Black Friday - 1940

We finished up with the list I had with the classic monsters, but the site I was getting the movies from still had oodles of old horror flicks from the 40s I'd never heard of, so my daughter decided we should watch some of those. The first one on the list that we hadn't seen was Black Friday.

An absent-minded professor is crossing the street when he gets hit by a car and dies. In the car was a gangster by the name of Red Cannon. He's paralyzed and begs the doctor, the professor's friend, for help. The doctor's genius plan is to transplant part of the gangster's brain into his friend's head. And since the gangster hid $500, 000, the doctor figures the money can fund his experiments.

The plot immediately goes off the rails. George (professor) starts to act weird. At first, they just tell us he had a brain transplant, so I thought he had a full transplant. They only mentioned later it was partial, so for a while I didn't understand how George had memories of two people. Then George had some skull fractures. What did we do about those? We'll skim over that for now.

The movie made no sense. Ernest (doctor) convinces George to go to New York to try and jog loose the memories of Red Cannon to locate the stashed loot. When they get to the hideout (a swanky hotel), they get adjoining rooms (which George magically remembers as his hideout) and tells the bellhop the secret knock. Then he sneaks out and starts murdering the other members of the gang. Ernest was the worst babysitter ever.

The end/beginning was a bit confusing for me. They're taking the Grinch to the electric chair, but they're not saying why. He did murder a person, but it was to save his daughter, so does that really warrant the electric chair? I don't think he owned up to the experiments, because he handed off his notes to a reporter on the way to the chair. That was a bit confusing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Grinch (Boris Karloff) in this one. Bela was also in it, but we didn't see him as much. I'm going to give a shout-out to Stanley Ridges. He would switch between George and Red in such a way I wasn't 100% sure if it was the same person. Other than that, I'm not sure how hearing a siren magically made him switch. Putting that aside, this was pretty hilarious. If you have some friends and like this kind of thing, it's not a bad way to spend an hour.