Maniac (1934)
This wild exploitation film runs less than an hour, but it's packed full of enough bad acting, incoherent plot twists, and deranged scenes to fill up a whole case of CD's.
We begin with some words about insanity on the screen. Get used to this, because similar quotes are going to pop up at totally random moments during the film. The story starts off with a mad scientist and his assistant. The scenario is familiar, at first. The doctor has a formula to revive the dead, and he goes off with the assistant to get the body of a young woman from the local morgue. After bringing her back, things get a little stranger.
The doc wants another corpse to work on, this one with a damaged heart, so he can put the one he's got beating on his laboratory table into it. (We get a lot of shots of the throbbing heart in a jar, in a sort of preview of similar scenes in Hammer's Frankenstein films. Pretty gruesome for 1934.) The assistant goes to the local undertaker, but gets scared by some cats fighting. (This film has a LOT of cats in it.)
Assistant goes back to the doctor, who yells like a loon at him for messing things up, but then he has a great idea. He'll shoot the assistant and bring him back to life. In a very poor choice of actions, doc hands the gun to the assistant and tells him to shoot himself. Guess what happens.
Assistant (earlier said to be an ex-actor and master of disguise) makes himself up as the dead doc. (Not too tough, since the mad scientist has a huge bush of curly hair, a gigantic beard, and big round glasses.)
A woman comes in and wants doc's help with her husband, who thinks he's the killer orangutan from Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Hoping to get the woman out of his hair, assistant plans to inject him with plain water, but he gets the syringe with water mixed up with the one with "super adrenaline." (An interesting mistake, since the two syringes are vastly different in size.) Husband gets the injection, goes berzerk (more wonderful overacting), and drags off the revived dead woman. (Remember her? The writers almost didn't.) We get some almost-nudity as husband drags her outside and tears at her clothes. (Later on, we get some actual nudity, as the assistant does something or other with a topless woman. This movie was definitely intended for ADULTS ONLY!)
Wife finds the dead body of the real doctor and confronts assistant. He explains that he was going to revive him. Wife accepts this calmly, then leaps to the conclusion that the revived dead man will obey all commands. She then asks the assistant to do the same thing to her husband!
Meanwhile, assistant bricks up the dead doc in the basement, along with a cat. (Yep, this is a direct steal from Poe's "The Black Cat.") In the film's most infamous scene, while chasing one of the other cats around (there's a guy next door who has a backyard full of caged cats, which explains all the cats in the movie) assistant pops out one of its eyes and eats it.
In a wild plot twist that comes out of nowhere, we find out that the assistant's wife, never mentioned before, learns that the assistant has inherited a bunch of money from somebody in Australia. (This is all revealed in a scene with the wife and her girlfriends, so we can watch them prancing around in their underwear. One of the girlfriends has a horribly squeaky voice that will drive you right up the wall.)
So, to make a long story short, assistant's wife shows up, doesn't recognize her husband, and is manipulated into going down into the basement with the madman's wife. (Remember him? It doesn't matter, because he never shows up again.) They get locked up, get into a wild, clothes-tearing fight. The cops show up (called by the guy who owns all the cats) and the movie ends.
Maniac is utterly deranged, and is must viewing for fans of the worst in cinematic horror. It's a very bad movie, but it's never boring.