Theatrical Release: 1932-02-21 DVD Release: 1992-09-10 Torrent Release: 23-10-2013 by user
Swarm:
0 Seeds & 3 Peers
Movie Genre:
Crime, Horror, Mystery, Romance
Runtime:
61 min.
Parental Rating:
Passed
Awards:
1 win.
Vote:
No votes yet.
DESCRIPTION
Paris, 1845. One day, medical student Pierre Dupin takes his girlfriend Camille to a street carnival where the main attraction is Dr Mirakle and his giant ape Erik. Mirakle has devoted his life to proving that man evolved from the savage ape, and to this end he intends to find a mate for Erik. So far, his experiments have been a failure. He has abducted several prostitutes and injected them with Erik's blood, but on each occasion the human and ape blood fail to mingle and Mirakle's victims die. The bodies of the dead women are fished out of the Seine and arouse the curiosity of Dupin, who makes the bizarre discovery that they died not from drowning but from a kind of blood poisoning. Mirakle is not to be deterred by these failures. Instead, he pays a call on Camille and invites her to visit Erik, who appears to have taken a liking to her. Naturally, the young woman declines the scientist's invitation, so Mirakle has to resort to more extreme measures. One night, Erik breaks into Camille's apartment and, having murdered her mother, hauls her up onto the roof. Pierre must act fast and risk his own life if he is to save the woman he loves from a fate worse than death...
Effective B-movie starring Lugosi as the scientist who kidnaps a girl to use in his experiments to create an ape woman. Based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, though you wouldn't know it, this strikingly beautiful horror flick may not quite be equal to the task of accurately conveying Poe's sophistication and sub-texts, but Lugosi is magnificent, and some of the setpieces are deliciously dark.
There is one truly memorable passage in Murders In The Rue Morgue: the laboratory sequence. Critics and audiences alike were deeply disturbed by the frank sadism inherent in Mirakle’s treatment of the unfortunate Woman of the streets, in which the scientist takes a scalpel to the arm of the fully conscious girl, impatiently hushing her anguished shrieks and pleadings as he examines the resultant tissue under the microscope, then abusing her violently as she hangs dying before him.
The mad doctor's intention is to let Erik rape these captive women for some unspoken, unspeakable purpose. It's as sick as the concept in the old fright-show Alraune, where artificial insemination between degenerates produces a woman without a soul. In this instance, the horror suggests societal taboos and bugaboos that anyone this side of Tod Browning would shrink from presenting on a screen: 1) Rape; 2) Bestiality; and 3) The possibility that Mirakle might be arranging an unholy coupling of woman and beast in order to produce the AntiChrist.
Edgar Allan Poe wouldn't recognize his story, which drops everything but the ape and the t