1944’s Voodoo Man should not be confused with the Ween song “Voodoo Lady” from exactly 50 years later. One could be forgiven for saying it also shouldn’t be confused with actual entertainment. Even at only an hour long, this is one surprisingly hard watch. Still, I found some value in this. Those not predisposed to watching such films will find this a long slog.
This is a Monogram picture, the product of a studio that many film scholars use as the textbook example of a “poverty row” studio. It isn’t that they couldn’t make an enjoyable movie; in fact, their Mr. Wong series starring Boris Karloff is quite enjoyable. And, as has been proven time and time again by the major studios, money doesn’t ensure real talent on either side of the camera. The issue is more so the restrictions their miniscule budgets put on sets, with pictures such as this one largely confined to six or so spaces, only a couple of which feel like real environments that were occupied by actual human beings before we see them on the screen.
The bulk of the sets are the mansion of Bela Lugosi. Like some sort of architectural mullet, it is plantation mansion on top and voodoo temple below. Another subterranean room is where various robed women are kept, each behind a glass door and facing outwards in a trance, like full-size Barbie dolls in their original packaging. It is a genuinely creepy image.
Those women are essentially zombies, albeit of the old-school, pre-Romero variety. They are the spent shells of their former selves (shelves?), alive but mindless after Lugosi attempts to transfer their life essence to that of his equally zombified wife (Ellen Hall).
It would be neat if what we saw was something like the lifeforce-draining scene in The Dark Crystal. Instead, we get voodoo as imagined by people without reference materials, and who probably wouldn’t have used them, anyway. We’ll see and hear a young John Carradine playing bongos as arrhythmically as the Fremen are taught to walk on the sand in Dune. There’s lots of robed figures, one of whom does things like commanding a rope to tie itself. Now there’s an aspect of such rituals I haven’t seen before. I wonder if this process involves any other cheap magician’s tricks, such as pulling a preposterously long scarf out of an orifice. Heaven forbid it be the same orifice from which I believe the script for this was produced.
Speaking of scripts, this is a curiously meta picture which is essentially bookended by a bit in a movie studio office where screenwriter Tod Andrews receives an assignment to do research for a potential film based on the disappearances of multiple women in the deeply rural area where Lugosi’s doctor resides. Those women are all now those zombies in Lugosi’s basement, and gas station owner George Zucco alerts the doctor to unaccompanied women drivers so that Carradine and fellow henchman Pat McKee set out a fake detour sign. Then, after the women take the faux detour (henceforth “fauxtour”), Lugosi flips on some magical electronic device that disables their vehicle.
That machine is almost as mysterious as however Lugosi is communicating instructions to his henchmen, as he talks through a microphone, but the recipients don’t seem to have earpieces. Then the women are ready to be abducted by creepy toadies, with Carradine always going on about how pretty each new victim is, as if he is Of Mice and Men’s Lenny by way of Manos: The Hands of Fate’s Torgo. I think I’m going to call him “Lengo”.
I’m not sure why electronics were necessary at all, as Zucco’s voodoo priest can do things like summon any woman he wants once he has something belonging to them. That’s how they recapture Louise Currie, who had wandered away when Carradine brought her out of her holding area just to admire her, once again not unlike Torgo in Manos. For that matter, why do they even keep the zombie women around when they no longer appear to be of use after reviving Hall for only a minute or so. At least Hall gets to show some personality in those moments. Otherwise, she just looks bored.
With as much wackiness as happens in this, I couldn’t believe I found myself more than a bit bored as well. That shouldn’t be possible in a picture where you essentially have Lugosi as an evil voodoo mastermind with a harem of zombie women. It establishes a convention of horror cinema with Zucco’s gas station owner as essentially an early version of the “harbinger” trope, even if he is wearing a sweater vest.
I think much of the problem with this movie can be found in such tangents as the unfunny exchanges between sheriff Henry Hall and deputy Dan White, two guys with a curiously urbane and sophisticated manner of dress for being the law out in the sticks. Their conversations are elliptical, with the same phrases said back and forth in minor variations, leading inevitably to nowhere. This burns through much of what is already such a short runtime.
It is things like these that don’t belie a low budget, but a deficit of imagination in a film that is otherwise overflying with glorious insanity. It’s not like there isn’t much too enjoy here, but that it doesn’t focus enough on those traits. When the film wasn’t reminding me of Manos, it was reminding me of a different terrible picture, and that is Plan 9 from Outer Space. It is odd to watch Voodoo Man and think how a worse movie was in Lugosi’s future.
Dir: William Beaudine
Starring Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, George Zucco
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray