It began with me buying one Bela Lugosi vampire film and one Ed Wood movie starring Lugosi, and that spiraled into me buying a 4-disc set of Universal films starring Lugosi and Boris Karloff…which led to me buying one of the last films in which Lugosi appears. I have a feeling one of these days I’m going to get the urge to own every horror movie Lugosi was ever in. Anyway, let’s take a dive into the black and white days of Bela!
MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)
I simply had to own this one because, like Return of the Vampire, it’s another film in which Bela Lugosi appears in his classic Dracula form without actually playing Dracula. It runs only an hour long, and unfortunately I feel totally duped. Let’s just say this movie features the kind of surprise that eventually made a classic 1986 slasher go down in infamy.
A man is murdered and bite marks are found on his neck. The medical examiner believes the culprit is a vampire, but the inspector thinks that’s tomfoolery. And as in many of these old films, everyone just always seems to be hanging out in the house of the deceased for no apparent reason other than to save on sets.
Anyway, the murder victim’s daughter is soon targeted by Bela and his pretty vampire woman minion, and those scenes capture that classic gothic vampire vibe. The film even opens with a spooky cemetery scene, but overall it is just incredibly flat, and the twist only compounds the disappointment.
There are two interesting things to note that easily could have gotten this film some attention in the Queer for Fear documentary. First of all, this is credited as being the first film to deliver the cheap “cat scare”, and when it does, two men scream like girls and clutch each other like a couple of lovers. Second, Lugosi never lays a fang on the daughter character—it’s straight up girl-on-girl action, for each time she is attacked it’s Lugosi’s female minion doing the sucking while he watches. Vampire women really have always been lesbians, haven’t they?
THE BLACK CAT (1934)
A 65-minute flick that stars both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, this film features standard horror movie elements of the time but also feels ahead of its time.
A couple in Hungary shares a ride with a doctor played by Lugosi. They get into an accident, and he takes them to a “friend’s” house because the woman has been hurt.
The friend is Karloff, who plays an architect. Rather than the usual gothic haunted house you’d expect him to be living in, this one is very modern.
The story is odd. Lugosi is back from war and is looking for his wife and daughter. He believes Karloff has something to do with their disappearance. He’s also terrified of black cats and believes they take over the bodies of the deceased—which is a concerning theory once the woman from the car accident begins acting quite different when she awakens after being tended to.
It’s no surprise that there are dark secrets buried in Karloff’s home, and it involves keeping women preserved in glass cases and practicing Satanism. Awesome. There’s even a gruesome kill before the film is through–not visually presented, however, but it’s fun to see Bela and Boris doing some BDSM.
THE RAVEN (1935)
While The Black Cat used a Poe title with no real connection to the works of Poe, The Raven is basically an homage to Poe stories. This is the gothic horror you would expect from Bela and Boris together.
Lugosi is a surgeon obsessed with Poe. A judge’s daughter is badly injured in a car accident and he asks Lugosi to heal her.
Then Karloff comes to Lugosi asking him for surgery to change his appearance. I don’t know why, because he makes a hot bear.
Evil Lugosi decides to deform Karloff and promises to fix the mess he’s made if Karloff helps him abduct and torture the judge and his daughter in his Poe-inspired dungeon. Yippee!
Lugosi and Karloff give us just the kinds of performances we want from them, the Poe themed dungeon rules, and crazy Lugosi has a wicked way to abduct the daughter…her bedroom in his home is rigged to simply lower into the dungeon like an elevator. Amazing.
An interesting note about what very well may have been an intentional self-referential moment (if they even thought of things like that in those days): there’s a scene in The Black Cat in which Karloff plays creepy music on an organ in his home, and there’s a scene in The Raven in which Lugosi plays creepy music on an organ in his home!
THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936)
This odd movie is sort of a roundabout way to retell the Jekyll & Hyde story. Other than Lugosi looking suave with a goatee, I found both him and Karloff to be rather flat here.
It begins on a stormy night in a gothic house, which seemed like a good place to start. But it doesn’t hold onto that atmosphere.
Things turn sci-fi. Karloff has a lab and is doing experiments. He assembles a team to head to Africa to examine a crashed meteorite. As is common with early 1900s movies, Black people are relegated to the roles of native tribesmen, and they aren’t treated very humanely.
Karloff gets poisoned by the meteorite’s radiation, so Lugosi, who plays a doctor, creates an antidote Karloff must take regularly so he won’t go mad–or glow….
So much for that miracle of medicine. Karloff does start to go mad and plots to kill people…as well as to get revenge on his cheating wife.
That’s about it. There’s nothing particularly chilling or thrilling going on in this one.
BLACK FRIDAY (1940)
This one gets points for inspiring numerous movies over the years, but overall it feels more like a gangster film than a horror movie.
Karloff is a doctor who transplants a gangster’s brain into his friend when the friend is involved in a car accident.
The friend starts to act violent, but that doesn’t stop Karloff from taking him to New York, where the gangster hid a large sum of money. Karloff is hoping the friend with the gangster’s brain will remember where.
Instead, the friend is more interested in getting revenge on the gangster’s enemies. You would think that would lead to a juicy body count. Wishful thinking.
Lugosi has a minor role as a gangster and never interacts with Karloff.
This one is a total dud.
BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955)
When Bela Lugosi hopped aboard the Ed Wood train for a few of his last films, there was no telling they would become cult classics. Sure, Plan 9 From Outer Space is the more famous (and infamous) collaboration, but I personally think Bride of the Monster is the true classic.
I’m guessing the title was chosen to bring to mind Lugosi’s years doing Universal monster movies, and that just sucks, because this movie has nothing to do with Frankenstein’s bride, which is how it sounds.
One of the real monsters here is mad scientist Lugosi’s pet octopus! It’s awesome both when it’s stock footage of a real octopus and when it’s just an octopus model that actors are pretending to struggle with by wrapping its arms around their bodies. I wouldn’t be surprised if this film was an inspiration for the pet crocodile in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. Hell, there’s even a scene of a battle with an alligator or croc in this film!
The ominous horror music is spot on for the time, and there’s a rainstorm crashing around Lugosi’s creepy house throughout the film. As much as Ed Wood is known for being a horrible director, this film feels on par with many better-received flicks from the era.
Seems there have been disappearances in the area around Lugosi’s house, and a female reporter is convinced that some sort of monster is killing people in the wilderness. She decides to explore the area and is captured by Lugosi’s big goon assistant. Lugosi then uses his classic eye hypnosis to keep her asleep while he plots to make her the “bride of the atom”. Say what?
See, Lugosi intends to convert humans into atomic super humans to take over the world. I guess he needs a bride so he’ll only have to make two atomic super humans and then they can just procreate and have atomic super babies? Who knows.
A detective, a Loch Ness Monster expert, and some others head to Lugosi’s house as well to see what’s up, and sooner or later everyone either ends of up octopus food or a potential lab rat.
Considering the questionable sexual orientation and gender identity of Ed Woods, it’s interesting to note that when the detective/hero battles with Lugosi’s big goon assistant, the big goon tears his shirt off and the detective spends the rest of the time running around shirtless and wet in the rain. Delicious objectifying of the male body for a flick from the fifties.
One of the other major highlights is the way in which the detective puts a stop to Lugosi once and for all.
THE BLACK SLEEP (1956)
This film was pretty edgy for its time, and yet it’s still kind of slow until about the last 15 minutes.
A surgeon breaks a doctor friend accused of murder out of prison by slipping him a drug he created that makes a person appear to be dead. The surgeon claims “the body” and brings the doctor to his home lab and asks him to be his assistant.
The surgeon is doing brain surgery experiments on what the doctor at first thinks are dead bodies. Nope. The surgeon is using live people and messing with their minds in the process. Eek! There’s even a surprisingly graphic scene of an exposed brain considering this is 1956.
Turns out those who have been mentally and physically marred are being held captive in a basement dungeon.
It’s pretty good payoff when the doctor and his lady friend discover all the deformed people, and these monstrous patients end up going on a psychotic rampage for the last few minutes of the film. If this movie were made today, the freaks would be pursuing them for at least half the movie and both torturing and killing them.
Lon Chaney Jr. plays one of the brain surgery victims that has gone mad, and Bela Lugosi has a blink and you’ll miss him role as a mute butler.
