Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

oscar-35 I got to review this fine motion picture off 'Creepy Classics' and it was enjoyable. "When the DEVIL commands....Karloff obeys!" is the catch phrase to this film. 1940 film is a semi-forgotten great from Columbia Pictures. A riveting mad doctor movie with Boris trying to communicate and bring back the should of his beloved dead wife. He finds a way to do that with mystical women medium and several corpses. He thinks he can talk to his dead wife. When a vortex to the other side is established. He hears his wife and reads her brain waves to confirm the connection while his daughter looks on in terror. He puts the dead corpses seance members in electronic robot suits and it becomes a electronic-age seance not to be missed.

Michael_Elliott Devil Commands, The (1941) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Boris Karloff plays a scientist working with brain pulses. Once his wife dies he learns that even after death her brain still has these pulses so he tries to contact her. Decent, if not overwhelming, horror thriller features a good performance from Karloff but that's about it. The supporting cast is rather dull and the middle of the film really drags down, which isn't good when you consider the film is only 65-minutes. Worth watching if you're a fan of Karloff but not worthy of $20.

Neil Doyle BORIS KARLOFF is a scientist who wants to communicate with the brain waves of his dead wife. His daughter narrates the tale and concludes with: "It is dangerous to communicate with the dead." That's about the impression the viewer gets after seeing what happens in the course of a brisk one hour and six minutes.Columbia produced this low-budget feature and gave the directing chores to Edward Dmytryk, who would later go on to bigger and better things at RKO. But it's an efficient thriller thanks to his direction and the low-key, shadowy photography that makes the absurd story at least come to life on occasion.Enjoyable too are the performances of ANN REVERE as a sinister housekeeper who knows all about Karloff's experiments and what goes on behind the locked doors of his laboratory; DOROTHY ADAMS as an inquisitive servant who agrees to check out the lab and gets locked inside; and KENNETH MacDONALD as the Sheriff determined to find out who is responsible for all the missing bodies from the graveyard.It's typical Karloff stuff and he lends his commanding presence to the role with more dignity than it deserves. If it emerges as a better than average horror vehicle, it's because director Dmytryk is at the helm, but the script is absurd. The low-budget production values are neatly hidden by all the shadowy photography.

whitec-3 As for another viewer, this film was deposited in my memory banks a generation ago. This morning (4 Sept 2007) the TCM screen stirred that memory, so I taped and replayed the conclusion. The content is thin but the film is short, at least for a grown-up. Karloff is splendid, perfectly absorbed as ever in his character. His role is well supported by the evil medium-familiar woman with regulation severely-pulled-back hair. Dmytryk's touch is in evidence already, as every scene is well composed and lighted.But the reason why the film stuck in my aging memory, and the only reason for it to attract attention, is the stunningly realized seance scenes at the end. As other posters have described, this isn't just any seance: most of the participants have already crossed over, but they look bewitchingly cool sheathed in deco metal suits. (Another poster called them diving suits, but more like space suits you'd find on the covers of Amazing Tales in that era.) In classic seance style, all these suited bodies are seated around a table.As in Frankenstein and so many other movies since, the action in the lab scene mostly involves turning up the juice, which pours through the whole interlinked seance, adding a lot of hypnotic background noise. (And can be defended historically, since Spiritualists often used electro-magnetic metaphors to describe their rapport.)What happens then testifies to a lesson later film-makers probably can't re-learn: nothing is more suggestive than restraint. In two concluding scenes where Karloff finally gets the experiment up and running the way he planned, this well-built seance scenario comes to partial but mesmerizing life. A spinning vortex appears at the bodies' center. The voice of Karloff's dead wife breaks through in a grinding electronica: "Julian!"Then a lovely, unpredictable action: the seance cadavers in their space suits move ever so slightly, bowing toward the vortex in a series of click-actions. Then, when the electricity ceases, they click back into upright postures. Just as the Karloff character hears his wife's voice, something strangely suggestive of life beyond death occurs. The scene lasts only seconds but is repeated for the mob-finale. It's like an Eric Clapton solo, where you're touched less by what is actually played than all that might have been played. The performance stops at its peak moment, launching the audience's imagination in a way that extensions of the scene could never have accomplished.