by Paul Mount
Creeping Horror is Eureka Entertainment’s latest deep Blu-ray dive into the darkest corners of the Universal Pictures vault. This time, they’ve unearthed a quartet of real curios; inevitably, there are no studio big hitters here – no bloodsucking caped counts, bolt-in-neck manmade monsters or furry lycanthropes – and instead, we’re offered four titles that demonstrate that there really was more to Universal than the famous classics, and whilst two of the movies here are rightly pretty forgettable, the other two are decent little chillers that are well overdue a 21st-century exhumation.
The two-disc set kicks off with 1933’s Murders in the Zoo, in which Lionel Atwill’s maniacal hunter uses the animals he has caught in Africa and brought back to the US to dispose of his enemies and love rivals, notorious in its day for some graphic imagery – particularly an early scene where one victim has his mouth sewn up – Murders is enlivened by a comic turn by Charlie Ruggles as an inept, drunken journalist. Night Monster (1942) also features Atwill. It boasts little more than a recurring cameo from Bela Lugosi as a butler in a slightly turgid tale of a crippled scientist in a remote mansion experimenting with materialisation. Disc Two opens up with Horror Island, a rather witless 1941 comedy thriller which avoids the Trade Descriptions Act by at least being set on an island. The film is eminently disposable, notable really only for the fact that it was filmed, edited, and released in cinemas all in the space of a month! Take note, James Cameron. The set ends with a real winner, though, in 1946’s House of Horrors, a clever and surprisingly sophisticated script built around the physical presence of the imposing and tragic Rondo Hatton as ‘The Creeper’, a classic Universal ‘monster’-in-waiting, denied cinematic immortality thanks to Hatton’s early death shortly after filming its sequel The Brute Man.
Crude and simplistic by today’s horror standards, obviously, these films are nonetheless significant stepping stones in the history of the genre, and they’ve been lovingly restored and presented by Eureka in a sturdy slipcase supported by a limited edition collector’s booklet with each film enlivened by informative commentaries.
Creeping Horror is available now on Blu-Ray from Eureka Entertainment.
