The Monster Walks (Frank R. Strayer, 1932)

In a few recent posts, I've commented on the early 1930s being a golden age for the horror film. The Monster Walks is a horror film from the early 1930s, but no one is ever going to mistake it for being part of a golden age of anything. It is a cheap, clunky, stiff, visually unremarkable, lifelessly written product that is fortunately only about an hour long. It has some historical curiosity value, but its flaws are even more apparent when compared to contemporaries like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, and the list goes on.

Borrowing most of its plot from The Cat and the Canary, as well as the same actor, Martha Mattox, playing the slightly sinister housekeeper/caretaker, The Monster Walks begins after the death of Dr. Earlton, a medical researcher who lived with his invalid brother Robert, his housekeeper Emma "Tanty" Krug and her son Hanns, and an ape that was a former research subject turned pet. Dr. Earlton's daughter Ruth, her fiance Dr. Ted Clayton, and their driver Exodus (Willie Best, known in the early '30s as Sleep 'n' Eat, and a pioneering black actor, comedian, and musician who was mostly relegated to Stepin Fetchit-type roles that are pretty cringeworthy to sit through today) make it through a storm to arrive at the Earlton estate for the reading of the will by Dr. Earlton's lawyer Herbert Wilkes.

Long story short, Ruth inherits the bulk of the estate, secretly angering Robert, Tanty, and Hanns, and sinister shenanigans go on the rest of the night. Lives are threatened, lives are ended, ape arms appear in mysterious holes in walls, midnight violin playing occurs, the racism and sexism of white America is on full display, mysteries are solved, the damn ape is in its cage for the whole movie (no ape rampage, WTF?), and slightly more than an hour goes by. Ho hum.

Every character is dull as dirt except for the Krugs and Exodus, and Dr. Ted, our ostensible hero, is a patronizingly sexist ass to his fiancee (though she is soooo boring), an angry racist to Exodus, and a milquetoast dud to everyone else.

I don't have much to say about this movie. It ain't that great, and not much happens. Watch The Cat and the Canary instead. There's no ape, but there's so much more of everything else that makes a movie good.