text: I've been working my way through a collection of Lugosi films recently, and having just been blown away a couple of days ago by the combination of Lugosi and Boris Karloff in "The Black Cat" I was really looking forward to seeing their collaboration in "The Raven." Alas, it just didn't work for me, and by the end of the film I was quite disappointed.<br /><br />For the first three quarters of this movie or so I thought the story lacked any real suspense. Lugosi was doing a pretty good job of holding things together as the somewhat mad Dr. Vollins, some sort of surgical genius who falls in love with a young woman (Irene Ware) he treats after a car accident but who can't have her - partly because she's already engaged, and partly because her father (Samuel S. Hinds) disapproves. To deal with that situation, he enlists the aid of Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) - a horribly ugly man who wants Vollins to make him look more acceptable. Aside from Lugosi's performance, though, I found little to hold my interest. Then, suddenly, in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, the movie shifts around completely. Suddenly it becomes quite suspenseful, but I thought Lugosi's performance fell apart, largely because the movie tried to shift him from mad to insane - and there's a difference. He plays the "mad" role very well - controlled and in control but evil. "Insane" is a more out of control evil, and I didn't think Lugosi pulled that off well. At one point, he offers some maniacal laughter which just comes across as fake. In the meantime, Karloff was a huge disappointment. He never grabbed me at all. As an aside, it must have grated on Lugosi that - in movies in which they co-star - Karloff gets the top billing, even though in "The Raven" it's clearly Lugosi who is the lead actor. This surely gives a hint as to how Universal ranked their two great horror stars - inexplicably, I would add, because I've always thought of Lugosi as the better actor of the two.<br /><br />In any event, there's no real connection here to Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Raven" - except that Vollins is a Poe fanatic, who tries to recreate some of the torture techniques from Poe's stories. Overall, a disappointment. 4/10.