'Dead Man's Eyes' starts lame but gets better

Inner Sanctum: Dead Man's Eyes (1944)
Starring: Lon Chaney Jr., Paul Kelley, Acquanetta, Jean Parker, Edward Fielding, and Thomas Gomez
Director: Reginald Le Borg
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

David (Chaney) is blinded when he mistakenly puts acid in his eyes instead of eye-wash. When his elderly future father-in-law (Fielding) is murdered after willing David his eyes for transplant, he becomes a prime suspect with lots of motive and no alibi beyond being blind.



Successful crime dramas, thrillers, and horror films usually work because they foreshadow what's coming, be it the obnoxious rich uncle delcaring, "you'll get my fortune over my dead body!" or the weird gypsy woman warning the characters not to go into the woods after midnight. Lack of foreshadowing makes the mystery or horror film feel forced and slipshod, and the wrong kind of foreshadowing makes viewers roll their eyes.

Like the foreshadowing in "Dead Man's Eyes". The main character, David, lives and works in a small studio apartment. It is so small, in fact, that it has only one sink that serves as both kitchen, bathroom, and the place to his brushes. Above the sink is a shelf... where David keeps the eye-wash he uses daily right next to the acid he uses to clean his brushes. And he keeps these two liquids in identical bottles. Right next to each other.

I'm sure you can see the coming disaster that's invariable going to strike, especially given the title of the movie. And, sure enough, one day, David grabs the wrong bottle (maybe by accident, but most likely not, given his model is a South American psycho who is insanely jealous of David's fiancee and madly possessive of him) and pours acid in his eyes instead of eye-wash.

I almost shut the DVD off at that point, because I wasn't in the mood for wasting my time on fodder for Movies You Should [Die Before You] See but wanted to be entertained by something good. And this film was not looking promising.

I'm glad I stuck with it, though. because once it got past the monumentally stupid set-up, it turned into quite the thrilling little mystery, with a nice array of suspects and enough plot twists to keep suspicion on almost everyone up to the end--including the main character, David.

The film is also fun, because of the many strong performances. Acquanetta is great as David's crazy model, and she's also the easy suspect for all the nefarious going-ons in the film. And if the movie had stayed as weak as it began, she would have been the only suspect. But Lon Chaney Jr. also gives a fine performance, one that gives viewers the idea that there's something a little off with his character. The other actors are excellent in their parts too, and, supported by a clever script, they turn what started out as a disaster into a fun viewing experience.

"Dead Man's Eyes" is the third of six movies in the "Inner Sanctum" series. Like the two previous ones, Lon Chaney Jr. gives an excellent performance. It might well be that these films feature Chaney at his best. If you liked him as the reluctant wolfman in Universal Pictures' monster-mash films, you absolutely need to check him out in these pictures.

Is that the smallest continent on Earth?

Lost Continent (1951)
Starring: Cesar Romero, Chick Chandler, John Hoyt, Sid Melton, Whit Bissel and Hugh Beaumont
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

When an experimental missile goes out of control and crashes on an uncharted island, Air Force Major Joe Nolan (Romero) leads an expedition to recover the guidance system and figure out what went wrong. But when the same mysterious rays that caused the missile to go of course also brings down the expedition's plane, Nolan and his team must travel through miles of wilderness, scale a mountain... and find themselves confronted with dinosaurs and other life that has died out millions of years ago elsewhere on the planet. But what is more deadly--the pre-historic creatures, or the man Nolan suspects of being an enemy agent (Hoyt) and of trying to pick off expedition members one by one.


"Lost Continent" is a film with very little to recommend it. It's got a slow-moving story that's made even more slow-moving by what seems like a never-ending sequence of the characters climbing a mountain; I used to think the driving scenes that are popular padding in crappy movies were boring, but scenes of guys pretending to be scaling a mountain on an obvious set are even worse.

Those climbing scenes are doubly-boring when the attempts at generating suspense come from extreme illogic in character behavior and actions. For example, one character is injured early in the expedition, but do the supposedly experienced leader Major Nolan leave him behind in the care of the buxom and friendly young native lass played by a cameo-ing Acquanetta near the end of her brief acting career? Nope, they drag him along on a difficult climb for no reason whatsoever other than to have his injury give rise to him slipping and falling... and ultimately to give grounds to suspect the Russian defector as a double-agent trying to sabotage the mission. It's what "The Eiger Sanction" (review here) might have been like if it had been made by morons.

Then there's the stop-motion animation that gives life to the dinosaurs that menace our heroes. Even allowing for the facts that this is a movie from 1951 and that it was more stock footage like the exterior scenes of the air force base the missile was launched from. However, after taking a quick look at the silent movie version of "The Lose World," where I assumed the dinosaurs had been picked up from, I concluded that the animation was original... just so bad that it made one think it had to state from the early decades of filmmaking. Further, these dinosaurs don't appear until about 3/4th of the way into the film, despite the fact they were a main selling point of the picture.

At every turn, this is a movie that lets the viewer down. Heck, even the promo still I used to illustrate this article has nothing to do with anything that happens in the movie. Acquanetta is never menaced by any flying creatures, as she never sets foot outside the village set.

The Rating of Three I'm giving this film is so low that it borders on a Two. I'm only being as generous as I am, because the actors are actually pretty decent given what they're working with. Plus, Cesar Romero is particularly good as the American officer who knows to be suspicious of a possible enemy agent, but who is intelligent enough not to jump to judgement until he is 100 percent certain that he is right. I always appreciate a movie that features portrayals of military officers as I have known them, not the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoid psychopaths that are so often presented in Hollywood flicks. (Of course, another reason for the portrayal of Major Nolan may be a statement on the part of the filmmakers about the Red Scare that was running through American pop culture and politics at the time this movie was made. While there were reasons to be wary, there were more reasons to be certain before accusing, could be what the movie was trying to say.)

Those few good elements can't make up for the fact that this is a movie that at every turn delivers less than it should. Heck, even the name promises more than the movie delivers. Instead of a lost continent, it presents a mountain valley on an uncharted island.

With Paula, it truly is a glandular problem

Captive Wild Woman (1943)
Starring: John Carradine, Milburn Stone, Lloyd Carrigan, Acquanetta, Evelyn Ankers, Fay Helm, and Ray Corrigan
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A mad genius (Carradine) proves the correctness of his cutting-edge theories in glandular functions by transforming a gorilla into a shapely young woman he names Paula (Acquanetta). Tragedy and death ensue.

The more one watches horror and sci-fi films from the 1940s, the more obvious it is why Universal's attempt to recapture the horror profits that carried them through the depression in the 1930s failed. Too many of the films from this "revival period" are no different than the nonsensical films from small studios like Monogram and PRC; instead of living up to greatness of "The Mummy" and "The Invisible Man," Universal executives and directors instead lowered themselves to the level of those who had followed on their coattails.

When compared to the classics of the 1930s, or even "Ghost of Frankenstein" and "The Wolfman" from the 1940s--something the modern-day Universal marketeers are encouraging us to do by including this film is DVD multipack titled "Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive"--this movie falls woefully short. It's more in the league of low-budget efforts like "The Devil Bat" or "The Monster Maker," just to pick two movies about mad scientists at random. That is a serious step down from the great horror shows of the 1930s.

While disappointing when considered in the light of the cinematic greatness that Universal had once brought to the world, "Captive Wild Woman" is well-acted and well-filmed, with a fast pace to carry us quickly through the story. While Carradine is no Bela Lugosi or Lionel Atwill, he does a decent enough job as the mad doctor at the heart of the story, and the exotic beauty of Acquanetta makes the movie more enjoyable as well. This is not a "classic" in any sense other than it's an old movie, but it's worth checking out if you like the fantastic pulp-fiction science of the early sci-fi and horror flicks.



Trivia: The Universal Studio marketing department nicknamed Acquanetta "The Venezuelan Volcano." Her real name was Mildred Davenport, she was born in Ozone, Wyoming, and was of Arapaho decent with no trace of Venezuela in her blood or family tree.