House of Mystery USA, NR, 62 m, 1934
House of Mystery is yet another “old dark house” inanity from one of Poverty Row’s most parsimonious players, Monogram Pictures. (A churner-outer of mostly B-grade pap, the studio’s high-speed, almost niggardly approach to moviemaking had something of an influence on—believe it or not—the French New Wave.) Based upon an inconsequential stage show by Adam Hull Shirk, House of Mystery isn’t much of a mystery, but it has some sparkling dialogue and a plum cast that is clearly having a yabba-dabba-doo time with the script’s array of cranks and goofballs. My favorites are Prof. Horatio Potter (Harry C. Bradley), an improbably garrulous bluenose, and his shrewish wife, Hyacinth (Mary Foy). These two provide more than enough comic relief, but we’re also treated to the rapacious doings of Jack Armstrong (Ed Lowry), a life insurance salesman who’s all over the opportunity to make a few bucks in a house where stiffs are piling up like so many johnnycakes on Vito Spatafore’s breakfast plate at Jim’s Diner. The year is 1913. On an outing somewhere in Asia, archeologist and frequent imbiber John Prendergast (Clay Clements) comes across a Hindu temple. As he stumbles inside, a monkey drops on his shoulder, but instead of just shooing the critter away, he dropkicks it over Rainbow Bridge. Dumb move: The worshippers have it in their noodles that monkeys are sacred, so the church’s high muckety-muck calls upon the goddess Kali to put some sort of curse on Prendergast. This so enrages our pie-eyed protagonist that he thrashes the holy man with a riding crop and then makes off with a belly dancer and a fortune in revered artifacts. In the twenty or so years since then, Prendergast has gone into hiding and has shortened his surname to “Pren,” but the dreaded curse of Kali still dogs him. (Though we’re told the belly dancer has taken his hand in marriage, she’s relegated to skulking zombie-like in the background.) The folks who invested in his little expedition are still dogging him, too, and they’ve finally retained a shark to figure out his whereabouts and collect on their piece of the ill-gotten treasure. Well, Pren (who may or may not be faking paralysis) is willing to cut them all in, but on the condition that they spend a week in his cobwebby manor. The curse, it seems, extends to anyone who profits from the number Pren did on the Hindus, and he wants his guests to know how hazardous taking part of that loot could be to their health. What makes a
sleepover at Pren’s place so little fun is that there’s a gorilla there that
likes to pop out of the shadows every now and again to choke off peoples’ lives.
(The mystery, I guess, is if the ape is an expression of Kali’s wrath or if
it’s just a tool in Pren’s scheme to fuck his partners out of their shares.)
The first victim is Geraldine Carfax (Dale Fuller), a moneyed hypochondriac who
gets her neck broken during a blackout; the second is the appropriately named
David Fells (George “Gabby” Hayes, I shit you not), a degenerate gambler who faces
his final curtain while waddling around the estate in a gorilla suit. (That’s
just one of many red herrings, by the way.) Enter three homicide detectives, who
obviously learned everything they know about analyzing a crime scene at the
Keystone Cop Academy. The primary on the case, Ned Pickens (Irving Bacon), is a
loud-mouthed tough, while his subordinates are a couple of goose-stepping
dummies who speak every damned word in unison. It’s supposed to be a
side-splitting routine worthy of the Marx Brothers, but it educes about as much
head-scratching puzzlement as another lame bit in which the houseguests hold a séance
to see if the ghost of Pocahontas (!) can direct them to where Pren has stashed
his fortune. For God’s sake, a lot of this stuff even Abbott and Costello
wouldn’t touch. House of Mystery’s
director, William Nigh, reunited with Monogram several years later for another
go at Shirk’s play, but this time with bankable talents like Boris Karloff.
The result was The Ape, which retained the play’s
title but nary a shred of its plot. Actually, House of Mystery is more of
a precursor to that dreadfully unfunny Ritz Brothers comedy, The
Gorilla. House of Mystery may have the laughs, but The Gorilla
has Bela Lugosi. You do the math. August 25, 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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