Starring Kenne Duncan, Duke Moore, Tor Johnson, Valda Hansen, Johnny Carpenter
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
Strange goings on at the house where a mad scientist once created monsters cause the police to send Lt. Dan Bradford to investigate, and he finds a phony spiritualist has set up shop there.
A quasi-sequel to Wood's Bride Of The Monster, this film was never released theatrically as per Wikipedia, Wood never paid off the film lab for the negatives, and it was only in 1984 that businessman Wade Williams paid off the fees and released the film on video. It suffers from minimal sets, overacting by Wood regular Paul Marco as Kelton the cop, and being padded out with unrelated footage from Wood's unsold TV pilot, Portraits Of Terror, which also starred Moore. Despite the movie's failings, I have to admit Moore, as detective Bradford, and Kenne Duncan as fake mystic Dr. Acula, give respectable understated performances. The only times I actually laughed out loud were at Dr. Acula's weak gimmicks, a floating trumpet suspended from wires and a phony ghost walking across the stage accompanied by silly sound effects. Wood's story here is fairly straightforward and although it's not a very good one, it was different enough from his other films to hold my interest, and you can tell he cared about this film. Like his other efforts, I can critique it on one level, but enjoy it on another.
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