THE CORPSE VANISHES & BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT

The horror films produced by Monogram in the 1940s lie somewhere between the lurid horror pulps of the 1930s and those ghastly black and white horror magazines from the late '60s and early '70s, the ones published by Myron Fass and Stanley Harris, the really cheap ones that consisted of public domain reprints with a mix of new, substandard art. Yeah, those, the ones I never bought, opting instead to purchase the far superior product published by James Warren (CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA). But I digress.

Monogram, an outfit which honestly earned the sobriquet of a poverty row studio, produced a slew of extremely low budget cheapies in a variety of film genres. The Monogram pictures that I've seen have all been marked by dark, murky cinematography, wretched library music (which in no way matches the onscreen action), flimsy sets, acting on the level of a UIL one act play competition and narratives that are about as solid as a loaf of bread. I dearly love the Universal horror films and I recently watched a couple of  the Mummy films from the 1940s (with Lon Chaney Jr. as Kharis) and as cheap as those films are, they look like something produced at MGM in comparision to your average Monogram programmer.

I know there are legions of "monster kids" who share my love and devotion to all things Universal but come on, are there any fans out there who feel the same way about the Monogram horrors? If so, I'd love for someone to comment on this post and make the case for these films. 

I watched a couple of Monogram chillers the other day, BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT and THE CORPSE VANISHES. Both of them were made in 1942 and both star horror icon Bela Lugosi. I love Lugosi and he's always fun to watch but it's sad to see him working for relative pennies in third rate productions shot in a manner of days (hell, hours!). He needed the work and the powers that be at Monogram (including legendary cheapskate producer Sam Katzman), were canny enough to know that Lugosi's name on the marquee was all that was needed to sell tickets and turn a profit on these bargain basement thrillers.

In BOWERY, Lugosi runs a soup kitchen for the down and outers. He's assisted by a pretty young nurse who provides minimum health care to the men of the Bowery. The soup kitchen is really a front for Lugosi's crime ring. He recruits derelicts to aid in his jewel thefts and then kills the poor unfortunates when the jobs are done. Lugosi is also assisted by a mad doctor of an assistant who keeps the corpses of the dead bums in marked graves in a basement (how convenient!) where he also experiments on resurrecting the dead. Lugosi has a day job teaching at a university(!) and one of his students just happens to be the fiance of Lugosi's nurse. The young student (who looks far too hold to be a college student), decides to write his paper on the poor and visits the soup kitchen for material. Meanwhile, Tom Neal (wearing the same outfit he later sported in DETOUR (1945)) shows up at the kitchen. He's a tough gangster who kills anyone who gets in his way.

That's a lot of plot elements to cram into an hour's worth of film but it gets better. The narrative in the last reel is nearly incoherent as the boyfriend appears to be killed by Neal, Lugosi is thrown to the now reanimated, zombie like bums who were shown dead and buried earlier and the film ends with the student alive and well and now married to the pretty young nurse. I suspect the production code demanded that the film have a happy ending rather than stopping with Lugosi being killed by his victims. It's abrupt and confusing and even rewinding and watching it over failed to make it any more understandable. 

THE CORPSE VANISHES is marginally better than BOWERY. Lugosi again stars, this time as a mad scientist who causes young brides to go into suspended animation at the altar (thanks to a special breed of orchid). Everyone believes the young women to be dead but they're only in deep comas. Lugosi steals their "corpses" and extracts serum from their glands which he injects into his 80 year old crone of a wife to restore her lost youth and beauty. Of course, the change is only temporary so Lugosi must have a constant supply of fresh brides. 

He's aided in his evil pursuits by both a hunchback and a dwarf (!) and a bitter old woman (the hunchback's mother). The laboratory set has a back wall of painted stone blocks and Lugosi forgoes any proper medical procedures when administering his life sustaining injections. A plucky young reporter ala Lois Lane and a local doctor become suspicious of Lugosi's shenanigans and investigate. All of the evil doers are killed in the end and the brides are restored. 

If you're a die hard horror movie fan or Lugosi aficionado you might want to give these films a look. If not, move along, there's nothing to see here.  

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