Bowery at Midnight Reviews

BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT is arguably one of the best of the Monogram quickies featuring Bela Lugosi, although there are so many characters and so much plot--mostly borrowed from THE HUMAN MONSTER (1940)--that it's extremely difficult to figure out just what is going on. Lugosi plays Prof. Brenner, a respected psychologist who has a secret criminal alter ego that manifests itself by night. In his criminal state, Brenner runs a Bowery mission as a front for his murderous activities and buries his victims in the basement which is rather ludicrously set up as an actual cemetery--complete with headstones. Unfortunately for Prof. Brenner, his disgruntled, drug-addicted assistant has figured out a way to revive the deceased and has turned them into zombies, hiding them in a cave below the basement cemetery where they await the chance to get at their killer. Although his career was beginning its steep slide downward, Lugosi turns in a nicely detailed performance that required him to shift in character from a kindly, benevolent psychologist to a cruel criminal mastermind and back again. Despite the fact that the film is padded out with the usual Bowery Boys-type nonsense, it does build up to a horrifying, surprisingly effective climax.