Horrorfest 2018: The Invisible Ray

This 1936 sci-fi thriller directed by Lambert Hillyer is mentioned during one of the funniest exchanges in the greatest film of all time, ED WOOD. A PA asks for Bela Lugosi’s autograph and tell him he was great as Karloff’s sidekick in THE INVISIBLE RAY and Lugosi loses his shit. Do yourself a favor and look it up.

This is one of many of Karloff and Lugosi’s team ups and although Lugosi takes second billing, I wouldn’t necessarily call him a sidekick. With how well Lugosi performs here I continue to wonder why he kept making movies for Universal but none of them were Dracula sequels (until the Abbot and Costello era, that is). Oh well, who knows, no need to keep harping on it.

This time Karloff stars as a scientist who has discovered a way to capture light from the Andromeda Galaxy and view them on Earth, which provides a window the past. Doing this he’s able to pinpoint the exact location of a meteor that struck Africa a billion years ago. This meteor is believed to be made up of a heretofore unknown but super powerful element Karloff dubs Radium X. Incidentally I wonder if the guys who made up BLACK PANTHER are fans of this flick.

Against his protective mother’s wishes (Violet Kemble Cooper), Karloff leads an expedition to Africa along with his wife (Frances Drake) and skeptical colleague (Bela Lugosi) to find the meteor crash site. Upon exposure to the meteor, Karloff becomes poisonous glow-in-the-dark monster who can kill with just a touch. Lugosi is able to work out an antidote, and together the scientists return to Europe where they use Radium X for good causes – curing the blind, etc.

Without getting into too much detail (too late) it turns out the Radium X is exposure is slowly turning Karloff mad, and, upset about losing his wife to the nephew of one of his skeptical colleagues, goes on a kill crazy rampage of revenge, using his deadly touch and titular invisible ray to kill those he perceives as his enemies.

The first half of this movie is bursting with so many images and ideas that it’s difficult to guess where it will go from one moment to the next. The initial scenes with Karloff getting the images from the past via his giant ray into space are unique in concept to this day, and then the movie suddenly cuts to the African safari as if to say, “Yeah, we’re going to follow this premise wherever it takes us.”

After that it does slow down a little as it becomes more conventional in its climax, but it does have a bittersweet ending where Karloff comes up against his own mother in a showdown that concludes with the idea that both great and terrible things can be done with scientific discoveries.