Creeping just over the 60 minute mark,
this Universal film may be much less known than some of their classic horror
films, but it is quite entertaining if totally absurd. This was Universal's
third adaptation of a Poe story (Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Black
Cat) but like most of the Roger Corman Poe films of the 1960's any resemblance
between Poe and the film is nearly entirely accidental. You can see a smidgeon
of The Raven and a touch of The Pit and the Pendulum but the script is wildly
different from the poem and the story.
Starring two horror film legends with
Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff (as did The Black Cat), they are allowed to
cut loose with theatrics. But the real star is the set designer and the camera
man who make this two week low budget production visually dark and deranged.
The morbid mansion sets are quite wonderful with hidden doors, secret elevators,
disappearing floors, cells with closing walls and of course implements of
torture. For the man who has everything.
Lugosi is a brilliant doctor with a strong
penchant for Poe - perhaps a bit too much as one realizes as the film goes
on. In other words he is batshit crazy. He saves the life of a young beautiful
woman and then becomes obsessed with her. Her father disapproves. Karloff
shows up at his door as an escaped murderer who blowtorched a face ("what
else could I do") looking for a change of face. He gets one. Lugosi turns
him into a monster - part Igor, part Frankenstein. When Lugosi is rejected
in love he sets in motion a nutty insane plan for revenge. His overacting
could have been revenge enough. But honestly that is part of the pleasure
of the film.
Tame by today's standards but considered
absolutely pushing the limits of horror at the time, it had trouble getting
past the censorship boards in England and the USA and was banned in a few
other countries. Universal was to begin cutting back on their horror output
for the next few years and it became much more difficult to release them
in the UK. Wouldn't it be fun to go back in time and replace this film with
Saw and see how the audience reacted.
