Boris Karloff is his name and redeeming clumsy B-movies is his game.
Even by trash movie standards, the “science” in this little horror flick is complete drivel. They don’t even try to get it to make sense. And when logic isn’t on your side, all you need is Karloff in the lead role. He can spout the dopiest dialogue ever and convince us that he MEANS it–and there are people like me in the world who are gullible enough to go along with it.
In this one, Karloff starts off as a not-yet-mad scientist. In fact, he’s an all-around sweet and caring guy who just happens to believe that human brains are like radio transmitters that give off external signals. He’s also built a machine that looks like a medieval torture device, but that picks up the signal from a person’s brain and then translates it into a drawn waveform that looks like an EKG reading. According to Dr. Karloff, this is the first step toward eventually being able to read anyone’s mind at any time.
WHY is this a good thing? Me, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with people reading my REVIEWS, much less reading my awful mind. Meanwhile, Karloff talks about this bright future with a smile on his friendly face. He talks about it like he’s just invented the self-cleaning oven.
Things take a turn when Karloff’s wife dies in a car accident. After that, he becomes distant and even more obsessive about his work.
The worm continues to spin when Karloff’s brain reader machine suddenly, in the middle of the night, picks up his dead wife’s free-floating mind. (He can tell because, apparently, everyone’s brain has a signature waveform.)
So, now Karloff’s privacy-invading machine is now a communicating-with-ghosts machine! Yay!
But the other scientists aren’t buying it. In fact, they think that the cheese has slipped clear off his cracker.
This REALLY pushes Karloff off the deep end and he becomes more weird and scary from there as he works to improve his invention.
And that’s one of the main points of this film. How do you turn Karloff from a nice guy to a bad guy in one measly hour and on a tiny budget? This slaps together one such scenario, while Karloff is ready to sell it.
What also helps a lot here is that when the horror stuff kicks in, it ain’t half-bad. At the least, it’s very entertaining and brings some shocks that, while not as hard-hitting today, no doubt sent popcorn flying in 1941.
About halfway through the movie, Karloff abandons his job and his family and moves to a place in the sticks where he devotes every waking hour to his talking-to-the-dead machine. His only companions are a harsh-faced con-woman (Ann Revere) who somehow has a talent for being electrocuted and surviving (very important to Karloff’s weirdo experiments!) and a stumbling, violence-prone, brain damage case (Ralph Penney) who’s a sort of manservant/bodyguard/lapdog/zombie/complete idiot in tattered clothes.
Meanwhile, the locals in Karloff’s new town all hate him because he doesn’t even try to come off as NOT creepy and NOT up to no good. When the grave-robbings start, they’re ready to take pitchforks in hand and fuck shit up.
This isn’t the first time that Karloff has dealt with that sort of thing, but this time he’s both the scientist and the monster.
One of the best things about the storytelling here is that Karloff’s discoveries are just vague enough that he could be either RIGHT or CRAZY. The film doesn’t lean too hard in that direction, but this could all be a delusion if you think about it. A very faint voice and a few words are all that we ever get from the dead wife. It’s kept very mysterious and strange and creepy. A smart choice.
The director is Edward Dmytryk in his early days when he churned out cheapie programmers for Columbia before he went to work for RKO and scored low-budget hits that eventually elevated him to major studio productions. He was already good at this time at making a film that moves along at a snap, even when the script doesn’t make a nickel’s worth of sense and the production budget doesn’t have a cent to spare.