KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Scott LeBrun Dr. Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is experimenting with brain waves, and determines to continue his work especially after his wife (Shirley Warde) dies. His daughter Anne (Amanda Duff) and his young associate Dr. Sayles (Richard Fiske) try to make him see reason. Meanwhile, Julian hooks up with a (mostly) phony medium (Anne Revere) and a hulking brute (Cy Schindell), and moves to a new town so as not to get in trouble with the law."The Devil Commands" has its entertaining, unusual touches, such as the sight of various corpses propped around a table, clad in what can only be described as space suits, in mockery of a traditional seance. But it's basically a routine B movie in the end, albeit capably directed by Edward Dmytryk, who was still years away from mainstream success with films such as "The Caine Mutiny"."The Devil Commands", taken from a story by William Sloane, has a very tight running time of 65 minutes, and tells its tale in a concise enough manner. It does have an adequate amount of atmosphere for any sci-fi / horror tale from the era, with some effective looking equipment. But Karloff remains the primary reason to watch, as he did with so many of the B pictures that he headlined. He's just so wonderfully sincere and plaintive, that your heart does go out to him ever so slightly, no matter if he is as mad as mad scientists get. The supporting cast is fine in general, especially Ms. Revere. Dorothy Adams has appeal as a housekeeper in the doctors' employ, and Kenneth MacDonald is solid as a sheriff trying to keep a mob from enacting some vigilante justice that, for all he knows, might possibly be unjustified.A decent viewing that won't take up a lot of your time.Six out of 10.

bkoganbing Though the science involved in what Boris Karloff is trying to do is very flawed, in The Devil Commands Karloff gives a very good performance as a man obsessed with contacting his late wife. Unfortunately he falls into the clutches of a fake medium played by Anne Revere who takes advantage of him.The first few minutes of the film show a happy well adjusted Karloff married to Shirley Warde with daughter Amanda Duff also getting ready to marry scientist Richard Fiske. After a car accident where Warde dies in his arms, Karloff goes off the deep end as he becomes obsessed with the idea that Warde is trying to communicate with him via electrical impulses. His efforts to combine science and the occult lead him to Revere and ultimately to tragedy.The electrical devices in his laboratory have the familiar Frankenstein like look about them, no doubt Edward Dmytryk in one of his early directorial efforts was trying to capture the mood of the Frankenstein films from Universal. Though the rest of the cast is pretty bland, Karloff and Revere play well off each other and carry the film.One exception to the blandness is that of Dorothy Adams whom I recognized immediately as Bessie the maid from Laura. Her part here is similar to that one and her acting has some real bite to it.The Devil Commands is from Columbia's B unit and it's not invested with a lot of production values. Still it's a good horror film from the master himself.

MartinHafer In the 1930s, Boris Karloff was initially with a relatively important studio (Universal) and was enjoying a lot of success. Later, he did some dandy films for Warner Brothers, but he also made some grade-Z films for poverty row studio, Monogram. All these films were fun to watch and often a bit silly, but the Monogram ones were known for their very low production values and silly plots. After THE APE (1940), Karloff was thrilled to get out of his contract with Monogram and ready to go on to better things. It SHOULD have been that way when he made THE DEVIL COMMANDS for Columbia. Sure, like Universal in the 1930s, Columbia was not the biggest of studios but it did have decent budgets and production values and I expected this to be a much better style of film than THE APE....but unfortunately, it seemed a lot like the exact same old style of film and nothing more. Like THE APE and the rather bland Mr. Wong films for Monogram, this one was nothing special.It stars Karloff as a kindly scientist with the best of intentions that ultimately becomes a mad man--using science to create abominations. Considering how often he did this, the whole thing seems very, very derivative and stale. We've seen this all before and there is nothing that makes this film stand out from many others just like it. Also, the narration and the epilogue just seem heavy-handed and unnecessary.Is it fun and worth a look (particularly to lovers of B-horror films), yes. But it could have been so much better.

whitec-3 As for another viewer, this film was deposited in my memory banks a generation ago. This morning (4 Sept 2007) the TCM screen stirred that memory, so I taped and replayed the conclusion. The content is thin but the film is short, at least for a grown-up. Karloff is splendid, perfectly absorbed as ever in his character. His role is well supported by the evil medium-familiar woman with regulation severely-pulled-back hair. Dmytryk's touch is in evidence already, as every scene is well composed and lighted.But the reason why the film stuck in my aging memory, and the only reason for it to attract attention, is the stunningly realized seance scenes at the end. As other posters have described, this isn't just any seance: most of the participants have already crossed over, but they look bewitchingly cool sheathed in deco metal suits. (Another poster called them diving suits, but more like space suits you'd find on the covers of Amazing Tales in that era.) In classic seance style, all these suited bodies are seated around a table.As in Frankenstein and so many other movies since, the action in the lab scene mostly involves turning up the juice, which pours through the whole interlinked seance, adding a lot of hypnotic background noise. (And can be defended historically, since Spiritualists often used electro-magnetic metaphors to describe their rapport.)What happens then testifies to a lesson later film-makers probably can't re-learn: nothing is more suggestive than restraint. In two concluding scenes where Karloff finally gets the experiment up and running the way he planned, this well-built seance scenario comes to partial but mesmerizing life. A spinning vortex appears at the bodies' center. The voice of Karloff's dead wife breaks through in a grinding electronica: "Julian!"Then a lovely, unpredictable action: the seance cadavers in their space suits move ever so slightly, bowing toward the vortex in a series of click-actions. Then, when the electricity ceases, they click back into upright postures. Just as the Karloff character hears his wife's voice, something strangely suggestive of life beyond death occurs. The scene lasts only seconds but is repeated for the mob-finale. It's like an Eric Clapton solo, where you're touched less by what is actually played than all that might have been played. The performance stops at its peak moment, launching the audience's imagination in a way that extensions of the scene could never have accomplished.