This was the fourth film Bela Lugosi made at Monogram.
Monogram was one of the most successful of the so-called “Poverty Row” studios, notable for their low budgets and slap-dash productions.
And, yes, Bela Lugosi’s nine picture deal with Sam Katzman was perhaps the biggest mistake he made in his entire career. He was far too interested in getting as much as he could as quickly as possible.
That never works out well.
Still, there is a certain charm to many of these films. They aren’t the absolute worst films he ever made, and many of them have an odd sort of vision driving them, even if they aren’t very good at bringing it to the screen.
It also helps that Lugosi put everything he had into his films, playing his terrible lines in these films to their hammy fullest.
Once again, Bela plays yet another mad scientist.
Dr. Lorenz wants to keep his aging wife young and beautiful, so he does the simple and obvious thing under the circumstances:
He kidnaps young brides on their wedding day.
This is very close to the platonic ideal of mad scientist films, although normally the good doctor would be curing a horrible disease or bringing his wife back to life again. Just making her pretty is actually a fairly good take on the classic pattern. Normally, though, we would get a much clearer idea of what it is he wants from his roomful of kidnapped brides — like blood or cerebrospinal fluid. Here it is, well, something glandular.
But don’t quote me on that.
And we get another tweak to the standard model as Lugosi is aided by, not a giant gorilla, or a hulking brute, or even a hunchback, but by Angelo Rossito, three years after he played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz.
Although, to be fair, he is kind of creepy in this one.
I suspect that Bela’s 1940 film, The Devil Bat, may have been the pattern Monogram followed when they made this one (and their later Lugosi film, Voodoo Man): the focus of the story is on the reporter (in this case, girl reporter) investigating the case and on the usual romance, with Bela’s mad scientist shenanigans taking more of a background role.
Only, for whatever reason, he plays this one mostly straight, and Dr. Lorenz is one of the more pallid mad scientists of the Forties.
Oh, well, at least we don’t have the usual Boris Karloff plot where he’s just misunderstood, or ends up becoming a monster inadvertently. I like my mad scientists evil.
We do get a very strange moment when we see that Dr. Lorenz and his wife both sleep in coffins, but this is merely given a throwaway line for an explanation: coffins are really comfy and a lot of people do it.
Right.
But I’m willing to bet they’re darn hard to get out of in the morning.
I’ll confess that it is a touch strange to see serial hero Tristan Coffin playing the romantic lead: he’s perfectly fine in the role, but outside of the serials he usually ended up playing villains.
In fact, despite the trivial detail that he’s come to the house (the usual, sinister house that the locals won’t go near) to help Bela in his studies, he’s never a suspect, not even for a moment.
Not even when he claims that he doesn’t remember an important fact.
Oh well.
So we get all the good stuff — mad science, glandular extracts, beautiful girls in danger, Bela in a coffin, that sinister house, sinister servants, and even hypnosis — and yet it is all so tame.
Someone once claimed that he’d seen six of Bela Lugosi’s Monogram nine and that they all ranked at number nine. This is a tad bit unfair: they are, after all, fun little movies which move fast and have some nicely weird bits (although Voodoo Man is by far the best because it is so bizarre).
But, sadly, The Corpse Vanishes is rather tame. It really needed Bela at his hammy best. I don’t know whether the director told him to tone it down, or the script, or a conscious decision on Bela’s part. Whatever the case, we needed him in all-out “kindly Dr. Carruthers” mode.
Oh, well.
You can’t win them all…
rivets on the poster 