Dead Men Walk
I don't like to look at the summaries of the horror movies that I watch from my Classics package. Don't ask why, I kind of feel like they give the whole movie away when they summarize, and I want to be surprised. Anyway, though, I didn't really know what to expect coming into this. I thought more zombies. Turned out it was a vampire movie - of sorts - so I was almost right. Undead, shmundead, all the same right? Eh, not really.
Dead Men Walk encompasses a set of twins, both played by George Zucco, where one of the twins, an evil man named Elwyn Clayton, has died from "unknown causes." We soon find out that his twin brother has killed him because of the evil that he had wrought on the town, but Elwyn isn't ready to give up just yet. Elwyn's servant digs him up from his grave, and Elwyn proceeds to vampirize off of his brother's daughter and drive his brother, his brother's daughter, and her fiance, batty. Teehee I'm so humorous.
This movie seems a little confused at what it's trying to be. First off, I was really puzzled as to what I was supposed to think. Now, was Elwyn a warlock, or was he a vampire? In the beginning, the movie seems to make him out to be more of a witch, or whatever genderized word you want to call him. Later on, though, we learn that he is actually a vampire who likes to feed off of the other Clayton's daughter. Now the movie starts to resemble Dracula, and it really steals a lot of Dracula's themes to use as its own. Later on, the townspeople thinks the living Clayton is going crazy and trying to kill his daughter, so they form a mob and come with torches burning to Clayton's house, where they proceed to ransack it. Does this sound familiar? Maybe a little Frankenstein-y? And we can even say that the evil twin thing is a reference to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!
So we must ask ourselves, which does this movie do the best at? Well, since most of the plot focuses on Elwyn being a vampire, we can assume that the movie succeeds for the most part at this plot line. Yet it really doesn't, as most of the vampirism occurs off-screen, or at least very cheesily. I mean, take a look at George Zucco.
He just kind of looks like a scary uncle that you don't want watching over you while you sleep, not a creepy vampire. At one point, Elwyn begins to laugh and it seems as if he doesn't really know what to do next, because he halts for a second and then walks backwards a few steps, and then disappears into smoke. I wouldn't be scared of this man, I'd wonder if he had had a bad gas attack or something. Look at his eyes - he's got some constipation.
Anyway, Mary Karlisle doesn't do very much as the attacked young lady. She kind of just lays in a bed through most of the movie needing blood transfusions. Nedrick Young as the young girl's fiance, Dr. David Bently, is a brash and impulsive young man who loves to jump to conclusions. When Elwyn shows up and Bently finally believes the other Clayton is telling the truth of Elwyn being a vampire, we kind of laugh because of how much Bently made an ass of himself. He's pretty helpless as well, since he gets beat up by a mob and lets Clayton do all of the work.
The movie moves along pretty slowly, and isn't really creepy or spooky at all. I think the best scene in the movie is the graveyard scene, for it's the only potentially spooky shot in most of the movie. All of the other scenes are either boring because there isn't enough going on in them or are too quick for us to care what's happening. Overall, this movie has too much of an identity crisis to know what it was going for, and the blatant rip-off of Dracula is too in-your-face to be overlooked. The best part of the movie for me was this guy and his little hunchback, yes-masa attitude. It was pretty fun to see him get pummeled throughout the movie.
PS: So do dead men run too? Not that I saw in this movie. They barely walk; they've got their own stylish shamble.
