VOODOO MAN (1944)
Article #141 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 8-4-2001
Posting date: 12-18-2001

A man tries to revive his dead wife by kidnapping women who drive on the road alongside his house (he uses a fake detour sign and ambulatory bushes to trap them), and using voodoo to transfer their life essences into the corpse of his wife.

This is, I believe, the only movie to feature Bela Lugosi, John Carradine AND George Zucco (unless you think George is in RETURN OF THE APE MAN somewhere). It would have been nice if the script had been fashioned to put all three stars to their best use: unfortunately, only Bela gets a good role, and both Carradine (as a blithering idiot) and Zucco (as an evil gas station attendant) are woefully miscast. The goings-on are pretty silly, as you would expect from Monogram. And even though the plots are significantly different, there’s something about the movie that strongly reminds me of THE CORPSE VANISHES; maybe it’s the presence of someone who looks like George Eldredge who played the role of Mike in that movie. At any rate, I wonder what kind of movie they could have made had they tailored a script to fit all three actors rather than wasting two of them.