper came from a traveling carnival background. Stadie, a Chicagoan, toured the country with her drug-addicted uncle, who sold a cure-all called Tiger Fat. One of her contributions to the rube-grifting sales pitch was posing nude while draped in a python, the snake covering certain delicate areas. Esper, born in the state of Washington, worked as a carnival barker in the Pacific Northwest. Stadie and Esper met when their traveling paths crossed, and the pair married in 1920. Growing weary of his carnival performers' occasional unreliability and tired of paying them, Esper thought making movies would be a much better grift. Once the film was in the can, you had a fixed product you could sell that would not rely on the availability of live human beings with all their inherent problems and financial needs. Stadie agreed, and the pair moved to Los Angeles to grift some city rubes.

While Dwain and Hildegarde had no intention of creating film art and were mostly just trying to make a pile of cash without spending a pile of cash, the movies they made were so weird that I think it's fair to call them accidental outsider artists. Whether they're good artists or not is another story. Maniac is the pair's second surviving feature film, following a couple shorts to figure out the equipment and lost debut The Seventh Commandment. The surviving first film, Narcotic, is a story of drug addiction, loosely based on the experiences of Hildegarde's uncle. I'm stretching the definition of "feature" a bit, because both Narcotic and Maniac get the job done in slightly less than an hour.

Moving on from the world of drug hysteria, Maniac is a horror film about Maxwell (Bill Woods), an aspiring actor and master impressionist who is taken in and given an assistant job by a renowned medical doctor/research scientist/psychologist named Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter) (I love how old B-movies frequently assume the same guy does all three of these jobs -- it's all doctoring, baby). Though the film is called Maniac, it really should be called Maniacs, because Meirschultz and Maxwell are both, uh, maniacs, and so are a handful of the supporting characters. Meirschultz has figured out how to bring bodies back from the dead, and he and Maxwell steal the body of a beautiful young suicide victim from the morgue and take her to the lab, where they reanimate her.

So far, so good, but Meirschultz soon gets insanely pissed at Maxwell because Maxwell is so afraid of cats that he bungles a second body-stealing expedition by completely losing his shit after seeing three of our feline friends. Long story short, Maxwell goes full-on bonkers and ends up impersonating Meirschultz after shooting him. His complete lack of medical knowledge creates havoc (he turns a mildly maniacal patient into a full-on maniac after injecting him with super-adrenaline), and eventually we get major hoopla involving multiple maniacs, bodies bricked into walls, lots of cat business, and several women in varying stages of undress.

None of this overly complicated story is presented with much coherence, skill, or talent, though the occasional exciting image pops up. There are several scenes where the camera focuses on the back of a character's head or the character who is not talking during dialogue scenes, and the overall sound quality is poor. Storylines are introduced and dropped, characters wildly overact or dramatically underact, the editing has a mind of its own. During the two brief scenes that contain topless nudity, the actresses transform into body doubles who don't look like them, in one instance with a completely different hairstyle. The same thing happens in a scene where a cat's head is squeezed until its eyeball pops out. A black cat is grabbed but magically transforms into an orange cat before turning back into a black cat. (An actual one-eyed orange cat was used for this scene with a fake eye prop.) The second half of the film is mostly just women in underwear or loose robes or topless with the horror movie plot weaving in and out.

This, of course, is an "educational" film, so we are treated with silent-movie-style intertitles with textbook definitions of various mental disorders at appropriate points in the action. Maniac should probably be shown in schools. We could all learn a lot from it.

Maniac is not very good, and the filmmakers have a far more interesting life story than anything they slap on screen, but it's pretty damn weird and a fascinating historical example of how people in the early 20th century received their sleaze. Also, if you're a Hüsker Dü fan, the illegal cat farm scene will be of much interest, since Bob Mould's lyrics to the song "How to Skin a Cat" on the New Day Rising album are taken mostly verbatim from its dialogue.

Esper and Stadie's moviemaking grift worked out nicely for them. After making some more sexploitation and drugsploitation films, the couple also started distributing and traveling with other controversial and/or banned films in the 1940s, including Tod Browning's Freaks and several European softcore sex movies. Esper, also a skilled con artist, supplemented his handsome movie income with occasional scams on his friends and family, though he was reportedly so successful at talking his way out of trouble that he convinced them not to press charges. By 1948, the couple were independently wealthy. They sold their movie studio and retired, living into old age. The lesson in this educational post: grifting pays.