After the last gasp for air in Universal Pictures’ famous monsters brand with the re-release of Frankenstein & Dracula as a double bill that resulted in the creatively bankrupt Son of Frankenstein, there wasn’t much work to go around for actors Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi. The drought that followed for the eternally typecast horror movie heavyweights is perhaps what turned up the heat on their professional rivalry & turned their next collaboration, 1940’s Black Friday, into such a disastrous bore. A bland gangster film with only the slightest hints of horror or sci-fi in its formula, Black Friday is a shameful what-could’ve-been experience, one made dull by Lugosi & Karloff’s refusal to play nice & share the scraps that Hollywood had left for them to fight over.

In Black Friday, Boris Karloff plays a brilliant neurosurgeon who saves his close friend’s life by replacing his brain with that of an infamous mobster. Once a meek college professor, Karloff’s buddy starts to show personality traits of the gangster his surgeon-savior-friend effectively murdered to extend his life. The split-personality professor now has the hots for the deceased gangster’s showgirl girlfriend, drinks & smokes with the same mannerisms, threatens violence in a way far outside his normal character, and (much to Karloff’s surgeon’s piqued interest) talks of a hidden fortune stashed before his death. Rival gangsters & the showgirl dame rush to uncover the fortune before the surgeon can beat them to it, while he’s not fighting off suspicion about what happened to his once genteel friend. It’s even less exciting to watch this all unfold than it sounds, exhausting even for a feature barely more than an hour in length.

If you’re asking where Bela Lugosi fits into all of this, you’re not alone. The original script cast Lugosi as the troubled neurosurgeon & Karloff as the split personality professor-gangster. That formula might’ve actually been interesting. Alas, Karloff insisted on playing the surgeon & instead of taking the role of the professor-gangster Karloff had left vacant, Lugosi was relegated to the much smaller part of a rival gangster. Perhaps the reason they didn’t switch roles outright was that playing the rival gangster allowed Lugosi to avoid ever filming a scene with Karloff. It also allowed him to continue their onscreen meta rivalry that dated all the way back to the actors’ first collaboration, The Black Cat. As a result, although Lugosi is second billed he only has a bit role in the film and does not appear in a single scene with his rival.

There are only a few isolated moments of interest in Black Friday. The film’s opening credits play over a calendar reading Friday the 13^th & are followed by an intense death row march that promises a much more horrific vibe than what follow. The film’s sole moments of outright horror are a brutal car crash stunt & an onscreen brain surgery, both motifs echoed from earlier Karloff-Lugosi collabs The Black Cat & The Raven. Watching Lugosi play gangster & Karloff don surgical gear are fantastic images, but aren’t put to much use. The only line of dialogue that really stuck with me was when Karloff’s daughter pesters him about his professor friend’s sudden change in personality & he snaps, “Haven’t you guessed?! The operation I performed was a brain transplantation,” as if that were the most obvious explanation for the change. The rest of Black Friday is a forgettable slog made hopelessly dull by two great actors who were visibly tired of working with each other on occasional projects & fighting over the scraps of the rest.

-Brandon Ledet