Creeping Horror
A double-disc dip into the Universal archives, Eureka have dusted off further monochrome monstrosities for their Blu-ray collection entitled Creeping Horror, comprising A Edward Sutherland’s Murders in the Zoo, produced in 1933 before the introduction of the Hays Code, Ford Beebe’s Night Monster of 1942, George Waggner’s Horror Island of 1941 and Jean Yarbrough’s House of Horrors of 1946.
Starring The Vampire Bat’s Lionel Atwill as millionaire sportsman Eric Gorman, insane and possessive husband of Evelyn (Island of Lost Souls’ Kathleen Burke), the Murders in the Zoo actually began in the jungle when a travelling companion Gorman felt was too familiar with his wife was given to the tigers; returning to America by ship with the hold full of animals, she must keep her affiar with Roger Hewitt (John Lodge) a secret lest he suffer a similar fate.
The Municipal Zoo in need of funding, new press officer Peter Yates (Bringing Up Baby’s Charlie Ruggles) suggests a dinner in the hall of carnivores with wealthy benefactors making contributions to attend, but when John is suddenly taken ill during the evening the assumption is that he has been bitten by a newly acquired green mamba given into the care of Doctor Jack Woodford (Western stalwart Randolph Scott) despite protests that it was secured, but Evelyn believes differently.
Surprisingly nasty for the era, not only for the painful deaths by snake venom but the fact that Gorman’s actions are actually depicted onscreen rather than just implied, Murders in the Zoo benefits from a rapidly diminishing small cast with the background filled with animals or non-speaking extras and the short run time, and had it been played for suspense rather than revealing the identity of the sadistic killer in the opening scene it might have been better remembered.
An odder tale set in Ingston Towers, reclusive brother and sister Curt and Margaret Ingston (The Creeper’s Ralph Morgan and The Wolf Man’s Fay Helm) have each invited guests to their home in the swamps, he the three doctors whom he holds responsible for his confinement to a wheelchair and she Doctor Lynn Harper (Play Misty for Me‘s Irene Hervey), a psychiatrist to whom she confesses her fears that she is going mad, not believing she could have seen the thing which is the Night Monster.
Clarence Upson Young’s script introducing imaginative ideas, with suggestions of the power of mind over matter as mystic Agar Singh (Nils Asther) conjures bleeding skeletons from Sicilian tombs by altering “cosmic vibrations” and the titular monster moves through solid walls to kill the unwary, the film is less than the sum of its parts, never fulfilling its subversive potential, hampered by Beebe’s flat direction and the sheer number of characters.
With the two Ingston siblings and their five servants including The Black Cat’s Béla Lugosi, On the Waterfront’s Leif Erickson and The Time Machine’s Doris Lloyd, four physicians, a writer, a neighbour and the useless police captain plus other minor parts, Night Monster plays a game of upstairs/downstairs where every transit through the house is followed by another round of formal greetings, too much of the seventy minutes taken up with the simple mechanics of the plot rather than advancing it.
Next, a one-legged sailor in possession of half a treasure map and an indebted ship captain make their way to Horror Island along with a boatload of friends, relatives and paying passengers, spending the night at the four-hundred-year-old castle where the gold and jewels of pirate Sir Henry Morgan are supposedly hidden, an adventure tour of booby traps and ghostly voices making sinister threats through the night.
The cast led by The Atomic Submarine‘s Dick Foran as Captain Bill Martin, Peggy Moran as Wendy Crayton, along for the ride after having driven into the side of Bill’s car, The Cisco Kid‘s Leo Carrillo as peg-legged Tobias Clump and Captain Blood‘s Hobart Cavanaugh as Professor Jasper Quinley, expert on antiquarian maps, despite being adapted from an existing text, Alex Gottlieb’s Terror of the South Seas, it feels like a first-draft mishmash of ideas thrown together.
Played more for cheap laughs than atmosphere, heavy on slapstick and pratfalls rather than substance, there is little to engage in Horror Island, the characters largely played as idiots as they find obviously plastic skulls in their beds and wander around the dark in a manner more suggestive of a theme park than a mystery thriller, their own indifference to the dead bodies piling up around them making it difficult to feel there is any real threat.
Closing the Creeping Horror collection, House of Horrors is by far the best of the quartet in terms of writing, design, direction and acting, starring Batman and Robin‘s Robert Lowery and Agent for H.A.R.M.‘s Martin Kosleck as painter Steven Morrow and sculptor Marcel de Lange, All That Heaven Allows‘ Virginia Grey as reporter Joan Medford and Batman‘s Alan Napier as newspaper art critic F Holmes Harmon.
Murdered after publishing another column viciously attacking not only their work but the artists themselves, even Harmon’s colleagues find it difficult to mourn a man who enjoyed petty acts of public cruelty, Joan having spoken with him earlier the same evening about his unreasonable dismissals, but the police investigation shows similar injuries to the victims of “the Creeper,” supposedly dead after falling into the river.
Never given a name but Rondo Hatton’s near-slient performance surprisingly sympathetic, rescued from drowning by de Lange and now serving as his muse, “a neanderthal crafted in mud,” it is he who is killing those who have denigrated his benefactor, directed by a madman who is as entrenched in his anger as those he seeks to eliminate in his quest for recognition, a tragedy of no winners, only survivors.
All four of the titles making their UK Blu-ray debut, Murders in the Zoo and Horror Island are supported by commentaries from Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby while Stephen Jones and Kim Newman provide the same for Night Monster and House of Horrors, and in addition there are galleries for all four features and trailers for both Night Monster and Horror Island.
Creeping Horror is available on Blu-ray from Eureka now
