In which Matt, Dan, and Ron wrap up the first night at the Mahoning Drive-In with Bela Lugosi in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932) and a bonus feature, ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948).
[Here is me copypasting the comment I was supposed to leave here initially (but somehow it ended up below the other video) in hopes of pleasing the almighty RU-vid algorithm:] The movie version, it seems, is drastically different to the Poe's story. I used to have Murders on Rue Morgue as a part of a fairly peculiar book series. The concept of these series was that every book was double-sided (so that after you read it to the middle, flip it over and read another story from the beginning; I believe it is a variation of a tête-bêche format, except without the hardcover part in the middle of a book) and each side was devoted to stories about specific animals. And each part was simply titled with a name of the animal in question. For instance, "Bears/Tigers", "Monkeys/Elephants", etc. I think the initial concept was to collect nature-centric stories about each animal kind, basically to teach young readers about wildlife and all that. However, as you may have guessed by this point, the stories themselves were only tangentially connected to the series' theme and some were wildly inappropriate for the target demographic (kids 8-12). So I do remember being quite shocked (at age of 9 or so) having read this Poe's story about a killer orangutan on the loose armed with a razor blade, which has been cutting people's heads off. Sort of a baby's first slasher :)
Dan here from my store account. I have never heard that term for double sided books before, I gotta look into this. I'm not actually sure I read Rue Morgue when I was in school, I think the curriculum was The Raven, The Golden Scarab (think thats the name?) and Fall of the House of Usher. Will go read it and hopefully write a more informed comment here, tho I may need to rewatch the movie too since someone gave me some extremely potent brownies before we watched this one lol.
