Good Dr. Lloyd Clayton recently killed his evil brother Elwyn (George Zucco in duel roles), but Zolarr (Dwight Frye) digs up his old master’s body, and Elwyn rises as a vampire. He sets his sights on Gayle (Mary Carlisle), their niece. It’s up to Lloyd and Gayle’s fiancé to save her, a task that becomes more difficult as the town’s people come to believe that the living brother is the killer.
It’s not uncommon in the independent film world to claim that money doesn’t matter, only ingenuity. Well, sometimes it’s money. Dead Men Walk is a poverty row cheapie that looks like it was shot in three days, and probably was. The sets are few and simple, and obviously missing their fourth wall since the camera rarely moves. I’d be very surprised if there was paid rehearsal time; the actors show no sign of getting into character or reciting their lines with anything close to comfort. The entire town consists of no more than a dozen people, and only two of them are women. I’d hate to live there. Maybe the picture could have been saved in editing, but it looks like it was cut in less time than it was shot in. As an after thought, music occasionally swells in and vanishes again, with no connection to what is happening on screen, which makes me wonder if there was a sound editor at all.
George Zucco was an easily identifiable and always enjoyable character actor in the ’30s and ’40s, but was not strong enough to carry a picture. His kindly doctor is too drab to be of any interest, and his vampire brother is far from horrific. Zucco isn’t given much help. Only Dwight Frye (most famous as Renfield in Dracula) is memorable, and he just performs a poor version of the many psychos he’d played before.
There are no surprises in the script. It could have been cobbled together from previous vampire movies. Nothing’s new. And since there was no money for stunt men, it would have been smart to leave out the fight scene. Zucco just stands there holding a chair in the air as Frye whacks at it with a knife.
Dead Men Walk is a sad little film. There are plenty of more entertaining silver screen vampire flicks, so there is no reason to waste time with this one.
George Zucco appeared in multiple Universal monster movies, including The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and House of Frankenstein (1944) as well as the mystery After the Thin Man (1936), the old dark house film The Cat and the Canary (1939), and the ghost comedy Topper Returns (1941).
Dwight Frye also has a long resume with Universal, playing small roles in Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Vampire Bat (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), as well as the swashbuckler The Son of Monte Cristo (1940) and the original version of The Maltese Falcon (1931).