This is How Movies Should Be Made

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

As usual with exploitation films, this one presents us with unmotivated spectacle supposedly justified as educational: different kinds of mental illness are described in captions, followed by disconnected scenes of nudity and gore, such as a man popping out a cat's eyeball and eating it as a tasty morsel.The reason the impersonator of a mad scientist ate the cat's eyeball was that the cat ate the heart that was going to be used to bring the real mad scientist back to life after the impersonator shot him because the mad scientist wanted him to commit suicide so that he could bring him back to life and show the world. Of course, the mad scientist had already brought a woman back to life earlier that evening by injecting super adrenaline into her body in the morgue, but that did not seem to be enough for one day.We get to see the woman stripped almost completely naked and raped by a patient who is accidentally given a shot of the super adrenaline while under the delusion that he is the orangutan in "Murders in the Rue Morgue." She was pretty good looking too, which was why the two workers in the morgue were glad to have her body when she was first brought in.

Don Maxwell is an ex-vaudeville ham, wanted by police, who has now found himself as the unlikely assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist in the business of reanimating corpses. Maxwell's gift of impersonation gets him and Meirschultz past the guards and into a morgue where they use a special serum to revive the corpse of a pretty young woman. But that's nothing. Dr. Meirschultz has a heart beating in a jar of solution and is eager to put it into a corpse that really needs it. Meirschultz gives his assistant a gun and advises him to commit suicide, so that he can put the heart in him, but Maxwell shoots and kills the scientist instead and hides the body. People will miss Meirschultz, Maxwell quickly realizes, but no one will miss his lowly assistant; and so Maxwell dons eyeglasses and a fake beard to become his onetime benefactor. The trouble is, he impersonates the mad doctor too well and goes crazy himself. Bleached out sometimes out of focus print, but sound was good.Lots of overacting. Lots of talking. In fact, too much talking. Makes the 50 minute length seem like 3 hours. I didn't see any nudity,, but then my mind was drifting in and out because this is not a good film.

Oh, man! This one was so daft I had to watch it twice. It's like the Great Grandad of bad movies, sitting way out there pre-World War 2, being all disjointed and hilarious. What you have here is a monumentally stupid film which is supremely entertaining for every second of it's fifty minute running time. Maxwell is an actor, but he's not very good, which is why he's actually working as a lab assistant to a mad scientist who is intent on bringing the dead back to life and performing illegal transplants. The mad scientist is all about shouting and laughing and screaming and blackmailing Maxwell to dress up as the coroner, or sneak into an undertakers to steal bodies (a truly weird scene, as we get to see cats fighting each other, and dogs fighting cats…who knows why). Eventually the scientist goes completely nuts and gives Maxwell a gun, telling him he's got to shoot himself so that the scientist can bring him back to life. Quite sensibly Maxwell shoots the guy instead, but rather insanely then decides to become the scientist, mimicking his hair and stealing his glasses (although the professor magically grows another pair on his face later). In a scene that truly must be watched for full effect, some lady brings her husband to Maxwell to have him treated for depression. Maxwell injects him with something that turns the guy mental. After screaming "Burning! Burning in my veins" in one of the funniest acting jags I've ever witnessed, this guy grabs a resurrected woman and runs off with her into the country (where she changes into another woman and we get to see some thirties boobs! Who'd have thought it). His wife is cool with this though (really!) as long as the scientist can do what he was planning to do the dead body the lady finds on the floor (she's cool with that too!). After that, the film just gets weirder…Maxwell goes mental at a cat (who can be seen being thrown into the room by some runner), pokes its eye out (obviously a different cat with one eye), then eats the eyeball. There's a bad actor who has a house full of cats (he keeps the skins after they're eaten by rats…or something) who randomly turns up. At one point Maxwell is fondling a lady for no reason at all. We cut to Maxwell's wife and her scantily clad friends (one with a voice as high a chipmunk) and Maxwell plans to have his wife and the wife of the crazy guy kill each other (because of the 'gleam in their eye'). Then he stands around while crazy imagery from another film (where people look like the devil and breathe fire) is superimposed on top of him. Randomly there are dialogue cards detailing various mental illnesses with music that cuts off abruptly. The moment this film ended I wanted to watch it again. No one can act, hardly anything makes sense, and it's all so entertaining I think it might be one of my favourite bad films. If indeed you can label an entertaining film 'bad'.

Don Maxwell is an ex-vaudeville ham, wanted by police, who has now found himself as the unlikely assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist in the business of reanimating corpses. Maxwell's gift of impersonation gets him and Meirschultz past the guards and into a morgue where they use a special serum to revive the corpse of a pretty young woman. But that's nothing. Dr. Meirschultz has a heart beating in a jar of solution and is eager to put it into a corpse that really needs it. Meirschultz gives his assistant a gun and advises him to commit suicide, so that he can put the heart in him, but Maxwell shoots and kills the scientist instead and hides the body. People will miss Meirschultz, Maxwell quickly realizes, but no one will miss his lowly assistant; and so Maxwell dons eyeglasses and a fake beard to become his onetime benefactor. The trouble is, he impersonates the mad doctor too well and goes crazy himself.The schlockmeister, Dwaine Esper, produced and directed this utter crap, which includes more than enough nudity, sex and morbid perversity to have kept it out of legitimate theaters in 1934. It also includes the infamous scene in which the mad assistant pulls out a cat's eye and eats it. The movie is hilarious at first, not least because of the arbitrarily distributed title cards, which irrelevantly inform the audience about mental illness - a ruse to give the exploitative garbage the pretense of being an educational film. The funniest scenes are between the scientist (Horace B. Carpenter) and the assistant (Bill Woods), each actor trying to out-ham the other, making it a shame when one of them has to get killed off. Luckily, Ted Edwards, as one of the doctor's patients, gets his chance to do some over-the-top raving when the assistant accidentally injects him with the corpse-reanimating serum.But even at the short running time of 51 minutes, the whole business starts to get tedious and the laughs wear off around the time we're subjected to some dismal cheesecake scenes. Eventually the irritation of the incoherent plot, which constantly introduces a new idea, only to drop it quickly and pursue another, will make even bad movie fans grateful when it's all over.