The story is recycled from twenty other trashy scripts passed around Hollywood’s poverty row in the 1940s, each new writer adding little more than his own bourbon stains and cigarette burns. How many times has Bela Lugosi played a madman with a dead/ill/comatose/insane wife? Too many for even a creep like me to count. This film is pretty much the same thing as The Corpse Vanishes except that Bela has a goatee and he resorts to voodoo spells to bring back his dead wife (gone for twenty years, though well-preserved as twenty-year-old porcelain-featured actress Ellen Hall). As in previous films like this, that means kidnapping vibrant young women and somehow passing on their life force, via B-movie magic, to the cold stiff in the room. Whatever. To enjoy these movies today, one must get their kicks from things other than the clumsy plot. This film helps by giving us three of the biggest cult horror stars of the day: Lugosi (glowering nicely), George Zucco (spewing nonsense incantations with authority) and John Carradine (as the Renfield-like half-wit henchmen who becomes one with the universe when he’s mindlessly banging on a bongo drum). Then there’s director William “One-Shot” Beaudine whose cheap and quick approach lends a reliably seedy sheen to the whole affair. The young players struggle to find their footing in Beaudine’s slapdash style, while the old pros own the screen with little effort. They’ve got the real magic.