You give a man a fish and he’ll eat that fish and need another one in like a day or two. Teach a man to fish and he’ll be good to go and can eat whenever he wants or at least when the fishies are biting. Give a mad scientist a ship and he’ll use that ship to perform experiments on criminals involving their bad brains and turning them into upstanding citizens. Dr. Stander is the dedicated lunatic getting his experiment on and the criminals he has aboard are a little fed up with it. Fortunately, they talk right by an open vent which allows the doctor to hear everything. Mutiny avoided. It would seem the man of science had set everything up as a cruise so he could work in privacy at sea. I guess that’s something that would work. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been on a cruise, especially in the 1930s. There’s other shit going on involving a poison ring and the pissed off woman running it. She blames her cute secretary Joan for turning over some information to the police and then lies about her being a co-conspirator which gets Stander interested in experimenting on her. Her lieutenant boyfriend Bob (also the doctor’s nephew) is not ready to allow that, so he hides her in his quarters. It’s a good call. Sander’s first subject dies after the procedure, the second one grows homicidally worse and breaks free. Stander thinks maybe experimenting on someone who’s not a criminal is the way to go, which would not prove his hypothesis at all but who am I to judge? So, now Bob is a lunatic and the whole cruise is going straight to hell. What a clunker. This boring drag is not helped by some ten minutes being cut and making a few things feel like they fell in from some other movie. Irving Pichel is solid as the heavy, playing his mad scientist as more misguided than insane while the ship full of scumbags mope around and plot. I fell asleep twice watching it and I wasn’t all that tired.
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