The Frozen Ghost

Right in the beginning it seems to be the same old story with spiritualists and fake mediums: 'Gregor the Great' (Lon Chaney Jr.) hypnotizes his beautiful medium Maura (Evelyn Ankers) during his obviously quite successful radio broadcast to read the thoughts of some of the people in the audience. She evades difficult questions, and so a drunkard starts grumbling that it's all a phony - and Gregor accepts the 'challenge', invites him up to the stage and tries to hypnotize him... and the man drops dead!

From now on, although the autopsy proves that the alcoholic died of a perfectly natural heart failure, Gregor is absolutely convinced that he killed the man: he'd wished him dead because he threatened to spoil his radio broadcast, and then he'd hypnotized him and killed him that way - nobody, not even Maura, his fiancée, can get that obsession out of his mind. So his manager George suggests that he should spend some time at Mme. Monet's Wax Museum, a nice, secluded place - with murder scenes made out of wax all around, and a VERY weird young artist, a former plastic surgeon, who talks to the wax figures and is himself obsessed by Mme. Monet's pretty young niece Nina...

This fourth one of the six movies made from the hugely successful radio program "Inner Sanctum" certainly IS scary, a mixture of a murder mystery and a horror movie (Universal Studios were masters at that...); the cast is quite good, Lon Chaney Jr. is once more teamed with Evelyn Ankers (they co-starred in eight movies altogether), and once more seems doomed by a strange kind of fate to do bad, like in "The Wolf Man"... Although "The Frozen Ghost" is nothing too inventive, it's QUITE a treat for fans of the genre!