Life Returns (1935)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Better Late Then Never

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

"Life Returns" is another example of a film Universal produced during their horror golden age that, despite sometimes being included among those classics, is not actually a horror film. Instead, it's a maudlin drama with only the slightest science fiction trappings.This film is loosely based (Very loosely based) on a real life incident where scientist revived a dead dog. The filmmakers, for some reason, choose to build one of the most hackneyed melodramas I have ever seen around that premise. You've got a young, ambitious scientist who's dreams of reviving the dead are crushed by the cold harsh realities of corporate commercialism. His wife dies of reasons never further elaborate on. His young son can't sell newspapers and is constantly threatened with "Juvenile Hall," as if that was the worse fate imaginable. Soon, the kid meets up with a gang of young rapscallions, right out of friggin' Little Rascals. After the kind of mean, sadistic dog catcher that only exists in lousy movies like this steals his beloved pet, the kids do a daring escape and release all the dogs from the pound. Meanwhile, Little Jimmy's Dad kind of sits around, getting more depressed. Eventually, the beloved dog is killed and we finally get to the central gimmick the whole movie is built around. Instead of recreating the actual experiment, the characters in the film look just off-screen at the actual stock footage of real scientist doing their thing.I'm sure in real life the scientists just killed a dog for the expressed purpose of reviving it. And I'm fairly certain, after they brought the animal back to life, the beloved owner didn't kneel before the operating table and cuddle. The movie's in the public domain and is widely available on Youtube. Turning the hilariously incoherent self-generated close captioning on actually makes the film somewhat entertaining. Somewhat.

Self-absorbed scientist Dr. John Kendrick (Onslow Stevens) becomes so obsessed with realising his dream of bringing the dead back to life that he neglects both his successful medical practice and his loving family, losing his wife and his mind in the process. Rather than face a stint in juvenile hall, Kendrick's son Danny (George P. Breakston) runs away from home and joins a gang in the next neighbourhood, where his lovable mutt Scooter proves popular with the other kids until it is nabbed and gassed to death by the local dog-catcher. A distraught Danny gives his father one last chance to prove his worth: teaming up with old college pals Dr. Louise Stone (Lois Wilson) and Dr. Robert Cornish (played by real life pioneering scientist Robert Cornish), Kendrick performs a revolutionary procedure to bring the mutt back from the dead.Part heavy-handed drama, part Little Rascals-style kids' adventure, and part scientific curio, this has got to be one of the most unusual films to come out of Universal Studios during the 30s; however, despite its undeniable credentials as a genuinely bizarre obscurity, the film utilising real-life footage of Cornish's experiments on a dead dog during its climax, Life Returns offers very little in the way of real entertainment value, being too dull, depressing, and devoid of genuine entertainment value to be of much interest to anyone but the most avid fan of Universal's output.

Arguably one of the most baffling movies ever, and probably THE single worst thing Universal Studios was ever involved with during their golden "horror cycle". LIFE RETURNS is a rare curio which features Onslow Stevens (Dr. Edelmann from HOUSE OF Dracula), Valerie Hobson (BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN) and even Frank Reicher (KING KONG). In the excellent MacFarland book UNIVERSAL HORRORS I had read that this was one of those obscure films that fans love to try and locate, only to be bitterly disappointed once they track it down. I remember a quote which concluded that "LIFE RETURNS deserves its ongoing obscurity", or something. Well....the risk is yours! So what is this, then? One guess is that it's possibly a story about a doctor (Stevens) trying to develop a formula for bringing dead people back to life, though it's certainly not a horror film. This also echoes the vibe of an "Our Gang" two-reeler minus the comedy: the doc has a young son who becomes involved with a gang of kids and has a pet dog which ultimately becomes a participant in dad's experiment. Footage in here was taken straight from an actual medical procedure trying to revive a dog, spliced in to make it appear part of the movie! * out of ****

Universal created this picture with a horror theme that was too upsetting for the British and it was censored. "Life Returns" was fiction and created by director Eugene Frenke and his writers James Hogan, John Goodrich, Arthur Homan, Wolfe Gilbert and Mary McCarthy. Onslow Stevens, formerly the invisible scientist of Universal's science-fiction serial "The Vanishing Shadow",'34, played John Kendrick, a doctor devoted to seeking a formula to restore life after death. He succeeds when his son's pet, called Lazarus is gassed by the dog-catcher. It was surprising to see Valerie Hobson playing the faithful doctor's wife. Great Film for 1935!