Sixty-four minutes. That’s it. The Corpse Vanishes, one of five movies featuring Bela Lugosi in 1942, uses just sixty-four minutes to tell its story. That’s not unusual for the time, but there is a ruthless efficiency to this flick that many others lack. Director Wallace Fox made sure there was nary a wasted frame in this movie, even though he filmed the same opening twice.
A strange occurrence of serial criminality has descended on the city. Brides are dying at the altar, then men, posing as undertakers, take away the corpse, never to be seen again. The film opens at one of these weddings. The bride swoons, a doctor pronounces her dead, and the body is taken, Bela Lugosi’s leering face the only clue to her fate. Then, just minutes later, another wedding with the same outcome, only this one was attended by Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters), an intrepid reporter from the local paper.
Hunter finds the bride’s discarded corsage — a lotus with a peculiar smell, that had been delivered anonymously. She suspects the orchid has something to do with the deaths (it does, of course), and she tracks its unique cultivar to Dr. Lorenz (Lugosi), a former medical doctor and expert on orchids. Hunter, along with this film’s period-requisite male lead, Dr. Foster (Tristram Coffin), discover that the lotus simulates death, that Lorenz is extracting some kind of precious bodily fluid from these comatose brides, and using it to create a youth serum that will keep his wife, played by Elizabeth Russell, young in appearance.
That’s not a bad setup, but why brides? Aren’t there any other young women around, perhaps somewhere less conspicuous than their wedding? Surely. This must be the result of an idea coming before a screenplay. The idea of brides dropping dead at the altar gets 
asses in seats, sure, but fleshing out that story opens up this flick to a lot of nitpicking.
Never mind all that, though. Bela Lugosi is playing a mad scientist. If his motivations make sense, then his methods should be suspect, and vice versa. We come for the brides, we stay for the Bela. And he delivers. His range remained nonexistent, and showcased his mastery of the creepy pose with the curled hand. That and his sneer are signature, from all the way back in Dracula. This is around when Lugosi had to work in cheapies to pay the bills, and it sucks to watch an iconic actor slumming it out of necessity rather than an easy paycheck, but…it’s Bela Lugosi!
The film proceeds as expected. There are no surprises, and some shocking cheapness here and there. Lorenz’s house, for example, is very much a matte painting, and the interior is a cheaply built set. In fact, everything about this movie feels like a veneer of real life plastered on the barest of bones. There is no unnecessary detail to catch a wandering eye. Just like the short running time, everything else about this movie gets the point across, so long as the viewer is willing to move right along with it.
I was. So much of this movie is rote and familiar, despite the conceit of the brides. The anchor for it all is Lugosi. He wasn’t the only person who could play the role of Lorenz, but because he did, this otherwise anonymous movie still attracts eyes over eighty years after it was first released.