Film Review Walking on Eggshells around Karloff By Jerry Saravia (Pseudo Film Critic) An ex-con who has just been released from prison can’t catch a break. He is a musician who had accidentally killed his wife, and is frustrated due to lack of cash. A stranger in the streets offers him a job to keep track of a certain judge, this judge being the very same one who put the ex-con in jail. It turns out there is more to this than the ex-con thought. So begins the fast-paced, often hair-raising “The Walking Dead,” a noir steeped in elements of horror
and it has got the uncanny Boris Karloff as John Ellman, the unlucky pianist who can play composer Christian Sinding’s “Rustle of Spring” like nobody’s business. When John is hired to make notes on the judge’s home schedule, a murder occurs offscreen and the body is dumped inside John’s car! It is of course the judge’s corpse and John is executed for his crimes, though evidence of passerby could have saved him had they acted sooner. Nevertheless, John is resurrected by the noble Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn, best remembered as Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street”) who is anxious to use an untested mechanical heart. When John is revived, he realizes he had been framed and wishes to kill the participants in his electrocution. How John acquires keen insight on the identity of his culprits while he was unaware as an unemployed musician is a good question. In a rather fascinating turn of events in the film, John doesn’t actually kill his culprits -- they meet their demise through accidents of their own. At a running time of 66 minutes, “The Walking Dead” manages to thrill us, terrify us with Boris Karloff’s unmatched visage which needs no real horror makeup, humor us and leave us with a Biblical passage that has more depth about the consequences of revitalizing life than even 1931’s “Frankenstein.” “The Walking Dead” is a relentless nail biter, a classic, and further proof that Karloff could give one nightmares and goosebumps that could last for weeks.
Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead (1936)
128 | Steel Notes Magazine
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