Dwain Esper’s MANIAC is so inept on every conventional level that it actually achieves an intermittent kind of interest. When a filmmaker has no interest in achieving anything except conning the public out of their money, the results are certain to be poor, but when he’s not good enough to efficiently do even that, you start to get some entertainment oozing back into the thing through the gaping fissures. Add to this that Esper wants to keep more than one ball in the air at once, a wildly unrealistic ambition considering his total ineptitude.
Esper’s balls are ~
1) Straight carny exploitation of sex and violence
2) Mock-medical pseudo-authenticity to lend socially redeeming merits to his film (important for staving off censorship)
3) An atmosphere of the macabre
(3) is sought via story borrowings from Poe’s The Black Cat, and actual film borrowings, seen in these double exposures which mix Esper’s footage of bad actors grimacing, with Guido Brignone’s footage of better bad actors grimacing more effectively in MACISTE IN HELL (1925). I was very glad that I’d seen Brignone’s film first, because otherwise I’d have spent MANIAC wondering what the devil it was and how I could find a copy. The baroque proto-peplum imagery, fusing Dore’s Dante illustrations with the epic rhubarbing of CABIRIA and the shade of Steve Reeves to come, somehow found its way into Esper’s hairy palms and was interpolated willy-nilly into the trash auteur’s ongoing mastur-piece.
shadowplay 