User Reviews

Voodoo Man may not be a "good" movie, but if your a fan of classic horror, it's a must see. The draw here is Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, and John Carradine in the same movie. The plot goes something like this: Zucco runs a gas station and intentionally gives young women the wrong directions so Carradine can kidnap the women for use as guinea pigs in Lugosi's voodoo ceremonies. Lugosi is trying to bring his wife back from the dead using the women's essence or life-force. It's not great, but it's enjoyable enough hokum. Be warned, however, this is a low-budget Monogram film, directed by one-shot William Beaudine.

A few things I enjoyed include: the voodoo ritual has to be seen to be believed with our three stars all getting into the act; Carradine leering at and stroking the hair of the kidnapped women; the glee in Zucco's eyes as he gives the women incorrect directions; the local sheriff who seems more put-out that he's missing his dinner than concerned about the rash of missing women; Carradine's ridiculous running style (a real hoot); and all the other nonsense. As I've said, this isn't great filmmaking, but it's fun.

For a classic horror fan with an affinity for the great icons of the past, I was positively thrilled to discover through an Internet user that VOODOO MAN was streaming public domain. The reason is that three horror stars of the 40s star in this same film..Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, and John Carradine. I'm not sure if they ever appeared in the same film again, but simple knowledge of seeing Carradine and Lugosi in scenes together had me giddy with excitement. The main plot concerns Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist obsessed with finding a way to bring his beloved wife back to life by using lovely women his henchmen kidnap(including George Zucco who runs a gas station, contacting Lugosi when a female driver passes through, Carradine as a loyal bumpkin who tells girls they're pretty before grabbing them along with Pat McKee)in "lifeforce" experiments. It's one of those poverty row low-budgeters Zucco and Lugosi were known to act in for far less than their worth(the idea that someone of Lugosi's stature was making such a low income is a crying shame, but alas..). The voodoo ceremony with Lugosi evoking "from mind to mind" as Zucco chants some sort of ritualistic jargon, with face paint, costume, and head dress, with Carradine beating on a drum has to be seen to be believed. Carradine is more or less a harmless idiot servant who fears beatings from his master and ogles the pretty girls held captive in a hypnotic trance by Lugosi. Lugosi isn't as completely evil as his usual roles would require for Monogram, only really committing his crimes so he can return his beloved to life. The cheap Monogram sets pale in comparison to those of Universal, but Lugosi's star power helps.

Tod Andrews is a reporter whose fiancé, Betty(Wanda McKay) could be in danger as Lugosi's Richard Marlowe believes she is a perfect "affinity" to reawaken his long dead wife, Evelyn(Ellen Hall). Louise Currie is Betty's cousin, Stella, herself kidnapped and put under a voodoo spell. VOODOO MAN may well be a laughingstock for those who find the premise wacky, but I think Lugosi fans will find it worth a look.

VOODOO MAN is one of many horror B-flicks that Bela Lugosi shot for Monogram Pictures in the early 1940s. It has William "One Shot" Beaudine directing, no less, and it features a hodge podge plot about some evil voodoo practitioners kidnapping beautiful young women and holding them captive in an isolated house for their own sinister rituals. Lugosi is at his sinister yet urbane best, as ever, and there are some of those eye close-ups that were a staple for the actor ever since WHITE ZOMBIE. Horror fans get their money's worth with the presence of John Carradine as a simpleton servant and George Zucco as the evil voodoo priest. It's cheap, repetitive, and cheerful, and at just an hour it doesn't outstay its welcome.

Odd ball horror film, I think its a horror film, starring Bela Lugosi as a doctor trying to resurrect his dead ("not in the way you know death") wife. To that end he kidnaps women who pass by his home on the way to Twin Falls. Aided and abetted by legends John Carradine and George Zucco Lugosi is trying to use a weird form of voodoo to bring his lady back. Into the mess comes a screenwriter on his way to get married who turned down a chance to write a movie based on the missing girl cases, but ends up in the middle of things when the cousin of his bride to be goes missing when she disappears after giving him a ride when he ran out of gas. I'm not making it up. Thats not even half the film. Really. As I said at the top I have no idea if this is a horror film or a comedy since much of the dialog seems to have been written with a knowing edge. You have dialog scenes that don't build plot so much as crack wise, the writer and his brides cousin for example. Its a weird sort of film that probably should not be seen any earlier than 2AM on commercial TV, thats neither good not bad but a weird mixture of the two (sort of like its mixing Horror and comedy). Give Monogram credit for turning out a film that kind of predates the madness that Ed Wood set loose upon the world. For lovers of Lugosi and those who like off the wall treasures (especially stuff that feel like a Late Late Late show movie), all others need not apply.

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.

****SPOILERS****The big three,Bela Lugosi John Carradine & George Zucco, of the bottom basement Monogram studio put their talents together in this flick about voodoo and kidnapping as they all are involved in kidnapping pretty women motorists to be used for experiments in the crazed Dr. Richard Marlow's, Bela Lugosi, plan to resurrect his dead wife Evelyn, Ellen Hall, back to life. Catching the confused women on the road to Twin Falls Dr. Marlow has his two goons Toby & Grego, John Carradine & Pat McGee, kidnap them and bring the women to his in his underground laboratory. It's there where Dr. Marlow's voodoo expert Nicholas or Nick the Greek, George Zucco, does his thing in a crazy and confusing ritual where he just goes plain crazy talking mombo jumbo like jive to bring the dead, Evelyn , back to life!

Not much of a story but still worth watching in the way Lugosi Carradine and Zucco ham it up that make the film look more like a comedy then a horror movie.The hero Ralph Dawson, Tod Andrews, in the movie ends up getting the lights turned out on him and doesn't have anything to do with putting an end to Dr. Marlow's crimes which included him kidnapping Dawson's wife Betty, Wanda McKay. At the end when the movie finally ended it's Dawson who's a movie screen writer who suggests that star of the film he's to write about what he experienced in real life, in the movie "Voodoo Man", should be no other then actor Bela Lugosi! Thus giving Lugosi who's been down and out on his luck at the time a plug in his own film.

The last film that Bela Lugosi made for Monogram Pictures before he sunk into his own real horror movie of drug abuse that almost ended up killing him. It took Bela some 10 years to get his act straighten out by kicking the habit but by then he was almost completely forgotten by the movie going public. It was that great bad movie director Ed Wood JR who resurrected Bela's career with bad movie classics like "Glen & Glenda" as well as "Bride of the Monster" that put Bela back in lights as well as on the silver screen.