And speaking as we were last Friday of perennial cult favorite Reefer Madness, I'd be remiss if I didn't add a postscript about a Kino DVD of two other bizarre 30s exploitation films written and directed by RM's producer Dwain Esper (1894-1982). I refer, of course, to the, er, remarkable double feature that is Maniac and Narcotic.

Esper, who drifted into filmmaking from a background as a carnival barker, is often referred to as the World's Worst Director (in an Ed Wood Jr sense) and that's not inaccurate; like Wood, his films are largely incompetent and incoherent in an interestingly surreal sort of way, and there are strong auto-biographical elements as well; in Wood's case, it was transvestism, in Esper's drug addiction.

Of the two films on the Kino disc, Narcotic (1933) is the more heartfelt, if that's the word. It's actually a pretty accurate biography of Esper's wife's great uncle, a medicine show huckster who sold a miracle cure (morphine based, unsurprisingly) called "Tiger Fat" in the late 1880s. It's a no-budget mess, as you'd imagine, but the script -- your basic road to ruin scenario -- is reasonably well-written, and as always with Esper's films, the mostly amateur actors are train wrecks you can't help gawking at.

Maniac (from 1934) is, however, something altogether different.

As Esper enthusaist Jack Criddle (currently working on a documentary on the great man) observed:

This is a film so bizarre, nonsensical, and utterly amazing that it staggers the mind. The plot, which concerns Maxwell, a mentally unstable former vaudeville actor who kills, then impersonates, his mad scientist boss, segues off onto weird tangents whenever it sees fit. There's a raping psychotic next door who thinks he's the orangutan from Murders of the Rue Morgue. His other neighbor farms cats for their pelts. Two women fight with hypo needles and splintered two-by-fours in a scummy basement. Maxwell pops a cat's eyeball out of its head and eats it. He and Professor Miershultz revive a dead woman by giving her a shoulder massage. There's implied necrophilia jokes, rape, naked boobs, and intertitles dropped in seemingly at random that describe the symptoms of mental illness. This film is truly a sight to behold.

Believe it or not, that's a fairly conservative description of the film's uniquely disturbing vibe. Here's a clip to give you a more concrete idea of Maniac's simultaneously creepy and wiggy mise-en-scene.

The bottom line, of course, is if you've never seen either of these, you need to get over to Kino's order page and grab the disc posthaste. Apart from featuring the best possible prints you'll ever encounter of both films, it comes with an interesting audio commentary by Esper scholar/exploitation film maven Bret Wood, and -- most interestingly -- a beautifully restored excerpt from Maciste In Hell, the rather spectacular for its day (1925) Italian sword and sandal fantasy that Esper (in a move of dubious legality) edited into Maniac at a strategic(?) point in the narrative.