Dead Men Walk (1943)

After an introduction where a book on vampire lore is thrown into a fire and a disembodied head warns us in dire tones to beware the unknown, we cut to the funeral of one Elwyn Clayton (George Zucco). It is interrupted when old woman Kate (Fern Emmett) bursts in to declare that Elwyn does not deserve a church service due to the evil he has done.

Though unbalanced, it seems that her opinion of Elwyn is also held by his brother Clayton (Zucco again), his son-in-law to be David Bentley (Nedrick Young) and daughter Gayle (Mary Carlisle). It turns out that Elwyn had attacked Clayton, and in defending himself he had to kill his own brother. However, sometimes people refuse to stay dead.

Clayton begins burning Elwyn's papers, but the latter's servant Zolarr (Dwight Frye) interrupts him, accuses Clayton of murder and threatens death for him and those around him. Zolarr then proceeds to remove Elwyn's coffin from the crypt and open up. Lo and behold, Elwyn is now a vampire! After feeding, he pays a visit to his brother to reinforce what Zolarr has said. The next night Gayle starts to show signs of extreme anemia.

David at first fears that Clayton is purposely killing his daughter slowly, but soon encounters Elwyn himself. The hunt is on for Elwyn's hiding place, while the town starts to rise against Clayton, demanding justice for a string of murders.

This is largely a by-the-book old-time horror film, produced on a low budget in hopes of competing with the Universal horror pictures, which, though getting long in the tooth, were still quite popular in the 1940s. It's not horrible, but it also does nothing new with the genre. Zucco's performance is great, Carlisle is largely wasted in her last film role and Nedrick Young looks more like a second-string thug in a cheap gangster film than a learned doctor.

Still, what it lacks in originality it does make up for in atmosphere, and the movie is still quite enjoyable for many of the hammy performances of the character actors, Dwight Frye in particular.

Dead Men Walk (1943)
Duration: 64 minutes
Starring: George Zucco, Mary Carlisle, Nedrick Young
Director: Sam Newfield

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more