Cereal At Midnight

  Within the first moments of the film, Murders in the Zoo  lets us know what we're in for. We enter on a jungle scene as a group of adventurers hold down a struggling man while their leader--played with wonderful menace by Lionel Atwill--sews the captive's mouth shut. Atwill stars as Eric Gorman, a zoologist who captures animals in their native habitat and supplies them to zoos. His wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke) is something of a flirt (though it's implied she does more than flirt), and we soon learn that Atwill is so jealous that he's willing to resort to extreme measures like sewing up the mouth of a man that he sees as a threat. But when he catches his wife with yet another man (John Lodge), will he kill to keep them apart? Answer: you betcha. Much of the story unfolds in and around a zoo, which serves as a nice backdrop for the animalistic actions of violence. Future western-genre stalwart Randolph Scott has a notable role here as the dashing Dr. Jack Woodford, and ...

At its core, 1933's  The Secret of the Blue Room is a chamber murder mystery in the rich tradition of the "old dark house" subgenre. In fact, some of the sets used in the film itself come from 1932's The Old Dark House , a stellar Universal chiller. The formula for these films rarely strays: throw a group of people with lots secrets into a house, find a reason for them to spend the night, and then let the murder begin--and with it, the suspicion as trust erodes and they begin to turn on one another.  The Secret of the Blue Room  successfully trades out horror for more of a mystery atmosphere. This is a film of antique tapestries, long hallways, dark shadows, and secret passages. While other movies would later do a very similar thing (many come to mind, ranging from The Cat and the Canary to Clue , and more recently, Knives Out ), this film is elevated by it's pre-Code status and the elegance of the sets themselves. Films from the early thirties have a distinct fe...