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6 gruesome murders have been committed, and the murder weapon in each
of these, a certain surgical knife, can be tracked down to Doc Xavier's
(Lionel Atwill) medical institute. Soon, the circle of suspects is
narrowed down to scientific staff of the institute (John Wray, Harry
Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe) and of course Xavier himself. Only Doc
Wells (Preston Foster) gets off the hook as a suspect because he only has
one hand, and several of the victims were strangled by two strong hands
... Fearing for a scandal that will ruin his institute's reputation,
Xavier asks the police for 48 hours to find the killer himself, then moves
all of his scientists, his staff and even his daughter Joanne (Fay Wray)
to an old dark house to conduct an experiment supervised by Doc Wells in
which all the suspects will be exposed to reenactments of the crimes while
all of their bodily functions will be carefully monitored. One of the
scientists (Arthur Carewe) actually shows a reaction, but then the lights
go out and when they're back on, he's dead, and Xavier has to start from
scratch again, but worse than that, he now knows there really is a killer
in the house. The next day, Xavier decides to repeat the experiment, but
have everybody, including himself, handcuffed to his chair that's bolted
to the floor. This way he figures the murderer just cannot strike again -
which would be godawful, too, because his daughter plays the victim in
this night's reenactment. Unfortunately though, the killer is the one man
who couldn't have done it because he has only got one hand, Wells. Thing
is, Wells has done some research in synthetic flesh and has grown himself
a second, detachable hand, and for tonight's reenactment he has decided to
go all-out, and thus he covers himself in synthetic flesh until he looks
like a grotesque monster, then prepares to kill Joanne - when nosey and
pesky reporter Lee (Lee Tracy), the man Doc Xavier was desperately trying
to shake, butts in, and after an extended fight, he sets Wells on fire and
throws him down some cliffs to his death - and of course, Lee gets the
girl as a thank you. This is a film that holds quite some
promise: Its plot is bizarre, macabre and gruesome, its sets are great in
a Gothic sort of way, and director Michael Curtiz makes perfect use of
them, the lab set is just a wonderful creation, the cast is uniformly
good, and Curtiz even proves to be quite competent in handling colour
(there are both black-and-white and colour versions of this movie). The
main letdown of this film though is Lee Tracy. Now don't get me wrong, I
like Lee Tracy as well as his signature character, the fast-talking,
funny, nosey, a tad clumsy yet resourceful and utterly unshakeable
reporter, a variation of which he plays here. But his character is just
totally out of tune with the rest of the movie (not his fault though) and
pretty much destroys the film's basic tension, pacing and buildup. That
all said, Tracy does not really destroy the film, it just would
have been much better if his character was simply ommitted ...
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