BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

MARIO GAUCI What little reputation this film has is very mixed, so it is no surprise my own reaction proved likewise. Revolving around an intriguing concept, yet the script (by genre regular Edward Dein) is seemingly at a loss about what to do with it: an eminent and much beloved physician (George Macready) lies dying and, in desperation at the unfairness of it all, his wife (lovely Jeanne Bates – who, late in life, somehow got to appear in two David Lynch movies!) renounces God and asks the Devil for help; immediately afterwards, a mysterious woman (Rose Hobart – from the 1931 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE) turns up, restores Macready to health and basically starts running his life. While happy to see her husband get better, Bates soon notices that his personality has changed – becoming distant, aggressive and even loses interest in his work: in short, alienating everyone around him – so that she actually wishes he had died back then! All of this sends her running into the arms of Macready's best friend, Erik Rolf (looking like a cross between Glenn Ford and the young Orson Welles...or, for that matter a local film-buff friend of mine, Robert!!): his character and relationship to the couple is pretty ambiguous – he acts almost as their spiritual adviser (thus being instantly and openly averse to Hobart's machinations), yet is a constant presence even at social engagements, hardly deigning to keep the 'love triangle' situation in check! Anyway, Macready's negligence costs a colleague's life and the once-respected doctor is put on trial…only this takes us back to the very beginning, so that all that went on in the interim turns out to have been nothing more than a death-bed hallucination – the moral being that one must face up to death with dignity and resignation, apparently after having done one's bit for the good of mankind (which should have especially resonated with wartime audiences)! The film offers more than adequate atmosphere (courtesy of future double Oscar-winning cinematographer Burnett Guffey) and Hobart (with an icy demeanor and a devilish coiffure to boot) is quite good – the combination of which leads to its eeriest moment, the very first appearance of the Devil's envoy in which she is unperturbed by a car running her over and then, after following her in a tilted camera angle shot, no less, she is seen literally electrifying her surroundings! However, as I said at the start, the plot is insufficient as Macready is not seen doing much of anything after he is revived (what was the point, then?) and Hobart actually has to prod him towards committing murder (naturally because it constitutes the extremity of an evil deed)! That said, the choice of target (the 'pastor'/rival) would benefit each of them – only he flubs it and, so does the film, since this clearly Lewtonesque sequence is kept on going much longer than necessary!; consequently, the inherent suspense in having the 'sleepwalking' Macready (armed with an ice pick long before BASIC INSTINCT [1992]!!) stalk Rolf by night out on the streets is gradually diffused…particularly with the unintentionally comic off-screen effect of the sudden opening of a rising street elevator's hatch sounding like Macready had bumped into some dustbin or a mailbox around the corner! Mind you, I am glad I acquired the film also because, as it happens, this viewing actually urged me to get back to work on my unfinished review of the slightly similar but far superior ALIAS NICK BEAL (1949; which I had originally watched on my birthday back in August) – in which Macready now actually (and atypically) takes on the role of the Minister Of God who strikes fear into (and eventually brings down) the Agent Of Hell.

dbborroughs Much loved and saintly doctor falls sick and near death. In desperation his wife looks into a fire and asks for some power to save him. A dark woman appears and the doctor is saved…but something seems different. Breezy tale of possession and of evil coming into the lives of the friends and family of a well respected man is good and well acted, but suffers in that once you know what the premise is there really isn't anywhere to go with it. In all honesty the film is similar to numerous other films, radio and TV shows so its easy to guess where its going. I hung with it during the course of it hour long running time in the hope that some new twist would add some spark to the tale, but it never happened, the film just started and went straight on to the end on its appointed course. Not bad, but far from unique or original.

sol **SPOILERS** Very esoteric and little know film about "Good" an "Evil" that has to do with a man on his deathbed within moment of leaving the world that he gave, in saving the lives of hundreds of people, so much of himself to.Dr. George Winson,George Macready, has done so much and asked so little in helping those who needed his help as a brilliant surgeon and psychologist. Infected by an incurable disease, from one of the patients that he saved, George is now in the hands of the Almighty waiting for his final curtain call. It's then that George's bereaved wife Ann, Jeanne Bates, goes a bit off her noodle, mind, begging for anyone, in this world or the next, to please save her husband from the faith, death, that's now waiting for him.Ann should have known better and left things the way they were but her love for George and wanting him to live turned the man into a monster. Not the kind and caring saint that he was before he fell into the deadly coma that's slowly taking his life away from him. It turns out that Ann summoned this "Evil Spirit" in the form of Lilyan Gregg, Rose Hobart, who despite giving her husband back his life forgot, on purpose of course, to give him his soul back with it. Now fully recovered and in excellent health George was not exactly the person that his friends family and patients knew him as. Stuck up and irritable as well as rude to everyone, including his loving wife Ann, he came in contact with it's obvious that George just isn't himself. It's George's best friend Fred Stevens, Eric Rolf, who soon sees the metamorphose that he went through and in an effort to save George's soul tries to get the poor and confused man help. It's then that Lilyan trying to keep George under her evil control turns George,like a guided missile, on Fred only to be stymied when Fred who happened to find a crucifix, lying there in front of him on the sidewalk, in just the nick of time to stop the crazed and icepick waving George in his tracks.It soon become a struggle between George who's Godly goodness, despite him having no soul, is slowly getting the upper hand over the evil Lilyan. It's then when Lilyan really goes all out to get George to murder his loyal and admiring assistant Dr. Vance,Jim Bannon, and then have him sent straight to the hot seat, the electric chair, for it. It's this way that Lilyan can have George by being sent to the place where the sun don't shine, and where it's hot as blazes all the time, all for herself for eternity.*****MAJOR SPOILERS****The surprise ending is a bit uneven in that it left you up in the air to just what exactly it's trying to tell you. Not in George's mental state but in the condition he finds himself in as the movie ends. Still "Soul of a Monster" is by far one of the best, as well as one of the most unknown, movies about the struggle between "Good" and "Evil" ever to come out of Hollywood. The film is surprisingly nowhere as corny or predictable as you would have imagined, before you saw it knowing it's storyline, it to be and that by far is the biggest surprise, together with the surprise ending, in the movie.

dcole-2 This movie is a treat: a beautifully-shot, well-acted little horror film in the tradition of Val Lewton. Admittedly, it's very preachy and didactic with a load of pretentious spiritual dialogue, but it's far more advanced than any of the "Monsters jumping out at you" brand of horror that most studios were doing in the 40's. George Macready (always great) is a dying surgeon whose wife pleads with the forces of darkness, or any forces, to save him. Enter Rose Hobart, a mysterious woman who somehow brings him back from death's door. But Macready is now a changed man: moody, vicious, mean, distracted. He eventually leaves his wife and goes to live with Hobart. His friends try to save him, but he nearly kills one of them, then allows another to die when he could easily have saved him. This is all shot in a dreamlike style that takes place in a nightmarish night-world where every action seems to be a choice between life and death, every thought is about salvation and damnation. It's not perfect, but it's very unusual and very worth catching. Wish it were out on DVD.