The Undying Monster was the first and least of three horror films made by director John Brahm for Twentieth Century-Fox in the 1940s (the others were The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), both featuring the tragic Laird Cregar) but it’s still a fun, if derivative, Gothic romp. It was Fox’s most blatant attempt to hitch a ride on the Universal horror bandwagon. It also anticipates some of the feel of the studio’s later Sherlock Holmes adventures, a series which had itself been initiated at Fox when Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce had been cast in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (both 1939) and which Universal had taken over two months before The Undying Monster was released with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.
Based on the 1922 novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, it tells the story of the British Hammond family who have been living under the yoke of a curse since the time of the Crusades, a curse which has resulted in family members dying or committing suicide under mysterious circumstances. Oliver Hammond (John Howard) is apparently attacked by a mysterious creature on a windswept cliff-top and Scotland Yard scientists Robert Curtis (James Ellison) and Christy (Heather Thatcher) arrive at the gloomy old family mansion to help get to the bottom of it. When Helga Hammond (Heather Angel) is kidnapped, but Curtis and the police reveal the culprit – it’s Oliver himself, the latest in a long line of Hammond werewolves.
Proceedings get off to a flying start with Lillie Hayward and Michel Jacoby’s script economically setting up the background to the family and their curse before we head off for a spooky dash around an impressive cliff-top set in search of the missing Oliver. Brahm brings his customary visual flair to a rather so-so story, often going for the unexpected camera angle or unusual bit of staging. He races through the script’s meager 62 minutes at a breathless clip, leaving us little time to question how unoriginal it actually is.
The photography by Lucien Ballard, who worked again with Brahm on The Lodger as well as Stanley Kubrick‘s The Killing (1956) and the classic westerns Ride the High Country (1962), Hour of the Gun (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), True Grit (1969) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), is a highlight, Ballard bringing a touch of film noir spookiness to the Gothic sets created by Lewis H. Creber and Richard Day. Ballard The Undying Monster certainly looks marvellous even if it has nothing particularly new to say.
Brahm is helped no end by an enthusiastic cast who attack their roles with real gusto. Refreshingly, the film finds strong roles for its female leads – the result of having a female co-writer no doubt – with Heather Angel’s Helga rushing headlong into the action in search of her imperiled brother at the outset and Thatcher is a hoot as the supposed comedy sidekick (“this place is colder than a tax collector’s heart”) but who turns out to be even more methodical and scientific minded than her partner in detection. The male leads are less interesting but no less enthusiastically acted with Bramwell Fletcher – the archaeologist driven made when Boris Karloff went for his “little walk” in The Mummy (1932) – taking the honours as the family doctor who has been aware of the curse and was trying to cure Oliver before the secret was revealed.
The Undying Monster is little more than a clone of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) (it even comes with its own cautionary poem recited by fearful the family retainer played by Halliwell Hobbes: “When stars are bright, on a frosty night, beware the bane, on the rocky lane”) with a dash of Fox’s own The Hound of the Baskervilles thrown in for good measure but it’s a fun film nonetheless, one which drips with Gothic eeriness from every pore. Brahm would do his best work in the genre with The Lodger and Hangover Square before jumping ship for Columbia where he made the House of Wax (1953) knock-off The Mad Magician (1954).
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