Horror Classic 18 of 50: MANIAC (almost)

This week's movie is Maniac, a 1934 movie that truly defines the phrase "a 1934 movie."

Okay, I have a confession, for the two or three of you who check this blog regularly: I haven't watched Maniac yet. I really have no excuse; it's only 51 minutes long. Fifty-one minutes! I've taken longer to fold my underwear!

So, I haven't been very good lately about sticking to the "update once a week, exactly on Wednesday evening" schedule, despite the large salary I make for writing this blog. But I'm really, really going to try to do better, and that's a promise. May mad monsters and atom age vampires strike me down if I'm lying!

By the way, in the unlikely event that you hadn't guessed, that's not even a picture from Maniac up there. That's from the classic LucasArts adventure game Maniac Mansion, which has the word "maniac" in the title. Also the word "mansion," but I don't think there's a movie called Mansion in the Horror Classics DVD set.

But here's what I'm going to do. I looked at the first sentence of the description on the disc sleeve, and only the first sentence. It was something like, "In this film we meet a mad scientist who is attempting to reanimate dead tissue when he himself expires." Now, based on that, I'm going to guess how the movie goes. Here's how I see it playing out:

Dr. Madbrain is working in his lab attempting to bring dead people back to life when an accident occurs -- let's say he gets hit on the head with a falling piano, or his hotplate starts a fire. It's also possible that he has a heart attack. So his slow-talking, hunchbacked assistant Melvin, or possibly his melodramatic colleague Dr. Macabreman, takes his notes and figures out how to bring him back to life. Dr. Madbrain is now the Maniac, and he repays the favor by killing Melvin/Macabreman.

Then he kills a bunch of other people. He also has a daughter or a niece or a cousin or a maid or some kind of chick, whose name is Esmerelda, and she has a bland boyfriend named Tom. When a bunch of angry villagers band together to stop his reign of terror, Tom faces off with Dr. Madbrain... two men enter, one man leaves. Or rather, one man and one maniac enter, one bland boyfriend leaves.

There's probably also some kind of other character who's trying to figure out what's going on -- a cop or a detective or a reporter named Ralph. And I predict at least one scene with a barking dog, and three speeches by the maniac Dr. Madbrain about how unstoppable and rad he is.

So that's how I predict the movie will go. Come back soon to see if I was right! And join me again next Wednesday (no, really!), when the classic horror movie will be Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Wait a minute... this DVD set includes a movie I've heard of?