An out-to-lunch crime story with a faint dab of horror, from the low-budget mavens at Monogram Pictures. It’s not Bela Lugosi’s Poverty Row best, but it’s as loony as any of them. It doesn’t even try to make sense and you have to admire that. Making sense is for movies that last longer than sixty-two minutes and that don’t have sets that look like they’re made out of plywood.
Here, Bela runs a soup kitchen for the homeless, but it’s all a front for a small gang of robbers who operate out of secret rooms below. Bela’s the leader and he doesn’t hesitate to kill off any of his men the very second that he thinks they’ve outlived their usefulness. Naturally, one of his underlings secretly plots against him, BUT that’s not what the film’s about. The film is instead about Bela’s double (actually, triple) life, in which he’s a criminal/soup provider by night and a college professor by day.
How does he find the time? Easy. B-movie magic. Anything can happen. Even the dead can come back to life for no reason (which happens here) and nobody bats an eye.
Helping things along is a good cast of familiar B-movie faces, including Dave O’Brien, who won all of our hearts as the craziest marijuana addict in Reefer Madness, here playing a freshly recruited police detective. Also, watch out for Tom Neal, who’d later star in Detour, as the memorably surly young gun in Bela’s gang.