THE UNDYING MONSTER (1942) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Brahm
James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard,
Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Halliwell Hobbes,
Aubrey Mather, Holmes Herbert, Eily Malyon
When a man and a woman are brutally attacked on the cliffs outside their ancestral home, a Scotland Yard detective gets called on to investigate. The house is a drafty old place with a crypt in the basement, everybody's a suspect, there's talk of ghosts and monsters, and it appears a family curse may be involved. Those sure sound like wolf howls out there in the frosty night, and if it's occurred to you that Lon Chaney's "The Wolf Man" had come out the previous year, you're on the right track. There's even a little four-line werewolf poem that gets repeated. It's not as good as the one in the Chaney film, and there's no Maria Ouspenskaya to recite it this time, but you get the idea. It takes, like, forever for the beast to finally appear, and by then, even finding out who the werewolf might be feels a little anticlimactic.
Trick or Treat
