Lon Is Messing With The Devil!

DEVIL’S MESSENGER-1961-Lon Chaney is the devil or the devil’s secretary who sits behind a desk in a short sleeve shirt and tie grinning fiendishly while consulting a Rolodex of damned souls. He takes a shine to Santanya (Karen Kadler; also in THE BEATNIKS and IT CONQUERED THE WORLD) a suicide victim who’s glad she’s dead.

Unfortunately evil Lon decides to send her back to the land of the living to take care of some business. What unfolds are three tales of the unknown. In the first a photographer (US actor John Crawford who was later in a lot of TV stuff produced by Irwin Allen) kills a woman and her image appears in a photograph he took after she died. The second features a scientist who becomes obsessed with a woman he sees frozen in a block of ice and third has a guy with bad dreams visiting a fortune teller who foretells his death at midnight.

THE DEVIL'S MESSENGER is actually three episodes of a Swedish TV show made several years earlier called 13 DEMON STREET. It was created and directed by Science Fiction author Curt Siodmak (“Donovan’s Brain”) but this version is credited to Herbert Strock, usually a film editor who directed a few films like HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER. Strock may have directed “the hell’s waiting room” framing sequences although I believe Chaney was the host of the series too. Some of the dialogue is dubbed and some funny out of place close-ups occur. Strangely the stories (especially the third one) are very reminiscent of US based shows like THE TWILIGHT ZONE, ONE STEP BEYOND and THRILLER all of which came later!

By the middle ‘50’s Lon Chaney’s career had taken a serious dive despite credible performances in big studio productions like HIGH NOON, I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES and THE DEFIANT ONES. He appeared on TV in the short-lived LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1957) and was great as the successful junk dealer who goes back to school in THE GOLDEN JUNKMAN (an episode of TELEPHONE TIME in 1956). He starred as the silent resurrected killer in Jack Pollenfex’s THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN but mainly was wasted in other low budget films like THE BLACK SLEEP, Bert I. Gordon’s THE CYCLOPS and THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE. The last quality production he was in was probably Roger Corman’s THE HAUNTED PALACE (with Vincent Price) in 1963. After that it was mostly seldom seen junk like HOUSE OF BLACK DEATH (with John Carradine and 2 directors) and several Al Adamson movies. He was in Jack H. Harris’ deranged but fun SPIDER BABY (1968) which years after it’s release became kind of a cult film. Despite health problems Chaney (who’d dropped the “Jr.” years before) kept plugging away right up till his death, working on his autobiography, writing a horror script he hoped to produce and appearing in the obscure FIREBALL JUNGLE. His last role was that of another mute killer in Adamson’s FRANKENSTEIN MEETS DRACULA. He died of throat cancer (the same disease killed his dad in 1930).

There was always some question as to how many episodes actually were made for Swedish TV or if in fact there were any other episodes at all but lo and behold a few years ago "Something Weird Video" released a bunch of them on DVD....

Thanks for reading!