Marihuana (1936) - Dwain Esper

One hot lover coming right up!

One ripe peach coming right down!

Another day, another Dwain Esper exploitation film . . . for, you know, some reason. This one clocks in at 57 minutes and tells the story of a young woman who smokes a marijuana cigarette at a beach party with some of her teenage (early 30s) friends and, next thing you know, she’s mixed up in a murder rap and then she’s pregnant out of wedlock and then she’s a hardened dope pusher who gets high off her own supply and is haunted by the memories of the baby she gave up lo those many years ago.

This one is kind of interesting. In some ways, I’d say this is objectively the best of the three Esper movies I’ve watched recently, but in some ways that makes it also the weakest. Here’s what I mean: this movie is the most competently made of them. This is only 3 years after Narcotic and 2 years after Maniac, but I feel like Esper’s genuinely got a better sense of movie making. I also have to give a lot of credit to Harley Wood, who plays the ill-fated Blondie. Weird as this sounds, she’s actually kind of giving a performance I’d call unironically good. She has to take Blondie from being a naïve and charming bumpkin to being a slang-spitting, hard-edged gangster and she’s actually really entertaining to watch. Yes, it’s over-the-top in a very 1930s way, but that doesn’t make it bad. She even sells the last minute tragic ending as Blondie finds her one last chance to redeem herself slipping away. Again, I’m not saying she’s going to win an Oscar or that this performance is some kind of undiscovered gem. But by comparison with the scenery-chewing hacks in practically every other role in this and the other two Esper films, she’s genuinely good. Apparently as her career went on, she was kind of embarrassed about starring in this movie, but, you know, I’ll stand by her performance for what it is.

But what with all these actually good performances and actually semi-competent filmmaking techniques going on, what we end up with is a movie that is substantially more sedate than Narcotic or Maniac. It just doesn’t have the live-wire gonzo craziness of those movies and, look, if you’re gonna watch a Dwain Esper exploitation movie, you’re coming for the wackiness and the craziness. So, Marihuana just isn’t the Dwain Esper I would recommend watching. It’s not bad; it’s decently entertaining and it does have some jarring moments for a movie from this period. But watch Narcotic and Maniac instead. They’re just better, wilder experiences. 3 stars.

tl;dr – movie is somewhat competent and has a genuinely good lead performance, but it lacks the usual Dwain Esper gonzo wackiness that usually makes his exploitation films so gripping. 3 stars.

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Maniac (1934) - Dwain Esper

Oh! Stealing through my body! Creeping through my veins! Pouring in my blood! Oh, darts of fire in my brain! Stabbing me! I can’t stand it! I won’t!

The year after the wild and woolly movie that was Narcotic, director Dwain Esper and writer Hildegard Stadie reteamed for another exploitation film, Maniac, and they managed to shave 6 minutes off this one’s running time. Whereas Narcotic clocked it at a lean and mean 57 minutes, this one manages to bring off its tale of mad scientists, violence, lust, drugs, sexuality and . . . illegal cat breeding (?) off in just 51 minutes. Yes, I said illegal cat . . . look, I’ll get to that in a minute.

In this one, Stadie puts her spin on the old Poe story The Black Cat as only she and Esper could. But that’s hardly the only thing they crib from. You’ve got a mad scientist who is obsessed with reanimating dead corpses for one thing. His assistant is an old vaudeville performer who is incredibly gifted with impressions. When the mad scientist has trouble finding a body to experiment on, he decides to just off his assistant, but when the assistant gets the upper hand, it’s the scientist that ends up dead. In a bid to cover his trail, the old vaudevillian begins impersonating the mad scientist, but unfortunately he’s not much of a doctor really, which leads to . . . shall we say malpractice? And then there’s a whole thing with some blackmail and a kidnapping and a rape (!!). If you think that the creepy morgue attendants have been up to some stuff, well, at least it’s only implied. And, as previously mentioned, the guy next door is running an illegal cat-breeding racket. I read that some people speculate that there just happened to actually be an illegal cat-breeding racket next to the filming location, so Esper, never one to miss an oddity, just stuck it into the movie. I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes about as much sense as anything else.

For my money, this one doesn’t measure up to Narcotic. It’s not as genuinely shocking, nor is it as entertainingly crazy. This isn’t to say that it is at all a “normal” movie. It is surreal and dreamlike in some ways. And it is very weird to be watching a movie that is just very clearly from the 1930s and then all of a sudden there are bare breasts being exposed. The best, most shocking scene is when a man strangles a cat until its eye pops out and then the man eats the eye. Fear not, the animal actually wasn’t harmed. The scene was executed by finding a one-eyed cat and putting a glass eye in the animal’s open socket. That’s just great practical effects and it looks really cool. And Ted Edwards in particular is an absolute hoot whenever he’s on screen as a mild-mannered patient driven mad when the vaudevillian accidentally gives him the wrong injection.

So, it’s definitely an entertaining movie and, at only 51 minutes, it’s a fast-paced and weird ride. In a straight contest, I’d take Narcotic, but Esper and Stadie are still operating in the realm of the weird and crazy here and Maniac more than earns its name. 3 ½ out of 4 stars.

tl;dr – wild exploitation movie is a rowdy romp through a tale of murder, drugs, sex and it even gets to say it’s a Poe adaptation; not as good as Esper’s Narcotic, but plenty crazy. 3 ½ stars.

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