Crew
Director/Producer – Eddie Saeta, Screenplay – Sal Ponti, Photography – Emil Oster & Kent Wakeford, Music – Richard LaSalle, Opticals – Van der Veer Photo EFX, Art Direction – Ed Graves. Production Company – Freedom Arts Pictures Corporation.
Cast
John Considine (Doctor Death), Barry Coe (Fred Saunders), Stewart Moss (Dr Greg Vaughn), Cheryl Miller (Sandy), Leon Askin (Thor), Jo Morrow (Laura Saunders), Florence Marly (Tana), Sivi Aberg (Venus), Jim Boles (Caretaker Franz), Barbara Boles (Alice), Pierre Gonneau (Harry), Larry Rogers (Young Man in Park), Athena Lorde (Spiritualist), Moe Howard (Volunteer), Anna Bernard (Girl in Phone Booth)
Plot
Fred Saunders’ wife Laura dies but promises on her death bed that she will be back. Fred obsesses over what this means. He goes to mediums and spiritualists seeking answers but encounters only frauds and madmen. He is then introduced to Doctor Death, who conducts a stage magic act in which he kills a badly disfigured woman and then transfers her soul into the body of a dead woman and brings her to life. Fred dismisses this as a trick but is persuaded to go back to Doctor Death. However, when Doctor Death tries the transference using Laura’s body, the soul of the dead girl keeps being rejected. Doctor Death becomes obsessed with bringing a soul to life inside Laura’s body. He begins a spree killing women around the city in search of a body, only for each of their souls to keep being rejected.
Doctor Death, Seeker of Souls was the sole film directed by Eddie Saeta who worked as an assistant director on a great many films and tv between the 1930s and 1970s, including 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), several Three Stooges films and tv’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-8). The film was not a wide success when it came out.
It may well be that Doctor Death, Seeker of Souls was influenced by Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970), which came out three years earlier. Both films feature a stage magician who has an act where they cut a woman up for real on stage. It is hard to say as both were films without wide releases. In contrast to The Wizard of Gore’s reality and illusion games, Doctor Death offers a novel scene where John Considine kills a woman by sawing her in half on stage (albeit conducted without the goriness that Lewis did) and then guides her soul over to inhabit the body of a dead woman and brings the body back to life. John Considine has quite a degree of charisma in the role of the title – the character is never actually given a name throughout, is just known as ‘Doctor Death’ on the credits.
I liked the fact that it doesn’t take long for Doctor Death to start getting weird. Doctor Death is naturally aided by a hulking disfigured retainer who has had his tongue removed. Doctor Death’s demonstration of sawing a woman in half and then transferring her soul is followed afterwards by a guy (who is clearly meant to be gay) pleading with him to transfer his soul into a hot body like the woman in the demonstration. Afterwards, Considine lounges in his home, lusting after the dead woman he has just revived (Sivi Aberg) to the increasing jealousy of his ignored wife (Florence Marly), who retaliates by throwing acid in Sivi’s face.
The latter scenes consist of John Considine prowling the streets of Los Angeles in his white Rolls Royce Silver Ghost looking for souls to kill and revive in Jo Morrow’s body. In the most entertaining scene, Considine comes across a couple whereupon the guy (Larry Rogers) pulls a switchblade to attack Considine, who is stabbed and erupts in gouts of black blood that spill over the guy’s face and cause him to have a complete meltdown. In another entertaining scene, Barry Coe gets cold feet and pulls out of wanting to have his wife resurrected, whereupon Considine has a severed head in a box delivered to his office. There is also a fine twist ending.
There is an interestingly odd cast. The most fascinating name to see is Moe Howard, no less than one of the former Three Stooges, in his last film role at age 73 and only a couple of years before his death. He can be seen, during the initial demonstration, almost unrecognisable as the man that John Considine asks to come up and confirm that the woman on the stage is dead before he transfers the other woman’s soul. Czech-born emigre Florence Marly, best known in the genre as the green-skinned alien vampire woman in Queen of Blood (1966), turns up as John Considine’s jealous wife. Larry ‘Seymour’ Vincent, a horror host on several local channels in the L.A. area during the 1960s/70s, appears in a black-and-white film on the tv as a character called The Strangler.
Trailer here
Full film available here