The Corpse Vanishes

The Psychotronic Zone

By Ed Garea

The Corpse Vanishes (Monogram, 1942) – Director: Wallace Fox. Writers: Harvey Gates (s/p). Sam Robins & Gerald Schnitzer (original story). Cast: Bela Lugosi, Luana Walters, Tristram Coffin, Elizabeth Russell, Minerva Urecal, Angelo Rossitto, Joan Barclay, Kenneth Harlan, Gwen Kenyon, Vince Barnett, Frank Moran & George Eldridge. Black & White, 64 minutes.

“Like all of Bela’s Monogram quickies, a must” – Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

The early 40s saw the return of the horror picture after having been out of fashion for about 5 years, a good thing for Bela Lugosi, whose career prospects had diminished over the years from leading man to character roles. In addition to working for Universal he also signed on at Poverty Row studio Monogram for a series of bizarre low-budget horrors.

The Corpse Vanishes was the fifth film out of ten total that Bela made for the company. Produced by the amazing Sam Katzman, the film seems to set new lows for cheapness, looking like Sam was trying to save on his electrical bill. The acting was about what one would expect in a Poverty Row production and the direction by B-movie veteran Wallace Fox also meets low expectations. However, a big difference between the films Lugosi made for bigger studios and the ones he made on Poverty Row was that in most of the films made for the major studios he was usually cast as a red herring. On Poverty Row, he got to be the villain.

In The Corpse Vanishes, one of the more gruesome films he made for Monogram, Bela is at his villainous best. As the film opens a mystery is plaguing the city. Brides are suddenly dying at the altar. Even worse, their bodies are disappearing on the way to the funeral parlor. This being a rock bottom horror flick, we know who is behind this villainy. Right from the start Bela makes his appearance as the person behind the kidnappings. Our only question now is to wonder what he’s up to.

There are also two other spectators at the weddings. One is Our Heroine, society reporter Patricia Hunter (Walters), yet another in a series of wise-cracking reporters. Accompanying her is photographer Sandy (Barnett), the ostensible Comic Relief who is not really given enough screen time to be a proper Comic Relief. 

Our Heroine is chomping at the bit to leave the society pages for a regular job on the investigative beat, seeing herself as the next Lois Lane. But her editor, Keenan (Harlan) has her firmly planted on the society pages, covering weddings and such. Her  big break comes when she covers the society wedding of Alice Wentworth (Barclay). Alice and her mother have been personally assured by the DA that nothing will go wrong and there will be a strong police presence. But Alice meets the same fate as those before her, including having her body kidnapped by Bela.

As Pat and Sandy leave the scene Sandy spots an orchid that fell from Alice’s dress when she collapsed. He gives it to Patricia who is puzzled that it has a strange, pungent scent. As she sniffs the flower she suddenly becomes dizzy. This should alert her to the fact that something’s wrong with that orchid because orchids do not have scents. Some reporter. Her photographer finds the key clue and she can’t put two and two together.   
   

Back at the paper, Keenan lambastes Patricia for the awful story she turned in on the wedding, but she waves this away, exclaiming excitedly that she has a real lead. She shows Keenan the orchid, noting that not only did none of the wedding-party send it to Alice, but that all the abducted brides wore one just like it. Keenan grudgingly allows her to follow her lead, but gives her the standard ‘40s B-movie warning that she’ll be fired if she doesn’t bring something back.     

Meanwhile, at the country estate of Dr Lorenz (Lugosi), the body arrives. Bela and Mike the chauffeur (Eldredge), along with housekeeper Fagah (Urecal) and her son Angel (Moran), take the body into a laboratory, where we hear Dr. Lorenz’s wife, the Countess (Russell), pissing and moaning, demanding that Bela hurry as she hides her aged face. Using a syringe, Bela extracts glandular fluid from Alice, mixes it with something from his Junior Chemistry Set, and voila, instant fountain of youth serum. He shoots it into the neck of the Countess, transforming her into a more middle-aged edition. We also learn that the brides, far from dead, are actually in a cataleptic state thanks to Lorenz’s magic orchids. Following the traditions of the horror film, the serum has to come from brides, because they are presumed to be virginal.

Like any other self-respecting mad scientist, Bela has his assistants. They are Fagah and her sons, Angel and Toby (Rossitto). Angel, the handyman, is retarded, disfigured, and possibly a necrophiliac. He likes to sneak into the secret mausoleum next to the lab to stroke the hair of the victims. The Countess is worried lest his antics bring the house down on them one of these days. Toby the butler is a sadistic midget, proving that not only is good help hard to find, but also making us wonder about the depth of Fagah’s gene pool. When the latest bride arrives Angel begins stroking her hair. This leads Lorenz to savagely beat him with a whip, a case of spare the rod, spoil the idiot. Fagah can only ask, “Why do you beat my son so hard?” To which he replies, “Because he's at best an animal, and some day I shall have to destroy him.” Comforting words, indeed. Fagah can only say wth a resigned voice, “My poor son! . . . Why was he ever born?” 

Meanwhile, intrepid reporter Pat takes the orchid to a florist, who informs her that it is a rare hybrid, and that the only person the florist can think of who might know anything about is the botanist who first bred it – Guess Who? Why, Dr. Lorenz, of course.

The next thing we know, Patricia has taken a train to the little hamlet. When she asks the local cabbie to take her to the Lorenz place, his response follows the horror film tradition. No way in hell is he going anywhere near the Lorenz estate. Instead he directs her to Mike and Toby, who have just come to the train station to pick up a package (a crated-up coffin) for their boss. Patricia tries to hitch a ride with them, but they refuse. So what does Our Heroine do? She jumps on the back of the truck when they’re not looking, taking her luggage with her. Anyone with any brains would first have checked into a local hotel and worried about a ride later. 

She doesn’t get far before Toby spots her hiding in the back, and Mike pulls over to dump her by the roadside. Again, this is a B-movie with a short running time, so it isn’t long before another car ambles down the lonely road, driven by Dr. Foster (Coffin), who just so happens to be on his way to the mansion. As they travel, Foster tells her he has been helping Lorenz treat his wife for a rare glandular disease.

At the house she finds Lorenz has been expecting her, as she conveniently left her luggage and handbag aboard the truck. The Countess, for her part, welcomes her with a slap across the puss, telling her she isn’t welcome here. Lorenz apologizes for his wife as she retires upstairs.

One would assume that because neither Pat nor anyone else suspect Lorenz of being the kidnapper, he would do well just to answer her questions and send on on her merry way. But no, this is a Sam Katzman picture, and with a thunderstorm brewing Lorenz invites Pat and Foster to stay the night, telling her he will answer her questions in the morning, although he adds that he is out of the orchid business. 

After Pat and Foster exit upstairs, a hidden panel under the staircase swings open and out pops the Countess, who we saw going up the stairs just a few minutes before. She asks Lorenz why he invited her to spend the night. His answer? “For a very special reason.”

An overnight stay gives Pat a chance to scope out the place. She locks her door carefully, but no sooner has she done so than the Countess comes up behind her. Pat asks her how she got in, but all the Countess can reply is “You are beautiful! So young! Such lovely skin!” You’d think Pat is lucky the way the Countess is talking. So round. So firm. So fully-packed. So easy on the draw. 

Later that night Lorenz pays a visit to watch her sleep. A while after he leaves Angel sneaks in to stroke Pat's hair as she sleeps. (A hot dog stand would clean up here.) She awakens, screams and runs out to find Foster. Looking for his room, Pat finds the master bedroom, where Lorenz and his wife are asleep in coffins. (Katzman’s subtle way of cashing in on Lugosi’s role as Dracula.) Pat finally finds Foster and tells him what happened, but he’s convinced she had a nightmare and tells her to go back to sleep. Meanwhile Lorenz, eavesdropping again, informs the Countess that Angel has disturbed Pat. The two of them agree that he may have outlived his usefulness.

Returning to her room she finds a passageway in the back of the closet that leads to a network of similar passages that riddle the mansion. (I’ve often thought there was a rule in the local building codes that required mad scientists to have such a network of passageways.) As she walks down the passageway for what seems like an eternity she senses she is being followed. She is – by Angel. After she finally looks back and sees him, she hides in a darkened corridor as he passes by.

Pat watches as Angel presses a lever, opening the door to a morgue. He pulls out a drawer, revealing one of the catatonic brides and begins stroking her hair. Pat looks on and sees the woman is the missing Alice Wentworth. Suddenly, Lorenz appears, and as Pat watches from her hiding place he fulfills his promise to Fagah by strangling Angel. This causes Pat to faint dead away.

The next morning she wakes up in her bed and none the worse or wiser. Telling Foster about her experience only leads him to dismiss it as a bad dream. He also tells her that he does not recall having been awakened by her during the night. When she finds an orchid by her bedside Pat decides the best course is to get the hell out of Dodge and she has Foster drive her to the train station, confiding her suspicions before leaving for the city.

Foster comes to the newspaper’s offices a few days later to back Patricia up as she recounts the story to her incredulous editor. He tells Pat and Keenan that he was initially skeptical at first, but when he later witnessed some strange happenings himself, he began to think that Pat might have actually seen something. He decided to investigate further and at the station found a shipment of moss, which is used exclusively to grow orchids. Further investigation revealed it was ordered by Lorenz. 

Foster, Pat and Keenan now set a trap to catch Lorenz. Pat’s friend, aspiring actress Peggy Woods (Kenyon), will pose as a bride in a staged high-society wedding designed to lure Lorenz into striking again. When an orchid is delivered, they know Lorenz is present, and proceed with the wedding. However, what everyone has failed to take into consideration is that Peggy won’t be the only good-looking young woman at the church. Pat will also be there and her glands are as good as anyone’s.     

Lorenz kidnaps Pat during the ceremony, and while making his escape, gets into a gun battle with the police, during which Toby is mortally wounded and left at the scene by Lorenz. At his laboratory, Lorenz prepares to use Pat to whip up a batch of his youth juice. Fagah, enraged at the killing of both Angel and Toby, stabs him in the back, gloating, “You betrayed me, master! You shouldn’t have done it!” Lorenz, though, has enough strength to kill Fagah before he collapses. The police arrive before the Countess can attack Pat, with Foster coming to her aid. 

We now cut to another wedding, where Keenan is grumbling about having gone to all that trouble to make a reporter out of Pat, only to have her quit on him. The film ends with the typical dumb and unfunny punchline ending so common in these sorts of movies: Sandy sniffs an orchid and keels over.

Afterwords:

The Corpse Vanishes is pure poverty-row gold. Next to 1943’s The Ape Man, also with Lugosi, it’s perhaps the screwiest horror flick of the 1940s. Give the credit to screenwriter Gates and producer Katzman. Right from the start Katzman’s Monogram horrors always favored sheer outrageousness over coherence. Coherence takes time and costs money, anathema to the likes of Katzman. 

While the plot isn’t quite as perplexing as those of other Katzman gems such as The Invisible Ghost or Black Dragons, the movie comes mighty close with its Old Dark House-full of wackos and a plethora of perversions and human deficiencies that, according to one blogger, “would not be matched until the deliberately campy Spider Baby more than twenty years later.”

However, while Spider Baby is more on the tongue-in-cheek side, The Corpse Vanishes comes across as a carelessly slapped together concoction of genre cliches with nary a care as to whether or not it made any sense. 

And when it comes to bad plotting, we need look no further than the role of Dr. Foster. As played by Tristram Coffin, Foster has a pivotal part, but in what sense? When he plays the good Samaritan by giving the stranded Pat a lift to the Lorenz place, he casually mentions that he has been working with Lorenz, describing him as “A doctor himself, but has no license to practice.” He goes on to say that he is assisting Lorenz in finding a cure for his wife, whose problem seems to be glandular. Foster goes on to tell Pat that she will find the couple “very interesting,” describing Lorenz as a man of “unusual accomplishments” while noting that his wife is “rather peculiar,” further describing her as “eccentric.”

The character and motivations of Dr. Foster are ambiguous at first. It seems from what he’s telling Pat that he is Lorenz’s accomplice and the reason he’s so chatty is because she will never leave the Lorenz house alive. But later he not only comes to her aid, but falls in love with the plucky sob sister. The best explanation for this ambiguity is that in the original script he was the henchman of Lorenz, which would have made Pat’s escape all the more dramatic. Then, perhaps, Katzman, looking over the finished script, noted there was no love interest. Vince Barnett’s photographer, Sandy, is a tad too goofy to take on the role so, lacking a knight in shining armor, the script was revised to change Foster’s character from that of a devious accomplice to that of a naive scientist. 

To make things even worse, Gates’ idea of distracting us from the obvious plot anomalies is to come up with some of the most dreadful dialogue and situations ever found in a horror film. For instance, when incredulous reporter Pat asks Dr. Lorenz if he makes a habit of collecting coffins, he replies: “Why, yes, in a manner of speaking. I find a coffin much more comfortable than a bed. Many people do so.” (By the way, on that point, it’s difficult for us to believe that someone so obsessed about growing old as the Countess would have no qualms about sleeping in a coffin.)

Director Wallace Fox doesn’t help matters any with inept blocking (the technique a director uses to plan the details of an actor's moves in relation to the camera) and editing. In the scene where Foster and Pat arrive at the Lorenz place, Fox’s inept blocking of the scene leads to confusion of who is speaking to who. 

The scene where Pat finds the hidden passageway is an example of Fox’s terrible editing, although one blogger mistakenly attributes it to bad blocking: “Here the awful blocking really begins. As a panel slides back to reveal Pat, Angel gapes in delighted astonishment. He, apparently, is looking straight at her – but she, apparently, can’t see him.” Rather than a case of bad blocking, it’s a case of terrible editing as the director is trying to insert some element of danger into the proceedings. The scene is so dark in any event that even after Angel lights a candle he still can’t find her.

When all else fails (and it has) it’s time to pull out that old tried and true element – the over-the-top performance. The movie is loaded with them, even down to the extras attending the various weddings. It’s almost as though they’re auditing for larger parts in the next awful movie.

But of all the zany performances, one goes above and beyond all others – that of Elizabeth Russell as the Countess. Russell pulls out all the stops to make her character the most high-strung, demanding and bitchiest in the movie. It’s not an easy task to steal a scene from Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto, but Russell comes through with flying colors several times in the course of the film. It’s yet another example of a decent actress earning a paycheck in the absence of other offers. She is best known for her work in several Val Lewton movies, including Cat People, The Curse Of The Cat People, Youth Runs Wild, and Bedlam. She also had a supporting role in Douglas Sirk’s Hitler’s Madman, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. 

As for Lugosi, he, too, is at his hammy best, whether explaining his love of coffins or trying to convince Pat that everything she saw was a bad dream. Though his performance is a couple of degrees lower on the ham index than that of Russell, he still manages to entertain us as only he can in these sorts of pictures. An excellent example is when Lugosi returns with the kidnapped Alice Wentworth. He finds himself surrounded by Toby, Angel, Fagah and chauffeur Mike. He looks at them and beams: “My little family! You’re all so very faithful!”

As for the other performances, Luana Walters as Pat and Tristram Coffin as Dr. Foster acquire themselves as best they can given the parameters of the film. Walters was a mainstay of B-Westerns, acting alongside the likes of Gene Autry, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Charles Starrett, and Bill Elliott. After husband Max Hoffman, Jr. died in 1945, Walters took to the bottle and died from the effects of alcohol in 1963. She was 50.

Coffin was another actor who started in the Bs and stayed there, transitioning to television in the ‘50s and guest-starring in everything from The Adventures of Superman to Death Valley Days. 

Frank Moran (Angel) was a former heavyweight boxer whose biggest fights were losses in heavyweight title bouts to Jack Johnson (1914) and Jess Willard (1916). He became a solid supporting actor in B-movies and was a favorite of director Preston Sturges, who used him in several of his films.

Angelo Rossitto began his career back in 1927 and racked up 92 credits in his career, mostly in horror films or mysteries. As he was only 2’11” he was somewhat limited in his choice of roles, but remains one of the most beloved actors by fans of psychotronic cinema.

Trivia:

Filming lasted from March 13 to April 1, 1942. The film was released on May 8, 1942. In England it was released as The Case of the Missing Brides. In France it was released on DVD as Le voleur de cadavres (The Corpse Thief)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 showed the movie in the fifth episode of their first season. After the movie ended Joel offered a RAM chip to the bots if they could think of a good thing and a bad thing to say about the movie. When it came to his turn and Joel asked him to think of a good thing about the movie, Tom Servo short circuited and his head exploded. The MST3K episode is available in the collectors volume 16.