 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are touted obviously on the box. This film is
referred to as a "macabre horror classic inspired by the works of Edgar Allen
Poe." It seems that Lugosi is Dr. Richard Vollin, a great surgeon who really
likes torture devices. He comes out of retirement to save a young socialite and
he becomes obsessed with her. Her daddy is a judge and tells Lugosi to buzz
off. So when escaped killer Demund Bateman shows up at Lugosi's house looking
for a new face, the good doc gives him one and enlists the killer to "assist
him in his sinister plan of revenge." The box concludes by claiming that this
movie is an "elaborately produced shocker." 1936, 62 minutes, VHS
This movie really doesn't have anything to do with Edgar Allen Poe's poem of
the same name. The 1960s version with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre probably
stays closer to the source material (but not real close) than this effort does.
In this one you get your two 1930s horror stars for the price of one. Both
Karloff and Lugosi do riffs on their Dracula and Frankenstein monster
characters to some extent in this one. Lugosi is a great surgeon who has
retired and his hobby is building torture devices derived from Edgar Allen Poe
stories (hey, everyone needs a hobby, right?) which means he has a basement
where the walls close in and crush you and also a razor sharp pendulum swings
ominously from the ceiling. So its pretty obvious from the get go that the Doc
is a whack job. The story gets going when a young woman is injured in a car crash. The doctors
check her out and she can't walk so Lugosi is called in out of retirement.
Reluctantly he agrees to fix up the girl and does such a good job that she is
able to dance again. The only problem is that now they have to pad out this
already way too long 62 minute movie with a dance sequence featuring this young
ninny. She announces her big dance comeback and tells the doctor she's got a
big surprise for him. Well, he shows up ready to shove dollar bills into her
g-string and it turns out that she is doing an interpretative dance. For some
reason, to thank the doctor she has chosen to do a little dance based on the
poem that this movie takes it name from. What follows is her just jumping
around the stage and twirling about with no rhyme or reason. The camera cuts
away (thankfully) to Lugosi watching with a grin on his face. Of course he's
laughing with her, not at her. Later the girl's father and Lugosi have a confrontation where the father tells
Bela that he needs to keep his surgeon hands off of his daughter. Lugosi didn't
really appreciate the suggestion so he immediately begins to plot his revenge.
Luckily for his plot (and the movie's) an escaped killer played by Boris
Karloff shows up at the Lugosi mansion. It seems that Karloff, who is sporting
a really fake beard and bad haircut is in the market for a new face. You've
come to the right place my good man, because it seems that Lugosi is running a
special on new faces for escaped killers today. Lugosi tells him sure, I can
get you a new face, no problem, trust me. Lugosi operates and then in what is
probably the best moment in the whole movie, slowly removes the bandages from
Karloff's face. Of course, the new face Lugosi gave him is a horribly
disfigured one (dang!) but no one will recognize him now. Karloff is irked at
being ugly. Earlier he had said that maybe people do ugly things because they
look ugly and that he wanted to be beautiful so that he would be a good person.
I would have advise the ugly people in the viewing audience to skip this film.
Lugosi tells him not to sweat it because he will fix his face and since you're
all disfigured you may as well help me with my revenge plot. Karloff doesn't
like it, but all he can do is grunt like Frankenstein's monster some of the
time because part of his mouth is frozen by the bang-up job the Doc did.  Lugosi invites the judge, his daughter, and her boyfriend to his house for
some kind of sleepover. Being the morons they are they go. To be fair, the
judge thought it was a dumb idea. First time I've ever seen a judge show any
common sense about anything. Some of Lugosi's other friends (how does he have
friends that will spend the night in his creepy mansion?) also come along to
liven up the goings on. So they have this get together and then when its
bedtime, Lugosi starts skulking about the mansion with bad intentions! This is
one of those movies where there is a secret door in the library or the study
and it goes down to the basement torture chamber that most mansions of the era
seemed to be equipped with. In one particularly unbelievable scene, Lugosi
pulls a lever on some giant contraption in the basement and the entire bedroom
that the girl was staying in becomes an elevator and is lowered into the
basement so that she can have a front row seat to watch her father sliced up by
the pendulum. Then Lugosi decides to throw her and her boyfriend into a room
where the walls close in and crush people. It seems to me that for all this
equipment and space these devices would require that this mansion would have
huge and funny shaped. I mean how much extra space does it take to make an
entire upstairs bedroom actually be a large elevator? And how many times would
that come in handy? The acting in this film usually consists of the characters squinting with
their eyes and making faces in reaction to something going on. To emphasize
this the camera does an extreme close up of their eyes to make sure we get the
point. It's a good thing they didn't do a close up of my eyes cause those
suckers were rolling all over the place! Also, there is one word that comes to
mind whenever I see Lugosi act: ham. This guy doesn't so much deliver his lines
as pronounce them. Everything he says is grand and dramatic. Nothing he speaks
is in any ordinary conversational tone, but he is a madman I guess. He also
always looks constipated, his face all pinched up like somebody just burped in
his face or something. Karloff is alright and is able to communicate more with
his eyes than Lugosi can with all his old world bluster. The rest of the cast
is unremarkable except that the dancing the woman does will stay with you for a
long time to come. Is the escaped killer gimmick ever a good substitute for an
idea? At 62 minutes it's hard to complain that things are too slow paced, but
the whole affair comes off as fairly minor in effort and execution.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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