DOCTOR X (1932)
The 1930s were a Golden Age of horror for many reasons, including the creation of many screen icons that are still found in popular culture today. Expressionist cinema gave them a certain look, while various actors gave them a certain sound. But what about the less well known features from this part of the decade, before censorship and changing audience tastes? There are plenty of experimental movies out there, and this is one of them. Perhaps it's a result of Warner Bros competing with Universal. Not content with just one genre or even just one colour, this is a strange hybrid story of murder and mad scientists. How successful is the final product? It really depends on what you're looking for.
A cannibal murderer, dubbed 'The Moon Killer' by the press, runs amok near a medical academy. The killer has a monstrous face and strikes when the moon is full. As a result of the deaths being in this location and certain surgical implements being linked to the case, the police believe that one of the resident doctors is their man. It's a straightforward who-dunnit kind of plot, so surely a detective will be the main protagonist. But things are not so simple. Instead this is a movie that toys with different genres, and morphs into something new more than once as things progress. As a result it doesn't always make sense and some inclusions are questionable.
One of the main threads involves snooping Daily World reporter Lee (Lee Tracy.) He bumbles through the movie, lying and mugging his way into various inane situations. This is the comic relief element in a plot which is fairly dark in nature, particularly towards the end. But the most sinister revelation in this story is that he's supposed to be the main character. He's not a compelling lead by any stretch of the imagination, and he's certainly not a romantic figure. Which is odd when things get mired in a love story involving Joanne (Fay Wray) the daughter of Doctor Xavier (Lionel Atwill.)
Atwill is his usual stoic self, given the task of finding the killer himself to avoid a public scandal. Wray on the other hand doesn't have much to do beyond playing the next potential victim, but she is charming. Tracy meanwhile is a clown who gets trapped in closets and has buckets of water thrown on him. It's a constant distraction and spoils the mood once too often. It's a relief when a mystery figure uses sleeping gas on him, but he's still a central figure in the conclusion. Conventional tropes don't seem to fit anywhere else here, so it's annoying that some clichés are still present.
Xavier somehow convinces the police that he will find the killer, and takes all his colleagues to a remote house to find the truth. It's a strange way of getting to a spooky mansion, and his methods are stranger still. The doctors involved include several potential choices, as one has a past with cannibalism and another is studying the moon. But Xavier has a bizarre stage production in mind, one that will test their reactions during a recreation of the murders. It's kind of a polygraph test involving each man being tied to a chair, while an elaborate series of tubes measures their composure. A little like the test scene from 1984's The Thing. Of course nothing goes as planned.
The strength of the film is the way this is all shot. The initial reveal of each doctor uses a lot of dark shadows and several eerie laboratory sets. The wax-works and actors used in the test scene are surprisingly creepy. The whole mansion set with its strange apparatus and hidden doors is nonsensical, but it's well utilised. Things are elevated of course by a two-tone colour process, which casts everything in a luminous green and orange. It shifts between crime thriller and science fiction without much warning, but there's something about the way it's shot that makes this all work. The final reveal is just as bonkers, but it's memorable.
The results are kind of a mixed bag with all these strong sequences being undermined by odd tonal choices and actors who don't fit. The killer isn't shown often enough to be a really menacing villain, but the finale is suitably striking. There isn't any sort of clever reveal playing on earlier clues, so it comes out of nowhere, as do his crazed motives. But this does mean the gruesome special effects used are surprising. Although the real horror of the conclusion comes when Lee and Joanne announce their marriage. It's a strange tale on many different levels, but it's still a interesting one that shows how film-makers were willing to do new and creative things in the genre.
3/5
BONUS REVIEW
THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932)
Elsewhere Pre-Code creativity was also flowing at the MGM lot, where Boris Karloff donned the make-up of yet another screen villain. The whole thing is of course a kind of Orientalist nightmare brimming with negative stereotypes. There are torture chambers, opium dens and loose morals. But taking into account these questionable choices, even for this time period, there is a movie underneath. In some ways a movie that inspired something like the Indiana Jones series, many years before the 1950s serials that are always talked about. It's a race against time in which two competing groups want to acquire a mysterious artefact, one that could bring great wealth or spell great disaster.
It's a lavish production filled with detailed sound stage locations. Perhaps one of the best looking features of this era. It's not exactly a horror film of the period, although it does lean into those elements in amongst all the adventuring. Sir Denis Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) of the Secret Service and Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant) of the British Museum must apply their stiffest upper lips to find the golden mask and sword of Genghis Khan. Is there such a thing? It doesn't matter, this isn't a story about historical relics. It's a story about a mad scientist who wants to conquer the world. He's got a genuine death ray and all kinds of other contraptions at his disposal, but this is apparently what matters to his followers.
Karloff plays up the whole thing with a sly comedic touch, although everyone else takes it far too seriously. Perhaps it's because he gets all the weirdest sets and is often on screen with Fah Lo Say, (Myrna Loy) his diabolical daughter. He's an evil doctor and a mystic, and a genius, whatever the story demands. There are mind control sequences, crocodile pits and crushing spikes. There's a sequence in which enemy agents go to the trouble of disguising themselves as museum mummies. Yellow Peril awkwardness is ever present, so it's best that the viewer doesn't take any of this seriously either. It's pulpy B-movie nonsense, and it's much more stylish that later iterations starring Christopher Lee.
3/5
