Cast:
Béla Lugosi (Dr. Richard Vollin), Boris Karloff (Edmond Bateman), Lester Matthews (Dr. Jerry Halden), Irene Ware (Jean Thatcher), Samuel S. Hinds (Judge Thatcher), Spencer Charters (Colonel Bertram Grant), Inez Courtney (Mary Burns), Ian Wolfe (Geoffrey "Pinky" Burns), and Maidel Turner (Harriet Grant) Directed by Lew Landers (#2260 - The Return of the Vampire)
Review:
You might remember that Universal had done a few horror films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934) had each featured Lugosi, and just like the latter, he co-stars with Karloff for a "adaptation" of The Raven. Apparently, several writers were brought in to try and bring treatments for writing, but only David Boehm would be given credit. The movie isn't really an adaptation of the 1845 poem of the same name by Poe because, well, if you read it, you would know all it involves is a man who sees and hears of a raven that goes "Nevermore" among other various rhymes (interestingly, there was a 1915 film that went by the same name as the poem that merely was a biographical film about Poe himself). It merely is a film where a man really seems to like the works of Poe instead, complete with seeing a solo dance set to a recitation of the story and a torture device straight from "The Pit and the Pendulum". This was the third appearance of Karloff and Lugosi together (eight by the end of the 1940s) after the aforementioned Cat film and Gift of Gab, a musical comedy that probably nobody interested would care about unless they like bit parts; the next film with the two was The Invisible Ray (1936). This was the kind of movie that probably unsurprisingly led to people being weird about horror movies, with one British paper wondering what was behind the movie that was "of "horror" for "horror's" sake", accusing it as nonsense for trying to hide under the Poe inspiration while saying it has no indication of "imaginative control" in story or treatment. This was among the first films directed by Landers, who actually was born Louis Friedlander before he elected to go by Landers for directing later on. Nearly thirty years later, Karloff appeared in the next "adaptation" of the Raven story as part of the Corman-Poe cycle for AIP.
It actually is a pretty neat movie when you get down to it, mostly because its obsessive glee is pretty infectious for such a carefully curated runtime of just 61 minutes. Lugosi gets to eye-ball his way through a movie that is more his show than Karloff's show in the best of ways imaginable for cut-rate spooks. Lugosi gets to have some fun moments involving a considerable ego (he says at one point that he is "a law unto myself") and getting to play a game of cat-and-mouse with Karloff, who gets packed in with some makeup because of the nature of the plan drawn up of obsessive love by way of extortion; the theory of ugly folks going around doing crimes because of said ugly is amusing here, suffice to say. It's funny to compare it with say, Supernatural when it comes to saying just how clearly better one is in doing a movie with enjoyment within a limited body-count potential (this one has one, technically) because it actually feels like there is commitment with one's lead stars to go with a story that runs bold-faced into devotion with no hacky limitations. I like how one can have such a delusion of being a god can go hand in hand with basically being a fan of literary works, particularly one that likes scary moving doors to use on people. Sure, the others besides our duo are merely "fine", but you get madcap enjoyment seeing Lugosi, even with an obvious ending involving beasts liking the sight of happy normal folks. As a whole, it isn't a great Universal horror film, but it does fine with those other Poe films they made and has a worthwhile duo to make a neat curiosity anyway.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
