The Man with Nine Lives (1940) is sort of a hold-over from Spooktober - a black and white Boris Karloff movie. It’s also kind of a fluke - it was about 9 down on our Netflix queue. But we didn’t mind when it got sent.
It starts with Dr. Roger Pryor and his fiancée Nurse Jo Ann Sayers demonstrating an advanced medical procedure to the faculty and press: they have frozen a patient and resuscitated her after 5 days. But the world isn’t ready for this, and the dean makes him take a vacation to get him out of the limelight. So they go to look for the man who developed these techniques, Dr. Boris Karloff, who disappeared from his home by the Canadian border 10 years ago.
After the obligatory warning-off by the locals, they find his house on an island. It’s deserted and run down. But they discover there is a hidden basement when they fall through the floor. Under that, there is a deeper basement, and that’s where the hidden laboratory is. And behind a door they find an icy room, with Karloff frozen on the floor.
They revive him (OK, that’s 2 lives) and he tells of how he was treating a rich man for cancer by freezing him, when his greedy nephew tried to get him declared dead. The court ordered him to show them the uncle, so he took the judge, sheriff, nephew, and lawyer into his underground lab. Then he threatened them with a foaming poison and everyone got locked in the deep freeze.
When they thawed everyone out, Karloff was very excited that his experiment worked. It just needs a few test subjects, and he has 7 right there (judge, sheriff, lawyer, nephew, uncle, doctor and nurse). So he plans to start trying out different formulas on them one by one until someone lives.
The cool thing about this movie is that Karloff is so sympathetic. Pryor and Sayers are on his side almost all the way, against the bumbling, ignorant and greedy nephew and crowd. Even when he shoots the nephew for burning his notes, they kind of see his point. But when he starts to run out of subjects, and it’s either Pryor or Sayers...
It’s amazing how good Karloff can be. I’m beginning to think that we have to watch some of the Dr. Wong movies.
In conclusion, if you count all the lives, the math kind of works out.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment