Damaged Lives

An extramarital affair leads to a young couple contracting venereal disease.The Alpha Video presentation is very poor, with a grainy picture, frames that jump and sound that cuts out at times at at others is just not clear.

Most of the time when you watch a vintage exploitation cult movie, you can count it in being pretty shoddy. The writing, the performances, the production values, and the directing are inferior.

"Damaged Lives" has a damaged print, filled with lines, choppy sound that goes in and out (and is often impossible to hear), which makes it nearly impossible to get into. It is an exploitation film about syphilis, made before the production code although with a poverty row exploitation film, the production code probably didn't have much influence.

*SPOILERS* Syphilis was the AIDS of its day (its day being several centuries), a death sentence, slow and horrifyingly debilitating, and passed to loved ones and children. Penicillin changed that, but at the time of this film I think arsenic was the only cure, and iffy at that, with risk of death.

Damaged Lives (1933) * 1/2 (out of 4) A year before directing the first team up between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat, director Edgar G. Ulmer made this cheapie warning film.

Lyman Williams is engaged to Diane Sinclair, but it's to be a June wedding, so he goes home with Charlotte Merriam and goes offstage behind a closed door, leaving his jacket on top of her wrap. Now that he's a man, he's not interested in Contract Bridge, so he and Miss Sinclair elope.

This is a typical early 1930s film warning about the dangers of unprotected sex and the diseases one can contract. The film was directed by Dwain Esper, who made several films in this drama.

(Some Spoilers) Early 1930's educational movie about the horrors of contracting a social disease and the consequences that come along with it: blindness madness loss of ones abilities to function as well as infecting other people with it, even one's unborn children, and finally death. "Damaged Lives" is far ahead of it's times in educating it's viewers about the dangers Venereal Deasise.

The DVD for this film is by Alpha Video--a company that almost always releases the poorest quality prints. In Alpha's defense, often that is the only print available, but the specialize in public domain and cheap-o films.