VCI Entertainment's 2K Restoration Of Bela Lugosi's The Human Monster Ready As DVD And Blu-ray Product Offerings On Oct. 29

VCI Entertainment announced this past week that The Human Monster will be available just before Halloween — Oct. 29 — as both newly-prepared DVD and Blu-ray product offerings.  This is a new 2K restoration from a combination of a fine grain print and a duplicate negative.

One of the oddest films in the lexicon of Bela Lugosi films — and the iconic actor certainly has his share of “odd films” — is director Walter Summers’ 1939 (domestic 1940) film adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s 1924 novel, “The Dark Eyes of London.” 

Lugosi’s career had hit the rocks around 1937/38 when he became “typecast” as a strictly horror actor, but during the summer of 1938 a theatrical revival of Dracula and Frankenstein suddenly got his film career going again.   Typecasting tossed aside, he shot Son of Frankenstein later that year under a renewed contract with Universal Pictures, which was released in early 1939.   

It’s a little sketchy, but Lugosi got an offer to shoot a film on location in London shortly after production on the Son of Frankenstein wrapped — which in retrospect seemed a little chancy with the drum beats of war and all.  Nevertheless he made his way across the pond to film The Dark Eyes of London before the year was out in a grueling eleven-days shooting schedule … and then sailed back home. 

The summer of 1939 slips by and there is no theatrical release of the film.   September of 1939 begins and war breaks out in Europe … still no trace of the film.    The Dark Eyes of London finally opens theatrically in November of that year in England.

A distribution deal was cut with Monogram Pictures for a domestic theatrical release.   Somehow the studio got a print across the Atlantic before World War II began … retitled the film to that of The Human Monster and released it nationwide in April of 1940.   In the meantime, Lugosi had appeared in not one, but three films — The Gorilla, Ninotchka and the 12-chapter serial, The Phantom Creeps (in addition to the aforementioned Son of Frankenstein).

Wallace’s original story was about an elaborate insurance scheme involving two brothers who used a blind charity as a front for a series of murders.   The routine Scotland Yard murder mystery is upped several notches to an out-and-out horror tale as Dr. Orloff (Lugosi) has mastered a unique method of “drowning” his insurance victims.

Greta Gynt (The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Two for Danger, Shadow of the Eagle) plays Diana, the female lead, who lands a job as a “seeing” secretary at the Dearborn Home for the Destitute Blind, which is run by the kindly Dearborn, a blind man himself (guess who).   Hugh Williams (One of Our Aircraft Is Missing) plays a detective hot on the case.

Bonus goodies for The Human Monster include not one, but two commentary options.  The first features Bela Lugosi expert, author and scholar Gary Don Rhodes (“The Perils of Moviegoing in America, 1896-1950,” “Lugosi,” “White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film,” “No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi” and “Tod Browning's Dracula”) and the second teams film historian David del Valle with author Phoef Sutton.