Director: Michael Curtiz
Year: 1932
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Mad Doctor
Plot:
After a rash of murders in New York, a reporter's quest for the truth leads to the seaside mansion of a famed scientist conducting a series of illegal experiments on the nature of evil, forcing him and his still-alive captors to stop their experiments before he can finish.
Review:
This here was a pitiful and absolutely wretched effort. What makes this one so terrible is the fact that there's just no possible way the story to this one can mean anything when the large portion of what's going on here tends to fall into the rather ridiculous and lame comedy that's supposed to be down-right hilarious but truly isn't. Not only is the lead's constant bungling around his clothes for different objects at a given time or his thousand-words-a-minute smooth-talking to get out of sticky situations unbearably unfunny, but the gall to believe that three separate scenes of him being trapped in a room with skeletons that manipulate themselves on their own are gut-busting hilarious enough to warrant that many repeated returns to that gag is a great example of the purposeful horror/comedy that's not funny.
That each of these scenes last as long as they do not only make this one a staggering chore to get into in the first half but also drowns out the horror to a bare minimum in these parts which is really only in the fact that the rampage is on-going and we get detailed explanations of the victims' remains in such a state that the technical jargon for these sequences is almost as bad as the boredom from the supposed laughs to come along.
What tends to keep this one remaining as a horror film is the film's final half which is where this one really gets going with some admittedly decent and suspenseful times in their experiment chamber where the different attempts to provide the search for their mission manages to get pretty enjoyable by holding out the killer's identity quite well here in the first sequence as the chaos makes it quite chilling, while the second attempt is even better with the identity switch putting the killer with her while the others are helpless to watch culminating in a great brawl that ends this on a high note. Still, the massive flaws with this one really holds it down the most.
Overview: */5
A bland, nearly worthless effort without much going for it, it's positives that come from the final half keep this one going when a lot of the stuff otherwise here isn't really worth it. This is more of a curiosity piece for those interested in the early stages of the genre or the most devout hardcore fans of the era while most others that don't like these elements should heed caution.
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