Bela Lugosi the best part of early talkie Night of Terror

Review by Doug Gibson

I finally got around to seeing "Night of Terror," an early non-Universal talkie that Bela Lugosi starred in a couple of years after "Dracula." It never appears on Turner Classic Movies and only scenes appear on YouTube. Finally, at DailyMotion.com, I found it here. (It can be found easily to buy as a DVD online).

So, I watched it last week and ... I was a bit disappointed. Lugosi does a fine job as a solemn, somewhat menacing servant wearing a turban. He does a mean stare, as you can see from the lobby card above. But the film has a mediocre script and a "climax" that is a bit ridiculous. It's a "old dark house" mystery, in the style of its peers "The Bat" and "The Cat and the Canary,' but not as good, and quite derivative.

Someone, whom the press calls the "The Maniac,' is killing off people, with eventual emphasis on killing members of the wealthy Rinehart family. Despite this threat, none of the Rinehart family members  appear eager to leave the house and the area to escape the threat. They are too concerned about the revealed will of family patriarch, Richard Rinehart, one of the early murder victims.

Some of the Rineharts crab that faithful servants Degar (Lugosi) and his wife, Sika (Mary Frey) are in line to inherit if the Rineharts die. That makes Degar a suspect to some. Pretty Mary Rinehart (Sally Blane), daughter of Richard, is engaged to boring Professor Arthur Hornsby (George Meeker) who wants to bury himself to prove that a formula he's working on can presumably keep people buried alive safe for long periods.

Really, however, Mary has the hots for romance-minded reporter Tom Hartley (Wallace Ford), whom she enjoys bantering with. Meanwhile, the maniac is still around, outside windows, killing, giggling. Eventually there is a seance in which Sika is killed by a knife that comes out from her chair and enters her back. Also, the professor is under the the ground testing his theory.

If this sounds convoluted it is. This film is almost as confusing as "Scared to Death." However, it's worth an hour of your time. Watching talented actors Blane and Ford spar romantically for an hour is good 1930s' cinema. And Lugosi does his usual good job, even in a "butler" role. He also handles all the rash accusations against him from scared Rineharts with dignity. (Below is an extended clip from film that shows Lugosi's talent.)



Columbia released this film, but it has a poverty row look to it. Maybe a Blu Ray release one day will change that. As mentioned, the "climax" scene, where the killer is unmasked and all explained, is poorly done. It strains credibility.

NOTES: Sally Blane, a middling movie star, was sister to actors Loretta Young, a major star, and Polly Ann Young, a poverty row starlet. Wallace Ford co-starred with Bela in "The Mysterious Mr. Wong" and "The Ape Man," also playing a reporter in both. The film is marred by racist comedy relief with a black chauffeur, Martin, who plays frightened very broadly. There is an epilogue where the maniac threatens movie-goers who give away the plot to the film. Watch it below:

The Return of The Vampire - Columbia's Take On Dracula

By Steve D. Stones

In the same year that Columbia Pictures cast Bela Lugosi as a vampire in The Return of The Vampire, Universal Studios cast the stocky, mid-western actor Lon Chaney Jr in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney's Dracula lacks the old world charm and mannerisms that made Lugosi so famous in the role.

By 1943, Lugosi's star power had faded. Universal Studios would not allow Columbia Pictures to use the name Dracula, so Lugosi's character was named Armand Tesla in The Return of The Vampire.

Armand Tesla is a 200 year old Hungarian vampire who roams the London countryside in 1918 with his werewolf sidekick Andreas (Matt Willis). After Tesla feeds on the necks of young victims from the village, Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort) and Professor Walter Saunders (Gilbert Emery) find Tesla's resting spot and drive a stake through his heart while he is sleeping in his coffin.

Two decades later, a bombing raid during World War II unearths Tesla's grave. Two grave diggers walking through the graveyard notice the stake in Tesla's chest and mistaken it for a bomb splint. They remove the stake from Tesla's chest. Little do they know what they have unleashed. Tesla returns to life.

Like the original Dracula (1931), Tesla becomes obsessed with a beautiful, young blond woman. Nicki, played by Nina Foch, is the ingenue who falls under Tesla's spell. Nicki was bitten in the neck by Tesla in 1918 when she was just a little girl. Tesla returns to seek revenge on Lady Jane for driving a stake through his heart. Professor Saunders dies in a plane crash, which is a curse placed on him by Tesla.

Lady Jane employs Andreas in her research lab as an assistant. Little does Lady Jane know that Andreas has teamed up with Tesla and once again becomes a werewolf. With the help of Andreas, Tesla takes on the identity of a Dr. Hugo Bruckner, a respected scientist.

The graveyard sequences in The Return of The Vampire give the impression that the film is a Universal Studios picture. Lugosi and Andreas walk through a fog-covered ground with twisted trees and eroded tombstones, which look similar to the graveyard scenes in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Lugosi covering his face with his cape in an opening scene as he walks through the graveyard looks like a sequence that Ed Wood could have easily used in Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).

The film ends with another bombing raid striking the graveyard, but this time the raid kills Tesla. Andreas is freed of his werewolf curse and returns to normal. Tesla melts into a hot glob of wax. The police commissioner of Scotland Yard, arriving on the scene, looks at the audience and asks if they believe in vampires.

After Dracula in 1931, Lugosi was type-cast to a career of low-budget, bottom of the barrel productions with studios such as Monogram and PRC. Despite his poor salary on many of these films, Lugosi always gave an amazing performance, and was always a true professional in all his work. No actor plays a vampire with as much charm and effectiveness as the great Bela Lugosi.

Happy viewing.

Boris Karloff plays good twin, bad twin in 'The Black Room'

By Doug Gibson

Boris Karloff is pretty darn good in The Black Room as Gregor and Boris, evil and good twin brothers in Columbia's 1935 mystery/horror "The Black Room." It seems that there's a curse with the landowner's family that whenever twins are born, the younger kills the older in a part of the castle called "The Black Room." To end this fate, the Black Room is sealed off and the younger twin, Anton, is eventually shipped off to Budapest (Anton, by the way, has a paralyzed right arm) and the older twin, Baron Gregor, is left in charge.

Well, you guessed it, Gregor is an evil psychopath and serial killer of women as well. Just before the peasants are about to overthrow his authority, he sends for mild-mannered, kind Anton, eventually ceding his power to Anton and promising to leave. But, just before he does that, he takes Anton into the Black Room (Gregor has a built a secret entrance) and reveals his evil and murders to his brother before killing hapless Anton and taking his identity, complete with a faux paralyzed arm. He fools everyone except a faithful dog which knows he's not Anton.

Subplot involves a gorgeous colonel's daughter, played by Svengali star Marian Marsh, who is lusted after by Gregor. Her dad is opposed to Gregor pawing his daughter but would love Anton to marry her. You get what's happening. The colonel's daughter has a fiance, a lieutenant, but Gregor manages to kill the colonel and frame the lieutenant, which leads to a proposed marriage with the young lovely, while her intended awaits an execution date. Meanwhile, the dead Anton rests at the bottom of a pit in the Black Room, with the sharp end of a knife sticking out of his chest. At the marriage climax, the faithful pooch attacks Gregor, which leads to a wild chase toward the Black Room and a fulfillment of the family curse.

Karloff is excellent playing dual roles. As author Greg Mank has noted, his "Grinch Who Stole Christmas" voice almost 30 years later sounds eerily like Gregor. Katherine De Mille, wife of Anthony Quinn, has a small role as one of Gregor's murder victims. Starlet Marsh was still a big name in the mid '30s, but by 1940 her A studio days were over and she was on Poverty Row toiling at Monogram and PRC. Her last feature was "House of Errors" with Harry Langdon as a co-star.

All in all, a great film, highly recommended as among Karloff's best non Universal 30s work.