To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd.\u00a0 Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen.\u00a0 Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists.\u00a0 They are too ridiculous to consider.<\/p>\n
Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary.\u00a0 They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination.\u00a0 But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.<\/p>\n
Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night.\u00a0 Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel.\u00a0 Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is.\u00a0 Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite).\u00a0 Here he is shown Karen\u2019s embalmed body in a giant bell jar.\u00a0 And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead.\u00a0 Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast\u2019s daughter isn\u2019t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.<\/p>\n
The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim.\u00a0 Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice.\u00a0 Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan\u2019s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall.\u00a0 Don\u2019t ask me why such a room is part of the story.\u00a0 The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features.\u00a0 Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.<\/p>\n
But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered.\u00a0 Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive.\u00a0 Joan sees this and starts screaming.\u00a0 Peter finds a gun that Poelzig\u2019s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him.\u00a0 While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.<\/p>\n
O, brother!\u00a0 Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig\u2019s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches.\u00a0 And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top.\u00a0 There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd.\u00a0 And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff\u2019s face, they show Lugosi\u2019s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him.\u00a0 This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be.\u00a0 And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun.\u00a0 Only for fans of the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd.\u00a0 Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237,4,243],"tags":[428,441,354,43,38,1355,5068],"class_list":["post-35086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-bela-lugosi","tag-boris-karloff","tag-horror","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-universal-horror-movies"],"yoast_head":"\n