Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff team-up for the second time after the earlier film, The Black Cat. Like that one too, this is another 'inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe' effort. And also like The Black Cat, this has extremely limited relevance to the Poe source material - well, in this case it is a short poem, so what can you really expect? The story is a sort of love letter to the famous writer though. A deranged brain surgeon, who is infatuated with the works of Poe, falls for the beautiful daughter of a judge; given Bela's overt weirdness, the judge unsurprisingly disapproves of this. So, with the assistance of a criminal Bela has intentionally facially deformed (Karloff), the dastardly doctor invites the judge and his daughter over to his house to subject them to his Poe-based instruments of torture!
Having recently seen The Black Cat and finding it more admirable than enjoyable, I have to say that I found The Raven to be more straight-down-the-line fun. Bela, especially, is a riot in this and its one of the best turns I have seen him give. Karloff is also pretty well utilised with some grotesque make-up, which does make him look somewhat sinister. At an hour's runtime, there's not much messing about and I suppose, there's not really a lot of plot either. But it is pretty entertaining stuff and definitely on the more manic end of the Universal horror scale - after all, what other film can boast a Poe influenced interpreted dance routine?
Having recently seen The Black Cat and finding it more admirable than enjoyable, I have to say that I found The Raven to be more straight-down-the-line fun. Bela, especially, is a riot in this and its one of the best turns I have seen him give. Karloff is also pretty well utilised with some grotesque make-up, which does make him look somewhat sinister. At an hour's runtime, there's not much messing about and I suppose, there's not really a lot of plot either. But it is pretty entertaining stuff and definitely on the more manic end of the Universal horror scale - after all, what other film can boast a Poe influenced interpreted dance routine?