The basic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective story rearranged as a horror film about a murderous mad scientist (Bela Lugosi) in 19th century Paris who experiments with injecting gorilla blood into humans. Yep, that’s what it’s about. Poe’s Dupin is changed here from an eccentric sleuth and into a dashing medical student (Leon Ames) and the dead woman in the original story is now Dupin’s still-kicking love interest (Sidney Fox). However, the film does squeeze in Poe’s witty moment from the story in which witnesses who heard the screams from a murder offer conflicting testimony about the nationality of the presumed-human killer based on the gorilla grunts. The pre-Code violence here is notable though tame, and the film drags in a way that feels longer than its mere sixty-minute running time. The most interesting thing about this cinematic dust mite is its dated critique of the human evolution theory. Lugosi’s Dr. Mirakle (pronounced Mir-AK-el) is a firm believer in evolution, which the film offers as evidence of just how much of a wackjob he is.