BLOGTOBER 10/3/2021: DOCTOR X
This is some exploitation movie shit! I can't believe I'd never seen this before. This gruesome pre-code freakshow features serial murder, rape, cannibalism, and an early example of body horror that satisfied many of my most depraved desires, despite its being almost 90 years old. That it took me so long to catch up with this makes me curse my lack of initiative, but at least I did finally catch up. You should too, if you haven't. Spoilers abound.
No-joke Hollywood bigshot Michael Curtiz, director of CASABLANCA among other things, brought to the screen this vivid 1932 adaptation of Howard Comstock's 1928 stage play, which must have been pretty interesting live. The story centers on Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill), whose prestigious medical academy has become unfortunately associated with a series of brutal murders in which a deformed psychopath has murdered, partially cannibalized, implicitly raped, and mutilated with a brain-specific scalpel (pronounced scal-PEL, as per the honored Mr. Atwill) his helpless victims by the light of the full moon. Fearing a scandal, Xavier races to figure out which of his potentially deranged colleagues may be the guilty party, and he has quite a few candidates to choose from: a shipwrecked amputee who had traveled to Africa to study cannibalism; his disfigured shipmate who obsessively studies the evil effects of moonlight; a porn-addicted voyeuristic brain expert; and an embittered old invalid. Sensing her father's urgency, Joanne Xavier (Fay Wray) participates in an elaborate high tech psychology test designed to weed out the killer, placing her own life on the line in the process.
This grisly thrill ride was such a success that Warner Brothers chased it the next year with MYSTERY AT THE WAX MUSEUM. This might portend something repetitive and formulaic, but their cosmetic similarities are interesting to compare. DOCTOR X has almost a full cast of disabled or disfigured mad geniuses, one of whom leads a double life as a sadistic murderer; we are treated to a disturbing scene of someone hiding among the cadavers in a mortuary; the human form is transfigured by toxic goo; and eerily convincing effigies provoke perverse reactions from voyeuristic audiences. (There is also the matter of a plucky reporter on the trail of the killer, played here by Lee Tracy, but that's honestly extraneous in this case) The latter point is most interesting here, as Xavier handcuffs his colleagues in front of diorama-like recreations of the murders in order to measure who is most stimulated by them. It's fascinating to me that this bizarre original conceit actually gave birth to the more mundane and familiar use of wax figures in MYSTERY; I'd have sooner guessed that Xavier's reenactments were inspired by the voyeuristic reality of the wax museum experience, which just goes to show how fiercely original DOCTOR X is.
The movie only gets weirder as it moves along, climaxing in the appalling revelation that the previously shipwrecked Dr. Wells (played by the wonderfully sinister Preston Foster) wasn't "a student of cannibalism", but he had traveled to Africa to use live natives as guinea pigs in his quest to invent "synthetic flesh". He uses this newfound substance to replace his amputated hand with a monster mitt, and transform his face into a horrifying countenance that hides his identity as the fearsome Moon Killer. The eerily effective two-color technicolor process used for DOCTOR X compliments the fabulously freaky makeup effects created by Max Factor for the movie's grossout transformation sequence, which is really worth the price of admission all by itself.
The moral of the story is, don't be lazy about old familiar-sounding movies, and if you know of any early or pre-code films involving the delights of cannibalism, please let me know all about them!
