Universal Cult Horror (TCM DVD Set) Analysis: The Mad Ghoul, Murders in the Zoo, House of Horrors, Strange Case of Dr. Rx, The Mad Doctor of Market Street

THE MAD GHOUL
1943 - **1/2
"With me it's ghoul trouble baby," laments Carl Denham, i.e. Robert Armstrong, to a little honey of a fellow reporter who appears and exeunts with little fuss in one of the few horror movies made in 1943, THE MAD GHOUL. Excuse its impoverished gloss as half the studio workforce was busy fighting in WW2, back when we weren't entirely sure we'd win.

But despite the horror overseas, here at Universal the censors won't allow us to learn what the ghoul (David Bruce) does with the body that makes him so evil.  Presumably he eats the heart; they mention the heart is removed and graves are dug up, but then they change the subject. Meanwhile Evelyn Ankers lip syncs light opera on a tour of the midwest, lovesick ghoul trailing after (he got that way cuz of romantic rival and thesis advisor George Zucco's ancient zombie gas formula) like a semi-dead groupie, unearthing stale hearts to keep himself from becoming too decomposed to pitch woo. Zucco and the ghoul have yet another rival: Turhan Bey as the urbane composer-pianist who sweeps Evelyn away while the ghoul is off eating other people's heart out.  "He always chooses a new corpse" the critics say. Catching the culprit "may be the means of saving the deceased from a horrible mutilation!"

That's what you call a low stakes game, certainly not worth risking your life for.  It's not like he's killing people, just grazing. Relative to what the Nazis were doing to Poland, and the Japanese to China, corpse eating is hardly even a ticketable offense.

Zucco has fun but the plot is the same as all the Universal pics of the time: a killer and his handler taking out their critics while a snappy reporter (Armstrong) goes undercover as a funeral home cadaver. "Whatever you do, don't mar this coffin!" exclaims the undertaker. It's all good, brozo; the make-up is interesting, the shambling effective, the suspense music fine; the heart-eating thing is uncanny chiefly for its glaring elephant in the room mums the wordedness. The lighting is competent but needs more shadows and darkness. Hasn't anyone ever heard of expressionism? A dark set could save on electricity! I guess the censors wanted to make sure no phantoms were having sex in the corners.

I''ll say it again: THE MAD GHOUL is the best PRC horror movie that Universal ever made. It's every bit as strange and oddly engaging as any Poverty Row monster movie of the 1940s that you can name, but it's got all the brand-name (B-unit) trappings of Universal Studios to give it that little bit extra and deliver a lasting, satisfying, and fun film. Although it was probably pretty forgettable as the second-banana feature in the cinemas in 1943 to SON OF DRACULA --- Shock Cinema

Rose Hobart is in it, somewhere. I didn't see her though. There's not even eight people in the whole cast, aside from some disheartened gravediggers.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO

1933 - ***1/2

Somehow this Paramount film wound up in the Universal Cult Horror collection, to all our benefit. The beautiful Kathleen Burke (the Panther Woman from Paramount's same year ISLAND OF LOST SOULS) is something to kill over in the familiar cycle of betrayal, love, revenge, and maniacal jealousy. But this is pre-code so the lurid come-ons of Eric (Lionel Atwill) are truly perverse, like few lechers ever got to be after 1934. "Yes, Eric, I know, now you're going to make love to me," Burke says, voice trilling with panic, after he kills her latest lover with a mamba bite. Lots of cutaways to pent-up animals in cages the better to symbolize a panorama of human emotions with, dearie. Atwill sits with a chimp in his lap and looks quite comfortable.

Unfortunately there's some comic relief in Charlie Ruggles as the zoo's dipsomaniac PR agent who hems and cowardly haws for whole stretches at the thought of l-l-lions and t-t-t-igers! and there's boring straight man stuff from Randolph Scott, but hey Burke is so lovely and haunted it leaves a queasy taste; her misery with Eric has put her in a state of somnambulistic terror so irresistible you too will want to risk having your mouth sewn shut and being left to die in the jungles of Malaysia or wherever just to save her. Too bad for you, then! 

HOUSE OF HORRORS
1944 - ***
Two disparate artists - one of murder, one of sculpture -- are brought together by fate to rage against the bile of snooty art critics determined to rob them of revenue. As the acromelagy-ridden Creeper, Rondo Hatton (a real-life victim of Japanese nerve gas) was in a string of Creeper Bs (including the Sherlock Holmes film PEARL OF DEATH), then died, but his name lives on in the Rondo awards. I was once nominated for one! It all fits together.

There's a great dissolve between the hero's hot vacant bikini model and Kolseck's Rondo.  Beautiful Rondo vs. bland blonde!  Kolseck rants "now I have a feeling of power! Limitless power..."

As someone who labors greatly for this little site, I'm always having mental dialogues where grandiosity is soon tempered with rage at a lack of public recognition, followed by dejection, humility, redemption, artistic inspiration fueled by grace, which quickly becomes overstuffed with grandiosity once again, and the cycle clicks a spoke anew. Sometimes I take this journey in a single breath. So I appreciate the Napoleanic frustrations of Martin Kolseck, an actor used to playing Nazis relishing a chance to add some depth to his villain, making him as sympathetic up to a point as, say, Condrad Veidt in A WOMAN'S FACE (my 2008 Bright Lights appreciation here)

The Rondo award prototype is complete!

I like this from Memphis gadabout John Beifuss: "Those who do not appreciate true art will probably call it ugly," rationalizes the film's mad sculptor about his work -- a useful comment that could function as an inadvertent slogan for all the undervalued directors laboring in the sometimes disreputable horror genre." I like that Burns and Allen's regular third wheel and announcer, Bill Goodwin, is a cop. And there's a great existential sadness that hangs over it all, which Beifuss again nails:

"House of Horrors" is little more than efficient in terms of its staging and camerawork. But it's utterly absorbing in its alternately dismissive and sympathetic attitudes toward art and abnormality; as the story volleys between the healthy Steven and the weird Marcel, between the vibrant Joan and the grotesque Creeper, it functions almost as a dialogue. On the surface, Yarbrough seems to encourage the conflicted viewer to embrace the film's rote 1940s endorsement of wholesomeness; yet it's the almost Steinbeckian duo of Marcel and the Creeper that engages our identification.

The DVD image is super clear, exposing the relative poverty of the bland-half sets, but the crazy sculpture studio has some good lighting, and Rondo's reputation as the Creeper is well established by his supernatural ability to slip silently in and out of shadows and sneak up right behind people before strangling them and breaking their spines with only his tall twisted shadow to give him away. The film is a sort-of sequel to THE BRUTE MAN, which ends, presumably (I can't remember) with the Creeper being shot and disappearing into the river, which is where our sculptor fishes him out. Word to the wise: if you want to kill a bunch of enemies, rescue a monster!

STRANGE CASE OF DR. Rx
1942 - *

This is the one where the guy kills all the people who were exonerated for crimes with which they were clearly guilty. I say, good work, Dr. Rx! Mantan Moreland is 'great' as a sassy butler, jiving with delivery folks and generally deserving to be fired. He does have one good moment when he's supposed to pick up the blandsome hero from the airport in the morning, but then he wakes in the afternoon to said hero strangling him. "Why didn't we meet me at the airport?" the hero snaps. "Boss, I'm on my way right now!" Mantan says.

Similarly there's only one tiny little dark patch of horror in the film (pictured above) when we see Dr. Rx pulling a mindfuck freak-out gaslight routine, a heavy metal oasis in a desert of tedious post-code banality. It gets worse with the arrival of a feminism-sabotaging first amendment-violating hack reporter who tries to rope her detective husband out of the crime solving racket and into a straitjacket of domestic suffocation. Yeesh, you'll want to suffocate the lot of them. 

MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET
1942 - *
I started watching this in good faith but its tale of a mad scientist working on early forms of cyrogenics--and leaving a trail of bodies wherever he goes--is so dull and flat it makes one long for the comparatively ingenious touch of PRC or Monogram. El Mad Doctore (Lionel Atwill) is marooned with some dislikeable specimens on a tropical island where he saves the chief's wife with an adrenalin shot (not into the heart, I guess to not shock those heart-phobic censors). So from then on he's got the tribe in his hand, which means experimenting on the natives and then, when he wants to work on 'higher' forms of life (censors don't mind racism), the white castaways. Now he's gone too far! 

The Mad Doctor of Market Street presents us with such lousy specimens of the human animal, I am tempted to think that Martin's script was trying to sneak in an existentialist subtext. Certainly, life couldn't seem more absurd or meaningless than it does at the end of The Mad Doctor of Market Street. Only Martin's colossal incompetence at every other facet of screenwriting keep me from taking such an idea seriously. - Horror Inc.

I actually stopped watching about halfway through in disgust. I paid real money for this set, after eyeing it now for a few years on TCM's site, thinking the price would go down or I could get them to send me a review copy. For $44 or whatever the list is they should endeavor to give us at least four decent films instead of only three. The last two 'doctor' films are appallingly bad. We all know 1942 was a grim period for the horror film but jeeeze.

Maybe it was the war. Nothing could compare with the Nazis and Japanese as far as horrors. (By 1944 it was okay since we realized we would win). At any rate it does make one wonder if anyone at TCM even saw these last two films, or just figured that since they had doctor with the words strange or mad they must fit in the box. A pox on them, but not too bad a one, don't want to spook the censor. In closing, if you're wondering whether this set is worth the money, here's my breakdown:


Mad Doctor of Market Street - value - $0.00
Strange Case of Dr. Rx - value $0.50
The Mad Ghoul - value: $3.00
House of Horrors - value: $10.00
Murders at the Zoo - value: $30.59

It's worth it, just barely...

In the future, TCM, here's my recommendation for a great five film horror set, PRE-CODE JUNGLE HORRORS:

KONGO - 1931
EAST OF BORNEO - 1933
WHITE WOMAN - 1933
BLACK MOON - 1934
THE INTRUDER - 1933