Henry Hall

A professor perfects a working television system and invites investors to a demonstration, only to die on camera when a mysterious ray intercuts the broadcast. Bela Lugosi plays a dual role — the professor's loyal assistant and a sinister European interloper — in a whodunit where the murder weapon is the new technology itself. Shot in 1935, when television was still laboratory speculation, the film treats live broadcast as exotic enough to carry a thriller. June Collyer plays the professor's daughter caught between suspects. Made by poverty-row outfit Cameo Pictures, it entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Mystery · Thriller · Sci-Fi

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Bernard Adrian, a gentle small-town physician still grieving his wife and daughter's deaths from polio, now experimenting with spinal fluid to cure a paralyzed young woman. When a vicious circus ape escapes and is shot, Adrian sees a grim shortcut to the human material he needs — and the killings that follow are blamed on the ape itself. A Monogram horror cheapie that gives Karloff an unusually sympathetic mad scientist. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Mystery

Bela Lugosi at his most committedly absurd: Dr. James Brewster, a scientist whose experiments with ape glands have turned him into a stooped, shaggy ape-man who must harvest human spinal fluid to stay alive. Wallace Ford and Louise Currie play the reporters who stumble onto the story, and Henry Hall wanders through as the creepiest character in the picture — a mysterious man who keeps appearing to comment on events. Shot in a week for Monogram under William Beaudine, it is cheap even by poverty-row standards, but Lugosi plays the degradation with real conviction, and the final twist is genuinely strange. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal of copyright.

Horror · Sci-Fi

The Mad Monster is a 1942 horror film directed by Sam Newfield and produced by Sigmund Neufeld for Producers Releasing Corporation. George Zucco plays Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, a discredited scientist who injects his simple-minded handyman Petro (Glenn Strange) with a serum derived from wolf's blood, transforming him into a werewolf. Cameron unleashes his creation on the colleagues who ruined his career, while reporter Tom Gregory (Johnny Downs) and Cameron's daughter Lenora (Anne Nagel) close in on the truth. A quickie knock-off of Universal's monster pictures, it gave Glenn Strange an early turn as a screen monster before he played Frankenstein's creature at Universal. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Horror · Sci-Fi