Karloff turns in another stellar performance as Dr. Julian Blair, a research scientist working on a new machine that records brain waves. When his wife dies in an auto accident on the day that he presents his findings to his scientific colleagues, he discovers to his shock and surprise that his machine is picking up his wife's brain waves hours later. Enlisting the aid of a phony medium played by Anne Revere, he embarks on a series of horrific experiments he hopes will finally prove the existence of life after death. It's corny and clichéd, but this movie still works. The atmosphere of inevitable doom is set right from the start, with a creepy narration by Dr. Blair's daughter. Karloff starts as a somewhat absent-minded scientist and family man who is slowly reduced to a madman totally obsessed with the idea of communicating with his dead wife. He's aided by Anne Revere, playing the medium Mrs. Walters as the coldest, most evil bitch you've ever seen. With its New England setting, nightmarish laboratory scenes full of corpses in bizarre head and body rigs, to the conclusion where Dr. Blair actually does reach the other side only to be destroyed, the obvious influence of H.P. Lovecraft's writings is clearly in evidence in this movie. It's barely feature-length, but it barrels along and hangs together so well that you won't mind at all when it's time to leave the abandoned house perched on the cliffs of Barsham Harbor.

Though the science involved in what Boris Karloff is trying to do is very flawed, in The Devil Commands Karloff gives a very good performance as a man obsessed with contacting his late wife. Unfortunately he falls into the clutches of a fake medium played by Anne Revere who takes advantage of him.

The first few minutes of the film show a happy well adjusted Karloff married to Shirley Warde with daughter Amanda Duff also getting ready to marry scientist Richard Fiske. After a car accident where Warde dies in his arms, Karloff goes off the deep end as he becomes obsessed with the idea that Warde is trying to communicate with him via electrical impulses. His efforts to combine science and the occult lead him to Revere and ultimately to tragedy.

The electrical devices in his laboratory have the familiar Frankenstein like look about them, no doubt Edward Dmytryk in one of his early directorial efforts was trying to capture the mood of the Frankenstein films from Universal. Though the rest of the cast is pretty bland, Karloff and Revere play well off each other and carry the film.

One exception to the blandness is that of Dorothy Adams whom I recognized immediately as Bessie the maid from Laura. Her part here is similar to that one and her acting has some real bite to it.

The Devil Commands is from Columbia's B unit and it's not invested with a lot of production values. Still it's a good horror film from the master himself.

In the 1930s, Boris Karloff was initially with a relatively important studio (Universal) and was enjoying a lot of success. Later, he did some dandy films for Warner Brothers, but he also made some grade-Z films for poverty row studio, Monogram. All these films were fun to watch and often a bit silly, but the Monogram ones were known for their very low production values and silly plots. After THE APE (1940), Karloff was thrilled to get out of his contract with Monogram and ready to go on to better things. It SHOULD have been that way when he made THE DEVIL COMMANDS for Columbia. Sure, like Universal in the 1930s, Columbia was not the biggest of studios but it did have decent budgets and production values and I expected this to be a much better style of film than THE APE....but unfortunately, it seemed a lot like the exact same old style of film and nothing more. Like THE APE and the rather bland Mr. Wong films for Monogram, this one was nothing special.

It stars Karloff as a kindly scientist with the best of intentions that ultimately becomes a mad man--using science to create abominations. Considering how often he did this, the whole thing seems very, very derivative and stale. We've seen this all before and there is nothing that makes this film stand out from many others just like it. Also, the narration and the epilogue just seem heavy-handed and unnecessary.

Is it fun and worth a look (particularly to lovers of B-horror films), yes. But it could have been so much better.