After he saves the life of a beautiful young woman, Jean (Irene Ware), Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) becomes obsessed with her. When her father, a local judge (Samuel Southey Hinds), bars him from pursuing her, the doctor concocts a scheme to remove him and her fiancé Jerry (Lester Matthews) from the picture.
With the help of scarred gangster Bateman (Boris Karloff), Dr Vollin invites Jean, her father and her fiancé to a party his having at his home, which is filled with all manner of dastardly torture devices inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Will the good doctor's plan succeed?
Released a year after The Black Cat, The Raven is the lesser of the double bill but it is still a lot of fun.
Whereas the Poe influence was pretty minimal in The Black Cat, The Raven is filled with references within the text - Lugosi and his co-stars actually discuss Poe at one point, and Lugosi's method for killing one of his rivals is the famous execution method from Pit and the Pendulum.
In a reversal of The Black Cat, Lugosi plays the lead heavy with Karloff in more muted form as a scarred murderer who wants a new face. Without the moral ambiguity of The Black Cat, Lugosi is well-cast as the megalomaniacal doctor, spouting ridiculous lines and filling up any silence with cackling (it is an under-appreciated art).
Karloff's role weirdly repeats some of his mannerisms from Frankenstein, such as growled monosyllables. He is sympathetic to a degree, but the role is not big enough to give him room to make something interesting.
While it is only 61 minutes long, The Raven takes a while to get going. But once all the players are assembled in Lugosi's murder house, the movie turns into a pulp thriller, complete with hidden trapdoors, rooms that descend through the floor, walls that flatten people like pancakes and plenty of cackling.
With distance, it is a pile of garbage, but it is a really fun piece of garbage. Plus it is too short to get mad at.
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