The second Scream Factory UNIVERSAL HORROR COLLECTION Blu-ray set offers a mixed bag in terms of entertainment value and showcasing filmographies of some of the studio's other horror stars.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO: Returning from Africa with a veritable ark of animals for the local zoo – and short one expedition member who had the temerity to kiss his wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke, THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS) – billionaire sportsman Eric Gorman (Lionel Atwill, THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM) notices the attention paid to his wife by his best friend Roger (John Lodge, THE SCARLET EMPRESS). Evelyn's plans to run off with Roger are scuttled when Roger suffers a deadly Mamba bite at a fundraising banquet at the zoo arranged by new publicity manager Peter Yates (Charlie Ruggles, THE PARENT TRAP). With news of a loose snake, the zoo is forced to close down, and biologist Jack Woodford (Randolph Scott, SUPERNATURAL) – fiancé of the owner's daughter Jerry (Gail Patrick, MY MAN GODFREY) – is blamed by Gorman for incompetence for letting the snake out while trying to synthesize an antidote for its venom. Evelyn suspects otherwise but vanishes before she can alert Woodford who may be the killer's next victim as he continues to investigate to prove his own innocence.

A Paramount production inherited by Universal, MURDERS IN THE ZOO is the crown jewel of this set even if the other three films come nowhere close to comparing. "Sadist" Atwill is truly in his element here in the film's wonderfully queasy pre-code atmosphere of onscreen gruesomeness and implied sexual perversity, getting lines like "You don't think I sat there all evening with an eight-foot mamba in my pocket, do you? Why, it would be an injustice to my tailor!" Ruggles' comic relief is a bit grating but it perhaps prevents the film from being too grim. What does surprise for a film of the period is the absence of impassive female characters. Burke's Evelyn is no deadly temptress, her cunning only emerging once she has been terrified with proof of her husband's evil, and the intelligence of Patrick's secondary love interest character is gravely underestimated by Atwill's villain during the climax. Gorman's comeuppance involves some back projection shots and an obvious double for a couple angles but is satisfyingly gruesome in a manner unseen in Universal's own later works.

A Broadway matinee idol, Atwill had shocked audiences and colleagues by embracing his status as a second tier horror star, moving between Warner Bros. with the color films DR. X and THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM and Poverty Row with the likes of THE VAMPIRE BAT, as well as a host of memorable supporting roles in studio pictures before becoming part of Universal's horror stable with a memorable turn in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (in the role lampooned by Kenneth Mars in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN); however, his non-FRANKENSTEIN works for the studio proved to be of lesser quality in spite of his presence. THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET is one such example. Atwill is Dr. Ralph Benson whose experiments in suspended animation out of a skid row clinic have attracted the scrutiny of the police. After a failed experiment, Benson evades the police and hops aboard a cruise ship bound for Australia. Although Benson is able to do away with a cop on his trail by throwing him overboard, a ship fire forces him into a lifeboat with arrogant ship's officer Dwight (John Eldredge, HIGH SIERRA), deck hand/medical student Jim (Richard Davies, ARSON INC.), boxer Red Hogan (Nat Pendleton, THE THIN MAN), dotty Margaret Wentworth (Una Merkel, PRIVATE LIVES) and her niece Patricia (Claire Dodd, THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE) who shipwreck on a tropical island and are soon captured by the natives who believe that all contact with the white man brings death. Benson is able to save their skins by curing dying Tanao (Rosina Galli, VOLCANO), wife of the chief Elan (Noble Johnson, THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) while also exposing his true identity to his fellow castaways who are now his prisoners and future test subjects. Seriously hampered by the restrictions of the Production Code, THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET has no bite in spite of Atwill's enthusiasm. The nature of Benson's experiments are vague, the comic relief of the usually delightful Merkel no more tolerable than Ruggles in the previous film, Davies and Hogan dull as romantic leads, and pretty much no suspense other than just how Benson will get his comeuppance. Production values are lower than Universal's higher tier horror productions but still better than the film deserves.

In THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR RX, the titular fiend is behind a series of strangulation murders of high-profile murder defendants of charismatic attorney Dudley Crispin (Samuel S. Hinds, THE RAVEN). With four victims so far and no clue as to the killer's identity other than the title doctor conferred based on the notes left with the victims signed "rx," police detective Bill Hurd (Edmund MacDonald, DETOUR) tries to engage private detective buddy Jerry Church (Patric Knowles, THE WOLF MAN) to help him so that he can steal credit. Church turns Hurd down, eager to give up the business and become a bonds salesman until he sees Crispin's brother John (Paul Cavanagh, HOUSE OF WAX) and wife Irene (Mona Barrie, CHARLIE CHAN IN LONDON) and realizes how terrified they are for Crispin's career and his own safety once his latest defendant is murdered in the courtroom after the jury finds him innocent. As Church delves into the case, his mystery writer wife Kit (Anne Gwynne, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN) who used to spy on his cases for inspiration becomes increasingly fearful for his safety after learning what became of the last detective who investigated the case. While no triumph, THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR RX is a definite improvement. It is more of an audience-friendly light comic thriller with the climactic threat to Knowles' protagonist only slightly less comical than the sort of dangers Lou Costello often faced in the genre-oriented ABBOTT & COSTELLO entries for the studio. While Gwynne has some spirit, the chief draws of the film are Mantan Moreland (SPIDER BABY) as Church's houseboy and a post-THREE STOOGES Shemp Howard as Hurd's bumbling partner. Poor Atwill skulks about in a couple shots as an obvious red herring before popping up in the last scenes to explain everything.

The final film in the set is THE MAD GHOUL in which chemist Dr. Alfred Morris (George Zucco, THE CAT AND THE CANARY) has discovered an ancient Mayan nerve gas that does not kill but creates "life in death or death in life" and conjectures that the heart removal sacrificial rites were actually carried out to reverse the process, having tested the gas on a monkey and observed both physical and mental changes in the creature. With his singer fiancée Isabel Lewis (Evelyn Ankers, CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN) set to go on a tour with accompanist Eric Iverson (Turhan Bey, THE AMAZING DR. X), medical student Ted Allison (David Bruce, YOUNG DANIEL BOONE) agrees to help Morris with his surgical expertise, restoring the life of a gassed monkey with the transplantation of a heart from another monkey combined with a concoction of Mayan herbs created by Morris. Morris believes he needs a human subject to prove his theories but Ted will have no part of it. Having intuited that Isabel has fallen out of love with Ted and that the more mature man with whom she has become infatuated is himself, Morris promises to help her let him down easily. He does so by gassing Ted and removing his free will, taking him out of commission as Isabel before he can propose to her on the day she sets off on her tour, and then has him dig up a recently dead man and remove his heart to undo the effects of the gas. Morris soon discovers that the effects are only temporary and that Ted will need more hearts to continue functioning normally, and that emotional upset can cause Ted to relapse. When Morris, however, discovers that Isabel is actually in love with Iverson, he starts to trigger Ted's transformations in order to make him carry out his deadly bidding.

Anticipating the strain of horror films in which elders control the lives of trusting youths for scientific experimentation and their own selfish aims that would inform films of the next decade like BLOOD OF DRACULA as well as I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF and HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, THE MAD GHOUL is better than the prior two films in the set in some resepcts but otherwise half-baked. Lacking the cruelty and sadism of Atwill, Zucco seems more pathetic here ("We see what we want to see," he remarks upon learning that Isabel does not return his affections) while Bruce's character is so underwritten as to seem in his cluelessness as "like a child" as he is characterized by others. Ankers screams and lip-syncs to some musical numbers but generally comes across well. The same cannot be said for Bey whose "Latin lover" character is oblivious to the point of obnoxiousness. With the three younger supporting leads all rather passive, the investigative legwork is mainly performed by reporter Ken McClure (Robert Armstrong, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG), his own fate all the more surprising as he is one of the less annoying comic relief characters in a Universal horror production. The ghoul make-up was the work of often-uncredited Universal regular Jack B. Pierce (FRANKENSTEIN).

The transfers are as much a mixed bag as the films. The oldest of the films in the set, MURDERS IN THE ZOO was released to VHS by MCA in 1995 and then appeared on DVD as part of the UNIVERSAL HORROR CULT COLLECTION with the other three films in this set and HOUSE OF HORRORS (1946). While the film has not been newly mastered for Blu-ray, the existing HD master probably looks as good as the elements allow outside of a new restoration. Grain does not seem to have been smoothed away but textures of facial features and clothing are not as defined as one would hope. Definition is such that the film's first and final shock close-ups still register, but one wonders whether the darkness of the alligator pit sequence was darkened further to lessen the impact. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track has some surface noise but dialogue and music come through clearly. Optional English SDH subtitles are included. The film is accompanied by an a new audio commentary by film historian Gregory William Mank in which he delights in discussing Atwill's touches as an actor, the pre-code aspects (particularly in the dialogue), Burke's "Panther Woman" persona (Patrick was a runner up in the studio's contest), and future Connecticut governor Lodge who was a young lawyer spotted by a talent agent while his Italian wife was in Los Angeles dubbing the performances of Greta Garbo for Italian release and actually got work in spite of turning down a film role as the love interest of scandalous Mae West. The disc also comes with an image gallery (1:48).

THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET understandably did not reach home video until the aforementioned Universal DVD set, but the dated HD master of a more "recent" film than MURDERS IN THE ZOO reveals more textures in costumes, the native sets, and some studio jungle backdrops while a few bits of location work look less defined and stock footage more apparent in its graininess and higher contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono audio is okay but the hiss becomes more apparent with an increase in volume. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided. The disc includes only the film's theatrical trailer (1:41) and an image gallery (5:55).

THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR RX was also a DVD home video debut, and the HD master is comparable to THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET with a largely studio-bound film favoring static camera setups and a handful of close-up inserts while the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is better at conveying the "noiseless" recording of the era. Optional English SDH subtitle are provided. A disc of such a poor Atwill film seems to be an odd choice on which to include "Gloriously Wicked: The Life and Legacy of Lionel Atwill" (19:02) – which seems like it would be more suited to MURDERS IN THE ZOO – in which Mank discusses Atwill's beginnings as an actor on the stage, his move from Broadway to Los Angeles, his third marriage to General McArthur's wealthy daughter Henrietta, and his parallel character actor and horror star careers before delving into the less savory aspects of the actor's private life and the ensuing scandal and trial. The disc also includes an image gallery (5:16) for the film.