Another Old Dark House thriller with a cliched plot and a gorilla on the loose. The plots of these films weren't even interchangeable - they were the same. If it wasn't a The Gorilla, it was The Bat or the Octopus, or The Cat. This is actually a pretty enjoyable example of the sub-genre. It stars The Ritz Brothers and features Patsy Kelly and nobody is going to slee
p through the amount of noise that quartet can generate. Direction is by veteran film pioneer Allan Dwan who certainly knows how to keep things going at a fast pace - thunder, corpses, red herrings galore, secret panels, clutching hands and, perhaps best of all there is Lionel Atwill looking like he's having great fun and Bela Lugosi who looks like he's highly amused by the silly proceedings. It's hard not to like it. Rating **
Forde Beebe's NIGHT MONSTER is, for my money, a rather routine old dark house horror movie from Universal. It has all the right elements but they never really come together and Ford Beebe never really gives it the pace that he used to mgive to his serials. It isn't that Beebe is a bad director - he's a workman like most of the directors of this sort of fare and there is no denying that the individual suspense/horror scenes are well handled but the bits in-between tend to drag. There is a more than competent cast which includes both Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill (neither of whom are really given anything to do), Nils Asther, Leif Erikson, Frank Reicher and Don Porter. The female lineup is particularly strong with Irene Harvey, Fay Helm, Doris Lloyd and, best of all, perky little Janet Shaw, who disapears far to early from the proceedings. Rating **
Another Old Dark House thriller with a cliched plot and a gorilla on the loose. The plots of these films weren't even interchangeable - they were the same. If it wasn't a The Gorilla, it was The Bat or the Octopus, or The Cat. This is actually a pretty enjoyable example of the sub-genre. It stars The Ritz Brothers and features Patsy Kelly and nobody is going to slee
p through the amount of noise that quartet can generate. Direction is by veteran film pioneer Allan Dwan who certainly knows how to keep things going at a fast pace - thunder, corpses, red herrings galore, secret panels, clutching hands and, perhaps best of all there is Lionel Atwill looking like he's having great fun and Bela Lugosi who looks like he's highly amused by the silly proceedings. It's hard not to like it. Rating **
