The Black Sleep is an intriguing and little seen low budget horror film, with a dream cast of genre veterans.
In Victorian England, a brilliant surgeon, Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone) is trying to find a way to revive his beloved wife from a coma caused by a brain tumor. But, his methods are a little unscrupulous, as Cadman employs a powerful anesthetic from India to induce a death like state in his test subjects. He uses it to snatch a fellow Doctor, Gordon Ramsey, from Death Row, where Ramsey is awaiting execution for a murder he denies carrying out. Cadman wants Ramsay's help, but as Ramsey soon discovers, not all Cadman's previous experiments have been so successful.
Rathbone is on fine form, making Cadman initially seem charming and even sympathetic, but slowly revealing him to be cruel and insane.
His co-stars are not always as lucky. Lon Chaney Jr hams it up as Mungo, a former scientific genius who has been turned into a crazed madman by the good doctor's experiments. But poor Bela Lugosi, in his final filmed role, is left without a word to say. The underwritten character of Cadman's butler feels like it was written to put Lugosi's name on the posters.
Tor Johnson, Lugosi's co-star in the Ed Wood films Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, has some fun as the sort of lurking bulk of a monster he excelled at.
The highlight comes in the form of John Carradine, playing another of Cadman's victims. Carradine does not hold back, even by his usual standards, as the climax sees the inmates taking over the asylum.
