Lock Up Your Daughters is a British compilation of clips from American 1940s Bela Lugosi films. It was apparently marketed as the first ‘film quiz’, and had selected bookings in ‘flea-pit’ cinemas around London, including the Grand in Camberwell (November 1959), and the Empire in Staines, Middlesex.
The film was made by the E. J. Fancey Organisation and released by New Realm Pictures, one of the company’s distribution outlets, which also included DUK Films, SF Distributors, and E. J. Fancey Productions. Fancey previously had the UK theatrical rights to distribute a few of the old Lugosi and Monogram pictures including Lock Your Doors (US: The Ape Man), Case of the Missing Brides (US: The Corpse Vanishes) and The Corpse Vanished (US: Revenge of the Zombies). This unusual oddity now appears to be a lost film.
A 1959 review of the film that appeared in the British trade journal Kinematography Weekly claimed that Lugosi played a “vampiric doctor who experiments on young women in order to bring back to life his lovely wife.” The review states the film incorporates clips from films made earlier in Lugosi’s career, with footage featuring the Bowery Boys and “some of the great favourites of yesteryear.”
Other reports on the film claim that Lugosi served as an on-screen host to a series of excerpts from his older films but given the opportunistic nature of E. J. Fancey releases this seems unlikely. There are also assertions that Lock Up Your Daughters offered cash prizes for audience members who could identify the original films that provided excerpts for this production.
The film was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and was passed with no cuts and a running time of 50m 47s.
Wikipedia | IMDb | We are grateful to the Classic Horror Film Board for confirming some of the information above (the link also contains some ultra-rare front-of-house stills for Lock Up Your Daughters - and various other Lugosi films – posted by Doctor Kiss.
