Karloff At Columbia (UK-import)
Six horror dramas starring Boris Karloff. In 'The Black Room' (1935) Karloff plays Baron Gregor de Berghman, a wealthy landowner who grows increasingly suspicious of his younger twin and plots his downfall in order to ensure he retains his personal wealth and status. In 'The Man They Could Not Hang' (1939) Karloff plays a scientist who is sentenced to hang for meddling with a young man's life in order to test an artificial heart that he is working on. In 'The Man With Nine Lives' (1940) Dr. Leon Kravaal (Karloff) experiments with cryonics and then disappears for ten years. When he is discovered in a secret chamber along with four colleagues they are allowed to thaw out and come back to life, although legally they remain dead. In 'Before I Hang' (1940) Dr. John Garth (Karloff) is on death row and given an opportunity to test a serum using the blood of another criminal. 'The Devil Commands' (1941) sees Karloff portray Dr. Julian Blair, whose wife is killed in a road accident resulting in him attempting to connect with her consciousness beyond the grave. Finally, in 'The Boogie Man Will Get You' (1942) Karloff plays Professor Nathaniel Billings, the owner of a dilapidated mansion house. When new owners move in to the property Billings continues to inhabit the basement where he experiments on human subjects as he attempts to create a new race of people.