Torn from the headlines! Both this movie and The Man They Could Not Hang on Dr. Robert Cornish, a University of California professor who brought a dog. named Lazarus back to life. After that became a big story, the university kicked out Cornish, who played himself  in the 1935 film Life Returns. Following a preview screening of the film, Universal pulled the film from general release and said that it was a “freak picture, not suitable for the regular Universal program.” In 1937, director Eugene Frenke won a lawsuit and got his film back, re-releasing it through Scienart Pictures a year later.

Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) is trying to convince his bosses that he can use cold therapy to heal patients, but they disbar him. He and his nurse Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) travel to the abandoned home of the man who inspired him, Dr. Leon Kravaal (Boris Karloff), a genius who has been missing for more than a decade. That’s becaue he and five other men — one already dead — have been frozen all that time. Kravaal awakens and must figure out how to recreate the method he used to freeze everyone, even if that means experimenting on and killing everyone else.

Like all of Karloff’s mad doctor movies of this era, this was directed by Nick Grinde from a script by Karl Brown and Harold Shumate. With a tag like “He kills in the name of science…Tombs of ice for the living…Chambers of horror for the dead!,” I can see why audiences kept coming to these films. It’s also one of the few Hayes Code movies to allow the word cancer.

Mill Creek’s Thrillers from the Vault set also includes The Black Room, The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Devil Commands, The Return of the Vampire and Five. There’s also a documentary, Madness and Mayhem: Horror in the 30s and 40s. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Another in the series of mad scientist movies starring Boris Karloff for Columbia, this was directed by Nick Grinde and written by Robert Hardy Andrews.

Karloff is Dr. John Garth and he’s on trial for mercy killing a friend, predating the right to die controversy by decades. He had been trying to invent a cure for aging but it was too late to give it to the patient. He asks the judge to allow him to live as he’s close to this medication, but he is due to be hung in three weeks. Yet with support from the warden (Ben Taggart) and Dr. Ralph Howard (Edward Van Sloan), he is able to take the blood of an executed murderer and turn it into a serum that reverses the effects of aging just in time to be saved from the gallows.

If you’re wondering, “Will that killer’s blood make Dr. Garth a killer?” you don’t have to wait all that long to find out. He kills Dr. Howard and a fellow prisoner, which looks like he was the hero, and he’s soon released to live with his daughter Martha (Evelyn Keyes).

Dr. Garth then tries to convince each of his elderly friends to let him help them escape the ravages of age. When they refuse, his evil blood takes over and he kills them. Convinced that he could even kill Martha, he runs back to the prison and is killed trying to get back inside, in effect killing himself to protect his friends and daughter.

There are nearly five similar movies in a year starring Karloff as a scientist driven to murder. I’d watch them all and more.

Mill Creek’s Thrillers from the Vault set also includes The Black Room, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man With Nine Lives, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Devil Commands, The Return of the Vampire and Five. There’s also a documentary, Madness and Mayhem: Horror in the 30s and 40s. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Directed by Nick Grinde (The Man with Nine Lives, Before I Hang) and written by Kurt Brown (A McKeesport native who was the assistant to D.W. Griffith’s cameraman G.W. Bitzer before becoming a cinematographer; he was the son of comedian and character actor William H. Brown and his mother was Lucille was an actress), The Man They Could Not Hang stars Boris Karloff as Dr. Henryk Savaard, a somewhat mad scientist who has invented a procedure for bringing the dead back to life.

The film begins with him being arrested and about to be executed for murdering a young medical student who volunteered to be killed as part of the testing phase of this procedure. On death row, his assistant Lang (Byron Foulger) signs papers to take possession of the doctor’s body and then he is lynched.

That’s just the start of the movie.

Lang surgically repairs Savaard’s neck and then, like a 1930s version of Dr. Phibes*, he ensures that six of the jurors that convicted him all die by hangings that appear to be suicidal. Only Scoop Foley (Rbert Wilcox) believes that the doctor is still alive and killing everyone who did him wrong. By the point that jurors are being killed every quarter hour, people start to take him seriously.

Virginia Pound — billed here as Lorna Gray — is Savaard’s daughter. She played plenty of comic roles — opposite Buster Keaton in Pest from the West and the Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy!; Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise; Three Sappy People and Rockin’ thru the Rockies — as well as receiving co-billing in several Republic movies and serials. I love how at the end she holds off all of these important doctors and basically sacrifices herself twice.

After this film, The Man with Nine Lives, Before I Hang and The Devil Commands, Karloff had played basically the same role four times. So when he did a fifth takeoff on the same idea, The Boogie Man Will Get You, it was treated as a parody of this storyline.

Also: Open heart surgery is science fiction in this film.

*One of the victims is killed by picking a phone up and a needle going in their ear to kill them. That’s a total Phibes kill.

Mill Creek’s Thrillers from the Vault set also includes The Black Room, Before I Hang, The Man With Nine Lives, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Devil Commands, The Return of the Vampire and Five. Each movie has a commentary track — The Man They Could Not Hang has C. Courtney Joyner and Heath Holland — and there’s also a documentary, Madness and Mayhem: Horror in the 30s and 40s. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Directed by Roy William Neill  — who gets mystery, after all, he directed eleven of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes films as well as early noir like Black Angel — and written by Arthur Strawn and Henry Myers, The Black Room has a prophecy at its center: at some point, the younger brother of the de Berghmann family is cursed to kill his elder in the Black Room of the castle. Hmm — seems like something that would show up nearly forty years later in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.

Boris Karloff seems to be having the time of his life in this movie, playing the dual role of the kindly Anton de Berghmann and his depraved brother Baron Gregor de Berghmann, who is about as blasphemous as the Hayes Code would allow. After all, he’s known for randomly killing the wives of the simple folk that make up his people.

When servant girl Mashka (Katherine DeMille) disappears, the people have had enough and take their pitchforks and torches to the castle. The Baron claims that he will be leaving forever, giving the kingdom to his more genial and popular brother. As they sign the papers in secret, the Baron leads Anton to his Black Room. By that, I mean he drops him like thirty feet into it and before Anton dies, he sees the dead body of Mashka and plenty more women.

Now, the Baron acts as Anton — even pretending only one of his arms works — and manipulates Thea (Marian Marsh), the daughter of family advisor Colonel Hassell (who also gets killed), into marrying him instead of her true love Lt. Albert Lussan (Robert Allen), who is jailed. Just when there’s no hope, Anton’s dog interrupts the wedding and basically shoves the man who killed his master into the pit that is the Black Room as the Baron is impaled on a knife held in his dead brother’s hand, fulfilling the prophecy.

This was shown often on TV as it was part of the Son of Shock package, along with Before I Hang, Behind the Mask, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Face Behind the Mask, Island of Doomed Men, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man Who Lived Twice, The Man With Nine Lives, Night of Terror, The Devil Commands, Black Friday, The Bride of Frankenstein, Captive Wild Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, The Jungle Captive, The Mummy’s Curse and The Soul of a Monster.

It’s a really fun — and fast moving — movie with a huge cast of extras, making it seem like a way bigger movie than it really is.

Mill Creek’s Thrillers from the Vault set also includes The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang, The Man With Nine Lives, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Devil Commands, The Return of the Vampire and Five. Each movie has a commentary track — The Black Room has Dr. Steve Hoberman — and there’s also a documentary, Madness and Mayhem: Horror in the 30s and 40s. You can get it from Deep Discount.

John G. Avildsen is probably best known for movies with fighting in their center, like the two Rocky and three Karate Kid movies he made. Here, he’s working from a script by Warren Lane, which was based on La bonne année by Claude Lelouch.

Nick (Peter Falk) and Charlie (Charles Durning) are two old timer thieves looking for one last big score. That score is a Harry Winston jewelry store in Palm Beach, but for all their planning Nick’s potential love interest Carolyn (Wendy Hughes) might throw these cons off their game. Their mark is her boss Edward Saunders (Tom Courtenay) and his security team, which they throw off through a series of disguises.

Hollywood once seemed addicted to remaking French films — 12 Monkeys, And God Created Woman, The Jackal, Jungle 2 Jungle, The Birdcage, Blame It On Rio, Diabolique, Oscar, The Toy, True Lies, Three Man and a Baby, so many more — and this is another example. It’s a cute movie that didn’t get seen much when it first came out, which gave it a bit of appeal.

Luv is part of the Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection from Mill Creek Entertainment, along with The Cheap Detective, Luv and Big Trouble. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Big Trouble is the last movie that John Cassavetes would direct and it reunites Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, who starred in writer Andrew Bergman’s The In-Laws, but the wild thing is that without this movie, Back to the Future may not have come out from Universal.

That’s because it was so similar to Double Indemnity that Columbia Pictures requested that Universal Pictures give them the license to reuse the plot. Universal executive Frank Price used to be at Columbia and remembered the time travel script, so if they made the deal for Big Trouble, he would make the deal for the movie he wanted.

Bergman has been in some other strange studio deals in his career, like Blazing Saddles. His screenplay Tex X was what Mel Brooks started with and he’s listed as a co-writer. When Warner Bros. decided they wanted to keep the movie rights to make sequels, they did a sitcom pilot called Black Bart starring Louis Gossett Jr. It only aired one contractually obligated time in 1975. Bergman is the only creative listed.

Los Angeles-based insurance man Leonard Hoffman (Arkin) has a ticking timebomb of triplets all graduating at the same time and all going to Yale instead of a cheaper state school, as demanded by his wife Arlene (Valerie Curtin, who is Jane’s cousin). The solution might come from one of his clients, Steve Rickey (Falk), who has a week to live but according to his wife Blanche (Beverly D’Angelo), has let his insurance policy slip. If he were to die unexpectantly, the double indemnity clause would make her rich and could possibly pay for Leonard’s problems.

As for Cassavetes, as you can expect, he had issues with the studio bosses and didn’t have final cut. Bergman was originally directed and left a third through shooting. Falk asked Cassavetes to come on and he wasn’t used to making a movie from a script he didn’t write.

Bergman took some of the blame when he said, “That was a mess. I never fixed the ending and that was the problem. You’ve got to have it when you get it on the floor. You can’t say, “Later, we’ll get it straight.” It’s true in every medium. You’ve got to hit the ground running and we didn’t. I never had the ending straight.”

Bergman was able to get his name removed, which is why Warren Bogle is in the credits as the writer. There’s no producer credit as Bergman’s long-time producing partner Mike Lobell took his name off this.

That said, at least it has a good cast, including Robert Stack (and his wife Rosemarie, playing his wife), Richard Libertini, Paul Dooley and Charles Durning. It also turns out that the stories of how it was made and the movie that was made somewhere else because of it are more interesting than the film that it is, which doesn’t feel like a script by Bergman or a movie by Cassavetes.

Luv is part of the Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection from Mill Creek Entertainment, along with The Cheap Detective, Luv and Happy New Year. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Directed by Robert Moore (the director of the stage version of The Boys In the Band) and written by Neil Simon, The Cheap Detective stars Peter Falk as Lou Peckinpaugh, a private investigator trying to clear himself of the murder of his partner.  It’s similar to another Moore and Simon film, Murder By Death, which also has Falk in the cast.

There are diamonds, plenty of ladies for Falk to chase and a huge cast that includes Madeline Kahn, Dom DeLuise, Louise Fletcher, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Stockard Channing, Sid Caesar, Marsha Mason, John Houseman, Vic Tayback, Abe Vigoda, James Coco, Phil Silvers, Fernando Lamas, Nicol Williamson, James Cromwell, Scatman Crothers, Paul Williams and David Ogden Stiers.

That cast is much needed, as the jokes are so broad and the film is basically a little bit of The Maltese Falcon with a pinch of Casablanca. I mean, Madeline Kahn can make any movie worth watching and she’s surrounded by so much talent.

This film led to the birth of CinemaScore. Ed Mintz liked Neil Simon but didn’t like this movie. He was talking to someone else as they left the theater and that person said that they’d rather hear the opinions of real people instead of critics.

Luv is part of the Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection from Mill Creek Entertainment, along with Luv, Big Trouble and Happy New Year. You can get it from Deep Discount.

As a kid, I only saw the end of Clive Donner’s directing career — TV movies like Babes In Toyland and Spectre and weird stuff like Old Dracula, The Nude Bomb and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen.

At one point, he was a big part of the British New Wave, making movies like What’s New Pussycat?, Nothing but the Best and The Caretaker.

Luv wasn’t well-received by critics, but I think it was just the inevitable backlash against what the old guard was told was the next new thing.

The story begins with Harry Berlin (Jack Lemmon) about to jump off of a bridge before he is distracted by an old friend he barely remembers, Milt Manville (Peter Falk), who can’t stop bragging about how good his life is. Harry has a plan, though. He plans on leaving his wife Ellen Manville (Elaine May, who went on to write many a romantic comedy) and hopes that Harry can take care of her when he’s gone.

The problem? Milt and Ellen love each other more than they love their new spouses, so they try and get Harry to fall for Milt’s Linda. Either that or he’s going to have to really jump off the bridge.

I kind of love the poster for this, which panders to hippies, who were all either avoiding theaters or waiting for Easy Rider.

Luv is part of the Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection from Mill Creek Entertainment, along with The Cheap Detective, Big Trouble and Happy New Year. You can get it from Deep Discount.