I have only ever seen a live freak show one time. I don’t remember when it was or which of any
number of annual county fairs it may have been at, but I did see one many years
ago. Don’t misunderstand, there wasn’t
much to see. There was a sword
swallower, a tattooed lady (she didn’t have a thing on the Suicide Girls, but
still…), and an alligator man (note to rubes: simply a guy with
icthyosis). I was young enough to love
every minute of it, even the mannequins made up like various freaks in a poor
man’s version of the Mütter Museum. So
naturally, I also fell for the come-on to take a gander at what was behind the
dark curtain. Again, I don’t recall the
wording exactly, but I fell fast for this hard sell. Next thing you know, I’m one dollar poorer
and standing in a partitioned corner of the tent staring at replicas of
deformed babies in suspension: babies
sharing a head, babies sharing a torso, and so forth. I can’t say it wasn’t interesting to look at,
but let’s face it, if someone says they want to show you the Egress and then
escorts you out the door and onto the street, you’re likely to be hit with a
mix of aggravation and admiration. I
don’t think I’d want to go see a modern freak show like Jim Rose’s for the
simple fact that part of the fun of old school freak shows was in being taken
advantage of. To my thinking, the modern
versions are more “freak” than “show,” and that’s not really entertainment to
me.
Dr. Meirschultz (Horace Carpenter) wants to try
out his new life-restoring serum on the corpse of a young woman who recently
turned up in the morgue. Strong-arming
assistant and former actor Maxwell (William Woods) into impersonating
the coroner, the two skulk into the morgue and perform their experiment with
successful results (kind of). But
Meirschultz wants to get a victim with a “shattered heart” in which to
transplant the heart he has been keeping alive in his lab. Resisting the doctor, Maxwell winds up
shooting the older man and, instead of getting the hell out of there, decides
to impersonate the madman and carry on in his name. And that’s about the first ten minutes.
Anyone who is in any way a fan of Genre and Exploitation Cinema
should know the name Dwain Esper.
Basically, what he and his wife, Hildegarde Stadie, would do was
take their little films, like Maniac (aka Sex Maniac), from town to town and exhibit them in roadshow style
at local theaters and burlesque houses, appealing to the prurient interest of
both male and female audiences. Well-versed
in the carnival tradition, Esper was no dummy, and he knew how to both satisfy
his audience and skirt decency laws.
Essentially, he advertised his films as being educational or, barring
that, moralistic and therefore uplifting to his audience’s character. This is why there are often text cards or
crawls which interrupt the film’s story (such as it is)to give the audience
some cursory edification about a given subject (for example, medical
descriptions of Dementia Praecox, Paranoiacs, Paresis, and Manic-Depressive
Psychoses). The restrictive Hays Code (aka
the Motion Picture Production Code) was enacted into law in 1930 and started
being enforced in 1934 (and would be in effect until 1968) by the Breen Office
which was a giant thorn in the side of exploitationeers, but this in no way
slowed down Esper and his wife. This is
the ball which such luminaries of Exploitation as Kroger Babb (of the infamous Mom And Dad), H.G. Lewis, and Roger
Corman would pick up and run with (not always in the right direction, but that
it moved at all is significant) for decades to come. And his influence is still felt today, in my
opinion.
When we think of the past (or at least when I do, and
particularly the past as depicted in visual media of the day), it is typically
very clean, sanitized in a way. It’s not
the past, per se, but how its producers want the past to be remembered. People didn’t have genitals (a notable
exception to this being actress and libertine Louise Brooks). People didn’t die violently. The good guys always won. The State always had its people’s best
interests in mind rather than its own agenda.
It’s a fabrication, but damn if it hasn’t become the truth (or the
popular truth, at any rate). Film’s like
this one are examples of sleaze which feel more transgressive for the times in
which they were created, because we (okay, me) still have it in our heads that
what we’ve been show about this era is honest for the most part. So you feel a little dirtier seeing a woman’s
bare breasts as she’s virtually raped by Maxwell’s latest patient, Buckley (Ted Edwards). It feels somehow more wrong watching an
erstwhile actor pop out a cat’s eyeball and eat it (though I’m fairly sure they
didn’t actually do that on set, to be honest) in the film’s most (in)famous
scene. Of course, after having seen such
transgressive films as Cannibal
Holocaust and Salò, Maniac feels a bit old-fashioned, but
it still doesn’t feel 100% okay, either.
Intriguingly (and it’s almost metatextual, in a way), the
film also deals with appearances and truth.
Maxwell is a gifted mimic, and he starts off impersonating the coroner. And yet, after taking on Meirschultz’s
persona, he quickly becomes as insane as the doctor ever was, his appearance
becoming the truth. What we see is
Meirschultz, and what we get is Meirschultz, even though it’s not. Ironically, Maxwell will attain the
apotheosis of his acting career by completely becoming the deceased scientist
and successfully carrying on his maniacal work in actuality. He is the two people at once, but his
original calling (the theater) is at last fulfilled by fulfilling this new one
(mad science). In the same way that Dr.
Mabuse’s evil transcended his physical being to infect others, insanity in this
film is contagious and “…our defense against a world which is not of our making
or to our liking.” In other words, if
you’re not careful, you could very easily go as insane as any of the people in
this film (or, say, the person sitting next to you watching this picture). With a level of theatricality somewhere in
the stratosphere and all the technical virtuosity of moldy bread, this is in no
way, shape, or form a well-made or even a good film. This is insanity on celluloid and a peek
under the antiseptic veneer of a past so meticulously cultivated since its
inception, it’s difficult to fathom that things like this could ever have
existed back then. But I absolutely love
that they did.
MVT: At a scant hour long runtime, the amount
of pure craziness that infests every frame of this film is bewildering. You not only don’t have a second’s respite to
consider that everything about the film is bullshit, but you also don’t have a
second’s respite to figure out if you’re not as nuts as the characters on
screen.
Make Or Break: There’s a reason why the cat’s eye scene
is so talked about (in the same way that similar scenes are talked about in
films as variegated as Zombi 2, Un Chien Andalou, and Thriller: En Grym Film), but let’s be
honest; You could unspool this film onto your floor, sit in the middle of the
celluloid pile and point at any arbitrary frame, and you almost certainly would
still point to a scene which makes this movie such a deviant pleasure to
behold.
Score: 6.75/10
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