A bundle of brides for Bela

"Starring Béla Lugosi!"

White Zombie (1932)

Grade: C+

The Corpse Vanishes (1942)

Grade: D

Bride of the Monster (1955)

Grade: D+

There's no real sense in having a separate entry for each of these three movies, since they all have much the same plot: Béla abducts a young woman for nefarious purposes. In this, he's helped by one or more mindless servants, whom he repeatedly maltreats. He then subjects the young woman to some sort of outré medical procedure, but in the end, she's rescued when Béla's much-abused servants take their revenge.

This makes it rather difficult to keep them straight in one's head: did the spunky female reporter crash into that tree in The Corpse Vanishes, or was it Bride of the Monster? Did White Zombie have both poison flowers and hypnotic gazes from Béla, or was that only The Corpse Vanishes? Why can't any of them get a decent male lead? And most importantly, which of these three movies had the most absurd plethora of coneboobs?

In fairness, White Zombie is really in a separate class from the other two, and a far more memorable film. Yes, the acting is stagy, the plot is silly at best, and plenty of other faults besides. But the imagery is at times genuinely inspired, as in the tavern scene in which the protagonist, drinking his sorrows away, has a hallucination of his bride. Instead of filling the set with drunken Euro-Haitian revelers, the other patrons are depicted as shadows against a translucent backdrop, like Javanese puppets. The net effect is striking in a quasi-Expressionist sort of way, and makes for yet another example of how economic necessity (there wasn't enough in the budget for extras) can be the mother of invention. There are also a few choice moments for connoisseurs of strange sounds, particularly the grotesque, damaged saxophone timbre that serves as background for the zombie mill scene. A good choice for fans of the pre-Code aesthetic: and as a bonus, it's not nearly as racist as you'd expect!

The Corpse Vanishes, on the other hand, is essentially a mishmosh of clichés and stock characters. Luana Walters is the requisite Girl Friday, and she and Béla are the only actors who have much of anything to sink their teeth into, though her delivery owes as much to Dorothy Gale as Rosalind Russell. Meanwhile, Rosalind's sister-in-law Elizabeth plays the insufferable shrieking invalid harpy, leaving you to wonder: Béla's stealing virgins for this? Really? And yes, it has coneboobs galore.

Enough ink has been spilled over Ed Wood's films, and we're not foolish enough to think we have much to add. By most metrics, Bride of the Monster is the worst movie of the three, and Tim Burton's Ed Wood makes it seem of a piece with the incompetencies of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But Bride's most obvious faults are really the product of limited funding: if the octopus had a working motor, and a few other budget elements had been in place, it'd hardly seem any worse than a lot of the 1950s B-pictures we've seen, and better than quite a few. It does, however, suffer from the same case of acute talkitis that plagues Wood's other movies, and while that's not such a bad thing when Béla's doing the talking, it's mostly a snooze otherwise.