If you're looking for a really great classic zombie movie, this is not the one for you. If you're looking for a great classic suspense thriller/crime drama, this is right up your alley. Bowery at Midnight has it all. With murder, betrayal, damsels in distress, shoot outs, and, okay, a few zombies, it made its way to my top 5 of this project though it wasn't a zombie movie. To its defense, not many of the early zombie movies focused on zombies, just mad men. I've compiled a list of zombie movies based on lists from books, websites and Wikipedia that apparently have a very loose definition of "zombie". Its okay though because this movie was actually very well made.
It starts out looking a lot like a silent movie with exciting music and no other sound. The prologue seemed to be shot with an old hand-crank camera; the ones where if you would crank it to fast while filming it would make the actors look like they were running a hundred miles an hour. This was just the beginning of a very easy progression of scenes that kept me guessing right up to the end. After seeing the mish-mash of scenes in The Ghost Breakers and some others on the zombie movie list, it was refreshing to see a little development for all the characters involved and none of them were ignored in the end just for the sake of squeezing in one last joke. This is thanks to the director Wallace Fox who took the time to make sure all the stories didn't just finish but came together smoothly in the end.
Wallace Fox, who was best known for directing westerns during the 20’s and 30’s, had recently started getting into different genres. As far as I can tell, he only directed two movies involving zombies and only a few horrors. He wasn’t much for comedies either although there were a few good one-liners in Bowery. Unlike the Halperin Brothers (White Zombie and Revolt of the Zombies), Fox’s career didn’t plummet after directing 2 zombie movies. After the mid 40’s, he got back into directing westerns through the end of his career in the mid 50's.
The music in the movie could have aided in the horror feel a little more. There were a few scenes that should have been extra creepy, like when a giant door rolls back revealing a secret cemetery in the Bowery's basement or when a coffin in that cemetery opens revealing a zombie infested, sub basement that, architecturally, made no sense. I used to watch this old Don Knotts movie when I was a kid called The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, a comedy, but there was a scene where Knotts is walking through a cobweb invested secret passage way with piano music playing in the background and it always freaked me out. Bowery was a poverty row flick for sure but how much could it cost to buy some cobwebs for the secret passageways? The music director, Edward Kay, had just received an Oscar nomination for his work in King of The Zombies from 1941 and his music was great during the action scenes but it was too quiet during the horror scenes. Maybe that got cut from the budget as well.
Bela Lugosi was a great mad man as usual. He plays a professor living a double life and proved to be quite a sociopath. Any remake with today’s standards would probably clue us into an incident from his past that gave him such a disregard for human life but no such luck in this movie. He killed people so unexpectedly that I believe the writers needed to add a few minor characters just so the professor could kill them and drive home the point that he was a crazy guy. The cemetery I mentioned earlier, in his Bowery basement, actually contained the marked graves of his victims. See…crazy. If that doesn’t say don’t go in the basement, I don’t know what does. The best part about this mad man, though was that he was a very likeable guy. Lugosi seemed to be having fun in this role. He played a very versatile character and this could have been an opportunity for him to get into more serious roles but he was about to start taking any role he could get to support his pain killer addiction. Unfortunately, he was only getting paid about $3,000 per movie in the early 40's and the small roles he was taking ruined his potential.
The movie didn't scare me much. There were two zombie scenes that put me on edge and it was too bad they were so short lived. They are definitely getting scarier as time progresses and I'm already starting to get used to not watching them from behind a pillow. However, if it were to be remade with today's standards, it would scare the h out of me. I kept focusing on how spooky this story actually would be if that were to happen. The foreshadowing, character development, dialogue, etc really set it apart from the other zombie movies of its time. However true this was, it wasn’t a hit in 1943 and its only saving grace was that Bela Lugosi was the star. I really enjoyed this movie and would definitely recommend watching it. Even if you need to use a pillow.
Stats for Bowery at Midnight...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: only to their original killer
Dead or alive: dead
How they become zombies: mad scientist
Other: when their killer dies, they come back to life (for real)
How to kill them: they can't be killed although I'm not 100% sure of that
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