How about that? Friday the Thirteenth and not a Voorhees in sight! Obviously both titles "Black Friday" and "Friday the 13th" were randomly chosen and completely irrelevant to the storyline. It just sounds nice and sinister, that's all. The events take off on this notorious date, but they might as well have occurred on any other day of the week and month. In fact, it doesn't even qualify as a full-blooded horror film but more as an amalgamation between a virulent gangster/crime thriller and a loose interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi receive top billing, but both their characters (and even their performances, for once) are inferior to Stanley Ridges who literally steals the show whenever the cameras are aimed at him. The film atmospherically opens with guards and a priest guiding Karloff to the electric chair. To a journalist he hands over his diary containing all the detailed events leading up to the execution. The ambitious yet slightly unorthodox doctor Sovac sees the opportunity to perform the very first brain transplant AND save the life of his best friend at the same time when Professor George Kingsley is involved in a near-fatal road accident. With half of his own brain and half the brain of relentless gangster Red Cannon, Kingsley sometimes unpredictably and unstoppably awakes as a gently English professor and sometimes as a mad criminal out to wreak havoc on his former accomplices. Sovac himself loses his last bit of sanity when he discovers that Cannon hid half a million dollars just before his death and starts to manipulate his friends memory. "Black Friday" is the least entertaining film pairing Karloff and Lugosi I've seen thus far. This isn't entirely due to the stars' supportive roles, but primarily because the tone of the film is very uneven. The scenes of Cannon going after his traitorous partners (one of them Bela Lugosi) with a frenzied stare in his eyes are tense enough, but the alternate mad-scientist story lines tend to be overly melodramatic. The cinematography is moody enough though, with a great use of shadow, and Arthur Lubin's direction is continuously surefooted.
Review of Black Friday
