Alright, this might be the most deranged of all Monogram horror cheapies featuring the great Bela Lugosi. Of course in my little world "deranged" equals "fun" and I really don't want to imagine someone who can watch this film without having any.
Bela overacts his role of a mad scientist in a gloriously unhinged fashion even surpassing his grand performance in The Devil Bat. Again our villain needs glands, this time to keep his insanely bitchy wife young. So he devises a most devious plan to collect the glands of young women: he sends poison orchids to women who are going to be married, so they are (seemingly) dying right at the altar. He then proceeds to steal the supposed corpses to harvest his beautiful fresh glands and keep his wife comparatively satisfied (I should add that they are sleeping in separate coffins).
But he is not alone. Helping him are a boring dude who can drive a car, a dwarf of dubious sanity, an old woman with an unnerving tendency to look unnerving and her son, the hunchback Angelo aka "The Angel", who really, really likes to fondle the hair of dead or unconscious women. All of them are acted in equally hysterical fashion.
Our heroes are a spunky young lady reporter and a young doctor, but who cares about them?
Much more important is our local freakshow in the old dark house.
I don't know what the producers, writer and director of the movie might have been thinking, but I know enough about poverty row creatives to be absolutely sure they didn't plan to make one of the weirdest -okay, let's be honest: completely insane- movies ever conceived. The actors however were surely in on the joke. There is no other explanation for the sublime quality of their performances.
Oh, and the dialogue!
Darling of many days to come:
"I find a coffin much more comfortable than a bed. Many people do so, my dear."
Friday, April 18, 2008
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