In a slightly different turn, Boris Karloff stars as the congenial mad scientist, or perhaps bumbling would be a little more apt.  He calls to mind The Nutty Professor starring Jerry Lewis, except with killing.  Karloff though, does not mean to kill anyone.  He is just trying to see if his experiment works, whatever that might be.  The fact that people are ending up dead, five and counting, is just purely accidental.  When a young woman buys the place and her ex-husband shows up to make sure she has not been swindled that is when things start to go awry, or at least more than they already have.  Finding Karloff’s latest victim, Peter Lorre, the local constabulary is notified and he turns out to be no more apt at his job than Karloff is.  But, as Karloff starts to explain himself, Lorre decides to join him as he is also the local coroner and the science aspect interests him, and it was not Karloff’s fault that the people had died was it?  But even then, that is not the end of it as Karloff and Lorre soon discover a murdered man and thing just get zanier from there on out.

At first glance, this would seem to be a horror film, but it is in actuality a comedy.  And it is actually quite humourous, not because of the story so much, but the performances of the leads.  Karloff is funny, but Lorre steals the show as the man who holds every job in town it seems.  The fact that he carries around a cat in his coat pocket that is not only his pet, but also helps him solve crimes is ridiculous in the extreme, but somehow just fits the character perfectly.  Usually when one thinks of Peter Lorre, in Casablanca, in Mr. Moto, and roles where he is the little shifty character when needed, it is not funny that comes to mind.  Comedy is not the first go-to option, either for Lorre or Karloff, and yet they end up doing a great job of it and work really well together.

The film is not a masterpiece, far from it.  It almost seems as if Edwin Blum, who wrote the script, just decided to take a whole bunch of elements from other screwball comedies and mash them all together to see if it would work.  We have the bumbling scientist, the bumbling sheriff, the bumbling maid, and so on, not to mention a house that is falling apart so that you can get the desired amount of physical gags in the film as well.  There is nothing usually wrong with that, but it seems that on the whole, they just did not try as hard as they could have on the story.  This film, for all it is, is only worth watching for the performances.  Worth watching for the curiosity that it is.

3.5 out of 5