****SPOILERS**** George Zucco, Dr. Llyod & Elwyn Clayton, does double duty here, probably because of the acute manpower shortage in Hollywood due to WWII, as twin brothers who represent good and evil in the movie "Dead Men Walk" as it sluggishly moves to a flaming and Armageddon-like ending. "Dead Men Walk" rips off "Dracula" and puts a different "spin" on it in a tedious and dull version of the famous Bran Stoker novel with George Zucco doing his best to make it all work but to no avail.
Dr. Llyod Clayton battling his evil brother Elwyn, who turned into a vampire after his death, who also tries to kill and turn into a vampire like himself Llyod's niece Gayle, Mary Carllsle. Elwyn does this by making night visits, once is not enough?, to Gayle's bedroom and sucking her blood, thats a new one, and thus making her a charter member of the living dead.
The movie also has Dwight Frye as Zolarr Elwyn's creepy servant in death as well as in life always messing thing up for his master. In the end of the movie during the Llyod/Elwyn fire fight Zolarr is pinned to the ground by a fallen pedestal and during the entire scene keeps saying over and over again, ad nausea, to the annoyance of the every one in the movie as well as the theater audience "Master, Master".
The story somewhat confuses you when Kate, Fran Emmett, who's the only one at first in town to know about Elwyn being a vampire and later one afternoon when she's in the cemetery finds where his body has been hidden, by his servant Zolarr. Kate opens up the cover of Elwyn's coffin where you see the sunlight hitting him and instead of him shriveling up and turning to dust nothing happens? This compared to when Elwyn and Llyod are fighting it out at night in the end of the movie in a burning house, Llyod is the one with the hat on, just the sound of a rooster crowing, thinking that it's dawn, was enough to do in the evil Elwyn even though it was pitch black outside? There's also the possibility that the rooster could have also had the wrong time.
George Zucco's acting in "Dead Men Walk" was far above the material that he had to work with but he could go so far in making his part, or parts, that he had come across effective and believable without looking silly at times.
Dwight Frye did his usual creepy act as the cracked assistant or servant to the heavy, Elwyn, in the movie like he did in previous movies like Frankenstein and Dracula. Mary Carllsle was asleep or in bed in almost all of her scenes in the movie due to her loss of blood with Elwyn obsession in trying to get her to join him in the world of the dead. Nedrick Young as Dr. David Bently, Mary's boyfriend, was like Zucco; much better then his role in the movie called for him to be.
"Dead Men Walk" did have some good atmospherics especially in the graveyard scenes but overall it was just flat and uninteresting and never really scared you at all a total waste for everyone involved; the cast as well as the theater audience.
