The Undying Monster (1942)

A Scotland Yard inspector (James Ellison) investigates an attack on a wealthy man named Oliver Hammond (John Howard) at his family's estate. Turns out there's a werewolf curse on the Hammond family but the inspector believes there's a more scientific explanation. Rare '40s horror film from 20th Century Fox. It's obviously meant to capitalize on Universal's success with The Wolf Man. It even has its own werewolf poem. Not exactly as catchy though. It's a good B horror-thriller. Director John Brahm and cinematographer Lucien Ballard create a beautiful-looking film, full of shadowy atmosphere and some great sets. Ellison and Howard are good, as is the lovely Heather Angel. Nice support from Halliwell Hobbes, Holmes Herbert, and Bramwell Fletcher. It's barely over an hour so there's no excuse not to try it out. It will be well worth the effort.

20th Century Fox never went in for the Gothic horror films that Universal specialized in. But when they did one it was a quality product even as a B picture. Such is the case of The Undying Monster. I wish it had a better story though because the mood captured by director John Brahm is completely right for this kind of film.In a film story line that borrows quite liberally from Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound Of The Baskervilles, the Hammonds seem to be as cursed as the Baskervilles. For several hundred years a male Hammond falls victim to a curse because an ancestor sold his soul to the devil.I can't believe that none of the English colony was available here. The Scotland Yard Inspector who is using science to try and catch the murderer is American James Ellison. John Howard is the last of the male Hammonds is also American. His sister however is English Heather Angel and the key role of the coroner is played by Bramwell Fletcher.Fletcher's a scientist too, but he's real tuned into the whole occult business concerning werewolves though he thinks that science can do the trick to cure them. In that he's got an agenda all his own.The Undying Monster is a decent try at Gothic horror, but I have a feeling it would have been done better at the studio which knew how.

"B material given A execution" is how film historian Drew Casper describes 20th Century Fox's first horror movie, 1942's "The Undying Monster," in one of the DVD's extras, and dang if the man hasn't described this movie to a T. The film, a unique melding of the detective, Gothic and monster genres, though uniformly well acted by its relatively no-name cast, features a trio of first-rate artists behind the camera who really manage to put this one over. And the film's script isn't half bad either. Here, Scotland Yard scientist Robert Curtis (James Ellison) comes to eerie Hammond Hall, a brooding pile on the English coast, sometime around 1900, to investigate some recent attacks ascribed to the legendary Hammond monster. Viewers expecting this legend of a voracious predator to wind up being explained in an anticlimactic, mundane fashion may be a bit surprised at how things play out. Ellison is fine in his no-nonsense, modern-detective role (he uses a spectrograph to analyze various clues!), and Heather Angel (who does have the face of one), playing the house's mistress, is equally good. But, as I've mentioned, it is the contributions of three men behind the scenes that really turn this little B into a work of art. Director John Brahm, who would go on to helm Fox's "The Lodger" and "Hangover Square," and DOP Lucien Ballard have combined their formidable talents to make a picture that is noirish, moody and fast moving, with superb use of light and shadow. And composer David Raksin, who two years later would achieve enduring fame for his score for that classiest of film noirs, "Laura," has co-contributed some background music here that is both mysterious and exciting. Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck apparently had hopes that "The Undying Monster" would be the opening salvo in his studio's bid to challenge Universal's monster domination, and in retrospect, it does seem like a fair way to start. This DVD, by the way, looks just fantastic, and sports more "extras" than you would believe capable of accompanying a minor B. All in all, a very pleasant surprise.

It's hard to imagine that this was a product of 20th-Century Fox because it looks so much like a B feature from Universal Studios -- the isolated mansion, the absence of daylight, the ground-covering fog, the spooky music, the family haunted by a curse, the dark figures slinking through the shadows, and most of all the werewolf. I haven't read the novel but the writers have used every cliché in the monster book. I could hardly sit through it -- wouldn't have sat through it except that I'd bought the DVD.There's nothing wrong with John Brahm's direction except that it's flat and unimaginative. He's done much better work elsewhere, as in "The Lodger." Really -- in a dark corner of the room, a hairy hand sneaks out from behind a heavy curtain while the musical score tells us to notice it and be frightened. There is not only no poetry here; there's very little effort at all. The script sucks. The dialog not only lacks sparkle but is predictable from moment to moment. There is even one of those ancient proverbs that serves as a warning, "Even the man who is wholesome and sane must cover his rear as he walks by wolfbane." Something like that. (Repeated twice, and also displayed on a plaque.)And the score, by the way, so stereotypical, is by David Raksin, who was to go on two years later to produce the pretty little suspenseful and romantic theme for "Laura." Heather Angel is okay. She has the proper delicate features. But what is James Ellison doing as a Scotland Yard scientist assigned to investigate a death and mauling at the estate of an upper-class British family? He brings to the part the broad vowels of an American cowboy from Iowa. And the director doesn't help him in the least. Ellison rushes through his scenes as if the film were a one-hour quickie from Monogram Studios.As it turns out, one of the family members suffers from "lycanthropy" -- the belief that under certain conditions he turns into a wolf. The problem is that in this instance he really DOES turn into a werewolf. We see him looking like hairy Lawrence Talbot until he's shot, and then as he dies he assumes his normal human form. A sample of his wolf hair disappears in the lab while under analysis. And yet, at the end, the whole business is treated as a quirk of the victim's mind, a kind of insanity, even by the family's doctor. It makes no sense. Either lycanthropy is a delusion or it's real. The movie gives us both, contradicting itself and papering over the plot holes.The most interesting scenes involve the spectrograph and the centrifuge. Both the instruments had been around for a while so they're not anachronisms.