The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

man-they-could-not-hangBoris Karloff is the whole show in this first of three B-movies he made for director Nick Grinde that are all about the same thing: a well-intentioned scientist who discovers some medical miracle, but he needs to break the law in order to pull off his experiment. Here, Boris gets sentenced to hang for a death he caused while perfecting a method to bring a fresh corpse back to life and normal health. Does Boris’s method work? Of course it does. The dumbbell police just arrested him before he was able to revive the volunteer he killed.

You already know where this is going.

It’s not long before Boris comes back from the dead via his own corpse revival machine—but he doesn’t do what I would do and just brag that he was right all along and make everyone feel bad. Nope, this is a horror movie and Boris is angry so he starts to kill off the judge, the jurors, the policeman, and the lawyer who sent him up the river.

An entertaining film that blows by in a snappy sixty-five minutes.