“I must let nature do this work for me, in the body of a normal person.”
The mad scientist of the day is Dr. Herbert Stander (Irving Pichel). He believes that he can “cure” criminals by conducting experiments using an invasive hormone therapy using, of course, glands. The problem with his experiments is that most of his subjects die. To avoid a trial, prison and most likely death row, He flees. He gets a ship, breaks some prisoners out of prison and sails the high seas. All he asks for in return is for the criminals to let him experiment on him.
Stander hires his nephew Bob Bennett (Lyle Talbot) to help sail the ship. Then he adds Mike Briggs (Stanley Blystone) as Captain. Mike has some issues in his past and Stander thinks he can trust him to keep an eye on his nephew in case his nephew gets any qualms about his uncle’s ethics. As lab assistants he has two former students Dirk (Anthony Averill) and Paul (Julian Madison).
There is also a love interest between nephew Bob and one of the criminals. Joan Martel (Julie Bishop) was convicted along with her boss “Poison” Mary Slavish (Sheila Bromley). Joan maintains her innocence and nephew Bob believers her because he is in love with he.
The killers are hoping to take over the boat and escape both justice and the scalpel. In the meantime they are taken one by one to the surgery. Of course the first couple experiments don’t go as well as expected so Dr. Stander comes up with a new theory. Instead of injecting the bad guys with synthetic hormones he thinks it would be a good idea to extract secretions from a normal person and inject them into a criminal to make the criminal all better. And who better to get untainted hormones from than nephew Bob?
“Torture Ship” is a Poverty Row film that was released in 1939 and was directed by Victor Halperin. The movie is supposed to be loosely based on Jack London's short story, "A Thousand Deaths". The only thing I can see that is the same is that they both happen on a ship.
If you are looking for this film you need to know that there are a couple variations out there. I believe the original movie is somewhere around 60 or 63 minutes long. A shortened version is out on DVD that is around 48 to 50 minutes long. For some reason the first 10 minutes or so of the movie was cut. This is where we are introduced to the doctor. He is on trial for experiments that were against the law. It is also where we see him acquiring the ship. We are then introduced to the criminals on the ship by means of newspaper headlines that give the criminal’s name and what he or she was on trial for and the fact that they have escaped from prison. The new version of the movie opens with everyone already at sea and the criminals talking about a way to take over the ship and get rid of the doctor.
Whether you see the full movie or the truncated version, the movie doesn’t have much going for it. The plot could have been interesting but it never really went anywhere. All the characters are one sided and the dialogue is meh. As for the experiments, there really wasn’t much to see. One person walked around zombie-like but even that was short lived.
I think the only real highlight about this movie is that it was one of the first to use glandular experiments as a plot devise. Not much of a pulse point since later on the movie theaters were inundated with glandular experiment movies.