The Phantom Creeps
| The Phantom Creeps | |
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| Directed by |
Ford Beebe Saul A. Goodkind |
| Produced by | Henry MacRae (associate producer) |
| Written by |
Willis Cooper (original story) George Plympton Basil Dickey Mildred Barish (screenplay) |
| Starring |
Béla Lugosi Dorothy Arnold Robert Kent |
| Music by | Charles Previn |
| Cinematography |
Jerry Ash William Sickner |
| Edited by |
Irving Birnbaum Joseph Gluck Alvin Todd |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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12 chapters (265 min) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 serial about a mad scientist who attempts to rule the world by creating various elaborate inventions. In a dramatic fashion, foreign agents and G-Men try to seize the inventions for themselves. A 78 minute feature film version of the film was released for television showing in 1949.
It was the 112th serial released by Universal Pictures and the 44th to have sound. The serial stars Béla Lugosi as the villainous Doctor Zorka with Dorothy Arnold and Robert Kent.
It was adapted in DC's Movie Comics #6, cover date September–October 1939, the final issue of that title.
The first three episodes of The Phantom Creeps were lampooned during the second season of the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Dr. Zorka, a rogue scientist, is the creator of various weapons of warfare, including a devisualizer belt which renders him invisible; an eight-foot tall slave robot (Ed Wolff), robot spiders that can destroy life or paralyse it and he also has a deadly meteorite fragment from which he extracts an element which can induce suspended animation in an entire army. Foreign spies, operating under the guise of a foreign language school, are trying to buy or mostly steal the meteorite element, while his former partner, Dr. Fred Mallory, miffed that Zorka will not turn his inventions over to the U.S. Government, blows the whistle on him to Captain Bob West of the Military Intelligence Department. Tired of answering the door and saying no to the spies and the government, Zorka moves his lab. When his beloved wife is killed, Zorka, puttering around for his own amusement up to this point, is crushed and swears eternal vengeance against anyone trying to use his creations to make himself world dictator. And would have if not for his assistant Monk, an escaped convict virtually enslaved by Zorka, who is cowardly, treacherous and totally incompetent, and whose accidental or deliberate interference with Zorka's efforts repeatedly frustrates his master's own plans...
The serial contains some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, such as an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot. was used from The Invisible Ray (look closely and you'll see Boris Karloff), including scenes of Dr Zorka finding the meteorite in Africa. As with several Universal serials, some of the stock music came from the Frankenstein films. The Phantom Creeps' car chase was itself used as stock footage in later serials.Newsreel shots of the Hindenburg disaster were used as part of Dr Zorka's final spree of destruction after his robot, which is supposed to destroy the human race, is stopped due to the sabotage by Monk after being unleashed.
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