Bowery at Midnight is typical of the films that Bela Lugosi was typecast in during this era. In fact, the plot of the film seems to have substantially been borrowed from another slightly better budgeted Lugosi vehicle of a couple of years earlier – The Dark Eyes of London/The Human Monster (1940), which featured Lugosi as a doctor who had a double identity running a charitable institute for the blind as a front for criminal activities. Like The Dark Eyes of London, Bowery at Midnight is more of a crime thriller than it is a horror film. It feels like something that started out as a standard crime film but then the casting of Lugosi mandated that it be billed as horror. The sole element that places Bowery at Midnight into horror genre classification is a muddled subplot about Lew Kelly’s alcoholic doctor turning cohorts murdered by Lugosi into zombies in the cellar, but this is given scanty time.

In the hands of Wallace Fox, a director used to making cheapie Westerns and serials, Bowery at Midnight is dull and static. Certainly, it does have an entertaining luridness at times – Bela Lugosi gloating over the graveyard he keeps in the mission basement with headstones marking the bodies of his murdered cohorts; or of him shooting his associates and throwing them off rooftops. On the other hand, the script has clearly been quickly dashed off and is often confusing. It is never made at all clear why Bela Lugosi’s psychology professor has to masquerade as someone running a mission and conduct robberies, other than perhaps to provide his wife with jewellery. The aspect with the doctor creating zombies is muddled and should have been brought to the forefront far more than it is, certainly for something that is billed as a Bela Lugosi vehicle.