Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

mark.waltz If there was ever an award for "worst ensemble", this film would have won that prize for 1932. Everybody speaks as if they are reciting a dictionary filled with words they can't pronounce, as if the director was timing each of their lines to reach a certain point When the fastest speaker is "Sleep n' Eat" (aka Willie Best), you know that the film is moving along slower than a snail in a swamp. Had everybody spoken their lines at a normal speed, the film would have been 20 minutes shorter than its hour long running time.This "old dark house" movie utilizes elements already old hat in talkie horror films (an invalid patriarch, a heroine in peril, sinister servants, even a gorilla living in the basement), and you just know that a hair-covered hand is going to pop out of a wall to grab the heroine as she sleeps. A violin playing shadow will instantly make you think of Cloris Leachman in Frau Brucher in "Young Frankenstein".Mischa Auer can't make up his mind whether his character is a slow-witted servant or sinister red herring. He takes the wacko that Dwight Frye played in "Dracula" to a new level of ridiculousness. Vera Reynolds' heroine is so dull and the dialog so non-campy and the identity of the perpetrator so obvious that you will figure it all out within the first 10 minutes of the film.

kidboots Hollywood was still enamoured with the German cinema - even in this little Action Pictures thriller from 1932. An eerie corpse lies in a candlelit room, outside a storm rages and all is presided over by movie's most sinister housekeeper - Martha Mattox. Meanwhile whisperings are going on between wheelchair bound Robert Earlton (Sheldon Lewis) and his menacing hireling Hanns (Mischa Auer).Ruth (Vera Reynolds) has arrived from Europe to learn her father is dead. She is due to inherit the estate, that is, if she lives - if not, it will all come to her Uncle Robert. From the interesting beginning, quite clearly derived from "The Cat and the Canary", the film suffers from massive doses of over acting, Lewis pointedly exclaiming "If only I were not so HELPLESS" and "If only I could WALK" with plenty of shots of Hann's rolling eyes and Ruth saying every ten minutes "Oh Ted, take me away from here"!! Through it all is the maddening screams of Yogi, the ape, caged in the cellar, which is a bit of a problem as it is supposed to possess superhuman strength and be bitterly unforgiving of those that have taunted it but when you finally see it, it is only a chimpanzee and because of all the jungle films around at the time in which chimps were cute and funny, Yogi just doesn't convince.There is also a family secret which Hanns is forever on the point of revealing, especially when he realises that he and his mother, Mrs. Krug, were not that well provided for in the will. Ruth's fiancée, Dr. Clayton (handsome Rex Lease) is also staying there and he is convinced Ruth's hysterics are real and the whole mystery has something to do with the myriad of secret tunnels in the house that Ruth says confused her as a child. Unfortunately another red herring as the viewers see none of the subterranean passages. When Mrs. Krug is murdered it is obvious Ruth was the intended victim and Clayton is determined to get to the bottom of Robert's affliction. I just love the way, in these old chillers, two o'clock in the morning is no deterrent to performing an examination to see if Robert really is wheelchair bound or only "putting it on"!!!There is some awful racist humour involving Exodus (Sleep 'N Eat, which is the name Willie Best originally went by), including a joke about being descended from apes!!! Also Vera Reynolds, a former Cecil B. DeMille star who had seen better days, to me seemed a bit too matronly to be the innocent and easily excitable heroine.

Theo Robertson The concept of the old dark house type of horror movie was very common in the 1930s but died out relatively quickly . This is down to the fact that it's very self limiting but still cast a shadow against the rest of the genre . How many times have you seen a sequence set in a dark house where lightning flashes across the sky and thunder rumbles ? It's become something of a cliché and one wonders how audiences would have reacted when this type of movie was something new ? THE MONSTER WALKS is one of the very earliest old dark house movies and to be blunt it's absolute rubbish . This is not to say it's not entertaining but it should be pointed out that none of the entertainment value is intentional . Whlist James Whale's THE OLD DARK HOUSE is deliberately tongue in cheek keeping with the director's sense of humour this film is funny for all the wrong reasons A good example of this happens in the opening credits where one of the cast members is credited as " Sleep n Eats "a pseudonym for actor Willie Best . It's fashionable for African Americans to use a made up name such as Snoop Dog or 50 Cents but Sleep n Eat ? I bet Willie Best didn't pick that name . As you can imagine being African American he speaks in a stereotypical manner as in " Where da dead man dat "which if nothing else relives the tedium In fact the rest of the cast do their best to out do one another by giving the most dreadful , stilted wooden performances you can never hope to see in a movie with only Sidney Bracey giving any sort of accetable performance as the polite English sounding butler . As for the rest of the movie it would have been totally forgettable if this wasn't a film that was so bad it's almost good

Polaris_DiB The set-up of this movie is very simple--a bunch of people in a house, trying to be scary. Add an ape to good effect. Here's the idea: a woman and her fiancé return to her childhood home after the death of her father, who was a scientist. Her uncle, his wife, and their son reside there as tenants and housekeepers, and they all want the money the young woman inherited. Thus, they do the usual thing a mismatched group of spurned relatives do in this situation: plan to kill her, framing the dead scientist's angry ape as the murderer. Of course, they're really bad at it, so it doesn't really work out very well.Even though this movie was very low budget and the plot was slim, it still could have been a lot better. The direction jumps from exposition to action with very little consideration for timing, which means both fall flat and ultimately the whole set-up is given away too early, ruining any chance of suspense or horror. It's also not worth it to expect good acting from these kind of productions from this era, but on the other hand, only the black man and the messed-up son seemed to have any character. Also, is it a little wrong to ask that the movie have something to do with the title? But worst (or perhaps best) of all, this movie does feature one very memorable scene: the worst attempt at murder EVER. Tell me, how does chaining a woman to a pole and whipping a monkey cage work to off the woman, especially when one is on a time limit? Wonderful b-movie absurdity leads to situations like that, which are very fascinating not only because they're poorly done, but you have to wonder who thought up the scene in the first place! --PolarisDiB