The Invisible Ray

Last and least of Universal's three co-starring vehicles for Karloff and Lugosi in the '30s, with the latter overshadowed by Karloff in the first of his many mad scientist roles. After a superb opening in the Carpathian laboratory where Karloff learns the secret of 'capturing light rays from the past', it gets a bit rickety in the African scenes, where a meteorite provides his ray with the necessary 'Radium X' and where a demonstration goes disastrously wrong. But it's briskly staged with some fine camerawork, and Karloff - turned into a radioactive killer and melting down a symbolic statue after each death on his vengeance trail against his wife and the colleagues he feels have betrayed him - is great.