Here’s another Pre-Code film that couldn’t have been made just a few years later. Murders in the Zoo is an astonishingly violent film for its time, I’m rather surprised it got a full release even if it was made before the Production Code was in full effect.

It begins with a man getting his mouth sewed closed (and as you can see the film delightfully gives us that image) because he dared kiss another man’s wife. Several other people are murdered by snake bite and one woman is tossed into an alligator pit where she’s ripped to shreds.

Obviously, there isn’t a lot of gore in this film made some 90 years ago, the blood and guts are decidedly off-screen, but that’s still a lot of violent deaths for such an early Hollywood film.

Lionel Atwill is Eric Gorman, our murdering psychopath. He’s a big game hunter and zoo owner who is insanely jealous of his wife Jerry (Gail Patrick). Admittedly, she regularly seems to have affairs and wants to divorce him, but that doesn’t quite call for brutally murdering everybody who looks longingly in her general direction.

Randolph Scott is the doctor who comes up with an antidote for the snake venom (something that will come in handy when he gets bit). Oh, the snake is a super poisonous mamba. Gorman brings one back from Africa and uses it to kill a couple of his wife’s suitors.

Charlie Ruggles is Peter Yates a newly hired press agent who is scared silly of pretty much all the animals in the zoo. He’s ostensibly our hero and very much the comic relief.

The story is mostly silly, and the comedy mostly didn’t work for me, but it gets good use out of its animals. There are big cats, and alligators, and snakes, and the film gets its money’s worth out of them.

What really makes the film worth watching is just how much they got away with. I’m not a big fan of acting like modern audiences are more sophisticated, or intelligent, or even less prudish than audiences from times before. There were intelligent, sophisticated people 90 years ago. They understood violence. The papers were full of it. And yet, the violence on screen in this film does seem shocking. That opening scene where the guy gets his eyes sewn shut is wild. You know it is happening off-screen and watching it I sat there wondering if they would actually show it, thinking there was no way we’d get something like that in a film from 1933.

And then he came out, eyes shown shut.

That’s one of the many reasons I love Pre-Code cinema.