The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), by Joseph H. Lewis

Lionel Atwill is resurrecting the dead, like a goddamn asshole. Won't you step into his lab on old Market Street?

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Doctor X (1932), by Michael Curtiz

It wouldn't be Spookyween without an Old Dark House. Now, calling Doctor X an Old Dark House film is a bit of a misnomer as the movie takes a little bit to actually get to the ODH in question. But this is the first Old Dark House movie I watched, and if it wasn't for it, then I think I would have developed a migraine over movies I love today like Sh! The Octopus and House of Mystery. These movies were so good at packing in menageries of oddity into their cheap and quick desire to make people laugh and scream that it's hard not to gawk at them today. Plus, with some authentically antiquated creepy visuals and a stellar performance from Lionel Atwill, there are some nice thrills to supplement the trashy hilarity.

For six months, New York has been wracked with murders committed every full moon by the rather dully named Moon Killer. Reporter Lee Taylor, a cowardly klutz, is looking for news on the murders and stumbles across an autopsy on one of the victims led by Dr. Xavier, head of a prominent medical research institute. Not only do the cops learn that the victims are being partially cannibalized, but they reveal that each of the victims was butchered post-mortem by a particular brain scalpel only used in the Xavier Institute. Xavier and all his scientists are now under suspicion. Xavier insists on the privilege of conducting his own investigation to help exonerate his Institute's reputation; this being the '30s, the police agree. We meet each of the doctor's staff in turn. Dr. Wells is a cannibalism specialist, but he lost an arm years ago and therefore isn't really super great at crushing people's tracheae, which is usually how the victims met their end. Dr. Haines is the most capable physically, but he's (initially) the least suspicious, as his deal is just that he reads porn. Dr. Duke is a rude, shrieking bastard, but he's also paralyzed and thus not really the strangle-murdering sort. And Dr. Rowitz gets creepy framing and has scars and an eyepatch, plus a scientific fascination with the moon, but he seems harmless enough. Taylor ultimately finds out where Dr. Xavier's testing of himself and his staff will take place: his creaky upstate mansion, a suitably aged and shadowy locale. Xavier and his scientists, along with Xavier's daughter Joan and his maid and butler, pack themselves into the house, with Taylor not far behind. Xavier will find his killer, alright--but he should know that keeping his killer so close is playing with fire.

Like many an Old Dark House film, Doctor X is part comedy as well as part horror-mystery. This works to varying effects throughout the film. Much of this comedy is centered around our ostensible protagonist, Lee Taylor, a character whom other critics hate so much you'd think he was Jar Jar Binks. I find him sort of charming, but then, I also have severe brain damage from having sat through the vast plethora of comic relief reporters who crop up in horror films from the 1920s through the 1940s. That he ends up with Joan Xavier in the end is something of a male entitlement issue, a conformance to tropes better left dead, but Fay Wray's performance is entirely fitting that of the daughter of a mad scientist, and while she could definitely do better when it comes to bedmates, you'd better believe she's wearing the fucking pants if they go places. I trust her judgment in men, and I do find some of Taylor's shtick at least a little funny, so I'll be kind to him. The movie never made me laugh out loud, but it had a consistent pace and rhythm to it that helped draw me into the experience.

This movie is so old that a character has to explain to us how a joy buzzer works. Contrariwise, this movie also features Prohibition jokes and a character entering what is obviously a brothel, salaciously-clad ladies included. Keep it classy, 1930s. And don't forget, Dr. Haines' "textbook" turned out to be full of "French Art," which is made all the funnier by the fact that Xavier calls Haines a "most studious worker." But this changes, as the movie goes on, and we see that Haines is definitely some sort of sicko. After all, it's not quite professional behavior to stare at the swimsuit-clad body of one's boss for prolonged periods of time, is it? That Haines is physically abled and the seeming meekest of all the scientists makes it stand to reason that he's the killer--he and Xavier himself, who the movie beautifully never keeps above suspicion, especially by having him played by Lionel Atwill. But nope, this is a '30s horror film so of course the real solution to the mystery is something far less comprehensible. Spoilers ahead.

The killer is Wells, and he's able to strangle people because he knows how to make new limbs. While his field is ostensibly cannibalism studies, we find out that he's actually been working on something called "synthetic flesh" (a phrase which he ends up saying in the best voice possible no less than three times in the film's climax). Not only can he recreate his missing arm, but he uses the synthetic flesh to makes a monstrous face and head for himself, resembling something like the handsome older brother of the closet-monster from The Brain That Wouldn't Die. The scene in which he applies the synthetic flesh has some artsy, proto-psychedelic flair to it. He then explains that he wasn't in Africa to study cannibalism, but was instead actually there to use the flesh that natives eat to develop his synthetic flesh.

This makes no sense. If Wells was never a cannibal, or even particularly interested in cannibalism outside of--I don't know--securing meat from the cannibals, why the hell does he start eating the corpses?! Maybe he wants to convince that the public that this killer is a maniac and not a respectable doctor, but this argument falls flat when he considered; 1) Wells also butchers his victims with a scalpel, which is why the Xavier Institute is under suspicion to begin with; 2) Wells is a known expert on cannibalism. That's what he's a doctor in! Also, how does studying the feeding patterns of cannibals provide insight into the creation of an organic flesh substitute? Is synthetic flesh refined in the human gullet or something? Is that why he was taking bites out of his victims...? Maybe that's why the comedy is here--it's conforming to type as an ODH film, but it also helps cover the fact that They Just Didn't Care. Or, perhaps more properly, that It's Just a Show, and We Should Really Just Relax.

Doctor X can fade into a dull sit at times, but it really is one of the best of its kind. Filmed at a time before mass film censorship, it takes full advantage of the guttural sensationalism at the time and comes up with something nearly as fucked up as West of Zanzibar and Murders in the Zoo. It's absolutely not perfect, but I watch it every October. Join me, won't you?

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Murders in the Zoo (1933), by A. Edward Sutherland

It's hard not to sympathize with certain early movies. When I was a kid, I had this belief that anything from the past, especially from the 1950s backward, was considered art by the world at large and was therefore universally preserved. I've since been proven quite wrong. In my line of work I come across dozens of films and books that sound like they were absolutely wonderful, but which have been neglected by the ages, doomed to ever-increasing obscurity. Sometimes you'll be lucky and you'll just have to settle for something expensive, but much of the time you'll be lucky if you find any of these things at all. All the same, I like the thrill of hunting for something: I managed to find a copy of the '70s TV paranormal-kids thriller The Wednesday Children, which was believed lost. That was pretty neat, even if the movie was boring. In any case: it can be interesting to see what history has preserved and what it hasn't. A lot of these movies, especially the cheapies, have become tediously repetitious staples of public domain multi-packs, like The Ape, The Devil Bat, and The Corpse Vanishes. But others--including films made by bigger companies than Monogram, PRC, or other Poverty Row studios--have been harder to track down, with some of them still claiming Laserdisc as their most up-to-date release medium. It's weird to think of how many of the films of the '20s and '30s we fetishize simply because they were products of those eras, including ones which legitimately suck, and how many other, better-made films from those times have only found homes on rough VHS tapes, or DVD-Rs cloned from such. Sometimes, it's the pirates to the rescue: some films have only survived because of gray market labels or torrent sites. You never know how intense the battle for film restoration is until you're in it.

I say this because it sounds like it was very difficult to obtain Murders in the Zoo until about ten years ago, when Turner Classic Movies released a DVD of it. I find this odd because Murders in the Zoo is a Paramount film; on top of that, it is very good. Now, I realize it may not have been released because not many people have heard of it, but I've met a lot of people who will obsessively monitor every pre-'50s horror film, claiming each is some kind of classic. I heard people praise this film before the DVD came out, mostly hardcore Lionel Atwill fans, and that impression of theirs must have arisen from watching one of the low-quality VHS editions. But for once, those obsessive folk were right. Murders in the Zoo deserved a better touch-up, because thanks to it, I am now in that eccentric, minuscule camp of hardcore Atwill fans.

Lionel Atwill (praise him!) plays Eric Gorman, one of the most valuable employees of the Municipal Zoo. This movie wastes no time in telling us exactly who Gorman is, as the first scene is him stitching a man's mouth shut! He's out in Asia with his wife, Evelyn, looking for new specimens for the zoo, and it was Eric himself who found this man, Taylor, enjoying some smooches with Mrs. Gorman. Evelyn is immediately suspicious, as Taylor probably wasn't the first man to suffer an awful fate at the hands of her husband, and she grows more so when Taylor is eaten by a tiger. Fortunately, Taylor wasn't Evelyn's only lover: her heart truly belonged to Roger Hewitt, whom she is reunited with on the trip back with the captured animals. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, the alcoholic coward reporter Peter Yates, whose comic relief is extremely dull and should be skipped. He creates massive tone problems in this movie about a man who will stitch your mouth shut if you mess around with his wife. He is the unwitting agent of much of the film's conflict, however, when he mentions that Roger was staying in Evelyn's room. Later, at a dinner put on at the zoo to raise its public standing, Gorman murders Roger with what turns out to be the severed head of the venomous green mamba. When Evelyn finds the evidence (in a tense chase scene which is easily one of the movie's best sequences), she ends up as her husband's next victim. Of course, Gorman can't hide from his crimes forever, and if you use nature for your ends, nature will exact its price...

It can be a letdown sometimes when a movie lets us know upfront who our killer is, but if the killer is a character worth following, then it can be a great thing. Eric Gorman is indeed such a character. Gorman is a bastard; he knows and has known for a long time that his wife hates him, and rightfully so. One can infer that the zoologist's murderous trends only intensified Evelyn's desire to fool around with as many men as possible after she found about said trends. If this movie had been made in the '70s, we probably would have seen a much bitterer Evelyn, one who usually has a glass of scotch in her hand.  

There's just one issue that bugged me about this: our main conflict is Gorman's obsession with Evelyn and the desire to "protect" her against other admirers in a perverse attempt to keep her love. While the movie doesn't lose traction or tension with the rest of the plot it plays, it's odd to have Gorman kill Evelyn so early in the runtime. We are then left with Gorman wanting to defame his coworker Jack Woodford, whom he faux-blames for Evelyn's death (playing the grieving husband to a T), which he uses as an opening to get the zoo closed down. But I don't know why he chooses to do that: if he does, where's he, y'know, gonna get his money from? He works for the zoo, after all, and does seem to take genuine pride in the animals he's brought into the zoo's keeping. I get that he's unhinged for having been the one to cut Evelyn off from himself forever, but it's strange to me that his way of working through that would be to destroy his own career.

I should also say, while commenting on the film's faults, that Peter Yates is an extremely annoying character. He really does seem to be an import from the hallowed halls of The Invisible Woman. Wait...he is an import from The Invisible Woman! His actor, Charlie Ruggles, played..."George," whoever that was. Unlike The Invisible Woman, however, he does get at least one joke that lands. After getting locked in a cage within arm's reach of a tiger, he discovers that his cage has a mamba in it, leaving him caught between a rock and a hard place. When the mamba is taken away, he gasps out, "Does this town have a good laundry?"

I laughed because this is proof that they had piss and shit jokes in films as early as the 1930s, not because it was actually funny. I shouldn't be surprised, since even the most prudish of historical eras have had cracks in their conservatism. I popped in another Lionel Atwill thriller after I got done with this one, which was the original Mystery of the Wax Museum, made in the same year. In that one, reporter actually gets to ask someone, "How's your sex life?" Mr. Hays--you know where you can shove that Code of yours.

I have now seen several thrillers with Lionel Atwill as the villain or a suspect for such, to say nothing of his myriad Universal appearances. Mystery of the Wax Museum wasn't as fun, but for awhile now I've been a fan of 1932's Doctor X and that one will probably turn up here at some point. Atwill has a wonderfully rich charm about him, and he does justice to almost every role I've seen him in. My unfortunate habit of comparing actors I like to Doctor Who persists, and I see a trace of William Hartnell, the First Doctor, in Atwill. They have a prideful composure even when they don't really have much to be proud about. If that makes any sense.

Anyway. I am pleased to say that Murders in the Zoo keeps such a nice, tight system of works that you will find yourself forgetting the comic relief as soon as we return to the real action. It is a well-devised thriller, a relaxing and engaging mystery, and a piece of Paramount history generally deserving a wider release. Bravo to TCM for taking on official duties with it--may many of its lost kin find similar fates.