A quickie from Republic Pictures that probably didn't take much longer to
make than the film itself (55 minutes) and has a bunch of no idea who they
are actors. Still with a name like that and a cool poster it probably brought
in a few saps. Like me. I mean Valley of the Zombies. Who can resist that?
So there is no valley and there are no zombies but you can't have everything.
But you do have a creepy old house, a few murders, a hypnotized girl ready
to kill her boyfriend (which would have added another star to the rating)
and a bargain basement villain doing his best bug-eyed Boris Karloff.
In other words, good enough to pass an hour that you could have been using
for something productive.
Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) is curious about that space between life and death
- sort of what you would expect from a fellow with a name like Murks -
and is able to accomplish this and be declared dead. But he needs blood to
keep living. Lots of it. He steals it from doctor's offices but when they
run out of his type he has to find people who are his blood type and kill
them, suck out their blood and embalm them. Three easy steps covered in the
book Murder, Extracting Blood and Embalming for Dummies. When one doctor
is killed, a fellow doctor (Robert Livingston) and a feisty nurse (Lorna
Gray) decide to solve it when the cops suspect them. That takes them to an
old spider web infested mansion that has another dead body waiting for them.
Not too bad really for the budget it must have had - I kind of respect that
whole industry that created hundreds of films to play the second or third
film in a sitting. And Lorna Gray is very cute and personable - will have
to see if I have any of her other films. She was Gail Richards in a Captain
America serial and was in a bunch of other films I have never heard of under
the name Adrian Booth, which seems an odd name change choice. Looks like
she spent much of her career at Republic. Poor thing.
