The Corpse Vanishes

1942 "Horror to make your hair stand on end!"
4.6| 1h3m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 08 May 1942 Released
Producted By: Monogram Pictures
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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A scientist keeps his wife young by killing, stealing the bodies of, and taking the gland fluid from virgin brides.

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Director

Wallace Fox

Production Companies

Monogram Pictures

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The Corpse Vanishes Audience Reviews

Mjeteconer Just perfect...
Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Eric Stevenson I think this may in fact be the oldest movie that was ever featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I guess there were some serials that were in fact earlier, but I think this fits the bill. This movie features Bela Lugosi doing, well exactly what the plot synopsis says. There's almost nothing else that goes on. It was really weird to just see a bride die for no reason at the beginning of the movie. It does make a little more sense later, but it's still pretty dumb. It's weird how this wasn't the part where Lugosi was in bad movies.He became much more infamous during the Ed Wood years. Well, there were always cheesy movies. The main problem is how slow this movie is. You just keep on seeing characters walk around for the longest time. I guess the story could have been dumber. You could say it set a sort of weird precedent for later bad movies. Well, "Reefer Madness" was earlier. There's too much darkness and the characters have little depth, but at least it was short. **
GL84 Following a rash of mysterious wedding disappearances, a reporter believes a clue found at every scene ties a European botanist to the brides' disappearances needing them for his wife's youth-restoring surgeries and set a trap to catch him in the act of abducting his victims.This here is a rather decent film at times. What really helps this one out is the few scenes of solid atmosphere present here which is much better here than expected for such a title since most of the film's middle section takes place inside a creepy castle, giving it a really spooky feel. With secret passageways into rooms, characters appearing and disappearing, shadows being thrown across the walls and a raging thunderstorm in the background, this has the hallmarks of a classic Gothic horror film, and it's easily the creepiest sequence in the film. With this also including the odd creepy image here and there, from the series of scenes in the laboratory as he's preparing his experiments with his staff to the really freaky scene where one character's disembodied head appears to be floating in the background as it spies on another character and the creepy family hanging around her while she's at their house makes for some decent times here. As well, the mystery that comes out of the film quite naturally and has the appearance of being put together with some intelligence, with one clue leading logically to another as the transition from the brides disappearing to the flowers found there to the botanist and finally the wife. That is a nice thing to see how it's all quite realistically pieced together and it's really not that forced at all. Otherwise, there isn't much else about this one, and as there isn't much to this, there isn't a whole lot to dislike in this one. The sheer lunacy of the motive to spring this into action is quite high, lending it a series of easier scenarios the viewer can come up with that will provide the villains with the same goal rather than to try such a really insane strategy. That none of them are even carried out, even for how out there the motive is, makes them even more infuriating, and really don't do much for suggesting terror or fear at anything. None of the motivations for doing so are revealed either, giving this a really confusing at times. There's also the rather big nature of having a really slow- moving pace and stuttering along for long periods of time without much action, which for a movie this short doesn't provide this with many opportunities to add to the pace as so many of these scenes lends a little more campiness to the proceedings rather than chills. That makes this one of the more unspectacular films from the time period.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.
Rainey Dawn This horror story plot is simple: Bela Lugosi is Dr. George Lorenz. Dr. Lorenz is a scientist with a wife of unknown age. With the help of a strange family, the doctor kills young women, steals their gland fluid and injects his wife with the fluid in order to keep her young.This is a pretty good old fashioned horror film. My questions are: How did Lorenz and the Countess met? How was the Countess kept alive before she met Dr. George? If they had made this movie about 30 minutes longer they could have filled in quite a few blanks. But the movie is still worth watching - I just wish this one was a bit longer than an hour to give us a bit more background on the Countess herself.7.5
BA_Harrison The Corpse Vanishes opens in fine fashion with a series of society brides dropping dead at the altar and their bodies abducted shortly thereafter by a pair of faux morticians. Matters get even more fun when feisty investigative reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters) suspects that the species of orchid worn by the brides is the key to solving the mystery and tracks down the original hybridiser of the flower, Dr. Lorenz (Lugosi), for an interview: in doing so, she puts herself in mortal danger, for it is Lorenz who is responsible for the dying and disappearing brides. With a little help from his 'family'—old crone Fagah (Minerva Urecal) and her two sons, loping brute Angel (Frank Moran), and malicious dwarf Toby (Angelo Rossitto)—Lorenz has been extracting fluids from his victims' glands and injecting them into his 80-year-old wife (Elizabeth Russell) to keep her young.Fans of cheesy poverty row horror thrillers should have a great time with this 1942 Lugosi vehicle from Monogram: featuring the Dracula star at his most hammy and with a plot that packs in so many genre tropes (hidden passageways, thunder storms, eccentric characters etc.) it's positively creaking at the seams, The Corpse Vanishes is solid schlock entertainment from start to finish.N.B. Actor Tristram Coffin, whose surname suggests that he would perfect for one of the film's more grim characters, actually plays the hero, Dr. Foster, who rescues Patricia in the film's deranged finalé (and who proposes marriage only a couple of days after first meeting the pretty news-hound).