Rating: 4/5
The Moon Killer attacks every full moon. They leave bodies surgically brainless and cannibalized. Detectives ask Doctor Xavier to do an internal investigation of his institution, as the scalpel used in the murders came from his labs. A reporter named Lee Taylor sneaks into Doctor Xavier’s lab to learn all the details he can for a scandalizing story on the doctor.
The result is a science lab murder mystery, where Doctor Xavier summons all the suspects, digging into their personal history and using bizarre methods of deduction to narrow it down. But it seems that the killer is taking out suspects as well.
This movie has a lot of comedic beats — Lee Tracy plays erratic and is full of gags (he shakes several hands with a hand-buzzer). His scenes have strong Scooby-Doo vibes — dark hands nearly grabbing him, falling into random chutes, passing out, and whatnot.
The cinematography is gorgeous! Maybe it’s the combination of color and early 30s filming style that makes it stand out, but I had genuine spine tingles in a few scenes. And the lighting is so dramatic!
I love the greens in this! I’m so happy that we have this surviving red-green Technicolor print. It makes this movie feel special (I talk more about it below, but that’s so I can have that history on hand).
I love this movie — it’s so whacky.
** Historical Aside ** Technicolor destroyed all of their red-green negatives in the 40s since they printed them on nitrate film, which is dangerously combustible (one of the contributing reasons we lose so many old films).
But that isn’t why color didn’t become more mainstream earlier on. The studios weren’t getting positive responses from test audiences, so they switched back to cheaper black-and-white processing.
We had black-and-white copies of this movie, but we thought we had lost the color version. When Jack Warner died in 78, they opened his vault and found a surviving color nitrate print.
They transferred the print to safety film — the standard for color prints that studios switched to during the 40s, but then WWII happened, and the war demanded all of the safety film. That’s why studios didn’t transition to color until the 50s.
The nitrate print went into UCLA’s Film and Television Archive. The archive did a digital restoration in 2020, and a Blu-ray version came out the following year.
I’ve said it before — we’re in the golden age of film restoration.