Main Cast: Basil Rathbone, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Bela Lugosi, Herbert Rudley, Tor Johnson
Release Year: 1956
Country: US
Run Time: 82 minutes
Plot
Given its cast and director, it is disheartening that The Black Sleep isn't any better than it is. Basil Rathbone heads the cast as Sir Joel Cadman, who uses a mind-controlling drug known as "The Black Sleep" to place brilliant scientist Gordon Ramsay (Herbert Rudley) under his control. Cadman needs Ramsay's intellect and expertise to aid him in a series of mysterious, covert experiments involving brain transplants. Evidently Cadman has already endured a few failures, as witness the present feeble-minded state of his former "volunteer" Mungo (Lon Chaney Jr.). Ramsay and heroine Laurie Munro (Patricia Blake) finally learn what Cadman is up to when they stumble upon a dungeon full of his previous "experiments," including a demented, emaciated man (John Carradine) and a blank-eyed monstrosity (Tor Johnson). In his last mainstream film, Bela Lugosi essays the thankless role of Cadman's mute servant. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Patricia Blake - Laurie; Phyllis Stanley - Daphne; Sally Yarnell - Nancy; George Sawava - K-6; Claire Carleton - Carmona Daly; Peter Gordon - Sgt. Steel; Louanna Gardner - Angelina Cadman; Clive Morgan - Constable Glenowen; John Sheffield - Scotland Yard Detective
Credit
Angela Alexander - Costume Designer, Wes Jeffries - Costume Designer, Reginald Le Borg - Director, John Schreyer - Editor, Aubrey Schenk - Executive Producer, Les Baxter - Composer (Music Score), Gordon Bau - Makeup, Ted Coodley - Makeup, Ben Colman - Camera Operator, Robert Kinoshita - Production Designer, Gordon Avil - Cinematographer, Howard W. Koch - Producer, John C. Higgins - Screenwriter
Set in early 19th-century England, the story concerned a prominent, knighted surgeon whose wife has fallen into a coma caused by a deep-seated brain tumor. Due to medicine's state of the art at the time, he does not know how to reach the tumor without risking brain damage or death to the woman he loves, so he undertakes to secretly experiment on the brains of living, but involuntary, human subjects who are under the influence of a powerful Indian anesthetic,'nindantera'(sp?), which he calls the "black sleep". Once he has finished his experiment, surviving subjects are revived and placed, in seriously degenerated and mutilated states, in a hidden cellar in the gloomy, abandoned country abbey where he conducts his experiments.
Distribution
Produced during 1955, the film went into theaters in the early summer of 1956, just ahead of the TV syndication by Universal Pictures of its two decades of "monster movies" through Screen Gems, under the package title of Shock Theater. It may or may not be coincidental that writer Higgins, director LeBorg, and stars Rathbone, Chaney, Carradine, and Lugosi had all been significantly associated with Universal "horror films" or related B movies. It certainly recalls two "houseful of monster" films of Universal in the mid-40s, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, only relying on a completely new cadre of human monsters.
