Rating: 4/5
Hooptober 9.0 | 7/34 | Decades 1/8 | 1930s
Paris, 1845
Horny medical students and their girlfriends make their way through a series of carnival sideshows.
Arab woman’s belly-dancing, Native American men tying up a white man, and Erik the Ape Man — the monster who walks upright, the beast with a human soul, the ape who talks.
Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is the carnival sideshow entertainer who translates for Erik and expresses his link in the evolutionary chain.
A priest decries heresy as Dr. Mirakle describes his experiments of mixing human and ape blood.
At night, Dr. Mirakle rides the streets, looking for his next victim. He witnesses two men, knives in hand, carving at one another. A woman stands by, watching, screaming. Both men kill each other. Dr. Mirakle approaches through the fog, his eyes aglow in the light of a single streetlamp. He offers her safety in his icy grip.
At home, he ties her to a crux decussata, drawing and mixing her blood with Erik’s, only to find impurities that make it unusable. He kills her, the third in a series of murders that the police cannot solve. One of the medical students, Pierre, performs his autopsy. His inquiries lead him back to Dr. Mirakle.
Bela Lugosi does stellar work here. It helps that they wrote the role for him. There is hardly any correlation to the Poe story.
The film creates Rococo moments, such as Camile on a vine-laced swing, to contrast the dark world occupied by the carnival and Dr. Mirakle.
The cinematography and lighting work best in the darker moments, when it composes quiet moments of chiaroscuro.
For an hour-long movie, it’s still a little slow in places, opting for characterization over brooding dread for most of its runtime. If they had followed Poe’s story closely, this decision would make more sense for a detective story. Here, where horror is the focus, it detracts from the appeal.
The third act makes up for it with a Frankenstein meets King Kong finale.
This is a fun little Pre-Code flick.