Rent Creeping Horror (1946)

on three of the films... - Creeping Horror review by Steve

MURDERS IN THE ZOO

Creaky, exotic curiosity from the brief horror boom which lasted from the release of Dracula in 1931 to the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934. There are moments that have to be seen to be believed. Especially the jaw dropping opening scene. And the death of the hunter’s wife…

You have been warned! However, there is far too much comic relief padding out the transgressive grotesquery, courtesy of Charles Ruggles as the alcoholic press agent of a US zoo… which has taken a shipment of wild animals from the mysterious east captured by an insane trapper (Lionel Atwill)...

...Whose beasts kill anyone who stands against him! Or flirts with his attractive wife (Kathleen Burke). There’s an agreeably deviant shocker squeezed in among the buffoonery. Atwill stands out in the horror role, and Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick are fine as the attractive toxicologists searching for an antidote for snake venom…

But there’s an excess of Ruggles, even in such a slender running time. And there is rather more of the animals than seems reasonable, now that everyone has seen plenty of tigers and alligators. It’s a lesser precode horror which is obviously dated, but fun, and quite stylishly directed by Edward Sutherland. 

NIGHT MONSTER

Crazy low budget Universal monster picture with a gallery of genre oddballs played by a deep cast of B-picture stalwarts. Ralph Morgan is a quadriplegic who holds his highly respected physicians responsible for his extreme deformity. He invites the doctors to his spooky old estate, only for someone to murder them!

It can’t be the host- obviously- as he has no arms or legs… The denouement is completely wild! But fun. Bela Lugosi as the creepy butler and Lionel Atwill as a bumptious medic are only there for name recognition and hardly figure…

In a uniformly relishable cast, the standouts are Irene Hervey as a straight-arrow psychiatrist, Fay Helm as the neurotic relative scared out of her mind and Nils Asther as an unorthodox mystic. There’s a memorable scene where he teleports a skeleton via arcane, yogic ritual!

This is all astonishingly overstated. Ford Beebe is a minor director of serials, but he creates plenty of foggy/shadowy atmosphere from his studio backlot swamp and secret passages. It’s a ludicrous mishmash of melancholy, hokum and weirdness- yet irresistible.

HOUSE OF HORRORS

Classic film fans know Rondo Hatton as The Creeper from the 1944 Sherlock Holmes picture, The Pearl of Death. Universal planned to use him in the same role for his own series of horror releases. Of course, it was his real life acromegaly that made him the 'monster without makeup'. So there is some squeamishness in watching his misfortune made into a franchise.

Anyway, he died after one more Creeper film and he is mostly remembered now for that Sherlock Holmes entry. But this oddball B horror is well worth a look. It's part of an attempt to bring Universal horror out of the gothic and into contemporary US. Martin Kosleck co-stars as a psychopathic modern artist who compels the brute to kill his critics.

The sculptor pulls the Creeper out of the bay as he is about to throw himself in, so there is an impression that the colossus represents his own grotesque, suppressed psyche. The other male leads are colourless, but Virginia Grey is lively as a girl reporter, and she gets some fabulous wisecracks. Actually, the pulpy dialogue is a standout.

And Joan Shawlee brings some jaw-dropping glamour as a sassy model. This is just a 65 minute, low budget shocker. But it is offbeat, and twisted. And a change of direction for the studio, squeezed into the void between Universal gothic and '50s science fiction. With the kind of shadowy pessimism we also get from '40's film noir.