Horror 2020 Countdown: The Black Sleep (1956)

 The Black Sleep (1956) dir. Reginald Le Borg, Bel-Air Productions 

By now Lon Chaney had more or less moved to Westerns and adventure flicks but he still occasionally ventured in horror, and thus we end our lookback at Lon Chaney, Jr. and the last official film Bela Lugosi completed. 

 1872 and Dr. Gordon Ramsey (Herbert Rudley) has been sentenced to hang upon the morrow. He sits despondent in a cell when he is permitted one visitor: his old teacher Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone). Sir Cadman offers him his condolences and also a small amount of powder he tells him to take with his food. 

The next day Dr. Ramsey is found to have died in the night. Sir Cadman bribes the officials and snatches the body. When Dr. Ramsey wakes up, Sir Cadman welcomes him back to the land of the living. During his long travels, Sir Cadman found a rare drug in eastern India the natives call 'the black sleep' which can induce a death-like state. 

Of course Sir Cadman didn't fake his top pupil's death just for fun. No, Sir Cadman has a project that only Ramsay's gifted hands can perform. Dr. Ramsey is hesitant but given that all that is waiting for him outside the remote abbey is the hangman's noose he agrees to help his mentor. 

It seems Sir Cadman's wife has a tumor deep within her brain. Sir Cadman is desperate to operate, but for various reasons can't. He's turned the abbey into a makeshift operating theater, even having two nurses (Phyllis Stanley and Patricia Blair) there with him. He also two mute brutes, Casimir (Bela Lugosi) and Mungo (Chaney) to serve as helpers and watchdogs. Then there's Udo (Akim Tamiroff),a wandering soul who seems to visit the abbey an awful lot and usually at odds hours. 

After a while Sir Cadman confesses; his wife's operation? That was true but the good doctor needed some practice. Hence Udo; oh, don't worry. The operations Sir Cadman performs (and messes up) leaves the victims utterly brainless. Like Curry (Tor Johnson) or Borg (John Carradine); utterly harmless despite Borg's obsession with cutting things in two; of course Curry is a dead ringer for the man that Ramey supposedly murdered but that's surely a coincidence, right?

Nurse Laurie (Blair) slips a note to Ramsey late at night. When they met she confess that she is the daughter of the missing Dr. Munroe, who happens to have a remarkable resemblance to Mungo. Ramsey gets more evidence later. When performing an operation on a body Sir Cadman swore was taken from a graveyard, Ramsey notices some fresh bleeding in the brain. 

So, isolated and trapped with a madman. What can Ramsey do?

Pretty good; the mad scientist was getting a bit passé at this point, but Rathbone as the doctor is cut from the Cushing Frankenstein mold and that more than makes up for any shortcomings.