This 1944 racket takes place in a strange Wilder-Lovecraft hamlet called Twin Falls, and features Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor trying the revive his living dead wife. A few backlot exteriors show the paranoid wastespaces marking the underside of programmer production, a desolation held off on screen by table cloths, dining rooms dying with doilies, and other signs of a Middle American jive sophistication. This is a desperate sign that the frontiers of Protestant austerity are under siege by vague memories of the bourgeoisie's hickoid prior lives: it may all vanish to unveil the Jukes and white lightning bubbling beneath.
John Carradine's sub-Lennie Small character lopes along, plays a conga at black magic rituals, and caresses the pretty girls he steals for his master's bizarre immortality project. He also strangely resembles an art school student gone senile, searching glumly for his tattered copy of the "Long-Lost Friend" and stroking the captive girls' hair. Carradine and his Cro-Magnon sidekick (Pat McKie) are overseen by a petit bourgeois white Conjure Man (George Zucco), who uses a gas station to waylay potential victims. These kidnapped bints are given to the lovesick Dr Marlowe (Lugosi), who employs mysterious machines to bring back his wife from a kind of living purgatory.
After their essences are extracted by a séance-cum-invocation which, despite constant assurances that the deity 'Ramboona' is all-powerful, never really works, the hijacked girls are made into zombies (Zucco's voodoo rites resemble a Hoodoo catalog cover, while his garb is strictly Shriner). Ellen Hall is memorable as Lugosi's moribund wife, a Beardsley waif sleepwalking until she can consume enough souls to live again. The zombie women are kept in cabinets with glass doors, making for an effective set piece combining Cocteau with the small-town dark ride. Voodoo Man is set not in California but in some Midwest windtunnel, where no one knows how they got there or why they are doing what they are doing, but yet they must keep on doing whatever it is. Raise the dead, drive the car, solve the case.
Director William Beaudine moves his camera only reluctantly, sometimes arranging his actors in mock-Hindu (Lugosi at left, Zucco in the center, and Hall at right, with arms, skulls and magic implements fanning out behind them), and at other times, shuffling them along conveyer-belt style through fake cramped caves and plywood hallways. Tod Andrews, pretty irritating as a Hollywood scriptwriter who soon stumbles on Lugosi and Co en route to his own wedding, initially tells his boss that newspaper accounts of the Twin Falls kidnappings will not make for a hit film. In the last scene, he drops off a script entitled "The Voodoo Man" and recommends that Bela Lugosi play the heavy (Andrews takes a few moments to remember the great man's name, which I read as a dig at a public which has even forgotten Dracula). Thus, that old trendy device now gussied up as 'meta' lets us know that real life and scripted life are essentially the same and nothing in either should be taken seriously.
But questions stubbornly remain unanswered. Is Zucco's warlock a new Joseph Smith or has he just been hanging around with Obeah practitioners, despite his posh exterior? Why is everyone so vested in Lugosi's project, and why is their dogged devotion to it so oddly moving? And the fact that the unreality of the distant Second World War for the United States-a war known mainly through war bonds, rationing, newsreels, and propaganda pieces targeting the Japanese-is quite remarkable in these period flicks. Everyone else was getting bombed and genocided by the barbaric end result of centuries of European 'culture'. Our homeland dreamed, sent a few shell-shocked souls to the madhouse, and made out pretty good after the shooting stopped.
Barely passing an hour, Voodoo Man is an effortlessly realistic film.
John Carradine's sub-Lennie Small character lopes along, plays a conga at black magic rituals, and caresses the pretty girls he steals for his master's bizarre immortality project. He also strangely resembles an art school student gone senile, searching glumly for his tattered copy of the "Long-Lost Friend" and stroking the captive girls' hair. Carradine and his Cro-Magnon sidekick (Pat McKie) are overseen by a petit bourgeois white Conjure Man (George Zucco), who uses a gas station to waylay potential victims. These kidnapped bints are given to the lovesick Dr Marlowe (Lugosi), who employs mysterious machines to bring back his wife from a kind of living purgatory.
After their essences are extracted by a séance-cum-invocation which, despite constant assurances that the deity 'Ramboona' is all-powerful, never really works, the hijacked girls are made into zombies (Zucco's voodoo rites resemble a Hoodoo catalog cover, while his garb is strictly Shriner). Ellen Hall is memorable as Lugosi's moribund wife, a Beardsley waif sleepwalking until she can consume enough souls to live again. The zombie women are kept in cabinets with glass doors, making for an effective set piece combining Cocteau with the small-town dark ride. Voodoo Man is set not in California but in some Midwest windtunnel, where no one knows how they got there or why they are doing what they are doing, but yet they must keep on doing whatever it is. Raise the dead, drive the car, solve the case.
Director William Beaudine moves his camera only reluctantly, sometimes arranging his actors in mock-Hindu (Lugosi at left, Zucco in the center, and Hall at right, with arms, skulls and magic implements fanning out behind them), and at other times, shuffling them along conveyer-belt style through fake cramped caves and plywood hallways. Tod Andrews, pretty irritating as a Hollywood scriptwriter who soon stumbles on Lugosi and Co en route to his own wedding, initially tells his boss that newspaper accounts of the Twin Falls kidnappings will not make for a hit film. In the last scene, he drops off a script entitled "The Voodoo Man" and recommends that Bela Lugosi play the heavy (Andrews takes a few moments to remember the great man's name, which I read as a dig at a public which has even forgotten Dracula). Thus, that old trendy device now gussied up as 'meta' lets us know that real life and scripted life are essentially the same and nothing in either should be taken seriously.
But questions stubbornly remain unanswered. Is Zucco's warlock a new Joseph Smith or has he just been hanging around with Obeah practitioners, despite his posh exterior? Why is everyone so vested in Lugosi's project, and why is their dogged devotion to it so oddly moving? And the fact that the unreality of the distant Second World War for the United States-a war known mainly through war bonds, rationing, newsreels, and propaganda pieces targeting the Japanese-is quite remarkable in these period flicks. Everyone else was getting bombed and genocided by the barbaric end result of centuries of European 'culture'. Our homeland dreamed, sent a few shell-shocked souls to the madhouse, and made out pretty good after the shooting stopped.
Barely passing an hour, Voodoo Man is an effortlessly realistic film.