FANTASIA OBSCURA: Bela Lugosi Swaps Dracula for Some Deadly Wedding Bell Blues
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, when you get to the top of the slide, then you stop and turn around and go for a ride ‘till you get to the bottom, you have to ask how in hell you got here…
The Corpse Vanishes (1942)
Distributed by: Monogram Pictures
Directed by: Wallace Fox
There’s a reason Monogram Pictures used to be consigned to what had been called “Poverty Row.”
The studio, the forerunner of Canon Films and American International Pictures, produced B pictures and serials, the type of bottom card fare to turn a trip to the movies in the 1930s into an all-day event. (And when those days were over, its pictures gave television stations content for its late late shows.) Monogram’s main fare were Westerns, but it did quite a bit of work in the horror and suspense field as well.
Although the word “work” might be a bit misapplied here. Production values were cheap, and quality control often took the back seat to having something to ship out the door that met the requirement of being on film and running for the contracted time on the schedule. At best, you could call a Monogram Picture work product, the same way you’d look at plastic straws and cupcake wrappers.
In fact, looking at straws and wrapper might be better for you than watching this one…
We open with a wedding, where the bride says “I do,” before she cannot do, passing out at the altar. Word spreads quickly that the bride died, which excites the cub reporter on the society beat, Patrica Hunter (Luana Walters)…
…which, yeah, her name is a little too on the nose, as we’ll see, but anyways…
Tragedy gets heaped upon tragedy when it’s quickly revealed that the bride’s body has been spirited away before the coroner arrived. We get a good look at the unidentified body snatcher, played by Bela Lugosi, as he spirits her away for his nefarious purposes.
The unfortunate events at the society wedding (which we find out is the fourth such occurrence, even if she never gets named) leads to panic and concern from the family of Alice Wentworth (Joan Barclay), who is next scheduled to tie the knot.
She asks for protection from the authorities, who promise what they cannot deliver, as Alice herself swoons into a coma and likewise gets spirited at the ceremony to go somewhere other than where her honeymoon was likely to be. This makes the authorities look bad and the newspapers desperate for leads, which gives Miss Hunter all the motivation needed to rise above her being just a part of the news conglomerate and fight for the truth. She takes up the mantle of a crusading reporter, willing to get to the bottom of the news and provide an unvarnished truth, in the grand tradition of many news professionals.
Must. Resist. Obvious. Comment…
While we watch Hunter get herself girded for the truth and a Pulitzer, we follow poor Alice as her captor, who we learn is Dr. George Lorenz, takes her to his house outside of town. There, with the help of the devoted Fagah (Minerva Urecal) and her two children, the half-wit Angel (Frank Moran) and diminutive Toby (Angelo Rossitto), they prep Alice for harvesting her glands.
The reason the bride’s glands are so precious is because they are used to treat Countess Lorenz (Elizabeth Russell), who benefits from the procedure by keeping her youthful beauty well into her 80s. The Countess is part Joan Crawford and part Elizabeth Bathory, and is actually the central monster in this picture, as evident when our plucky reporter and her convenient hanger-on, Dr. Foster (Tristram Coffin), show up at the house to continue the investigation:
From there, it goes downhill, as our heroine digs deep enough to get herself into danger, goes from hunter to hunted and back again, and otherwise runs out the clock over a convenient-and-likely-contractually-obligated 63 minutes.
As we said, it’s more product than work, and this really doesn’t work by any stretch of the imagination. About the only reason to pop on over to see this is to catch Lugosi just as he’s cresting.
As the 1940s started, the second wind of his career was winding down. The attention he received when Emil Umann put the spotlight on the original Dracula had helped Lugosi get more work, with Universal in films like Son of Frankenstein and at MGM in Ninotchka. But tastes changed quickly, with audiences no longer demanding to see him and studios not giving him a chance to expand his range, and Lugosi’s bad spending habits put him in debt again, desperate for any work he could get. (His problem with opioids wouldn’t start until the late 1940s, but the groundwork that made him more susceptible was there by this time.)
As the only one taking the film seriously, he tries his best to do what he can with what he has. But there’s no support here, and like his later
infamous work with Ed Wood Jr., he cannot get over everything against him to make this work.
Consider this: We never get an explanation why Lorenz needs to harvest glands from society brides on their wedding day. If anyone was smart about it, the good doctor would have sought glands for his wife from cigarette girls, taxi dancers, maybe more hardcore “professional women” ifyouknowwhatImean. He’d have gone where nobody cared, harvesting with abandon and avoiding Brenda Starr-wannabes, by being in the low rent part of town.
Then again, considering how well that worked out for Lugosi when he appeared in a Monogram release, well-l-l-l-l….
NEXT TIME: Never send a soldier to do a geologist’s job, especially if you have an auteur guiding him along…
