You are listening to Zombie Strains. I'm John, and with me is my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. We're horror movie fans living in what appears to be a zombie world. According to Wikipedia, over 600 zombie films have been released since 1932. And of those 600, 400 of them have come out just this century. Why is that? To answer this question, we're going to follow the shambling zombie path from the beginning, one movie at a time. Welcome to Zombie Strains. Hello, everybody out there. Today, we're going to talk about a film from 1934 called Maniac, aka Sex Maniac. And I think it's safe to say that of the four films we've talked about so far, this is clearly head and shoulders above the other three. This is a truly epic achievement of a film. Yeah.

I really want to know your criteria for this.

My adjective would be bonkers.

My one word review is yikes.

Yeah.

It's quite a movie. I think we went looking for the history of zombie movies, and we intersected with the history of exploitation movies accidentally on this one. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. Speaking of exploitation movies, what do you want to warn our poor listeners about today?

Yes. Well, this is an early or maybe one of the first exploitation films, and that means we do get a couple of things that maybe might not be quite as kosher to put in a film these days. So we have some harm to animals, and we have some implied sexual assault.

Yes. And I think there's also some pretty severe anti-Semitism, but I don't think we have any clips for that, so it'll be less obvious, but that is a big part too. So we'll cover that in a cultural context.

So hey, Brad, can you give us the rundown on this film before we start our chat?

Maniac was released on September 11th, 1934. It was directed by Dwayne Esper and written by his wife Hilda Gard Stady. The two made several other exploitation films, including Narcotic, Marijuana, How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, and How to Take a Bath. The only actor of note in the cast is Horace B. Carpenter, who has over 400 credits and continued acting into the 1940s.

I'll tell you what, Horace acts the heck out of this movie.

I'll tell you that. Yes, indeed.

The movie didn't do well initially, so Esper retitled the movie Sex Maniac and distributed it to grind houses such as Burlesque and adult theaters, where it did much better. And by going this route, the film avoided the Hays Code and didn't have to be certified by the Production Code Authority.

This whole thing is fascinating. I think what we stumbled across is a character in cinema history, Andy, and we don't have to talk about this too much, but I wanted to talk about it briefly. So Dwayne Esper apparently is legendary for making these early schlocky horror films that only Quentin Tarantino could love. That was his schtick. And he's also an uncredited producer on Reefer Madness. It looks like he obtained the rights in the 40s, but when I look at this movie and that movie, the vibe is totally the same.

Well, watching this, it occurred to me that I, in my life, I don't know what your experience with exploitation movies and exploitation horror is, but most of the exploitation movies I've seen have been, I guess, these sort of postmodern, ironic takes, like Tarantino's style takes on exploitation, I realize. So it was a little bit interesting to be watching the real deal.

Yeah, it was alarming in some way. So let's talk about the cultural context, and then we can talk about some of the stuff that's in this movie that is so shocking. So, and I wanted to make a comment about why the cultural context is important. A friend of mine pointed out to me one of the most important things you can talk about in talking about a horror movie is what is society currently afraid of that made this horror movie play well to that society. So often the cultural context feeds into horror movies. It feeds into all art, right? But it feeds into horror movies in a way maybe more, especially an unsubtle horror movie like this, in a really sort of direct and visceral way. So a couple of things are going on in the world. It's 1934. 1932, FDR becomes president. It's the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. But I think the bigger deal here, right, is in 1932, Adolf Hitler comes to power. And he is obviously completely unapologetic about his horrible politics regarding Jews and the Jewish people. And we all know how that story comes out. But at this time, the war hasn't started yet. And it's clear to a lot of people in Europe that they need to get out of there. Because of the horrible rhetoric coming out of Germany. And so this leads to a great migration crisis for Jews across Europe. And though thousands of Jews come from Europe to the United States, hundreds of thousands could not come. There's also, I think, I mean, anti-Semitism is always present, but there's a big rush of it right now, not only because of Hitler, but because of things like the Russian Revolution, which were often seen as anti-Semitic conspiracies. None of this is, of course, true, but it did create a lot of fear about all these migrants coming to our shores. And I think that definitely impacts this film, Andy. I don't know what you think, but like what we'll get into it as we get into the thing. But that is really kind of a big deal. There's also some other stuff going on in America in particular. It is the age of gangsters, right? Bonnie and Clyde and real gangsters are running around, actually shooting people. Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, all this stuff is in the news, and this gets discussed in the movie a lot too. And I think we sort of romanticize that stuff now, but I think it could have actually been scary. I mean, think about Bonnie and Clyde. It's a couple on the run killing people as they flee across the country. I mean, I would be scared of that if that were happening now. You know what I mean? So I think that's a huge impact as well.

I don't know much about the history of psychology, but is there something going on? This film clearly makes some half-hearted attempts to connect to psychological ideas and mental illness. And I'm just wondering, was this a time when the modern field of psychology was stirring or starting to formulate? Do you know?

So Sigmund Freud dies in 1939. So I think in the 20s and 30s, psychoanalysis and specifically scientific language about psychology and the mind is still a pretty new idea. And Sigmund Freud in particular had a somewhat dark view of the inner human character. And I think some of that language is finding its way into the film in a way that we'll talk about too. So I think you're right, Andy. Well, let's get to it. Where should we start, Andy?

Well, I think the best place to start might be taking a look at this movie poster.

Oh, my God.

It is a work of... It is a masterful work of art.

And it's orange and black and white. So it just jumps out and slaps you in the face, first of all.

Yes. So I'm going to go ahead and read. It's full of texts. I'm going to go ahead and read some of what this film promises you will find when you pay your money and watch this thing is Sex Maniac. It promises true and authentic, nothing withheld. So at the end of this episode, John, we do need to circle back and decide how Sex Maniac, how well it achieved its own stated goals here. So a subject seldom discussed. It's not clear what the subject is, but it's either sex or insanity, I guess. Strange loves exposed. Adults only, no one under 16 admitted. What are the dangers of desire? What wrecks romances? The truth about love fearlessly told. Definitely, this is a movie people turn to when we talk about what does love do. And lastly, hear dynamic sex lectures and plain facts about secret sins. So, yeah, those are all of the titillating taglines they've jammed onto this movie poster. All of it surrounding the image of a creepy looking guy. I wouldn't say he really evokes zombie to me, at least in our modern aesthetic of the zombie. But there's a kind of creepy looking guy who's holding what looks to be like an unconscious woman in a nightgown.

Yes.

So what do you make of this poster, John? And what did this poster lead you to believe you were walking into when you fired this movie up?

It did not believe me to believe I was walking into a zombie movie. And it's one of those things designed to see, to sound like everything in here is forbidden. So whatever you do, don't come watch this. And then, well, of course, everybody's going to come watch it. Right? So yeah, I imagine this poster was not in a movie theater, but sort of stapled to a electric pole in the middle of the country or something. I don't...

Yes.

Yeah.

It doesn't broadcast a lot of class, I would say. It also does not accurately describe what you're going to get in the movie. But I do think it establishes the general timbre of what you're going to get from watching this movie, I think. So shall we jump right in, John?

Let's do it.

Okay. So Maniac begins and makes, it made an impression on me in the first five seconds when they screw up the title music by, instead of gracefully switching from one piece of music to the next, the first one just stops abruptly and they lurch into the next. So we're five seconds in and this is already looking like a dime store production here. That's it. I don't want to bias us in advance. As we discuss us, we could decide that there's more to it.

This is a strong artistic choice. Yeah, sure.

Yes. So right here at the beginning, it is as good a time as any to talk about something we touched on briefly in the White Zombie episode, and that is the experience of watching what seems to be a kind of badly degraded film.

Yeah.

This either through just the ravages of time or poor archiving or whatever, the visual quality on this film, at least the one I watched on the streaming service, is really bad, and everything has that, everything has this sort of fuzziness to it. It's like you're watching the film through like a layer of murky water or something like that. And I wanted to ask John, to some extent, you get this with a lot of movies from this era, I assume, like I said, due to archival practices or lack thereof. And I have to admit it, there's something not comforting isn't quite the right word, but it's an aesthetic that I've associated that fuzzy aesthetic and the kind of poor crackly audio with films from this era. And I don't know, I wouldn't say it's a feature, but it doesn't feel like quite the bug that you might expect. What do you think about that?

I agree. And I think what's interesting about it is it does, I think it lends itself particularly well to horror movies, right? Because it is so jarring and so strange. It almost takes you out of yourself. So comforting is not the right word. But I think that the sort of gonzo, sort of low-budget nature of this movie also reminds me about something that we often forget in the face of say, a super polished Dawn of the Dead or Girl with All the Gifts. Like horror movies start and their origin is in, like schlocky, low-budget desire to shock, right? Like in our modern era, we have horror movies that are sort of like the Girl with All the Gifts is a great meditation on life and what does it mean to be alive and all of these things. None of those things are in these early movies. They're just designed to be transgressive and shocking and weird. And I think that aesthetic lends to that, if that makes any sense.

I think so too. I think it adds a little bit of a dreamlike vibe to them, when at least viewed as a modern viewer or watching it. And at points, this movie very much feels like a fever dream, and the poor quality of the visuals, the extreme fuzziness of what you can see, I think maybe unintentionally, almost certainly unintentionally, lends to that effect.

There's a couple of spots where somebody's walking outside or walking at night, and there's just nothing to see, and it's clearly just horrible filming. But other parts of it, where you're in the studio or where you're in the laboratory and the audio is bad or the lighting is bad, that does really lend to this feeling of, like in White Zombie where they had scenes that had a lot of shadows and silhouettes, which you wouldn't do in a modern film, but really lend because of low budget or tackiness, but really fit the genre and the time.

Yeah. So apologies for that little diversion, but we do need to jump into the exciting opening. And so the movie opens with a little trick that they're going to use about 100 million times throughout this movie's 50-minute runtime.

Yeah.

That is a title card with a quote about mental illness. So I thought this quote was going to really establish the theme. And so I was writing down this quote because I thought, oh, it might help our readers if I read this quote. But then the quote kept going on. It scrolls on for paragraphs.

It's like a crawl in a Star Wars movie. Yes.

And then a second quote starts rolling up after it. And I thought, this is just too much. But yes, maybe if I had thought of it more like that Star Wars opening crawl, I would have been more receptive to this.

I did pull one sense from it, which I loved, which actually sounds like something Yoda would say, right? Unhealthy thought creates warped attitudes, which in turn create criminals and maniacs. So yes.

Yeah. So I've been harshing on these title cards, but each of them, with one exception, we'll get to later. What these title cards do is they usually present a scientific term for an iteration of mental illness as understood in the 30s, and then some definition of what that means. And sometimes there is a loose connection between this quote and what is about to unfold in the movie. For instance, one of the ones later in the movie is about paranoia, and it gives you a little definition of paranoia. And then the next couple of minutes, paranoia enters into the story. Sometimes it doesn't feel especially connected to what's happening in the movie.

Even when it feels related to the film, I never felt it was intentional. I felt it was still randomly placed.

They just got lucky.

Yes. It is a funny, it's not artsy exactly, but this is the sort of thing a classier movie does. And it just, sometimes the contrast between the sort of lofty scientific quotes and the schlock that you're watching is pretty dramatic.

And I'd say, like back to your earlier point, Andy, about what is happening with sort of psychology and psychological language. My thought is that for the Roadhouse crowd, they're not familiar with words like psychosis and paranoia and mania. And if they are, I think these words in terms are actually designed to alarm them and scare them. Like, I actually think these cards are aligned to sort of create an, you know, maybe to an anti-scientific audience, the sort of scientification of scary things, making them even scarier. So, I don't know, maybe we'll see how that holds up throughout the movie. But that's kind of the vibe that I get.

I think you're correct on that. So, when the movie does open, it opens again everything. I'm not going to harp on this throughout, but you need to understand that the quality of the visuals in the film is pretty dire, both because of that kind of archival decay I talked about maybe, but also there's a lot of, I guess, what you would call subpar lighting and filmmaking. I'm not going to harp on this every time it comes up, so you just need to keep in mind that everything we're talking about is taking place within a murky, poorly lit, sometimes almost invisible scene.

Just a quick point, you commented in White Zombie that the main character was wearing a white suit and the woman was wearing a white dress with blonde hair and white skin, and we opened with two people wearing white smocks. I don't think it's a mistake. I think it's just at the time if you wanted to see people on a strip of film like they needed to be wearing light colors.

I think you're right that a good black and white film will use contrast quite heavily like that. So we open on a laboratory of some sort. We're later going to learn this is allegedly a doctor's office, but we get the mad scientist's vibes right away. And so when did Frankenstein the movie come out, Brad?

Frankenstein came out in 1931.

Okay. So it does predate this movie.

Yeah. So but Frankenstein, the imagery about mad scientists and stuff that I think Frankenstein helped mainstream are probably on everyone's minds and informing this film as well, because we are quickly introduced to a really old school mad scientist and his assistant. Yes. And this movie, like White Zombie, it doesn't fool around. It jumps right into what this movie is going to be about as this cackling mad scientist declares to us what his intention is. He is ready to take his experiments to a new level.

Tonight, my dear Maxwell, I'm ready to try my experiment on a human.

Yes.

In the morgue, there is a lethal ghast suicide. And I, dear special.

So we don't know yet exactly, although you can probably guess, what this mad scientist, his name is Dr. Meyerschultz, has in mind. But he needs a relatively intact dead body to do it. And in this scene, he is, it's clear that his assistant is very uneasy with the sorts of tasks that Dr. Meyerschultz is demanding that he do. But Meyerschultz orders his assistant, whose name is Don, to acquire the corpse from the morgue for the purposes of this experiment.

Yeah. So I want to bring up two things here. One is, so my claim of sort of anti-Semitism in my notes comes up here, like both of these men sound like immigrants and they sound like they have troubled pasts. And they have, I just feel like they're being cast as Jewish stereotypes. And I think that's really clear in this scene. I don't know if you agree, but that jumped out at me when I first watched it.

I would definitely agree. So yeah, Meier Schultz appears to have some leverage over Don, who has some kind of a criminal past that has never entirely explained, I don't think. But it's clear he is holding Don's criminal past over him to make him help with these sort of ethically dubious experiments, right?

Now, right here though, like he picks up a giant syringe when he says he's ready to conduct this experiment on a human. Is there a short story maybe that this flashed into your mind when you saw this? Because there was one for me. I'll give you a hint. It's by a man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft from 1922. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Re-animator.

Yes, Herbert West Re-animator. So there's a film called Re-animator. We're going to watch it at some point. But I was just, it feels to me like he just ripped the plot for his, such as it was, for the beginning of the movie, from that story and just like, hey, I'm just going to have a guy who has a serum that makes people come back to life. I don't know if there's a lineage of these kind of stories, but maybe it's part Frankenstein, but it seems so close to Herbert West Re-animator. I was a little, that struck me initially.

I entirely agree and we'll get into it later. But one of the weirdnesses of this movie is that it does actually pull on a number of what I would call pretty reputable literary sources. Lovecraft is an obvious influence here, and then Edgar Allan Poe gets even explicitly called out later in this movie. So this movie, it feels like it's sort of swimming in the waters of these kind of early late 19th, early 20th century horror and just grabbing the pieces that it wants willy-nilly.

Yes.

So Don, like I said, is kind of reluctant here and he complains, you know, he is expressing his distaste with the task that Meyer Schultz has given him.

It's horrible, I tell you, working on the death, trying to bring back life. It's not natural.

You with your weird idea.

Haven't I stayed here and nursed dying dogs?

Yeah.

And even that miserable cat.

So the cats are huge in this movie.

This cat, it's named Satan, which I didn't figure out until the very end of the movie. And it suddenly made a lot of random references to Satan make a lot more sense.

I was really lost. And then I was like, oh, it's the cat he's talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. So cats are going to be all over this movie, in part because this movie is, you know, on some level, a version of Ed Grail and Poe's short story, The Black Cat. Yes. That if you were a Poe purist, you were in for some disappointment here. But I wanted to comment about the physical acting here. We've mentioned this with White Zombie, and we're probably going to have this point to make about a lot of movies from this era, but it's extremely stage-like. It was almost funny at points when Don and Meyer Schultz are standing next to each other, talking to each other. They are almost turned and facing the camera instead of each other. It's what you would expect from a stage production where the actors are addressing the audience. In this movie and in other movies from this era, there is a lot of this sort of delivery that is aimed not... It's not really an authentic portrayal of how people in a room would be talking to each other, but they're all projecting their lines out to an imagined audience.

Yes, though there are some times in this movie where people... Where they're shooting people speaking from the back, too. So it's just this weird hodgepodge. But you're right, there's definitely this theatrical, I'm standing on stage delivering lines kind of thing going on.

Yeah. So Dr. Meyers-Schultz's idea is that we learn that Don has some past as a Vaudeville actor. Yes. I don't know if that... Would that have been a disreputable career? It's everyone who mentions it in this film sort of reacts with distaste. Is that... Or am I imagining that?

I'm going to say yes, but Brad, I don't know if you have a thought.

Vaudeville was respectable. It was family-friendly entertainment, singing, dancing and comedy. Many big stars came from Vaudeville like James Cagney, Bob Hope and my favorite's Abbott and Costello.

Yeah. Okay. Well, there is a brief cut, and I'm not going to call all of these out, but occasionally the movie does these odd cuts, in this case to some really choppily edited footage of a cat stalking a mouse. I imagine they are trying to inject some symbolism here. Yes. Into the film. It's a little unclear. But then they're both in the morgue, Meyer Schultz and Don. We, I was thinking we would get a scene where Don goes through with a plan which is to impersonate the coroner and bluff his way into the morgue. But we skipped that and we just skip ahead to where they're in the morgue and they have identified the body of that woman who killed herself.

I think Don Maxwell is clearly dressed up as the coroner. Like he's clearly impersonating somebody. He doesn't look like he did in the first scene, but they sort of blow past all of that and he's just here. They're just here.

Yeah. It took me a minute to figure out that Don was dressed up as the coroner here. This movie, it just doesn't help you out in the way that a better film would. There's a lot of places in this movie where you cut abruptly to a new scene and you have to do a lot of figuring out on your own what this new context is. Because one scene does not gracefully lead into another in this film.

No. And in fact, in this scene where they're injecting this serum into this young woman and rubbing her limbs and stuff to get her to wake up, they just drop in two gravediggers, I guess, corner assistants having a conversation. Do you want to describe it? I have many thoughts on this, but yeah.

So this was so confusing to me. It's not clear at first, but there are two, I guess, yeah, mortuary assistants or something who are down there and watching Meyer Schultz and Dawn in their disguises mess with the corpse. And they, I mean, these are side characters. It's a real dire line delivery, I would say.

But one of them is like clearly, like there's one that's trying to act. And the other one is, I think he might actually like, it might be like he's really a grave digger or something. He seems insane, maybe a little, little slow. And he keeps like sneering at the camera. Like with one eye, it is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah.

It's a weird thing. It's also gross as they're talking about how attract like which of the corpses are attractive. And it's just establishing a really low, a really low moral tenor for this film.

And they're talking about what people are scared. They're literally having a conversation about what people are scared about. And they talk about suicide and they talk about gangsters, right? Like these are scary things in the world. This is why we get all the bodies here in the morgue.

Yeah. This was interesting for exactly that reason. They are expressing that sort of ubiquitous feeling that the world has never been worse.

Yeah.

So the gang wars and the suicides, and they recount those things in the same way you or I today would complain about how everything seems to be going to pot, that sort of thing. Yeah.

It's just the complete lack of subtlety, right? Part of the reason I think we got excited about Zombie Booze, to go back to the girl with all the gifts from a couple of episodes ago, I feel like one of the great things that science fiction or fantasy fiction does, science fiction in particular can take, which I consider horror to be, which we can talk about, but it takes the weird things that are happening in the world, places them in a different context so that it's safer to talk about them, right? Or the scary things. They don't do that here. They're just like, here's the scary things in the world. We're just going to tell you.

So we should note that the woman whose corpse they are injecting with Dr. Meier-Schultz's serum is named Maria.

Yes.

And there is a comical sequence to me where Meier-Schultz takes out a stethoscope and listens to the corpse. This is before they've injected it with a serum or something. What exactly are you listening for? Are you?

Yep, she's dead. Yeah, I don't.

So they cart out with the corpse. And then we have another confusing scene change to what is like building this label like the Office of Missing Persons or something.

Yeah.

At any rate, there's like sort of a police inspector type person who's going to come back much later in the film briefly. He's having a conversation with the mortuary attendants and they're discussing the fact that, yeah, somebody stole a corpse last night. And it's a little unclear how or why, but the police inspector who, I'm sorry, I don't have his name written down. I don't know if he's named. I don't think he's named in the actual film. But the inspector seems to kind of guess that Dr. Meyers-Schultz must be involved based on the assistant's description of Meyers-Schultz, who, to be fair, is a very visually distinct person. His manic eyes and wild mad scientist demeanor. And then for reasons that are less clear, they also kind of guess that Don, who has some, and they mention his criminal past here.

They don't actually ever mention his criminal past. They just mention that he has one.

Yes, exactly. So it's the implication that the police are already on to these two, I guess, which is kind of interesting. There's no, you would normally expect sort of a sequence where the police sort of slowly close in, but here they've figured out who's behind the corpse theft pretty much right off the bat.

They're like, it must be these guys. Which, may I say, I don't blame them for doing it in their sleep.

Yeah, I agree. So then we're back at the lab where they have brought the corpse, and here we learn that stealing this corpse and restoring it to life is part of Meier-Schultz plan, but it's not the end goal. So first, he kind of tells the camera that the corpse, after 24 hours of rest, the corpse should rise again alive. And we have seen that the corpse he injected the serum in appears to be breathing and stirring a little bit. So, I mean, that's a pretty big scientific advance there, but Meier-Schultz is not content with that, because we learn that this is just a step towards his true goals. He needs a new kind of corpse on which to perform a very specific type of surgery that he wants to do.

So, what I want is a victim with a shattered heart. Yes, a heart that I can replace with this beating thing. You will get me such a victim, Maxwell. It will be my supreme accomplishment.

I'm sorry if my laughing, mixed in with his laughing. The crazy, crazed laughter in this is amazing. But that's not why we play.

10 out of 10 mad scientists laugh right there. That's fantastic. So to explain what he's talking about there, he's got this beating heart in a jar.

Right, they don't show the top of the jar when they shoot it, because presumably somebody is just point poking it from the top to make it look like it's beating.

Exactly. Also, I assume this is like a, well, I mean, it's either a model made up, or it's like some sort of like a cow heart or something like that, but it looks very large. I guess I don't know my human internal anatomy that well, but it's a big heart. He's got this beating heart, and his plan seems to be he needs somebody.

By the way, it's also a call back to Frankenstein, where they had the brain that they were guarding around.

That's right.

So this is designed to scare people by showing human organs.

Oh, interesting. I also thought of, just because this film is going to be pulling in Poe references, I thought of the Telltale Heart, because I wondered if that was going to pay off. It doesn't, spoiler, it does not. But his plan seems to be he needs a mostly intact human body that he can implant this undead heart that he's got into. I don't know why this would be a grander achievement than what he just did, which was bringing somebody back to life by injecting them with a serum.

Yeah, I just did demanding boss. Yes, we've gotten a dead body and brought it back to life, but I'm not satisfied. Now we have to find one that died in a very specific way for this other very specific experiment I want to carry out. Like, dang, dude, give us a day off or something.

Yeah. And also, I mean, he needs to pause and write his findings up for a scientist, a peer reviewed journal I think before he just charges on to the next thing.

Right, right.

So Don does not want to go get this corpse. It's clear that Don is quite dissatisfied with this arrangement, but Don heads out because Don remembers that earlier in that day, a gangster, there's a little probably tip of the hat to what everyone was reading in the news. Yep. The gangster was shot presumably through the heart or something, and his body would be in the nearby undertaker's room. And so Don sneaks over through some underground tunnels that are kind of poorly explained. But I guess there's this network of tunnels Don uses to... And this scene, I can't stress enough how visually incoherent this scene is. He kind of sneaks into the basement of the undertaker where there's some corpses, and there's some cats in there fighting. Again, the cat thing.

And these seem like... Like, this is one of the many scenes here where... In this film, where, like, they've just used actual footage they shot of actual cats actually fighting, right? Like, it's not, like, staged in any way.

I think so, yes. And I didn't quite understand it, but I think basically they spook Don into retreating. Is that right?

That's how I took it. And I wrote in my notes, what is with all these fighting animals? So, just as an aside, Andy and I compared notes a little bit, and this is probably the most question marks we've written in, like, things like, what am I watching? What is with all these fighting animals? Who are these people? There's a lot of that in our notes.

So, this is reading too much into this film. But shortly in a few minutes, we're going to see that one of the fears this film is evoking is maybe the idea of a person who has reverted into sort of a feral animalistic state. Yeah. And so I think these shots of sort of cats fighting is supposed to kind of start priming us to for that big shock that's going to come later.

And for all I know, cats are actually scary to people in 1934. Like I don't know that that's not true, but clearly somebody in this movie is scared of them because there's a lot of them and they do horrible things to them.

Well, the camera, I mean, the camera treats the cats like they're ominous, in a way that feels very alien now to all of us who have cute cats.

Yeah, exactly.

Again, not going to harp on this every time, but this is one of the scenes where there is a long sequence in this scene in The Undertaker's basement where it is almost pitch black and you cannot see anything that's happening. And it's not like an artsy cut to black. The camera's still rolling and you can occasionally see some slight movement, but they just don't... They haven't illuminated the set, and so you can't see what's happening. It's very strange.

It's weird.

But Don retreats back to Meyers Schultz, and despite the fact that... And he reports his failure to get the corpse. And despite the fact that this plan was hatched like three minutes ago, Meyers Schultz has an absolute meltdown about this. I don't have the audio clip here because I have a better one I want to use in a sec. But Meyers Schultz just freaks out that Don has just ruined all of Meyers Schultz's work by failing to get this corpse. But this leads him to think, maybe there is another way to get the corpse I need to implant this creepy heart in. And this is what he pitches to his assistant Don. He opens a drawer where there is a pistol in there, and then he addresses Don.

Take it and take your life, and I will give it back to you. My living heart shall be in your body, and will live again. Only think of it. You will live.

Oh.

It is impossible not to laugh along with this, with this jovial scientist.

Yes, he's like Santa Claus on some serious drugs. It's nuts.

So we heard a bang at the end of that audio, and a gun has gone off, but it is not the one that we expected, because instead, Don, who has his own gun, has shot and killed Dr. Meyer Schultz. That's right. The plot is a big twist right there. So any comments on this rather hilarious scene, John?

Well, it's interesting because I think, since this movie really doesn't have a plot, and as things happening, the characters just have to tell you what they're thinking and are going to do. So obviously a mad scientist probably shouldn't tell their subject they're going to kill them, and then replace their heart with this other heart. They should just do it. But they can't. So he's got to do exposition about his evil plan in order so that we know what's going on. And it's just ridiculous.

It's a big ask, John. If this guy asked you to do this with the promise that he'd bring you back to life, how compelling is that?

It's not super compelling. Let me ask you, is it a bigger ask than Brad and I asking you to watch this movie, Andy?

Well, so here's the funny thing. Up to this point, this movie has been pretty normal.

Normal-ish. It at least is attempting coherence to have a plot that goes from A to B to C. Like its success is in question, but it's trying.

Right. So far, it's the worst episode of The Twilight Zone you've ever seen, but there's a recognizable through line to what's happening. But things are about to go completely off the rails. So, Don, I want to talk about a special effect that's introduced in this scene that's repeated a few other times.

This is bizarre. Yeah, please. I did research on what this was from, but describe it to the people.

I'll describe it, and then I want to hear what you learned. Because Don is kind of doing this little soliloquy, lamenting the murder he's just committed. And while he's doing that, not for the last time in this movie, we have some bizarre images of people in devil costumes, superimposed over the screen. This was so weird. What did you learn about this, John?

So this imagery is from a 1922 silent horror film that is Swedish that is called Hexen, or Hexen, or The Witches. And it purports to be a documentary style film about witchcraft and evil magic. It's totally fictional, but he's overlaying another film onto his film with this bizarre imagery. It's very strange.

The special effect will happen a couple other times. It's always, I think, centered on Don. The literal reading seems to be that Don is like a devil character or that he's being manipulated by the devil or something. I don't think it matters too much. I want to say that he realizes, Don, that maybe one way out of this situation is he could buy a little bit of time by disguising himself as Dr. Meier-Schultz and impersonating him. And so that's what he does.

So first of all, there's also a card here about something called Dementia Precox. It's another scientific descriptor. We don't have to read it, but it's just like inserted here. And then I love that his plan is, rather than say, I don't know, hide the body, come over the story. There's a cellar right below that we see later. No, he's going to leave the body where it is, but put on this makeup so he looks like the doctor.

There is, Dr. Meyer Schultz's body is laying, just laying on the floor for quite a while.

For the rest of the movie.

Yes, yes. And other people, as we'll see, other people come in and have conversations. So, I wanted to note, the title cards are always accompanied by jaunty music that is wildly at variance with the theme of the scene that you're watching.

So, the other thing that is wildly at variance with the rest of this movie is, I don't know where you watched it. I watched it on Pluto.TV.

I watched the Criterion Collection Blu-ray.

But now I know where all your local advertising dollars went. It's on Pluto. So, I got my local car dealership right after the Dementia Precax card. So, that was cool.

That's incredible.

Pluto, call us. We're here. We'll pitch you. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, it's fine. So, I need to pick up the pace here because this movie is only 50 minutes. And yes, we're still here in the middle. But trust me, things are about to get wild. So, he's impersonating Dr. Meyerschultz. And then, what should happen at the worst time? There's a buzzing at the door. Doorbells in the 30s, I guess, were the worst noise imaginable. I much prefer the modern ding-dong sound effect. Anyway, yeah, this air raid alarm doorbell goes off, and he opens it, and a woman comes in who is a patient of Dr. Meyerschultz. And this is the first time I realized that Dr. Meyerschultz was supposed to have been like a practicing doctor.

Like, he's not just an evil scientist. He'll also treat your common colds.

I mean, I guess there must not have been much competition in whatever town this is, because this guy would have the worst online reviews. But so, this is Mrs. Buckley, and she is here, and she wants to bring her husband, Mr. Buckley, in, because he to be treated for some sort of, I forget what they call it, but it's some sort of like, he's in the grip of some anxiety or delusion where he believes he's a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Oh, I missed that. Okay.

Yes, he believes he's the Orang-e-Tang from the murderers in the Rue Morgue.

Okay.

You're looking quizzical, John, so now, could I possibly have dreamed that?

No, I don't think so. I believe you. All right. Yeah, I mean, this film is just a collection of other people's ideas thrown together in a way that makes no sense, so I believe you 100%.

So Don disguises Meier-Schultz, realizes he has to play along with this ruse, so he can get this lady and her husband out of here. Right. So the next three minutes of this movie are amazing. So Don decides he's going to inject, he goes into the back room to find something he can, some medicine he can administer to Mr. Buckley, just to satisfy him and get him out of the office. So he, well, he picks up this giant syringe and notes that it contains superadrenaline.

Yes. Apparently, which is what animated the corpse in the morgue.

He puts the superadrenaline syringe down, and then he decides, well, I'm just going to, I'm just going to inject on some, with some water, something harmless. Is that actually harmless to just inject people with water?

I don't know that it's great, but it's not like injecting them with just straight air, because that would cause air bubbles in your blood.

Right, and it's better than superadrenaline.

But... As we soon find out.

Yes, so in a scene that really suggests this film might have worked well as a comedy, I think.

Yeah, in a goof that Homer Simpson would make.

Yes, he sets down the water syringe next to the much larger superadrenaline syringe, and then the water syringe rolls off the table. He doesn't notice, and to make this work, he reaches for the syringe without looking. So he's looking in a different direction, and he reaches back and he grabs the syringe he thinks is the water syringe. It's actually the superadrenaline syringe. So he goes in and he injects Mr. Buckley with what he thinks is water, but is actually the superadrenaline.

You can't even get it out.

Buckley starts undergoing these sort of convulsions and as he's doing so, poor Mr. Buckley, as he's undergoing some sort of transformation, he delivers an amazing speech.

Yes.

Doctor, he seems to be getting worse instead of better.

Stealing through my body, creeping through my veins, pouring in my blood, oh, dust of fire in my brain, stabbing me, agony. I can't stand it.

So, so I guess that that's helpful. If Meyer Schultz were so alive, he would probably be pleased to hear the helpful articulation of what it feels like to be injected with super adrenaline. So John, why don't you take this one? What happens once Buckley kind of succumbs to this?

So Maria, unfortunately, coincidentally, walks out of the room where she's been resting for her 24 hours, and she is a slow zombie who has been reanimated. And Mr. Buckley sees her and goes insane and grabs her and runs out of the room with a maniacal crazed laugh. Then it's a series of scenes of him like running through the countryside. And then we get our, then there's the really unsettling scene where he sexually assaults her, which sort of grinds any of the weird humor of this film to a halt. But I will also say it's the first scene, but not the last, it features actual nudity, which was interesting to me because of the time. But also you and I watched this on a streaming service and anybody could watch this, right? Like I wonder if Pluto TV knows that they have a video nasty on their service, you know what I mean?

Yeah, this was, it's not like a pleasant topic. I want to go into great detail, but this was really interesting. This is me noting my own ignorance. I did not realize, I had no idea there would be nudity in a film from 1934, even a trashy exploitation film. And I would like to thank you, John and Brad, for bringing me to this point in my life, where I, a middle-aged man with a family in the other room on a Friday, was spending my Friday night, freeze framing this trash movie to try and see, like a 14-year-old boy, to try and see if there was real nudity or not. So thank you for that new level of degradation I've reached in my life.

The only way that story gets better is while you're doing it, your teenager walks in. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. So, I mean, that said, I mean, so it's not, it's not fun. I mean, the scene is not funny. And like John said, it is like a splash of cold water on whatever.

Ridiculous clip we played and all of the silly fun is like, whoa. Yeah.

Yeah.

So again, it comes to though, that sort of horror movies as transgressive acts. You know what I mean? Like before they were highly polished things, they're showing us actual awful things. And we're not done with that. There's going to be more of that.

But yeah. Yeah, for sure. So having just seen that, this is where the film increasingly from this point on, I started to feel my brain like leaving my body as I watched this film, because it just started to make less and less sense. But we immediately get this strange scene where Mrs. Buckley, so Mrs. Buckley has just watched her husband turn into a feral beast and run into the wilderness with a walking corpse. I don't know how you might react in that situation, but I am pretty sure it would not be how Mrs. Buckley reacts, which is, so Mrs. Buckley is quite calm about this, and she has sort of kind of figured out what's going on here, that she notices Dr. Meyer-Schultz's body, which again is just laying there, so of course she does. And she figures out, I forget the exact sequence of events, but she figures out that the plan here is that if you had a corpse, you could put that beating heart in it. And then, I don't know how she knows this, but she imagines then that you could control that zombie you've created, right? So she actually kind of pitches to Dawn that they go in on this together.

I have often heard of your uncanny experiments, but this tops them all. But, I think we speak the same language. Am I right?

Well, I just don't get what you mean, same language.

We have a common interest. When you bring your assistant back to life, his mind will do as you direct. You can do the same to Buckley. Then, he will do as I direct.

So, this is no grieving wife. Do I understand correctly she wants them to kill Buckley and bring him back to life as a zombie slave to her?

That's my understanding, yes.

Okay. I will say she is jumping to some conclusions.

Maybe she's just really smart, Andy, come on.

Maybe she's got a little mad scientist in her as well. But this heel turn from Mrs. Buckley was a surprise to me.

And then the movie becomes off the rails. There are random scenes. I think we should go through some of them. At this point, I have a note that Don Maxwell, as dressed as the scientist, kills and attacks a cat. Is that where this happens?

Yes. So, the movie is starting to accelerate here, and we are kind of entering the final act. So, if you are patiently wondering where this movie is going. So, I mentioned at the beginning that there is harm to animals, and this is that scene. This is in what I think is like an attempt to recreate a scene from the Edgar Allan Poe story. So, Don, again, he's disguised as Meyer Schultz, and the movie sort of suggests that...

Which he is for the rest of the movie, except the very end.

The movie suggests, you know, that Don is losing his mind, or he is kind of merging into the role. He is psychologically becoming Dr. Meyer Schultz. You know, he's getting too deep into his role or something like that. It's a better... It's not well done, but he is starting to become a cackling mad scientist himself.

He's convinced the cat has a gleam in its eye.

Yes.

Which is putting like a hex on him or something.

Yeah. So this is where I figured out, I think, that the cat's name was Satan. So he chases the cat around and it's gross. He grabs the cat and he gouges out its eye.

Yes.

And then he picks up the eye and he eats it.

Yes.

So yeah. But what did you make of this, John?

I mean, I think what, if the director is going for anything other than just shock value and every choice that he makes, I think that what is happening here is, is killing the doctor has driven him mad and seeing all the things he's seen. But that's not really clear. He just sort of goes nuts and attacks the cat.

Exactly.

And then we get another title card about the madness of the paranoic here too, which is great.

I didn't read up too much about this film, but what I did read suggested that this cat eye scene was this film's big shock moment.

Yes. Yeah. It was pretty, it's pretty gross.

It is gross. It's not, I mean, it's not like, quote, realistic looking or anything like that. But there is a way that even with very fakey looking stuff, you can be unsettling with. And I think that this manages to do it.

I think so.

They actually found a cat that was missing an eye. So they have the cat with two eyes. Then they have a second cat that only has one eye.

Thank God.

So they could cut between the two.

That's great news because I didn't want to think they actually did something horrible. So thank you for telling us that.

Yes, thank you. So yeah, like you said, we have another title card with more jaunty music. And so this is where, so now things are kind of coming to a head. He realizes he's got to do something with Meier-Schultz's body at long last. So yes, he remembers that there's a basement downstairs.

That's right.

He decides he's going to wall the corpse up, casque of Amontillado style or in the basement. And I think this is a direct Poe reference to the story of the Black Cat.

Absolutely. And yeah. And the cat hops in there with him, with the body for some reason that the cat, which this is the cat named Satan, I believe.

Oh, is it? Okay.

I think this is, I don't know why he killed the other cat, but I think this one is named Satan.

I'm not sure.

One of the cats is named Satan, which I only figured out later.

But yeah. I must stress, there's a lot of cats in this film.

There's a lot of cats.

Like it's hard to track which cat is which, I guess.

Well, speaking of cats, yeah, we're about to get a lot of cats. Very weird. Yeah.

There's a strange scene next. So we kind of skip out and we go back to that police inspector, who we learn is kind of trying to follow up on this corpse theft. And he's talking to some of the neighbors.

He talks to one neighbor who's, I don't know what she's, she's like an isolationist American stereotype or something. She's like, yeah, he's a mad scientist, but he stays out of my business, so he's fine.

Yeah. And she's even like, oh yeah, he's brought a bunch of dead animals back to life, but it's not my business. It's like, really?

Yeah, exactly.

Everyone here is kind of cavalier about what would be the greatest single scientific discovery in all of history.

And then the policeman runs into his other neighbor, who in the credits, I read, is named Goof, and he actually made a brief appearance just chatting with Maxwell on the porch.

Yes.

In a scene that made no sense. I think that scene was only in the movie, so we could have this scene where Goof talks to the police inspector and explains his business model to him.

And his business model is weird and gross. He like raises, I mean, I'm not even going to go into it.

He raises thousands of cats.

And then he lets like rats kill them, but then he then sells the like leftover cat skins?

Yeah, he sells cat fur, I think is his business. And then, but the model is that like a perpetual motion machine, like then the cats eat the rats and get big, and then the leftover cat parts are eaten by the rats. And like, he's invented the perfect business, according to his model. And his name is Goof.

You could not overstate how bad the like, the line delivery in this scene is with that housewife and with this cat breeder. So, I don't know if this would have made, if this cat breeding business would have made sense in any time period, but it's certainly ludicrous.

Yeah, and there's a lot again of real shots of real cats in cages and stuff. It's very strange. I don't know why we're lingering on cats so much, but yeah, and then we get another title card, which takes us in yet another direction.

Oh my goodness.

Sorry, I started driving here a little bit. Andy, I'll give it back to you, but what the heck happens now?

This is the one where this is the moment in the movie where I messaged you and Brad to say, what am I watching?

Yeah.

So tell us, this is the only title card to divert from the usual standard here, which is to put a scientific term up in a quote. So what remarkable plot twist does this title card introduce, John?

It tells us that Don Maxwell, the man who has shot the evil scientist and taken his place and is going mad, has a wife and she doesn't live with him. They're not together. Now that's explained, but he does have a wife somewhere.

Yes.

And that is an excuse for us to cut to the wife living with her three showgirl roommates all in various states of undress. So it's clearly designed to be a transgressive cheesecake moment that is just weirdly inserted in this movie, just like the one from White Zombie, where the woman is getting dressed.

This is a very long scene of the four showgirls. And I mean, clearly it's a long scene so that we can, the camera can ogle these women for as long as possible. Right. And it's very strange. It's not explained. Well, so his wife then is a showgirl herself. Is that the idea?

Yeah. And all four of these women are, but I don't know if, I don't know what that means. Like, do they work, like, presumably they work in a cabaret that is disreputable, is my assumption.

Yeah.

But I don't know what that means in 1934.

So they're cavorting around in their underwear. And I do not like to comment on, like, the, you know, the physical characteristics of people here. But one of the women has a voice. Did this strike you? Her voice.

Yeah, it was shocking. Yeah.

It sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks. It's a very artificial, like high pitch squeak. I mean, I assume that she's doing that on purpose or something, because I've just never heard.

Yeah.

I've never heard a voice sound like this. But it adds to just like the, what am I, like the surreality of this scene. But it does kind of ground itself eventually, because the point of the scene is that these women learn by reading the paper, that Dawn has inherited a fortune. Before Dawn knows, by the way, Alice, Dawn's wife, is like, well, hey, I better go tell Dawn this good news, that now we are rich.

And then there's this bizarre scene that has nothing to do with anything, of Maxwell, sort of, Don Maxwell transforming from the doctor to himself, and there's a woman on the table, and there's gratuitous nudity in this scene. Like, I literally could not piece together why this is here. Like, I can't tell you.

I didn't know who that woman was. Was that supposed to be... I didn't even put this in my notes, because I did not know what to make of the scene. But there's a weird... I think it's there so that there could be some... a sexually charged scene, I guess. So Alice goes to tell Don the good news, and she... Don, of course, is in his disguise as Meyer Schultz. And...

Yes, and she doesn't recognize him.

And so we have reached the movie's kind of climactic moment here. So Don has become convinced that his wife is going to murder him for his newly inherited wealth. So this is... There was a title card about paranoia earlier, so I think that that is paying off here. And he does the obvious thing, which is to conspire with Mrs. Buckley. Remember the woman who wants to go in with him?

On the controlling people by turning them into zombies business that he's starting?

He conspires with Mrs. Buckley, whose husband is still, you know, out loose. We never...

Who we've forgotten about. He's running around out there doing who knows what, and like he's just forgotten. Yeah.

They decide they're going to... Don is going to lure Alice into the basement where Mrs. Buckley will kill her. And there is an interminable scene. So Alice, after a very long... They drag this out like it's so dumb. They drag this out, but they get Alice down in the basement with Mrs. Buckley. And then there's this very long scene of the two of them having a fight.

Fighting. And it's horrible. And it feels very actually real. Like, are they actually fighting? Are they actually filming it? Like, I think, again, this is the transgressive grind house. Like, it seems pretty serious.

I had the same note. There's a... This feels like these are the two women going at it. And they're like tearing each other's clothes off, you know, as the fight's going on.

Right in front of the wall, where he's bricked up the mad scientist.

And John is upstairs doing mad scientist cackles.

And I think the Haxson witch imagery overlays. Like, he's stomping up and down on the cellar door that he's closed them in cackling wildly, as if his plans come together. It's very strange.

But you know what? It's consequences time, because finally everyone is about to get what they deserve, because we cut to some very fakey-looking footage of police cars driving through town, because the police are closing in on Don slash Meier-Schultz.

And I think we're closing in on Don because of the previous undescribed but mentioned crimes. Like, that's why they originally started to check in on him, and I think they're finally there. They don't know anything that is happening now, for sure.

So, yeah, so I think that it's implied that that nosy neighbor has tipped off the police. And the police burst in, and they arrest Don, who is just, you know, cackling maniacal. And they go down and they break up the girl fight. But what creepy sound do they hear while they're all down in the basement separating the two ladies?

The cat.

Yes, they hear a cat screeching. Just like in the Poe story. So they realize that the cat sounds are coming out of a bricked up part of the basement. So they unbrick it, and inside is the corpse of Dr. Meyer Schultz and Satan, the cat. Yes. And so we get our final title card. Do you remember what it is? This is the title card that defines what a maniac is.

Yes.

And then, John, how does this movie, what closing imagery does it leave us with?

So then it ends with Don behind bars, right? And he's cackling to himself about how he fooled them all, and it was the ultimate performance. It's very strange. What did you make of this scene? Did I understand it correctly?

It seems, again, this movie, I expected that Don might try and pick up Meyer-Schultz's experiments or something and try to fulfill them. But Don seems to mostly just be exulting that he has pulled off this, like, the greatest performance of his life.

Yeah. There's a lot of questions we would ask about this movie, but I feel like this is a zombie movie, maybe in the loosest sense of any of the zombie movies we've watched. Like, at the beginning, the doctor talks about a serum that will bring people back from the dead, and then he does that, but that almost seems incidental to the rest of the action in the movie. It's like one of the mad things that mad scientists do, but it's not all they do, right? They do other mad scientist things, like try to get women to fight and kill cats, and, you know, it's like a movie about a maniac who is Don Maxwell, but it started with this mad scientist making a zombie. Am I wrong? Like, that's what it seems like.

I think you're right, and I understand why this movie would go on a list of zombie movies, but it really, I think it's a zombie movie only in a pretty technical sense.

Yeah, like, it's like, well, we need, it's sort of like the missing link zombie movie, like, like we've had White Zombie, and we need to get to the next one, and there's like this one we can sort of she-horn in there as like a transitional object or something. It doesn't, yeah.

There are two zombies in this movie.

Yes. By the way, one fast, one slow, so you can't say that fast zombies were invented in the 2000s, because we've got one right here.

So yeah, the first corpse of the woman they revive is your typical. We don't really know if she's mindless. You know, we don't learn much about her.

So she doesn't really speak or, yeah. She does scream when the other zombie grabs her.

I don't think it's suggested that she has returned from life in like a mindless state. I think she might just be coming back to life like normally. But we can call her a zombie because she is kind of shuffling slowly around. And she obviously is a reanimated corpse. And then Buckley is our second zombie. And he is, you know, maybe the origins of like kind of the quote rage zombie that like 28 days later will capitalize on. He doesn't die. His zombification is like a process of reverting to sort of a feral state.

Yes. Not unlike the zombies in The Girl with All the Gifts, right? They don't actually die. They become possessed and zombie like through some scientific interaction with something.

So John, you have four kind of pillars of the zombie genre that you have articulated.

Yeah.

Would you mind listing those out? And let's see if we can find any traces of them in this film.

Right. So the first one is societal collapse, which I don't I think the movie suggests the world is horrible. But when I meant societal collapse, I meant there is some sort of plague or something that is causing the zombies to destroy the world. And I don't think that's happening here. The other one is sort of contagion or, and I'm beginning to doubt that one a little bit, because we've seen a couple of zombie movies where people become zombies for reasons other than contagion, right? Like they don't, zombies don't make other zombies, but they do become what I would consider a zombie.

Yeah.

And then a third is loved ones turning against you. You know, Maxwell turns on the doctor, but it's not, but he's not a zombie. And the point I was trying to make with that is that one of the things that happens to your loved ones when they become zombies is they turn against you. Now, I don't know, would you argue that Buckley sort of fulfills that criteria?

Maybe in a very loose sense, but the power of the loved ones turning against you is, you know, the emotional turmoil it creates. And that doesn't happen here. Buckley doesn't, you know...

Because we've just met Buckley three minutes ago.

First of all, we met him three minutes ago. He also runs out. It's not like he turns on his wife. Like, that might have been a better and more compelling scene. You know, if she watched her husband descend into this feral state and then attack her, you know, that's a good... That scene would be at home in an awful lot of good zombie movies. But he just runs out. And then we find out, you know, that far from being disturbed by this, she's excited at the prospect that he might be killed and reanimated. So I think only in the most technical sense does it meet that pillar.

Yeah. And then the last one was characters having to make tough moral choices. I don't think anyone struggles with a moral choice here. They all make bad ones all the time.

So I think ultimately, you know, this movie fits a lot better into the quote mad scientist genre of horror.

Yeah, I think so.

That the mad scientist and this movie, I mean, does have kind of tough ethical decisions, but they are not, they are not decisions, you know, are forced upon people trying to make the best choice out of impossible options. Instead, the mad scientist version of that is the moral decision to proceed along an ethically dubious line to achieve some greater good or greater goal.

And then deal with the consequences of that choice, which is different.

Exactly. So there is a choice, but it does not feel like the type of moral choice that we expect from zombie movies.

So yeah, yeah.

So yeah, technically, I see why it's on a list of zombie movies. Does this meet our Zombie Strains criteria for a zombie movie that you should watch?

Absolutely not. Like first of all, no, I just think zombies are kind of thrown in as another set of ideas in the mishmash of ideas in this movie. But secondly, it's kind of terrible. Like I could make an, like I actually, it was fun, fun at some point because it was, I think it definitely falls in the so bad it's good range. But also, like I could make an argument for why is white zombie is a good starting point for zombie movies. And like, we could start to build a through line here. I think we've made a detour into something, a mad scientist exploitation cheesecake nudity movie, and that just happens to have some zombie ideas in it. I don't think it's essential to the genre in the way that some people do.

I agree. If you're listening and you're curious, I mean, you don't need to watch this. It really is bad. If we've made it sound fun, it's just kind of more a psychological defense mechanism.

Exactly. I like to say, I appreciate, it did prove to me the bonds of our friendship, Andy, because Brad and I dragged you into this and you did show up to record today.

Yes. I mean, that's it. It is in the so bad it's good territory, I'd say, in one sense. I did see that there is a rift tracks of this movie, which would have been probably a more fun way to watch this, although I assume they have to get rid of some of the content in there.

The one way I've decided to watch these movies is, and I think I'm going to continue to do this because it's been working out for me so far, is not research them ahead of time, watch them and then do a little bit of research after. Because I want to experience the movie just as like the movie as it is without any influence other than the poster. So yeah, I don't know how you feel about that, but that's what I've been doing and it's been working out for me.

Yeah, I feel the same way. And I don't think we have time to do this, but I just want to say that the movie, it really fails to meet most of those tagline promises that it made to me.

It has nothing to do with the poster.

There were no dynamic sex lectures or meditations on why relationships fail. So, you know, thumbs down on that front. I really feel like I was sold a bill of goods. So we usually ask some questions like who survived and would you survive in this scenario? That's a little bit tougher on this movie because it is kind of only marginally a zombie movie.

Right.

Just to go down the list. So we really only have, we have one murder, one death, Dr. Meyers Schultz. And everyone else survives, you know, more or less. We never find out what happened to the two zombies that ran off of each other. And John, is this, if you somehow found yourself caught up in this scheme, would you survive? What would happen to you?

I would like to think I would, but maybe the randomness of the events, there's something I just couldn't foresee and I would get caught up in it and killed like in a way that I don't expect, right? But I would like to think I could outwit Maxwell and Mrs. Parkley.

Yes. Okay. Well, that's a wrap on Maniac or Sex Maniac, but there's much more coming. Brad, will you? After this, I'm just feeling real nervous now about whatever's coming. But Brad, what is next on the roster?

All right. Next up, we're going to 1936, the movie Wanga, O-U-N-G-A, also known as the Love Wanga. And in the chat, you guys can see the poster. Oh, wow.

Okay. So here's what I'll say. It's not as bad as the poster for Sex Maniac. That is, however, faint praise. So just to read some of the quotes here. Strange loves of queer people, the Love Wanga. Dramatic dynamite for adults only. More risqué than the stage version of white cargo. Naive, young and beautiful. Lithe, yielding and primitive. Love hungry child of the tropics. Oh, God. What is portrayed here on the picture here, Andy? What am I looking at?

A man and a woman. I guess the woman is in a slightly risqué outfit or whatever, are embracing each other passionately on like a patio porch or something.

Yes, I like a wicker chair. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I was hoping we would move on a little bit from the grind house of Sex Maniac, but I think maybe not with this very next movie.

I will just say that this was restored by the UCLA Film Archives as being an important film.

Oh, okay. Well, they know more than I do, so we'll give it a shot. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Brad. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back in two weeks to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment and rate us on your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend. Post on your socials. This will help like minded people find our show. See you next time on Zombie Strains.