Who Killed Doc Robbin?

Director: Bernard Carr
Writers: Dorothy Reid, Maurice Geraghty
Producer: Hal Roach Jr
Cast: George Zucco, some really irritating kids
Year of release: 1948
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK festival screening (FFF 2002)

Those who complain about ‘racism’ in old movies are often interfering, know-nothing PC loons, and those who actually alter old movies to eliminate such ‘racism’ are even worse (the recent rewording of intertitles in a restoration of the 1925 Lost World is an example). That said, some films are jaw-droppingly racist in a way which cannot be excused in modern times - but their very nature means that they should very definitely not be tampered with. It’s important for people to see how casually racist even a minor kids’ film could be, reflecting the appalling state of American society only a couple of generations ago.

Who Killed Doc Robbin? is an Our Gang comedy in all but name, with five lovable (white) ragamuffins: the (male) leader, the (female) voice of reason, the boffin, the coward and the little one. Plus two black kids credited (both actors and characters) as ‘Dis and Dat’. It’s made abundantly clear that these two are not part of the gang per se.

The story starts with a doctor’s surgery exploding then cuts to a courtroom where a nurse stands accused of the doctor’s murder. The kids disrupt proceedings but under questioning (and via flashbacks) reveal that the explosion was probably caused by the trigger of a nuclear device(!) created by local repair-man/inventor ‘Fix-It’ Dan - who is promptly arrested.

Seeking to clear Dan’s name, the kids investigate the smoking remains of the surgery and find a tunnel into an ‘abandoned’ old house nearby, full of scientific equipment, caged animals (for experiments), secret doors - and ultimately a (man in a suit) gorilla. They find a dead lawyer in a cupboard who later turns out to be merely unconscious, they send their dog to the town jail to fetch Dan and the police, and in a plot far more complex than it needs to be, the ‘gorilla’ turns out to be the still-alive Doc Robbin (George Zucco: House of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Hand - though it’s actually the legendary Charles Gemora, uncredited, in the suit), who was up to no good. And Dan is exonerated of the explosion because his trigger was useless without the rest of the device.

Dis and Dat mostly run around looking scared - like Stepin Fetchit’s nephews. In a dark room they appear only as two pairs of animated eyes, and one of them turns white through an optical effect when he first encounters the gorilla. But the worst scene has the smaller one falling into a large washing machine. No, he doesn’t emerge ‘clean’ and white, though he is coated in white soapsuds. But his clothes somehow become detached, emerge separately and are put on by a chimpanzee who has broken loose. And as the chimp runs around the house everyone thinks it’s the little black kid! It’s astounding that this sort of stuff was considered perfectly fine for children even after the horrors of WW2 (when black GIs were formed into their own battalions and confined almost exclusively to non-military duties such as roadbuilding).

The casual use of a nuclear bomb as a McGuffin, three years after Hiroshima, is also astounding, and one of the kids recites a poem of his own devising in court about how “the Japs” must have “had a fit” when their city was destroyed! (It’s tastefully entitled ‘Bombs Away’ and all the grown-ups find it delightful.)

The film was reportedly retitled Sinister House in the UK and has been shown on US TV as Curly and His Gang in the Haunted Mansion (although the building in question is neither a mansion nor haunted). Director Bernard Carr had been an assistant director on Hal Roach's prehistoric epic One Million BC and had directed a previous film about the same group of kids, Curley, in 1947. There does not appear to have been a third film in the series.

This 50-minute film just about falls into the SF/horror genre by virtue of ‘Fix-It’ Dan’s atomic home technology, the gorilla-as-stock monster, and the spooky old house. It is a pain to sit through however: the cowardly white kid is particular annoying, being an even worse actor than his comrades - and that’s saying something - and having an almost ultrasonic scream. Nevertheless, anyone who thinks that America fought WW2 for democracy and freedom should be forced to watch this (or something like it) so they can see how little difference there was between Hitler’s views on race and those of Joe Q Average in post-war USA.

MJS rating: D

The Vampire Bat

Director: Frank Strayer
Writer: Edward Lowe
Producer: Phil Goldstone
Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Dwight Frye
Country: USA
Year of release: 1933
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Classic Entertainment)

What a terrific movie. Let’s just take a look at that list of principal players: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and Dwight Frye. How can any film with a cast like that fail?

In a sleepy mitteleurope town, a series of murders have been committed; each victim was found, entirely drained of blood, with two small puncture wounds in their jugular vein. The locals suspect a vampire but Detective Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) maintains a sceptical attitude, convinced that a more Earthbound killer is abroad.

Karl is enamoured of Ruth Bertin (Wray) who is the ward of hypochondriac comic relief Frau Schnappmann (Maude Eburne: The Bat Whispers, Return of the Terror, The Boogie Man Will Get You). For some reason that is never explained, Ruth and her aunt live with Doctor Otto Von Niemann (Atwill) who shares Karl’s scorn for the villagers’ superstitious beliefs. When Martha the local apple seller (Rita Carlisle, who was in both the 1931 and 1940 versions of Waterloo Bridge) becomes the next victim, suspicion falls on local simpleton Herman Gleib, played with full-on, bug-eyed intensity by the always reliable Frye. The town’s night-watchman, Kringen (moustachioed George E Stone: ‘The Runt’ in the Boston Blackie films and ‘Toothpick Charlie’ in Some Like It Hot) leads the clamour for Gleib to be strung up - and when he is the next victim, even Karl starts to believe that Gleib is guilty in some way.

A torch-wielding mob chases Gleib into a large cave where he falls to his death down ‘the Devil’s Well’. (Isn’t that...? Why, yes it is. Bronson Canyon! The most heavily used natural location in California, instantly recognisable from a million westerns and only slightly fewer horror and sci-fi pictures.) The mob were obviously pretty prescient in equipping themselves with flaming torches since it is clearly still bright daylight outside the cave.

While this is going on, the up-to-now avuncular and clear-headed Von Niemann is seen up to no good, using some sort of psychic hypnosis to control the distant movements of his manservant Emil (Robert Frazer: White Zombie, Black Dragons, the 1944 Captain America serial and scores of silent westerns) as he attacks the doctor’s housekeeper Georgiana (Stella Adams). The problem for the viewer here is that, more than halfway through the film, we don’t know who either of these characters are. Emil first appeared briefly - unnamed and without dialogue - in the previous scene with Von Niemann, Karl, Ruth and Frau Schnappmann; Georgiana has never been seen or even mentioned before, to the extent that I assumed Ruth’s aunt was the housekeeper. Emil brings the woman’s body down to Von Niemann’s lab where all her blood is drained off.

When Georgiana’s body is discovered, back in her room, Von Niemann tries to pin the blame on Herman Gleib but his theory suffers a setback when the Burgermeister (London-born Lionel Belmore, instantly recognisable as the Burgermeister from Frankenstein; he was also in Son of Frankenstein and Ghost of Frankenstein) arrives to announce that Gleib was killed two hours earlier. Von Niemann claims that Georgiana had brought him coffee less than an hour earlier, meaning that Gleib could not possibly be the killer, not even through supernatural means as his heart was staked in the cave, just in case.

Karl is thoroughly frustrated with fewer clues than ever as to the murderer’s identity so the Doctor advises him to get some rest and gives him some sleeping pills (from a jar clearly labelled ‘poison’ but with a small label underneath the poison warning reading ‘sleeping pills’). That night, Von Niemann sends Emil to bring him Karl’s body and we see a mysterious figure climbing across the rooftops towards the detective’s open window. Ruth sees the Doctor doing his psychic hypnosis schtick and realises that he is the murder so he explains to her what is really going on - and it’s a real doozy.

In his lab, Von Niemann has created life: not a hulking great monster but a pulsating blob that looks like a giant prune, sitting at the bottom of a tank of water. He is enormously proud of this, but it can only survive on a constant diet of human blood. Quite why he would need the full contents of a human body every 24 hours when he seems to add the blood to the tank using a pipette is just one of many inexplicable aspects of this brilliantly daffy scheme. Anyway, unsurprisingly Karl has not been poisoned and returns to rescue Ruth from Von Niemann, who dies at the hands of Emil for some reason.

This whole film is deliriously bonkers, combining almost every subgenre of the 1930s. Although ostensibly a vampire film, it is in fact a mad scientist picture (or becomes one halfway through) but also shows a clear influence from The Bat, The Cat Creeps and other ‘masked maniac’ thrillers. Emil prowls the town’s rooftops clad in floppy-brimmed hat and dark cape; in fact he can be seen briefly in the opening scene of Kringen patrolling the streets, something which I only noticed on a second viewing. After Georgiana’s death, Karl fears that the murderer, presumably Gleib, may still be in the house; this seems to be for no other reason that because that’s what normally happens in these films.

Atwill, best remembered as the police inspector in various Frankenstein sequels, is never less than terrific in anything. He and Wray starred together in three films within the space of a couple of years: Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum and this one. The wonderful Wray, here sporting her natural brunette look, also made The Most Dangerous Game and, of course, King Kong around this time. Frye was midway between his two iconic roles as Fritz in Frankenstein and Karl in Bride of Frankenstein and had an uncredited role in The Invisible Man this same year.

Douglas makes a great leading man; there is real chemistry between him and Wray and his straight-faced mockery of the locals’ beliefs, together with his gentle ribbing of Frau Schnappmann, makes him a believable and likeable character. Although he appeared in dozens of films in the 1930s and 1940s, including The Lone Wolf Returns and Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, Douglas didn’t return to the horror genre until shortly before his death in 1981, when he appeared in The Changeling and Ghost Story.

Also in the cast are William V Mong (who was in Benjamin Christensen’s House of Horror/The Haunted House and played Merlin in a 1921 version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - I wonder if that still exists), Harrison Greene (The Case of the Black Cat, Charlie Chan at the Opera, The Devil Commands, Dick Tracy Returns), Fern Emmett (The Mummy’s Tomb, Captive Wild Woman), William Humphrey (who was in some Lon Chaney silents and also played Napoleon in a 1909 biopic!), Carl Stockdale (Intolerance, Mad Love, Revolt of the Zombies) and Paul Weigel (Dracula’s Daughter, The Black Cat, The Great Dictator).

Director Frank Strayer had helmed The Monster Walks the previous year and would direct The Ghost Walks the following year. From 1938 to 1943 he directed fourteen Blondie films. Writer Edward Lowe had started out in the mid-1910s writing scenarios for films with great-sounding titles like The Devil’s Signature and The Mystery of the Silent Death before co-writing the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame. Other credits include three Charlie Chans (in Paris, in Shanghai and at the Race Track), three Bulldog Drummonds (Escapes, Comes Back and ’s Revenge), two Houses (of Dracula and of Frankenstein), one Tarzan (‘s Desert Mystery) and one Sherlock Holmes (and the Secret Weapon). In a busy career, cinematographer Ira Morgan also lit The Unholy Night, Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, Mark of the Gorilla, The Cyclops and three classic superhero serials of the late 1940s: Superman, Batman and Robin and Atom Man vs Superman.

One reason that this film is so enjoyable, despite the creaky plot, is probably the contribution of art director Charles Hall who pretty much defined the look of early horror. His extraordinary CV includes The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Cat and the Canary, The Man Who Laughs, Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein (not to mention One Million BC, various Laurel and Hardy films, Show Boat, Waterloo Bridge, East of Borneo and All Quiet on the Western Front!). Born in Norwich in 1888, Hall designed scenery for Fred Karno’s troupe and continued his association with ex-Karno star Charlie Chaplin over numerous films. He is credited here as Daniel Hall, possibly to disguise his involvement in a non-Universal picture. Because, despite the presence of so many Universal stalwarts, this was actually produced by the obscure minor studio Majestic Pictures, their only foray into horror.

The print on this Classic Entertainment triple bill is not in great condition though it’s perfectly watchable. However, it only runs for sixty minutes rather than the normally listed 71 (like the Classic Entertainment version of The Ape) but apparently no versions actually run 71, most being between 62 and 67 minutes. (There is a 74-minute version but it only manages that by randomly inserting obviously nonmatched footage from Hitchcock's The Lodger!) At several points the screen goes black for a few frames and the only reason I can think of for that is that the original source material, way back when, had a soundtrack on disc. That was a technique still in use in 1933 which required, in order for the synchronisation to work, that any frames damaged were replaced with the exact number of blank frames.

Despite its truncated running time and the scratchy, crackly print, I am extremely pleased to have finally had a chance to see this marvellous film which has instantly become one of my favourites. Atwill is outstanding, Frye is brilliant and Wray and Douglas make a wonderful screen couple. Even the broad comedy of Frau Schnappmann is tolerable: Maude Eburne is much funnier than the ghastly and irritating Una O’Connor who normally filled those sorts of roles.

There is some lovely direction, effective use of shadows, some impressive (for the era) camera movement. It’s a wonderful package which makes for one of the best 1930s horror films to emanate from a minor studio.

MJS rating: A-

Night of the Bloody Apes

Director: Rene Cardona
Writers: Rene Cardona, Rene Cardona Jr
Producer: Alfredo Salazar
Cast: Jose Elias Moreno, Armando Silvestre, Norma Lazareno
Country: Mexico
Year of release: 1969
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

You know you’re watching a Mexican movie when the first five minutes consists of two people in coloured costumes and masks hurling each other around a wrestling ring. In this case the luchadoras are Lucy Ossorio (Norma Lazareno: Vengeance of the Vampire Women) and Elena Gomez (Noelia Noel: Santo and Dracula’s Treasure) who suffers a brain injury when Lucy tosses her out of the ring. Lucy is engaged to Police Lieutenant Arturo Martinez (Armando Silvestre: Santo Contra los Zombies, Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy, The Batwoman - plus Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara and episodes of Mannix and Wonder Woman!) and is understandably upset at seeing her opponent lying comatose in a hospital.

But there’s more to Night of the Bloody Apes than wrestling babes, because this my friends is an honest-to-goodness video nasty - one of the list of banned titles compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1984. Nowadays of course most of the films on that list can be bought for £4.99 down Tesco but nevertheless there is still a certain cachet to them.

The video nasties were an eclectic bunch of films and ranged from the truly nauseatingly sick to the hilariously inoffensive. This is certainly one of the sillier films on the list and it sports a plot which is best summed up as typically barking for Mexican popular cinema.

A certain Dr Krallman (Jose Elias Moreno, who played the title role in the notorious 1959 Mexican movie Santa Claus) is the physician called in to examine Elena Gomez. He has a grown-up son, Julio (variously pronounced ‘HOO-leo’ and ‘JOO-leo’ on the dubbed soundtrack) who is very ill with leukemia (pronounced, at one point, ‘loo-SEE-mia’); Julio is played by Agustin Martinez Solares who was also in Santo and Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man. After Lucy and Elena’s wrestling bout we have another trademark of Mexican cinema (in fact, of all cheap-and-cheerful populist film-making) with a staggeringly bad day-for-night scene. As the sun beats down from the heavens, Dr Krallman and his scar-faced assistant Goyo (Carlos Lopez Moctezuma: Curse of the Crying Woman, El Hombre y la Bestia) turn off the headlights on their car and break into the local zoo.

After some shots of an orang-utan, overlaid with the sort of scary growls that orang-utans don’t make, we see Krallman put together a rifle and shoot a painfully obvious man-in-a-suit gorilla, which the two men then remove from its cage and take home.

Krallman’s plan - you may want to write this down - involves transfusing the gorilla’s blood into his son ... but, because a human heart would not be strong enough to pump gorilla blood, he has to transplant the heart too. This he does, using stock footage of a genuine human heart transplant. Rather wonderfully, the surgical close-ups show two pairs of hands at work, intercut with shots of another pair of hands holding the anaesthetic mask to Julio’s face. But long shots confirm that only Krallman and Goyo are involved - so whose are the other hands? I also love the way that Krallman tells his son he won’t leave his side for a moment then promptly leaves the room with Goyo to stick the ape carcass in a convenient incinerator.

But we all know what happens when you put a gorilla heart inside a human, don’t we, boys and girls? In possibly the most unconvincing lap dissolve in cinematic history, Julio transforms into (as the original title has it) La Horripilante Bestia Humana - and I think we can all translate that, even if we don’t speak Spanish.

The bestia in question is as muscular as a body builder and has an ugly grey, Neanderthal face with a crop of shaggy black hair. Except in occasional extreme close-ups of its eyes, when its skin turns pale brown and all the hair disappears. It’s the most mismatched pair of images since Night of the Demon.

Naturally the beast escapes through a window and goes on a rampage and this is where I think the DPP may have been shocked as there is a violent - but frankly nonsensical - rape scene. A young woman having a shower (Gina Morett) is disturbed by the beast but has time to wrap a towel around herself. He carries her, topless but with the towel strategically placed, to her bed where he proceeds to rape her - without removing either the towel or his trousers. Legend has it that a more extreme version of this film, using alternative takes of the horror and sex, was released under the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title Horror y Sexo. But in this version, there’s not much horror and the sexo is relatively tame.

The other odd thing about this rape scene, apart from the two (possibly three) layers of cloth between the participants’ genitals, is the amount of blood that is splattered over the victim and up the wall, despite the lack of any obvious injury.

Recovering his errant boy, Krallman decides to put a human heart back in, but as the donor must be alive, he uses Elena, the luchadora from the hospital. He subsequently has to help the hospital authorities come up with an explanation of how a comatose patient could disappear from their facility. Oh, he’s a bad man. The populace, meanwhile, are blaming the spate of attacks on the gorilla that went missing from the zoo. (This is, I suppose, the origin of the title with which the film was lumbered in English-speaking markets. But let’s face it, Julio is not an ape and even if he was, there’s only one of him. Although his victims get drenched in the red stuff, he never seems to get any on either his pecs or his trousers so he’s not really bloody. It’s possible that much of the action takes place at night but, as previously mentioned, darkness is a somewhat fluid concept in this sort of movie. Another title often quoted is Gomar the Human Gorilla but I have yet to see any evidence that this is genuine.)

Unfortunately the human heart only restores Julio’s humanity temporarily and before you can say “Madre de Dios!” he has reverted to his horripilante self like a sort of low-rent Latin American Jekyll and Hyde. He leaps out of the rather hamfistedly repaired window and sets off an another rampage, this time attacking a young couple in a park. He rips the man’s head from his neck and sets about raping the woman, who wears a green 1950s-style dress and has red hair piled high in a beehive, making her look rather like the loud one out of the B-52s.

There are two great aspects to this sequence. One is that, when the woman extricates herself from the monster and runs away her hair is frizzed and her dress torn to shreds, but when she runs into a nearby shop pleading for help her dress is once more intact, her hair is piled up high and she looks ready to launch once more into the backing vocals on ‘Shiny Happy People.’ The other amusing thing is the painfully obvious interior nature of the studio set claiming to be a ‘park’, which is hammered home not only by the astroturf on which the attack takes place but most especially by the way that the energetic monstrous rape causes the astroturf to bunch up, revealing the studio floor beneath it. It’s a real Ed Wood moment.

Police Lieutenant Arturo Martinez (remember him?) is investigating all this and it all ends up... oh, I don’t know. Who cares? Night of the Bloody Apes isn’t a film you watch to find out what happens in the end, it’s a film you watch to marvel at the insane stuff that happens along the way (which includes another two wrestling bouts).

Writer/director Rene Cardona churned out more than 200 films from the 1920s to the 1980s including at least nine Santo movies plus such legendary mexploitation pictures as The Brainiac, Tom Thumb, Santa Claus and Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy. He started out as an actor with roles in Mexican versions of The Count of Monte Cristo and Lady Windermere’s Fan. Cardona co-wrote this picture with his son, Rene Cardona Jr (the cause of much confusion for filmographers as he also directed about a hundred films including Night of a Thousand Cats and Tintorera - Tiger Shark). Some additional footage for this English language version was shot in the USA by Jerald Intrator (Satan in High Heels).

Composer Antonio Diaz Conde also scored The Aztec Mummy vs the Human Robot and a 1958 Mexican version of The Invisible Man. Cinematographer Raul Martinez Solares handled the camera on scores of wrestling movies and (allegedly) some episodes of the 1960s Tarzan TV series starring Ron Ely.

The history of Night of the Bloody Apes in Britain is as follows. Originally released in Mexico in 1968, it played British cinemas in 1974 with an X certificate from the BBFC and running 81 minutes after the censors’ scissors had been at it. In 1983 it was released on VHS by Iver Film Services, allegedly uncut but running only 79 minutes so more likely the cut 81 minute version losing a little running time because it was a PAL tape. This version was promptly banned as a video nasty.

In 1993 the notorious Vipco label planned a release but there is no record of a BBFC certificate. Some uncut review copies of this made it into circulation but the planned release was presumably a version still further cut. Six years later a 77-minute version (probably the intended Vipco edit) was released by Sovereign Multimedia on their Satanica label. This was given an 18 certificate by the BBFC and I remember reviewing it for SFX at the time. For some reason, the film was submitted again in 2002, in the same 77-minute version, by Film 2000 - and was again given an 18, naturally.

Redemption’s version runs 84 minutes, making it even longer than the original theatrical release although as I type this, about five weeks before the DVD comes out, there is no sign of this version on the BBFC website. But to be frank I can’t see what anyone could possibly object to. What little gore is on show here is hamfistedly edited - to the extent that it still looks cut - and is nothing more than a few brief shots of throats being ripped etc. There is that first rape scene but it’s not salacious or exploitative, just silly. And I can’t imagine there would be a problem with the heart transplant footage.

The Redemption presentation is full-frame, scratchy at reel ends and the colours are a bit intense (especially Lucy’s red costume) but to be honest, who wants a pristine version of a movie like this? The extras are... well, haphazard is the adjective that springs to mind. There are two trailers: one for Jean Rollin’s Requiem for a Vampire (with English captions but no narration or dialogue) and one for Rollin’s Les Demoniaques (with French captions but no narration or dialogue). Both of these are random collections of images which tell you nothing about the films (except that they feature nude woman and clowns) but a lot about how people cobbled together international trailers in the early 1970s. There is no trailer for Night of the Bloody Apes.

The stills gallery is simply five photos; they are shots from the film and are presented here in a small frame, taking up about a quarter of the screen - so what’s the point? You could just freeze-frame the DVD at those moments and see the same images four times as large. The ‘promo art’ has three images: the original 1983 British video sleeve; the Something Weird US video sleeve (which double-billed the film with Feast of Flesh) and an unidentified original poster which calls the film Korang - La Terrificante Bestia Umana and is more interesting than all the other extras put together. The sleeve blurb has two typos and the only quote they could find is from the plot summary on the IMDB!

Never mind the video nasty tag, Night of the Bloody Apes is bonkers Mexploitation of the highest order and for that reason is essential viewing.

MJS rating: B+

Before I Hang

Director: Nick Grinde
Writers: Robert D Andrews, Karl Brown
Producer: Wallace MacDonald
Cast: Boris Karloff, Edward Van Sloan, Evelyn Keyes
Year of release: 1940
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

There is, let me state categorically here and now, no such thing as a bad Karloff film. Even his final Mexico-filmed quartet of stinkers are made worthwhile by Boris’ presence. But Before I Hang stems from long before then, and in fact dates from only a year after Son of Frankenstein, making it one of Karloff’s earliest ‘mad scientist’ roles.

He is Dr Garth, sentenced to death for committing euthanasia, who continues his experiments in prison in the few weeks he has left. He has been developing an anti-aging serum, made from blood cells, and persuades the prison doctor to inject him with it a few minutes before he is led to the gallows. Apparently this will somehow allow Garth to be secretly resuscitated after he is taken down, though this scientific side of the story is understandably vague.

”It’s a good job I’m not being electrocuted,” says Dr Garth, “as that would damage the cells in my body.” Erm, yes - but you know, you are going to have a snapped spinal column...?

But things go awry when Garth’s sentence is commuted to life imprisonment at the eleventh hour, after the serum injection. He continues his experiments, gradually growing visibly younger, but one night he develops a murderous rage and kills the prison doctor (Frankenstein co-star Edward Van Sloan), along with a trustee who interrupts him and takes the blame. For his ‘heroic attempt to fight back’, Garth is released.

The second half of the story sees Garth back at home, in the palatial mansion he shares with his daughter (Evelyn Keyes), explaining his theory to three elderly friends, who politely decline his offer of a serum injection. Garth then seeks them out one by one and kills them - because, you see, the blood used in the serum he injected himself with came from a triple murderer. It’s sort of The Transfusion of Orlac.

Granted, the story makes precious little - well, no sense at all actually. Andrews also wrote episodes of Boris Karloff Presents while Brown was a former cinematographer on silent movies who had been a camera operator on Birth of a Nation! Director Grinde had worked with Karloff on The Man They Could Not Hang and The Man With Nine Lives, as had many of the crew - all three films were shot within one year.

But what makes this film terrific - apart from a bravura performance by Karloff, a solid supporting cast, a decent budget for sets, props and costumes, and some impressive hair/make-up - is the lighting. Cinematographer Benjamin Kline (Rock Around the Clock, The Munsters) and art director Lionel Banks (His Girl Friday, Return of the Vampire) have worked together to create a monochromatic chiaroscuro effect, clearly influenced by German expressionism. Shadows loom and flicker everywhere, sometimes blown up to huge proportions by low-held lights. Sometimes the characters are actually kept off-screen for a moment and all we see are shadows.

Before I Hang is a stylish movie that looks way, way better than you would expect from the dodgy script and brief running time. This TV print (which carries a Columbia Screengems end title card) looks like a PAL conversion from an NTSC master and so, while it looks good, it is clear that it could look much, much better. I would love to see a digitally remastered print of this on DVD.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted before November 2004