EDITOR’S NOTE: The Man They Could Not Hang was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 22, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dark Eyes of London was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 10, 1973 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 8, 1975 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, October 4, 1975 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 26, 1978 at 1:00 a.m. It played as The Human Monster. 

Dr. Orloff (Bela Lugosi) has quite the scam going. He loans money to people so that they can get life insurance, then drowns them in the Thames and has their money go to the Dearborn Home for the Blind. Of course, Professor Dearborn is also Orloff, as secretary Diane (Greta Gynt) soon learns.

Based on the Edgar Wallace book, which also was made as Dead Eyes of London and The Awful Dr. Orloff in the 1960s, this was the first movie in the UK to get the H rating for horrific. As you may know, Wallace was the father of the krimi, the giallo and King Kong. He was a busy man, who apocryphally would write with both hands while dictating another story to his secretary.

Lugosi’s voice is dubbed by O. B. Clarence as the Professor, so the reveal is pretty good. Also, he was placed into a seven foot deep tank filled with a mix that looked like river mud. He had weights on his ankles so he would stay still and also had a chain to hold on to. You have to admit that this was a pretty horrific stunt for a major star to do. He also had to sail to England to make this, which took some time one assumes.

This was released in the U.S. by Monogram Pictures. I wonder if anyone in the past ever wondered why Dr. Orloff showed up in so many movies?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Every time someone comes to Mr. Wong for help, it seems like they die. Like in this film — the third movie in the series of William Nigh-directed, Boris Karloff-starring movies — when Princess Lin Hwa (Lotus Long, who played the murderous maid in The Mystery of Mr. Wong) comes for his assistance and she’s killed with a poison dart.

It turns out that she was the daughter of a Chinese general who was in America to buy airplanes to send to China. Yet the money she had intended to use has been stolen and someone has put a hit out on the life of Mr. Wong.

Luckily, he has the help of reporter Roberta Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), the girlfriend of Mr. Wong’s trusted police contact Captain Bill Street (Grant Withers).

For as much as this series gets compared to Charlie Chan, this story was remade as The Chinese Ring, one of the Charlie Chan films. And the dwarf in this movie, Angelo Rossitto, was in The Wizard of Oz the same year this was filmed. He had over a hundred roles, including Freaks, Mesa of Lost Women, Fairy Tales, Galaxina and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, where he was The Master.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of the Mr. Wong Collection has new HD masters of each of the five films — with a 2K scan of the fine grains — and this comes with audio commentary for Mr. Wong, Detective by Tom Weaver and Larry Blamire. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

William Nigh returns to direct and Boris Karloff stars in the second Mr. Wong movie. Wealthy gem collector Brandon Edwards (Morgan Wallace) has taken possession of the largest star sapphire in the world, the Eye of the Daughter of the Moon. Yet his life is in danger, a fact he tells Mr. Wong. On cue, he’s killed during a game of Charades and the gem is taken by his maid Dina (Lotus Long) who wants to take the Eye back home to China. Yet she’s killed too and the gem disappears again.

This movie is 68 minutes long, which is a perfect length, as it never gets slow and keeps you guessing as every time someone takes the Eye, they die. Plus, there are plenty of red herrings and potential murderers, such as Edwards’ wife Valerie (Dorothy Tree), her lover Peter Harrison (Craig Reynolds) or her singing protégé Michael Strogonoff (Ivan Lebedeff).

These films are a lot of fun and I’ve really been enjoying the Kino Lorber set, as it’s a chance to see all five of the Nigh/Karloff Mr. Wong films in one very easy way.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of the Mr. Wong Collection has new HD masters of each of the five films — with a 2K scan of the fine grains — and this comes with audio commentary for Mr. Wong, Detective by Tom Weaver and Larry Blamire. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

The SIgn of Death comes from way back in the past of Mexican genre cinema, yet director Chano Urueta would make movies the whole way up to 1974, including Blue Demon vs. the Satanic Power and the amazing El Baron del Terror (he’s also in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia).

Here, he’s putting Cantinflas* against several murders that seem to be Aztec in nature and all about sacrificing four virgins to Quetzalcoatl. What’s pretty crazy about this movie is that despite it being made in 1939 — a time when filmmakers north of the border were dealing with the Hayes Code and the feeling that cinema was destroying morals — this goes full on with topless women being murdered, like some forty years early slasher. Well, it doesn’t get that much into the gore, but you get my point.

*The actor is one of the biggest stars in Mexican film history, a comedian and hero of the people whose name as a noun meant lovable clown and as a verb means to talk too much but say little. He only made one movie that most Americans would know — Around the World in 80 Days — but he still has a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This Universal movie serial — told in twelve parts — shares some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, including the inventions of an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot.

That makes sense — at the time, Universal was all about recycling. This movie contains stock footage from The Invisible Ray and The Vanishing Shadow, as well as music from the Flash Gordon serials and Frankenstein movies, plus car chase footage that had been used in several other serials and newsreel footage taken from the Hindenburg disaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKXaUZPbgxk

Eight years after his star turn in Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s career was in decline. He had been typecast as a horror star and was not seen as talented as his co-star — and possible rival — Boris Karloff.

This career downturn had many factors behind it. Universal changed management in 1936 and due to a British ban on horror films, they dropped the once popular films from their production schedule. Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal’s non-horror B-film unit — such as the team that made serials like this. And while the actor was busy with stage work, he had to borrow money from the Actors Fund  to pay the hospital bills for the birth of his son Bela George Lugosi in 1938.

However, that year brought Bela back. California theater owner Emil Umann revived Dracula and Frankenstein as a special double feature, a bill so successful that it played to sellout crowds and Lugosi himself came to host the movies. The actor would say, “I was dead, and he brought me back to life.” Universal took notice of the tremendous business and launched its own national re-release, as well as hiring Lugosi to star in new films.

The Phantom Creeps — yes, we’ll get back to this movie in a minute — was the last of the five serials that the actor would make, shot right after he returned from making Dead Eyes of London. It was released a week before his comeback vehicle, Son of Frankenstein.

Sadly, by 1948, the parts dwindled again and severe sciatica from Lugosi’s military service was treated with opiates, causing a downward spiral that the actor would never really emerge from. He appeared in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster. After making that movie, he checked himself into rehab, one of the first celebrities to publically do so. According to Kitty Kelley’s His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, “Old Blue Eyes” helped with expenses, despite never meeting Lugosi before and visited him at the hospital.

The actor died of a heart attack in 1956, having just married his fifth wife. And yes, he was buried in his Dracula cape.

In this film, he plays Dr. Zorka, a man who loves to make weapons and refuses to sell them to anyone or any country. This upsets all manner of people, like Dr. Fred Mallory, his former partner, and government man Captain Bob West.

Dorothy Arnold, who plays love interest Jean Drew, was the first wife of baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Look for Edward Van Sloan, who always played the doctor battling the supernatural in Universal films. He’s Van Helsing in Dracula, Dr. Muller in The Mummy and Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. In fact, that movie begins by him warning the audience that they can leave now if they’re too frightened. And Ed Wolff, the seven foot, four inch actor who played the robot, was also in Invaders from Mars and The Return of the Fly.

Speaking of the robot, you may have seen him in Rob Zombie’s work. The song “Meet the Creeper” is based on the movie and the robot often appears in the singer’s music videos and stage shows.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or The Internet Archive. It’s also on Tubi with Rifftrax commentary.