Format: Internet video on Fire!
Some actors give every role their all no matter what. Even if the movie is terrible, poorly thought out, filled with holes, or just not very good, these actors put their heart and soul into every role they take. It’s one of the reasons I love about Boris Karloff. To be fair, Karloff made a ton of great early creepers, but a lot of them were low rent and low budget and filled with weird science and even weirder mysticism. Regardless, Karloff treated each role like Shakespeare. All of this brings us to The Walking Dead from 1936. This is technically an old-school zombie movie (in that it involves literally the walking dead), but we’re not going to be dealing with flesh-eating ghouls.
At its heart, The Walking Dead is a sort of revenge picture combined with Karloff’s classic Frankenstein role with mob ties to boot. The difference is that rather than being made up of a bunch of stitched-together body parts, Karloff is going to play a man fully resurrected by Science! and seeking revenge on those who had him killed in the first place.
We’re not going to get to the weird science right away with this one. We start in court where Judge Roger Shaw (Joseph King) sentences a man to 10 years in prison. This doesn’t seem important, except that the man he sentences is connected, and Shaw is essentially signing his own death warrant. Crooked lawyer Nolan (Ricardo Cortez), who has lost the case, plans the revenge, giving the job of whacking the judge to assassin Trigger Smith (Joseph Sawyer). However, Nolan has also cooked up a patsy—John Ellman (Karloff), who has just been released after being sent up for 10 years by Judge Shaw. Trigger does the work, Ellman gets framed for it, and winds up on death row.
This happens despite the fact that he has witnesses that he is innocent. These witnesses are Nancy (Marguerite Churchill) and Jimmy (Warren Hull), both of whom work for Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn). They are scared into silence, breaking that silence only when it is too late to prevent Ellman’s execution—but Dr. Beaumont has discovered techniques for keeping organs alive, and he essentially resurrects Ellman after the man is wrongfully electrocuted. When Ellman comes to, he has no memory of his past, but things start coming back to him, particularly the fact that he was framed for a murder he didn’t commit. He also seems to have supernatural knowledge about who precisely framed him.
Now that Ellman is back from the dead, the rest of the film is essentially John Ellman looking for revenge on the men who killed him. In each case, the actual revenge is only partially realized, likely because of the time in which the film was made. I’ll put this under a spoiler tag just to be kind, but since this film is almost 90 years old, the spoilers aren’t really that spoiler-y.
* * * HERE COMES THE WALKING DEAD * * *
In all of the cases of Ellman’s attempted revenge, the person he is getting revenge on essentially kills himself. One person accidentally shoots himself, another steps in front of a train, and the third falls out a window. In each case, Ellman seems to have been a sort of proximal cause. His presence seems to cause the accident even if he doesn’t actually do anything.
* * * AND THERE HE GOES * * *
Because John Ellman doesn’t actually kill anyone, it’s kind of disappointing in terms of actual revenge. In fact, all he really does is look menacing and walk forward with a glower. This is evidently so unnerving that bad things happen around him. <.p> The truth is that The Walking Dead is barely over an hour long, and the really weird stuff aside from a man being brought back from the dead, doesn’t happen until the last 20 minutes or so. It’s easy to get through because it never asks a great deal of its audience. It’s short on thrills and actual horror, aside from the idea of a man returned from the dead having the power to essentially guilt people into dying.
Honestly, there’s not a great deal here, but there’s not supposed to be. It’s a mild spook show, and Karloff acts like he’s getting ready to accept an Oscar. You’ve gotta love that kind of dedication.
Why to watch The Walking Dead: Karloff treats every role like Hamlet.
Why not to watch: The revenge parts of this feel like luck more than plan.
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