If you ever wondered why The Night Monster never entered the pantheon of great Universal horror movies, you need merely watch it. Pokey despite a seemingly thrifty 73 minute running time, the film is basically a meandering, low-grade remake of 1932’s Dr. X (luckily Warner’s apparently didn’t notice, since they made that earlier film). Worse, it sadly wastes a cast that includes Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill.
A saucy maid (the exceedingly pert Janet Shaw) makes to call the village cop about mysterious happenings occurring at the mansion house of the horrible crippled Kurt Ingstrom (Ralph Morgan). There’d been a recent mysterious death on the grounds recently, and moreover they keep finding a series of fresh blood stains on the carpets. Her call is interrupted by head butler Rolf (Lugosi), who warns her to mind her own business. She refuses, and in a rare moment of sanity for a horror movie character, demands to leave the premises immediately.
She gets a ride from the aggressively randy chauffeur Laurie (huge actor Leif Erikson). He inevitably tries a little session of parking and sparking, but she escapes his clutches. Then, depressingly, after all her spunk and savvy the script has her moronically return to the mansion that fog-laden night to collect her things. A conspiracy involving hunchbacked (!) groundskeeper Torque sends away her ride, and she is forced to set off on foot. Per the local legend, danger proves to be afoot when the area’s omnipresent frogs stop croaking. Needless to say, the maid starts croaking instead.
Meanwhile, the three doctors who attended Ingstrom during his illness (accident?) arrive, having been summoned by their former patient. Of the three, one is chronically guilty about having failed Ingstrom so severely, one is oblivious and ‘comically’ obsessed with glands, and the last (Atwill) nonchalantly blows off any culpability whatever.
The wheelchair-bound Ingstrom, who seems philosophical about his fate, has called the medicos together to meet his in-house swami, Agor Singh. Singh is notable for being about the least convincing “Indian” in movie history. Indeed, the only reason we knows he’s Indian is because of his name and the fact that he wears a turban.
Singh claims to have amazing mental powers he asserts can promote healing, which of course the Men of Science all scoff at. This persists even after they witness him materialize a kneeling skeleton from a foreign land in Ingstrom’s sitting room. By the way, the hands of the skeleton are dripping blood, like that found periodically on the carpets. Somebody asks Singh to explain this, and in one of the all time great examples of lazy scripting—top five, at least—Singh replies, “There are certain details in the process that we are not allowed to explain to the uninitiated.” You don’t say.
Also in the party are a Rebecca-esque Menacing Housekeeper, Ingstrom’s possibly crazy sister, the psychiatrist she calls in, Dr. Lynne Harper, and obvious (if lame) male lead Dick Baldwin, who like many callow leads before him is a mystery author. The film also offers about the stupidest (not to mention racist) cop I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen all the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. This guy is literally dumb beyond belief, and basically just wants to arrest Singh because he’s a “Hindu,” and thus obviously guilty.
The murders really pile up by the end, but they pretty much all occur offscreen, so there’s very little horror factor. The film looks like it mostly wanted to avoid annoying the censors. And again, despite its short length, the whole affair is pretty slow going, mostly due to the lethargic direction of helmer Ford Beebe. Only at the last couple of minutes does the film evince any real atmosphere or spookiness, and this only makes you wonder why they didn’t try that sort of thing earlier.
Don’t get me wrong, the movie isn’t unwatchable or anything, but it’s the sort of picture you watch once because you want to check it off the list, and then have no interest in revisiting for a while. I hadn’t seen it since I was a tyke, and I remembered the ending anyway, but I can’t imagine whipping this out again any time soon. There isn’t really a mystery element either, since the film not only obviously fingers the murderer over and over again, but even provides several possible explanations for how he is committing the crimes. Meanwhile, the final moments of the film, which attempt to add a note of apocalyptic finality to things, just seems comically overblown.
As noted, before, the film criminally wastes both Atwill and Lugosi, who have little screentime (to save money, no doubt), ultimately don’t do much of anything, and who never act even slightly sinister. Indeed, Beebe obviously (and counterproductively) sat down hard on Bela, who in his few scenes plays the butler in an almost bewilderingly restrained manner. What a waste. Adding insult to injury, Lugosi was actually top-billed in this (for only the second, and final, time in a Universal film!), so audiences of the time must have felt particularly ripped off.
Meanwhile, Ingstrom is played by Ralph Morgan, who looks and sounds just like his brother Frank Morgan, who in turn is most famous for playing the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz. The rest of the cast is professional, but the movie just doesn’t give them much to do.
It should be noted that the authors of the essential tome Universal Horrors disagree with my assessment rather severely. “An original and imaginative low-budget horror whodunit,” they write. “This lively [!!] mix of mystery, mysticism and monster menace boasts a well-mounted eeriness, a striking and unusual plot [again, I disagree, in that it reminded me strongly of the vastly superior Dr. X, which also used Lionel Atwill to far greater effect] and a handsome cast and capable direction by Ford Beebe…” In the end, they deem it, “One of Universal’s better B’s from the wartime era.” So give the film a try, you might like it better than I did.
If the rest of the film had lived up to its last five minutes, I’d probably throw in my hat with the Universal Horrors boys. As it is, gentlemen, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
