Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch every zombie movie ever produced. Yes, all of them. How many is that? The current total is more than 600, and we will try to watch them in order of release date, with a few flash forwards for fun. We look forward to watching zombie cinema evolve and become what it is today. I'm John, and I'm joined by my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. Join us for this journey to see which of us makes it to the end alive. Hello, Andy. Hello, Brad. How are we doing today?

Hello, John.

Doing well.

Hello, listeners. I would like to make a clever quip about this movie, but it exhausted me and I don't have the energy for it.

Was it's one hour runtime too much for you, John?

It was overwhelming. And the movie, by the way, is Bowery at Midnight from 1942 starring Bela Lugosi and our new favorite actor, Jeff Archer, who is featured in our brilliant last episode, King of the Zombies. I will say he does do a little bit of acting in this movie. So that was sort of the highlight for me.

This movie had acting in it.

Yeah, it had some acting in it. Any trigger warnings on this one, Andy?

You know, there's not too much to report this time, John. This movie features, you know, your usual shenanigans, you get some murders, you get a guy falling off a roof, another excitement. But none of it is graphic and there's nothing too disturbing, I think. And this movie avoids the pitfall that several, many, most, maybe all of our previous watches have done of being filled with racist content by just not having anyone who isn't white in the film. So take that for what it is, I guess.

I will say, though, I think despite our lack of trigger warnings, I think it was kind of lowbrow and salacious at the time. We're going to get into some gnarly zombie movies eventually. And I just wonder what somebody from 1942 thinks of Dawn of the Dead from 1978. You know what I mean? But anyway, there's nothing here. There's just some, there's shootings. It's everything you could see on the TV.

It did receive a certificate from the producer's code. So it was acceptable to the censors at the time.

All right. Yeah, I have some feelings. I think that producer's code had some influence on some weird things in this movie, but we'll get to those things.

I'm eager to hear all of this, John, because I didn't pull anything quite so interesting out of this film, by the way. No, I am looking forward to this one. This one, this was an odd movie viewing experience. So I'm actually really excited to talk about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So Brad, do you want to give us the rundown on when this film came out? And what else was going on in the Hollywood world?

Bowery at Midnight was released on October 30th, 1942. The big movies of this year were Bambi, Mrs. Miniver and Yankee Doodle Dandy. It's the second film we have watched released by Monogram Pictures. And we should take a moment to note that Monogram was a prolific producer of low-budget films. They did King of the Zombies, which was our last film. And they were part of a section of Hollywood called Poverty Row. And that was the term used to describe small independent studios making low-budget films.

Interesting.

Republic Pictures is another Poverty Row studio you may have heard of.

I don't want to interrupt you too much, but Jeff Archer, my new favorite actor, is in this movie. He was in King of the Zombies. I assume he was like in contract with Monogram and just made all their movies. He was like the leading man type they had. Yeah.

This falls under the category of questions you asked me that I didn't anticipate researching.

Sorry, sorry. I was just more musing than anything else.

So Bowery at Midnight was directed by Wallace Fox and written by Gerald Schnitzer. Fox directed mostly low-budget films, including nine East Side Kid films for Monogram. And the East Side Kids, if you haven't heard of them, were comedy films and they later became the Bowery Boys, which were my dad's favorite films growing up. And that was initially a monogram product.

Interesting.

The cast includes two actors from previous Zombie films. As you mentioned, Bela Lugosi returns to our podcast. He was in White Zombie from our third episode. And John Archer, who was the hero in King of Zombies in our last episode, is also in this film as the hero.

All right.

The rest of the cast is an experienced cast, though without any big names. But Wanda McKay, who plays Judy, starred in many monogrammed films, but she was also married to Hoagie Carmichael.

Now, let's assume our audience doesn't know who Hoagie Carmichael is.

Let's assume your co-host doesn't know who that is.

John, would you care to fill us in?

Oh, I was trying to hide the fact that I didn't know who Hoagie Carmichael was, and I'd only remembered the name.

It's all a sham, folks. Yeah.

Carmichael was a very successful Tin Panelli songwriter. He had over 50 hits, but his most famous song is George On My Mind, which Ray Charles released in 1960.

Oh, wow.

Huh.

Now, did you notice in the credits that Glenn Glenn was the sound engineer?

I did. It's Glenn with one N and Glenn with two Ns. It's the sound engineer. Does that mean something?

Well, you've seen that name a lot.

Yeah.

Because Glenn Glenn Sound was a company formed in 1937, and they did sound recording or post-production for many TV shows and movies. In fact, all the Star Trek original episodes, the original series were Glenn Glenn Sound, I Love Lucy was Glenn Glenn Sound, The Brady Bunch.

So that's not a name, it's the name of a business.

Well, Glenn Glenn was one of the co-founders.

Okay.

So it is his name. But I guess growing up, I saw the name in the credits all the time and it was as a company. So I didn't really realize it was a real person.

It was the busiest man in Hollywood, was Glenn Glenn. But it turns out he had people who work for him.

He died pretty young, I think, in the 50s. So he wasn't around for all the stuff that we watched. But the company was later absorbed by other companies. But they did do four of the six original cast Star Trek movies.

That's cool.

So quick question, guys. I don't know a whole lot about Bela Lugosi's career. But in this movie, part of Bela Lugosi's role is playing a kindly, gentle, quiet, and even somewhat charismatic person, very far removed from the pretty much just Satan roles that he's been playing in some of the other movies we've seen.

No weird eyebrows, no forked beard.

I'm just curious, do you guys know if Bela Lugosi ever made any sort of stabs at non-horror roles?

I don't know.

I know that in the 30s, he wrote letters trying to get out of these roles, saying he can do more. And the agents and the studios kind of felt, no, this is who you are. He was in a movie with Greta Garbo in 1939 called Ninotchka. He wasn't a lead role and he played a stern commissar, I'm reading from Wikipedia. And he had a couple other small parts in major films, but he was mostly relegated to these B movies where he played who we come to know.

Yeah, and where was he in his career trajectory when this film came out?

So this movie is 42 and his last film was Plan 9 from Outer Space in 57.

Which is on our list.

Which is on our list. So he did about a movie a year, on average between 42 and 1957 with Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Yeah.

Okay, so he's got a good ways to go then.

Yeah, but he might have peaked is my suspicion. We might be seeing...

That's what I was kind of wondering, if we're seeing him, is he starting to slide down the far side?

In the public consciousness, he kind of peaked with his first role as Dracula, right? That's what he will be remembered for.

And when he did movies with Boris Karloff, Karloff got top billing over Bela Lugosi.

That's a bummer.

All right, thanks for that context, guys. John, do you want to fill us in on what was happening historically at the time this film came out?

Yeah, so one of the questions I had about all of these movies is, if we talk about a modern film, it's often, I mean, you know more about this than I do, Brad, but the release date and the production dates are very different. Sometimes they're separated by two years, sometimes a year and a half. I looked this up on this movie because I was curious about this very question. This movie came out in October of 1942, and production started according to Wikipedia, which may not be correct, in 1942, August 3rd. So that is a production time of two months for a movie. But here's why I think that's important, is that you could take a movie from 2020 and say, well, what was happening in 2018? The world is moving so fast, maybe it's different. But in 1942, we're talking two months. This really is a movie that's not a thing here, right? Like the production of the movie accurately reflects, is very close to the release of the movie, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, very interesting.

Well, I think this is an example of it being a low-budget film. This company was known for shooting in like a week or two weeks. If you look at the sets, there's no ceilings. It's just high walls that disappear off the top of the frame. They probably did one or two takes and moved on. That's why it was done so quickly and so cheaply.

Okay, that makes sense. So obviously, the big thing is we're at war with both Germany and Japan, and I guess technically Italy. And we have a lot of fear of immigrants at this time, right? If you were from Italy, Germany or Japan, you had to register yourself. We don't need to revisit that here, but there were concentration camps for Japanese people. So people like Bela with an accent were maybe a little bit suspect. The draft age was lowered to 18, so now we've got a lot of young men going to war. But further, the name of this movie is Bowery at Midnight. And just a little context for the Bowery, it is a place on Manhattan. And it's kind of like saying Red Light District is a strong term, but it's kind of like the dive part of Manhattan. Even up through the 70s, it was like, let's go here for a dive bar or a cheap movie or to buy drugs or whatever. So the people depicted in this movie, they call themselves transients or vagrants, but we would call them unhoused now. But there are a lot of down on their luck people. And I think that was a real thing in the Bowery at this time. So I think that part of this at least reflects reality because that's part of the context.

Yeah, we get kind of two interesting elements in this movie that I wondered if they were linked to the historical situation of the Bowery. We have, you know, I mean, most of it takes place in basically like a soup kitchen, but one that offers some medical and other additional services as well. I'm curious how common a site that sort of organization would be.

One of the transients in the beginning makes the comment, hey, let's go to this place. It's much better than all the other places, because they are not trying to shove a Bible in my hand. So I feel like that is a pretty. Now I want to, the next thing I want to look up is, when did the Salvation and where did the Salvation Army start? Because I feel like the Friendly Mission has a Salvation Army vibe.

Yeah. My other question was just that this, because this movie really centers around the activities of a criminal theft gang. I'm just curious if there was anything exciting happening in the news about gangs or theft rings.

If there's not a ton, I'm sort of speculating here, but let me say if there's not a ton of real mob stuff still going on, I feel like America's cultural memory would remember that there was, right? Because we're not that far from Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd and all that stuff where gangsters were almost kind of celebrities. So I think fear of organized crime is still a huge fear in the United States.

Okay.

In a way that it isn't for us in modern day.

Yeah.

The Salvation Army was formed in the 1800s.

Never mind that.

Late 1800s.

Okay.

So I don't know what I'm talking about. But the place has that sort of, it has the soup kitchen vibe. And my understanding is there were a lot of soup kitchens in the Bowery.

Why don't we start, John, as we often do, by taking a look again at the movie poster? John, could you just describe the poster for our listeners?

I have a question about the poster. It almost looks colorized. So what it is, it says Bowery at Midnight, and it's got Bela Lugosi's sinister face at the top. We've got our heroine, who we didn't know at the time, Judy, and then all the other sort of, there are many other minor characters appearing here, but they're all colorized in sort of different colors and the Bowery at Midnight lettering is, I mean, there's a purple person and a green person, and the Bowery at Midnight is like that sort of horror movie script, right? It's like jagged letters that look like they were brush painted or something. And then it just says Bela Lugosi, really large, and then with John Archer.

It's interesting, these posters that have lots of pictures of the characters from the film. In this case, it looks like a selection of clip art, or they just pasted a bunch of pictures. If you think of the poster for Star Wars, it shows the ensemble, the cast of characters all in one kind of coherent painting.

Yeah, it's cohesive. This is like, yeah, cut and paste, which it probably literally was, right? It's probably like colorized photos that were cut out and slapped together. My final thought is there is a man with a cigarette pulling a gun out. So clearly this is about crimes, is the only thing I'll say, that we learned from the poster.

I don't get a zombie vibe from this poster, do you?

No, no, I barely got a zombie vibe from the movie. So I think that's a great place to start, yes.

Okay, so Bowery at Midnight opens. As the credits roll, we are getting some footage of an urban scene that I think, I mean, it's the Bowery, so this is supposed to be New York, although I didn't really see much effort here to get in any iconic New York locations. Did I miss anything?

No, it's just like an urban street.

Yeah, which is surprising because, I mean, surely stock footage would have been easy to come across, right?

I think that they had to put Bowery and Midnight in the title because it's not generic street USA.

And the thing that I actually noticed here was what we didn't get at the beginning of this. And this movie does not feature any drums or jungles.

No.

So that has been the drums in particular has been the audio cue through an awful lot of these movies to signify strange, scary, not from the US. But we don't get that at all here.

So one thing, and I think it speaks to the low-budget nature of this movie is we went to Bob Hope's Ghost Breakers, which seemed like a pretty decent production value. And King of the Zombies was not a great movie, but the production values were a little higher than this one. This one feels like we've gone back to the beginning, late 30s, early 30s from a production value standpoint.

Yeah, absolutely. So the movie starts in earnest. And just as a warning here, I'm going to talk about some scenes in detail, and I'm going to gloss over a lot of other things. Because first of all, it'll be hard to keep all of this straight and make it comprehensible to you, the Whistler. It's for an hour long movie, there's kind of a bewildering amount of stuff packed in here.

But yeah, which I kind of liked in a way, but let me say this, I could follow this better than I could follow the plot in The Ghost Breakers. Like I could tell you, did it, did it, did it. Like here's all the things, because everybody's talking about it all the time.

Yeah.

Then we did this, then I'm here, then I did this.

This was the first movie I haven't been able to turn subtitles on. It just wasn't an option on the service I was watching. And so I had a hard time with the audio on this. It just has that sort of murky old audio vibe to it. So, and I, and that kept me from catching character names. Yeah.

It took a little while to, but they are there.

Yes. So it, the movie opens in earnest with a scene at a jail. You see a bunch of prisoners are being shuffled into their cells, presumably after a day of whatever it is that prisoners did in the 1940s. And as everyone else is getting sent back to their cell, one prisoner manages to take advantage of the chaos and he escapes. And this, we'll learn his name later. His name is Fingers Dolan, which is a great hoodlum name. Yeah.

I could kind of, they sort of are telegraphing what Fingers special ability is. He's like a criminal superhero.

Yeah. So he's skulking around and avoiding the police. And while he's doing so, he overhears some-

Can I interject one thing here?

Please.

Here's probably the last really genuinely nice thing I say about this movie. But maybe there'll be more. I don't know. I don't want to limit myself. I do like that it starts kind of like Zack Sanders, Dawn of the Dead. We start in media res. We are in the middle of the action. This guy's breaking out of prison. He leaps a wall. Some guy's changing a tire. He clubs that guy and steals his car. I have to say just the first couple of minutes, maybe I'm a sucker, but it does kind of work and draw me in right at the beginning.

Well, I agree with you, John, actually. Until... I think that is a good point. And what's also interesting is Fingers is not going to be the protagonist of this film, which is contrary to what you would expect from the setup here.

Yeah, like I would expect they start with the major characters and they talk for a while and they set all them up, and then you get to the scene. But I kind of like that they go right to this scene and tell us we're in a visceral criminal movie.

Yeah, and we learn Fingers is in a minute is going to stumble into the real story that's going on. And then he will, you know, spoilers if you haven't watched this and you really want to have it unspoiled, now would be the time to do it. But yeah, he will be leaving us pretty soon. But yes, let me get back to it, though. So Fingers, while he's milling around, trying to avoid being recaptured by the police. So he overhears some transients talking about the best place in town where you can go to get some food with no questions asked, which seems pretty important to an escaped criminal like Fingers. So he makes his way to the Friendly Mission is what it's called.

That's right.

And this is a big soup kitchen in the Bowery that serves food and also offers some medical services. They have a nurse on staff who's going to be an important character. So when he gets to the mission, we are introduced to the biggest name in this film. Bela Lugosi and I didn't recognize him at first. I know. Tell us about Bela Lugosi as we first kind of meet him in this movie.

He has his hair slicked back. He is not wearing any sort of weird prosthetics. There's no forked beard. There's no gigantic eyebrows. And he's standing behind a table next to a pot of soup, and he is serving people and welcoming him to this kitchen. And I had this moment where like this is a kind of convincing sort of warm, friendly. I mean, it's the 19, it's 1942. He's not winning an Oscar here, but he was plausible as a friendly, warm person for the first time ever in a movie that I've seen him in.

Yeah, I agree. That was my impression as well. And at this point in the movie, we know him as Mr. Wagner, the owner of the friendly mission. We're going to learn a little bit later that there's more to his identity here than we know yet.

I'd just like to interject here that my favorite pulpy fantasy author is a man named Carl Edward Wagner, who spells it the same way, so I couldn't stop thinking about that the entire time. It's Carl with a K and Wagner.

Yeah.

Okay.

So yeah, Wagner is this kind, gentle man who owns the mission, and he invites fingers into the back room for a cigar. And then this is the first time that we learned that there's something a little bit more going on here at the friendly mission than we are led to believe, because he reveals that he knows who fingers is, and meaning he knows that fingers is a criminal, and presumably that he's escaped. And so we already know there's more to Wagner here than we know. Let's hear him assuring a very nervous fingers.

Real Havana. I hope you enjoy it. Fingers. Fingers? I'm sorry, mister. You must think I'm somebody else. No, I don't. I have known you and your work for a long time. I tell you, you've got me quite wrong. You've got your wires crossed. I don't think so. Don't worry. I'm your friend.

All right. So that's pretty suspicious right there. And shortly after that, Wagner invites fingers into there's several. He has a back room office and then he there's like at least two other layers below this one that he invites you in. Depending on how deeply you're getting drawn into a secret world, I guess, is how far into the layer you get invited.

Yeah, you get to the secret back room and then from the secret back room you can go into the secret cellar. And my favorite part about the secret cellar is the secret cellar door is half hidden by a giant map of Australia.

Oh, there's a lot of great details like that.

I'm like, is that important to the plot that it's a giant? It's not no other and nothing. It's just a map of Australia.

Yeah. So he invites fingers back and I like it shows that Wagner has this filing cabinet that is implied to be full of dossiers on people, criminals, right?

Yes.

So that's kind of weird. So he invites fingers back and they're joined by, he introduces him to a couple of people that are gonna be kind of important for this movie. One is we learn that Wagner has a really creepy doctor on staff. And did you catch this guy's name? Because I don't have it written down in my notes.

They just call him Doc.

Doc, okay, yeah. Tell us about the Doc, John.

The Doc looks like a mad scientist. Actually, you know what he looks like? He looks like a combination of a mad scientist and a mad scientist assistant, like all in one. You know what I mean? Like he sort of has the crazy hair and stuff, and clearly he does experiments, but he also sort of lurches around like Igor. Like he's a strange man, and he's clearly a drug addict. The other character we meet gives him some drugs that he calls his prescription, and he swears he knows what to do with them because he's a doctor, but they make it very clear that he's out of his mind and addicted to something.

Yeah. Several characters who see the doc ask something along the lines of, is he really an actual doctor?

Is he an actual doctor?

So I think the implication here is that maybe he helps run that little health clinic side of the mission, but he's obviously way too much of a weirdo here for that to be the entirety of what he's doing here. And we'll certainly learn that that's the case later.

Yeah.

And I wanted to say also, so might as well talk about the doc now. We'll see him more as the movie goes on, but he is kind of an innocent. He has a sort of, innocent is not the right word, but he does a little cackling in this movie, but he is not... He's like naive. Yeah, he's not pictures like an evil person, so much as that he seems just kind of delusional, and he can be kind of nice, and he has a sort of naivety about him that I found a little bit charming in a couple of scenes.

Yes. He's very strange in that way. Like he... Well, we'll get into it, but he does weird stuff, but he's also very nice to the nurse who we're going to meet shortly as well.

So we have this creepy doctor roaming around, and we are then introduced to one other important character this is Stratton, who is obviously a criminal. And John, we might as well pause here. It takes quite a while while you're watching the movie to put all the pieces together, but I'm just going to sum up what the deal is with Wagner here, so that you, our listeners, can follow. Wagner's deal is that he is running this mission as Carl Wagner, but he's living a double life. In his sort of other normal life, he is a college professor named Professor Brenner, and he's happily married. Well, sort of happily married. He's married.

He's not unhappy.

He teaches courses that appear to be about psychology, but his real deal is that he is running a criminal ring using the friendly mission as a front. So what Wagner does is he recruits pretty much expendable thugs that are in a tight spot, and he recruits them. He uses them to do a job, and the crime he does is he robs stores.

Yeah, jewelry stores, I think, are the two crimes we see.

Yeah, and so he recruits desperate criminals like Fingers, who don't have much of a choice here, and he sort of invites slash courses them to join his gang. They come to Bad Ends, which we're going to get to in a little bit, but that's what's going on here. So Bela Lugosi is the villain of this movie, but it is it. I will credit this movie that they do not really lean into Bela Lugosi's really famous Dracula style of ominous acting at all.

When he was in White Zombie, we zoomed in on his eyes. He was mesmerizing you. It was like a clearly sinister thing. He's plausibly nice at the beginning, and then it sort of becomes apparent that he's a coronal mastermind. I wasn't shocked, but he's not a total weirdo.

So they bring Fingers into the gang. Fingers is invited into the gang, and they reveal that they already have an operation, a heist planned, that Fingers is going to help them with. Fingers is a safe cracker. That's the type of crime he specializes in, and he is going to help them on their next heist. So let's listen to the three of them planning their little criminal heist.

Look, you birds, I know I'm not as quick as I used to be, but these, these are still quick, aren't they? Sure. Are we gonna crack a box tonight? Mr. Stratton, don't be so cruel. You mean you lay out a job, chase the place, can I tune the dial? The language is rather picturesque, but the meaning is perfect.

So they're going to go to a nearby jewelry store, and they're gonna rob it.

There is something oddly pleasurable about criminals using potentially made up slang for what they're doing. It's supposed to, I think, be edgy in 1942, but it's comfortingly hilarious.

Yeah, are you talking about crack a box? Are we gonna crack a box tonight?

Crack a box, yeah, we're gonna crack a box. Look you birds, we're gonna crack a box tonight. It's just kind of endearing in a weird way.

Call your friends, here's your challenge, call your friends birds next time you see them. Let's see how they react. So we move on to the scene of the crime where Brenner, or I'm sorry, so I'm gonna probably call the Bela Lugosi's character alternately by his two different names, but Wagner is his criminal kind of persona and Brenner is his regular person, professor persona. So Wagner, Fingers and Stratton break into a jewelry store, but we quickly learn that once Fingers has done his job cracking the safe, Wagner doesn't plan to keep him around. So let's hear one more audio clip of Fingers finding out what's going to happen to him.

Fingers, it's his job, now it's your turn to threaten. Fingers? You heard what I said. But he's a valuable man. He was a valuable man. Hey, are you guys kidding with that talk or what? Do your job, Stratten. I lost you now. Go ahead. Please, please don't kill me. Give me a chance. I only did jazz, me too. If I can show you that.

Oh, what a horrible death, yeah. So, this kind of scene will be repeated once or twice later, but the way that Wagner runs these operations, like I said, he recruits people, and then he, it's like almost like a calling card.

Yeah.

He leaves a dead body of one of the participants at every crime scene. That doesn't seem like the smartest long-term way to run a criminal organization, to like run ops that always kill one of the participants, but-

Right. One would think other criminals would hear about it eventually.

Exactly. And by adding murder to the list of charges here, he's dramatically increasing police interest with each of these.

I'm going to steal jewels, but to keep my jewelry thieving quiet, I'm going to kill multiple people.

Yes.

This is a good plan.

I mean, so I guess we're just supposed to learn that he's just ruthless and aim, that he's ruthless and amoral.

Yes.

And he just he uses these people.

The police are convinced that these thefts are, quote, the work of a homicidal maniac.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So there's one quick bit here, and we're going to have one more little audio clip here for you. Back at the Friendly Mission after the heist, Stratton is discussing the job with Doc. And a couple of things are clear here. One is that Staten is not very pleased. He has seen the writing on the wall. He's pretty disenchanted with Wagner and is even thinking about maybe turning on Wagner before Wagner offs him the way he offs all these other accomplices. And secondly, Doc is a little upset about the heist, but not for the reason that you might think.

This is the closest we've come to a zombie movie so far. So let's hear that.

I still say there's something bothering you. Is it that new man Fingers? Fingers won't bother anybody anymore. You mean to say he got rid of him without letting me have the body? He can't do that to me. He promised me. It seems he can do anything he pleases.

Yeah, so we knew Doc was a creep, but now we know Doc is a creep who for some reason wants the dead bodies.

Yes. And we are zombie fans who are watching a movie that is historically described as a zombie film, so we can start maybe making some educated guesses. But the movie strings us along here for quite a while before revealing what's up.

What's weird about this movie is that really it's a plot-driven police procedural in a way.

Yes.

Right? Like it's cops chasing criminals, and the criminal keeps doing more outlandish crimes, and the cops are trying to catch the criminal. That is all this movie could have been. And there are zombies, we'll get to those, but again, they could have not had the zombies, and it just would have been a crime movie.

Yeah, exactly. The zombies in this movie are a side plot that I'm not even sure that, like most of the characters realize is happening. It's 98% just a crime movie. But the zombie stuff is kind of cool and interesting. So we get a couple stuff I want to skim past here. We see, this is where we are learning about Wagner's double life, and that he's a college professor on the side. We get a scene where the police are being briefed about this new robbery, and we learn that this is one of a string of robberies, and that they always find a dead body. There's a cranky Irish police chief is yelling at everyone to get out there and do your jobs in the classic. I would love to know who the original cinematic cranky police chief is actually. Yeah, right?

Well, J. Farrell MacDonald, the actor who plays Captain Mitchell, has 336 credits on his IMDB page.

He might be it.

He played police chief, sergeants, judges. He played this type of role a lot.

Interesting. I swear, and I don't think he's credited, there is a policeman who's going to retire.

Yes.

And I saw that actor, I'm like, I recognize him, and I couldn't tell you what he is from.

So I have a larger comment to make about this movie that I'm going to make in just one minute.

Yeah.

Let me power through this please scene. We do meet two policemen here, one who has protagonist energy about him, and one older guy who talks about his pending retirement every couple of seconds.

Other word.

Yeah. So one of these policemen is going to, saying protagonist is too strong of a word, but it's going to be his job to kind of track down this jewelry gang.

Right.

And then we cut to a college class somewhere. It's abrupt. There's no context for it.

No.

Where a class of college students is talking about dangerous psychological conditions, specifically paranoia, which they define for the audience. And it reminded me so much of the bits in Maniac, where they would pause and put out a scary sounding word like paranoia and define it in the most scary possible way. And it certainly, the way it's presented, this movie suggests that the audience would find this like very thrilling or scary.

Yeah. I think he is describing what we would say in a modern movie is psychopathy, right? Like that's what they make paranoia sound like. It's like these charming people who can hide their dark natures and then kill people for pleasure. Like it's, they're like, oh, psychopaths, sociopaths, right?

Yeah. And Dr. Brenner, who is secretly also Wagner, is the prof here. And as they're discussing, he's defining or a paranoid person is like, I think we're meant to understand that Dr. Brenner maybe fits that description.

Right.

And so at this point in the movie, I paused John and I want to pause the discussion because we are halfway through the movie now and I have three things I want to observe. First, no zombies yet.

No zombies.

So that's not too unusual for these films, but a lot of them, even if the central part of the movie is not really involved the zombies, a lot of them tease you with zombie sightings early on, right?

Or like at the Ghostbreakers, I mean, we didn't get to the zombie till very late, but my God, could they not shut up about zombies? We were waiting for the zombies.

Yes.

You know what I mean? Like, I don't know that the word zombies used in the entire movie and it certainly hasn't been mentioned yet.

No, I think you're right. The second of my three points is at this point, I can't tell any of these people apart. I don't know if this is just a me thing.

No, not really.

But this movie has introduced us to like 12 indistinguishable white males of about the same age, and I don't know who their names are.

Right.

We've got a college student who's introduced in this classroom scene, who it turns out-

Who's like 34.

Yeah. Yes, he is.

I put in my notes, it's so nice that older people are going back to college even as early as 1942.

Yes. So at this point, listener, I don't know if you're finding this plot description hard to follow or not, but I was having a hard time with this movie at this point. I did go on to figure a lot of this stuff out, but basic questions of like, who are these characters and what are their names? Pull up a list of a cast of this movie, just like Google search it, and you'll see there's a lot of just people that all look like generic 1930s and 40s white male protagonists.

Yeah, the only memorable person who we've met briefly, but has not become a central player yet, is Judy, who is the nurse at the mission.

Yeah, who's gonna become really important, despite having hardly appeared in the first 30 minutes of the movie.

And they do help you later. There are tombstones with names on them.

That's the best part.

That's a little late.

If you say tombstones, Brad, they look more like signs you would put in your garden. Like they just say tomatoes on them.

You are spoiling one of the great reveals of this movie that I can't wait to discuss. My third comment, John, at this point is that at this point, I've been watching this movie for like 25 minutes, but it feels like I've been watching it for about four hours.

It is full with what Brad and I's screenwriting friend call, it is filled with incident. When they don't know how to advance a plot, just throw some incident in there and keep the thing going. To your comment on everybody looking the same, my daughter dropped out of the Marvel movies with my son and I at one point, and she made the exact same criticism of Marvel or of Captain America Civil War.

Oh, yeah.

Right? She's like Robert Downey Jr., the Baron Nemo guy and Bucky. She's like, I don't know. They all look the same. I don't know who these people are.

I can totally see that.

Yeah. So it's interesting that you noted that, and I was trying to talk her into going, and I'm like, well, the Scarlet Witch is in it. She's pretty cool. After the movie, she was like, it was fine. I didn't really know what was going on. I didn't know who all these guys were. They all had brown hair and beards, like she...

Yes.

So I think, yes. I say that just to validate your criticism. That's very much the vibe here. They've all got wavy, dark hair and suits on.

If it helps, our hero, the 30-something college student, is Richard Dennison.

Yes.

If you need a name.

He is.

Would people have instantly recognized him as main character material when they saw him, do you think?

If they saw our last movie, King of the Zombies.

I wonder, because we didn't even get into this whole thing about the police sergeant who's bucking for a promotion and trying to become a detective and like, we don't need to, but like, is it him? Is it that police guy? Is it, yeah, is it Judy? The only one who's distinctive is Judy.

Yeah. So back to the movies. Thanks for bearing with me through that little litany of complaints I had about this film.

Yes.

Because we're getting back to some excitement, we go back out to the streets of the Bowery where policemen are roaming around and they hear gunshots. There's a crime in process. And I'm not going to go into all the details here, but we are introduced to an important new criminal character here, so I want to get him down here. There is a shootout. The police see that a guy is robbing a store or something. There's a big chase scene. They shoot at each other a whole bunch. The old police guy gets shot and hit in the arm, but he's okay. Everybody's doing that thing where they fire with a gun held up to their torso, which is very funny. And the long and the short of it is, though, we have another criminal who's on the run and in desperate straits, who's looking for a place to lay low for a bit, and he heads to the friendly mission.

One thing about this shootout that I love is, I think the sergeant recognizes this guy, and I put a note in here, like, all the cops and criminals recognize each other. Like, it's like they're a small fraternity of people who all know each other, and they regularly trade gun shots and whatever. It's a very strange relationship.

So, when he's in there, he has been wounded. This crook, it turns out, his name is Frankie, and he has been wounded in the course of the robbery and shootout. So, he is sent, when he gets to the friendly mission, he is sent into their little medical room, where we meet someone who's been lurking in the background of a few scenes, but who is about to become very important. This is Nurse Judy. She's a young woman, super nice and friendly and kind and all that, and she is like an assistant at the friendly mission, and she is a nurse, so she tends to wounds when she comes across them. But while she's doing that, oh, there's a funny thing here. When Frankie is trying to explain how he got wounded to Nurse Judy, because he can't say I was just involved in a shootout with the police. So, he says, a guy sliced me with a knife, he tried to take my dog? Is that what he said?

I think, no, he tried to take my... I'm pretty sure he says, he tried to take my dough. That's what I heard.

Well, this is that murky audio and the lack of subtitles here. But I immediately knew that probably couldn't have been the word he said, but the image of it was too delightful.

My brain could have just filled it in. Maybe he did say dog and my brain was like, that can't be, it must be dough.

Like, yeah.

I think he says, try to take my dog.

So, the police, however, are still looking for Frankie and they kind of figured out what part of the Bowery he ran into. And so, they're doing like a building by building search. So, the police are coming into the friendly mission where Frankie is, and he's about to get caught. So, to evade the police, he ducks into the back room where, and there is Wagner, Bela Lugosi. In a little bit of a repeat of the scene we had with Fingers, basically, long story short, Wagner invites Frankie into his little criminal gang, and then he misleads the police, or he tries to. But the plan doesn't go entirely as they hoped, because unfortunately for them, Nurse Judy saw Frankie because she treated his wounds, and she innocently tells the police that, oh yeah, he was just here. So, from this point on, the police are going to start closing in on Wagner's operation and the friendly mission here. But the police do leave for now, and Wagner pitches his scheme and invites him into the gang, just like he did with Fingers. And then, in kind of a delightfully evil moment, he has Frankie kill Stratton and take his place as a...

Yeah, we skipped a bizarre thing earlier where Doc and Stratton, we talked about the scene where Doc and Stratton were talking about how they didn't feel, they didn't trust Wagner anymore, and maybe they'd turn on him. And Wagner eavesdrop them with using video surveillance. He has like a hissic of advanced video surveillance system set up. And so he has Frankie kill Stratton because he's heard and saw the video of Stratton saying maybe he would turn on Wagner. So he gets Frankie to be his new heavy. And then he insults Doc. He refers to Doc as a human derelict. Yes, and Doc does not take this well.

No, he doesn't. So after Stratton has been killed, and we've learned that Frankie is basically a psychopath here. He's happy to kill people.

And yes, he enjoys it even.

Yeah, he and Wagner leave, and they leave Doc, who has just been insulted. And let's hear what Doc has to say as he turns to examine Stratton's dead body.

I will save you, Stratton. Save you from the dead. Then you'll belong to me.

Yes, and just before that, he was saying how he was going to show them that he was a great doctor.

Yes. If you are any kind of doctor or scientist, if you ever hear words like, I'll show them coming out of your mouth, you need to do a quick check in with someone who loves you.

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

So something weird is going on. And I don't know if Wagner knows that Doc has this bizarre obsession with bodies. Are we supposed to imagine that Doc is going rogue here with these dead bodies?

I don't think so. So this is where he also shows the graves in the basement, which are these neat piles of dirt behind yet another secret door.

Yes.

To just keep sure we've got the back room, we've got the secret door upstairs, we've got the secret cellar, and then another secret room. And then actually later it's revealed there's another secret cellar in that last secret room under everything.

It's secret cellars all the way down. Yeah, let's pause and talk about that because that's a delightful scene. He takes Frankie in to what Wagner calls the dormitory of the dead, which is a back room where he has buried all his murdered henchmen in these grave plots that have little grave markers with their names on them.

But they're like white signs with the names in black lettering that are visible from a distance.

I don't know a lot. I have no experience with body disposal, but I've seen enough movies to think-

Neither do I, just to be clear.

Right, right, right. I've seen enough movies to know that, how do you get rid of dead bodies? I don't know, you dissolve them in lime, or you put them in an oil drum- Put them in the river with concrete shoes. Right, there's a lot of different ways, but nowhere on that list is bury them with a headstone, identifying them in your basement.

With their name on it.

Yes, I guess the intent of this is to terrify new recruits into keeping in line, I guess. Although, it really just broadcasts, like I kill everyone I work with.

Can we stop at this point and point out, I don't know why Wagner is doing any of this, other than he wants to steal jewels. But I don't know why he's bothering to do that either, because he has a job.

So we haven't talked about his interactions with his wife, and I don't really want to because it's all very unimportant.

Yeah, he has a bad dream, his, yeah, it's a whole thing.

So it's suggested that he, I think we're supposed to think he's living above his means. So he's giving his wife all this extravagant jewelry that she doesn't realize has been stolen.

And that she doesn't actually want. I mean, her only significant speech in the whole movie is when she tells him, I don't want all the jewelry, I just wish you weren't gone all night.

Yeah, well, Mrs. Brenner is a richly nuanced character, so I think you're picking up on all the subtleties of this film.

Yes, of how complex their relationship is.

But I agree with you why Wagner is doing it and why he's doing it in this particular way. It's just also elaborate that I guess you could just say he is maybe not mentally, completely mentally sane.

I think in the scene at the lecture with Denison, doesn't Denison describe who and what a psychopath is? Yes. He's really describing Wagner.

Yes.

Yeah, I think so.

I think so. I was hoping the movie would take a turn. There is a moment where I thought the movie would take a turn where it was like Jekyll and Hyde and neither Wagner nor Brenner were aware of the other one's behavior or existence. But then he makes it clear that he knows both, like he's aware of both. Like it's not like some weird psychosis. He's just a jerk.

Yeah.

Like I don't, you know what I mean?

Yeah, agreed, yeah.

I mean, obviously he's crazy, but like he knows that he's not, I thought it would have been cool if Wagner didn't know about Brenner and vice versa, but that's-

I agree. Okay, believe it or not, we are getting towards the end of this movie. I've noticed another common thing. These movies, they spend forever setting things up, and then they cover an enormous amount of time in like the final 10, 15 minutes to bring all the threads together. And this movie does the same thing, because we are actually getting into the third and final act of this film now.

Yeah, and I think we've made this complaint about the other movies, but clearly, this is how they made cheap movies in the 40s, right? It's like act one, act two, and then act three is five minutes.

Yes.

Like that's just how it worked, which is weird. It's the same structure as a modern movie with 30 minutes cut off all from act three. It's weird.

Yes. So here at the beginning of the final segment of this movie, we are going to officially meet two people who, it turns out, are the actual protagonists, I think, of the film. So 40 minutes in, we've had all these faints towards other characters. But so the movers and shakers of this plot are Nurse Judy and her boyfriend, Richard, who was a student of Dr. Brenner Zane in his little psychology class.

And was the guy we've been complaining about being so dull in King of the South. Same actor, John Archie.

He's dull in this movie as well. Nurse Judy, you can do better than this guy.

Though he has a moment. He just acts for a moment.

Well, he does. He's an important character. So we meet him because he and Nurse Judy are back at Judy's home, and they're having an argument. He wants to marry her, but he's very disdainful about Judy's work in The Friendly Mission. He thinks that she's just a do-gooder who's kind of wasting her time. Why doesn't she just marry him? He's rich. They can go live on a yacht or whatever.

Here's the argument he makes. You're doing good work as a social worker on the Bowery to help down and out people. Why don't we just go hang out on my yacht? That's Richard's character.

That's essentially his character. Yeah. Is that a persuasive argument?

Yeah. I'm drawn to him as a role model.

I mean, Judy here is clearly a sweet, good hero. I was not sure what we were supposed to make of Richard because he seems like a huge jerk.

We'll get to the end because it's bizarre.

It's bizarre, but it's also one of my favorite parts of the movie. But okay, so he's basically mad at Judy, and he maybe suspects that she's in love with her, what, 65-year-old Bela Lugosi character. So that's all very plausible. So he cracks the scheme to infiltrate the mission under the guise of doing a research paper.

Well, he first proposes about what do people think about right before they die?

He seems to be stuck on this question, which is going to become very deliciously ironic in about five minutes.

Yes.

He wants to know what goes through people's minds right before they die.

But then he says, no, no, I want to understand transients and other house people.

So he decides to basically dress up as a transient and infiltrate the mission, and I guess interview the people there. Also, it's implied he really wants to find out if Judy's in love with Wagner or not.

He's pitching all this to Brenner, aka Wagner. Unbeknownst, Richard does not know.

Yes. If that was confusing to hear, it was also confusing in the movie.

It's really confusing. I'm sorry I brought it up. Andy, Richard goes to the mission where Judy works.

By the way, Policeman Pete has gotten a promotion to detective now. That's not important in any way, but I have it in my notes.

In any way.

So Wagner, Frankie, and another criminal, who I don't even think it's a name because he's about to get off, are out robbing another store.

This is the most salacious part of the movie. May I describe how they pull off this particular crime? Please do. Frankie, they have him pretend to be blind and beg outside of a jewelry store in the Bowery. And there's all these people out shopping. So to distract everybody so that Frankie can rob the store, he throws the other man off the roof. And as he's dying on the ground and everybody's gawking, Frankie breaks into the jewelry store and robs it. That's probably the most salacious part of this movie. Like I could see somebody in 1942 going, oh my God, that's horrible. Why would they ever put that in a movie? But to our modern eyes, it's just like suddenly the guy's like what? He's flying off the roof and you're like, what is happening?

Yeah, the point of all that is to show you a couple things. First, Wagner and Frankie are sociopathic. And the police are getting extremely desperate to find who is committing this string of bank robbery slash murders. Well, that's going on back to Richard, who has disguised himself as a transient and he has gone into the mission. And while he's there, he bumps into Wagner. And he recognizes that that is the man he knows as Professor Brenner. So realizing that this is a pretty dangerous loose end, Wagner slash Brenner invites him back into the secret lair. And he takes him down into a couple levels of secret lair down low. And so-

Not the final level, we're in one of the middle levels.

But we're far enough that there's no way Richard can get out of this alive, basically.

Correct.

So he takes Richard down, and he introduces Richard to Frankie the Crook. And he introduces him to Doc. I thought this scene was great. I really enjoyed it.

Yes, actually.

He introduces Frankie as a psychopath. So he's like, you have questions about psychopaths here? Talk to him, ask him some questions. And so he asks, Richard asks Frankie, Richard, who is clearly nervous at this point, asks Frankie, do you enjoy killing people? And Frankie's like, yep, if they get in my way. But of course, Richard has been brought down here to be killed, to keep him quiet because he knows Wagner's secret identity. And there is a great excruciating scene where Wagner says, do you still want to know what goes through people's minds before they die? Well, what are you thinking right now?

Yes, yes, it was deliciously awful. And this is where John Archer does some acting, where he's very nervous and upset about this. So I take back, I don't take back everything I said about him last time. But I'll give him points for at least trying.

So Frankie shoots Richard. I was a little surprised that Richard didn't escape somehow.

I was too.

But he shoots Richard. And then John finally, I don't know, maybe 50 minutes into the movie, we get our first glimpse of zombies. That's right.

It's just a glimpse. And there could be more secret levels, but it's another secret cellar. It's the first time we've seen the cellar under the cellar, the subcellar.

So Doc is left to dispose of the body. And we see him opening a trap door in the grave room.

Which is disguised as a pile of dirt on the grave.

One of the graves is a fake. And if you push it aside, there's stairs going into our lower level, where you see a bunch of people milling around down there, and they are clearly zombies. We only get a fast glimpse, but John, did anything strike you about it?

I would not say they're clearly zombies. I would say it's a horde of zombies. I guess they're clearly zombies. The thing I want to point out is that he promises them something to eat soon, which is probably the most significant. And we could talk about this in depth in the wrap up, but he clearly says that they're clearly zombies in the basement, and he's clearly offering them humans to eat.

And I mean, just to sum up if it's not been clear, so Doc, either with or without Wagner's knowledge, has been running a zombie shop down here.

He's been creating zombies for-

He's been creating zombies and then hiding them in a cellar that I'm not 100% sure. I don't think Wagner knows the Doc has been creating zombies, do you?

No, I don't think so. I think, no, I don't think he knows.

Wagner knows the Doc has bodies, but he doesn't know what he's doing with them.

Yes, that's right. Which I kind of like. So Richard's been shot. It's strongly implied that Richard is going to join them as a zombie, although we don't see that happen. And then we are finally in the very final minutes of the movie. So often in these movies, I get to this point and I'm like, they have like six minutes to resolve all of this.

Yeah, I'm always like, how are they going to do it?

Well, so long story short, the police become suspicious of Wagner. Richard has gone missing, and they've realized that Richard is one of several people that went missing after being seen near the friendly mission. Too many people have vanished.

Yeah, they go talk to Brenner, because Richard was one of Brenner's students, and that's when they put together that Wagner and Brenner are the same person, or they start to put it together, so then they go see his wife. And then the policeman calmly asks her, Mr. Brenner, have you ever suspected your husband of leading a double life?

And her response is like, that would explain a lot of things. Well, yeah. So there is one, I want to zero in on one moment here. Basically, the wife is going to come down to the police station to give a full statement. They know now that Wagner and Brenner are the same person, and that something, this looks pretty bad. She goes into the other room to get a coat, and she's in there for a long time because she's in there forever, because Wagner slash Brenner sneaks into the house, and he realizes that they're talking to his wife and that the game is up. And then he, we don't see it, but he goes over to his wife and strangled and kills her. So the police eventually realize that she's been in there too long, they go and they find her dead body in the closet, and when Wagner slash Brenner is nowhere to be found. But back at the mission, Nurse Judy is looking for Richard, her boyfriend.

Right.

And she runs into Doc, and I like this exchange between Judy and Doc. Yes. Do you want to tell us about it, John?

So when she runs into Doc, she knows something is up, and Doc wants to tell her, this is sort of naïve Doc. We like Doc at this point. He says, I'll tell you, but you got to refill my prescription. So there's a whole exchange about that. She ends up in first the secret room, then she goes past the giant map of Australia, and then she ends up in the subseller secret room with Doc, and he's trying to get her out of there, but he's not mean. For a crazy person, he's treating her very kindly, and then she hears a cat. And that opens the next secret door, which leads into the room with the bodies, in which she sees a neatly labeled sign with Richard's last name, Denison, on it. And she sort of has a 1940s movies meltdown, which is not that serious, but she finds out that there are bodies here. Richard's body is one of the bodies, and Cries and the Doc is sort of wringing his hands and trying to get her to leave, but it's not like he's attacking her or anything.

And John, can you name what other movie on this very podcast? Trivia question for true fans. One of their movie featured a cat meowing and drawing people to the place where the zombies are.

This would be many.

Yes, indeed. Which was itself a reference to the Black Cat story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes. Yes.

So I like Doc in this scene quite a bit, whether his mind has been blasted by addiction or he's just very troubled or something. Rather than being like an evil cackling scientist, he seems to not really... He understands that people will be upset when they see what he's doing, but he seems to genuinely not want to upset them or upset his boss more than he's concerned about keeping his work a secret because it's evil.

It's almost like he feels like he's doing a service by bringing people back to life.

Yes.

You know?

Yep.

Which is bizarre, but also his vibe. And it doesn't feel evil. You're right. It doesn't feel evil. It's bizarre.

But the jig is up and upstairs, the police are crashing in. Brenner is up there gathering his files, the files that have all the dossiers on criminals, and he's clearly getting ready to make a run for it. But Judy stumbles in.

Having fled up the stairs from the sub-basement to the secret room.

Wagner tries to convince Frankie to kill Judy, but he refuses because he doesn't shoot, I think, is it Brods or something like that?

I'm sure he says Brods, but he won't kill a woman is the short version.

So Wagner and Frankie make a run for it. The police shot him. They shoot Frankie right away. And Wagner retreats into one of the many sub-basements down here. But he's trapped down here. This is a kind of a funny scene as they, I guess in theory, it's a desperate escape, but he's just sort of speed walking up and down a bunch of stairs for a while. Right. Here in the movie's final moments, though, Wagner slash Brenner is trapped in the basement, and the crazy doctor says he has the perfect hiding spot. And John, will you tell us how this movie wraps up?

So there's sort of two endings. So the first ending is he opens, Doc, opens the hidden door to the second cellar, which is disguised as a grave, and basically shoves Bela Lugosi down the stairs. And at the bottom of the stairs, you see all these zombies milling around. And I think Brenner Wagner, Wagner Brenner screams, and then we cut away from it.

And John?

No, we don't cut away from it. What happens is this dorky police guy says, well, that takes care of Dr. Wagner. Like, what? He just saw a man get eaten by other men.

How are you gonna write this up, buddy?

How do you write this up? Well, it was that classic zombies eat the bad guy scenario. You know, chief, like what?

As long as the bad guy gets like an ironic comeuppance, then you don't really have to worry about the niceties of the police procedure.

It was the same old paperwork. I didn't have to turn him in or put him in jail.

Ironically eaten by his own zombies. That's right, chief. Yeah. So...

Will you tell me about the second ending?

Because it's bizarre. Let's get to that in a second. So this is where the movie should end, right? Wagner has been defeated. But nope, there is a short epilogue. And John, will you just... John, describe the epilogue, and then let's discuss, because we have to discuss it.

Yeah. So Richard is now sitting in bed, as if nothing has happened, as if he didn't get shot, if he didn't get turned into a zombie, if he didn't eat human flesh, he's just sitting in bed in his smoking jacket. And Judy is there putting stuff away, and every time he makes an assertion, she says, yes, dear, yes, dear, yes, dear. And it's like this weird vibe where like, sure, she wanted to be a rebellious social worker who saved the world, but she's learned her place to now be the obedient wife of her former zombie husband. Yeah, it's bizarre.

So this scene would work perfectly in a modern film where this scene is supposed to be unsettling and cause you to rethink the film you have seen up to this point, right?

Yes.

Because so Richard has, Richard was a zombie, like canonically in this film.

For sure, and for sure was shot dead.

And yeah, this is the kind of zombie that gets shot to death and then turned into a zombie. So he's back. So I don't think this is supposed to be creepy. I think this is supposed to be a happy ending, like quickly shoved onto the end of this film. But I think you can view it as like a really creepy, surreal scene where, I don't know, what did you make of this?

So on a cynical level, I think, you know, like this movie is trying to be salacious. It doesn't show it, but it suggests like these zombies are eating people and Richard is clearly dead and they thrown somebody off a roof. I think they're just going like, hey, let's just get back to the status quo really quick so the censors aren't as mad.

Right?

I don't know of movies in 1942 where you can have like a dark ending where the hero dies. So they just bring him back to life with no explanation just so he can be alive so nobody complains. That was my take.

Yep, I think that you're right. I would like this better if it were a weird subversion of the...

And it could be. It definitely feels that way. Like, what is happening here? He's dead. She is now a Stepford wife. Like, what? Yeah. I like your reading better even if that wasn't the intention.

Yeah. So guys, that's a wrap on Bowery at Midnight. So John, we have a list of kind of questions that we typically go through for each of our movies. And not all of the questions are going to be relevant, but let's go through them. And then maybe we can have a final talk about whether we recommend this or not. So in this zombie movie, John, is there a hero party?

Kind of. The police combined with Judy kind of make up the hero party. I don't know if you could consider Richard as part of it because he's always separated from anybody else and he gets shot when he's by himself. But maybe he's part of the party. So yes, the policeman, Judy, and Richard are kind of a hero party.

This is an odd movie in a lot of ways. But one of them is that I think it takes a very long time to sort of settle on who its protagonists are. So you really have at least 30 minutes of following around people who have a role in the story but aren't really protagonists. And then it finally kind of settles on, I think, nurse Judy and maybe Richard and Pete, the policeman, as sort of the heroes. But they don't really work together like a party, exactly.

And in fact, when Pete is solving the crime, he's off by himself with another detective we've never met before briefly. Yeah. So no, not really. But I almost want to say this film is artful in the way it's structured, because it's so strange. But I think it's just bad writing.

I would agree with you. It is not without its virtues, I think, the way that the movie follows characters whose stories then intersect with other people's stories. And then it kind of, you keep moving through this cast of characters until you finally get to the ones around whom the movie is going to be centered.

And then it all sort of loops together very well, actually, right? The police figures out that Brenner is not who he says he is, blah, blah, blah, and it all sort of falls together, actually, in a way that most of the other movies we've watched do not.

Yeah. So we've been making fun of this movie, but the truth is I didn't hate this movie. We'll get to that in just a minute.

Yeah.

So we don't really have a hero party, and we certainly don't have a party of people I would describe as like survivors, right?

No. No. It's not about a bunch of people surviving the zombies. It's about a bunch of people fighting a criminal enterprise, and it's a very different vibe.

Yeah. So then we ask, how many of the party survived? What's the kill count here? Were there any zombie kills? Yeah. We get a bunch of criminals are killed, and I guess the only quote hero who's killed is Richard, right? Although he was resurrected, so it doesn't really count. Yeah. Do we have a zombie horde? John, you used the word horde early when to describe this, so tell us.

I would like to propose that this is our first, it's not explicit, it's subtle, but the word eat is used by Doc.

Yeah.

This is our first cannibal zombie horde.

Oh, okay. Interesting.

I would argue. It's small, it's only glimpsed, but there's no mention of voodoo. There is a mention that Doc does some mad scientist stuff to bring them back to life, but he's got five or six zombies in the basement, that he feeds Wagner to, suggesting they're eating him and they're mindless. This feels like a huge jump to me, and I'm curious to see over the next few movies what happens, but this feels like a nascent, cannibalistic zombie horde to me.

It does.

How do you feel about that?

I wholeheartedly agree. It's also...

But doesn't it feel like a jump to you?

I think it's really noteworthy that, I think first among the films we've watched, this movie doesn't make any mention of voodoo, haiti, any sort of tribal practices or religions, or any religious or superstitious or mystical or cult stuff at all. These are science zombies, right?

Yeah. The closest they get to mentioning the Caribbean is, he asked them about the cigar he's smoking, he says, is it a real Havana? Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. So we have science zombies here, and we have cannibal zombies, and that feels very new.

Yes.

I mean, has it been implied in the past movies we watched that the zombies eat people?

I don't think so. I think the closest movie we've got to this movie is Maniac, where there's science zombies and they're crazed, but they are not cannibals. Okay.

So let's keep this in mind as we go forward, if this is a branch point where we start getting a different take on zombies, or I don't know, for all I know, we might go right back into the Voodoo and Haiti-inspired zombies in our upcoming movies.

Yeah, I'd be curious to see because what could happen, and this is all speculation, but it could be somebody leaps forward, like people are looking for an idea, and they reach back to this obscure Bowery at Midnight movie and be like, what if the zombies are cannibalistic hordes? Like, this could lie dormant or it could build on itself? I don't know, but I feel strong like this is the first time any of the zombies look like something I recognize from all the movies I watched as a kid.

I agree. So I want to hypothesize that we may be looking at the birth of a new zombie strain, if you will. So let's just track that as we watch future movies.

I agree.

All right, we're in the habit of asking how this movie lives up to your original four pillars of a zombie movie. Do you want to walk us through those?

Yeah, so the first one would be Apocalypse, which I don't think we have here. We have a terrifying world, but it's not a terrifying world of zombies. It's a terrifying world of criminals, right? We don't have contagion, right? Like in order to become a zombie, the doc has to inject you with something that turns you into a zombie. They hand wave that, but it's clear that one zombie does not turn another person into a zombie. Now, loved ones turning against you. Richard did not turn against Judy, but Richard was a regular person who did like Dr. Brenner as his teacher, and it is implied that he is part of the zombie horde that attacks him at the end, which we also saw in King of the Zombies. So I think that's feeling a little more pillar-like at this point.

Yes, I think you're right.

Then lastly, like tough moral choices, I don't know. I think there's a lot of immoral choices in this movie, but not tough moral calculation.

Yeah, the only people doing ethically dubious stuff are criminals making those choices for bad reasons. Yeah, so no innocent non-criminal protagonist is forced to make a tough ethical choice here, I don't think.

Correct. I do think it's interesting that there's another person turning on somebody here.

So that leaves us with two questions, John. First, would Andy and John survive in this zombie world?

I'm a little afraid of these zombies. If I were trapped in this basement with them, probably not. I'm more worried about my ability to survive the criminal underworld of the Bowery than the zombies, to be honest, in this movie.

Agreed. Yeah, I mean, this is a... I mean, the zombies are not the threat here. The zombies are kind of a side element. So I think I would survive because I don't, you know, hang out with criminal gangs.

But if you met Bela Lugosi's character, would you find him friendly? Would you trust him? Would you accept his invitation?

If I didn't know all of the rest of Bela Lugosi's like film history, I might. He seems nice. Is that weird?

I mean, Bela Lugosi, the actor, does, I think, a pretty good job of playing a nice, kindly person for that.

He seems like a grandfather at times in this.

He does.

With his twinkling eyes.

Yeah.

So, okay, I will amend my answer. I think I would fall under the sway of kindly Dr. Wagner, and that would leave me open to getting involved in all these shenanigans that include a horde of zombies a couple of basement levels down.

Yeah. But let's be honest, they wouldn't invite us into their world because we don't know how to crack safes or turn security arms systems.

No, you and I would be the Richards of this movie. And then lastly, John, do you recommend this movie to our listening audience of zombie movie fans?

I'm so excited about this seeming leap in zombie technology, so to speak, that we've encountered in this movie. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, hey, cannibalistic zombies, they're just here now. But I can't recommend the movie because it's such a weird convolated movie that has nothing to do with zombies except for this weird side plot.

I think I mostly agree with you. While I found this movie confounding to watch, I didn't hate it by the end because it's just structured so differently than all of these other zombie movies we've watched. It's just different.

Yeah. I would almost describe it as like a tight narrative.

Yes.

The story does make sense at the end. There's no wasted time or space. And one action leads to the other actions. Like you can't say that about Maniac. You can't say that about the Ghost Breakers. Like it's a tight, that's why I almost called it a procedural earlier. Like it's a tight plotted movie.

There is a good Twilight Zone movie somewhere, good Twilight Zone episode somewhere in here. Yes.

With the dual lives and the whole thing. Yes, I think so.

There's too much going on. But I think that you could take this concept and make a stronger film out of it, I think.

And maybe it's the 40s. I think if we knew more about why Wagner, Brenner did anything, I think that would make it better.

But lastly, as for recommending it to zombie fans, that is a hard recommendation to make.

They're only in it for like a total minute of screen time.

If you have an interest like John and I do in the history of zombies in film, then yes, watch it. Because I do think we are seeing some new zombie things here. That said, they're less than 60 seconds of screen time are devoted to the zombies in any way. And you hardly even see them even when they are central to the scene that's happening.

I think one of the things that helps this movie is the acting. So many of these actors have done 200 to 300 movies that you never heard of these guys, but they're all pretty good. They all sell it. They all make the parts enjoyable to watch.

Yeah.

Like Maniac, there were clearly a bunch of people they just pulled off the street. And I know that was like a much lower...

Who only had four credits to their list.

And I know that was like a really dive movie compared to this one. This does feel like a bunch of competent pros knocking something out in a few weeks.

Yeah, and you know, I think we are far enough along in film history that despite the low budgetness and the limited number of sets and things like that, the movies are losing that sense of being like stage play productions and they are starting... the actors are starting to interact with each other, I think, in ways that feel more authentic.

And I forgot to mention at the top that our friend Edward Kay was a composer of this. He is the Academy Award nominated composer from King of the Zombies.

Yeah, it wasn't too bad. There was a couple of weird cues where I was like, is that really the right cue for here? But I mean, at least it felt like music that went with the movie. What do you think about that, Andy?

I agree. The music didn't stand out. Like I found the music for the last movie we watched, King of the Zombies, a little bit more striking as a score, but it didn't have that filler, generic vibe that music has been in most of the movies we watched.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

All right. So that's a wrap on Bowery at Midnight. Thanks for watching, John. And that means it's time to learn what we're going to watch next. Brad?

What is next, Brad?

Next, we're encountering I walked with a zombie from 1943.

All right.

And check your chat window for the poster.

Oh, okay. All right, John, tell us what we see here on the poster.

All right. Here we go. I walked with a zombie. This poster is kind of cool. Am I wrong?

No, you're not wrong. No.

No, it's got this sort of ghostly figure of a woman on the left.

Yeah, it looks statuesque almost.

Statuesque. Yeah, there's this hand reaching out. Below the hand is a woman screaming, and then there's this nefarious zombie eye. Looking at it, it seems to me like a mesmerist sort of zombie eye. So in bright yellow text, I walked with a zombie. Yeah. What do you think?

Yes, I think that the eye feels like a little bit of a throwback to the earliest movies we watched where both the posters and the films themselves seem really got a lot of mileage out of Bela Lugosi's creepy stare, I suppose.

Yes.

And not just Bela Lugosi, but other zombie master villains. So, I'm getting zombie master occult vibes from this, and I don't see any salacious claims made on this poster, just the title. And then actors, we have James Ellison, Francis Dee and Tom Conway are called out here. So I don't, none of those ring a bell for me, so.

No, me neither. So, well, I'm sure we'll find out that we have probably seen some of them in other things when we actually see them on the screen. I bet you. I bet you nickel.

I'll take you up on that, then.

All right, folks, so join us next episode where we leap ahead to 1943 for I Walked with a Zombie. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like minded people find the show. See you next time.