The Corpse Vanishes

NOVEMBER 21, 2007

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (BUDGET PACK 2!!!)

Like quite a few of the movies on the Horror Classics set, The Corpse Vanishes is probably best known as an episode of MST3k than anything else. But I haven’t seen that episode, since it wasn’t on Sci-Fi (I never had Comedy Central until the show made the switch). And it must be a “short” episode, since the movie’s only an hour long.

Well it starts off promisingly, with a bride dying just before saying “I do”, which momentarily had me thinking the film was a fantasy and not a horror movie. But then Bela Lugosi showed up, so my fears were abated. He plays a guy who poisons brides and uses their blood to restore beauty to his own wife. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think they ever explain why he had to go to such lengths to get only brides at the altar. I say again, do these cities not have homeless people?

There’s a few highlights, particularly a “chase” scene in which the bad guy follows the heroine, all the while gnawing at a giant chicken drumstick. How fucking awesome would it be if, in the middle of chasing some bimbo through the woods, Jason Voorhees suddenly took a huge bite out of a hamburger? Amazing.

Speaking of the heroine, she is the most resilient woman I have ever seen. So driven in her quest to get a good story (she’s a reporter), she never seems fazed by any of the bad things that happen to her; often going right back into reporter mode as soon as she wakes up from being drugged or knocked out. It’s pretty admirable. Or badly written.

The ending of the film is pretty hilarious. Like many an old tyme movie, there is little to no epilogue or wrapup. Instead, after the villains are dispatched, we fade to the heroine getting married, while her boss announces that she is retiring from the paper. Then her photographer smells the poison orchid that all the brides died from, and presumably dies. The end. What the?

So far the Horror Classics set has underwhelmed me (and, bad news for HMAD readers, I have already seen a lot of the good ones, like White Zombie, Carnival of Souls, and Nosferatu, not to mention public domain horror collection staple Night of the Living Dead). Granted I don’t expect much from these things, but I’d like a couple on par with the inanity and lovably terrible nature of your Scream Bloody Murders and Devil Times Fives. I might have to jump onto Decrepit Crypt sooner than planned.

What say you?