The Corpse Vanishes – review

Director: Wallace Fox

Release date: 1942

Contains spoilers

The poorest of poverty row, The Corpse Vanishes was one of a series of low-quality films that the late, great Bela Lugosi made and, like many of them, his presence does make the film pick up when he is on-screen but I probably wouldn’t ever have watched it were it not for Simon Bacon suggesting it is a vampire movie.

And it is, though Lugosi is not the vampire, rather he is a mad scientist and it is his wife, a Countess (Elizabeth Russell), who is the vampire. This is a really early example of a vampire, created by science whose access to the essence she needs for her vampirism is supplied by a scientist.

Sandy and Pat

It starts with a wedding and, just after saying “I do” the bride collapses dead. At the scene is social column reporter Pat Hunter (Luana Walters) and her photographer Sandy (Vince Barnett). The body is taken to a hearse, in the back of which is Bela – later revealed to be Dr Lorenz. The hearse drops off one of the men who carried the body to it, the driver paying him off. Back at the church the funeral parlour arrives to take the bride’s corpse and there is a realisation that this is the kidnapping of another dead bride.

Alice and the orchid

Another one – yep, there has been a spate (and all from socialite circles). That doesn’t stop Alice (Joan Barclay) from wanting to marry Dwight. Her mother (Gladys Faye) is less than happy but the DA (Eddie Kane) assures her safety. Before the wedding an orchid is delivered, Alice assumes from Dwight, and she too dies at the altar. The real hearse picks her up but the police escort is distracted by a burning car and the Lorenz hearse does a switcheroo and later, when stopped, the coffin inside contains the ‘corpse’ of Dr Lorenz.

The countess awaits her shot

So Lorenz gets the corpse back to his home where, aided by the strange servant Fagah (Minerva Urecal) and her children, brutish son Angel (Frank Moran) and diminutive son Toby (Angelo Rossitto, Dracula Vs Frankenstein), he prepares the corpse as the Countess cries in agony, urging him to hurry and bitching like a harridan. He extracts something by syringe (implied to be from a gland) and creates a concoction he injects his wife with. She apparently becomes younger – there isn’t much difference to be fair.

Dead brides

So meanwhile Pat finds the orchid (and its strange scent) realises it’s a clue and gets referred to orchid hybridiser… Dr Lorenz. The story gets really quite strange, she meets and falls for Dr Foster (Tristram Coffin) and finds a secret passage whilst they both stay overnight with Dr Lorenz. The Countess, Lorenz himself and Angel have all entered her room through it and she finds both the lab and at least two of the brides (who seem to be in a state of death-like sleep, and if so the question is why he needs so many) but Pat has a habit of fainting at danger and wakes in bed as though nothing happened and Foster can’t remember her speaking to him in the night… because hypnosis!

Bela Lugosi as Dr Lorenz

Equally unlikely is Lorenz reacting to a “sting” wedding when he knows it is a trap and then deciding to kidnap Pat. His downfall comes about mostly because of his mistreatment (read murder and abandonment) of his servants. The vampirism seems to be an actual thing – Foster confirms that, whilst she looks thirty, the Countess has the organs of a seventy year-old. The misogyny is rife too. At first I was impressed with the Pat character, a plucky female reporter taking on her sexist photographer and editor (Kenneth Harlan), whilst tracking down the criminals, but her habit of fainting at the slightest hint of danger and her later willingness to abandon her career for matrimony and suburbia undermines what could have been a great female character for the time.

coffins for two

Bela is, of course, Bela. He’d played the mad scientist before and relied on his presence to carry a naff plot. In a paper I wrote for Palgrave’s Handbook of the Vampire I argue that Lugosi was so deeply associated with the vampire, especially Dracula, that he is a genre trope in his own right. This is not a modern phenomenon, that association was apparent through his career and this may be why Pat, when wandering his night-time house looking for Foster, opens the Lorenz bedroom door to see the couple sleeping side by side in coffins!

All in all, it’s a mess. However, it is a really early science created vampire and it has Bela. It is barely worth 2.5 out of 10 despite that, however.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK