1993’s Murders in the Zoo is pre-code horror picture, and you’ll know it is when a guy turns to the camera and you see his mouth has been sewn shut, and so crudely that there’s a fair amount of blood as well.

This happens to the unfortunate guy who tries to put the moves on the wife (Kathleen Burke) of Lionel Atwill.  All these characters had been in the jungle, where he had been trapping animals for the zoo.  One would think prospective suitors would think again when considering hitting on the spouse of a vengeful trapper of big game, yet there’s John Lodge next in line, as he tries to make time with Burke on the return voyage. 

Odd aside: we didn’t see Lodge’s character before the scene on this ocean liner, so did he just happen to meet her there?  He wasn’t in the jungle scene which opens the film, so I can only assume this is the case.  Damn, but that girl gets around quickly.  Then again, one wonders what she ever saw in Atwill, who does not seem to have any endearing traits.

Lodge will be dispatched in the midst of a formal dinner in the room at the zoo where the big cats are displayed.  Curiously, he is killed by a snake bite while in the cat room.  Burke will later discover this was accomplished by Atwill through use of a severed mamba head he keeps wrapped in a handkerchief until it is needed.  I am still bothered by questions as to whether the venom would have eventually dried up or if it could even be delivered through the fangs post-mortem.  At the same time, I didn’t care enough to investigate these matters later.

You may be wondering why this dinner was held where it was, and that’s because this is a publicity stunt organized by new PR man Charles Ruggles.  This actor must have been a very popular comedian at the time, as he is top-billed and has waaay too much screentime for a minor character should has clearly been shoehorned-in.  Also, typical of many of that era’s top laugh-getters, his spastic, stuttering antics fare poorly today. 

Further muddling what should have been a straight-forward horror plot is a romance between two people are little more than young and attractive, those being Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick.  He is some sort of scientist for the zoo, doing tasks like milking venom from a mamba to produce anti-venom.  I like to think the snake is considering a different, and far more natural way, to give Scott a fangful of its poison, and in a more personal manner.

The extraction process looked very uncomfortable for the snake.  I don’t know if that would be regarded today as abuse, but there are a couple of other scenes that are unacceptable.  Especially appalling to me is a climatic scene in that cat house, where the gates are opened and the beasts largely turn on each other.

But it is really snakes that are the star animals of this picture, since the severed head of one is Atwill’s chief murder weapon.  Scott will do some forensic work involving snakes though, alas, not by trying to get fingerprints from them.  There’s also a bit with a boa constrictor dispatching a character and I wondered how they managed to film that without anybody getting hurt. 

The zoo is closed for the day after one of the titular Murders in the Zoo and I was amused by how an outraged kids yells, “we ain’t afraid of no snakes!”  However unlikely, I like to think this phrase entered the public consciousness, only to be updated by Ghostbusters a half-century later.  There are a couple of other lines that caught my attention, as they seemed like strange sexual euphemisms.  One is a character saying they have “a pulsing lump of gratitude in my throat.”  Even weirder is when Atwill asks his wife, “You don’t think I spent the evening with an 8-foot mamba in my pocket, do you?”  Just imagine if the kids of the day had adopted that as a catchprase.

Dir: A. Edward Sutherland

Starring Charles Ruggles, Lionel Atwill, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott

Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray set Universal Horror Collection Volume 2