Maniac ~ 1934 -BW

QUICKIE: The psycho "Dr." is killing people AGAIN!!!!

PLOT: (from IMDB): In a somewhat nonsensical and cobbled together plot, Don Maxwell (William Woods) is a vaudevillian actor known for his impersonations, who is running from the police and has taken a job assisting a certain Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter). Meirschultz believes he knows the way to resurrect the dead with a special formula he has created, and when he cannot find a corpse to experiment on, he orders Maxwell to kill himself so that he might test the serum on him instead. Rather than go through with it, Maxwell turns his gun on Meirschultz, killing him; and so that he won't arouse suspicion, Maxwell then disguises himself as the doctor and attempts to fill his role. He proceeds to meet a couple of murderously-minded women, drive one man to insanity, and eat a cat's eyeball as the plot grows increasingly more incoherent, finally resorting to blatant plagiarizing from Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Black Cat." Sporadically placed title cards relating the symptoms of various mental illnesses help give the movie its title.

SUMMARY: The psycho "Dr." is killing people AGAIN!!!! I never tire of this plot, I think it's funny. If there's a Doc in town, you just know he's gonna be a psycho murderer. He's usually killing people to fuel his experiments to develop a cure/vaccine or else create new life by killing old life, ala Frankenstein.

The difference here is we're educated along the way with on screen text about various forms of psychosis. The main character Maxwell (William Woods) becomes increasingly cucoo and even eats a cats' eyeball at one point. That was so disgusting, even if it was fake. He seals up his murdered Dr. in the basement behind a brick wall and the black cat "Satan" just happens to jump in unseen at the last minute. Eventually the police end up in the basement with two crazy ladies who are trying to kill each other and the meowing cat prompts the police to unbrick the dead Dr.. This leads to the demise of our maniacal psycho-killer.