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Load of rubbish!!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

This is a really scary movie. It has a great story line. It also has great acting. This is one of the scariest movie I have seen. This is a horror classic. Bela Lugosi is very scary in this movie. He was one of the best actors from his time. If you like horror stories see this movie.

Poor audio and cheap production values make this crime melodrama barely watchable, saved only by the action-packed ending and some horrific moments of suspense. It surrounds an insurance scam set inside a school for the blind. Bela Lugosi is the mastermind behind the scam, and it isn't made clear whether "The Human Monster" or "The Dark Eyes of London" (its original title which I prefer) are Lugosi's or the blind giant (Wilfred Walter) who utilizes other senses to perform Lugosi's nefarious orders. This seems like something that Tod Slaughter would have done, fitting considering his low-budget British melodramas like "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" and "A Face at the Window". Lugosi isn't believable at all in his disguise, and the dubbed voice of another actor for that disguise is just absurd and not at all convincing. Even with 65 minutes of dull melodrama, the climax picks up the pace as if the writers realized a bit too late that something needed to be done to save the film from total fiasco.

Over in the United Kingdom what we call B Pictures, they call quota quickies and this film The Human Monster was such a film. It even got its American release from Monogram Pictures which did nothing else.This should have been better being based on a story by the great British pulp fiction writer Edgar Wallace who was their Mickey Spillane. Bela Lugosi plays a man with two identities, insurance writer who writes policies for men without families and then has them killed with himself as beneficiary. Who's doing the killing is some hideous disfigured man who resides in a home for the blind and who does the bidding of the head of the home who happens to be Bela Lugosi in his other identity.Bela slips up because one of his insureds turns out to have a daughter played by Greta Gynt who wants answers. Scotland Yard Inspector Hugh Williams is on the case and he has an American partner Edmon Ryan over here on exchange from the Chicago PD.That theme has been used many times, coming to mind is John Wayne in one of his later films Brannigan and the TV series Dempsey&Makepeace from the 80s. Williams disdains the third degree methods used in America and tells Ryan in no uncertain terms. Actually the British police methods can get physical at times.Better production values would have made this a better film.

More of a mystery than a horror movie, this never really captured my attention closely, essentially because there really wasn't too much mystery involved. Could there have ever been any doubt that Dr. Orloff, played by Bela Lugosi, was behind the mysterious drownings? That was pretty clear. True, the twist revealed about the identity of Dearborn caught me by surprise, but that came across as silly more than anything else. Parts of the story, in my view, were totally unnecessary. The whole American connection was superfluous (the forger being extradited from Chicago, and the Chicago cop accompanying him to England and becoming involved in the investigation) and the need to make Jake a monstrous-looking creature baffled me. It seemed a weak attempt to introduce a horror-type element to the story. Lugosi did well enough as Orloff, managing to bring his typical "mysterious presence" to the character, although at times he frankly looked too mysterious, and therefore too suspicious, to take seriously the idea that it took a while for the police to suspect him. I also wondered about what he actually was. He runs an insurance company, and yet he's called "Dr." Insp. Holt says he "could have been" a practicing physician, and yet he is running a hospital and treating patients in a home for the blind. A bit more about the background of the character would have been appreciated. Overall, the bare-bones nature of the story was a problem. The last 10 minutes or so of the movie were pretty good, and Orloff's fate was appropriately ghastly. If you're a Lugosi fan, this is worth watching, although it's not one of his greats. 4/10