The Monster Walks

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with Ruth Earlton and her fiance Dr. Ted Carver arriving at her father's house. She has been told that her father has died, and is returning to find out what will be done with the estate. They arrive on a stormy night, and are greeted by her invalid uncle Robert, the housekeeper Mrs. Krug and the housekeeper's son Hanns.
While exploring the mansion, Ruth is dismayed to find a large ape her father used to conduct experiments in the basement. She and the others then gather to learn how the Earlton estate will be divided. Earlton has left his estate to Ruth, but it will go to her uncle Robert in the event of her death. Very small monthly sums are also left to the housekeeper Mrs. Krug and her son Hanns. These two are very upset about the small amount of the allowance.
When Ruth goes to bed that night, a large, hairy hand reaches through the headboard and attempts to strangle her. When she screams, it disappears. Her fiance and Mrs. Krug arrive at her room, and attempt to comfort her. Ted gives her a sleeping potion, and she falls asleep in a chair in her room while Mrs. Krug stays with her, taking the bed.
The hairy hand reappears and strangles Mrs. Krug this time, killing her. Ruth awakens and alerts the rest of the household as to what has happened. Afterward, Hanns Krug meets with Robert Earlton in secret, and tells him that their plan to kill Ruth Earlton has failed and he has accidentally murdered his own mother. He blames Robert for this, and after mentioning the fact that Robert is his father, he strangles him as well, leaving him for dead.
Dr. Clayton visits Robert's room, and Robert regains consciousness. He tells Clayton about the plan he and Hanns had to murder Ruth, so that the estate would go to them instead. Clayton rushes out to find Ruth and warn her. She has already been taken by Hanns to the basement though, where he attempts to force the ape to kill her. The ape turns on him instead, killing him. Clayton arrives to find Ruth alive and well.

Tags: murder

Review:
The dead mans brother (Sheldon Lewis, the Clutching Hand himself in a surprisingly subdued performance) is confined to a wheelchair and the servants (Martha Mattox, best remembered from THE CAT AND THE CANARY, 1927 and Mischa Auer later to costar in CONDEMNED TO LIVE, 1935) are the creepiest characters you ever saw.
When informed that his room is in the basement near Yogi's cage he responds "Well get me an umbrella and I'll sleep on the roof."  Once we know there is a killer loose in the house Willie is asked if he left his gun in the glovebox of the car and he replies "No sir, it's right here!" and pulls it from his pocket.
I'm sure that fans of early horror films will definitely detect a lot of charm and goodwill in this typical story about a wealthy daughter that is targeted for murder upon returning to her parental house for the regulation of her dead father's inheritance.
Strayer starring no one else but Mischa Auer (whom years later would achieve fame and recognition as a comedian) in a creepy and very dark role.The film is about the death of a millionaire scientist, and the subsequent reading of his will.
Among them are his young daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds), his brother Robert (Sheldon Lewis) and his two servants, Mrs. Emma Turg (Martha Mattox) and her son Hanss (Mischa Auer).
This kind of plot is nowadays a cliché, but in its day it was still fresh and a favorite both among the audience and among the writers.Made just 5 years after the first sound movie, "The Monster Walks" is a stylistically a film that still retains some features from silent films.
The rest of the cast is less impressive, and while Rex Lease makes a good lead, Vera Reynolds' over the top melodrama (probably another element from silent films) is a bit annoying and distracting.Like most films done on the Poverty Row, "The Monster Walks" suffers of a terribly low-budget and even lower production values.
THE MONSTER WALKS (1932)An ape is killing people in an old spooky house!
(He's called an ape but is obviously a chimpanzee.) Willie Best, annoying billed as "Sleep N' Eat," provides the intended comedy relief and is as good as usual, but don't expect too much from anyone else.
first off I really don't think that the producers, or director ever meant this movie to be funny,, I loved the old house and the set pieces,, the ape was fun too , because you never really know if he is gonna escape or not,, I love the hairy hand creeping in from behind the headboard you never really get quite a handle on who the killer really is till near the end of the movie,, yes the movie was not scary, but like I said I really don't imagine that they intended it to be that way, this movie however is full of laughs, and it sure kept me guessing thru most of the movie.
He turns on his father and tries to kill the daughter.It was a weird little film, just out of the silent era, and there was more talking than anything.Of course, they have the stereotypical black chauffeur (Willie Best, who was listed in the credits as Sleep 'n' Eat).
THE MONSTER WALKS is an "old dark house"-type film, complete w/ a violent thunderstorm, a rich, dead patriarch, a house full of guests, a creepy servant named Hanns (Mischa Auer), and a screeching chimpanzee locked in the basement!
Low-budget early talkie that may remind some of "The Old Dark House." A daughter returns to her family home when her father dies, to find she has inherited his estate.
There are moments of slightly weird entertainment.Some of the film posters for the movie shows what appears to be a gorilla but it is not a gorilla - it is a chimpanzee named Yogi that is screeching and escapes into the rest of the house.The acting is stiff - very wooden, the plot & story are weak and the overall scariness is zero.
This is an old black and white film from the early 1930's.The setting is an old house and at night with a storm brewing outside.It has some good elements but in the end it's ruined by just not being very exciting.You get all the elements of a horror film from that time---stormy night,old gloomy house ,skulky characters and ,of course,the reading of a will from a dead man and the ensuing darting eyes after each learns of what he got ,or didn't get, as the case may be.A young women returns to her childhood home after her father dies.She ,along with her doctor boyfriend,arrive on a stormy night for the reading of the father's will at the old darkly lit home.The young woman's crippled uncle,her dad's bother,still lives there along with a tall weird bony old housekeeper/nanny and her equally creepy bony son.Also in the mix is the dead man's lawyer who is there to read the will.And the doctor's driver is also there.One of the unfortunate things about this film is the driver is a typical black character of that era.....slow shuffling bug-eyed fellow with the horrid name of Sleep N' Eat ,altho he is also called Exodus.To top it all off the weird dark old house consists of a nasty dirty looking chimp locked in a cage in the basement.So after the will is read and they all learn the daughter gets everything they all are forced to stay there since the storm is so bad.The nanny and the weird son are peeved cause they got pretty much screwed in the will after many years of drudgery in this old house taking care of two old sick men.
Then they start to suspect each other of the attacks but then next time something happens they suspect the ape again.The doctor and lawyer naturally lead the investigation into the choking attacks and murders.I'm not sure why but it seems always in these old horror films a doctor ,lawyer or newspaper reporter is always doing the crime solving.Altho it's creepy looking and not an absolute waste this film doesn't make much sense.Why would the family keep a pet ape?
All in all this wasn't a complete waste but it doesn't have much to recommend it either.It's totally a period piece,implausible and silly, and the last few unfortunate scenes involving Sleep N' Eat will make your skin crawl more than the rest of the film does put together.The horrible racism in this film was a normal and accepted part of films from that era and that is the really scary thing.The usual bad acting and bad script is here, and I was prepared for those things, but to see a human being degraded for the amusement of the movie goer isn't something you get used to.It ruined what otherwise would have been just a silly little schlocky movie turning it into a sad reminder of how far we've come but how so very far we have yet to go..
I have an original Mexican lobbycard of this oldie-but-not-goldie dark house thriller with a terrific illustration (not seen in American publicity materials as far as I am aware) of a very scary giant (King Kong-size!) ape, but, alas, no such monster appears in the movie.
The Monster Walks (1932) ** (out of 4) It's rather amazing at how many films would follow after The Bat was released in 1926 and kicked off the "old dark house" genre.
THE MONSTER WALKS is one of the very earliest old dark house movies and to be blunt it's absolute rubbish .
Whlist James Whale's THE OLD DARK HOUSE is deliberately tongue in cheek keeping with the director's sense of humour this film is funny for all the wrong reasons A good example of this happens in the opening credits where one of the cast members is credited as " Sleep n Eats "a pseudonym for actor Willie Best .
As you can imagine being African American he speaks in a stereotypical manner as in " Where da dead man dat "which if nothing else relives the tedium In fact the rest of the cast do their best to out do one another by giving the most dreadful , stilted wooden performances you can never hope to see in a movie with only Sidney Bracey giving any sort of accetable performance as the polite English sounding butler .
Sy Tomashoff and "Dark Shadows" fans should be interested in the set production.*** The Monster Walks (1932) Frank Strayer ~ Mischa Auer, Rex Lease, Martha Mattox.
In fact, before the film began I KNEW it would be this way because for comic relief, they cast "Sleep n' Eat" (later known as "Willie Best")--a character actor who was almost as stereotypical and offensive as Steppin' Fetchit.
It was old man Krug, he was the ape all along, and he'd have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.(Actually, I think this is the second movie I've reviewed with someone in an ape suit killing people, which i guess was a pretty standard fare on Poverty Row in the 30's and 40's.) The final point is the actor credited as "Eat N Sleep", better known as Willie Best.
Present and accounted for are the wimpy, overly emotional daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds), her doctor boyfriend Ted (Rex Lease), wheelchair bound Uncle Robert (Sheldon Lewis), fraidy cat black chauffeur Exodus (Willie Best aka Sleep 'n' Eat), elderly maid Emma (Martha Mattox) and her very tall and menacing half wit son Hans (Mischa Auer), who...
Exodus says "I had a grand pappy who looked somethin' like him!" Groan.Fans of cheap old horror flix will be all-too-familiar with this film's set-up, plot and roster of stock characters.
With all the attention on the maligned monkey Yogi it turned out that the butler or monkey's attendant Hanns Krug, Mischa Auer, and his mom the house maid Mrs. Krug, Martha Mattox, were behind all this monkey business to ice out or do in Ruth from getting her share of her father's money and property.****SPOILERS**** It's soon found out that Hanns is actually Ruth's step brother or first cousin, it's not quite sure which one he is,who together with his mom Mrs. Krug feel that they were left out in the cold by the old man leaving them almost nothing, but $50.00 a month for life, in his will.
This is a misinterpreted film, with reviewers (on another site) believing the opposite of how I understood it; another of those situations when we are likely reviewing different movies, so dissimilar are the ideas, anyway to me Mischa Auer but also Sidney Bracey are the best from the cast, each of the others being also strongly effective and acting professionally, even Lease.A horror movie with a good cast: Sheldon Lewis as the surviving brother, Sidney Bracey as Wilkes (a reliable old-school role), Mischa Auer (who not only got a good role, but also knew how to play it), Martha Mattox as his mother, W.
In Strayer's movies, the murders are sometimes shown, in this one as well.I liked the dreary house, the sets, starkly unnerving, I enjoyed the feel, and the dialog, with some likable people, like the physician and the lawyer, behaving as they do, the lawyer made a nice gentleman, and chivalrous, so I approve of the way the characters have been thought out and played; both families, owners and servants, are German, Hanns looks and behaves the way he does, because he is the sickly brother's child, his cousin asks only twice to leave, and it's explained why she remains (as also the ape's presence in the house is amply explained; less obvious is why would Hanns use the unholy glove for his hand, but the ape is his double), and when she was going to leave, she's kidnapped.
Had everybody spoken their lines at a normal speed, the film would have been 20 minutes shorter than its hour long running time.This "old dark house" movie utilizes elements already old hat in talkie horror films (an invalid patriarch, a heroine in peril, sinister servants, even a gorilla living in the basement), and you just know that a hair-covered hand is going to pop out of a wall to grab the heroine as she sleeps.
Basically, what we have here is another "Old Dark House" knock-off with a group of characters convening a meeting at night during a storm to hear the reading of a dead man's will.
I got this in a DVD set called Back From The Grave along with a bunch of other Horror films and I must say this deserves it's very low 3.8 rating, plus Vera Reynolds(Ruth) laughably overacts and is a terribly non convincing lead, along with Rex Lease (Dr. Ted Clayton).
Through it all is the maddening screams of Yogi, the ape, caged in the cellar, which is a bit of a problem as it is supposed to possess superhuman strength and be bitterly unforgiving of those that have taunted it but when you finally see it, it is only a chimpanzee and because of all the jungle films around at the time in which chimps were cute and funny, Yogi just doesn't convince.There is also a family secret which Hanns is forever on the point of revealing, especially when he realises that he and his mother, Mrs. Krug, were not that well provided for in the will.
Sorry for my bad English :(This movie wants to be some many things at the time, and fails in every aspect, tries to be as Dracula or Frankenstein, tries to be a detective movie, a Gothic tale, a suspenseful movie ad scary, but none of this ones works, first the plot is ridiculous, a group of people stay in a old dark house to read the will of a relative and then strange things began to happen they all think is the ape of the dead relative, in the end the ape is controlled by three of the people to kill the others and stay with the money, which is ridiculous, so the story doesn't work and is rejected by major studios, but they still want to make the movie, so they make it independent, plus the develop of the script also has some plot holes and things that just don't make sense like the part the fiancée of the leading girl starts asking questions like a detective to a guy just because he found his cigarette, or the leading girl that screams the whole movie to take her out of the house, but they don't even try to get out, after all what just happened, or again the leading girl, screaming because she found a corpse in her bed, and just minutes later she sleeps in the same place the body was found, come on all this is ridiculous and i am not telling everything.From that we get the second point, the low-budget, you can see the movie is obviously cheap, because of the special effects, the setting and the actors, the killer hand of the monkey doesn't even look like the real monkey, it makes no sense, the setting tries to be Gothic and creepy but it is not, and the acting is laughable, the leading girl is always hysterical and in tow seconds she is smiling or laughing, Hans tries to be creepy, but it ends being laughable, and its a little bit racist, the only black character in the movie is the one with no intelligence.
Once the chimp's name is revealed as Yogi, you know you won't be able to pin any murders on the poor old boy.The story revolves around the large inheritance left a young woman (Vera Reynolds) by her father, with the provision that if she dies, the money reverts to the dead man's brother Robert (Sheldon Lewis), crippled and confined to a wheel chair.
There have been better films featuring a similar kind of plot and characters(..without the caged ape, of course), and I'd say search elsewhere for better examples of the genre..
Yeah, pretty much.I love old dark house films but "The Monster Walks" is without the slightest doubt the worst of the genre and after having viewed this poverty-row clunker twice (a decade apart) it was even more boring the second time around.
And since it's literally a rainy day at the moment there's no better a time, to waste some time, reviewing this terrible old movie - that CREAKS with age.Inept and anemic are just a couple of words that come to mind when watching this profoundly amateurish, low-budget old dark house/murder mystery film from 1932.
"Sleep n' Eat" with the quote: "Well I had a granpappy that looked sumthin' like em', but he wasn't as active".What disappoints the most about The Monster Walks, other than the acting, dialog, sound, set-design, etc, is the fact that the house itself isn't used effectively, for instance what of all tunnels and hidden passages that it supposedly has, not much effort put forth there, and merely mentioning such things isn't enough to keep your audience interested.
There are about half a dozen characters in total, but to me the only one that was even remotely entertaining was the black chauffeur character played by actor Willie Best (billed as "Sleep n' Eat"); a not-so-subtle racist stereotypical character that was common in that era.Of course I can't forget to mention the chimpanzee caged-up in the basement that screeches away every now and then.
The mansion has every haunted house attribute: it's old, dimly lit, has secret passageways, creepy servants, a corpse upstairs, an ape in the basement, plus a dark, stormy night outside.