A killer of the title nickname is on the loose, someone has engaged in a bit of embezzlement, and the loot is believed to be somewhere in the house currently rented by mystery writer Agnes Moorehead and her maid ‘companion’ Lenita Lane. Gavin Gordon is the resident cop who tries to keep the ladies um…less hysterical than usual. Vincent Price is a local physician who is first seen murdering the bank president, and is later scene handling bats as part of some odd experiment. Could he be the culprit? But he seems so genial and respectable, well except for that first scene, anyway. Darla Hood, who played Darla in ‘Our Gang’ has her final acting role as one of the murder victims, a bank secretary.
Two top stars and outstanding B&W cinematography by Joseph Biroc (‘Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte’, ‘The Towering Inferno’) aren’t enough to save this creaky, incompetently directed, haunted house/mystery flick from writer-director Crane Wilbur (writer of Price’s excellent ‘House of Wax’ and the similar ‘Mad Magician’). If nothing else, Wilbur fails to capitalise on the opportunity to have Moorehead play a strong, intelligent Agatha Christie-type character. She’s only marginally more competent than her scaredy-cat ‘companion’ (seriously, my straight man’s gaydar went bonkers throughout this one- not that there’s anything wrong with that!) played terribly by Lane. Lane’s comic relief is so ghastly she comes off looking like a white version of Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy from ‘Gone With the Wind’! And as much as Moorehead shows a little more resolve than Lane, most of the women in this film are seen as gossipy nincompoops who are incapable of looking after themselves, though thankfully Moorehead is spared a generic male hero/love interest (Make of that what you will). Meanwhile, as bad as Lane is, she’s no match in inept acting for Gordon, who is just pitiful in a much more crucial (but staggeringly useless) role. Hell, he’s hammier than Vincent Price, and just draws too much attention to himself.
On the plus side, there are some truly terrific shots here of the nefarious title villain seen in shadow adorning a full-brimmed hat, or a similarly Krueger-esque clawed hand here and there (the bat itself looks a bit fake, but so what?), but in the end this is a mess. Price does something clearly sinister in his opening scene that just isn’t properly fit into the rest of the film’s narrative until it’s much too late. The scene itself is excellent, and a surprisingly low-key Price is genuinely good in the role (though if you think there’s something iffy about Moorehead and Lane, Price is awfully limp-wristed too!), but it throws the audience off for quite a while because it just doesn’t seem to belong in the film itself, at least not for an awfully long time. It was as if the film had far too much muchness going on and the writer-director just didn’t know how to make it all fit (either that or the editor was a narcoleptic), introducing characters way too slowly.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Fans of spook house horror-comedies (though the film is really more of a mystery with macabre elements) might get more out of this than me, it’s relatively harmless I suppose. Two stars for Price and the cinematography, but that’s it.
