MonsterHunter

The Black Room is a slight, but effective little horror film that gives us the pleasure of seeing Boris Karloff in a double-role. He plays a set of twin noblemen. One of them is Gregor. He is the bad twin. When there are twins in the movies, one of two things will happen. Either both are really evil (like twins in real life) or there is one that’s evil and one’s that’s a pretty good guy. When you have one of each, it allows lots of cool stuff to go on, usually involving the bad twin impersonating the good twin so that he can do twice the bad things in half the time. I think that’s how that works out, right?

So this other twin Karloff plays is named Anton, which sounds like a guy who likes to write poetry and talk about fencing. We know he’s the good twin because his hair is combed, he dresses very dapper-like and his right arm is paralyzed. We know that Gregor is evil because his hair is not combed, he wears black muscle shirts that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off” and because he kills lots of young, pretty girls in his super-secret Black Room!

So what is the Black Room exactly? Well, it all started back when the Berghman family first began and there these twins and the younger one killed the older one. From then on somebody in marketing dreamed up the gimmick that the family would end as it began, with the younger twin killing the older twin and in order to increase the buy-rate for their PPV death match, it would be held in …The Black Room! So you can imagine the consternation of Gregor and Anton’s father when he finds out he’s got himself a brand new set of twins! If that was me, I’d immediately list my castle with Century 21 and move to Jersey, but I always was a pragmatist. Instead, the father wrings his hands, bemoaning his family’s fate, but recognizing that at least it wouldn’t transpire until he was dead, so who really cares?

Some of the father’s pals are like, “come on, don’t believe some hokey old prophecy, even if it is engraved on the family crest.” Then one of them comes up with this bright idea to foil the prophecy from coming true. Since the killing is supposed to occur in the Black Room, why not just wall up the Black Room so that the twins can’t get in there. Uh, yeah, I guess. I just might have painted it a different color and called it the Blue Room or something, but I guess you could wall it up, too.

This is the perfect plan except the contractors decide that in addition to walling it up, they’ll also throw in a secret entrance at no additional charge, thus allowing the teenaged Gregor to hide his Playboys in there and the adult Gregor to hide the bodies of chicks in there. So the Black Room is walled up, and no one goes in there (well, except Gregor of course) and the years fly by. Their parents die and Anton moves out of the castle and goes on tour with his garage band, leaving the older Gregor to hang out at the castle and torment the female residents of the local village .

Eventually, the kidnapping and murdering of their wives, girlfriends, and sisters wears thin on the populace and they start to demand that Gregor implement new programs like not killing women. By the way, this is one of those European villages from a few hundred years ago where people travel by coach, hang out at the inn, and are ruled by Barons. I bet these whiners were wishing they hadn’t voted Baron Frankenstein out of office once they got a gander at Gregor. At least he just stole body parts and was just trying to play God instead of being Ted Bundy with a really cool pad.

So the chaps at the inn, who apparently don’t have jobs, sit around complaining about the Baron and debating whether they should impeach him or form an angry mob and storm the castle when Anton shows up. If you have an evil twin and you’re coming home after 20 years away, you should probably make that announcement before you get there or at least check your evil twin’s polling numbers before you come waltzing into the bar for a pint of Keystone. In any event, on his way to the castle someone shoots at him since they think he’s the evil twin. On the plus side of things, Anton has a faithful dog with mammoth balls! It’s like my grandpappy always said, you can put up with a lot of crap in life if you have the dog with the biggest nuts!

Karloff’s good performance in both roles highlight the remainder of the film. Aside from the physical differences (bad hair, clothes, crappy right arm) in the twins, he’s able to show us the differences in the men with the way he carries himself in each role. Gregor slouches and scowls and has a smile that is one of obvious contempt, while Anton hold himself in an upright way, a pleasant chap with a winning face and good word for everyone in spite of the fact that he has to hold his right arm, bent at the elbow, up to his shoulder.

At first Anton can’t believe that his brother is a serial killer (In need of a comb, yes. Psychopath? I’m still not convinced.), but at the same time he wants to hear what the villagers have to say. See, he’s one of those do-gooders that wants to get to the bottom of things. Well, old Gregor figures that the only thing his prissy brother Anton is going to get to the bottom of, is the deep pit in the Black Room!

Gregor invites Anton into the Black Room. Like the goody-goody dunce he is, Anton goes in there and gets his dumb ass dumped down that hole and dies. Big Balls the dog is suspicious and barks a lot. At one point during the movie, Gregor grabs a whip that is lying around the living room and whips Big Balls because he keeps barking at the Black Room and at Gregor. How missed whacking those balls, I’ll never know!

Gregor assumes Anton’s identity and does what any of us would do if we were pretending to be our nice guy twin brother - frame a guy for murder and force a marriage on some chick who wants to marry the guy framed for murder! Of her dad! But even the greatest schemes can be undone by the tiniest of details! In this case, those itty bitty details happen to be the basketball-sized gonads of that crazy dog, Big Balls!

Big Balls goes and crashes the wedding and just before the priest can finish the ceremony! It was just like that scene from The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman stopped that marriage except this time it was done by a dog with really big testicles! Big Balls attacks Gregor who has to use his bad arm to defend himself (Uh, hey everyone! Look! I’m cured! It’s a wedding day miracle!) thus revealing himself to be that sick freak Gregor instead of that wussy freak Anton.

Gregor makes his escape as the wedding party rapidly trades its Salad Shooters and toasters for torches and pitchforks. For some reason he holes up in the Black Room and Big Balls, being the smartest doggie ever to interrupt a wedding follows him there and pushes him down into the pit where he lands on the outstretched knife his dead brother was holding when he died. Gregor dies and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that the prophecy was fulfilled. He was killed by his brother’s knife. Okay so maybe the prophecy wasn’t fulfilled to the letter, but the villagers seemed to think it was close enough.

It was fun watching Karloff play a good guy for a change and also fun to watch him chew scenery as the ornery Gregor. His characters weren’t often in the same scene together so you weren’t really distracted by the tricks they had to use to get him to appear with himself. The one time we saw both simultaneously was handled very well with some trick photography and looked fine. The rest of the cast is fairly unmemorable, but they mainly exist to react to Gregor’s antics.

What’s refreshing about Gregor’s character is that he’s not portrayed as some tortured soul who doesn’t understand what he’s doing. The guy is smart and he enjoys the heinous acts he commits. He seems to see all this as a big game, as evidenced by the fact that when the mob first shows up at his castle, he doesn’t break a sweat. He just sits in his recliner with his feet on a table and says he’ll deal with them in his own way when they show up. Then he has the guts to say he’ll resign if they let him go, even though these throngs of men could tear him limb from limb if they wanted. He had the arrogance every good serial killer needs. A Columbia release that’s often lost in the shuffle in the Universal-dominated horror genre of the 1930s, and one that you should seek out if you at all like Karloff, good horror movies, and well-endowed dogs).

© 2008 MonsterHunter