User Reviews

It's sad that "The Incredible Doktor Markesan" ended so badly, as up until then it had been incredibly creepy and gripping. Up until the end, I was anticipating giving this one a 9, but the ending was just awful.

Fred Bancroft (Dick York) and his wife are broke with no place to go. Out of desperation, they head to Uncle Konrad's house--and uncle that Fred hasn't seen in many years. However, when they arrive, no one seems home and the place looks decrepit and filled with cobwebs. Soon, the uncle arrives (Boris Karloff) and he looks rather cadaverous. He also talks very little and seems a bit zombie-like. However, he does agree to let them stay on one condition--that they NEVER leave their room at night. And, to insure this, he locks them in their room. Naturally, Fred is dying of curiosity and one night he goes for a peek... What he sees, you'll have to see for yourself. Suffice to say that it's really creepy and cool. But, at the very end there is a miraculous ending that seemed cheesy and stupid--sort of like in Dr. No where there was a self- destruct lever just waiting to be pulled!! It's a shame, as up until then it was exceptional.

If there's a lesson to be learned in this Thriller, it's the old "do as I say, not as I do", which is stated (somewhat differently) by the elderly, dessicated looking Dr. Konrad Markesan when his nephew, accompanied by his wife turn up broke at his door looking for a place to stay. That this wholesome young All-American couple would consent to spend the night in such a gloomy, dusty, filthy, neglected, ramshackle house strains credulity from the outset, but, as host (and star of this episode) Boris Karloff was fond of saying, "this is a thriller",--so put on your seat-belts and get ready for a wild ride.

What follows is, as one might expect, a tale of terror, more straightforward than most entries in the series in that it has almost no padding to speak of. It's about what happens when a young couple disobeys the order of their host and venture outside their room at night. They get much more than they bargained for, as uncle Konrad is not only up to no good, he's literally raising the dead. Adapted from a story by August Derleth and Mark Schorer, the episode itself is not particularly well written, and there's little in the way of characterization, but this is a horror story, not a character study. The art direction is superb, worthy of a feature film, and while I doubt that Chas Addams was technical adviser on the show, he may as well have been. The decaying Markesan house somewhat resembles an Addams cartoon, only without the funny stuff.

The director was Hollywood veteran Robert Florey, and he handled his chores brilliantly. From a purely technical standpoint, the episode is flawless. It should therefore come as no surprise that Florey had, fifteen years earlier directed the cult horror film The Beast With Five Fingers, and that fifteen years before that made Murders In the Rue Morgue. Most of Florey's work in films was at the B level, but occasionally he was handed an A assignment. One such came early in his career when Universal gave him the splendid opportunity to direct the first sound version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Bela Lugosi, fresh from his triumph as Dracula earlier the same year, was slated to play the monster. Lugosi was made up as the monster, Florey had some scenes storyboarded, filming was ready to begin, then problems arose.

There are many different versions of what occurred but the end result was that Lugosi, who didn't want a non-speaking part, never wanted play the monster in the first place, was gone, and Florey was yanked off the project. He was replaced by English director James Whale, who, after some shopping around for the right actor to play the monster, chose an obscure British character man named Boris Karloff, and the rest is history. Fast forward thirty years, Karloff, a by now a horror icon of long standing, is set to star in an episode of a TV series he's hosting in which he plays a doctor who resurrects the dead,--shades of Frankenstein here--and whether by luck or design the man chosen to direct the episode is none other than the man who had been assigned to direct the 1931 Frankenstein in the first place. This was the first and only time Robert Florey directed Boris Karloff, by which time the actor was a veteran at playing mad doctors and monsters, who now gets a chance to play a mad doctor who is a monster. So it all comes together in the end: Florey and Karloff working together on the Universal back lot.

To get back on track here: this one's a pip. It moves at a good place, the actors all do good work, with Karloff in particular in fine form. The ending is not what one might expect, runs counter to what was the norm at the time, and should even today provide quite a jolt for a newbie unaccustomed to Gothic black and white horrors.

Boris himself is the lead in this eerie episode based on a story by the morbid August Derleth and Mark Shorer. Except for a visit to a college dean's office, the story takes place in almost another dimension of reality and looks exactly like the panels of a 1950s horror comic, quite an achievement. Back then, the technical crews and directors came from movie production and were very skilled. The ghastly makeup is terrifying, the art direction and direction are masterful and as one reviewer noted, the grim, horrifying ending is a gut punch to the viewer. This bleak episode terrified me when I was a child.

Dick York and Carolyn Kearney play Fred & Molly Bancroft, a newlywed couple who are having severe financial problems, so visit his eccentric uncle Konrad Markesan(played by Boris Karloff) for a place to stay while they find nearby jobs at a college university. They are troubled to find that his uncle looks cadaverous, and warns them to never leave their room at night, even locking it on them, but of course this doesn't deter their snooping, which will lead to a dire fate indeed... Classic episode is a true masterpiece of modern Gothic horror, with a grim atmosphere dripping with portents of doom, and has Karloff's finest television performance. Legendary final twist and end is a bone chilling achievement in horror, and a real gut-punch to the viewer, but carefully foreshadowed to seem inevitable.

This August Derleth story from Weird Tales is to die for. Two people, down on their luck, one of them Samantha Steven's husband, ask for help. When it is given, they feel they need to ignore the wishes of the man who is putting them up. This is the sunken eyed Boris Karloff. They can't wait to start messing around in the house. It turns out that our good Doctor Markesan has been thrown out of the university for messing where he shouldn't have been messing. It all falls on the couple who show no respect. As bad as things are in this creepy mansion, if they had listened they would have been on their way! But noooooooooooooh! Of course, we wouldn't have creepy stories if people listened. Boris is great in this. We forget what a fantastic actor he was. It was sad that this series didn't last longer. This may be my favorite episode.

"The Incredible Doktor Markesan" marked the 5th and final performance of Boris Karloff as both host and star (his 4th this second season), the role of Doktor Konrad Markesan truly unique in that he is neither hero (as in "The Prediction," "The Premature Burial," or "Dialogues with Death"), nor a red herring as in "The Last of the Somervilles," but a figurative monster back from the dead, one year prior to another in Mario Bava's anthology "Black Sabbath." The spiral staircase used so effectively in "Pigeons from Hell" is back in yet another dilapidated, dust covered mansion, Doktor Markesan receiving an unexpected visit from nephew Fred Bancroft (Dick York) and his bride Molly (Carolyn Kearney), down to their last $12 and in need of shelter and work. There is no response to their knock and just when they believe the decrepit place is empty, Uncle Konrad appears from behind a door, Boris walking into a magnificent closeup as he surveys the couple without expression. He shows them a desk full of money and allows them to stay in the upstairs bedroom that belonged to his late wife, with an outer lock to keep them inside all night. Forced to rough it without electricity or running water, Fred peruses some old newspapers to learn about one of his uncle's adversaries, Everett Latimore (Richard Hale), whose testimony had Markesan expelled from his position at nearby Penrose College, devising a way of resuscitating the dead through a serum derived from mold found only in graves. An unfortunate venture downstairs sees the long dead Latimore rehearsing a new speech under Markesan's direction, along with two other former colleagues also guilty of betraying his trust. It shan't be long before his nephew feels the wrath of the undead, to Fred's everlasting regret. This was the only time that Karloff was directed by Robert Florey, exactly 30 years after taking the reins on Lugosi's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," a poor crumb to ease the pain of their both losing out on "Frankenstein." Donald S. Sanford again adapts an August Derleth story, allowing Boris to essay one of his rare, actual horror roles on the small screen, so frequently spoofing his boogeyman image, while another Universal veteran was beautiful Carolyn Kearney, the sexy water witch from 1958's "The Thing That Couldn't Die." Apart from "Pigeons from Hell," that winding staircase could also be seen in Lon Chaney's "The Mummy's Tomb," and even Karloff's own "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."