“Keep that cat from desecrating my graves!”
Bowery At Midnight has everything that it needs to be a great horror film. It stars Bela Lugosi, Count Dracula himself, features a creepy mad doctor, and even has a few reanimated undead victims. The problem though, is that the undead folks don’t show up until the final minutes of the movie. The 1942 feature plays out more like a crime thriller than a horror film and in all honesty, the “horror” feels jammed into the film at the end.
In the film, Lugosi plays Professor Brenner, a psychology professor at the local university, who spends his nights living a double life as Karl Wagner, a crime boss who uses a soup kitchen as a front for his crime ring. He uses the shelter to recruit potential members for his schemes. When the film begins, he has a right hand man named Stratton who helps recruit lackeys for Wagner. Wagner is extremely paranoid, so he has Stratton kill the new recruits when the job is done. Wagner also has Doc Brooks, a drug-addicted doctor who disposes of the lackeys that Stratton kills for him. To top it all off, Brenner/Wagner has a wife who is clueless to his criminal activity and he hides his work from the shelter’s nurse as well. It’s all a tad bit crazy but it’s not a terribly bad film.
I won’t give away the ending of the film, but Wagner’s scheme collapses around him once the shelter nurse’s boyfriend (who also happens to be a student of Brenner) starts poking around the shelter because he believes that his girlfriend is fooling around with Wagner (who he has never seen in person). Toss in the fact that Doc Brooks has a few sinister plans of his own that add the horror elements to the film and you get a crime thriller that ends in a somewhat bizarre way involving the undead. It’s not a terrible film. It just feels like the undead were tossed in at the last minute to satisfy the Lugosi fans that expect him to only appear in horror films.
The film stars Lugosi, who turns in a fine performance, and a ton of character actors and horror genre regulars such as Lew Kelly (Doc Brooks), J. Farrell McDonald (Captain Mitchell), Anna Hope (Mrs. Brenner), Wheeler Oakman (Stratton), and John Berkes (Fingers). The nurse, Judy, is portrayed by Wanda McKay. Her boyfriend, Richard Dennison, is portrayed by John Archer. Wallace Fox directed the film.
Thanks for checking out my review. This isn’t a terrible film, it just feels a bit conflicted about whether it’s a crime film or a horror flick. Had the plot just picked a genre and stuck with it, the film might have been a lot better. Let me know what you think about the film in the comments.
Ken's Alternate Universe! 