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 ...

It's easy to associate Roger Corman with Edgar Allan Poe film adaptations, considering he made eight of them between 1960 and 1964. But look even further back and you'll see that Universal had found success by mining the same source material, starting with 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue. The Poe inspiration continued with 1934's The Black Cat  and culminated with 1935's The Raven,  which reunites icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Lugosi plays Dr. Richard Vollin in the film, a lazy-but-gifted physician who is coerced into saving a young car accident victim (Irene Ware) by her father, a prominent judge (Samuel S. Hinds). Soon Vollin begins to form an unhealthy attachment to the young woman. That's not all he's obsessed with, either; he's spent countless hours and dollars to bring the elaborate instruments of torture in Poe's fiction to grizzly reality in his own home. There's a pit with a pendulum, a chamber with walls that close in and crush...