hyped garbage

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

I think this may in fact be the oldest movie that was ever featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I guess there were some serials that were in fact earlier, but I think this fits the bill. This movie features Bela Lugosi doing, well exactly what the plot synopsis says. There's almost nothing else that goes on. It was really weird to just see a bride die for no reason at the beginning of the movie. It does make a little more sense later, but it's still pretty dumb. It's weird how this wasn't the part where Lugosi was in bad movies.He became much more infamous during the Ed Wood years. Well, there were always cheesy movies. The main problem is how slow this movie is. You just keep on seeing characters walk around for the longest time. I guess the story could have been dumber. You could say it set a sort of weird precedent for later bad movies. Well, "Reefer Madness" was earlier. There's too much darkness and the characters have little depth, but at least it was short. **

This is a fairly painful movie to endure even in MST3K'd form, and even if you enjoy Lugosi's work. There are some pretty, plucky girls in it, but that's about the only positive. The only thing I found interesting about it is that this 1942 film seems to have made an impression on a young Ed Wood, who in 1955's "Bride of the Monster" recreated Bela's lab set from "The Corpse Vanishes" very closely, and even lifted the scene where Bela catches his big but infant-brained minion tenderly stroking something belonging to the reclined lady strapped to the slab (her hair in this case rather than a fur garment) and whips him in punishment. Honestly, "Bride of the Monster" is a much more entertaining flick, so more power to Ed. I enjoy Bela Lugosi's work, but most of what he has to work with here is pretty boring -- so much more fun to watch him chewing his way through a slab of Ed Wood's absurdly goofy yet always drama-suffused dialogue. :-)

The Corpse Vanishes opens in fine fashion with a series of society brides dropping dead at the altar and their bodies abducted shortly thereafter by a pair of faux morticians. Matters get even more fun when feisty investigative reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters) suspects that the species of orchid worn by the brides is the key to solving the mystery and tracks down the original hybridiser of the flower, Dr. Lorenz (Lugosi), for an interview: in doing so, she puts herself in mortal danger, for it is Lorenz who is responsible for the dying and disappearing brides. With a little help from his 'family'—old crone Fagah (Minerva Urecal) and her two sons, loping brute Angel (Frank Moran), and malicious dwarf Toby (Angelo Rossitto)—Lorenz has been extracting fluids from his victims' glands and injecting them into his 80-year-old wife (Elizabeth Russell) to keep her young.Fans of cheesy poverty row horror thrillers should have a great time with this 1942 Lugosi vehicle from Monogram: featuring the Dracula star at his most hammy and with a plot that packs in so many genre tropes (hidden passageways, thunder storms, eccentric characters etc.) it's positively creaking at the seams, The Corpse Vanishes is solid schlock entertainment from start to finish.N.B. Actor Tristram Coffin, whose surname suggests that he would perfect for one of the film's more grim characters, actually plays the hero, Dr. Foster, who rescues Patricia in the film's deranged finalé (and who proposes marriage only a couple of days after first meeting the pretty news-hound).

"Bullets for Bandits" director Wallace Fox never lets the action lag in "The Corpse Vanishes," a preposterous but provocative Monogram pictures potboiler. Although he achieved immortal fame as Bram Stoker's legendary vampire in Tod Browning's "Dracula," Bela Lugosi spent more screen time cast as either sinister scientists or deranged professors. In fact, the snappy screenplay by Sam Robins and Henry Gates, based on a story by Gerald Schnitzer, anticipates a similar plot in the later Lugosi B-movie "Voodoo Man" where he played a mad doctor who kidnapped women as part of a ritual to bring his zombie wife back to life. In "The Corpses Vanishes," brides collapse at the altar during the wedding ceremony and Dr. Lorenz hijacks their corpses so he can draw glandular fluid from their necks and restore his decrepit wife to her pristine beauty. Furthermore, both films feature a mentally challenged character who loves to stroke the hair of the victims. Angel (Frank Moran) does the stroking here while John Carradine did the stroking in "Voodoo Man." Indeed, "The Corpse Vanishes" and "Voodoo Man" qualify as far-fetched little melodramas, but they are entertaining nonsense staged with some competence. Mind you, Lugosi was a better actor than he received credit for, and his straight-faced performance in "The Corpse Vanishes" makes this atmospheric, 64-minute, black & white epic better than is should be. Rather than making it a predictable police procedural, Fox and company replace the typical gun-toting copper with a fast-talking female reporter eager to get off the society page and onto the front page"The Corpse Vanishes" opens as a bride , Phyllis Hamilton, collapses at the altar. Dr. Rayburn pronounces the bride dead, and they contact Forest Mortuary to fetch the body. When the hearse arrives for the body, the attendants learn to their chagrin that the body has already been picked up and spirited away. A montage of newspaper printing presses state that this constitutes the fourth time that something so unspeakable has taken place. Society reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters of "The Third Sex") and her photographer Sandy (Vince Barnett of "Scarface") covered the wedding. Later, they cover a second wedding and the bride drops dead at the altar, too. Sandy presents Patricia with a souvenir from the wedding that turns out to be a rare and exotic orchid. This is the clue that Patricia needs to learn more about the people behind this audacious plot to kidnap brides. Our heroine has a devil of a time persuading her antagonistic boss Keenan to let her investigate. After all, Patricia learns the whereabouts of the professor who had once grew the flowers that link each of the fatal weddings. A florist, Mr. Smith, informs her that the gentlemen lives in Brookdale. Patricia heads off to interview Dr. Lorenz (Bela Lugosi of "Invisible Ghost") about these unique flowers. Initially, she tries to hire a cab, but the cabbie refuses to take her, so she catches a ride on the back of a truck carrying a casket out to the Lorenz estate. The driver, Mike, spots her and removes her. As she is walking along the road, another doctor, Dr. Foster (Tristram Coffin of "Homicide"), who is working Lorenz to find a cure for his wife, gives her a lift. "Professor Lorenz is a man of unusual accomplishments, but his wife is rather peculiar. I expect you'll find them both a bit eccentric." The Lorenz house is surrounded by a high wall with gates for privacy. When Dr. Foster and Patricia arrive, Lorenz is playing an organ. A midget named Toby takes them in to see Dr. Lorenz. Countess Lorenz slaps Patricia because she suspects that she is up to no good. Patricia has no desire to stick around after she interviews Lorenz, but a storm prevents her from leaving. The night that she spends at Lorenz's residence is the stuff of nightmares. She snoops around and sees Lorenz and his wife Countess Lorenz (Elizabeth Russell of "Bedlam") sleeping in coffins. Later, when he talks to Lorenz, he observes that he prefers coffins to a bed. Patricia manages to get back to her newspaper where her cynical editor Keenan threatens to fire her until Dr. Foster shows up to validate her far-fetched story. The big twist comes when Patricia convinces Keenan to stage a phony wedding. The police are poised to make an arrest when a guy shows up with an orchid. Everything looks good for the wedding. Indeed, Dr. Lorenz and his wife read the newspaper earlier about the impending wedding and both love the picture of a June bride, Peggy Woods (Gwen Kenyon) who decided to pose as a bride for the publicity that the incident will generate and thereby advance her career. Just before the wedding begins, Patricia learns that the real reverend needs to see her. The reverend lies sprawled on the floor of his study behind a desk so Patricia doesn't see him when he enters the room. None other than Dr. Lorenz is waiting for her and he kidnaps Patricia and takes her back to his house. Just as Lorenz is about to carry out his experiment on Patricia, he is stabbed in the back by the mother of a mentally challenged man who likes to stroke the hair of the unconscious women in Lorenz's laboratory. "The Corpse Vanishes" concludes with Patricia giving up her job as a newspaper woman and marrying Dr. Foster. Fox doesn't rely heavily on comic relief was usually the case in this movies. He stages the action with fast efficiency