Voodoo Man (1944)

The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a series of disappearances. "Girl motorists" (and their cars) just seem to vanish into thin air, or at least, that's what the comic relief sheriff in his wisdom thinks (if he does think). In truth, Doctor Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi) and his merry band of malcontents - among them his Igor, the dedicated zombie wrangler, unfunky drummer and hair fondler Toby (John Carradine, doing his worst until it is oh so right) and gas station owner and voodoo priest Nicholas (George Zucco, often dressed in the most ridiculous voodoo priest get-up you'll ever see) - kidnap the women to solve a typical Lugosi problem. You see (and you just might have heard this one before), Bela's wife has been dead now for 22 years, but her loyal husband is still trying to revive her by transferring other women's wills to live (that's the technical term) to her body. Alas, not just any donor will do for a project like this. He has not been too successful until now, leaving the poor man with cellar full of young female voodoo zombies in white gowns (not even especially flimsy gowns!) to be hair-fondled and told about their prettiness by Toby and not much else to show.

I'm quite sure Bela would be able to triumph over death given enough time (let's say a few centuries), but as things like this go, he has finally kidnapped the wrong woman. Turns out that it's not a good idea to abduct the cousin of the fiancee of a Hollywood hack (Tod Andrews when he was still called Michael Ames, giving an absolutely perfect impression of a wooden doll with rubber arms; just too bad he's supposed to be human), unless one wants to be pestered by the incredible skill of the "romantic lead" (and golly, does this position deserve its quotation marks) of a Poverty Row movie at doing nothing at all and still being called a film's hero and triumphing over evil (by lying unconscious on the floor) in the end.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who hear about a Monogram picture featuring Lugosi and Zucco and Carradine and jump (not fall) into an ecstatic state of mind quite like being hypnotized by Bela himself and those (poor sods) who just look kinda puzzled and shrug while they're slowly backing away from the person who brought them such glorious news.

I don't know what else I can do for the latter group than to pity them; to the former group I can say that the film is very much like one would expect, which is to say, not a good film at all but still very lovely.

Sure, I'll give skeptics that the plot of the film makes no sense, that the comic relief is as painful as always (though at least lacking in racist stereotypes thanks to the total absence of non-white people - for a voodoo movie from the 40s, that's actually positive), that the young lead characters should be shot on sight, that William Beaudine's direction is as pedestrian as always. But what are these minor questions of quality compared to Bela doing his hypnotic shtick, the gloriously low-key and/or impoverished voodoo rituals (so cheap they couldn't even afford Hollywood voodoo drumming and had to go with John Carradine and Pat McKee performing their own drumming, very badly of course) or the mindbogglingly boring "finale"? Not much, as most people with discerning tastes (a much nicer way to say "I", don't you think?) would agree.

 

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