The Strange Case of Doctor Rx is a 1942 black-and-white murder mystery/horror B film by Universal Studios directed by William Nigh and starring Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Anne Gwynne, Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Samuel S. Hinds. Although Clarence Upson Young is credited with the screenplay, the actors mostly ad-libbed their lines. The plot involves the search for a serial killer who is targeting men who have been acquitted of murder. The film received poor reviews upon release.
Plot[]
Private investigator Jerry Church has just married his longtime fiancée Kit. Defense attorney Dudley Crispin and Church's former police partner Capt. Hurd talk Church into accepting one last case. The case involves a string of murders committed by someone calling himself Dr. Rx, and the victims are five clients whom Crispin had successfully defended in court.
After a sixth murder and the discovery that another detective has gone insane investigating the murders, Church agrees to drop the case at Kit's insistence. However, he is kidnapped and blackmailed into continuing the investigation by a criminal whom the police suspect is the killer but who wants his name cleared when Church finds the real Dr. Rx.
Church is abducted by Dr. Rx, who wants to transplant Church's brain into a gorilla. Church is found the next morning and taken unconscious to the hospital. Crispin shoots himself with a poison dart gun and dies. Church reveals that he has been faking unconsciousness, that he had been working with Dr. Fish to capture Crispin and that Crispin wanted to prove himself brilliant by defending criminals in court and then reestablishing justice by killing the guilty men after their trials.