This seemed like a logical-ish follow-up to Wax Museum, in that it’s another Warner’s horror, it’s another Michael Curtiz film, I haven’t seen this in years either, and I bought it on blu-ray in the same order with it… plus, at just 66 minutes, it’s even more ruthlessly efficient than the earlier film, and feels, frankly, like more of a B-film. Not actually a B-film per se, I’m sure, but it has the feel of one somehow… It moves in quite curious fashion from old-school Warner’s crime saga to, well, Frankenstein; things open with a criminal going to jail and his associates, including Ricardo Cortez’s crooked lawyer, plan to frame Boris Karloff’s recently released jailbird for murdering the judge responsible. Karloff is duly sprung, and duly wiped out in the electric chair… and then duly restored to life by a scientist experimenting with that sort of thing. Which complicates the gangsters’ plan a little bit, before everything ends with a Things Man Was Not Meant To Know climax… As good as the revival scene is—not quite Frankenstein-grade but not far off—it’s the highlight of a good but kind of minor film which I think is otherwise mostly memorable for Karloff in the lead role. Karloff had quite some influence over the writing of his character, and I reckon every change he suggested was an improvement to what was apparently in the original script; he delivers a first-rate performance as the man who didn’t ask to die and even less asked to live again, subtle and affecting, but the stroke victim bearing of the revived man also makes him menacing when necessary. All of this is filmed in quite lovely fashion, too, Hal Mohr pulls off some great cinematography here… but on the whole it’s not really a great film, and gets by mostly on Karloff. Mind you, from what I read and what I hear in the blu-ray commentary, at least the film we got is a good one and a fair piece of entertainment; if they’d gone with their original ideas for it, I feel we wouldve got something pretty shit instead…
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