These new entries are getting me to question the calculations in creating the TSZDT list, especially with many new titles appearing so high on the list. (Invisible Ray is #298, Mummy's Hand is #445 and Human Monster is #555.) I’ll give you there may not be 1000 good Horror movies in existence. I’ve only seen 1200 myself, but I can report that at least 500 of those are better and more interesting than this recent batch.
The Invisible Ray (1936)
★ ★ A special meteor lands in Africa and I immediately think “Wakanda!” Boris Karloff leads an expedition to study the radiation, which has magical healing powers but curses the doctor with glowing skin and a touch that kills instantly. He looks for help from scientist Bela Lugosi, who sees the radiation is also poisioning Karloff’s mind. There are some nice glowing effects and the destruction of a cliffside that disintegrates with a liquid center, but it’s all painfully average. Karloff and Lugosi are subdued and even together they seem disinterested.
The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936)
aka. The Man Who Lived Again
aka. Doctor Maniac Who Lived Again
★ ★ ½ Body swap horror with Karloff again. The early stage of this Marathon is starting to feel like a Netflix binge, with one-hour tales about mad scientists meddling in God’s domain amongst sparking lab equipment. The only thing to note here is director Robert Stevenson would go on to helm Mary Poppins.
The Human Monster (1939)
aka. The Dark Eyes of London
aka. Dead Eyes of London
★ ½ Bela Lugosi stars – and by now I know I am definitely more of a Karloff fan – as an insurance agent running a very obvious scheme involving murdered clients and a large disfigured, blind man who might be insulting if he were the least bit realistic. I appreciate the brief running time of these films, though with a few more minutes they might make more sense. This revised list has put too much importance into these cheap B-movies, and I have many more to watch.
Before I Hang (1940)
★ ★ ½ Back to Karloff, who makes this film as good as it is. Stupid (and oft used) plot about a good person injected with the blood of a killer that turns him into a killer too. Karloff’s explanations about science’s ability to stop aging would just be weird and campy coming from Lugosi, but Karloff has Vincent Price’s ability to sell anything. It’s a fairly layered performance, having to swing between various degrees of sweet and homicidal. Better than the dumb story deserves.
The Mummy’s Hand (1940)
★ ★My favorite Mummy movie is the 1999 Stephen Sommers film. (Well, what would you choose?) This has the exact same prologue and is also more Action/Adventure than Horror. It has George Zucco, who played the first Moriority against Rathbone in The Adv. Of Sherlock Holmes and Wallace Ford is a familiar face, though I don’t recall him ever trying so hard to be funny. That is all I might remember a month from now because there’s so little effort put into making these classic monster movies distinct from one another.