I think this is the ONLY time Ulmer ever had a budget to work with, fresh off the boat from Weimar, and what does he do with it? Hires Karloff AND Lugosi, buttresses them with a couple pug-ugly manservants and a truly goofy romantic-interest duo, and puts them to work: running through this outrageous modernist mansion built on a WWI bunker (they have electric clocks!), performing satanic rites and playing the organ, murdering (and stuffing) wives and daughters, settling ownership of virgins with a nice game of chess, fainting a lot, flaying each other alive, listening to stupid ass cops with feathers argue over whose home town is prettier, plus a line that EVERYONE should have implanted in their brains: "Supernatural - perhaps. Baloney - perhaps not." The denouement, in which the goofy male love interest reads a review exhorting him to be 'more realistic,' is out-of-left-field and perfection itself, like the rest of the movie. This is what cinema is all about folks! It's as if John Landis has been trying to remake this his entire life. Plus it was Universal's top money maker of 1934!!