Le Monstre ressuscité

Nora, an intrepid newspaper reporter eager for a juicy story, answers a mysterious "lonely hearts" ad and finds a brilliant but hideously disfigured plastic surgeon who only wants to be loved. Nora's sympathetic (if slightly repulsed) and the doctor seemingly gets his wish but when he finds out what she does for a living and what she may be up to, he resuscitates the handsome corpse of a presidential candidate to wreak a fiendishly ironic vengeance on Nora...

Director Chano Urueta (who seemed to have a knack for this sort of thing) takes a tip from Universal horror films of the 1940s by using an Eastern European village, a foreboding castle high above the sea, a mad scientist's lab, a wax museum, and a spooky cemetery with lots of fog to set the story. There's also a hairy sub-human in the dungeon who's transformed into a handsome instrument for revenge and the mad scientist, a lovelorn freak reminiscent of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA in both looks and temperament, is got up to look like Claude Rains in THE INVISIBLE MAN with a black cape, panama hat, and a mean bullwhip which he uses to keep his creations in line. There's lots of black & white atmospherics and a couple of Ripper-like murders to propel this off-the-wall horror movie-cum-romantic melodrama and it's all taken quite seriously which only adds to the charm. Nora's played by the beautiful Prague-born Miroslava who made a name for herself in Mexican film (working for Robert Rossen, Jacques Tourneur, and Luis Buñuel, among others) before killing herself in 1955 when her bullfighter lover left her for Ava Gardner. My DVD-R is dubbed in Italian (where it was released as THE MONSTROUS DR. CRIMEN) and subtitled in English (!)