1934 / Directed by Dwain Esper / Starring William Woods, Phyllis Diller
Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had. (Not since The Room has a film had such a deep impact on the staff of RiffTrax, so much so that the images in Maniac temporarily dislodged from our minds the mercurial Tommy Wiseau, the stark horror of Chris-R., even the enchanting beauty of Lisa!) Maniac starts conventionally enough, when a Vaudeville-impersonator-turned-lab-assistant-to-a-mad-scientist refuses his bosses reasonable request that he shoot himself in the heart and offer his corpse as an experimental subject.

A classic short from the public domain!
Contrary to what many of you are thinking, A Circus Wakes Up is NOT a wrenching adaptation of a short story by Philip Roth that recounts the heartbreaking tale of Bernard Circus, a Classics professor at Columbia, who is forced to confront his shattered marriage, his failure as a father, and a decidedly lackluster academic career.
A classic short from the public domain!
When last we left Tommy Tucker he had died and was just beginning an eternal stint on Safety Island, a particularly dull outpost in the vast Hell empire. The demon in charge of enslaving his soul (a big-chinned guy, as most evil people are) had been extolling the virtues of the dead Tommy Tucker, while Tommy himself was making noises that, all things considered, he’d rather be home pestering his fellow students and occasionally snacking from the paste jar.
A classic short from the public domain!
Many of us were left frustrated when What It Means to Be An American: Part 1 ended without answering the titular question. In fact, many of you noticed that it did not in fact appear to address the question, or even show the faintest hint that it was aware that it would later be titled What It Means to Be An American
Another short from the Public Domain!
This extraordinary film dares to do something no other safety short has ever dreamed of: killing its 9-year-old title character and sending him to hell; a hell run by two doughy, charisma-free demons wearing sensible jackets. Yes, Tommy Tucker, our protagonist, is a whiny, friendless little twerp who devotes himself to the petty hectoring of his fellow citizen.
A classic short from the public domain!
In 2009, if you ask someone What It Means To Be An American you'll get a simple response: a willingness to deep-fry anything and everything. But back in the fifties, before anyone had invented deep-fried cigarettes, it wasn't as clearly defined.
A classic short from the public domain!
If there's one thing that a small niche of people like, it's car racing! It's all there: the drama, the passion, the guy who for some reason shouts "Boogity Boogity Boogity." But we understand that for some people, sitting for hours and watching cars do five hundred laps around a track can be a bit too much excitement to handle. For them, Cork – Crashes & Curiosities provides a thrilling glimpse into a time in racing when the stakes were much lower, and cars were not capable of going nearly as fast.











