Bela Lugosi leads a double life, by day he is a well meaning psychology professor, but by night he
... feeds the poor ?
Being Bela, the poor-feeding Friendly Mission is of course
nothing more but a cover-up for one of his evil schemes, he uses the
mission to lure in some escaped convicts, then uses their respective
special skills to do some robbery before killing them at the crime scene
- & nobody seems to suspect him, until one of his students (John
Archer) goes undercover to spy on his girlfriend Wanda McKay, who in turn
unsuspectingly works in Bela's mission. The student is killed of course,
his body given to Bela's janitor, a former doctor who has his own little
plans for all the deceased Bela leaves along the way - he is turning
them into zombies (!). But Wanda McKay soon gets worried about her boyfriend & soon sets the police on Bela's tail. When cornered, Bela
falls into his janitor's pit of zombies, & they don't look like the
friendly type. Wanda McKay meanwhile gets her boyfriend back, him too
having been a zombie, but he got better (!)
In the 1940's, when it came to making rather outrageous horror-movies
on a shoestring, hardly anyone could compete with (2nd generation) Monogram, at least storywise - as this synopsis ably proves - though
PRC
came in a close second, making the movies of both studios overly ripe
for rediscovery on a larger scale.
This movie is just a fun horror-gangster-mixture with Bela Lugosi
turning in one of his usual great no-nonsense performances playing a
nonsense-character.
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