- Directed by: Dwain Esper
- Written by: Hildagarde Stadie
- Stars: Bill Woods, Horace B. Carpenter, Ted Edwards
- Run Time: 51 min
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-1tI_KHbQ
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The poster from a 1983 rerelease touts “Sex…Drugs…Psychos” and “The First word in bad taste,” and that’s about right. It’s awful and fascinating at the same time, surprisingly gross and graphic for 1934. And it’s short at only 51 minutes, so give it a try if you’d like something historically interesting and pretty entertaining – more chuckles and eww moments than scares for sure.
Spoilery Synopsis
We get an opening scroll that talks about fear, faith, and unhealthy thought. All criminals suffer from some mental disease.
We cut to Dr. Meirschultz and Maxwell working in their lab. The old man wants to experiment on a dead body and needs Maxwell’s help to get one. He’s going to impersonate the coroner to steal the body. They enter the morgue and inject one of the bodies with the doctor’s serum. She soon begins to move, and they need to get her out of the morgue, past the guard and attendants.
The police start looking into the missing body, and Dr. Meirschultz’s name comes up right away. So does Maxwell’s name.
Back at the lab, Dr. Meirschultz wants another body that he can transplant a still-beating heart into. He doesn’t care where the next body comes from, so Maxwell breaks into the nearby undertaker’s place, but he’s run off by angry cats. After he reports failure to the old doctor, Meirschultz wants Maxwell to kill himself for the experiment. Instead, Maxwell shoots the old madman.
We then cut to another scroll about “Dementia Precox,” a very common form of insanity.
Maxwell gives himself a speech about the “spark of life” as he hallucinates the devil. One of the doctor’s patients shows up, and Maxwell makes himself look like Meirschultz using his makeup and acting skills. He then treats Mr. Buckley and gives him a shot of super-adrenaline by mistake. Mr. Buckley has… a reaction; oh-boy does he ever. He goes berserk and steals the undead woman from the morgue.
Mrs. Buckley finds the old doctor’s corpse and thinks it’s murder. As Maxwell and Mrs. Buckley talk about blackmail and murder, Mr. Buckley and the undead woman run off into the hillside. Meanwhile, Satan the cat eats the beating heart from the jar on the desk. Maxwell grabs the cat and pops his eye out and eats it.
Maxwell walls up the doctor’s corpse and the one-eyed cat behind the wall in the basement.
The police come to a man who owns thousands of cats for the skins. He’s got it all figured out.
We cut to Maxwell’s forgotten wife, Alice, who lives with three other women who don’t seem to own many clothes. They read that Maxwell has inherited a small fortune, but no one can find him to let him know. She goes to “Meirschiltz” and tells him about the inheritance. He figures she’s going to murder him for the money, so he talks Mrs. Buckley into killing Alice. When Alice shows up, he tells her about Mrs. Buckley as a double-cross.
As the two women fight in the basement, Maxwell cackles like a lunatic, causing the cat-obsessed neighbor to call the police. Everyone runs to the basement, where the police hear the one-eye-cat yowling from behind the wall.
We cut to Maxwell, in jail, who goes on and on about his need to be a great actor, but no one appreciates him.
Brian’s Commentary
The movie poster promises “Sex, Drugs, and Psychos.” We do, in fact, get all of those. It’s all pretty ridiculous, but then again, this was 1934, so this was pretty over-the-top and extreme for the time.
The acting is awful, the plot is thin, but it’s really interesting considering what they got away with at the time.
It’s… weird.
Kevin’s Commentary
This was my second viewing after recommending it to Brian for a review. It’s kind of awful, yet interesting at the same time. It’s pretty wild and graphic considering it’s a film from 1934.
The Phyllis Diller in this movie is not the comedian Phyllis Diller.
It’s a strange little movie that I enjoyed seeing.
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