ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

The gorgeous poster above is for a 1940s-style horror story made ten years after the horror craze, starring four of the biggest names from the classic horror era.

Basil Rathbone is a mad doctor whose beloved wife is comatose because of brain damage. Rathbone is obsessed with his desire to repair the damage and bring her out of her coma. With that goal in mind, the doctor ruthlessly experiments on kidnapped victims, probing their brains, carefully mapping the various neurological regions, turning his human guinea pigs into mindless vegetables (a redundant phrase, I'll admit, since there not vegetables with minds.)

Afterwards he consigns the victims to cells in the dungeon of his Victorian house.



Akim Tamiroff is the chuckling gypsy who sells kidnapped people to the doctor. Bela Lugosi (in his last completed roll) plays a mute butler. Lon Chaney, Jr. plays a sub-human strangler named Mongo. Both Lugosi and Chaney are seriously wasted in their underwritten roles. Tor Johnson plays a lumbering zombie (as usual), a brain-wrecked victim of the doctor's exploratory surgery.



The hero of the story is young Herbert Rudley, who must stop the doctor from using lovely Patricia Blair's brain for experimental surgery.



The movie's creepiest scene involves a demonstration Rathbone gives Rudley to show what he has learned about the human brain. He stimulates various parts of a subject's brain and makes them roll their eyes and flex their hands.

In the climax, the mindless victims escape from their cells and form a small zombie mob that converges on the doctor. I'd call that poetic justice, but there are no words that rhyme with "zombie".

Directed by Reginald LeBorg from a script by John C. Higgens. Also released as: Dr. Cadman's Secret.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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Ah yes, another fond memory from the days of my youth (circa 1962-ish) and those Friday night late shows with the host of The Big Movie Shocker, Bestoink Dooley.

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Boy, did he rag on this one.

Before the movie started, I remember him holding a huge dictionary and reading this definition:

classic
ˈklasik/
adjective

Definition 1. judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind.
Ex: "a classic novel"
synonyms: definitive, authoritative

Then he proceeded to tell us — in his sleepy, droll, psuedo-sophisticated manner — that if we thought this movie was a classic, we should spend more time reading dictionaries and less time watching late late shows.

Anybody else remember seeing this one on TV in his younger days?


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]