EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mummy’s Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 12, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 1, 1975 at 3:00 a.m., Saturday, July 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 29, 1978 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 22, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

Universal brought back Frankenstein’s Monster with 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, a movie that boasts a deranged Lionel Atwill as a police officer obsessed with his fake arm. It did so well that they reintroduced the Invisible Man a year later in The Invisible Man Returns. Success in Hollywood means more of what works, so the Mummy would come back in this movie, which is a sequel in that it’s very similar without being an actual sequel, and yet, it would have a sequel, The Mummy’s Tomb, and a third in this series, The Mummy’s Curse.

Unlike the days of major league money thrown at these movies, like when the first movie was made in 1932, Universal did this on a budget, reusing sets from James Whale’s Green Hell, using stock footage from The Mummy and stealing the entire score of Son of Frankenstein. The crew worked from 6 a.m. to 4 a.m. some days, grinding down contracted talent and crew.

Andoheb (George Zucco) has come to the Hill of the Seven Jackals to speak with the dying High Priest of Karnak (Eduardo Ciannelli). There, he learns the story of Kharis, a man who loved the bride of the pharaoh, Princess Ananka, and stole the tana leaves that can bring the dead back to life to save her when she was killed. When he was caught, his tongue was torn out and he was mummified alive, used to guard the tomb of the princess for the rest of eternity.

This start of the film got me all fired up for Kharis to rise and destroy, but no, like all Mummy movies, I had to suffer through the humans in this, Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford), who are supposed to be heroic and comedic, respectively, but just made me want to see them get choked out by the curse of the pharaohs. Along with  the head of the Cairo museum, Dr. Petrie (Charles Trowbridge), The Great Solvani (Cecil Kellaway), a stage magician, and his daughter Marta (Peggy Moran), they decide to enter the tomb.

Andoheb makes it seem like he’s an educated man of Egyptology, but he’s also here to protect the treasure, so he raises Kharis (played here by Tom Tyler, who play Captain Marvel the following year) and finally, after what seems like years of comic relief, I get what I want: tannis leaves, bandages and sweet death. That said, Andoheb makes the mistake of falling for Marta, and he tries to take the leaves for himself, making the two of them immortal. The white bread hero ends up shooting him and setting Kharis on fire, making it back to America with all of the riches of the pyramids and the mummified remains of Princess Ananka. This is a happy ending to some. Not to me.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ape was on Chiller Theater on February 1, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Saturday, December 17, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

William Nigh had already made this movie before as The House of Mystery, but now he had Boris Karloff as the lead. As Dr. Bernard Adrian, he’s trying to cure polio through that mad scientist body magic known as spinal fluid. He’s so devoted to curing Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon) so that she can marry Danny Foster (Gene O’Donnell) that when a wild ape attacks his lab and destroys all of his samples, he skins the ape and dresses as it to get more spinal fluid.

Karloff had worked for Monogram on the Mr. Wong movies. Monogram often used actors on loan from bigger students, like Wrixton, who said that working there was like “…living in a poor apartment. It was like living in a foxhole.” Unlike the budgets they were used to, actors made movies in a week with none of the fancy things they may have become used to.

Karloff had to be in plenty of ridiculously plotted movies in his career but never before was he a kindly doctor who wore monkey skins to rip out the spines of innocent people so a kindly young girl could walk the aisle. Even at the end, when he’s shot, he finally gets to see her steady and he dies happy. I would assume the people who gave their lives and back juice do not feel the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Man With Nine Lives was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 23, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 31, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.

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 Hays Code movies to allow the word cancer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Before I Hang was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 4, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday June 14, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.

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.

The last of the five William Nigh-directed, Boris Karloff-starring Mr. Wong movies, this one starts when Cyrus P. Wentworth (Melvin Lang), the head of a shipping company, is killed by Dick Fleming (William Stelling), the son of his rival. He had wanted to marry Wentworth’s daughter Cynthia (Catherine Craig), but her father refused. Now, she wants Mr. Wong to prove that Dick is innocent.

The Wentworth family has been dealing with another tragedy as one of their ships, the Wentworth Castle, caught fire and sank with all 400 of the passengers and crew. That footage is real and is the burning of the SS Morro Castle, which caught fire on September 8, 1934 during a trip from Havana to New York City.

Mr. Wong has contacts within the tongs, Chinese secret societies, which help him find out the truth. He also, as always, has help from Capt. William Street (Grant Withers) and Roberta Logan (Marjorie Reynolds).

I’m kind of sad to come to the end of these five movies. But hey — now that I have the set, I can always go back and watch them all over again.

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 body of policeman Dan Grady has been pulled out of San Francisco Bay and his friend Captain Street (Grant Withers) is overwhelmed by the loss. He asks his girlfriend, journalist Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), and James Lee Wong (Boris Karloff) to solve the mystery.

It turns out that Dan was investigating some smugglers of precious gems, which puts jeweler Frank Belden (Hooper Atchley), smuggler Harry Lockett (Frank Puglia) and Tanya Serova (Lita Chevret) into the role of suspects, but before long, everyone gets rubbed out and only Serova’s boyfriend — and Frank’s son — Frank Jr. (Craig Reynolds) is the last one standing and perhaps the real killer. Or maybe not, if Wong’s suspicions are correct.

The radio in this movie was a Philco Mystery Control and yes, there was a remote control radio in 1940. The rotary dial could pick one of eight preset stations, turn the volume up or down and turn the radio off. It couldn’t turn it on, though. It cost $159.50, which today would be $3,465.

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.