The Devil Commands

Kindly Dr. Revere (Boris Karloff) has found a way to record the brain waves of people. His loving wife is tragically killed in a car accident. Revere however gets a reading from his dead wife (he thinks) when alone in is lab. He becomes obsessed with trying to communicate with her beyond the grave. He ends up with a cruel conniving fake medium (Anne Revere) and some corpses borrowed from the nearby cemetery.

OK--the plot doesn't make a lick of sense. He does turn on the machine after his wife dies and he DOES get a message--but how can he know it's her? Why does he need to use other dead bodies to communicate with his wife? Why not dig up HER body and try it? Too many questions. The sets are threadbare (looks more like a PRC production than Columbia), talented character actress Revere gives out her worse performance, the silly narration doesn't work and it just completely derails at the end. Still Karloff is good (as always) and gives this junk a better performance than it deserves. He single handedly makes this an OK movie. It just isn't that scary. It does have a somewhat spooky scene where a maid is stuck in a room with a bunch of dead bodies but that's it. Minor but a must for Karloff fans.