Devil and Son House

Even though it's after Thanksgiving, I'm still catching up on the Halloween horror. We had a nice run one weekend, starting with The Devil Commands (1941).

TDC is an almost perfect mad scientist movie. It stars Boris Karloff as the absent minded professor who has invented a way to record brainwaves. He demonstrates on his wife Shirley Ward. It is a sweet scene, as she bustles in to remind him they are picking up their daughter at the train for her birthday. They have the easy, loving feel of a long-term couple. However, before they can pick up their daughter, the wife is killed in traffic.

Now, Karloff becomes withdrawn. His daughter, Amanda Duff, can't get him out of the laboratory, where he works with his assistant Cy Schindell, a janitor or handyman (but not a hunchback). However, an experiment goes wrong, and Schindell's brain is damaged and - YES! - he develops a hunchback! So we have a mad scientist, his beautiful daughter, and a hunchbacked assistant. A phony psychic, Anne Revere, completes the team, as they try to use science to contact the spirit of Karloff's wife.

There's even grave robbing, a creepy old house, and a seance of space-suited corpses. Karloff is magnetic throughout - his love for his wife cutting through everything.

Son of Dracula/House of Dracula (1943/1945) are a nice pair. Son is directed by B-movie master Robert Siodmak, written by his brother Curt. It takes place in Louisiana, probably near where the mummy Kharis was last seen. Louise Allbritton is hosting a party at her father's mansion, where she hopes Count Alucard, who she met in Europe, will appear. He doesn't, but her father turns up dead - and then the count shows up. Her boyfriend, Robert Paige, doesn't like this at all. He goes a bit nuts and shoots the count several times, with Allbritton standing behind him. What really freaks Paige out is that the bullets pass through Alucard, killing Allbritton.

Paige is locked up for the murder, but Allbritton appears in his cell as a bat and tells him to kill Alucard, who we all know is Dracula. Then Allbritton will bite Paige and they will become immortal together.

There's a lot to like about this entry in the Universal Monsterverse. The bayou setting with the touch of voodoo, Allbritton's morbid gothiness, the shooting scene, even the bat transformation. One problem, though - Alucard/Dracula is played by Lon Chaney, Jr. This gives him all four monsters (Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, Mummy, Dracula), but he is not a great Dracula. He has a brutal look and Midwestern accent, not the suave European at all.

House, on the other hand, is very different. First, Dracula is played by John Carradine, suitably suave and sinister. Second, the story is all over the map, with three big monsters. Dr. Onslow Stevens is practicing mad medicine in a castle in Europe, with a beautiful assistant and a hunchback - no beatiful daughter, but the hunchback is a woman, Jane Adams. Carradine shows up, looking for a cure, and the doc gets to work. Then Lon Chaney, Jr. shows up, looking for a cure for lycanthropy, only to be told to come back later. When he tries to kill himself, he winds up in a cave where Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) has been stuck since House of Frankenstein. This is all a big muddle, but it does have a mad scientist plus beautiful assistant and female hunchback.

In conclusion, all mad scientists should have a beautiful daughter as well as a hunchbacked assistant. It's just the way it works.