Madness Times Two

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the best deals on Netflix are the old-timey double-feature disks like Before I Hang/The Boogie Man Will Get You (1940/1942). You a pair of short, bite-sized movies, both "classics" (or at least old). In this case, both featuring Boris Karloff, and one with Peter Lorre as well.

In Before I Hang, Karloff is a scientist (not yet mad?) on trial for a mercy killing. He was trying to cure an elderly friend's disease - old age. Since he couldn't cure old age itself (not yet?), he finally gave in and put the old man out of his misery. When he is sentenced to death, the warden offers him a chance to continue his experiments. If he can cure old age before he hangs, he'll have done mankind a service that might get him pardoned.

With the deadline approaching, he injects himself with a serum derived from the blood of an executed killer, asking that they autopsy him after the hanging to see if it worked. But just as he is being lead out the door, the governor commutes his sentence to life imprisonment. Now that he isn't going to hang, he discovers that he feels younger and stronger. But he is also feeling kind of murdery...

Boogie Man, on the other hand, is a comedy - as you might have guessed. Recent Divorcee Miss Jeff Donnell (as this leading lady with a man's name was styled) buys a colonial inn from mad scientist Boris Karloff. She agrees to let him stay on to continue his experiments in the basement, along with his sloppy housekeeper Maude Eburne and groundsman George McKay, a couple of pretty recognizable character actors. She pays off the mortgage, held by Peter Lorre, the town's real estate agent/sheriff/notary/undertaker.

Meanwhile, Karloff's attempt to create a supersoldier to fight the Nazis has only created a corpse, which he sticks in the secret dungeon with the others (others?). Fortunately, Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom shows up as a new subject. Meanwhile, a ghost seems to be haunting the inn, and Donnell's ex-husband has shown up and thinks that Karloff and crew are staging it all to get the inn back cheap.

So, two Karloff mad scientists, maybe not his best - only one with a beautiful daughter (Evelyn Keyes in Before I Hang), no hunchback assistant at all. But one is scary, one funny. Lorre in particular is a stitch. Recommended.