The Corpse Vanishes [The Case of the Missing Brides] **½ (1942, Bela Lugosi, Luana Walters, Tristram Coffin) – Classic Movie Review 3734

Director Wallace Fox’s amusing 1942 horror movie stars Bela Lugosi as a crazed botanist called Dr George Lorenz, who kidnaps brides to revive his 80-year-old countess wife (Elizabeth Russell) to her former youthful and healthy state. With the help of an old hag and her two sons, Dr Lorenz kills virginal brides, steals their bodies, extracts gland fluid and then injects it into his wife.

Luana Walters plays a news woman called Patricia Hunter, who sets out to report on the case and expose Dr Lorenz.

Monogram Pictures studios’ medium-grade low-budget horror film is done with lip-smacking relish, Lugosi is magnetically watchable, Harvey Gates’s screenplay is attractively bonkers, and the results are not too bad.

Also in the cast are Frank Moran, Tristram Coffin, Minerva Urecal, Vince Barnett, Joan Barclay, Kenneth Harlan, George Eldredge, Angelo Rossitto and Gwen Kenyon. The original story is by Sam Robins and Gerald Schnitzer.

It is the fourth of Lugosi’s nine Monogram features.

Catch it on DVD in a double bill with either The Vampire Bat (1933) or The Devil Bat (1940).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3734

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