Phantom Killer (1942)

Starring Dick Purcell, Joan Woodbury, John Hamilton, Warren Hymer, Mantan Moreland
Directed by William Beaudine
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A prosecuting attorney is convinced a philanthropist is the man behind three murders, but he's a deaf mute, contradicting reports the murderer spoke, and has alibis during the time of each killing.

Monogram Pictures remakes their own 1933 film, The Sphinx, casting John Hamilton in the role played by Lionel Atwill in the original.  As much as I like Hamilton, whose performance as newspaper editor Perry White in The Adventures Of Superman TV series has become iconic, I'll say he plays the part well enough, but can't outdo the performance Atwill gave.  However, for those who haven't seen the original, it's still a solid mystery.  This version of the story seemed to me to also inject a lot more humor into the tale, with Moreland excelling in a small cameo as Purcell's only witness, and Woodbury playing the familiar part of the prosecutor's wisecracking reporter girlfriend with plenty of sass.  However, the sequences with Hymer as a police sergeant trying to stay in the good graces of his combative wife take the comedy a bit over the top, especially when her voice is sped up on the telephone to the extreme.

King Of The Zombies (1941)

Starring Dick Purcell, Joan Woodbury, Mantan Moreland, Henry Victor, John Archer
Directed by Jean Yarbrough
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A government agent, his faithful valet, and their pilot crash land on an island where a mysterious doctor resides and frightening zombies roam the grounds.

Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures delivers a number of horror elements, from the zombies to a graveyard, to Victor's cultured villain with something to hide, but the whole movie's really a comedy vehicle for the always wide-eyed Mantan Moreland.  Although Moreland throughout his career played mainly stereotypical roles which would definitely be looked down upon and criticized today, he had an indisputable comic timing, and talent for delivering rapid-fire jokes, which kept him employed as comic relief on a great number of pictures.  He might have his funniest material in this script, bouncing off the other actors playing their roles as straight as can be, and excelling when hypnotized into becoming a zombie, but definitely not a silent one.  That helps the film flow pretty well, despite Victor's less than compelling villain- Bela Lugosi or John Carradine would have done more with the role.  Despite Monogram's status on Poverty Row, somehow this film earned an Oscar nomination for composer Edward Kay.