What do you get if you cross a poor man’s Katharine Hepburn and a beggar’s rendition of Clark Gable with a very, very small midget, a drag king, and Bela Lugosi on a bender, all within the confines of a comedic hard-boiled sci-fi horror mystery? Quentin Tarantino’s dream project? Nope. What if you add in a wild orchid hunt? Ah, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation on acid perhaps? Sorry. Instead you get is Wallace Fox’s The Corpse Vanishes (yes, the title harps of Hitchcock but that’s only well wishing), a film which only Ed Wood could (and did) make worse.
By anonymously sending poisoned corsages to soon-to-be brides, kidnapping their corpses, and extracting their vestal spinal fluids, Doctor Lorenz (Bela Lugosi) is able to thwart the aging process of his wife, Countess Lorenz (Elizabeth Russell). A spirited reporter, Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters), and her accomplice, Doctor Foster (Tristram Coffin), are granted entry into Lorenz’ estate as they attempt to account for the missing bodies of the deceased brides.
Indeed, Fox’s feature appears to have been the inspiration for Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, which followed Fox’s film 13 years later, for–aside from its stunningly similar plotlines–it bares many of what would later be known as Woodian trademarks. We begin with Lugosi himself, one of the crowding signatures of Wood’s canon and, like Ed’s films, it appears as if a large majority of Fox’s budget went to the Hungarian actor’s morphine bill as Lugosi literally (and all-too-ironically) imitates a corpse before it is revealed that Lorenz sleeps (go figure) in a casket. Sadly, not only does the famed actor consent to reiterating his already typecast role of Dracula but he plays yet another mad scientist whose eyes become a rote preoccupation of the director. Furthermore, Bela manages to keep quiet for the first quarter of the film, forcing one to wonder if the actor was high, confused, or merely pissed that he had once again agreed to star in yet another despicable B-movie fiasco.
Also akin to a Silent Era production, Arthur Reed’s cinematography is twenty years behind the time as his poor, uninspired use of Expressionistic shadows from the early days of German horror makes the viewer shake one’s head in shame before neck cramps ensue due to the acting being perhaps the worst effort from an ensemble in all of cinema history. Each and every actor delivers the dialogue at record speed as a light bulb in Reel Three steals the show as it manages to upstage everyone within the feature.
But what would a Wood . . . er . . . Fox film be without Lugosi beating his gimp assistant (Frank Moran) with a whip or a transvestite, that is, the drag king mother (Gladys Faye) of Alice (Joan Barclay)? Of course, the trite, foreseeable-even-for-a-blind-man plot twist involving Foster proposing to Hunter is only usurped by the quip that the dead brides are “so young,” which is followed by the eyebrow-raising retort, “They have to be.”
Wallace Fox’s The Corpse Vanishes serves as the best refutation of Darwinian theory for it is so mind-bogglingly inept that it is truly hard to comprehend how those responsible managed to stumble beyond childhood. Perhaps the better head-scratcher in this respect is the naivety of the Poverty Row executives (an oxymoron if there ever was one), who not only funded the feature, but agreed to release it.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
