Before I Hang

1940 "Beware! When Karloff stops the clock, your hour has come!"
6.1| 1h2m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 17 September 1940 Released
Producted By: Columbia Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
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A physician on death row for a mercy killing is allowed to experiment on a serum using a criminals' blood, but secretly tests it on himself. He gets a pardon, but finds out he's become a Jekyll-&-Hyde.

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Director

Nick Grinde

Production Companies

Columbia Pictures

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Before I Hang Audience Reviews

Nonureva Really Surprised!
Console best movie i've ever seen.
Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.
AaronCapenBanner Nick Grinde directs Boris Karloff for the third time in a familiar-sounding tale of Dr. John Garth, who was sentenced to death for a mercy killing, who nonetheless is allowed by the prison warden to experiment with his serum using the blood of an executed murderer. Garth uses it on himself however, and it proves a success, but has the unfortunate side-effect of periodically turning him into a killer. After one such murder(which is blamed on an escaped inmate) he is pardoned, but that doesn't stop his lapses into murder, as he decides to help some doctors with his serum, but that plan backfires. Standard thriller has a good performance from Boris, but that's all. Seen this done before, and better.
Robert J. Maxwell I don't know how many movies -- most of them pretty poor -- have been made about anatomical transplants causing the recipient to ape the deranged behavior of the donor. Maybe the most amusing is Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein", when Igor rushes to get the transplant from the laboratory, drops the good one, and substitutes a brain labeled A. B. Normal. ("Abnormal," get it?) There's a movie circulating on cable TV now about a baboon heart, and I remember Michael Caine got a murderous black hand a few years ago.In this instance, Boris Karloff is a doctor convicted of a mercy killing and sentenced to hang. He's been working on an anti-death serum and, while in prison, is permitted to continue his research alongside the prison's doctor, Edward Van Sloan.He undertakes an experiment that results in the kind of evidence that investigators refer to as "self report." That is, he injects himself with serum based on tinkering with the blood of a murderer. Well, let's not laugh too hard. That's how the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered LSD.The problem is that the serum works in the sense that it regresses the ancient Doctor Karloff to the age of about forty, but since the original blood sample was drawn from a murderer, the desire to kill has also been transferred. You can always tell when one of his irrational impulses are coming on because he rubs the back of his neck. Before he collapses, Karloff is able to strangle Van Sloan in private. The murder is blamed on someone else and Karloff is released from prison for his contribution to medical research.Now he's out in the open, back in society, and he wants to experiment on his close old friends, including Pedro de Cordoba as a pianist whose age has slowed down the tempo of his Chopin. De Cordoba sees Karloff alone and agrees to the injection but Karloff kills him instead.And so on.This seems to be regarded as a horror film by some. I don't know why. It's more of a drama. Karloff gives a very sympathetic performance. He's particularly endearing as the ancient practitioner, bent and kyphotic, who is convicted and sentenced to death for putting an old acquaintance out of his intractable pain after months of treating him.Evelyn Keyes doesn't have much to do, but what little she does is critical.There's little violence, no blood, and nothing supernatural. It's a relatively quiet movie about a man who finds that, now and then, he can't help himself. Doctor Jeykll had the same problem, didn't he? It wouldn't be surprising if the writers hadn't begun their story with the kernel of Stevenson's in mind.
Hitchcoc This starts out so well. We have a man who really shouldn't have been executed, facing the music for doing an act of kindness toward a fellow human being. The people around him give him his wish to continue to do research and he is eventually pardoned because of his great discoveries. Unfortunately, to prove his point, he gets injected with the blood of a three-time killer who was hanged. Of course, true to plot, Karloff's kindly old doctor begins to black out and do evil deeds to the people he loved. He has discovered a sort of fountain of youth, but his old buddies realize that he is messing where he shouldn't have been messing, and want nothing to do with it. Whenever he gets all worked up, he becomes a strangler. There's nothing very remarkable about it and the science is quite ludicrous. Karloff and the rest of the cast give it the old college try, but the thing is so lame that it just falls flat. Totally predictable.
preppy-3 Kindly Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff) is found guilty of a mercy killing and sentenced to hang. While in prison he experiments in trying to find a serum that halts old age. He uses the blood of an executed murderer and tries it on himself. He is then pardoned and finds the serum works...but it turns him into a cold-blooded killer which he has no control over.This is pretty much a forgotten movie and it's easy to see why. It's pretty slow and dull with terrible dialogue and questionable science. Also it's (technically) not a horror movie--it plays more like a melodrama with horrific touches. Wonderful actress Evelyn Keyes is in here too but is given nothing to do. Karloff single-handedly saves this from total disaster. He's just great in his role--he makes the worst dialogue sound like Shakespeare! Also when the killing urge takes over you can actually see the changes in his face and mannerisms and there are also some nice atmospheric scenes at the end. There's a funny lapse in continuity--Keyes finds out by the morning paper about a murderer--but a scene outside the house shows it's night time! This is really only for Karloff fans. I give it a 4.