Director: Sam Newfield
Year: 1943
Rating: 6.0
For the price of admission you get two George Zucco's - one good, one evil
- one alive, one dead - you can't ask for much more than that from a B horror
film from PRC. I can imagine that as the first in a double feature this effective
little 60 minute film was a good warm up for whatever came next. For me Zucco
is always a welcome presence in these low budget horror or mystery films
that he found himself cast in by the dozens in the 1930's and 40's.
He never could quite understand why these roles fell to him and eventually
became practically all he was cast in. He was a proper English gentleman
who had worked first in theater and had actually had a vaudeville comedy
act at one time. Hard to imagine Zucco doing comedy. In WWI he was wounded
and lost the use of two fingers but went back to acting afterwards. Perhaps
it was being Moriarty in the Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie that set him
on his way towards playing a raft of madmen and villains - his steely eyes
boring into his victims or his placid face showing total indifference to
their suffering. He didn't always portray a bad guy of course - sometimes
he was just the stuffed shirt that people made fun of - but if he is in a
mystery the chances that he is the killer are pretty high. Perhaps the roles
got to him because after suffering a stroke while on the set of The Desert
Fox where he would have played one of the plotters to kill Hitler, he retired
and slowly lost his mind and ended up dying in an insane asylum. Sad but
fitting.
This is a decent enough little vampire film with walks through the cemetery
at night, a little neck biting, the riled up towns people looking for vengeance,
the blonde virgin, people acting rather stupidly and a lunatic assistant
to the vampire played by none other than Dwight Frye of Dracula and Frankenstein
fame. He also played Wilmer in the first version of The Maltese Falcon. He
was another rather tragic case of an actor who had been successful on the
stage getting pigeon holed into playing secondary crazy film roles. He died
when he was only 44 from a heart attack in the same year as this film was
made.
Dr. Lloyd Clayton (Zucco) looks down upon the face of a dead man in the funeral
and we see Zucco again, his twin brother Elwyn. The mad Elwyn who went away
to the Far East and came back full of knowledge of the dark side and total
mental instability. But this is not the last we see of Elwyn as he comes
back as a vampire and village lasses begin to die. But he turns his attention
to his niece (Mary Carlisle in her last film - being cast in a PRC film was
always a good sign that your career had hit rock bottom - it was perhaps
a wise move as she just died in 2018 at 104 years old - a long life or perhaps
she became - no its not possible - but perhaps someone should check her grave)
and begins to suck a little blood every night to turn her into a vampire.
Which feels a little incestuous to me. Clearly, the two Zucco's will have
to battle with one another for the eternal soul of this girl!
I enjoyed this perhaps more than I should have - it was late on Christmas
night and I was full of turkey and beef brisket - and it was about all I
could consume at that point. You just have to be in the mood for low budget
scenes shot in the dark and I was and this is played totally seriously which
I appreciate. With a 4.7 rating on IMDB others would disagree.
