The Human Monster aka The Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Here's a weird one. The Human Monster has an atypical, complicated story, a quietly relaxed pace, a wealth of strange details, strong performances, and a dry British sense of humor. It's a little too laidback to pack a real punch (except for a few moments in the final scenes), but I liked its party-of-one eccentricity.

A UK production with a couple of borrowed Hollywood actors, the film is set in London and begins with Scotland Yard detectives investigating a series of mysterious deaths. Single men with no families are turning up dead in the Thames. There are no visible signs of foul play, so suicide is the most likely explanation, but that doesn't sit well with head detective on the case, Larry Holt (Hugh Williams), who is being trailed on the job by a visiting detective from Chicago, Lt. Patrick O'Reilly (Edmon Ryan). There's a running gag throughout the film about how much Americans love guns versus their more sophisticated British counterparts in law enforcement and crime. The U.S. never really changes, does it?

The investigation leads to the office of a former doctor turned insurance agent named Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi). Some of the dead men in the Thames had life insurance policies with Orloff's office. Orloff has records of the beneficiaries of the policies and shows them to the detectives, but the dude is played by Bela Lugosi. You know he's up to some shit, especially when you see him hypnotize people with his eyes. The man has a lot going on.

Orloff, despite being a disgraced doctor who left the profession for the insurance biz under a cloud of scandal, is allowed to be a doctor on call for a home for the blind, run by a blind minister named John Dearborn who looks a lot like Lugosi in sunglasses and a wig (the Dearborn voice is dubbed by another actor named O.B. Clarence). I repeat, the man has a lot going on. Dearborn's and Orloff's assistant at the school, Jake (Wilfred Walter), is a hulkingly enormous blind man with pointy ears and a row of misshapen teeth who groans and grunts a lot.

It's no surprise that Orloff becomes the main suspect in the deaths, especially after the autopsy of the freshest Thames dead man, Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), reveals the water in his lungs as tap water, not Thames water, and his life insurance policy was set up through Orloff's office. 

The audience by this point has already seen Stuart's fate and Orloff's extreme irritation when he finds out Stuart has a daughter living in New York who is about to return to London. The daughter, Diana (Greta Gynt), is enlisted in Scotland Yard's plan to take Orloff down upon her arrival, and she gets a job as a secretary at the home for the blind.

There's an unhurried pace to The Human Monster (except for the final third) that may annoy the nonstop action or nothing crowd, but I enjoy a good slow burn. I like movies that hang out instead of just slamming through plot points, and this movie still gets the job done in 76 minutes. Walter Summers is not enough of a distinctive filmmaker to lift this movie to the heights of '30s horror (a decade packed with classics), but he does a decent job with the material, especially when the craziness revs up in the finale.

Williams and Ryan are fine as the London/Chicago odd couple, who, of course, have a friendly rivalry but respect each other's methods, but Lugosi, Gynt, and Walter are the MVPs of the film. Lugosi gets to play around with a lot of different physical and personality traits, Gynt makes a great undercover agent and damsel in distress (she does an excellent horrified face), and Walter is both frightening and sympathetic, even while buried under makeup, wig, and prosthetics. I also really enjoyed Julie Suedo's small supporting performance as Orloff's secretary. She gives a great nothing-in-this-life-impresses-me look.

I don't have much spiel this time around. This is a solid little movie, and I give it a mild recommendation, especially if you're a Lugosi fan.