Carfax Abbey

A world that dust and scratches try to hide: an interview with Bjørn Egil Eide

2012-02-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

I was intrigued to receive an email a few weeks ago from Bjørn Egil Eide, to tell me about a film he has made called Volkodlak.

It was, as he explained it:
... a short film that mimics an old silent horror movie. It has English intertitles, original music and is just about as 'classic' as one can go both in terms of film-making and the horror genre. Now I'm searching for the "right audience" for the film... this is an amateur, ultra-low budget and artsy film, but it's also something completely different from the rest of today's many generic titles and I'm sure it would be very welcomed by fans of old horror films - if they actually knew about it. If nothing else it does at least keep the spark of classic horror cinema alive.

There's something perversely heroic about an amateur film-maker striving to recreate the look and atmosphere of a silent movie, and I really do like the finished product.
There are some truly impressive images and effects in it, and while you are never quite in danger of mistaking it for the real thing (the cast look unavoidably modern) it is often amazingly effective given the kind of constraints that video filmmakers must ever labour under, compounded massively in this instance by the need to create an artificial style and setting.
The absence of soundtrack does not feel gimmicky but genuinely of the essence of the piece. It's not a flashy pastiche but rather the product of Eide's deep and wide-ranging love of silent horror, coupled with a genuine disenchantment with many of the genre's contemporary manifestations.
I'd like to think that the renewal of interest in silent cinema brought about by The Artist might rub off in some small measure on this film, unquestionably one of the best amateur productions I have seen.

Despite his concerns to the contrary, Bjørn's English is fantastically good - better than my Norwegian, det er sikkert - and I first asked him if he had made any films prior to this one, and how he got the idea.

Bjørn Egil Eide: It was the first of my attempts that I managed to turn into a complete film. I'd had a couple of stabs at film making during the late 90's, but I lacked focus on what I was doing as well as the ability to do proper editing. As a result these attempts crashed and burned.
In August 2002 I had become more serious and wanted to try my hand at a dark comedy (in Norwegian) together with a group of friends. During its production I managed to "con" a couple of these into joining me on some "damn fool idealistic crusade", and so Volkodlak was started in January 2003.
This lead to both films being shoot at the same time. I finished the original cut of Volkodlak in 2005, long before the other production wrapped, but because of insecurities surrounding it (which can be read about at our website) I held it back. It didn't see a release until late 2010 - four years after its "twin production" had been shown at a local college.

Why silent?

Well, I had no choice really. I had to get rid of a ghost that had haunted me since my early teens. The thing that made me interested in making films in the first place was the early horror films, and of these I was particularly drawn to the silent ones. There was something about them, it was like peering into a color- and sound-less ancient mystery-world, that dust and scratches tried to hide from you. A place where monsters lived. Maybe they seemed more believable that way, I don't know. In any case, I was hooked.
I knew how to operate a video camera by then and made up my mind - I was going to make something just like this! Although I tried, and failed the following years, the urge to complete such a film kept lurking in the back of my mind. I couldn't get rid of it. Finally, the first day of 2003 I decided that I just had to go through with it if I hoped to stay (somewhat) sane.

I'm guessing you're a fan of Dreyer's Vampyr. Can you tell me what some of your other favourites are, or any other influences that fed into the film?

You know what, I actually didn't see that one until only a few years ago. I was impressed with its striking visuals, minimalistic use of sound and the fact that much of it felt like the recording of a dream. I distinctly remember the shot where the shadow of a peg-legged soldier sits down next to it's owner - who is already sitting! But there's a lot of fascinating and memorable moments in there.
A major influence on me as a film maker was the shot from Nosferatu where Count Orlok is discovered in his coffin, and the one of him rising from the earth box. Other major influences were The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Frankenstein (1931) - which was probably the first of the old horror films that I watched in it's entirety, Dracula (1931) and White Zombie. Really most of the old Universal canon and other horror, science fiction and fantasy films (and cartoons) that I saw at a fairly young age influenced me greatly. King Kong, Ray Harryhausen films, the old Star Wars trilogy and Gremlins also made me interested in special effects. I'm very glad practical effects were still the norm while I was a kid so that I was spared of the CGI craze at an impressionable age.
Mario Bava's Mask of Satan had a late but tremendous influence. It is my favorite Gothic horror film because of its beautiful black and white imagery, and because it's dripping with a wonderfully dark and dreamy atmosphere pretty much from start to finish.

I can see the influence of Bava in there.

Of the Italian horrors it's mostly the Barbara Steele films that I've seen, from the sixties. What I like about them is that many of them were shot in black and white and stepped back into the Gothic realm. Also they feel a bit deeper, more psychological than many of their contemporaries (like the Hammer output), dealing with taboo subjects such as incest, lesbianism, necrophilia. I think it makes them more interesting. They are what I fancy the American horror films of the late 30's could have become if they hadn't been made to suffer the wrath of the Hays Code. If you look at films like Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935), it doesn't seem so far fetched.
And yes, I am definitely a Barbara Steele fan. I have an autographed photo of her from the set of Mask of Satan on the wall of my office. In my book she is the Gothic horror chick, there's just something unique about her that's impossible to explain. That, and she's incredibly attractive in those films, especially in Mask of Satan. Yes, I know...

Have you seen The Artist? Do you think it might have a positive effect on how your film is received now?

Sadly it's not the kind of film that is likely to play anywhere near where I live. I've seen the trailer though and I think it looks great. It's nice to see something of this style being well received. I guess most people who'll go to see it (and want to see my film) are people who are fans of classic cinema, but who knows? So I hope it does very well, that certainly can't hurt a film like mine and other film makers who want to develop similar projects.

What do you dislike about modern horror films?

A lot, so get ready for my rant! No, I'll try to restrain myself. It was when all the torture-porn and extreme gore really kicked in (like the Saw pictures and all the zombie-stuff) that I'd had enough. It just doesn't do it for me. Sure, it's all truly horrifying, but it's the kind of experience that leaves me more sick to the stomach than fills me with dread. I can of course only speak from a personal perspective, but in general it seems that today everything has to be extreme. It's over-the-top and in-your-face, constant use of jump-scares and overuse of CGI. The result is overkill on all fronts and it renders me numb and unimpressed pretty quickly.
Then there's also a tendency to set everything to modern times which I think is a mistake. It seems to me that the further away from a world with electric light and technology you get the bigger the arena of darkness and insecurities become, and I don't understand why that isn't taken more advantage of. I truly believe that a less extreme approach in this genre - both in the use of special effects and in-your-face moments - along with a focus on atmosphere and use of the unseen (or only partially seen) - is far more effective if you want to get under someone's skin. I can't remember who said this and which film they were referring to, but it was something like; "this film is not designed to horrify, it's designed to haunt". Now that's a great philosophy! I'm not saying the genre as a whole should adapt it, but a good chunk of it should.

I agree. What is your next project?

There's so many ideas, but little time available to work on them. Volkodlak took three years to do, and after that I decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from film making mainly because it's just too time consuming. But, I do have a couple of finished scripts, and one is for another Cold Grave Studio production. It's called Black Cloak (it's not a vampire film), and would be similar to Volkodlak in terms of technique, but be closer to an early 1930's Pre-Code sound horror film.

You've got my ticket already!

The sound however would mainly be used for the sake of effect, not so much for dialogue. It has great potential, but since it's a much larger production then Volkodlak it would need some real funding as well as the involvement of an English-speaking crew, so it's pretty unlikely that I'll ever get it made. I would definitely go through with it though if I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity.

What would you like to say to anyone about to watch Volkodlak for the first time?

This is of course a very small, homemade film, a love-letter to classic horror cinema, made by fans for fans, to keep the spirit alive. Naturally it's not something that most websites promoting independent horror films are likely to care about, and we don't have resources to promote it ourselves. So we're totally reliant on word of mouth from fan to fan, but without the help from horror bloggers I fear the film will have an incredibly hard time finding this very specific audience. So I'm very grateful to you, Matthew, for taking the time to write about it. It means a lot to me. So everyone - please tell your ghoulish friends!

You can see the full movie here.

Vincent Price poll results

2012-01-03T00:05:00.001-08:00

Thanks to the 105 readers who voted in the Vincentennial poll.

I asked you to choose your favourite of the great man's horror films, and proposed fourteen of the most likely options. Even so, the 'other' category itself attracted eleven votes - the fourth biggest share - so do please let me know which films you prefer in the comments.

I'll admit to a few highly personal inclusions, such as my own choice, House of the Long Shadows, which picked up an encouraging four votes beside my own, and Madhouse, which at least somebody out there likes as much as I do!

As for the rest, a surprisingly low showing for House of Usher and Tomb of Ligeia, which only mustered one vote each (whereas Invisible Man Returns pulled in three), and I must admit to being pleased that Witchfinder General (in which Price is superb, but which remains a basically annoying film to me) did well but not too well.
There was little doubt that Theatre of Blood would win, which is only right and proper I think, though for a lot of the way it was neck and neck with House on Haunted Hill.
But in the final stages a late surge for Dr Phibes split the impasse and Theatre just streaked ahead.

All in all, I would say that his British films received most attention, then the William Castles, then the Roger Cormans: Theatre aside, probably the reverse of what I might have expected.

Here are the results in full, and keep looking in for more Price-related posts in coming months to celebrate his anniversary.
And if this all leaves you feeling hungry, go and visit Jenny at the Vincentennial Cookblog.

1. Theatre of Blood (15 votes)
2. The Abominable Dr Phibes and House on Haunted Hill (13 votes each)
4. 'Other' (11 votes)
5. House of Wax and Witchfinder General (9 votes each)
7. Masque of the Red Death (8 votes)
8. The Fly (6 votes)
9. House of the Long Shadows, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tingler (5 votes each)
12. The Invisible Man Returns (3 votes)
13. House of Usher, Madhouse and Tomb of Ligeia (1 vote each)

Socko Zucco Back To Backo

2011-12-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

George Zucco and Lionel Atwill to me are a bit like Karloff and Lugosi, or rather I should say Lugosi and Karloff: crazy George is plainly the Bela of the outfit.
Boris is the technician, and like Atwill is invariably a classy pleasure to watch, but if you want to see a real force of nature going berserk, giving wild performances in wilder scenarios, you need Lugosi... or you need George Zucco.

Are you in the Zucco club? Not many of us are.
Unlike Lugosi he didn't even have that one classic signature performance as a starting point from which to decline. He started off running. He began at the bottom, and declined from there. If there is any kind of tragedy in his career equivalent to Lugosi's it is certainly a less romantic one; he lacks the sense of doomed majesty that permeates Lugosi's work.
He is a member of the Universal team, sometimes in good bit roles in the biggies (like his Professor Lampini getting House of Frankenstein off to a roaring start, killed at the end of his first scene in a perfect little cameo), sometimes in leads in the second-eleven (most effectively in The Mad Ghoul).
But PRC gave him his best opportunities in the genre, and unlike Lugosi at Monogram, there is never the uneasy feeling of a great man being exploited.
Zucco always stands out, even when he's over on straight street, doing sensible cameos in proper films. He's not a bona fide horror star, but one of those men like Atwill, Carradine and Naish, who maintained a busy and sometimes critically successful career in supporting character roles in A pictures, but who moonlighted in horror films for extra pocket money. As a rule, their attitude to the latter work is not serious, and in some cases you may detect a certain visible resentment that manifests itself either in uninspired stock performances, or else a lofty kind of mockery (Carradine is especially guilty of the latter).
Zucco has certainly drawn this complaint over the years, but I can't see it myself.
Zucco, for me, has the velvet class of Karloff and that glint of genuine insanity that flickers in Lugosi's eye; the theatrical certainty of the one; the spectacular ill-restraint of the other, and a commitment to rival either.
His own background seems to account for the combination: his father a Greek merchant and his mother a former lady in waiting to Queen Victoria; part outsider, part aristocrat, all neither. He has flamboyance and he has precision, his mad professors have the cold madness of reason.
He is the consummate horror star: well-spoken and uninhibited, sardonic and flamboyant; the voice cut from the silk lining of Dracula's cape; the figure dapper, soft but not paunchy; the hands controlled. The face would radiate nothing but grandfatherly warmth if it were not for the eyes, which, possessed of some internal form of illumination, brood darkly and malevolently until suddenly lit from within, like the flicking on of a switch, as insane inspiration strikes.

To satisfy my heretic suspicion that the mad Mancunian might just be the greatest horror star of Hollywood's golden age, I have opted to watch all of his PRC horrors in one back to back session.
This was originally planned back when I was doing PRC Month, which ended without finishing. You may remember when I did the same thing with Lugosi and Monogram. Well this is like that, but even more so. It really feels like I've learned something doing this. I always loved Zucco, but now I really love Zucco. I can't understand why he isn't one of the absolute top icons in the horror star pantheon. He certainly is as far as I am concerned.
What an actor! And what a star; what screen-floodlighting star presence in the man! Such silky evil, such barely concealed depths of sadism and depravity.
I find myself heretically imagining him in other roles, even roles associated untouchably with the star who immortalised them: as Dr Mirakle in Rue Morgue, or Dr Moreau in Lost Souls, or Dr Vollin in The Raven. I'd have liked to have seen him doing the Atwill role in Murders in the Zoo. He was the screen's greatest ever Professor Moriarty.
Here, from wonderful PRC, are five films that entertained me hugely, from start to finish. Surprising, stylish, and one-of-a-kind strange.
Not just strange, but s t r a n g e. And beautiful.

Monogram misused him as they did most everybody: his near-comically demeaning role in Voodoo Man, as Lugosi's berk of an assistant, plays to none of his strengths. It hardly uses him at all, in fact, after his effectively creepy first scene at his gas station (as he deliberately steers lone female drivers into peril, his unlikely accent adding greatly to the character's creepiness). He somehow got out of the monster role in Return of the Ape Man - some say illness, others say pride.
But all of his PRC roles are, for me, models of the art of horror villain acting. They allow him a range of which Lugosi could only dream: monster-making mad scientist here, criminal mastermind there, revenger, vampire.
In each he is subtly different but always basically gives the star performance, the Zucco show, as if he somehow knew that decades after his death we were going to start really loving what he does. I don't think any other Poverty Row lead was as well served by his studio.
I really enjoyed these movies; as with the Monograms, it has changed my whole perception of them.

I kicked off with The Mad Monster (1942): not the best of them, my memory told me, but as archetypal as they come.
In the event I was pleasantly diverted. Posters claimed it 'the year's most terrifying shocker' (and just get a look of that luxuriant brown hair on Zucco)!
It may not be that, but there's one thing we can all agree on: what a title!
What a fantastically, amazingly fabulous title!
The Mad Monster: it's the very essence of PRC horror. So perfect a mix of hyperbole and mundanity. He's a monster, and he's mad!
With most monsters there always the chance you can reason with them. Catch them in a quiet moment, just before going to bed perhaps, and you can explain to them why violence never really solves anything. Or you can appeal to their best interests, if not to their better natures. Lon Chaney's Wolf Man might be induced to take a bribe in exchange for not savaging you - not this guy! He's not just a werewolf, but an insane werewolf!
American viewers, of course, have the additional option of taking it to mean 'The Really Angry Monster', which is if anything even better.
It's a masterpiece of a title. It's the Sistine Chapel ceiling of forties horror movie titles.
And the opening of the film lives up to the magic of the title. To the ominous theme tune, over which PRC in their profound wisdom have laid the sound of a barking domestic dog, we fade into a moonlit night in Dr Zucco's lab, where his assistant Petro (Glenn Strange doing Lon doing Lenny) is already tied down ready for business. And, as a measure of just how big a doofus Petro is, Zucco is ignoring him and chatting to a wolf in a cage (handily for us recapping everything he has been up to in the lab so far).
As with The Devil Bat there's no messing about like you'd get in a Universal horror: setting the scene, establishing relationships and motives, any of that rubbish. He's already perfected the means of turning Glenn Strange into a werewolf by syringing a bit of fluid out of the wolf's leg and injecting it into Glenn while we were still buying the Kia-Ora. A couple of minutes after lights down and it's already lap dissolve time.
The special effects, though hardly Jack Pierce standard, are ambitious and commendable, though it is typical of Poverty Row eccentricity that once transformed he does not leap out snarling but settles down to have a nap.

Zucco, clearly the weirder of the two, then immediately launches into an address to his imaginary colleagues, justifying his experiments and railing against their opposition to his ideas.
As he does so, we see their transparent forms hovering around the table. Sometimes they interject with objections to his claims, but there's no arguing with Zucco once all you can see of his eyes are the white bits.
"Gentlemen," he begins, "I wish you were here to see the proof of my claim that the transfusion of blood between different species is possible," perhaps not realising that 'possible' is next to meaningless if the result is that it turns people into werewolves.
Recalling one eminent professor who dared call him mad, he suggests: "Perhaps you will change your mind one day soon when Petro tears at your throat..."
Yes, that'll be the moment that clinches it. This guy's experiments have turned a harmless boob into a snarling werewolf and now it's ripping my jugular out. How wrong I was to suggest he was not the full shilling...
And it's not just revenge he's got in mind with his werewolf serum: he also wants to do his bit for the war effort.
This monologue is just terrific:

You realise, of course that this country is at war. That our armed forces are locked in combat with a savage horde that fight with fanatical fury. Well that fanatical fury will avail them of nothing when I place my new serum at the disposal of the war department. Just picture gentlemen: An army of wolf men. Fearless! Raging! Every man a snarling animal! My serum will make it possible to unloose millions of such animal men. Men who are governed by one collective thought: the animal lust to kill, without regard to personal safety. Such an army will be invincible gentlemen!

I foresee two possible objections to this plan. One is the Geneva convention - I doubt it's explicitly forbidden, but there must be at least one abstract principle it violates.
The other is the more practical one of what you do to maintain esprit de corps when your platoon consists of snarling wolf men governed by the animal lust to kill.
My guess is that discipline is going to be a problem. When the battle's finished it's unlikely they'll want to go back to the mess hall, listen to Moonlight Serenade and swap pictures of Rita Hayworth.
And what's to stop them eating their superior officers along with the enemy? Perhaps Zucco has been careful only to extract his serum from the legs of patriotic wolves.

Oddly, after this crackerjack beginning, the film settles down as one of the slower and least eventful of the PRC horrors, albeit with an honourably well-sustained spooky atmosphere, and well-photographed scenes of the beast stalking his victims through the undergrowth only occasionally let down by the size of the sets. And there's a major shock when Petro in wolf form slaughters a little kid.
But the plot goes pretty much nowhere (and literally nowhere in a geographical sense), consisting mainly of Zucco grumbling about his rival scientists interspersed with scenes of the local dungaree-clad rubes discussing mittel European folklore like they've just got off the bus from the Universal studios tour.
These yokels immediately spot a werewolf's handiwork, but our reporter hero (Johnny Downs - top-billed!) has a more audacious theory: dinosaurs.
I know, I know. But hear him out:

I understand they travelled around on their hind legs and made our present day public enemies look like horticultural specimens.

Well, that's my choice taken care of - now your suggestions, please, for the strangest line of dialogue in the history of American cinema.

Grrr! Woof!

The film has one of PRC's most interesting casts. As well as Zucco the film boasts bona-fide Universal horror heroine Anne Nagel in the female lead, as George's daughter. (Interestingly, George is often a close relative of the heroine in PRC.) Nagel's also one of Monogram's Women In Bondage, but you know her best from a somewhat classier bill of fare: Black Friday, The Invisible Woman, Man Made Monster and The Mad Doctor of Market Street. (To say nothing of Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.) Behind the scenes she seemed sadly to have been one who never got a break herself, and professionally her luck was on the out by this time too.
You may also spot another refugee of the terrible lottery of stardom: the great Mae Busch as Susan the hillbilly.
Way back in silent days Busch had been a major and exotic star. One of the many casualties of the talkie changeover, she kept at it in what little work she could get, though fate being an odd son of a bitch, one of the most demeaning gigs it landed her was supporting roles in Laurel and Hardy shorts - thus catapulting her securely into screen immortality.
If we only had her silent movies she would be a complete unknown today, thanks to Laurel and Hardy she remains a cherished star to millions of comedy fans. It's great when the roulette wheel dishes out some arbitrary good luck for a change.
This is a rare post-L&H straight appearance, and one of her last: I didn't even recognise her the first time I saw her in the movie. It's her voice more than her face that gives her away. When she yells at some clay pipe-chewing old crone: "Oh will ya stop talking like that! I'm so nervous now I could scream!" you suddenly hear her in Their First Mistake, berating husband Ollie: "It's Stan here, Stan there! I'm telling you it's beginning to get on my nerves!" God, I love this still. If a snarling man-beast tries to make off with your girl, grab him by the dungaree-straps and let him know who's boss.

Next up, a new one to me, which the reference books tell me is more a mystery thriller than a horror, albeit with horror icing: The Black Raven (1943).
Another splendid title. Films with the word 'raven' in the title are usually pretty good. Something about the word just seems to bring out the best in movie folk. (Even that new one with John Cusack dressed up like Edgar Allan Poe looks pretty good from the trailer.)
And another great opening, with that fabulous Devil Bat theme tune and one of those handy credits sequences I tend to associate with Warner Brothers, where they show the actor at the same time as projecting his name and character.
So we learn that Zucco and Strange are back together again, the former as "Amos Bradford, alias 'The Raven'", the latter, doing his Lenny bit again, as his dimwit assistant Andy. I really wouldn't care to guess if they are called Amos and Andy as a joke, or in blissful innocence. It could so easily be either.
Who else do we have to look forward to? Well, there's Noel Madison (gangster of choice for studios that couldn't afford Jack LaRue), Charlie Middleton (another L&H regular, to say nothing of the strangler in the PRC swamp, here playing a cop in a raincoat) and, joy of joys, the former Miss Dorothy Quackenbush herself: Wanda McKay, the oomph girl of Poverty Row horror. I. Stanford Jolley too.
I smell masterpiece and it hasn't even started.

Immediately the credits are over we learn that the Black Raven is not a black raven but an inn near the Canadian border, run by criminal mastermind Zucco.
In a splendidly Old Darky Housey first act, various unsavoury characters turn up in the middle of a storm, including a two-bit crook (Jolley) that Zucco had double-crossed right into the pokey, now busted out and itching for revenge ("he's suffering from rabid delusions aggravated by a moronic mentality," Zucco sums-up; "Is that bad?" asks Strange), a bank teller turned thief (Byron Foulger), and Madison as Mike Baroni, racketeer on the run, who wants Zucco to get him into Canada after his flight from the law has made the front page of the New York Leader, alongside 'Rodeo Begins Photo Drive'.
"D'you think I got where I did by bein' a cream puff?'", he asks when Zucco questions his criminal chops. Just when you think this inn caters for nothing but criminals, along come Wanda McKay and Robert Randall (our hero), with their eyes likewise fixed on Canada but for entirely different reasons: "We're not going to give up, even if your father's political influence did keep us from getting a marriage license in this state", he obligingly reminds her, filling in for us like he's George Zucco talking to a wolf.
Last to arrive is the father himself (Robert Middlemass), on the trail of Wanda, and coincidentally the man whose pressure has resulted in Madison's fleeing... Add thunder, a dead telephone and a weirdo stranger who may or may not be all or less than he seems, and all is in place for one of those delightful old house thrillers that Hollywood was at that time turning out at the rate of about one a week, but which never lost their instant marquee appeal (and still haven't round my place: if I had to pick one type of movie that I never, ever get bored of it's the spooky old dark house comedy mystery thriller).
Some good dialogue, as in this bit where a nocturnal shock propels the weaselly bank teller into the orbit of the redoubtable father:

- Help! Help! Someone tried to break into my room!
- A man or a woman?
- A man I suppose. Why would a woman want to break into my room?
- Yeah, I guess you're right.

Next thing, Pops is dead and obviously everyone's got a motive, and just as obviously the killer turns out to be the weedy little one who wouldn't say boo to a goose. (No this isn't a spoiler - the killer in these films always turns out to be the weedy little one who wouldn't say boo to a goose.)

Now its off to Fog Island (1945), another of those borderline horror-mysteries, but a really good one, with Zucco and Atwill, and that glorious spiv Lester Cowan, an actor born shifty, best known to me asHumphrey Bogart's ill-fated partner from the head-end of Maltese Falcon.
It starts off a bit like Black Raven, with a criminal on the run coming for Zucco's help, but soon turns into one of the most truly mean-spirited thrillers of the forties: a parade of figurative and literal back-stabbers, all trying to cross and double-cross each other, that builds to a grand finale in which almost the whole cast are locked in a flooded room and drown screaming.
It's inspiration, I assume, was Rene Clair's adaptation the same year of And Then There Were None, but whereas the Christie story is a blackly comic whodunnit, this puts all its cards on the table at the start, as Zucco greets his weekend guests:

I invited you out here for, let me say, retribution. Now, retribution's an odd word. It can mean so many things. It could mean reward - the return of money you think I stole from you. It could mean giving you an opportunity of getting even with me. Or with each other. It could mean revenge - taking a life for a life. You see, one of you killed something very dear to me. It might have been friendship, it might have been my ideals, it might have been my wife. Perhaps she never knew it, but I happened to love Kama. She was more than just a wife to me. She was my ideal, my friend. Whichever one of you killed her will kill again, and just as wantonly. So let me warn you - the innocent, mind you - to beware of the murderer whenever he, or she, finds it necessary to strike again. And that, my dear friends, concludes the business of the evening. Now. Let's all be as socialble as we can, hmm?

And then, as a deliberately insincere afterthought:

Oh, by the way. I'm afraid I had to send the launch back to the mainland for some slight repairs. It'll be back in the morning, probably. In th meantime I'm quite sure that you'll find every convenience on this island. Except, of course, the telephone. Dinner will be at eight-thirty.

Now, this is really good stuff, and Zucco is note-perfect: he's not overdoing it, he's not sleepwalking though it and he's not condescending to it.
It's good writing and it's good acting, the latter somehow improved by the retention of a moment, in the middle of the line 'Retribution's a funny word', where Zucco suddenly looks as though he is about to sneeze; he abruptly looks away, grimaces and puts his finger to his nose. He just manages to stifle it and, like the theatrical pro he is, continues uninterrupted.
And PRC, who know to the penny how much a retake costs, have their cameras do likewise. The result is a moment of charming and unexpected naturalism that somehow adds to the casual menace of the scene.

It's great to see Atwill and Zucco sparring, exchanging pithy, rat-a-tat dialogue, steeped in sarcastic loathing. Can't you hear their voices, and theirs alone, here, when Zucco discovers Atwill obviously snooping around where he shouldn't be:

ZUCCO: Looking for something, Alec?
ATWILL (knowing himself caught): Er... my pipe-cleaners. I thought I left them here.
ZUCCO: I didn't know you smoked a pipe.
ATWILL: Oh, didn't you?
ZUCCO: I've always been very interested in pipes. Do you mind if I have a look at yours?
ATWILL: Certainly... (Makes vague, token gesture of pretending to check his pockets.) Oh, I must have left it in my room.
ZUCCO: Undoubtedly. Have a cigar.
ATWILL (his old silky composure returned): Thanks.

Shortly after, Zucco is dead at Atwill's hand, and his death scene, a beautifully sustained rasping monologue as Atwill stands, nonchalantly smoking a cigar and staring at him with a fixed but entirely emotionless expression, is another genuinely fine moment. Two absolute pros doing what they do. (Sadly, it would be one of Atwill's last performances before his death from throat cancer the following year.)

Dead Men Walk (1943) begins with a scene almost guaranteed to play strange tricks on a heavily intoxicated brain that has already seriously overdosed on PRC wonderment: Zucco at a funeral, in full toupee, gazing into a coffin at the corpse of... Zucco, with characteristic bald pate.
Turns out they're twin brothers, and the one who's dead is an evil murderer and, according to his brother at least, a demonically possessed force of pure evil. This diagnosis is confirmed when the nasty one pops up post mortem in the nice one's office, and threatens him.
The hero is a big lunk of a doctor who arrogantly refuses to believe Zucco's story and treats him like a silly child, at first even refusing to accompany him to the crypt and examine the coffin ("I'd feel like a fool, or... worse," he cryptically explains.)
Eventually persuaded, his skepticism is undented on discovering the body gone ("perhaps it's been stolen by medical students") and despite Zucco's assertion that his dead brother has actually visited and talked with him, he continues to insist that "ignorant people believed that stuff in medieval times but not anymore."
"Perhaps you're right, I don't know," says Zucco, who has just finished explaining what he has seen with his own eyes.

This is a straight vampire movie: a rarity indeed on Poverty Row, with a support cast to match the nostalgic script.
Mary Carlisle, former WAMPAS starlet and high hope of 1931 gives her last screen performance before retiring as the heroine, and as the vampire's assistant, in one of his last performances before dying from a heart ailment exacerbated by overwork (movies by day, factory work for the war effort at night) and wacko religious abstention from medication, we have none other than Dwight Frye, quite unrecognisable as Lugosi's Renfield, but giving an equally balls out performance. Mary looks like she's travelled a long road from the little cutie who illuminated many a modest pre-coder, but Frye looks decades older than Renfield; sadly indeed he looks exactly like what he is: a man with not very long to live. There's something a little sad, but massively imprressive, about the aplomb with which he goes back into his whining and cackling routine here, even though he had tired of it years before. We lost a good one in Dwight Frye: I'd give anything to see him taking comeback roles for Roger Corman, or William Castle.

This is one of a number of PRC films that really do show how serious the studio was about producing quality product to rival the larger studios - unlike Monogram, whose films, though delightful, play as the work of sherbert addicts who can only just keep the camera steady from laughing so much.
This is no masterpiece - as most critics will helpfully tell you - but it is made with care, it has some great moments and it's emphatically worth your time. Zucco is, if anything, more than usually restrained in his two roles. He makes for a suave, sinister vampire, taunting his brother much as his Moriarty goads Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, but he never really seems like a vampire as such. We never get much of a sense of the demonic fury that his brother was ascribing to him even while he was still alive; there's something too solid and calculating about Zucco to usefully suggest the supernatural: like Atwill, he's strictly mad scientist, and could never really play any kind of monster. (I'm sure that's why he pulled out of Return of the Ape Man at some time after the eleventh hour.)

If you're like me, your first thought on hearing of a film in which Zucco plays twin brothers is - oh good, trick work! In particular, I'm already hoping for my favourite eerie effect: the stand-in dressed like the star with his back to the camera while Zucco is photographed over his shoulder, then switch angles and POV, and repeat. And somehow you can always tell when it's the stand-in, and obviously it's fabulous when they let you get a good look at him, as they increasingly did in Three Stooges shorts when Curly was supposed to fall off a chair but was too ill to do it himself.
The thought of Zucco filming this is an especially amusing one, because it would entail his having to take his toupee on and off each time as he swaps places.
Sadly, though, there's not nearly enough of this, though the final shot, in which the two Zuccos fight to the death in a burning room makes up for the lack immediately prior. Rarely have we seen such carefully positioned and half-hearted death struggles. The thing about a good screen fight is that it's uninhibited, and it's difficult to be uninhibited when the most important consideration is that one of the pugilists keeps his face away from the camera at all times and the other one's wig doesn't fly off.

Lastly, one of the great joys of my life. There have been some wonderful surprises today; how nice to round-off with something known and trusted.
The Flying Serpent (1946): an old friend.
That said, I'd quite forgotten that it began with a rolling caption, informing us that when "the wiley Emperor Montezuma" was fleeing the invading Spanish conquistadores, he "hid his fabulous treasure... and implored his native gods to guard it. Among these gods was the feathered serpent QUETZALCOATL."

Perhaps because he was silly enough to hide his fortune in a massive temple (in a 'secret chamber' only accessible by going through the door carved visibly into the temple's exterior wall), only one of the gods showed up, the aforementioned Quetzacoatl, and you have to assume that Montezuma knew he was coming, because he made a special alcove for him, the entrance barred so he can't escape.
Rather a shabby way to treat a god, still more one for whose assistance you have implored - and not much protection against looters either if it's trapped behind a grill in an alcove. Loyalty is not Quetzalcoatl's strong suit anyway: when Profesor Zucco finds the treasure (in best PRC tradition, long before the beginning of the movie) its loyalties, such as they are, switch immediately to him, which was of course the one thing he had been waiting there all that time not to do.
Even more obligingly, it proves willing to kill Zucco's enemies for him. Many writers have noted that this film is basically a remake of The Devil Bat and so it is, with the flying serpent primed to kill this time not by hatred of the victim's aftershave lotion but by their possession of one of its own feathers, which Zucco tweaks out and places on the person of the intended victim, and which the serpent can then mysteriously locate at any distance.

This leads to much amusement at the big climax when the monster kills its own master: in The Devil Bat it comes perilously close to making sense, because Lugosi had no means of removing the aftershave that had been splashed on him, but this time we get Zucco fleeing in terror from the winged serpent, but not thinking to simply discard the feather he knows full well is the reason for the attack.
Actually, his motives are pretty zany all through the film. He is zoologically fascinated by the serpent, and intoxicated by the treasure, which he makes no effort to move to a new location. He then pretty much goes looking for trouble, and seems in no hurry or desire to make his life more comfortable in the light of his find.
His only aim, it seems, is to leave both treaure and beast in situ, and kill anyone who looks like they might stumble upon the discovery themselves. This, rather than become both rich and hero of the hour by claiming discover's rights of the greatest combined arcaeological and zoological find of the century.

As in The Mad Monster (and The Devil Bat) we kick off with a useful sequence in which Zucco gets us up to speed by recapping his plans and achievements to the monster, this time Quetz in his alcove, whom he addresses with bar-room familiarity.
When an ornithologist innocently writes a piece about sightings of the legendary bird in Mexico and the legend of Montezuma's treasure in an obscure academic journal, Zucco is driven to open, contemptuous rage from fear that it will bring treasure-seekers, journalists and sightseers to the area. So he decides that the only way to rain on all this curiosity before it even starts is to make the bird man the victim of a sensational murder.
Before he has a chance to spring his trap, however, his dishy daughter invites the ornithologist round: "Doctor Lambert, I wish there had never been any such thing as Aztec Indians! Father does nothing but think, dream and talk Aztecs!"
What her well-meant meddling does, of course, is give Zucco a chance to plant the feather on the doc. Before his death, though, he correctly pieces together the truth, that the Aztec shaman who conceived of Quetalcoatl based it upon an extant prehistoric flying lizard, a last survivor of which is most likely the creature that has ended up fortuitously, and presumably coincidentally, in the temple.
This is precisely the account that Zucco pooh-poohs in his opening monologue, but there is little that is god-like about the creature's behaviour or abilities: it is, after all, killed with ordinary bullets. Neither can a Hollywood film of the forties admit to the genuine existence of non-Christian deities (or at least I would assume not, not that the Breen Office would have bothered spending too long untangling something like this).
All of which strongly implies that Zucco is wrong to assume that his house guest is a living Aztec god - making him even more of a bozo than he seemed straight off the bat.

The case is big enough to make the front pages in Chicago: "MYSTERY MOUNTAIN MURDER" (a phrase that cries out to be the title of a John Denver song) - "Scientist Victim of Unindentified Beast" yells the headline.
The story begins by observing that the killer appears to be "some monstrous creature", and goes on to add that "the case presents some strange angles."
The New York Blade opts to claim the doc is the victim of a vampire, "evidenced by the fact that the victim's body was entirely bloodless", an element the Chicago press had refrained from mentioning.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, where the police department must have a spotless record of clearing up cases, the somewhat impatient headline announces "HORRIBLE DEATH OF SCIENTIST REMAINS UNSOLVED MYSTERY".
So much for wanting to keep a lid on it. Zucco can only stand sullenly by as the small town becomes the focus of the nation's fascination, and fills with reporters, treasure hunters and rifle-packing serpent hunters, to say nothing of radio crime writer Dick Thorpe pledging to solve the case in a series of radio broadcasts: the exact opposite of the results he must somehow have anticipated when he first opted to murder an obscure academic who merely mentioned an already-acknowledged legend in a specialist ornithology journal.

Oh, how beautiful is this film? What part of it is not entirely perfect?
It gives me such pleasure I feel my eyes welling with tears as I watch.
The special effects are magnificent. The titular serpent is the best movie monster of all time. I love the way it swoops, I love the way it screams, and I love those beautiful shots of it making its lonely course through those gorgeous deserty locations. There are even a couple of lovely little moments where it switches to stop-frame.
People go on about visible wires as if they're let down to discover it isn't a real serpent, righteously wounded that forties technology wasn't quite up to the task of letting them off having to use the smallest grain of their own imaginations. 'Look - it's on wires!' they shriek.
Yes, I know. Funnily enough I guessed it might be as soon as I saw it. Did you think it wasn't, then? Because otherwise, what's the great harm in seeing them once in a while?
Cynical sophistication's all very nice, but if it stops you enjoying things like this with 1940s eyes you really are cutting off your stable door before the horse has bolted to spite your spilled milk. (Sorry, but I've been on a PRC dialogue-writing course. This week it was metaphor mixing. I'm looking forward to next week's: 'Why your hero should always be an unimginative dumbo'.)

The acting is wonderful: It may be Zucco's best and most confident PRC lead, and you'll also enjoy the spooky, switched-off quality of Hope Kramer as his daughter, especially if, like me, you've been watching PRC movies all day and are pretty much hammered by the time she comes on. PRC's leads often seem a little doped-up; understandable, I suppose. With painted eyebrows and an almost hypnotised delivery, Kramer is a real mystery, with this lead and a smallish support role in I Was a Communist For the FBI seemingly her only movie credits. But if you're only going to make two movies, these, clearly, are the two...
The supporting male cast is drawn to man from that great PRC stable of city-boy wiseacres and dumb-as-an-ox hicks, like the offspring of some new race created when the extras from Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma went off to live together on an island. Not a sympathetic characteristic in any of them, even the nominal hero: they're all either on the make, or trying to stitch up one or the other other of them, or else big dopes walking blindly into danger and incapable of making the most elementary logical connections.

But this is Zucco's show - it's the Zucco show - and what it is to watch him skulk about, effervescent with derangement, as he acts out a plot that requires total capitulation to his own lunatic world view for it to even pass as coherent, much less logical. I don't really know what this is or where it comes from, but it can't be something as random as carelessness. This is not bad writing, still less is it lazy writing. It's something different, but it has an almost narcotic allure, for me at least. (And if you agree, there's a comments box below...)
What strange alchemy was at work in forties Hollywood, whereby studios with no resources, no budgets, no big stars and only the lowest commercial aspirations so reliably turned out such strange and magnificent fare? And this is 1946, remember. Nothing Universal was doing by now was as innocent, authentic and fresh as this. These guys really were the ones keeping the torch alight by this point.
Thank you, Mr Zucco. Thank you, PRC.

Bath - City of Cheese, Monsters and John Landis

2011-10-30T01:08:00.000-07:00

A gala day in Bath on Saturday (and as Groucho will tell you a gal a day's enough for any man).
Not only was it the Bath Cheese Festival, with over twenty award winning cheesemakers keen for us to sample their wares - oh! cheese heaven; my friends, you have never smelt anything like it - but John Landis was in town too, signing copies of his new coffee table book Monsters in the Movies.

When we were living in London, my wife was a picture researcher at the Kobal Collection, which provided the images for the book, and so we have an insider's perspective on the project.
If you ask her nicely she'll tell you one of a thousand funny stories about his regular visits to their office to select posters and stills, each one a whirlwind of frenetic enthusiasm, his booming voice never varying in volume or tempo.
Though I say so myself, we both do rather a good impersonation of 'the Landis boom' - "Get me a Diet Coke!" "That's not a werewolf!" "Admit it! Your website's no good! Admit it!" - and once mastered it's enormous fun to slip into at random moments throughout the day.
An especially good time, in fact, can be had doing it while reading aloud the picture captions from his book.
It's a nice, Christmasy book, lavishly illustrated and attractively laid out, that probably won't tell you bunch of jaded know-all sods anything you don't already know about monster movies, but will pass a pleasant hour or two nonetheless, and would make the ideal gift for the young fan just finding their feet in the genre. I can't imagine how much it would have delighted me if I'd got it for Christmas when I was ten.
Plus he's a nice guy, and he wrote and directed An American Werewolf in London, a film virtually without peer in post-Hammer horror film history.
Good on you, Landis.

Devil Bats In His Belfry: An interview with Peter H. Brothers

2011-06-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

When you're obsessed with something to a degree that qualifies as 'medical', it's always a relief to encounter someone else who shares the same problem. Even better when they've got it even worse than you have.

I thought I had plumbed the outer limits when it came to obsessively pondering The Devil Bat, Lugosi's PRC masterpiece.
But even after that occasion when I watched it three times in a row without a break, it never once struck me that it might be a good idea to turn it into a novel.
For that stroke of genius, ladies and gentleman, the gent to whom your fedora must be tipped is Peter H. Brothers.
Peter's name may well be familiar to you already, author as he is of Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda. But now he has come up with Devil Bat Diary: The Journal of Johnny Layton, which as its title suggests is a retelling of the film, from the perspective of its newspaper reporter hero.

If anyone has ever had a better idea before - and I'm including penicillin here - I've yet to hear about it.
When Peter got in touch to tell me about the project, I decided to find out more.

Carfax Abbey: This is a terrific idea for a book! How did it first come to you, how long did it take to write and how many people per day on average told you you were crazy...?

Peter H. Brothers: Well I have been a Bela Lugosi fan since way back and The Devil Bat is my favourite film of his (don't tell him this!) And I thought since the story was so zany and the characters so interesting it might be fun to write, and it was. The film was ahead of its time in its tongue-in-cheek and self-parodying tone ("I tell you Layton, the idea of a bat being attracted to the scent of a lotion, is all foolishness!"); in fact its chief virtue is that it doesn't take itself too seriously.
One thing that makes the film so enjoyable to watch is seeing the idle rich getting bumped-off one by one by a guy who spends his whole life with his nose to the grindstone. The Carruthers character is one that a lot of people can relate to: a hard-working grunt who feels he doesn't get the credit or salary he deserves, so he takes revenge against those who wronged him - a premise we can all relate to! It took six months to write it and my wife, who thinks I'm crazy anyway, gave it her blessing.

Can you let us in on any of the book's major revelations? I'm assuming it doesn't go so far as Devil Bat's Daughter and whitewashes Carruthers of all responsibility?

Oh no! Carruthers did what he did all right, but we do learn why he is so resentful of the Heaths and Mortons. It turns out he has other issues as well. I have altered the ending a bit as well, to give it a more cinematic feel.

This is the diary of Johnny, the reporter in the film. Do we get to see an altogether different side to his character, or is he basically the same obtuse wiseacre we fans know and love?

We learn more about his character and his relationships with the others in the film; how he feels about them and basically the kind of person he is, how his mind works, a little about his background and so on. He basically comes across in a similar fashion to how he is in the film, but we learn more about him.

What other characters come over differently? I see Mary Heath is pegged as a religious lunatic...

Yes. I thought it would be fun to give some of the characters little quirks. For example, "One Shot" McGuire is a rather vulgar fellow who can't stand the sight of Layton (and vice-versa), Martin Heath is devastated by the loss of his son, Mary is a bible-beater who gets crazier and crazier as the story goes on and Chief Wilkins is gay -- strong stuff for 1940!

This can only be the work of a truly obsessive fan of the movie. Speaking as another one, can you tell me what it is about the film that inspires this kind of devotion?

I'm not too sure when I first saw it but I just fell in love with it and realised there's much more to it than meets the eye. It's an interesting film in many ways. For one thing, Bela was a man who was a cheap hire and who was known to take the first offer rather than hold out for things like better salary and so on; he was not choosy, he just loved to work.
The famous story is that he accepted Dracula for a mere pittance rather than get a percentage of the profits (although such deals were rather rare for the time). In a sense he had no bargaining power and he had to basically take or leave the offer. The Devil Bat follows an ironic parallel is that he plays a a man who settles for a quick cash settlement rather than become a partner of the firm. I'm sure Bela - who was an intelligent and sensitive man - was very aware of this parallel while he made the movie.

It's also an interesting part for him. As you know Bela loved to always give 110% when he performed regardless of the role or the studio or the story. In The Devil Bat he gives a very restrained and realistic performance; there is very little of the theatricality that is typically called for in a Bela role. "Sour irony" is I believe how director Joe Dante defined Bela's portrayal of Carruthers, which also comes across as very appealing; we like the guy even though he is basically a sourpuss!
Bela's greatest moment in the film is near the end, when he gets a wistful look in the eyes and tells Layton, "You wouldn't understand a scientific theory," which is delivered so sublimely I'm not sure I can ever attempt to define it. It is truly an extraordinary moment for him. He was truly a great actor.

Have you seen the sequel?

I have yet to catch-up with Devil Bat's Daughter but I understand that Carruthers is completely exonerated of his crimes and is now remembered as a bit of a local hero(!), which brings up another interesting issue: how people's reputations are enhanced after they're gone: you know, like Ronald Reagan?

What are your views on Lugosi's 'Poverty Row' films in general?

He was a professional who loved his craft, and I personally feel his performance as James Brewster in The Ape Man is the finest performance I have seen an actor give in a film; I mean we're talking Shakespearian stuff, man... just heartbreaking. I also love Scared to Death, The Raven, White Zombie, Chandu the Magician, The Corpse Vanishes, Son of Frankenstein (he should have gotten an Oscar for that one) ... I could go on and on, but yeah, I love the guy ...
In 1971, when I was 18, I saw Dracula on TV during a Saturday afternoon and that was it for me. He is my idol and in fact I visit his grave every year around his birthday and leave him a cigar which I'm sure ends up in the hands of the groundskeeper! (I live in Agoura Hills, about 40 minutes from the Holy Cross Cemetery where he is buried). I love all his films because I too am an actor and appreciate the total dedication he gave to each and every role he played.
So Devil Bat Diary is a tribute to both Bela and a wonderfully entertaining film which was very cleverly-written and has some wonderful moments in it (I can hear those Devil Bat screams to this day!) I hope you and your readers enjoy it.

Leave him a cigar from me next time.

Yes, next time I visit his grave I'll leave a cigar from you and say hello.

Lugosi in The Ape Man: "The finest performance I have seen an actor give in a film"

Peter H. Brothers: Well, he looks relatively normal...

By the way, it's still PRC month, too...

2011-06-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

... So it's about time I published the results of the favourite PRC movie readers' poll.
They're listed in reverse order, with the number of votes received in brackets:

9 (joint):
The Black Raven (1)
Devil Bat's Daughter (1)

7 (joint):
Fog Island (2)
The Mad Monster (2)
Strangler of the Swamp (2)

4 (joint):
The Flying Serpent (3)
The Monster Maker (3)

2: Bluebeard (4)

1: The Devil Bat (13)

No surprises at Devil Bat's runaway lead, or, I suppose, at his daughter's poor showing. But the low figure for a film as fantastic as Fog Island can only be attrubutable to the fact that it remains so criminally little seen.
Indeed all of PRC's output - which is, I've come to think, rather better and more interesting than Monogram's - still wallows in obscurity even in comparison with that studio's films. The only reason I can think of why this should be so is that Monogram had frequent recourse to Lugosi, whereas PRC bagged him only once (in a film that comes closer to legit horror classic status, for all its barking absurdities, than any of Lugosi's Monograms).
As horror films, especially if you imagine Lugosi in the leads, the PRC titles are a splendidly weird and wonderful crop: in particular The Monster Maker, Bluebeard and Fog Island would be unquestioned cherished favourites if only poor Bela had graced them with his presence.
And Fog Island, in particular, best illustrates another reason why PRC's horrors have their own claim to individual merit and status: they are the most unremittingly cynical and mean-spirited horror movies of the forties.
I don't think you need to look far to work out why. World-weary cynicism is only to be expected from a company that operated in the way that PRC did.
It's odd that they existed at all, really: just breaking even in the land of dreams seems almost to defeat the object. Nobody could have been working at PRC for the love of PRC. It was a place that existed on hope: on the starlet's hope that this, against all the odds, is going to be the one that gets them noticed, or that of the formerly noticed on the way down, hoping that this is going to be, against odds still greater, the one that turns the descent round again. Or the studio's own hope that this, or if not this then the next one, is going to be the one that breaks all known patterns and become the Poverty Row Breakhtough, the one that's a massive hit, just liked for what it is - even, dare to dream, the one that pushes them into the ranks of the semi-majors, like Capra had done for Columbia.
Success on Poverty Row was measured by how quickly you got the hell out. This seems to have been the great animating dream of all the Poverty Row studios as much as the individual men and women who toiled there.
None ever quite achieved it, but PRC got there closer than most, thanks to the likes of Detour, and Edgar Ulmer and Frank Wisbar.
The air must have been thick there with the scent of hope and frustration mixed: so who cares about trying and failing to match the majors in sappy heroes who can do anything, and have only to flash their million dollar teeth to guarantee a return on the investment? That's why they have no heroes, why they don't bother trying to compete on star power - or the imposed characterisations that star power demands. It's why every character at PRC is either a doofus or a chiseller, and every character is drawn from stock: the reappearance in film after film of the exact same obtuse country sherrif, identical in performance though rarely by the same actor twice, is a particular joy. That the hero, or the closest the film will get towards anything so crass as an endorsement of heroism in their lead males, will probably be some species of reporter, drawn almost always to the heroine as a subsidiary of his professional fly-to-a-corpse instincts, and often as not accompanied by a goonish photographer who's there to get the big laughs is similarly close to given.
Unmistakably, this is a fictional world peopled by the kind of characters who hung around while they were making it.
All the world is here, if by the world you mean the scruffier parts of Los Angeles, but none portrayed with a drop of real human compassion, and always with either no aspirations or else aspirations so meagre - yet so devoutly held - you just know they speak to a community of workers who all know how it feels to be so nearly what they've always dreamed of being, yet still not quite.
What seems so strikingly obvious in Detour actually holds good for almost all PRC product. It is the noir studio. It may not have had the resources to define that moment stylistically, but in its sensibilities it was the studio that thought noir, regardless of the film it was making.

Think about Fog Island again in this light: was there ever a more noirish little murder mystery, however unifrom the lighting or limited the set design?
After the death of Zucco's character we watch virtually every other character tie themselves in knots of cross and double-cross, before all perish in the watery finale. Killing off virtually your entire cast all at once at the end of the film takes a certain insouciance and also, I would suggest, a very certain kind of take on the world and its wonders.
Because PRC has characteristically filled the film with nasties and left just two half-hearted young lovers to represent the decent mass of humanity, they can get away with the mass slaughter of most of the cast and still not ruffle Breen, because they all separately and individually had it coming. As a result, nearly everybody drowns, screaming, in the last scene.
Just the thing to get your mind off the Second World War.

PRC's movies have had the sweetness knocked out of them by the hard lessons of experience: lacking Universal's gloss, RKO's hauteur and Monogram's who-cares sense of fun, these are cold, hard films. Nobody ever trusts anybody else or likes anybody else in them. Their villains are animated not by mad inspiration or cosmic hubris but rather by petty resentments, jealousy, spite, wounded pride. Their monsters are like Warner gangsters: heartless, selfish, contemptuous of their victims. Warners may have built the better mean streets for their characters to go down: PRC could never afford such artful poverty, but at PRC, the bus ride home was the real thing. Inside, the sets were bright and noir was an attitude, not a template. MGM was for winners, with not a care in the world. At PRC they had to turn their collars up to keep out the rain, work all night to fill the larder.
There were no mean streets leading to the gates of MGM, so what did they know?

Mortality, Immortality, Yvette Vickers

2011-05-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

- Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

It's a set-up tailor-made for Myron Fass, that could have leapt complete from the depraved frames of an Eerie Publication...
Neighbours near a small, largely boarded Los Angeles home become apprehensive at the complete lack of activity visible on the property. Closer inspection reveals cobwebs in the undisturbed mailbox.
Finally, they force an entry... and discover a mummified body.
Determining the cause of death is virtually impossible, even its identity will only be made certain after much scientific testing. It might have laid there for almost a year...

Of course, in a Myron Fass magazine, this would be where the story starts.
For Yvette Vickers, it's how it all ended, a strangely apposite last stop on her private roller coaster tour of B-Hollywood.
Ah, but she was a bonny thing...

Her parents were jazz musicians. She originally aspired to be a screenwriter. She met Billy Wilder in 1949 and he liked her enough, and thought she had enough of the right stuff, to give her a showy cameo in Sunset Boulevard.
Wilder had been around long enough to see through Hollywood's self-regard and out the other side where they dump the leftovers. He knew its wolves can turn savage when they're cornered, and his film is a knowing knife in Tinseltown's back. For Yvette it might have served as a prescient reminder, not that she was listening, that Hollywood is rarely what it's cracked up to be. She jumped in anyway; auditioned for the big shows, nearly got a few, landed upright but far from target in Reform School Girl and Juvenile Jungle.

Film-makers took one look at her and saw the word 'trampy' above her face like a neon halo. Her two shots at immortality both use her as a demonstration of the dangers of unchecked libidinous desire, as proof that adulterous liaisons invariably lead to death by mutant.
She is Honey Parker, whose fling with married William Hudson kick-starts the Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. Then she's Liz, a frustrated Baby Doll in leopardskin underwear, trapped in the Florida swamps, who cuckolds Bruno VeSota, her obese husband, and ends up the victim of man-size bloodsuckers in Attack of the Giant Leeches.
Two utterly unforgettable performances; two certain guarantees of drive-in immortality.
Leeches is my favourite. I just love the way she torments her poor, tub of lard sap of a husband, and that whole extended scene of him threatening murderous revenge, as her supposedly burly lover collapses into whining, begging cowardice while she spits in his face and curses them both... it goes on and on, and is dramatically riveting, ending magnificently when the monsters show up.
This is where the filmmakers were, in the fifties.

But drive-in immortality is a positive encumbrance when you're up for a role in This Earth Is Mine (1959). Director Henry King - who knew what he was looking for - okayed her, big lunk lead-with-co-star-approval Rock Hudson - who didn't, obviously - said no.
From hereon, whenever she was linked with Lee Marvin and Cary Grant it would be strictly in the gossip columns. Screen work was more or less all small screen work, and lucky to get that, from Leeches on. Howard Hughes called her up a few times, too: it was the high life for an hour or two, but strictly taxi-fare back home.

Her 1959 Playboy pictorial ended her second marriage, to writer Leonard Burns. Three months after the wedding he learned of the photographs and walked out.
"He was kinda square," Yvette explained.

She lived long enough to enjoy her rediscovery by cult movie fans, and went to the conventions, and did the DVD interviews.
But behind the bolted shutters, where she never threw anything away and lived amidst mountains of junk, she was becoming increasingly paranoid, convinced she was being pursued and watched. And so we end where we begin, in the Sunset Boulevard twilight of faded Hollywood dreams, and with a fifty foot woman laid low by movieland's giant leeches.

Her body was positively identified on May 13th, 2011.

The Vincentury

2011-05-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

What could be better worth celebrating than a hundred years of the suavest star that ever swung a pendulum or baked a poodle pie?

Vincent's next stop was the Uffizi, where he saw "so many famous pictures that I was lost. The best was Madonna of the Harpies by Del Sarto."
Indeed, decades later he still vividly recalled the momentous instant when he came face to face with the favourite painting of his youth:
"Suddenly, I came upon a room and there she was. My own personal Madonna... She is beautiful, and she's in love with all mankind. Especially with me. And there I was, standing in the Uffizi with a watermelon in my throat and two painful jets of warm salt water spurting out of my eyes. Then I heard a soft voice, over my shoulder, say: "Come over here, I'll show you the one that makes me cry."
I blew my nose, blotted my eyes, buried as much of my face as I could in my handkerchief, and blurted out a feeble: "Sorry... something in my eye."
The voice said: "Yes ... beauty."

- from Vincent Price: a Daughter's Biography, by Victoria Price Everyone knows what a serious, intelligent, cultivated and sensitive man Vincent Price was. That he spent the first few decades of his acting career not as a bogeyman but a greatly respected stage performer, and one of the smoothest supporting actors in Hollywood. Have you seen Laura lately? How great is he in that?
And while it is true he was never quite bland enough for leading man heroism, he could pastiche it effortlessly, in His Kind of Woman, or as The Saint on radio.
So when the cull did come, when fifties Hollywood cleaned out its locker and consigned its greatest stars to the scrap heap - a foolish enough thing to do by any standards, plain barking when you recall the planks of wood it was all done to make room for - the only salvation was genre. That Price found his safe haven in horror, first by default in House of Wax and The Fly, then beyond doubt for Corman and Castle and American International, might have been a tragedy, had he chosen to see it that way.
Because I happen to love horror movies, I always feel uneasy watching actors I love being obviously uncomfortable in them. And that's the best thing about Vince. He never felt hard done by. He loved the fact that he had been given a second career when so many of his more famous and more successful peers did not, and he loved playing scary roles. You don't need me to tell you how much energy he put into them, how much obvious fun they gave him.
If it was a decline, it was the happiest, worthiest, most welcome (and welcomed) decline in the movies. In the Poe series, in House on Haunted Hill, in Witchfinder General, self-pastiching in Phibes and Madhouse and Theatre of Blood and as the classiest elder statesman you could ask for in House of the Long Shadows, he had no master.
Was he the greatest horror star in movie history? All things considered, I think I'd say yes, he was.

"... suddenly in the fifties a whole new group of actors came out: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman, who were very moody and realistic. So actors like myself and Basil Rathbone and so on didn't really fit into those realistic dramas and we began to do costume pictures. This was really the only place we could go on working if we wanted to survive as actors. Most of the things of my later career have been costume pictures. They require a certain knowledge of the language, they require enunciation and a poetic approach to the language. Really, the one thing we have over the apes is our language, isn't it? That's about all."

- Quoted in Vincent Price, edited by Gary J Svehla and Susan Svehla I'm so jealous I didn't get to go to Jenny's Vincentennial Party, where several of his recipes were lovingly reproduced, including the immortal cucumber crocodile, and Theatre of Blood was projected on the wall. (She's making a Vincent recipe every week for the length of his centenary year and documenting it here, so do look in and cheer her on!)

Here at Carfax, we'll also be doing our bit over the coming year, starting with the favourite film poll at the top of the page on your right.
Do please take the time to vote, and look out for more to come on the most purely enjoyable performer in horror history.

RIP Michael Gough, the George Zucco of British horror

2011-03-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

Last November I paid tribute to Michael Gough on the occasion of his 94th birthday. That post, sadly, must now serve as his obituary.
Michael was one of the great unsung heroes of British horror, a true George Zucco to Lee and Cushing's Karloff and Lugosi. Whether in relatively sane supporting roles or going hell for leather in the lead he was always a delight to watch. Lovers of British horror's more eccentric byways will have so many memories of him to cherish, whether it's feeding chunks of raw meat to a huge carnivorous plant in Konga, playing the organ in Black Zoo to an audience of big cats in armchairs, smiling contentedly in the back seat as his customised Rolls Royce decapitates yet another luckless pair of would-be escapees in Horror Hospital, or ranting so peerlessly from virtually the first to last frame of Horrors of the Black Museum. He will be missed.
You can read the original post here.

Michael Gough (1917-2011)

The man I love

2011-03-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

Eternal custodian of the old dark house, keeper of the sacred tana leaves, Professor Bruno Lampini ("I have a collection of the world's most astounding horrors!"), foil to Bob Hope and the Ritz Brothers, sworn enemy of Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond and Tarzan, fiend of choice at PRC...

There never once was, nor ever shall be again, anyone else quite like George Zucco.

The George Zucco-at-PRC marathon is up next...

Man is what his ductless glands make him: The PRC acromegaly medley

2011-02-07T03:07:00.001-08:00

Acro-MEGaly.

I've often wondered how you pronounce it.
Ever since I first read up on the extraordinary story of Rondo Hatton, not long after first seeing the Creeper's mesmerising debut in the spooky Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death, I've known all about this sad, rotten little disease that makes hulking monsters of randomly chosen men.
I must have read the word a thousand times, but I've never said it, or heard it said. Now I can drop it into conversation with confidence, thanks to today's PRC double bill: The Monster Maker (1945) and The Brute Man (1946).
But I didn't learn how to say it from Hatton.
Despite being stranded in an age, not so far from our own, in which a tragic affliction could be played for cheap scares in yet cheaper films, Rondo never actually played an acromegalic in any of the horror films in which he paraded his deformities so the pretty folks could gasp and cower. Usually the Creeper, we assume, is just plain ugly; The Brute Man opts for a strange back story in which he is burned with chemicals, Phantom of the Opera-style.
Which makes it all the odder that it was from The Monster Maker that I got my lesson in pronunciation: this time it is acromegaly that is the cause of the horror - but the star is not Hatton, it's Ralph Morgan with prosthetic lumps.

There is a debate to be had - somewhere else, though - about which of these films has the more tasteless concept: Monster Maker, which uses a real, and desperately sad illness in a fictional context as the basis for a horror film, or The Brute Man, which sensationally exploits a real-life sufferer of the disease - but at least, it could be argued, not the disease itself, since The Creeper is not an acromegalic, only Hatton is.
Further, you might suggest, movies like The Brute Man, in which Hatton was obviously not forced to appear, at least offered him the chance to get something back from an otherwise wretched situation, to make a little money from an affliction that in all other respects gave nothing, and only took. By all means fight that one out in the Abbey car park: my view is that both films are insensitive to a degree that says something sad about human nature, but they differ only in degree from the legion of other films that exploit deformity and difference for cheap thrills. They may be towards the front of that queue, but it's a long queue, all the same.
A much easier one to answer is which is the better movie: Brute Man, though rather defensively underrated over the years because of its callous use of its star, is a solid enough little horror meller, worth your attention but not really your votes come Oscar time. The Monster Maker, on the other hand, however dubious its premise, is a sleazy jewel of Poverty Row horror, one of the strangest and best things PRC ever did.

It's the everyday story of creepy Dr Marcoff (J Carrol Naish) who falls so hard for Wanda McKay, daughter of renowned concert pianist Ralph Morgan, that when she spurns his attentions he decides to simultaneously punish and blackmail her by deliberately infecting Morgan with acromegaly!
The most striking thing about the film is its obvious indebtedness to The Raven (1935). It's unlikely, I know: the Lugosi film was ten years old by this time and had probably rarely if ever been revived. Nonetheless, not only the basic idea but whole scenes and settings seem to have been lifted wholesale from it. We begin with Marcoff, a weird, preening medical genius, falling for a beautiful woman at a theatre (with her boyfriend and father in attendance), calling on her backstage, and telling her that she is the image of his late wife, called - wait for it - Lenore! When he makes a continued pest of himself over the girl, her father visits him in his home surgery, finds him insane with lust, and threatens him. The jilted quack then plans deadly revenge...
It sounds like it's practically the same film, but needless to say the customary PRC touches take it beyond mere plagiarism.
Turns out Marcoff is the country's foremost expert on acromegaly. To prove it, he leaves his old science journal articles lying around around in his waiting room. The one Morgan is seen reading, sharing the page with 'Liquid Gas Discovery Breaks Chemistry Rule' ("It can be compressed into a bottle, and with a gas burner a brilliant light can be obtained" - yes, that chemistry rule) is entitled 'Man is What His Ductless Glands Make Him', and begins: "The hematocrit, hemoglobin and plasma protein values are relatively unchanged, but the pulse rate is accelerated during the first forty-eight hours." (And you thought PRC movies were hard to follow.)
He keeps acromegaly germs in a jar, and confesses to his devoted assistant that he deliberately infected his beautiful wife with the disease so that he would no longer have to be afraid that she might leave him for another man! Now, in a desperate attempt to regain his lost love (we see a fabulous framed picture of McKay in what looks like late nineteenth-century costume) he has done the same to the father of a lookalike girl!
Glenn Strange is on hand too, complete with fetching Chaney Jr 'tache, as Marcoff's servant, and do I need to tell you he's got an ape in a cage? No! This is PRC!

As well as the obvious lifts from The Raven, the whole film is weirdly referential: Morgan likens Naish to Frankenstein and himself to the Creature, and when Wanda worries that her father may be asking for trouble by squaring up to the bug-eyed perv who keeps asking her to marry him, he laughs it off with: "You've been listening to too many horror radio programmes lately. What you need is a good workout on the badminton court." (Which would have been a peculiar enough line even if Morgan hadn't opted to pronounce badminton as if it was two words.)
The one thing it doesn't take from The Raven that it could really make good use of is Lugosi. J. Carrol Naish is interesting but uncharismatic in the lead, and the film suffers from the loss of a more colourful lead menace. (Zucco was presumably on another call, but Atwill or Carradine would have done nicely too.)
Naish is generally remembered by horror fans as a reasonably interesting also ran. In fact, he was originally one of those actors promoted as master character players, whose gimmick was the wide variety of roles they could master, seemingly without any points of similarity: Naish played Irish gangsters, Indian chiefs and everything else between and beyond. Occasionally the public admires the mastery so much it grants star status - as it did on Lon Chaney Snr and Paul Muni. But generally speaking they like continuity, and the familiarity that comes of welcoming back their favoured stars. Naish was one whose range eventually made audiences give up on him (Akim Tamiroff was sold the same way - and went the same way.)
By the time he made Monster Maker he was in the unusual position of still being acclaimed by critics - he was nominated for an Oscar in 1943 and would be again in '45 - and more or less overlooked by audiences. Horror films seemed the obvious outlet for his flamboyant talents.

We can see what you're doing, you sneaky mad scientist you.

Oh but it's a compulsive, compelling thing, this movie! Few horror films of the forties have so sickly an atmosphere of cruelty and perversion. Marcoff is a bona fide degenerate, and the film's casual exploitation of sexual obsession and disease gives it a genuinely unpleasant aura that now seems, for better or worse, distinctly modern.
It helps, too, to have Wanda McKay on hand as the source of Marcoff's dementia: always the most athletically gorgeous of the Poverty Row heroines, she again sashays coquettishly through this one, with her usual obliviousness to the tension she inspires in the male characters. Her almost confrontational sexiness only adds to the film's pressure-cooker atmosphere. The film feels curdled, unclean; it has a smell and a flavour pretty much unique among the horror films of its period.

Whether Rondo Hatton went to see it or not I don't know - but had he heard of it he surely would have been too curious not to.
Impossible to guess what he would have made of it, because it's pretty much impossible to imagine how he felt about anything he did. I've never read an interview with anyone who actually knew him, and was qualified to say what his feelings really were about the movies he made. But what another layer of irony The Monster Maker must have added to his existence, to see that the disease his own studio was exploiting as the horror effect that needed no make-up was now itself providing the source of horror plots over at PRC.
And if you're thinking 'surely nobody went to see it?', here is proof - baffling to me even, I'll admit - that in Newcastle they actually queued around the block to do so:

Over at Universal, meanwhile, Hatton went on working.
As if the film wasn't quite an uncomfortable enough experience as it stood, he had inconveniently died by the time The Brute Man was released in 1946. He'd already gurned and grimaced his way through Pearl of Death, Jungle Captive, House of Horrors and The Spider Woman Strikes Back, and it seems certain that audiences were beginning to tire of Universal's latest gimmick. (They were actually getting nostalgic for Lon Chaney Jr.)
Nonetheless, The Brute Man was in some ways a more ambitious vehicle from Hatton's point of view: the first in which his really was the lead role, in which he was a free agent rather than somebody's murderous servant, the first in which an attempt is made, however clodhopping, to introduce a note of pathos (in scenes in which he is befriended by a blind woman), and the first to give him a backstory in which his deformity is accounted for. It's just possible he thought there were '31-vintage Karloff-like opportunities here: if so, he was soon to be disabused, and the disease took him before the damned thing came out anyway.One of two reasons are usually given for why this Universal production, with its Universal director (Jean Yarbrough), Universal supporting players and unmistakably Universal title sequence ended up as a PRC release. One is simply that the studio had come under new ownership and part of the incoming policy was the abandonment of the entire B-unit. Rather than release a raft of new Bs they opted to wipe the slate clean and sell off the still unreleased B films to smaller studios.
The more popular explanation is that they took one look at it, pronounced it disgusting, and tossed it over to PRC with tongs. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. Doubtless it was the new no B policy that made The Brute Man unwanted by the new team, but I don't know of any other forthcoming Bs that were similarly treated. I think they thought that if ever there was a chance to get rid of a sleazy, horrid little film, whose star was not only cruelly exploited but dead to boot, this was that chance.
As noted, Hatton had made several films exploiting his appearance by this time, which the studio had released without qualm and which the public had received without distaste, but The Brute Man, in part because of its attempts to humanise the Creeper, has a uniquely gloomy atmosphere that leaves it more depressing than frightening, and the singular emphasis on Hatton - best seen hitherto as a suggested, rarely seen background menace - revealed his considerable limitations as an actor, making him seem even more an object to be pitied rather than despised. (His raspy New York accent also makes him seem a lot less scary than films in which he is mute.)
So Universal pushed aside its own production, and The Brute Man ended up the slickest, classiest-looking PRC horror of them all!

MAYOR IN ULTIMATUM TO POLICE - Demands Capture of Creeper in 24 Hours "Or Else" screams the headline in The Daily Leader. (The story itself begins: "The Mayor has put the police department on the spot by demanding the capture of the Creeper "or else". As to the general outlook in the world of finance, I need not tell you that attempts to look into its future are much more difficult today, when the government of the richest nation in the world is making bold and astonishing experiments with its currency...")
Universal may be in the driving seat, but this is a PRC vehicle all right!

The Brute Man is one of those films that thinks its very essence will do the job of scaring you, so no effort is put into it. Whereas earlier Creeper films had used Hatton's mug as a delayed and briefly glimpsed horror come-on, this one simply points a camera at it and hopes we'll cower in horror from it like the obnoxious characters in the movie. (There's even a good, clear close-up in the opening credits, accompanying his name.)
But was there ever a time when his appearance was actually scary? The Pearl of Death makes him seem scary, with judicious lighting, shadows and angles - with film-making, in other words - but here, where he is simply brought out for us to gasp at, the effect seems inexplicable. He's pretty ugly for sure, but was mere ugliness really enough to inspire terror in 1946?
There is more of a freak show feel to the film than to any of Hatton's other vehicles because there is no pretence of artistry in the presentation: just as in a porn film, the plot is a mere excuse with which to frame the actual purpose of the movie, which is to parade Rondo Hatton, with no attempt to create suspense or make use of any typical horror film mechanics.
A stab at compensating pathos in the scenes where the Creeper befriends a blind girl falls flat because they reveal just how little thought has gone into the production as a whole: they simply make no sense, as well as being irredeemably hokey. (Like Virginia Cherrill in City Lights, she needs but cannot afford an eye operation, which our hulking hero determines to obtain the money for.)
Imagine yourself a beautiful blind woman, playing the piano in your living room, when you become aware of the lurking presence of an intruder in an adjoining room. Would you calmly go to see who it is, casually reaching to turn the light on as you enter, then after matter of factly telling him that there is little worth stealing if he is a burglar, turn your back and allow him to follow you into the living room, casually chatting the while about what sort of criminal he might be?
"You're not afraid of me?" he asks with understandable incredulity. "I'm a little nervous, I guess," the unflappable lovely replies, "but why should I be afraid of you?"
Er, because he's a gravelly-voiced stranger who has yet to explain who he is or why he has just broken in through your bedroom window, perhaps? We've established he's not a burglar, and with that voice he's clearly not the singing telegram boy. Rape may have been unmentionable under the Hays Code but it's surely not unimaginable? Yet for some reason, a blind woman alone in her house with a creepy uninvited stranger blithely assumes he's a nice guy and starts making small talk. Then, with nothing further established, the police arrive, and she tells the Creeper to hide while she gets rid of them! No explanation of any sort is offered as to why she should give them the brush-off, rather than welcome their arrival, and instead side instantly with the weird intruder. ("Should I be afraid?" she finally gets around to asking him, on the second occasion he breaks in!)
The model here, of course, is the hermit scene from Bride of Frankenstein, but transplanted to the city apartment of a modern girl it just makes no sense and, like so much else, leaves an unpleasant taste, for all its straining after poignancy.

And that's the thing with The Brute Man: there's no point trying to construct any kind of artful defence for it, because no such defence is possible. It's a film one must inevitably feel guilty for enjoying, which is no doubt why so many otherwise schlock-happy film writers prefer to pretend they didn't. But they did really.

The Girls of PRC: Jungle formula

2011-02-07T02:41:00.001-08:00

Time, friends, to salute the heroic efforts of those luckless starlets who struggled nobly through the swampy absurdities of that eccentric pair of PRC jungle movies I discussed here.

White Pongo offers us Mari Wrixon in its relatively dignified lead role (though when I say relative, I obviously really do mean relative), but Nabonga is lifted into even higher plains of weirdness than would otherwise be the case by one of the oddest female casts of any film that ever snuck out of Poverty Row: Fifi D'Orsay and Julie London.
Together at last! Only PRC could get those names on the one marquee, and with Ray Crash Corrigan and his ape suit too. What major Hollywood studio could hope to compete? It's a wonder they even tried.

First, Maris.
The comely blonde who ignites the White Pongo's libidinous urges is a familiar face from skid row movies, mainly at Monogram, where she appeared in The Face of Marble with John Carradine, and managed to avoid the titular menace of The Ape, as the paralysed heroine whose plight so moves kindly doctor Boris Karloff that he kills an escaped gorilla, skins it, and goes out at night wearing the skin and murdering people for their spinal fluid. That way Maris will walk again and the ape will be blamed for all the murders. Does it work out that way? What do you reckon.
Also at Monogram, she co-starred with the great, truly great Frank Albertson and Ace the Wonder Dog in Silent Witness (1943), perhaps the only film in the world that I want to see even more than I want to see Women In Bondage (1944), in which Monogram puts a dream cast - Wrixon, Anne Nagel, Tala Birell and top-lining Gail Patrick! - in (to quote Ted Okuda's essential Monogram Checklist) " a story of the degradation and brutalising of women in Germany where members of the SS Elite Troops are appointed to become fathers of children by women who are selected for motherhood by the Reich."
What on earth is this film like to watch? I only wish I knew. How on earth do Monogram handle the material? Surely not with their usual tastelessness or it would never have gotten past Breen, even allowing for whatever propaganda value it may or may not possess...

Like many another Poverty Row heroine, Maris appears unbilled in scores of walk-ons for the majors - look for her in High Sierra, Meet John Doe and Phantom Lady for starters. She made her last film in 1951, and died in 1999. She was the wife of film editor Rudi Fehr and the mother of film editor Kaja Fehr: they collaborated on the editing of Prizzi's Honor and were jointly Oscar nominated. Rudi died the same year as Maris; Kaja is still editing away.

How in the name of all that suffers and weeps did did Fifi D'Orsay end up in Nabonga?

The celebrated "French Bombshell" (actually a Canadian) and star of vaudeville and pre-Code comedies may have been past her prime and in PRC's price bracket by the time the opportunity to cast her came along - but that still doesn't make the pith-helmeted sight of her playing straight in a cheapo jungle movie any the more explicable. A talented and charming presence in musicals and saucy farce, her presence here transcends bizarre and sends the film to hitherto unreached heights of casting weirdness.

She also did PRC duty in three films where the working title made it onto the finished print: Submarine Base (1943), Dixie Jamboree (1944) and Delinquent Daughters (1944). All a long, long way from the Great White Way.

And then, to top that, they get Julie London, making her screen debut as Doreen of the jungle.
Julie, needless to say, is the sultry chanteuse whose smoky renditions of pop standards made her a permanent fixture on fifties jukeboxes, beloved especially by men who responded to the obvious erotic charge with which she imbued such numbers as Nice Girls Don't Stay For Breakfast, Love For Sale and My Heart Belongs To Daddy. It's also a thrill hearing her deliver that classic of musical sexism Wives and Lovers. Nobody could have been better cast as the woman who made a washed up alcoholic of Tom Ewell in The Girl Can't Help It, and now haunts him in his dreams, singing her signature hit Cry Me A River. Probably nobody could have been better cast in Nabonga either, come to that.
And can any other singer boast as many fantastic album covers?

These are just the tip of the iceberg.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Radiation Cinema is back!

2011-02-01T10:41:00.001-08:00

This is just a quickie stop-gap post, firstly to reassure the slavering hordes who have been daily beating an ever more desperate path to my door, their urchin-faces streaked with grime and tears, begging for more PRC posts before January ends. Worry not! As hinted we will indeed be marching boldly into PRC February. So in all seriousness, if you are one of the half dozen people who give a toss about this project, rest assured that the best stuff is still to come. Later this week I'll be examining an acromegaly double-bill - how's that for entertainment - closely followed by Edgar Ulmer inviting us to the PRC arthouse, and the much promised Zucco-athon.

And secondly, I want to notify you all that Radiation Cinema - simply one of the best movie blogs ever - is at last out of hibernation.
Mykal Banta's tribute to the great b-movie sci-fi and horror films of the fifties has a new, streamlined look and a new post - breaking a silence of over a year - on Forbidden Planet.
Like everyone else I saw this film as a kid and haven't really given it much thought since, but now I'm seeing it in a whole new light. Which is what Mykal does, every time. The trick is in the mix - of intoxicating nostalgic enthusiasm and eye-openingly original insight - and of course in making it all look so easy. I'd hate him if he wasn't such a great guy.
I've made many rewarding acquaintances in the blogging world, but there's also a small handful that I consider to be true friends. Mykal is of this number, and Radiation Cinema is one of the small number of websites that gives me the happy feeling of being exactly on my wavelength. Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about it, merely, perhaps, to let you know it's back. So as soon as you've finished this, head over there. Then, why not slither over to The Bloody Pulp, where Mykal exhumes the grisly world of Eerie Publications with the same intoxicating mix of scholarship and love. (And if you ever come across a copy of his novel No Ceiling But Heaven, do anything in your power to get your hands on a copy. It's a masterpiece.)
Anyway, the night is drawing on, and I have PRC movies to watch.
Back soon.

Nabongo Pongo Overlongo: Down in the jungle something stirred...

2011-01-17T08:13:00.000-08:00

So long ago.
Jungle movies. So, so long ago.
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Jungle movies were once popular enough to be conveyor belted out to the masses in endless slight variation; now they look like they were made on another planet. Preserving attitudes more unsavoury than one cares to remember went unquestioned in what is still, for many, living memory, and openly celebrating the bone-headed speciesism of their main characters, jungle pictures are historical documents indeed.
Hard to imagine, now, anyone hearing that there was a new jungle picture coming to their local and instantly reaching out to phone the babysitter, but that must have been the way it was. They made millions: someone had to love them. They made serious, po-faced documentaries, with animals being blown to crap for real. They made sneaky pseudo-documentaries, with library footage and faked inserts of men in gorilla suits. They made popular jungle-based fiction series: Tarzan is merely the best remembered of many. They made artful pastiches like King Kong, spoofs galore, and dozens of third rate supporting mellers, with fuzzy, decades old jungle footage mixed with new scenes in which Poverty Row starlets in pith helmets pretend to look awed as they peer through jungly creeper on a set smaller than their bedroom, troop off camera, come in again from the opposite direction and look awed all over again.
Needless to say, it is in these at the cheaper end of the genre that the most modern-day fun is to be had, and PRC's Nabonga (1944) and White Pongo (1945) are about as cheap as they come. (But not quite as cheap as they come: see The White Gorilla and die.)
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Made within a year of each other - same director, same six-foot-square jungle set, same library footage, fractionally different plots, slightly different titles... tell me it wasn't party time every day at that studio!
Hey, remember that jungle picture we shot a couple of months ago? Seems to me it's about time we made it again!
I watched them one after the other with a big glass of something beautiful in my hand the whole time, so it's already impossible for me to remember with absolute certainty what bits go with what movie, though I think I'm still up to speed on the broad outlines provided I get this written down fast enough: Nabonga's the one where a little girl who survived a jungle plane crash is raised by a gorilla (Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in a zip-up ape suit), turns into Julie London in a professionally-tailored sarong, becomes revered by the natives as a white witch and duels with Fifi D'Orsay for the affections of Buster Crabbe. Pretty sure that's right. Set the comments box aflame with indignation if I'm wrong. Whereas White Pongo is the one where Maris Wrixon and a bloke doing the stupidest cockney accent I've ever heard mount an expedition to the jungle and encounter Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in a white zip-up ape suit. As I say, it's been a long night, but I'm pretty sure that both films involve the ape falling into the same pit.
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I also see from my notes that I felt the need backaways to jot down the following exchange of dialogue from Nabonga, after Buster encounters Julie's strange, primitive jungle girl for the first time, and witnesses her amazing ability to subdue a rampaging Ray 'Crash' Corrigan with jungle know-how:
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Buster (awed): You must be the white witch I've heard so much about.
Julie: I am Doreen.
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Incidentally, you may be thinking that White Pongo is just about the silliest title for a film you've ever heard. If so, you'll be delighted to learn that the original shooting title was Congo Pongo. I have a theory that the title of the first draft screenplay was Congo Pongo Wongo Dongo, but I haven't been able to actually prove it yet.
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Now for some zoology. Here's how Ray carries off Julie in Nabonga:

And here he is showing us how a fluffy white gorilla would carry off Maris in White Pongo:

You'll notice that in both cases the technique is pretty much the same. The only possible conclusion, then, is that human-carrying dexterity is neither adversely nor beneficially affected by the relative colour or fluffiness of the gorilla's fur.
Tell that to the poster illustrators, who presumably did the Nabonga poster one cold Monday morning, and the White Pongo one after a Friday lunchtime scotch and cocaine rampage:

What did I learn from these films? I learned that if you're the only blonde woman on an arduous jungle expedition you're probably asking for trouble if you put on a slinky evening gown with feather trim collar, and that if you dig a pit in the ground to catch wild animals, chances are that the funny guy on the expedition will fall in it too. The rest of the time I was too busy staring at Julie London to learn much of anything.

There's a great Julie London website that reproduces this priceless article written by PRC publicity hacks for the film's press book, that tries to claim that the apes in the film are genuine (the credits read: 'Gorilla ......... Nabonga', with no mention of poor Crash at all!):

THERE’S PLENTY OF REAL DANGER IN JUNGLE FILMS
Making jungle pictures is not the easiest way to make a living and is fraught with danger, as all those who worked in and on the PRC’s thriller “Nabonga,” now playing at the . . . . . . Theater, can testify. In the first place , working with animals is always difficult, but working with two gorillas, including the huge Nabonga who has the title role, is something else again.
From running an elevator in a department store to portraying the part of a gorilla's daughter in her first motion picture was the dramatic step taken by Julie London, pretty young film aspirant who makes her debut in PRCs "Nabonga." (...)
Since the exacting part calls for her to play with her “protector” a huge gorilla, and cut capers with monkeys and tropical birds, Julie’s first day on the set was a series of startling experiences.
First, she was introduced to Nabonga the gorilla, who has an important part in the picture as the human actors... Cameras started to grind as director Sam Newfield called ‘action.’ She strode through the jungle with a monkey perched on her shoulder. Then Nabonga lurched into camera view and the monkey screamed, jumped for the nearest tree, and fled, chattering and gibbering. It was some time before the monkey was calmed and shooting resumed.

Quick - phone the babysitter!

The Girls of PRC: Devil Bat edition

2011-01-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

It's an enlightening experience looking at that gadget at the bottom of the sidebar that ranks the ten most read posts each week.
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What will they be, I wondered naively, the first time I added the facility.
Surely my piece on the influence of postmodernism on the modern American horror film would come out top. Closely followed no doubt by my 25th birthday salute to Kenny Everett's Bloodbath at the House of Death.
Imagine my surprise on discovering that the things that seem to bring folks here with far greater frequency and fervour are the posts with pictures of Hazel Court and Julie Ege, or the phrases 'Hammer Glamour' and 'Universal Girls' in their titles.
I can take a hint.
So each of the film analyses that form the backbone of my PRC Month posts will be accompanied by a subsidiary post, of which this is the first, celebrating the leading ladies of the films in question, illustrated wherever possible with that most important aspect of American cinematic culture and practice: the swimsuit cheesecake picture.
In so doing I hope to both illuminate a vital and important chapter of American film history, and to get that little page-view counter gadget ticking over like there's no tomorrow.
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We start with the girls of The Devil Bat and Devil Bat's Daughter, and with the heroine of that original Lugosi classic, Suzanne Kaaren.
Any Stooges fans in tonight? If so, you may be interested to know that she appeared in a few of their shorts, usually unbilled, including What's the Matador? and Yes, We Have No Bonanza. But most important of all, she's none other than dancing Gail Tempest in Disorder in the Court!
. I appreciate this may not mean much to the rest of you, but to Stooge fans Gail Tempest is probably the most beloved female presence in the entire Howard-Fine-Howard oeuvre, the name instantly recalling that oddly mournful vaudeville number the brothers perform on spoons, double bass and harmonica, prompting Miss Tempest, on trial for murder, to kick off her city suit and delight the court with inappropriate but well-received hoofing.
Judge from the still above whether the old publicity line about a starlet having her legs insured for a million dollars really was true in Suzanne's case, as even contemporary sources continue to insist. I vote yes.
But million dollar pins or no million dollar pins, Kaaren was another of those leading ladies of whom big things were confidently predicted but who was almost instantly relegated to the bush leagues, before she'd even had a chance to fail. Contracted to MGM and Fox, she tends to be unbilled even in prestigious films where she has a named character: The Great Ziegfeld, The Women, Idiot's Delight.
So when PRC offered her the female lead in The Devil Bat she unsurprisingly jumped at it, even though most of Hollywood would undoubtedly have considered an unbilled bit at MGM more classy than a PRC lead. Needless to say, it's for The Devil Bat that she's now remembered.
She retired in 1944, after marrying actor Sidney Blackmer (a Ray Millandish drawing room type, today remembered chiefly for playing the next door satanist in Rosemary's Baby). She came out of retirement once, to play the Duchess of Park Avenue in The Cotton Club (1984). She was, of course, unbilled.
She died in 2004.
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Who would have guessed that Bela Lugosi's daughter would come out looking like Rosemary LaPlanche?

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Rosemary is probably the best candidate for the female face of PRC horror, in that she's one of only two actresses to have taken the lead in two of their major horror films, and unlike Wanda McKay, she did not perform similar duties for Monogram. Wanda is a Monogal,just moonlighting at Producers Releasing, but Rosemary is the real deal: the Queen of the PRC screamers.
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The former Miss America of 1941 (and sister of Louise La Planche: former Sennett child star, the young Esmerelda in the Chaney Hunchback, thirties and forties bit part player, Miss North America of 1940 - the first year that Rosemary won Miss California - and still with us, turning ninety next month), Rosemary appeared in scores of unbilled bits in the early forties, mainly for RKO, among them three titles in the Falcon series, Mademoiselle Fifi for the Lewton unit, and Zombies on Broadway in a sarong with Lugosi.

As with Suzanne, it took a move to PRC to get billing. In Strangler of the Swamp (1945), a moody little ghost story that aspires to a Lewtonesque ambiance and half gets there, she gives the best of her two performances, but for iconic status there's no rivalling Devil Bat's Daughter, her modest but undeniable entree to the pantheon of great horror relations, alongside Dracula's Daughter, Bride of Frankenstein and, of course, Daughter of Dr Jekyll.

Rosemary gave up on movies in 1949 (as who wouldn't after taking a thankless role in a Republic serial called Federal Agents vs. Underworld, Inc?) and switched to tv; she died in 1979.

Truly, she was the most beautiful woman who ever made a British horror film

2011-01-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

When I read of the death of Jill Haworth earlier this month, just sixty-five, I found myself turning into a blogging Elvis:
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Maybe I didn't write about you quite as often as I should have, but you were always on my mind...

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Retrospective praise comes easy. It also feels like an obligation, a mark of respect, to lavish praise on those just departed, almost as if they'll somehow take it as consolation. Much better, if you really loved them, to tell them so when they're still alive.

I clicked on Jill Haworth on my own labels cloud to see what I'd already said about her: loads, surely... But no. Just one reference, in my Tony Tenser obituary. Britain's most beautiful and underused screamer, I called her.

True enough. But had I nowhere said that she was my favourite of all the leading ladies of British horror in the Hammer years? No, I hadn't.

So I deserve your scepticism if you don't believe me when I say she was, now she's gone. But she was.

Why was it so easy to overlook Jill, when we all hailed the greatness of Valerie and Veronica and Caroline and Hazel and the rest so often even their mums were starting to get bored with it? Perhaps we tend to think first of the milestones, then link back to the faces that animated them? Jill always worked off the beaten track. Never at Hammer; never at Amicus. Just once at Tigon. Never alongside Peter or Chris or Vince. You could forget her all too easily when constructing your mental pantheon. The only time you can't forget her is when she's on the screen. Then you can't look away. She was so gorgeous. Did you see her in Haunted House of Horror? I've seen renaissance sculptures less idealised.

I've seen swans with less elegantly poised heads, on less impressive necks.
.Yes, that is Frankie Avalon as her boyfriend. Let's hear it for British horror movies, ladies and gentlemen.

But by the time she made these films, without which I wouldn't even know her name, she'd already had two proper careers.
First, she was Otto Protégé's preminger. The big man with the bad temper plucked her from English obscurity, aged eighteen or something, and launched her with a big splash in Exodus and a couple others. He knew his job to that extent: epics about the founding of Israel are all very well on one level, but a bit of Jill Haworth helps to get it over at the Drake Cinema, Plymouth. That didn't take for some reason. She's back in In Harm's Way and another one, but the old Faith Domergue handling had the old Faith Domergue result; I can never decide if it's a good or a bad thing that he let her go in time to avoid Skidoo.
Then she was the original Sally Bowles in the Broadway run of Cabaret, and despite bad early reviews (worse: bad reviews for her, in raves for the show) she stuck with it for two years and was much disappointed not to get the gig in the movie.
Not half as disappointed as I am. I've had that film on DVD for years; I don't doubt it's good - it's a Monogram movie after all. But there's always something I need to see more. Had it been Jill in the lead it would have probably melted from overuse by now.

Career number three - relegation to cheapo British horror - was not pleasing to her, I fear, and it's a wonder she even stood for it. But it is pleasing to we who persist in finding a dark kind of beauty in those things. Such flawless glamour is not to be expected in these movies, among the tawdriest in the Brit-horror catalogue.
You can tell she's not into it; there's a remote, icy quality to her work in British horror - she knows we don't deserve her here. Perversely, it's one of the most attractive things about these performances; a sense of sadness and frustration, the obvious feeling that here is a butterfly of Hollywood on the wheel of Wardour Street. It's one thing to do this on the way up, but when it's clearly a step back down - well, it's no wonder that she always seems disdainfully apart from the other characters.
But I love all of her horror movies a great big lot, however tacky or mired in their eras or occasionally demeaning they seem. However much, for that matter, she appears to be just going through the motions in them. If you only watch one actress going through the motions this year, watch Jill Haworth going through the motions. There are motions and then there are motions, after all.

I never got to see It! (1967), though one of the key images of my Alan Frank horror education was that mad shot of her in a nightie and cute little slippers being carried off by the Golem. (Oh what a time it was to be going to the cinema!)
But the other three: Haunted House of Horror, Tower of Evil, The Mutations... Now you're talking!

Of the three, Haunted House of Horror is the most purely fun, a typical Tigon barn dance that should go down well with anyone who enjoyed The Beast in the Cellar (that'll be YOU, dear reader), but with the added attraction of Richard O'Sullivan, Sid James's son from Bless This House and two women so outrageously beautiful the film needs no further endorsement, instead of Flora Robson and Beryl Reid. (Gina Warwick is the other one: another inexplicably non-starting career.)
But as anyone who has listened to director Michael Armstrong's fascinating DVD commentary will know, it could have been much, much more. The film he originally delivered was a cynical attack on the values in which it superficially trades, an anti-swinging sixties film that takes the beautiful people and exposes them for the self-obsessed, mean-spirited and superficial crowd of wretches they so surely were. Much has been made of the daffy things Tigon did and tried to do with the movie (attempts to get Karloff into it persisted in various forms almost until the last minute) but far more important is the insidious damage done to its thematic framework.
Editing, reordering and extensive reshoots (with which Armstrong was not involved) relentlessly softened and humanised the characters; in an effort to make them more - or even vaguely - likeable, the new material serves only to make them uninteresting, and to leave many of their motivations obscure and some of the plot developments decidedly opaque.
One of the worst hit characters is Haworth's, now turned into a typically bland damsel in distress with not much going on under her sensational architecture, but given every once in a while to what now seem like inexplicable flashes of petulance that have lingered from Armstrong's original cut. As written, her character is a prize bitch; spiteful, resentful and sullen. For what is ostensibly the heroine, the girl in whose last-act peril we are expected to care, this was audacious indeed.
That said, she's still hardly what you'd call sympathetic, and a bit of a primadonna, even in the soppy recut. She and her boyfriend (Frankie Avalon, you'll recall) appear to have come together through a kind of social inevitability: they are the stars of the London party scene and could never be seen with anyone lesser on their arms. But they don't give any indication that they actually like each other.

Tower of Evil (1972) is so grimy, so claustrophobic and so dank you'll want to hose your tv down when it's finished. It's one of those ultra-cheap Brit-horrors with one foot firmly in the British sex film tradition, far franker than the norm in matters of sex, nudity and salty dialogue, as well as gore. In these respects not unlike Horror Hospital, with which it shares Robin Askwith, but lacking entirely that film's playfulness of tone, Tower is grim, grim, grim - but compulsive. It's also cheap - cheaper even than the Mike Raven films it may also remind you of a little. In the opening scene, wreaths of swirling fog nobly try to distract us from the fact that the boat approaching the island is a) in a studio, and b) not even moving.

As in Haunted House, Jill's character is fittingly resentful, miserable and tense throughout. Only in The Mutations (1974) is she the straight, sweet heroine, most charmingly cast as a student in Donald Pleasence's biology class, clad in the sheepskin fashions of those delightful years when London had stopped swinging and started smiling, when Cathy Come Home had morphed into Man About the House, and not before time either.
The Mutations is hardly the most savoury of films, but at least some of it is shot in real, daylit exteriors, so it feels like a holiday in the Bahamas after Tower of Evil. By any other standards it's still pure sleaze, though.

Pleasence is trying to cross-breed animals and plants. At one point he is asked if he has had any success; he replies that he most certainly has, and proudly produces a dead mouse with a sprig of watercress sticking out of it. In need of human subjects for his experiments, he pays the grotesquely deformed proprietors of a travelling freak show (Tom Baker, drooling and covered in plastic lumps, and Michael Dunn, real dwarf and fine, much-underused and misused actor) to abduct sexy girls from London parks. Post-experimental rejects are sold on to the freak show.

When Donald's students get a bit too close to the truth they go the same way; Jill's boyfriend (payed by Scott Anthony from Ken Russell's Savage Messiah, and yet another talent that vanished without trace soon after) is turned into a human venus fly trap. Because of the freak element, many people feel this film crosses some sort of line, but it's hard to stay angry with a film in which a man feeds a rabbit to a growling shrub.

As for Jill, it's the most relaxed performance she ever gave in British horror, the only one where her character is one of the gang, the only one where she appears to like her boyfriend, and quite possibly the only one where we see her smile. Certainly it's the only one where she's laid back enough to put her hair in these cute little bunches:

And there it ended, and now, it ends for all. Natural causes they say, and thank God for that. But surely there's nothing natural about any causes that can take Jill Haworth away.

Say what you will about Dr Paul Carruthers, but his theory of glandular stimulation through electrical impulses was correct

2011-01-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

"With the town in an uproar, and everybody terror-stricken and wondering whether he's going to be the next victim, I don't want any more trouble stirred up, even with an artificial bat!"
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Wise words from the sheriff of Heathville, the town at the centre of what the papers are calling the Devil Bat Murders, in response to news photographer "One Shot" McGuire's attempts to storm the front page with a faked photo of the Devil Bat in action.
You or I, if called upon to play the Sheriff, might have stressed the word 'artificial', meaning that the bat might still have panicked people even though it wasn't real.
But Hal Price, a PRC man to his fingertips, opts to put the emphasis on 'even' and 'bat', implying he's so opposed to any form of trouble-stirring, that he even draws the line at some nitwit rigging up a massive fake bat in the grounds of the house where the victims lived.
These small town sheriffs! Will they ever lighten up?
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It's not easy to find anything new to say about The Devil Bat (1940) - though that in itself is a point worth making.
A Poverty Row quickie that came and went, that most critics ignored, that those who didn't heaped scorn upon... and which is now more famous, more beloved and probably more watched that anything MGM released in 1940.
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Actually, remind me - what did MGM release in 1940?
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Basically a crazy cock-eyed spin on The Hound of the Baskervilles, an adaptation of which had just proved a nice hit for Fox, The Devil Bat is one of those films that everybody loves - even those who claim to hate it. It is unquestionably the best-known of all Bela Lugosi's Poverty Row horrors; it's also surely the best.
It was the only film he ever made for PRC and that's a great shame because, love his Monogram monstrosities though I do, he was often ill-used by the company, placed in unsuitable and sometimes demeaning roles, whereas you only have to consider for a second what he could have done with the lead role in The Monster Maker, for example, and his absence from the film becomes almost too heartbreaking to contemplate.
Whatever distinctions one has to draw about the scenario and production values of The Devil Bat, the fact remains that it is a classic Lugosi role, another Richard Vollin or Dr Mirakle. It's a rare treat indeed to see him get so full-blooded a showcase in a 1940s movie, virtually a unique treat in fact.
You know you're in for a good time from the very start, kicking off with that so familiar yet so perfect score, and then, the best explanatory foreword in the history of American cinema:
. Kindly village doctor? Everyone loves him?
Poor Lugosi - typecast again. How he must have longed for the opportunity to play a nasty character!
This is PRC chutzpah indeed - with his usual portentous, knitted-brow delivery and bats upstairs both literally and figuratively, to say nothing of the human skull on his telephone table, it's hard to imagine there was ever a time when Dr Carruthers took temperatures and applied antiseptic cream in such a way as to earn not just the respect but the love of all Heathville.
Nonetheless, the fact that any such love is misplaced is confirmed to us instantly the credits are over.
Like many another PRC horror, the film begins by plunging us into the story at an advanced stage. This spares us the boring preambles that disfigure so many horror films, and means that the very first thing we see is Bela Lugosi already in the throes of madness, talking to a bat (useful for filling in the back story; thanks):
"Ahhh, my friend! Our theory of glandular stimulation through electrical impusles was correct! A few days ago you were as small as your companion, and now look at you!"
The bat - which didn't, I think, have any actual creative input in the scheme; Lugosi was just being cute with that bit about "our theory" - then hangs motionless from a coat hanger while Lugosi zaps it with electrical impulses, peering through a window in the door, wearing goggles and beating his clenched fist in waltz time.
Sure enough, the bat's glands are indeed stimulated: within a few seconds it has doubled in size and - presumably not as a result of the same process, but by some related training undisclosed in its details - we learn (because we get to hear Lugosi explaining this to the bat as well) that it hates the smell of a particular aftershave so much that when it encounters someone wearing it, rather than fly off smartly in the opposite direction to get the hell away from it, it will rip out the offending dandy's jugular vein.
The smell actually makes it angry: a bit of conditioning far more impressive than the electrically impulsed gland stimulated size increase. (What's the betting Lugosi gave Karloff a bottle of aftershave that Christmas?)
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Immediately after discovering how Carruthers is able to make bats bigger and more crotchety than nature felt necessary, we find out why: it's because he's an embittered aftershave formulator driven to fury by the fact that he was left out of a business venture that allowed several of the town's other inhabitants to become perfume millionaires using his fragrances.
So he has decided to kill them in the most complicated, impractical and attention-seeking method he can devise: by inventing, building and secretly locating the expensive and cumbersome apparatus needed to make bats swell to many times their natural size, training them to kill people who wear his special aftershave lotion, getting his enemies to use it, then releasing the bats and hoping for the best.
Even when the first of these attempts proves such a gruesome success, and the eyes of the nation are fixed on the Heathville mystery, he continues to stalk them one at a time, doing everything he can to look suspicious short of actually bringing the bat along with him on a string.
And to think, he would have succeeded, if only his plans hadn't come up against that eternal barrier between the innocent masses and the machinations of evil criminal geniuses - a smartass reporter. This one's played by Dave O'Brien, the pratfalling stuntman from all those Pete Smith shorts.
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The oddest touch in the screenplay is the decision not to make Lugosi's victims grasping villains who deliberately pushed him out of the deal that made their fortunes on the back of his efforts. On the contrary: they're scrupulously fair. He declined the offer to take a share in the venture, and even now, as he unleashes his bats, they are still making every effort to be friendly and accomodating to him. Their only sin, it would seem, was not to give him a big payoff when their ship came in. For that, it seems, they must die.

It's a nice touch to have a bat's shadow superimposed over the usual newspaper headlines montage (one of several small but pleasing evidences of just that little bit more care being taken than usual in the movie), though from the evidence it's hard to tell how seriously the papers are taking the case.
In the Chicago Daily Register the headline MYSTERIOUS DEVIL BAT KILLS THOMAS HEATH! dominates the front page, but the accompanying story is abruptly stiffed midway through a sentence in the first paragraph, to make way for another scoop: Pericles the Great Athenian Speaks. The Devil Bat mystery is 'continued on next page'.
In an identical layout, the Heathville Daily goes for the massive header VILLAGERS LIVE IN FEAR OF THE DEVIL BAT but pulls the same trick after the first paragraph, and - suggesting that readers have more interest in the affair in Chicago than in the town where it's actually happening - doesn't pick it up again until page 5. While over in Peoria, where they also use the same typesetters as the Chicago Daily Regsiter, the Gazette headline asks WHO WILL BE THE DEVIL BAT'S NEXT VICTIM? but then relegates all but its first two sentences to page thirty.
Later, when the Register's man manages to blast Bela's baby from the skies, the paper celebrates its scoop by giving it two paragraphs before relegation (to page 22) to leave room for the day's other top stories: AMERICANISM, an enigmatically-titled piece they had already printed in the same spot in the last edition, and the even more intriguing GIRLS.

When the deaths continue, and it seems a new bat is on the loose, the Register is so excited (DEVIL BAT'S MATE KILLS HENRY MORTON) it again only forces its readers to wait until page two to read the second paragraph; meanwhile the rest of the front page allows readers who may have missed it last time a second chance to enjoy that exclusive interview with Pericles the great Athenian.

Few are the horror film monster-makers who are not ultimately undone at the hands of their own creation, and sure enough, Carruthers eventually perishes under the talons of his own devil bat, after O'Brien takes some of the aftershave and splashes it all over the doctor.
So ends Carruthers's insane campaign of murder and madness, and so ends a film which, while every bit as deranged as its central character, has much to commend it. Even as a horror film, it sort of works (in Poverty Row terms that is extravagant praise). The shots of the giant bat prop, flapping its way through the dusky, deserty landscapre of Heathville are eerie and beautiful; the bat itself a laudable piece of special effects engineering for its time and place. PRC liked it so much they later used it again in a spooky western, Wild Horse Phantom (1944), and the accompaniment of what sounds like a human scream as it swoops down, along with well-used intercuts of a real bat's ornery face, make the film a rare thing among Poverty Row horrors: one where the actual horror scenes are as effective as those of a Universal movie.

Well - so far, so familiar.
Nobody reading this needs me to tell them - again - what a great film The Devil Bat is, but not all of you may know that what you see in the movie is in fact only half the story.
Because the truth about Dr Carruthers and his giant bats may not be as straightforward as you think. Is it possible that we read him wrong? That what we thought was a vindictive nutcase releasing killer bats was in fact a nice guy doing nothing of the sort?
Did we only think we saw him doling out that aftershave and chuckling as each fresh jugular is severed? Could we really all be the victims of some sort of collective hallucination?
Sounds incredible, doesn't it?
But hold tight - we're about to hit a curve...

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Devil Bat's Daughter (1946), made a full six years after the original film had been released and (temporarily) forgotten, is surely the only sequel to a Poverty Row horror original ever made. (Don't count Return of the Ape Man, because it's about an ape man returning, not the Ape Man returning, and has nothing in common with the Lugosi film besides the presence of the man himself, in a totally different and unconnected role.)
It stars Rosemary LaPlanche, the former Miss America of 1941 and already a PRC veteran - she's also the lead in Strangler of the Swamp - as Nina MacCarron, who we first see unconscious in the sheriff's office, having been found face down in the road. According to a local cabbie she had just arrived in town, and asked him to take her to the old Carruthers residence...
The sheriff takes a trip to the now derelict property, where an abandoned newspaper reminds us of the conclusion of the previous film:

He also finds the girl's handbag, dropped in her flight from the house, which contains a birth certificate revealing that her real name is Carruthers - she is the Devil Bat's Daughter!

What follows takes every first-time viewer by surprise. While the original Devil Bat appeared at a time when Son of Frankenstein had made traditional horror all the rage again after a half-decade in the doldrums, the sequel appeared when the genre was again winding down, and the new thing was the twisty psychological thriller laced with quarter-baked chunks of half-baked Freudianism.
Sure enough, Devil Bat's Daughter is a boldly revisionist murder mystery, with several overt but presumably coincidental similarities to the Universal movie She-Wolf of London, released the same year. The only Devil Bats we get to see are in the distorted flashbacks using footage from the first film, and almost from the first, a strange note of ambiguity creeps in when characters are called upon to recall the original events.
As the friendly town doctor puts it:

He was a scientist who came here to work in peace and secrecy. No one around here got to know him. His work seemed to consist chiefly of experiments in cell growth stimulation. How he achieved what he did, I don't know. But his work finally appeared in the form of gigantic bats. Several people were killed by the creatures, and then one day he himself was found dead, killed by one of his own beasts... Somehow or other the rumour spread that Carruthers was a vampire, so round here they call him the Devil Bat.

This explanation is given to Dr Morris (Michael Hale), a psychiatrist, and one that all but the naivest viewers will instantly want to keep at arm's length, with his oily insincerity and an odd habit of tossing a walnut into the air and catching it again while he's conversing.
Meanwhile, poor Nina is subject to terrifying waking nightmares, in which she thinks she sees one of her father's Devil Bats in her bedroom. As Dr Morris attempts to probe her psyche for the explanation of her strange obsessions (she's just learned her father was found guilty of training giant killer bats and was appararently widely thought to be a vampire - won't that do for starters?) we become more and more certain that the slimy headshrinker is up to something. (We already know he's having an affair and wants to get rid of his wife.)
It's an unwritten rule that whenever a creepy psychiatrist makes a big deal about whether or not you drink the tonic he's made for you every night, the chances are you'll wake up the prime suspect in a murder you can't remember commiting.

Sure enough, Nina wakes in the middle of the night to find herself in the hall, and Morris's wife nearby, stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.

Confessing to the crime like a good psychotic, Nina becomes as big a news sensation as her father had been, with the Chicago Star jumping to the obvious and inevitable conclusion, as who wouldn't when they hear of a woman murdering someone with scissors:

But luckily, Morris's stepson Ted, who loves Nina and is the only man in town who dislikes Morris as much as we do, decides to do a little investigating of his own, journeying with the town doctor to the old Carruthers house. Here he finds a dropped walnut, indicating that his stepfather's been snooping around there too, and dropped his walnut in the excitement. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Carruthers's papers on cell stimulation are missing.
"I don't get it, Doctor," Ted exclaims, "who would be interested in learning the secret of enlarging bats? Who?"
"Well, to speak for myself, Ted, I'd be very interested," the doc replies. "Any man with a scientific turn of mind would be."
Ah, yes! The great dreams of science: fuller understanding of the limits, structure and origin of the universe, technological progress, fewer diseases and bigger bats.

And if you're entertaining any hopes at this point that Dr Morris has stolen the papers because he has become infatuated with Carruthers's ideas, and even now may be in the act of duplicating his experiments and unleashing an all-new army of Devil Bats - take a deep breath and calm down. This is 1946, for God's sake, not 1940! It's all in the mind, now. He just wants to get some psychological dirt with which to influence Nina's mind, to push her towards insanity and get her to take the rap for his murder of his wife.

But the biggest surprise is still to come, when Ted confronts Morris with the evidence:

Ted - I've found Carruthers' papers!
Morris - Well! Now perhaps you'll tell me their great significance.
Ted - They prove that Carruthers was not a murderer. If you'd let Nina read the truth about her father, she would have been cured!

You heard him right. Carruthers was not guilty of the Devil Bat murders! And Ted's not finished, as he later explains to the police:

Any jury would be quick to condemn her on the basis of inherited criminal tendencies. He couldn't give up those papers because they prove that her father was not a murderer. Calling him 'devil bat' and 'vampire' was throwing mud at a great scientist. He was far ahead of even today's experiments in cell growth stimulation and proved it on plants and frogs and bats. It was the world's loss when his bats broke loose and killed some people - because they killed him too!

Not a word about the aftershave, the fact that all the bat's victims were members of one family in the cosmetics trade, or any explanation as to why Carruthers had stood idly, not to say maliciously by as the deaths continued, denying all knowledge of their cause. All of that, the nasty Dr Morris made you think you saw, when really, you saw nothing of the sort.
If the good Dr Carruthers is looking down on us now, and I like to think he is, I only hope he's forgiven us for saying such beastly things about him.

Which is to basically say that Devil Bat's Daughter just has to be the loopiest, most audacious Poverty Row horror of them all. The nerve of it! The sheer nerve!
For some reason it tends to be loathed even by seasoned fans of this sort of thing, but I loved it. Once you know you aren't getting a proper follow-up to the original - and really, how much fun would that be anyway, without Bela? - there's no reason in the world that I can see why this hallucinatory wallow into B-movie absurdia shouldn't strike you as it did me; as a constant delight.
And as the second half of a double-bill with the original Devil Bat? Well, is there a word to describe the experience? 'Sublime' will have to do, until a better one comes along.

PRC: Monogram's cousin from the country

2011-01-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

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Producers Releasing Corporation were latecomers to Poverty Row.
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When Monogram first appeared in the early thirties there were scores of small production outfits specialising in cheap and cheerful genre entertainment, companies like Chesterfield, Grand National and Invincible. But most of these had fallen by the wayside by 1939, when distributor Ben Judell teamed up with producer Sigmund Neufeld and his director brother Sam Newfield to form Producers Pictures Corporation (PPC) and Producers Distributing Company (PDC). Their first film was the interesting, and interestingly early, anti-Nazi film Hitler: Beast of Berlin (1939).
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Their second sounds like a tempting foretaste of the company's horror future: Torture Ship (1939), directed by Victor Halperin, one half of the maverick brothers that made White Zombie and Supernatural. But Torture Ship, sadly, lives up neither to its name nor Halperin's reputation, being basically a thriller, with little horror and less torture, always assuming that the 49 minute print I've seen is a fair representation of the original release. (It's a version issued to tv in the fifties to fill a sixty-minute slot, from which the enterprising distributor has simply lopped off the opening reel. Frank Capra once claimed he turned Lost Horizon from a dud into a hit by doing the same, and counselled other filmmakers to try it, but the only effect here is to make the film more or less impossible to make any sense of.)
Basically we have a mad medico who has chartered a yacht as a means of obtaining the privacy he needs to experiment on kidnapped criminals, to support his contention that either criminality has something to do with endocrine injections, or endocrine injections have something to do with criminality, or both.
The cast is a Poverty Row all-star bill: Lyle Talbot is the hero, Irving Pichel is the doc, Skelton Knaggs is on board, and Jacqueline Wells and Sheila Bromley are the gals. Wells had appeared with Laurel & Hardy and Karloff & Lugosi; Bromley is beloved by all Marx Brothers fans as the girl whose entire appearance in Horse Feathers consists of entering Groucho's office and delivering the two most thankless pun-enabling feed lines in comedy history.
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Five more films followed but the big time kept its distance and by 1940 PPC was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was then that it was renamed PRC and sold to Pathe, who appointed a new President for the company but retained the Neufelds.
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And so the golden age of PRC began.
Like Monogram, most of their movies were westerns: in their banner year of 1944 (when Leon Fromkess, one-time treasurer of Monogram, became their second president), the company were boasting of a production schedule encompassing "24 features, 16 westerns". But their line-up included most other kinds of movies too:
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PRC knows why girls leave home
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Yes, that is the Blake Edwards in the cast - and Laurel and Hardy villain Charles Middleton as the ghostly strangler (who looks nothing like this illustration!)
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A cozy murder! A mad romance! It's gay and ghoulish! I don't know about you but I'm sold
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Eight top-hatted dwarves jostle for the best vantage point from which to contemplate Mary Beth Hughes
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By 1948, the company was again looking like a spent force: it was bought out by Eagle Lion and ceased to exist as an independent production outfit.

In its various forms, PRC had existed for less than a decade. Yet in that short time, it produced a disproportionate number of horror quickies that amply reward exhumation and examination.

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We shall begin our journey by returning to the dawn of PRC proper: the year 1940, and the unleashing of one of the most loved and enduring Poverty Row horrors ever made: The Devil Bat...

Come with me to PRC...

2011-01-06T23:40:00.000-08:00

Sorry; I'm starting a bit late on this one, I know. So it may well be that PRC January extends a little into PRC February too - we've got a lot to get through.
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PRC Month serves two purposes for me.

First, because some folks out there seemed to like Monogram Month more than anything else I've done, and it's always nice to see the visit-counter zinging, this seemed like the only right and proper and inevitable follow-up.

The other reason has something to do with an evolving aesthetic. I've always enjoyed Poverty Row horrors, but my attitude towards them had a touch of the Medveds about it. I enjoyed them, or thought I enjoyed them rather, because they were bad. I always looked down on the kind of humourless film writers who resented them because they were bad, but I never questioned that essential badness itself.

But then, when I got stuck into Monogram Month, and really watched them for the first time, and in such large numbers over so short a space of time, my whole attitude changed. Of course, I could still see that they were cheap, with makeshift scenery and tiny cramped sets, full of absurd dialogue, insane plots and bizarre, heightened performances. But since when was that how I defined bad?

'Bad' to me is lazy, is boring, is pretentious, is take-the-cheque film-making. It has nothing to do with how little money you've got to fling about. In the course of Monogram Month I found myself wondering if they were not actually among my favourite horror films of all. Voodoo Man, such a spooky film, was the one that did it, I think, and then it all fell into place. And then Invisible Ghost suddenly came alive as a work of art. Yes, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. But what if that didn't matter? Then, clearly, you are left with a strange and beautiful piece of film-making.

And from 'what if that didn't matter?' to 'what if that were actually a good thing?' is but the smallest - and happiest - of steps. And then you really are in love with Poverty Row horror movies.

PRC, actually, were the Poverty Row studio among Poverty Row studios. Monogram were several enviable rungs higher on the ladder of Hollywood respectability, especially in terms of studio facilities and contract artists. You can see that just by looking at their respective casts.

Over at Monogram, Lugosi - who could barely get a light at Universal - was king of the castle. Only once was Monogram able to bag Karloff for a horror role. But at PRC, it's Lugosi who only appears once. The stars of PRC horror tend to be the supporting actors not only in Universal films but even in Monogram's: John Carradine, George Zucco, J. Carroll Naish.

PRC's support casts don't have the same rep company feel that Monogram's do, and there are fewer recurring faces to establish a sense of identity to the movies as a group. Monogram had a fine stable of starlets to whom they returned whenever a new screamer was in the works; PRC gave the impression they were starting the casting search afresh each time. So while it's great to see the occasional appearance by a Monogal - Wanda McKay, for instance, or Maris Wrixon - their casting feels random, and there isn't that feeling of continuity that the Monogram films enjoy. Every PRC horror film feels different, because they lacked even Monogram's resources to establish a basic house style.

The irony that I think results directly from this fact is that, necessity being the mother of invention and all, the most highly regarded Poverty Row movies, those that now enjoy a reputation as minor classics in the raw, tend to be PRC rather than Monogram titles.

Detour (1945, directed by skid row auteur and PRC regular Edgar G. Ulmer), and Railroaded! (1947, directed by Anthony Mann) have long been acclaimed as among the most stylish of all B-noirs. Hitler's Madmen (1943, directed by Douglas Sirk) was felt to be so good it was picked up for distribution by MGM. In the horror field Bluebeard (1944; directed again by Ulmer) and Strangler of the Swamp (1945, directed by German arthouse emigree Frank Wisbar) enjoy a reputation far greater than any Monogram horror.

Even their one and only Lugosi movie, 1941's The Devil Bat, though not taken seriously critically, is probably the most famous and loved of all his Poverty Row quickies. (The only Monogram that approaches its iconic status is The Ape Man, and it proves a far less generous vehicle for his talents.)

PRC's horrors are less trippy than Monogram's; they play fairer by the genre's coventions, and tend to cheat less with regards to content. Many of the films Monogram sold as horror turned out to be light mysteries, war thrillers, gangster films and suchlike. PRC, by contrast, rarely skimp on the yak hairs and stock footage. PRC give you burly blonde werewolves in dungarees, giant aftershave-crazed bats, Aztec winged serpent gods, and even honest to goodness vampires.

And they give you George Zucco. Oh, how they give you George Zucco!

While Universal were killing him off in reel one of House of Frankenstein, when even Monogram were giving him nothing better to do in Voodoo Man than put on a funny headdress and chant gibberish, PRC were putting him under the centre spotlight and letting him go bananas. Fifty years after his death, this bald Englishman with poached egg eyes and one of the most mellifluous voices in the movies is still awaiting full recognition as perhaps the greatest mad scientist of them all. To see him at his uninhibited best, join me as we cross the Hollywood tracks and drop in on our pals at PRC...

Still to come:

Devil Bat and Devil Bat's Daughter: the most bizarre double-bill in horror film history!

The Zucco-athon: five of the mad Mancunian's PRC finest, back to back!

Nabonga and Pongo: Men in apesuits deep in six square feet of studio jungle!

The Monster Maker: the kinkiest horror film of the forties?

... and more!

So please stick around, don't forget to enter the poll, top right (results announced at the end of the month), and if you feel like sampling a little PRC magic yourself and reporting back here, please get in touch!

matthewconiam@aol.com

Bela the nomad, Elyse the nonagenarian and notification of PRC Month...

2010-12-16T22:48:00.000-08:00

Just three short announcements before I return with something more substantial after Christmas...

First, in case you missed it, December 14th was the 93rd birthday of lovely Elyse Knox, female lead of Universal's The Mummy's Tomb (1942).

Elyse (whose real first name was Elsie - you've got to give it to those Hollywood publicists) made a mammoth 37 films in seven years, between her debut in 1940 and her retirement (to raise a family) in '47. She also appeared in Abbott and Costello's Hit the Ice and as herself in the all-star jamboree Follow the Boys at Universal, and was a queen of sorts at Monogram, where she slogged through the entire Joe Palooka series.

But at the Abbey she will always be swoon-postured in the burly and none too secure arms of Lon Chaney Jr, her negligee trailing behind, as he stalks slowly through the standing sets.

Happy birthday, Elyse.

Second, if you're a Lugosiphile - and if you're not you must have sneaked in here under false pretences - I'd like to draw your attention to a nice new blog, Bela: the Nomad Years, they being the underdocumented period of '46 to '55. It's an ambitious site which aims to plug some of the gaps in the known Lugosi story, specifically (but by no means solely) in this twilight interlude between the twin peaks of Monogram and Bride of the Monster. The author became a Lugosi fan after a formative viewing of Scared to Death on tv - an impressive claim in itself - and the site promises to be a feast of rare photos and obscure insights. Do take a look...

.And finally, some of you out there seemed to like my Monogram Month postings, so it is with the chill hand of inevitability that I direct your attention to the fact that January will be the month for celebrating the great Producers Releasing Corporation, the studio that made similar films to Monogram but without that studio's showy veneer of high class and lavish resources.

PRC is where Lugosi created his army of giant gland-stimulated bats that strike and kill whenever their victims use his patented after shave lotion, where George Zucco plays his vampire twin brother in a toupee, where mad scientists hope to create a legion of snarling wolfmen as their contribution to the Allied war effort, where the Aztec bird god Quetzacoatl is alive and well and ready to kill anyone who attempts to steal his feathers, and where J Carroll Naish deliberately infects a concert pianist with acromegaly because he won't let him get jiggy with his daughter.

The stats assure me that my Lugosi Monogram Marathon was one of the most read posts I've done on this site, so naturally there will be a PRC marathon, in which I attempt to watch more George Zucco films in immediate succession than has ever been attempted before (beating the current Guinness World Record holder's total of one). And there'll be lots more beside. If you'd like to contribute, let me know either in the comments or at matthewconiam@aol.com.

Okay, that's it for now. Back shortly.

Ingrid and Michael and you and me

2010-11-26T00:19:00.000-08:00

The British horror film.
A bit like the American horror film, except for the fact that a) it had a different Golden Age (roughly 1956-1975), and b) it had Michael Ripper instead of Dwight Frye.
There may be other differences, but those are the main ones.
I'd be the first to admit that it is not the Bach Matthäus-Passion. Neither is it Mahler's third, The Brothers Karamazov or that Rembrandt painting of the female tennis player showing her bum.
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But if this stuff does have lasting merit, and I think it does, it should strike us more forcefully than it tends to that we were alive at the same time as these people who helped make it.
Future fans will not be so lucky, and they will assume that we went around all day remarking on our good fortune to have actually lived in the same days as Michael Gough or Ingrid Pitt.
But we don't, we just sort of take it for granted, as if it couldn't be any other way, as we mark off the dates on the calendar: Ingrid Pitt died this week, aged 73; Michael Gough - I hope - ate a big cake with a miniature icing sugar Konga and 94 candles on it this week.
That's this week, modern life fans!
. So, firstly, we lost mad Ingrid.
When all is said and done - and, now, all is said and done - Ingrid was the female face of Hammer Horror. The stubborn facts that she only appeared in two Hammer films, and was dubbed in one of them, matter less than zip. Today is a day for printing the legend, and if anyone ever relished their association with Hammer it was Ingrid. Not for her the Christopher Lee "actually I'm more of a roller-skating song and dance man than a vampire" type of squeamishness. Ingrid loved being a Hammer gal, and you don't get to be the number one female face of Hammer for no reason. Something about her Carmilla Karnstein was uniquely iconic in a way that her peers could never quite duplicate.
If you're a regular reader in these parts you'll know why I'm bending over backwards to stress points that are for most uncontested and uncontroversial. Ingrid was not my favourite Hammer actress, and it would be disingenuous to pretend I haven't gone on record as saying so. Off screen she seemed like an exposed electric wire, onscreen I always preferred Valerie and Veronica and Caroline and Hazel.
But I do think she's a good actress, which was not something Hammer actually demanded of its leading ladies. Her two Hammer performances are real performances, with odd moments and nuances not dictated by the script but indicative of a responding intelligence in their interpreter.
Countess Dracula, even crassly dubbed, is to be commended for the way in which both actress and director seem to be inspiring each other to take the thing more seriously than necessary: the result is one of the most instantly distinctive and under-rated Hammer films of the seventies. Her performance in Vampire Lovers, the schoolboy's Citizen Kane, is even more layered: the character's existential melancholy is entirely Ingrid and entirely effective, as though she had taken Lugosi's enigmatic line "To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious..." and used it as template for the entire performance.
It is especially interesting to see how she plays her scenes with the young girls she corrupts and ultimately abandons. One might have expected her to do it Dracula-style: coldly seductive, with an obvious edge of calculating, cynical disregard. Quite the reverse: she seems almost self-loathing in her appetites and genuinely in love with her victims. Just compare her scenes with Madeline Smith with the swiftness and savagery with which she dispatches inconvenient men. You can see the difference instantly if you look at Lust for a Vampire (and it's as good an excuse as any): Yutte's Mircalla is much more the machine-like vampiress; it's not - and I mean this - a bad performance by any means, but a standard one. Pitt was never standard.
. Aside from her Hammer films, the obituaries have focused on Where Eagles Dare and, for some reason, The Wicker Man, in which she has almost literally nothing to do. According to Allan Brown's book Inside The Wicker Man she was cast against Anthony Shaffer's wishes ("I said, "Christ, must we have her?"; I wanted to avoid any further connections to Hammer Horror"), apparently because it was felt her then-liaison with George Pinches, Rank's head of exhibition, would guarantee the film a place on the Odeon circuit. But even in the full-length version she has only one tiny speaking scene before she turns up at the finale to assist the villagers in the burning of Sgt Howie. (Her only other appearance is in a gloriously unnecessary two-second shot of Howie disturbing her in her bath, apologising and leaving again: "It was quite wonderful to get all my kit off and sit in the hot water in the cold winter... When you take your kit off, everybody is so nice, everybody just loves you to bits...")
I liked this recollection, from assistant director Jake Wright, very much:

The weather was just appalling. It was always bitterly cold, with a cold wind blowing in off the sea. All our lovely crowd were dressed in little summer blouses, the men in shirt sleeves. And they froze, poor loves... Then came a moment when we needed two minutes to reload the camera, so I told the wardrobe people to give the main artists their coats to keep them warm. And Britt Ekland took hers, Diane Cilento put her coat on, but Ingrid Pitt said, "Thank you, but if the crowd haven't got time to put on their coats, I haven't got time," which I thought was lovely.

I tend more readily to think of her in The House That Dripped Blood.

This is her third great appearance, a nice little spoof of Hammer, in which she is both authentic and amusing. It's as if she just knew she was destined to be the female Christopher Lee for all time, remarkable considering that she was launched by Hammer with none of the fanfare that accompanied non-starters like Victoria Vetri or Julie Ege, and doubly so when you realise it was made before Vampire Lovers had even been released.
It's great because it trades on the idea of her being a horror star, an idea that would have been conveyed even more joyously if only Lee hadn't been so silly as to turn down the male lead. As it is, Pitt's third and - in its own odd way - most iconic British horror role remains curiously overlooked.

Farewell, Ingrid - a place in the Abbey crypt is yours.

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Michael Gough might be the most neglected stalwart of British horror still with us.

I always think of him as the British horror film's equivalent of George Zucco. Like Zucco he was, to the real world, a respected character actor. Like Zucco, he never became a real film star, but did occasionally make a notable impression in the odd character role in a major film. (He's good in two of Ken Russell's, Women In Love and Savage Messiah, also an interesting Bertrand Russell in Derek Jarman's lousy Wittgenstein.) Like Zucco, he was happy - and I do mean clearly happy, not reconciled or merely content - to take roles in horror films between more earnest gigs. Like Zucco at Universal, his work for Hammer was of the unshowy, supporting variety; both men got to be the big horror star only in the shadier parts of town: Monogram and PRC for mad George, Herman Cohen for Gough.
To Herman Cohen, Gough was Chris, Peter and Vincent all rolled into one, and - again like Carradine - he rewarded the attention by really letting rip when the narrative demanded, sometimes even when it didn't quite.

He's always good value in a horror film: as the villain in The Phantom of the Opera or Arthur Holmwood in Dracula, or in stranger escapades like The Corpse or Satan's Slave. He also did a nice line in weird and/or doolally butlers: as the almost literally dusty family retainer in that joyous all-star romp Curse of the Crimson Altar, he turns in a performance almost as knowingly generic as in that fine spoof What a Carve Up.
But it's as obsessive perverts that we love him the most: watch him in Horror Hospital or Cohen's Horrors of the Black Museum if you're after the full dosage. Quite simply, nobody in British horror does uninhibited sadistic loonery with the relish, enthusiasm and delight of Michael Gough.

Horror Hospital (1973), one of the weirdest and most fabulous British horrors of the seventies, was the work of eccentric showman and Wardour Street legend Antony Balch. An occasional film-maker and full-time importer and distributor, he was perhaps best known for the imagination and ingenuity with which he retitled foreign films, correctly reasoning that The Kinky Darlings could well take a shilling or two but Per Una Valigia Piene di Donne was on a hiding to nothing. (Other, equally unpromising titles went through his back door to emerge out the front as The Doctor In The Nude, Pussycats, The Pornographer, Massacre For an Orgy and, my particular favourite, Weird Weirdo. These titles usually had nothing to do with the film in question, and the last two, as the more observant among you will have spotted straight away, don't actually mean anything at all. According to David McGillivray he retitled Juliette de Sade as Heterosexual in the hope that punters would assume the term referred to some obscure perversion.)
He wrote and directed Horror Hospital seemingly on a whim. Robin Askwith is the hero, so it's a winner before it even starts, but audiences will realise within two minutes that this is one of the strangest darned films ever. Sillier than any spoof, but not a spoof... just talented people messing about. It's like a horror pantomime. Watch it this Christmas after the Queen's speech.
And happily, Gough seems to be enjoying it most of all. He plays Dr Storm, a lunatic scientist who runs a health farm cum holiday camp as a front for his attempts to build an army of zombified tenagers. He talks a great deal about his scientific innovation and sophistication in this regard, but as far as we can see he just lobotomises them, and spends the rest of the time being pushed around in a wheelchair by his devoted accolyte (a German lesbian and former brothel owner nicknamed Harris on account of her fetish for harris tweed suits), cracking his knuckles (the sound of which Balch amplifies horrendously) and caning his dwarf assistant about the face. He also has a customised Rolls Royce in which he pursues would-be escapees: as the car pulls up alongside the runaway, a decapitating blade shoots out of the side and the severed head is caught in a string bag attached to a hoop.
But Storm is not just a nutso scientist: in a glorious twist inspired (if that's not too ordinary a word) by Mystery of the Wax Museum we learn that his wiry body and fully expressive face and hands are just a synthetic suit and rubber mask concealing his true form: a hideous pink mutant blob, substantially larger than when he's got the Michael Gough suit on.

I've no idea what Gough's position is on his horror career now. I do know I've never read an interview with him on the subject. Perhaps he shuns such unworthy attention? I only hope it's not just that nobody's asked. In the great pantheon of British horror stars, he's the next best thing to Tod Slaughter - or even Edward Lionheart. Many happy returns. May he live forever.

Tits and monkeys: “Mother of Tears”, “Giallo” and the decline of Dario Argento

2010-11-17T06:01:00.001-08:00

So they built this big theme park dedicated to the films of Dario Argento, and they called it Italy.
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I've written about this before, I know, but I've just got back from the place and it feels truer than ever.
Despite my ever-advancing disenchantment with his filmography, the man's shadow still looms over every street, every building and courtyard, every tree and streetlamp.
I've probably watched more Italian movies, with greater pleasure and keener appreciation, than those of any other non-Anglophone nation, but no other Italian director has stamped his signature on the landscape for me with anything like as much force and ubiquity.
With the possible exception of Chaplin, Fellini is to me the greatest film-poet in the history of the medium - but the fact remains that when I'm in Italy I rarely feel like I'm in Fellini's Italy. We watched I Vitelloni while we were in Florence last month, because we knew that it was partly shot there, but not for a second did I connect the images on the screen with the view from the window. It's Fellini-land; he built it himself. But Argento is Italy and Italy is Argento, and in that strange, seductive menace that is uniquely his, man and landscape share each other.
We walked from Florence to Fiesole, and the architecture that seemed merely picturesque to my wife was to me so vividly cinematic as to be almost hallucinatory. All those old houses, their peeling paint, high walls, rusty ironwork and crumbling pillars and shuttered windows, seemed like repositories of secrets - old secrets, nearly forgotten, biding their time.
Why is this? I've been trying to make sense of it for years. There now follows my latest attempt. Does this make sense, I wonder? Perhaps it comes down to this...
Some Italian directors ignore Italy. Antonioni ignores Italy because he's an existentialist and all that matters is the people: that's why his films could be set anywhere and, indeed, why he made a point of setting them all over the world. Others deliberately show you Italy because they want to tell you Italian stories: Bicycle Thieves, obviously, evokes a real and tangible Italy in this sense. While Fellini takes Italy and turns it into something different because he is interested in creating his own universe.
But only Argento uses the real Italy and plonks his own fantasy universe into it, each redefining the shape and limits of the other.
This is what sets Argento apart not just from other Italian directors generally but specifically from Italy's other exploitation horror directors of the seventies. Fulci made some good films and some bad ones, but none of them trade in Italian-ness for their effects, and many try to deny it. All of his most famous films are set outside of Italy, though often largely shot there, with locations picked therefore for their anonymity. And even if nominally Italian-set they are still shot in faceless anywhere-cities, the better to complement the dubbing. We tend to think of him as the Number 2 man in Italian horror, and I do find his films interesting and like a good number of them, but that's an important difference. Argento's work is explicitly Italian - he tends to name his cities and to really show them and use them, while still completely re-imagining them in the process. And it rubs off permanently, for me at least.
. Though it's a long time since a new Argento release has actually excited me (not since Stendhal, I suppose; my interest in the man just post-dated his glory years, and Trauma was the first one I saw while it was still new) I always return from Italy with the compulsion to rewatch Bird With The Crystal Plumage or Deep Red.
But until this time I've never actually watched one of his films while there. (It seemed superfluous somehow.) Mother of Tears was on Italian general release last time I was in Bologna and I toyed with the idea of seeing it, but having seen The Phantom of the Opera and The Card Player I was in no mad rush, and never quite got round to it. But I did get the DVD and watched it before heading off to Italy this time.
Wow.
If it's not the worst film ever made - and it's got to be somewhere in the running - it must be the worst film Argento's ever made. As we speak, linguistic scientists are hard at work inventing a new language containing words capable of conveying how wretched it is.
The most obvious problems have been ably listed by others, notably Maitland McDonagh. The screenplay is by American hacks with no grasp of Argento's style, the gross-out violence is unaffectingly crude in both conception and mechanics, the scenes of diabolic excess are pretty puerile, it's all depressingly mean-spirited, none of it is even remotely scary and too much of it - especially but by no means solely the bit where the Italian branch of the Cyndi Lauper Appreciation Society go razzing at the airport - is just plain silly.

But the biggest problem for me is simply this: it doesn't for one minute make it impossible to believe that anyone but Argento made it. Until now, even his very worst films had at least done that. But this is completely faceless, voiceless, authorless. It doesn't look, sound, feel or smell like Suspiria or Inferno in any detail or regard. It's set in Italy only in the sense that it's set somewhere. Rome it may well be, but it doesn't say Argento and it doesn't say Italy. If anyone can save it, Asia can save it - and Asia can't save it. That patented Argento atmosphere - thick, weird, dusty, cloying, dreamlike but pin-sharp - is gone.
Instead we just have substandard sadism, gore as slapstick (more Three Stooges than Three Mothers), tits and monkeys and intestines, and all so unenthusiastically dispensed.

I instinctively gave Giallo an easier ride because, even though it wasn't Argento back to being good, at least it was Argento back to being interesting. This one I did see in Italy, in my hotel room in Florence as I recovered from the previous night's attack of the mosquitoes. It's bad but fascinating in its badness, and I haven't been able to stop pondering on it.
According to what I've read, the film had a complicated history. In the first place, rather than a project he devised himself, it was written for Argento by a pair of Americans: Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, the latter a Film Threat writer who, to quote the imdb, "played guitar for the Industrial Rock group Hate Dept". (The credits are very strange. First we get 'written and directed by Dario Argento', Argento solely that is, but then, quite a bit later, 'screenplay by...' the two other blokes, and Dario third, presumably meaning that he just gave it a bit of a polish.
But if the fact that it was written specifically for Argento makes you think it's going to be full of the kind of quirks and deviations that would be sure to lure him to the project (as Boileau and Narcejac deliberately wrote Vertigo to attract Hitchcock) let me sit you down and disappoint you before the film itself does.
The title may raise expectations of it being the director's ultimate giallo, both an example of the form and an examination of it, with tricks upon tricks upon tricks upon tricks in the plotting, in place of the director's usual tricks upon tricks upon tricks. But the film itself goes out of its way to frustrate them, and is (to the limits of my experience - I've not seen everything he's done in the last ten years or so) his first and only non-supernatural thriller with no plot twists of any sort - no sleight of hand, no audacious surprises... none of the structural mystery suggested, demanded even, by the title.
This is, I think, Argento's only twist-free giallo, and so arguably not really a giallo at all. It's just your basic police procedural serial killer thriller, fifteen-to-twenty years too late, and rendered ever stupider than the likes of Copycat and The Bone Collector (no small boast) by Argento's habitual (and in other contexts laudable) inattention to realism in scenario, plot development and characterisation.
It's not just the usual daffy criminal profiling stuff (killers who 'like to destroy beautiful things' and leave bodies in significant places because 'they're trying to tell us something', detectives that can see into the killer's mind, and all that sort of horseshit). It's crazy stuff like the detective knowing the killer uses a taxi on no evidence at all, or the idea that a policeman might interrupt someone in the act of committing a savage murder and, out of sympathy for his motives, give him a job on the force instead of arresting him, or how, after victim upon victim of thumb twiddling, the supposed psychological profiling genius is instantly galvanised into tracking down his man by someone else's idle speculation that the killer might be nicknamed Giallo because he has jaundice.

The casting, too, which in the absence of any non-linear plotting is the only distinctive thing about the movie, was all very last minute and haphazard.
Originally Ray Liotta was down to play the New York cop in the Italian sub-basement, Asia was the tagalong sister of the victim, and Vincent Gallo was Giallo. (Liotta would have been interesting; Gallo would have been very interesting.) Then, as I read it, Gallo dropped out like a big sissy for no better reason than that he and Asia had a bit of a history, Asia got pregnant and pulled out too, and Liotta, I don't know, had to go visit his brother Tarka or something.
Only then was it decided to recast the three roles with a Polanski double-header: his wife - Emmanuelle Seigner - as the heroine, and his pianist - that strange, strange actor Adrien Brody - as both 'tec and killer (and using an anagram of his real name in the latter role).

Seigner fits well, in a role that seems to deliberately evoke her iconic debut in Polanski's Frantic, my favourite Paris movie (albeit in the Harrison Ford role this time). But despite bagging himself a producer credit as well as the two main roles, Brody seems deeply unhappy, gives two totally ridiculous performances, and ended up suing for unpaid wages and trying to stop it being released at all.
Okay, it's a cheap shot to say you have to wonder if that was all just an excuse because he'd seen the movie and realised what a laughing stock he'd made of himself. But you really do have to wonder if that was all just an excuse because he'd seen the movie and realised what a laughing stock he'd made of himself.
But how odd that the only thing that makes the movie remotely Dario Argentoish - the doubling-up of Brody as both sleuth and sadist - was not part of the original idea. As the story develops, of course, there's no reason why it should have been, other than to do what the film in fact now does: frustrate the hell out of the audience. But that's what makes it all so intriguing.
As it is, even the most minimally Argento-savvy viewer will instantly recognise Brody under the Giallo putty and ready themselves for the totally predictable but still dramatically and logistically intriguing twist ending: that the killer is the detective in disguise. Certainly the most enjoyment the film gave me came from watching the scenes where the two characters appeared to be in different places at the same time, and trying to guess how Argento was going to explain it all away. (Or if not the same guy dressed up then they're brothers, and the one is somehow responsible for, perhaps even complicit in, the psychopathological quirks of the other.)
It comes as the worst kind of surprise to discover they are two different people after all, and the only reason Brody's playing both of them seems to be to get two silly performances out of him instead of just one, and to spoil the big fight at the end with loads of that similar-actor-with-back-to-camera-when-the-other-character's-in-shot stuff.
I suppose had it been two actors it would have been even more annoying, because our minds would have been constantly whirling with possible twists of all kinds, instead of the one we opt for from the start here. How much crueller then, would have been the big bad surprise that there is no surprise at all.

In the light of this, the film's silly-nasty violence is the least of its troubles, though it's a shame to see Argento playing catch-up with the torture prats rather than loftily challenging them to raise their game to his level.
As I get older, I do see less and less of what is essential about Argento in his scenes of frenzied violent excess, even in the masterpieces. The first killing here, in the taxi, looks like it's going to be totally bloodless and I can't tell you how excited I was by that, and how disappointed that we then found the victim still alive, strapped to a table, next to that oh-so-boring trolley of tools and implements...
Doubtless he felt, quite rightly, that without the grue there really would be nothing left in the movie with his stamp on it at all, and it's true that the violence here is less stupid and special-effectsy than in Mother of Tears. But still, I always think there's something a bit sad about horror directors in their dotage still sucking up to the punks. (Look at Wes Craven. He's in his seventies for Christ's sake, and still fartarsing around with cock rock soundtracks and frat house killers. Grow up, man!)
Argento should have become the most stylish and acclaimed director in Italy, as cherished as Fellini; instead he went the fanboy route, which is ironic as well as disappointing, because the blackshirts by and large don't like his new stuff any more than I do.

So what next? Well, apparently, it's a 3-D Dracula. Will I be able to resist that if it's on when I'm next in Italy? Does Berlusconi dye his hair? You bet I won't - especially if Asia plays Lucy. But I'll be amazed if it's any good. And considering this is the director of Suspiria we're talking about, that's a depressing certainty to have settled on.

Please note the Abbey will be temporarily closed for a private function

2010-10-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

Carfax Abbey will be closing its doors for a month while I go off and get myself hitched.

Thanks to everyone who has stopped by the Abbey in the past, and do please come again in November, when it'll be re-opening its doors - bigger and better, and with a ring on its finger.

Cheers!

Matthew,

Keeper of the Keys,

Carfax Abbey

Roy Ward Baker (1916 - 2010): “People only bluff because they are stupid”

2010-10-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

"Nowadays the audience is expected to be absolutely passive; they are given no encouragement to involve themselves emotionally with the film... Perhaps they are flattered by the lengths to which filmmakers go in titillating their eyeballs. They don't seem to protest about the sheer vulgarity of it all; they remain uninvolved. What real pleasure they get out of it, I do not know. I believe that this attitude may simply be a bad habit which developed from watching television. The audience here usually consists of two or three people: doing homework, glancing occasionally at the sports page, or knitting. And then the phone rings... This is not a criticism of the programmes; this is the way things are and people develop a detached attitude."
- Roy Ward Baker, The Director's Cut
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Roy Ward Baker, one of the less-discussed but to my mind most interesting directors to have made a corner for themselves in the British horror movie died last week at the age of 93.
I like his films very much, and I always found him a most attractively crotchety character in interviews. He reminded me of my grandfather. I also very much enjoyed his book The Director's Cut, a fascinating account of his working life that also doubles as a guide for aspiring directors, and ends with the invaluable advice: "don't go to the cinema too much."
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Baker occupies an interesting place in the Hammer (and Amicus, and Tyburn) story, in that he was an old hand of the Terence Fisher generation (and another Gainsborough graduate), but one who only arrived at the studio when most of his generation were being replaced with the cynical young bloods like Chris Wicking and Peters Sasdy and Sykes, and such brazenly exploitational talents as producers Fine and Style and screenwriter Tudor Gates.
If he tends to get overlooked it's not so much because of any deficiencies in his work so much as the fact that his films are associated less with their director and more with their stars (The Anniversary), their writers (Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Quatermass and the Pit, Asylum) or their wacky innovations. As regards the latter, he certainly seemed to get first dibs on the crumbs from Hammer's weirdo table. (Even I can see that's a bizarre sentence, but I think I'll leave it.)
So he got to direct "the first Kung Fu Horror Spectacular!" (Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires - also the last kung fu horror spectacular, frustrating those of us who continue to long for a kung fu Frankenstein film), and the definitive lesbo vampire movie (The Vampire Lovers). Strangest of all, perhaps, was Moon Zero Two, the sci-fi western that the studio were convinced was going to be the big hit of 1969.

The film was a logistical nightmare, as Baker recalled in his autobiography:
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We had difficulty with the simplest problems, for instance, flying Bernard Bresslaw on a Kirby wire.
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When making Bernard Bresslaw fly is one of your simpler problems, you know you're in trouble.
But several of his films are underrated. Asylum (1972) is a beauty, probably second only to Tales from the Crypt among the Amicus multi-story films, and I'm not sure that company ever made a better full feature than Baker's splendid And Now The Screaming Starts (1973). Not much wrong with Vault of Horror (1973), either.
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As plain Roy Baker he began as a tea boy and gradually worked his way up to second assistant director by the end of the thirties. In various capacities en route he worked on the films of Will Hay and the Crazy Gang and Arthur Askey and Mags Lockwood, alongside Hitchcock on The Lady Vanishes and Roy William Neill on Dr Syn, and with visiting Hollywood stars Boris Karloff on The Man Who Changed His Mind and Fay Wray on The Clairvoyant.
"People like Claude Rains, Boris Karloff and Fay Wray were eye-openers to us," he recalled in his autobiography. "They had an instinct for the camera and they weren't afraid of it."
The home-grown talent, by contrast, was primarily comprised of "actors who fluffed their lines and missed their marks, were hopelessly inefficient about their wardrobe, make-up, props, etc, and spent most of their time wandering off the set."
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He rose to the rank of full director and soon earned a reputation for tight-shipped professionalism, reliability and skill. ("People only bluff because they are stupid.") This reputation spread as far as Hollywood, to which he was invited for a brief stint, most interestingly making Don't Bother To Knock for Fox, the only film to exploit the instability informing Marilyn Monroe's passively inviting allure.
.Back in England he made an interesting movie out of Margery Allingham's The Tiger In The Smoke in 1956, and perhaps his most famous film, A Night To Remember, in 1958.
The latter is without any serious competition the best film ever made about the Titanic disaster and a considerable logistical achievement, with difficult visual effects and fifty speaking roles. With characteristic inventiveness, Baker shot the scenes of the survivors stranded in the freezing Atlantic on a suitably chilly night at Ruislip Lido, and disguised the fact that only a cross-section of the ship exterior was built by shooting the starboard scenes in a mirror, with the cast wearing reverse-printed cap badges and and jackets buttoned on the wrong side:
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It worked. The officers saluted with their left arms and the gentlemen exchanged left-handed handshakes. I gather this wheeze has also been used elsewhere; I have no copyright in it.
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But after the failure of The Singer Not the Song (1960) film work was suddenly hard to come by, and he did lots of tv, including several of the very best episodes of The Avengers.

In 1967 he entered the world of British horror, and added the 'Ward' to his name to distinguish himself from a dubbing editor with the same name. The unfortunate result was that people assumed it was to distinguish himself from himself. To this day, the mistake that the man who made A Night To Remember and the man who made The Monster Club are two different people persists.

My favourite of his Hammer films is Scars of Dracula - not a masterpiece, perhaps, but better than its reputation, plainly.

For one thing it restores Lee's Dracula to a position of centrality, and gives him proper dialogue for the first time since the original film. And its faults are clearly not Baker's. It looks cheap, with some truly horrid studio sets, and terrible special effects, especially at the climax. But the worst mistake is the beginning, which seeks to establish spurious continuity by having Dracula revived from his ashes by a rubber bat dribbling blood on them.

It's crazy: he died in London at the end of the previous film, and as soon as he's revived here the flame-wielding villagers are on the scene to burn his castle down! It seems obvious that the film as conceived, and as shot by Baker, was not a sequel but a new beginning, with Dracula back in his Transylvanian castle at the kick-off. The new opening - with its cheapo revivification scene that simply plays his demise from the last one in reverse - ruins the film as planned, and in no legitimate way achieves the sense of continuity it seeks. I'm convinced that, even with all its other faults still in situ, the film would be much more highly regarded if only this sequence were removed.
The most obvious novelty in the movie is its vastly increased level of gore and sadism, which Baker says he entered into wholeheartedly on the basis of 'if that's what they want, that's what they'll get'. It gives the film a harsh, modern quality that translates well for younger horror fans, and also sits intriguingly alongside the director's equally pronounced streak of romanticism. (Dracula has doors that open for him, and for the first time in the movies he does Stoker's clambering up and down the castle walls routine - and far more effectively than Gary Oldman, too.)

A similar sense of old-fashioned mystery permeates The Vampire Lovers, another film that balances romance and exploitation with surprising dexterity. Certainly the film Baker delivered was not the one producer Harry Fine had initially envisaged:

He always carried a briefcase in which he kept several copies of a New York magazine. He seemed to be keen to show them to me. It was called Screw. It was in tabloid newspaper form and was entirely devoted to physical sex in all its forms, including full page photographs of full frontal nudes, men and women together, still fairly unusual in those days.
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Roy's last movie was The Monster Club in 1981. If I were to claim that this is my favourite of his films I suspect I would lose the sympathy of virtually everyone who has followed me thus far, and to explain why would double the length of this post and fatally overbalance it.

That's why I've relegated discussion of this beautiful film to a separate post, below.
For now, I shall end, with a heartfelt thank you to RWB, for so many happy hours of British horror.

May flights of vampire bats flap thee to thy rest.

The Monster Club dims its lights

2010-10-14T03:59:00.000-07:00

I've already noted the passing of director Roy Ward Baker, the British and Hollywood film director, who directed Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, the Titanic classic A Night to Remember, a sci-fi western with Bernard Bresslaw in it, the first ever Kung Fu Dracula film, the last ever kung fu Dracula film (same film actually), a Dracula film in which Peter Cushing's son is played by the chap who plays Sid James's son in Bless This House (yep: same one again), and the one where Dr Jekyll turns into a hot babe.

But to me, all of the above are merely footnotes.
Let the obituaries yell first and above all: Roy Ward Baker was the man who directed The Monster Club (1981).
It was his last theatrical work as director. Anyone who has seen it will share my certainty that he saved his best for last.
The Monster Club is important for being the only true first generation Hammer-Amicus era horror film that I can remember being on general release. (The only other candidate is House of the Long Shadows, but that's a bit more of a pastiche than a straggling authentic like the Club.)
Alas, I didn't actually see it on general release - I don't think its box-office glory trail extended as far as Plymouth - but I vividly remember staring at a full-page poster for it in my Doctor Who Monthly and thinking - as I still do - that it was one of the most exciting and enticing film posters I'd ever seen.
I even borrowed the title for my imaginary tv horror movie review programme, and cut out the poster to use as the cover of my spin-off book (which devoted a whole chapter to 'Horror Films with the actors who have played The Doctor in them').
I was a little older when I finally saw it, it would have been in the early days of Betamax, the day after its first ITV showing. Many, many subsequent viewings only confirmed my deathless regard for its manifold subtleties and delights.

Basically, the film was producer Milton Subotsky's last and most suicidal attempt to keep making the horror short story movies that he had made his trademark when he was running Amicus.
Already in 1977 he had come up with The Uncanny, a three-story clanger about killer cats. (He had already done a story about a killer cat as part of Torture Garden back in '67; but the twist this time was that all the stories are about killer cats, which gives the film a unique kind of negative momentum.)
The link story had Peter Cushing as a paranoiac author, trying to sell his publisher his book about how cats are evil and conspiring to destroy mankind, a thesis he illustrates with three anecdotes that then form the basis of the film. The first rips off the American film Eye of the Cat (1968) and has a good bit where Susan Penhaligon, trapped in the pantry by marauding moggies, is forced to eat cat food spread on crackers. The next, about a witch's cat, is set in Montreal (where the money came from) and features my favourite kind of miniaturisation effects - where the actors stand next to massive props - and a child actress you really want to get hold of and slap. The last steals the plot of Bram Stoker's The Squaw and features Donald Pleasance as Hollywood actor Valentine De'ath (with VD monogrammed on his dressing gown) who kills his wife but is himself killed by... her cat. Then finally, it's back to Cushing, who gets killed by some cats.
Is this the only horror film that opens with a Ted Hughes quote? I know of no others.

Then, in 1981, he was back; the film was The Monster Club, the director was Roy Ward Baker, and the tagline was "the horror film that's fun", which carries with it the peculiar implication that most horror films are not fun.
It stars Vincent Price as Eramus, a vampire with retractable fangs, a role that had already been turned down by both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The idea (if that's not too strong a word) is that Eramus bites a passer-by, who turns out to be R Chetwynd Hayes - the real horror author who wrote the original stories the film is based on, but here played by John Carradine, another actor whose answerphone presumably said, "I'm not in at the moment, but I'll do it."
As a reward for letting him have some blood ("from such a noble source") Vincent takes John to the eponymous club, where blood is served by the glass, the club secretary is a werewolf in a suit and glasses, the entertainment comes from the likes of The Pretty Things and B. A. Robertson, and the disco-dancing monsters all wear polo necks to disguise the bottoms of their plastic joke shop masks.

As well as several exceptionally good pop songs, there are three stories, as told by Eramus.
The first is about a hybrid monster called a Shadmock that can kill with a high-pitched whistle, who never leaves his house because he is so hideously, monstrously ugly. When a woman comes to his door, shock music yells on the soundtrack and she flees, screaming.
But this is the odd thing: there is nothing - absolutely nothing - wrong with him. He has fairly pasty skin, fairly - but not abnormally - large nostrils, and a fairly severe centre parting. But that's it. He's just an ordinary looking bloke. Now, how this came about I don't know. Perhaps there was a make-up design that relied on lighting and opticals rather than prosthetics, and it didn't photograph properly. Who knows? All we can see is a woman running in terror from a man who looks, at worst, like a bank manager.
Episode two is supposedly work in progress from an autobiographical film by "the great vampire film producer Lintom Busotsky". Richard Johnson is a vampire and devoted family man apprehended by Donald Pleasance and the men from Scotland Yard's B-Squad, a special unit formed to investigate "blood crimes" and known as 'the Bleeney'. Humour on this level is generally speaking rare after teatime. At the end the supposedly dead vampire rises from his coffin to reveal that he has been saved by his stake-proof vest. ("Filled with... TOMATO KETCHUP!" screams Johnson.)
Episode three is about a location-scouting horror director, played by Stuart Whitman, the only actor who envied Cameron Mitchell his career trajectory. He turns up at a village of ghouls, barely escapes with his life and flags down a police car, but the policemen have plastic fangs, and drive him back again to be eaten.

Oh, do I ever love this film! Of course, I know that the general feeling is that it's not even bad enough to be fun, just bad enough to be bad. But objectivity is out of the question. Unchanging, uncomplaining, and as unfathomable today as it was when it came out of the kiln in 1981, this film has walked with me through the good times and the bad. If I live to be ninety I'll still be finding an excuse to watch it at least once a year.

The amazing Jinx

2010-10-11T00:45:00.001-07:00

I can't remember now how I first stumbled across Totally Jinxed, but I do know it was way back in the smoky tangle of over a year ago, and that there was some sort of monster sighting involved, in a wall in Bridlington.
That is to say that Jinx, or a friend of Jinx's, had seen a real honest to goodness Jack Arnold-style beast crawling out of a wall in Bridlington, and Jinx posted a photo of it.
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It was Bridlington, rather than the monster per se, that did it for me.
I've never been there, but it has long meant a lot to me: ever since I heard Little and Large singing the song Bridlington on their 1981 LP Little & Large Live At Abbey Road I've felt oddly proprietorial about the place. ("Take us back to Bridlington / Where the food is cheap. / Fish and chips and sausages / By the sea, on the beach.")
And this brings me to an important reason why I felt such an affinity with Jinx.
To paraphrase an old saying with almost complete sincerity: I never met a film blogger I didn't like. Since I started doing this, long, long ago, when the Saw series had yet to make it to triple figures and Robert Pattinson still had to ask his mum every time he wanted to cross the road, I've made all kinds of good friends and had all sorts of shared experiences.
But the majority of these new pals were fundamentally different from me in two important ways.
First, they were younger than me to a degree that passes 'considerable' and teams up with 'distressing' and holds its hand on the way to 'horrendous', and second, they were usually American.
Now there is nothing wrong with being either of these things, apart from the first one, but it always gave a slight 'strictly business' feel to our interaction. We could unite in rhapsodies over the obscurest 1950s B-horrors, but as soon as I mentioned Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, or BBC-2 horror double-bills, or Scream Comic, or Fang and Claw crisps... the old mist of temporal disjunction would pass between us and I was once again wandering lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills.
Then, suddenly there was Jinx! Just two years my junior and matching - swoon for swoon and heartbeat for heartbeat - my love for Rentaghost, Tales of the Unexpected, Mr Meek in Night of the Demon and the made for tv horror films that ITV used to show after News at Ten.
Like me, she seemed not so much immersed in the vanished popular culture of our mutual infancy as marinaded in it. The bonds that formed that day I saw the monster in the wall that she was so keen to stress to the entire doubleu doubleu doubleu was in Bridlington have grown stronger and stronger ever since.
Since I last posted, which was to accept an award she gave me, she's given me two more. One is the frankly essential Zombie Rabbit, which will look splendid on the Carfax mantelpiece next to the Zombie Chicken (always assuming that zombie rabbits and zombie chickens get on well together; I'm not sure the research has been done on this), and another, I think called a Happy Award, that involves some pink cakes and a picture of a sunset laid out on a gingham picnic cloth. This is something I would generally be a little wary of, but coming from Jinx it's an honour. Both I hereby accept, belatedly and with glee. I'll get around to passing them on, probably some time in 2013 (or when I get back from becoming a married man, whichever is the more unlikely.)
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Discovering the things Jinx and I have in common has long since tipped into absurdity. I posted a piece about the new wave of shark and piranha movies, went over to Jinx's to ask her for her views on the subject, and found that she had published a piece about the same films almost literally simultaneously. I stuck an episode of Worzel Gummidge on a DVD of Rentaghost I sent to her (dead space is wasted lifetime) and only afterwards learned that the character had haunted her throughout her childhood.
Despite all of this, however, I might still have held my tongue. Great phrase that - you hear it but you don't think about it, do you? Next time you hear someone talking about 'holding their tongue' picture them actually doing it: how weird would they look? It's such a lovely idea, too, that the only way they can refrain from saying something is by actually holding their tongue still. Also, relatedly, have you ever crossed your fingers, as if you were wishing for something, and touched your tongue with the fingers still crossed? Stop reading this, if you haven't already, possibly a considerable time ago, and do it now. How strange is that? It feels like you've got two tongues!!! Kray-zee! Now your nose. Two noses! Weird, weird, weird.
But I digress. As I was saying, I might still have held my tongue; no, sorry. It's no use. I'm still thinking about people holding their tongues. I think what I'll have to do is use a totally different cliché. 'Kept my counsel': that one's due for a dusting-off, I'd say.
So: despite all of this... Despite all of what, you're probably thinking by now. Well, a couple of paragraphs back, before I distracted myself with - no, I'm not even going to say it - I was commenting on how much Jinx and I seem to have in common. Okay, here we go. Despite all of this, however, I would still have kept my counsel, if it weren't for the fact that I happened to be reading Jinx's interview over yonder, noting that we must now add Bob Hope's Cat and the Canary to our list of mutuals, when I suddenly found myself basking in the most extravagant praise I have ever had heaped upon my slender frame in my whole short and blameless life.
Just one sentence more of it, and I would have ended up like this guy:
. Therefore it seemed only right and proper to hold my tongue no longer (sorry, couldn't hold out - and is anyone else picturing Fuad Ramses at this point?) and bat a little of it back in the direction from whence it came. When I mentioned to Jinx that I was intending to offer a few words of thanks and praise when accepting her latest awards, she asked me to mention how funny, clever and pretty she is, but otherwise was happy to leave the content up to me. Always thoughtful.
So, let me advise any readers who have somehow not yet found their way to Totally Jinxed, or remind those who just haven't stopped by there recently, that it really is the most consistently inspiring, surprising, eclectic, evocative and enjoyable horror blog I know.
Speaking as someone who was there virtually from the start, it's terrific to see the word getting around. The world of horror blogs is full of great things: the first of these is Totally Jinxed.

This and that and what have you and so forth

2010-08-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Not much posting round here lately, I know.
Fact is, I'm getting married in something not so far from two and a half months' time, and so the hours in which to drivel rhapsodic about Peter Cushing, Monogram and films with big piranhas in them are somewhat rationed at present.
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However, by way of a stop gap, I'd like to acknowledge two recent awards that the Abbey has been proud to position on its cobwebby mantelpiece.
The Versatile Blogger Award has been kindly sent our way twice in the last month or two, by the splendid Neil Fulwood at The Agitation of the Mind, and the exceptional Jinx at Totally Jinxed. It's an honour twice over: both of these sites are way up on the high branches, and the only reason why I do not urge you to become a regular reader is that I assume I don't need to.
The small print says that I should pass the award on to further 15 recently discovered and deserving sites, which always makes me a little nervous. Personally I love getting them, but I know that many others do not, either because they just don't dig them at all, or because they don't want the responsibility of passing them on. Elizabeth, one of my favourite bloggers, has a little sign on her site saying "Awards are nice, but no thank you!"
So what I'm going to do instead is just offer up a short list of sites I've discovered this year that swiftly became regular rendezvous, and which I hereby recommend most highly.
Each appears on the understanding that it is more than worthy of a Versatile Blogger Award, and if their authors would like one: consider it proffered.
Or, if you'd rather not, that's all fine and dandy too.
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1. The Bloody Pulp
If you only know Mykal Banta from the sadly dormant Radiation Cinema you could be forgiven for assuming he has hung up his blogging gloves and moved on to pastures new. In fact he's busier than ever, presiding over a number of sites devoted to the world of comics, of which this is my favourite. It says a lot for the enthusiasm and authority with which Mykal assembles his material that until I stumbled upon it I had no knowledge of comics at all, and not much more interest. I'm now addicted to the wonderful world of Eerie Publications. Don't believe anyone who says they're not a bad influence.
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2. Crap Video Artwork
Come celebrate the golden age of weird, horrible and just plain inadequate VHS cover art!
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3. Viewmaster 3-D Spectacular Now in 2-D!
Ah, the Viewmaster! If you had one of these magical little gizmos, or even if you did not, remind yourself of what you have forgotten, or never knew. Heaven in two dimensions.
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4. Terror Titans
One of Steve Miller's many authoritative sites and a good general introduction to his world of tireless bloggery. Others, all to be found at this central sorting office, deal with black and white movies, Lugosi, Karloff, Cushing, Charles Band, Universal horror, detectives and movies you should die before seeing, and all are worth your time. Or just stick with the broader Cinema Steve, if you like your reviews mingled with acidic skewering of movie biz pretension and cowardice.
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5. Scared Silly: Classic Hollywood Horror-Comedies
What is it about spoof horror films? They're rarely as good as you want them to be, and yet, there's just something about that combination that never fails to get me salivating. Paul Castiglia suffers from the same disease. His blog is a labour of love where fellow addicts can come and indulge their addiction without having to suffer the disapproving stares of people who think the only thing worse than a Universal horror film is a Universal horror film with Abbott and Costello in it. What do they know, eh?
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Before I go, I thought I'd have a bash at a couple of memey quizzy-type things I've come across lately. First, over here, Dr Blood invites horror bloggers to assess their compatibility by rearranging an alphabetical list of twenty films in their personal order of preference. Here I go, into the wilderness as usual. It has to be noted, by the way, that by the time we get to the ones I really hate at the bottom, the preferential difference between them is a hair's breadth at best:
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An American Werewolf In London
Bride of Frankenstein
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Psycho
Friday the 13th
The Wicker Man
The Haunting
Halloween
The Omen
The Thing
Rosemary's Baby
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
The Exorcist
The Hills Have Eyes
The Shining
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien
The Lost Boys
Hellraiser
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Now for the questionnaire that I saw at Jinx's, here, and which originally came from here.
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1: In Ten Words or Less, Describe Your Blog:
Analytic sobriety and unconditional love fighting with wet toilet paper.
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2: During What Cinematic Era Where you Born?
A: The Classic Horror Era (late 30's to 40's)
B: The Atomic Monster/Nuclear Angst Era (the late 40's through 50's)
C: The Psycho Era ( Early 60's)
D: The Rosemary's Baby Era (Mid to Late 60's)
E: The Exorcism Era (Early to mid 70's)
F: The Halloween Era (Late 70's to Early 80's)
G: The Slasher Era (Mid to late 80's)
H: The Self Referential/Post Modern Era (1990 to 1999)
Well, I was born in E, but the first contemporary horror I was aware of was G. Having said that, my horror sensibilities were founded in A, the genre movies I first encountered on tv. It wasn't really until H that I actually felt myself to be as one with the horror of my own generation.
Now I know what you're thinking: His list of eras virtually spells out the title of Eegah, that film with Richard Kiel as a randy caveman. It startled me when I realised it too, especially as I had just been reading an interview with Ray Dennis Steckler in which he recalls that some of the desert locations used in the film were land owned by Harpo Marx, who turned up to watch some of it being filmed. (If only he had been talked into doing a cameo in full costume.) Anyway, I digress. Next question.
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3: The Carrie Compatibility Question:
(gay men and straight women - make your choice from section A)
A: Billy Nolan or Tommy Ross, who would you take to the prom?
(straight guys and lesbians - make your choice from section B)
B: Sue Snell or Chris Hargensen, who would you take to the prom?
I've seen Carrie, I think, twice in my life, the second time really just to make sure that I wasn't just in a bad mood or something first time. Terrible film, and I've no idea who these characters are. Besides, I've already made my prom date: it's Julie James from I Know What You Did Last Summer.
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4: You have been given an ungodly amount of money, and total control of a major motion picture studio - what would your dream Horror project be?
Either Werewolf of London Meets the Wolf Man (Shock! Terror! Confusion!) or an animated remake of The Omen with all the characters as talking monkeys.
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5: What horror film "franchise" that others have embraced, left you cold?
I remember being very sniffy about Freddy Krueger. In fact, I've still only seen the first three of the legit series; I haven't seen the remake and I haven't seen New Nightmare. The mid-eighties were the least interesting years ever for horror up to that time: that this and Hellraiser were the era's defining titles tells you all you need to know about it. But Freddy Vs Jason I've seen many, many times. Who hasn't?
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6: Is Michael Bay the Antichrist?
No, merely our generation's William McGonagall.
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7: Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Frankenstein Monster - which one of these classic villains scares you, and why?
Dracula, because he's the only one that knows he's being horrid. The Monster wants to be nice and the Wolf Man can't help himself, but Dracula's a rotter through and through.
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8: Tell me about a scene from a NON HORROR Film that scares the crap out of you:
The bit in Moonraker where Jaws, disguised as a participant in a street carnival and wearing a horrible, massive papier mache clown's head, breaks away from the main procession and follows Bond's girl down an alley to kill her. In particular the long shot of him advancing down the alley: I still think it's really frightening, actually.
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9: Baby Jane Hudson invites you over to her house for lunch. What do you bring?
Some mayonnaise to put on the rat. She looks like the sort of person who wouldn't have any.
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10: So, between you and me, do you have any ulterior motives for blogging? Come, on you can tell me, it will be our little secret, I won't tell a soul.
Jennifer Love Hewitt pays me a small retainer every time I mention her. (That's twice so far.)
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11: What would you have brought to Rosemary Woodhouse's baby shower?
A cute t-shirt that says 'I'm a little devil' on it. And some mayonnaise to put on the rat.
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12: Godzilla vs The Cloverfield Monster, who wins?
I never did get around to bothering to find out what Cloverfield was. Had no idea there was a monster in it. So assuming there's no way I can work Jennifer Love Hewitt into this one (it's okay, Jen: you can have that one for free) I'll go with The Zilla. But obviously that's the real Zilla, not the one that chases Ferris Bueller around the Apple.
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13: If you found out that Rob Zombie was reading your blog, what would you post in hopes that he read it?
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. You're an idiot and all your films are rubbish. You are everything that is wrong in the universe crammed into one moron, and if I and everyone else in the world had to die simply as penance for the fact that you exist it would be no more than we deserve. Your remake of Halloween was worse than I thought it was possible for any film to be, and starting it with a quote from one of its own fictional characters - and a really, really crap quote at that - was almost touchingly subhumanoid. But not quite. Ever thought about changing your name to Rob Tosser?
Or words to that effect.
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14: What is your favorite NON HORROR FILM, and why?
Boring answer: Cecil B DeMille's Madam Satan (1930). But I'm also very keen on Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered, especially the bit where he's dressed as "a fucking English bobby".
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15: If blogging technology did not exist, what would you be doing?
Playing keyboards with Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Or sitting at home eating Wheat Crunchies and watching old films.
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Thanks again to Neil and Jinx, and I hope to be back soon with the ravings resulting from a Ray Dennis Steckler marathon, a few thoughts on Ted V Mikels, my pick of the best of PRC and more. If the missus lets me.

The best thing to happen to exploitation cinema since Emergo

2010-06-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

Sorry if you're all far more clued-up about this stuff than I was, but while impatiently waiting for MegaPiranha to get its UK DVD release (August 10th!), I got my good friend the postman to bring me the equally lipsmacking Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, and I've been looking into the background of these two projects.
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In the age of torture porn, how heartening it is to see people getting eaten by big sea creatures again! How wonderful to see the exploitation industry reconnecting with the innocent joys of optimistic special effects, novelty casting, cheap gimmicks and shameless plagiarism. The bedrocks of cinema, in other words.
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Both films emanate from a production company called The Asylum, founded by a bunch of former Village Roadshow execs who realised the only way to compete with the big boys was to get their stuff out quicker.
Accordingly, they specialise in what are known as 'mockbusters'. The company keeps its ear to the ground, listens for what the majors are up to, knocks out its own one for under a million dollars, and gets it on the video shelves before the paint's dried on the posh version.
They did a version of The War of the Worlds at the same time as Spielberg. They released Transmorphers two days before Transformers. ("Unlike Transformers," wrote the New York Times, "it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians.") Like a big corporate girl's blouse, Twentieth Century Fox threatened legal action when they made The Day the Earth Stopped, a variation on The Day the Earth Stood Still, which Fox had apparently just remade with that chap from Bill and Ted who acts like he's just been woken up in the middle of the night.
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The low-budget rip-off is of course one of the oldest and noblest tricks in the exploitation handbook, and the best thing about it is that it drives the major studios crazy. There they are frittering two million dollars just so Tom Cruise can have a trailer shaped like the Belt of Orion before they've even spent a penny on making the bug-eyed monsters, and along comes some little two-bit outfit and does the job just as well if not better for less than the cost of Mel Gibson's Grey-away hair dye. And by the time the two movies are side by side on the shelves at Blockbuster they've averaged the same take, too.
Good. This is as it should be.
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The Italians used to be the best at this, of course. Every country makes cheap rip-offs, but only Italy could have the chutzpah to market them not as rip-offs but as phoney sequels. (Copyright laws? Non me ne frega!) Only Italy could produce a silver-tongued genius like Ovidio G. Assonitis, the rip-off king, who made virtual carbon copies of The Exorcist and Jaws (Tentacles, about a naughty octopus) and then sweet-talked the likes of John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda into appearing in them. For The Devil Within Her, his Exorcist clone, he somehow got Juliet Mills to do the green face and vomit routine.
Then there's Mexican maestros Rene Cardona Sr and Jr, the cinematic ambulance chasers who got cheap cash-ins on the Andes air crash cannibals (Survive) and the Jim Jones mass suicides (Guyana - Cult of the Damned) onto the world's screens before they'd even finished carting the bodies away. They also produced their own nifty rip-offs of Jaws (Tintorera) and The Birds (Beaks), and surely no other film-makers have so many mouthwatering titles on their CVs: Santo vs the Ghost of the Strangler, War of the Pastries, Bang Bang al Hoyo, OK Cleopatra, Night of a Thousand Cats, Zindy the Swamp Boy....
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is the first film since forever to truly belong in such exalted company.
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It stars Debbie Gibson. MegaPiranha stars Tiffany. I appreciate not everyone was around in the nineteen-eighties, but if if you weren't, just take my word for it: this is clever. It's like when AIP started putting Frankie Avalon in horror films. It's that clever. Belinda Carlisle in the next one, please. Giant ants.
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I love big mutant monster films. I love monster duel movies. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man: what an amazing concept. Freddy Vs Jason: I was there. Went to see it twice. But this is really something. It's a fantastic big monster, and then it's another fantastic big monster, and it's both of them at the same time, and you sit back and you let them come at you. I've never seen anything like it. It gets pretty much everything right. It's everything you wanted Orca - Killer Whale to be, and more. I don't think I've ever seen a less pretentious film: it makes Police Academy 6 look sly. I just couldn't believe, given the premise, that it could be so totally without irony. Couldn't and wouldn't. I don't mind if I am unable to convince you: I understand. You have to see it.
It is as innocent as any monster flick of the nineteen-fifties; a worthy successor, lacking both the misguided self-importance or the kitschy knowingness of most later variations. There's an amazing moment when the shark leaps out of the ocean and takes down a passenger plane. How can this possibly be played straight? Surely it's parody? No it's not.
The special effects are not going to convince you it's really happening, but neither are they deliberately silly. They are my favourite kind of special effects: the kind that get the job done. The kind that show you what's happening and rely on you to put the effort into believing them. The kind you get from Jack Arnold. The kind you get from Bert I. Gordon. The kind you don't get from Roland Emmerich.
. The best thing about Jaws is that they use a rubber monster - one created by the great Bob Mattey, yet. Imagine Jaws with a CGI shark. It would rip the heart out of it. In a stroke, you'd have turned the greatest film of the nineteen seventies into Jurassic Park.
This is CGI, of course; how could it not be? It is ironic that CGI is now the only option for low budget movies: the cheap way is just too expensive. (Along with all of its other crimes, I blame CGI for killing off the art of animatronics, which was just entering its golden age when the mouse-clickers showed up.) But as in the best fifties monster movies the budget rules, and this is not the kind of monster movie where you see so much of the beastie you're sick of the sight of it come the halfway mark. We see the creatures when it is essential that we do so; the rest of the time it teases us with flashes and bits and pieces.
It even does that fifties thing of latching naively on to some fashionable scientific neurosis: not the atom bomb anymore, but melting ice caps. They froze together, millions of years ago, this shark and this octopus, locked in combat. Now they've thawed, like Frankenstein and the Wolf Man in House of Frankenstein, and they're ready for the rematch. And I don't throw about House of Frankenstein comparisons lightly either.

"The octopus is headed towards Tokyo and our shark is on its way here!"
The cast plays it fifties-straight. The material is absurd, the lines are absurd, but they never wink at you, not once. It's not serious. Of course it's not serious. But it doesn't think you're an idiot for wanting to watch it. Best of all, it's all over in an hour and twenty-four. Imagine Tarantino bringing this in under an hour and twenty-four. That's the difference between hipness and sincerity.

"We'll get them to kill each other!"
Debbie Gibson is just terrific. Could there be better casting, given the brief? She looks great. She is great.
Debbie gets the idea to have the monsters fight each other rather than let the government bozo nuke them. Nukes aren't as cool as they were back in the Fifty Foot Woman days. The modern answer is pheromones. They all celebrate like true scientists: by joyously pouring coloured liquid from a test tube into a beaker. Thank God no killjoy says: "But Debs, even if you can get them to fight it out, what on earth makes you think they'll both die?" They don't need to. She calls it right.
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"Looks like they finished what they finally started eighteen million years ago!"
Such a blizzard of hyperbole here, I know. Such little restraint, such casually wind-tossed caution. But this film spreads happiness. Torture porn does not make me happy. Sodding big octopuses do. I just didn't know I still had the choice.

What would I make of MegaPiranha?

2010-06-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

Okay.
So, my friend Corbey has just emailed me out of the blue from whatever obscure corner of the map she's living in at the moment with the following advice:
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I have a terrible horror movie recommendation for you. Although, I have to confess, I haven't actually watched the whole thing myself as I switched to another crap one after a few minutes. It's called "Mega Piranha" about genetically enhanced you-know-whats that grow exponentially and even leap out of the water to consume helicopters. How about that ?? And, if that's not enough of a grab for you, it even stars singing idol Tiffany as the scientist who created these wondrous creatures. Hard to resist, right ?
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Needless to say, her guess is correct. Everything about this film spells greatness to me.
I love the adline: They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong. That's got to suck. Out of the goodness of her heart and with the very best of intentions, yesteryears pop princess Tiffany breeds some giant mutant piranhas to save mankind, and whaddayaknow? Something goes wrong. Bummer.
What did she create them to save mankind from? Other than the general lack of giant, mutant piranhas, of course. I know, I know - exactly: I'll have to see it to find out.
I've done a little research and discovered that the film is a kind of knowing, pastichey sort of a niche-market tv movie, the point of which is to celebrate the implausibilities of the scenario, the limitations of the effects budget and the trashiness of the concept. Not a parody, not some winking, sneering, Zucker Brothers-style hardy-har. Just honest to goodness monster mutant leaping piranha magic that doesn't take itself seriously, because it can't, given the circumstances.
I looked it up on the imdb and found the following review:
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This movie is pure awesomeness! The Piranhas in this movie are the size of whales! They're jumping 1000ft into the air and eating helicopters! They're jumping into buildings and exploding! They can't be killed even with nuclear weapons! (...) I mean what's not to like? Rarely have I ever seen a movie of such quality. I was in pure awe of this awesome spectacle of a movie from beginning to end. How could someone create such an awesome movie? I just couldn't believe the greatness of this movie. It has to be seen to be believed.
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I also read of something similar made by the same team, called Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus which has Debbie Gibson in it! Except she calls herself Deborah Gibson these days. Makes her seem classier, which is always handy when you take a role in a movie called Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus.
Now obviously, this sounds fantastic. Cheapness, trashiness and TVness bothers me not at all. I enjoyed the original Piranha - it had Barbara Steele in it, after all - but I enjoyed the pluralised tv remake with the dark-haired mare from Baywatch much, much more. I loved that Jaws rip-off Tobe Hooper did about a crocodile; Crocodile, I think he called it. I adore those Peter Benchley mini-series The Beast (giant squid) and Creature (hybridised part-human walking sharks). I even enjoyed Beneath Loch Ness. I would have enjoyed Beneath Loch Ness even if Lysette Anthony wasn't in it.
That's how ready I am to see MegaPiranha. I need to see those babies leap out of the sea and bring down copters. I need to see Tiffany as a government scientist.
So tell me, before I splash out on this (it doesn't seem to be cheap anywhere)... Have any of you lot seen it? Is it really everything it promises to be? Could it be, even, without knocking the earth out of orbit through sheer excellentness and superiorosity?
Seriously - I'm THIS close to the edge of wasting money on this thing. Pull me back or push me over... It's up to you...
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POSTSCRIPT: This is the weirdest coincidence in the history of weird coincidences. I've just popped over to Totally Jinxed to get Jinx's view on the matter, expecting her to be particularly on board with the whole Tiffany thing, only to discover that she's just put up a review of a whole bunch of piranha movies she's been watching lately. And MegaPiranha is there. And this is what she has to say:
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Starred Tiffany. That’s all I have to say about that.
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I'm guessing that's a 'no' vote.

Make us famous: Pamela Green (1929 - 2010)

2010-05-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

My good friend Anthony Blampied has emailed to tell me that Pamela Green has died at the age of 81.
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Pamela, should you need reminding, was Britain's foremost glamour model of the nineteen-fifties, a monumentally statuesque blonde who appeared in countless magazines and 8mm striptease films, mainly made in collaboration with George Harrison Marks, with whom for a time she shared both a professional and a private association.
Their most famous joint venture remains the cinema film Naked As Nature Intended, a supposed celebration of naturism that caused considerable controversy at the time for the barrier-breaking ease with which it circumnavigated censorship restrictions against nudity despite its obvious insincerity.
Remember the scene at the start of Carry On Camping, with Sid and Bernie trying to convince their dates that the nudist film they are seeing is an artistic celebration of physical freedom? Such debates were commonplace in every cinema in the land at the time. Now, you hardly need telling, it all seems almost heartbreakingly innocent.
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This is more than enough to ensure Green's place in the pantheon of British exploitation icons, but she secures her spot in Carfax Abbey's Hall of Fame on account of her short but scene-stealing appearance in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, as the girlie model Mark Lewis photographs above the newsagents that sells the pictures to middle aged gentlemen.
Pamela is obviously the genuine article, and her scene rings with authenticity: she's also a more than competent actress, who invests her lines with a colour that Powell surely wasn't counting on when he cast her. ("Well look who's here - Cecil Beaton!")
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It's a funny old film is Peeping Tom, isn't it? Obviously an important piece, and fascinating to watch, though just as surely its vaunted reputation is as much a knee-jerk reaction to its initial denigration as a sober evaluation of its merits. I'm not certain it's quite a masterpiece; certainly it's not Powell's masterpiece, not while A Canterbury Tale or The Edge of the World are still around. It's uncertainly paced, the suspense goes awry at a few key moments, and the oddball piano score is plenty unusual but so emphatic that after a while it works against the film's mood, which should be one of lingering unease and dread. Some of it is profoundly clever, but a lot of its tricks are just that, and screenwriter Leo Marks - a fascinating man whose compelling book Between Silk and Cyanide documents his work as a World War 2 code breaker and deviser, and reflects a lifelong obsession with subterfuge and games playing that carries over into the movie - is as much a sleight of hand conjurer as a true penetrator of psychopathology. The film's psychology is for the most part crassly Freudian.
Still, it is one of those films that must be seen, and once seen, is never forgotten: certainly it wasn't forgotten - or forgiven - by contemporary critics, who spoke of the desire to flush it down the nearest sewer.
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Powell cast himself as the murderer's sadistic father, the cause of his adult psychoses, and his own son as the infant killer. It was typical of his demand for authenticity that none other than Green would do in the role, and you can only wonder how many in the audience knew who she was. He even shot a nude sequence with her, only a fragment of which remains in the most complete modern prints, knowing full well that it would be cut by the censors. According to Green he insisted that his son watched the scene being shot.

The calm before the storm: Powell and Pamela at the film's ill-fated premiere

It was not Pamela's last appearance in British horror: look sharp for her in the bordello scenes of Tyburn's Legend of the Werewolf in 1975. (By this time she and Marks had split and she was living with Doug Webb, veteran of the Dambusters raid and Tyburn's stills photographer.)
But it is her work in Peeping Tom that will carry her into cinema history.

"Come on, sonny, make us famous..."

Highgate Cemetery is officially a Hammer-free zone

2010-04-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, Hammer Horror still retained just a smidgen of that disreputability it enjoyed when it first erupted in 1957.

Since then, I've watched it become a cosy uncle of British cinema, equivalent almost to the Ealing comedy in respectability and affection, with some pleasure but a little sadness also.

It's disheartening to see something that was once edgy become so thoroughly absorbed into the fabric. I suppose the days when we see the films being shown on television on weekday afternoons are just around the corner.

So in a way it was almost pleasurable to discover that there are corners still where Hammer Horror is still something to be sniffed at, and handled, if at all, with tongs.

Despite living virtually on its doorstep for over five years, I had never been to Highgate Cemetery. A visit from my sister a couple of weekends back seemed the perfect opportunity to put this right, since she too is a Hammer Dracula addict, and the cemetery was used for some of the locations in Taste the Blood of Dracula; the (matte-painted) church in which the blood rite takes place being approached via a gated section of the cemetery called the Collumbarium.

We arrived on the Sunday morning, just in time for the guided tour. We asked the tour guide if the official route encompassed the Collumbarium.

"We go past it," he replied; "why?"

It's funny how embarrassing the phrase Taste the Blood of Dracula seems when you have to say it to a Highgate Cemetery tour guide.

"It was used in a film," I fudged.

"Which one?" he persisted.

"A Hammer film called Taste the Blood of Dracula," I conceded, any further obfuscation futile.

"Oh," he said, almost wistfully, as if receiving confirmation of a bad suspicion. "We don't mention that."

"Really?"

"Yes, I've got the DVD, but I won't be mentioning it."

"Any chance that we could go in on our own?"

"No, it's unsafe and you'll get lost."

Feeling thoroughly leprous, we decided not to take his tour, and that's why there are no photographs of the locations for Taste the Blood in this post.

The wonderful feeling that I again love something just a little bit too unsavoury for the English to openly acknowledge to each other on a Sunday morning, however, remains oddly compensatory.

The Lugosi-at-Monogram Marathon

2010-04-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

I did it.
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I watched every single Lugosi Monogram film (except Return of the Ape Man, which I still don't have; my birthday is June 20th...)
I watched them in order, I watched them one after the other, I stopped for nothing other than natural necessities, and I lived to tell the tale.
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And I have to be honest about something right at the start.
What I thought would be a fun test of endurance was, for the most part, an effortless blast.
And I'll go further. I always loved these movies, but it was a condescending kind of love, far from the mockery of the Golden Turkey fraternity, but condescending all the same.
What this exercise has finally convinced me of is that I actually really do think these movies are good.
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Explain yourself and fast, I hear you cry.
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Well, look at it this way. What's bad about them?
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They're cheap.
True. And I don't care. I love low budget movies when they're made by people seeking to transcend such petty brakes on their creativity with sheer, unfettered imagination. A low budget film with no imagination is no fun, but then, neither is a big budget film with no imagination. And you'll find plenty of them playing at your local cinema right now.
Lugosi's Monogram films have almost too much imagination.
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But they look cheap...
So what? If by that you mean the sets are small and there's no location shots, and it's obvious that the laboratories and living rooms are studio flats... well, what's your problem with that? Does it bother you at the theatre, too? Do you come out of Macbeth thinking, 'hmmm... some pretty language there, but that castle was obviously a set...'? Why should it be any different for films? We love seeing the same sets go by time and again in Universal and Hammer horrors - what's so bad about Monogram not really having any sets worth speaking of in the first place? Use your imagination. If you can't enjoy a film about a guy who accidentally turns himself into an ape unless you're convinced by the architecture, you're in the wrong genre, pal.
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But the cheapness shows in the technique: they're badly directed and photographed, they lack atmosphere...
Well, I hear you and I take your point. It's true that the studio did not have the liberty of being able to craft beautiful imagery, shoot exotic sets in moody shadows, call on the services of expert make-up and special effects teams, or labour over composition so as to achieve exactly the right shot for the monster to leap into from the left hand corner. On the other hand, there's so much else to enjoy in them that you don't get in those superficially better-crafted movies, I'm happy with the trade-off. And when they are placed in the hands of a director who wants to do something with them - above all here, I'm thinking of Invisible Ghost - the results can be surprising.
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They demean Lugosi.
Some do, perhaps. I can see that The Ape Man does. But most of the others give him juicy parts, loads of dialogue and acting opportunities undreamed of in the crappy parts Universal were throwing to him in the forties. There are actually some great Lugosi moments in these films, classic sequences, in which he is allowed to show exactly why he is the foremost horror star of cinema history. Without Monogram, we wouldn't have the opening dinner party scene and dressing gown murder sequence from Invisible Ghost, the eerie opening scenes of Voodoo Man, the wonderfully creepy sequence in Bowery at Midnight when his university student slowly realises that he is a cold-blooded maniac and is about to kill him, or the campy but still cherishable highlights of The Corpse Vanishes, with Lugosi and Elizabeth Russell in their twin coffins.
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But they're so silly... the plots are just insane...
I know; isn't it wonderful? You've noticed that too, have you?
Now, I'm assuming here that you don't believe in vampires, or that Egyptian mummies can rise from the dead and carry away the cream of forties womanhood. If you do, we will never quite see eye to eye about anything. But if you don't... These are meant to be fun films, and you're not meant to believe them. People talk about 'the suspension of disbelief' as if it meant something, as if anybody, any time, any place, was ever sufficiently impressed by the crafting of Bride of Frankenstein to think that maybe it is possible to stitch a bunch of corpses together and create a green giant with an English accent, until they leave the cinema and realise they've been had yet again. Verisimilitude is all very well for true life dramas, but who the hell says horror films need do anything other than entertain? And I would rather watch a film like Invisible Ghost, with enough plots for six movies and not the first idea about what to do with any of them, much less how to tie them all together, than some formulaic big-studio spook show without a fresh idea in its head.
Weird is good. Illogical is good. If you hate Fellini and David Lynch and Luis Bunuel because they don't make sense too, then fine. We'll talk again when The Simpsons is over. But if there's poetry in Miracle in Milan or It's a Wonderful Life then there's poetry in Monogram. The Seventh Victim doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. I love it when the Monograms don't make sense. Love it.
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Okay, okay... but even you wouldn't dare say they're scary...
Well it depends what you mean. If you mean: do they feature people being tied to chairs and tortured by freaks in masks on the understanding that you'll get off on watching folks whimpering and begging before having parts of their bodies cut off, you have a point. If you mean they're not scary compared to what the other studios were doing at the time, you have less of a point. Personally, I find Voodoo Man much spookier than The Mummy's Curse, mainly because the first time I saw Voodoo Man I really didn't have a clue what was going to happen next at virtually every stage, whereas you only need to see the first two minutes of The Mummy's Curse to know exactly how it's going to pan out. And that's fine too: those Mummy films are great fun. Don't ever make me choose between them... but if I ever had to choose between them...
Sorry, Lon.
.Trust this smiling man with the big collars who got dressed in the dark this morning. He may look like Moe Howard's sinister uncle, but when it comes to cheapo horror movies, he knows what he's about.
So let's go!
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Ahhh! That gorgeous original Monogram logo sequence! A celebration of modernity: planes, trains and airships. The Mysterious Mr Wong (1935) is the only film Lugosi made for the old Monogram, pre-Republic, and not for Sam and Jack at Banner Productions. As such, it has a totally different atmosphere from the later films he made for the studio.
It also has nothing to do with the studio's later Mr Wong detective series except, oddly enough, sharing their director William Nigh. Nigh was thus able to boast that he made a film called The Mysterious Mr Wong and a film called The Mystery of Mr Wong and that they had nothing whatsoever in common. (Whether he actually did boast about this, I don't know.)
The main point of interest is of course: how is Lugosi going to handle the role of a Chinese warlord? Is he going to do an accent?
What's more, the film knows that's what we want to know, and teases us mercilessly.
First, there's the preamble to sit through, setting up the plot. Then we see him sat at his desk, fiddling about with something, saying nothing. But then, three guys come in, a transaction of some sort is carried out and they leave again, and still all without Lugosi saying a word. Some more fiddling about with coins (they're important to the plot), and then, at last, what we've been longing to hear...
"One more! And the province of Keelat shall know its rightful ruler!"
Yes! Just as we'd hoped, it's Mysterious Mr Vonk. Only Lugosi can pronounce the word 'one' as if it begins with a 'v'.
Despite the fact that its obvious inspiration is Karloff's Mask of Fu Manchu, this is for the most part a serial-style action film, with Lugosi's villain more dastardly than horrifying, notwithstanding a good bit where he gets cross with one of his servants and pushes him through a trap door into a pit full of rats.
By and large, though, he displays none of Karloff's sadistic relish, neither is anything of the perfumed perversity of Karloff's relationship with daughter Myrna Loy duplicated in his bickering and crotchety dealings with his dishy niece Moonflower, played by Lotus Long. (Long, incidentally, also turns up in the 'other' Mr Wong films.) Unlike Loy she wants nothing to do with his criminal schemes: "That dreadful gong!" she exclaims at one point; "Every time it sounds Wong gives dreadful orders and terrible things begin to happen!" (The truth is somewhat more prosaic: every time it sounds it means someone is about to come in.)
Bela is at his most at sea in his scenes with Moonflower: "I will teach you to guard indifferent speech!" is the kind of line that would defeat most any actor; coming from a Hungarian done up like a Chinaman it doesn't stand a chance. (Though Moonflower does manage to top it, coming straight back with the film's best line: "This madness of his is driving all reason from his mind!")
It says a lot for the depth of Monogram's casting pool that several of the supporting army of Vonk's Chinese assassins are played by actors even less convincing in their racial origins than Lugosi, and the most fun aside from the big man is to be had with the romantic leads: a point one is rarely able to make.
Here though we have Wallace Ford as a reporter, dealing with the usual unhelpful editors and stupid Irish flatfoots, and Arline Judge as Peg, the spunky telephonist who deliberately plays Wally off against a slick rival who's invited her to watch a six-day bike race. Their scenes together have a lovely, bouncy thirtiesness to them, with plenty of crackle and snap in the dialogue. Ford - a great actor and a great guy - shows again why he is second only to Lee Tracy as a reporter in my book, and Judge is a pip.
In all, a pleasant and painless, if untypical overture to the Lugosi marathon, and it perks up a lot at the end, with Arline strapped to a table and Vonk threatening to do something unmentionable to her with long thin strips of bamboo. Mysterious Mr Wong came in eighth in our readers poll, with a 4% share of votes cast.
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On then to the forties, and to Invisible Ghost (1941), a film dismissed as the most arrant tripe by even the most sympathetic Lugosiphiles and secret Monogram maniacs, but for me one of the three true classics of the series; a film in which almost nothing makes sense from the title on. (How to tell a Monogram fan: whereas most people would go into a film called Invisible Ghost with the expectation that it would be about an invisible ghost, a true devotee sees the title and is immediately certain of two things: there won't be any ghosts, and they won't be invisible.)
Everything about this film is just perfect. It's well-paced, with some very good suspense scenes and a bravura Lugosi performance, and any idiot can see it is unusually well-directed for a Monogram, with inventive camera placement and very good use of light and shadow. (If only director Joseph H Lewis had been assigned Bowery at Midnight and Voodoo Man as well, I think we'd be talking about these movies with the same kind of reverence with which we speak of The Seventh Victim and I Walked With a Zombie.)
But for most people all this counts for nothing because, and there's no denying it, the plot is simply bananas. Lugosi's Dr Kessler has a problem. Years before, his beloved wife left him for another man, and now once a year, on the anniversary of their parting, he goes a little doolally and pretends she is still there having dinner with him. The butler has to lay out two meals and dutifully tend to the imaginary wife, while Lugosi has conversations with thin air.
But - and I cannot stress this enough - the rest of the time he is COMPLETELY NORMAL. When his daughter and her boyfriend Ralph enter the house during this annual performance, Ralph in particular is shocked to the core because Lugosi had "always appeared completely rational to me." (Yes, and you'll remember that all Heathville loved Paul Carruthers, their kindly village doctor.)
But the truth is even stranger: his wife has not been absent for years, but living under his very roof: she crashed her car the night she set out to start her new life and now lives secretly on the premises with a brain injury that has reduced her to a childlike state, tended to by the butler and the gardener. (There seems no good reason why Lugosi wasn't told instantly of her crash; whether the film bothers to make up a daffy one or not I can't remember. It probably does.)
On top of all this, there have been a number of murders in the house, for each of which the police troop out, ask a few questions and then go, as if a house in which people are constantly being murdered is just another routine spot on their beat. They never seem to draw any conclusions, treat each killing as if it were an entirely separate affair, and seem no more concerned for the safety of those still living there than those still living there seem to be on their own behalf.
After what must be something like the fourth slaying, a cop asks Lugosi: "What gets me, Mr Kessler is why you refuse to move out of this place." "Sentimental reasons," Lugosi replies. "There's nothing very sentimental about a house where anything can happen and usually does," the cop continues. "My mother lived here, Lieutenant," Kessler's daughter explains. "Oh, I see," says the cop, his incomprehension soothed away.
But guess what: the killer is actually that nice Dr Kessler! Every so often he looks out of the window and sees - as nobody else in the house ever seems to - his wife mooching aimlessly about the garden. Their eyes meet, Lugosi falls into a trance, and is instantly overcome by an irresistible urge to go off and kill someone. (Ours not to reason why.)
The film's first murder (of Lugosi's cute blonde maid), is a genuinely chilling and effective piece of cinema, featuring a Lugosi-advances-menacingly-towards-the-camera shot to rival the classic examples in White Zombie and Rue Morgue. It's superbly directed by Lewis, using unconventional imagery and strictly ambient sound, setting the whole thing not to something from Monogram's spooky music library but, weirdly and effectively, to the dance music on the maid's radio.
Lugosi enters the room and slowly takes off his dressing gown (making us seriously wonder for a moment if he has rape on his mind). Holding the robe in front of him, we realise he intends to smother the girl, and Lewis keeps cutting between his face, the terrified girl, and a static shot of the radio, which somehow enhances the mood by ignoring it, and continuing to emit band music. Then, with the camera taking the girl's point of view, we see Lugosi bring the robe up in front of the camera, and as the screen blacks we probably assume it will then fade on a scream. Most surprisingly, it instead lowers slightly again - the girl's, and our, ordeal is not over - and we see more of his leering face before the screen blacks a second time.
If you have any ideas as to how anyone on Val Lewton's staff could have made a better job of this, by all means let me know.

Because he and the maid have a past, and he has no alibi (for any of the murders?), poor old dopey Ralph finds himself charged with the crime and then, to our great surprise, convicted and executed. But don't worry if you're a big fan of actor John McGuire: a couple of minutes later he's back as Ralph's lookalike twin brother.
In a lesser work, this might come across as a bit of a stretch. But Invisible Ghost is so successful in creating and sealing its own world, within which its own rules apply, that such overt absurdities somehow play as convincingly as the comparable moments in our own dreams: it's only when we leave this other world, when we wake from our dreams, or stop watching strange Monogram films, that the silliness seems overwhelming. Commit to the logic when in process, however, and it will sustain itself.
This is what I meant when I compared the film to Bunuel or Fellini or Lynch: the film is not a representation of reality any more than it claims to be; it is the recreation of an internal world.
Obviously director Lewis deserves a large slice of the credit, but let us also salute the screenwriters, Al Martin and Helen Martin. Though the automatic assumption is that the two were related, I have never actually seen this confirmed, and from their credits and career paths it seems unlikely. Al was a script machine who started out writing the titles for the silent What! No Spinach? in 1920 and was still crafting episodes of Tarzan for tv in 1967. In between came scores of thirties cheapies, Invasion of the Saucer Men ("They Threatened The World Until Some Hep Youngsters Took Over!") in '57, and some episodes of My Favorite Martian. He also created Rusty the Dog. Helen, who only wrote one other movie, was one of the founders of the American Negro Theater, and an actress who was still appearing in movies and tv in 2000, the year she died at the age of 91. Between them, these two unlikelies got together and wrote Invisible Ghost. And an invisible ghost is pretty much the only thing they didn't cram into their profoundly unusual screenplay.
There are some equally surprising supporting players, including the great Clarence Muse as the butler, former silent star Betty Compson, left, as Lugosi's nuthatch former wife, and Polly Ann Young as the heroine.
Polly, who was responsible for her little sister Loretta's career when she suggested she attend a casting call meant for herself, worked a few times at Monogram, but this was her only horror. Her resemblance to her sisters is striking in some shots, and she gives the film a nice kind of class-by-proxy. (The thought of Loretta in a film of this nature is almost too exciting to contemplate.)
Hero John McGuire played uncredited bits in Shadow of a Doubt and White Heat, and was apparently the voice of Michael Redgrave's vent doll in Dead of Night. Can this really be true?
Invisible Ghost secured the pleasingly higher-than-I-was-expecting position of joint third in our readers poll, with 16% of your votes, for which Polly thanks you, below.

Still going strong...

Spooks Run Wild (1941) is what happens when you assign an old dark house comedy involving a bunch of loveable juvenile delinquents, a sinister magician, his dwarf assistant and a prowling sex-killer to the author of High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai.

I'll be honest, this one took it out of me a bit, not so much on account of the East Side Kids, whose schtick I found myself rather enjoying, but because Bela's red herring role is so ridiculous: if he's just a harmless magician, why doesn't he say? Why is he so blatantly sinister? Why, even when the Kids have knocked him unconscious and tied him up, does he decide after freeing himself not to say, "hey, Kids, you've got it wrong; I'm a magician" - which he presumably does do at some point between the penultimate and final scene - but to continue stalking them about the house, and advancing silently and malevolently whenever he gets one cornered?

But again, even here, that old Monogram black magic had me in its spell - either it's the gin that I've been quaffing liberally since the latter stages of Mysterious Mr Wong or there really is some genuine and intoxicating atmosphere that is hard to pin down and define, but real all the same, and all Monogram. No other studio had it (or wanted it, but that's beside the point) and it's here as definitely as it's in Voodoo Man. This, I'm assuming, is what accounts for your generosity in giving the film 8% of your votes, helping it to joint fifth position in our poll.

And how sweet to think of these Kids as the same characters that appeared in Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces, one minute in a gritty recreation of the New York slums and the company of Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sidney and Bogart and Cagney, now being chased by wee Angelo Rossito round a spooky house festooned with cobwebs and suits of medieval armour.
A stiff drink after this one.

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I'm sure you know, but just in case you don't, I'm not going to tell you the one thing that all write-ups and reviews of Black Dragons (1942) tell you about its plot in their first sentences. Not because it isn't up to Monogram's highest and most crazed standards - believe me: you won't be disappointed - but because it is retained as a twist. The plot is not explained, in fact, until the very last scene, which makes the whole thing a lot more fun if you're lucky enough to not know what's coming. (If you do know what's revealed at the end, I'll content myself with two questions: is a small bag of scalpels and scissors all Lugosi needs to perform plastic surgery, and why does he have to anyway, when the other guy's an exact lookalike?)
The fact that virgin audiences don't know who Lugosi is or quite what he's up to until the final scene makes for a fun climax (somewhat in the manner of one of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, with a last-minute monster make-up thrown in to boot) but if what you're after is horror film atmospherics, be warned that Black Dragons is the most ordinary of Bela's Monogram pseudo-horrors; basically an espionage thriller with a last-minute fantasy twist. Not that it is without merit or interest: it's an intriguing little piece, and historically very interesting indeed, but of all the vaguely horror-themed vehicles that Monogram's publicists had to try to whip up into full-fledged screamers, they had the most work to do on this one. (Even Lugosi helped out, claiming on posters that "Never have I worked in a story so startling or so blood-chillingly shocking.")

The film is an opportunistic wartime mystery, made by people whose immediate response to the attack on Pearl Harbour was to think, 'there must be a way to make use of this in a Bela Lugosi picture.' And what do you know: there was a way, albeit one that involves Japanese spies disguised as American businessmen, and stock footage revealing for the first time that axis saboteurs were responsible for crowd disturbance during the funeral of Rudolph Valentino.

It's an offbeat, unusual little film that holds the attention and scarcely deserved its joint-bottom ranking in our poll, with not even a single vote. (It's fellow null-pointer, Return of the Ape Man, probably got nothing because it is so rarely seen: Black Dragons has no such excuse.) Well, if I have to bang the drum for this one, let me merely note in passing that the film boasts some of the sexiest walk-on bit-part actresses of any film I've ever seen. Joan Barclay is the only woman credited in the whole cast (and in a fairly kinky touch for the time spends a lot of the second half cracking the case and climbing out of windows in a white bath robe), but the secretary that brings Mr Hanlan's special delivery letter towards the end and then leaves again, and the girl at the party in the spray-on satin dress are major distractions, or at least they were to me at this stage in the day, with three films behind me and six still to go. Is this the gin talking? Here's the party girl so you can judge for yourselves.

She's just in this one scene, for about ten seconds. What were you thinking, Katzman?

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The Corpse Vanishes (1942) is perhaps the most authentic seeming Lugosi Monogram, the one that at times (though only at times) comes closest to being able to pass itself off as mainstream studio B-product. If it weren't for Lugosi getting a proper role and all that juicy dialogue, there are moments where you could almost mistake it for a Universal movie. (It's the only Monogram movie in which Lugosi plays the organ, for example.) Whether this makes it a better or lesser Monogram movie depends on whether you enjoy the films because or in spite of the studio's characteristic flashes of lunacy... but either way, it romped home to first place in our poll, with a 36% grab of votes cast.

For my part, I find it all hugely enjoyable (it was the first Lugosi Monogram I saw, and is still the one I've seen the most) but it doesn't impress me, or linger in my mind afterwards, in the way that weirder and more ornery critters like Invisible Ghost and Voodoo Man do.

Perhaps I just take it for granted a little. There's stacks to enjoy in it: Tris Coffin as a goodie, Luana Walters as a reporter, Joan Barclay drawing the straw maked 'your turn to be strapped to the table', a dwarf, a big loon, Lugosi and Elizabeth Russell in twin coffins, poisoned orchids being sent to brides so they collapse at the altar and Lugosi can abduct them and remove their glands to keep his decrepit wife in a state of permanent artificial youthfulness... It's all here. The only surprise is that there's no caged ape in the cellar. Perhaps they were using the costume for something else that week.

Best of all, no explanation is ever given as to why Lugosi is specifically snatching brides - presumably they are a Breen-era euphemism for virgins, but that doesn't explain why he snatches them in so risky, complicated and attention-seeking a manner, when it would surely be easier to just bundle them into his car when they are walking along the street a week or so before the wedding. That the orchid scheme is not only senselessly elaborate but also leads straight to Lugosi, the original hybridiser of the unusual strain in question, is a gloriously typical Monogram touch, as is the fact that after Walters discovers it, her boneheaded editor mocks her for reading anything into it at all. Later, when she mentions to Lugosi seeing his wife's and his unusual sleeping arrangements, he asks her if she thinks it is "so strange" to want to sleep in a coffin while waiting for eternal rest; she ponders for a moment and replies, "No, I suppose not."

Joan Barclay's nonchalant refusal to accept she might be in any danger comes likewise from the studio's well-thumbed manual of irrational characterisation: she disdainfully tells her mother to "forget all that silly nonsense about brides dropping dead", as if they haven't been, and it isn't the biggest news story of the day.
. Another drink, a handful of Snyder's of Hanover's Jalapeño Pretzel Pieces, and on to the Bowery. Don't stop me now.

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A splendid little oddball crime melodrama in horror spats, Bowery at Midnight (1942) is one of my favourites, and I'm pleased to say it did quite well in our poll, taking 16% of your votes and sharing third place with Invisible Ghost.
This time round, 'Gosi is a college professor (with pince-nez!) called Professor Brenner, who also runs a Bowery soup kitchen under the alias Karl Wagner, which is not only an alias but also a front, because kindly Karl, the bum's friend, is really a ruthless criminal mastermind. (Since he really is a Professor, living a double life in the underworld, rather than a criminal masquerading as a Professor, we can only wonder what drew this happily married, dignified academic to moonlight as a skid row crime boss.)

In his private office at the mission, a secret door behind a bookcase connects to an inner sanctum in which he organises his crimes and stashes the proceeds. From here a second door, not hidden but for some reason with a map of Australia stretched over the top half of it, so he keeps having to duck as he passes through, leads to his sub-basement, where the really weird stuff goes on.

Wagner, who reruits jailbirds from his mission to carry out his robberies, has the peculiar quirk of making his newest recruit murder the previous one after each caper, partly to cover his tracks, partly to keep them on their toes, partly so he gets to see a different thug when he goes to work every day, and partly because he's a good few numbers short of the grand total. Touchingly, however, when he buries them in his basement he marks their graves with little crosses with their names on.

All of which makes Brenner/Wagner a thoroughly nasty piece of work (and the already mentioned scene in which he smilingly allows the truth to dawn on one of his students after he stumbles onto his secret is a true classic, and a reminder of what a good actor Lugosi could be when he had something worth doing and knew what all the words meant), but not quite the stuff of horror films.

So someone at Monogram hit on the idea of giving him a whacked-out former doctor as an assistant, who just happens to know how to revive the dead, and keeps many of Wagner's victims as zombies in the cellar.

This truly bizarre subplot has no bearing on the main story at all, until the very end when Lugosi tumbles through the trap door and gets killed by the zombies, while the police and various other characters stand by like lemons and do nothing to help him, as if they see a pit full of zombies killing people all the time.

(And, in true Monogram fashion, one of the zombies - our nominal hero, the aforementioned dimwit student - is somehow able to bounce back to normality after being killed and zombified, just as at the end of King of the Zombies.)

All this and Wanda McKay, too! At last, Monogram's most straight-down-the-line gorgeous female lead makes her coquettish debut in the Lugosi series playing, as usual, one of her trademarked cocky, rather obnoxious teases, who refuse to take things seriously and treat the male leads like the idiots they usually are.

...
The best of Monogram's horror films say: we don't have all the things that those other studios have; we have to make do with a scarcity of resources, not coast on a surfeit of them, but we will do our very best with what we've got.

For some reason, perhaps because it is the only film in the Lugosi sequence in which he gets to wear a monster make-up, The Ape Man (1943) is regarded in many quarters as the archetypal Monogram horror movie, as befits its second place status in our poll, with 24% of your votes in its pocket. But it's one of my least favourites, largely because its cynically self-parodying script violates exactly that covenant with the audience I outlined above.

The fault, I think, lies in the fact that it is the only Lugosi Monogram to have been written by their regular associate producer Barney Sarecky, and you can just hear him suggesting what a hoot it would be if he wrote one of them as well. His jokey script is incredibly formulaic, but the formula to which he thinks he is adhering is only half understood.

So we have a character called Zippo (played by Ralph Littlefield, who had already played a bum uncredited in Bowery at Midnight and would go on to the decent but still uncredited part of Sam, George Zucco's gas station assistant, in Voodoo Man) who wanders through the scenes, peering in windows, sometimes directly altering the plot by steering characters away from their deaths, sometimes looking straight at us and laughing mockingly at what we are watching. At the end he reveals himself to be the writer of the film ("Screwy idea, wasn't it?") and winds up a car window on which the words 'The End' are written.

So anyway, for reasons unspecified, but presumably connected with increased virility, Lugosi's Dr Brewster has been injecting himself with ape glands in a series of experiments "far in advance" of contemporary science. "Unfortunately," his colleague explains ruefully, "it was a great success." And what a success:

Some day, all apes will wear fedoras.

But Lugosi, having suceeded, decides he preferred things before he had a furry face and slept in a cage, but is at a loss as to how to put things back. He's tried just about every liquid that can bubble in jars and be poured into a test tube, but alas, without success. The answer, of course, is the usual stuff about injections of human spinal fluid that can only come via murder.
It's great to welcome Wally Ford back as the reporter, partnered by Monogram's Katherine Hepburn, Louise Currie, as photographer Billie Mason. Minerva Urecal does her usual thing as Lugosi's ghost-hunter sister, and in fact bags the film's best moment, as (in a totally irrelevant scene) she proves the existence of ghosts to Ford and Currie by playing a record she has made of spooky noises and people screaming.

And the film does pick up at the end, with Louise Currie in killer heels being chased about the lab by Lugosi and attempting to defend herself with a bullwhip.

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...And not a ghost in sight.

Imagine Spooks Run Wild all over again, but without the killer on the loose, or much of the spooky atmos, and with Lugosi not as a weird magician but a common or garden Nazi with hardly any screen time and you'll have Ghosts on the Loose (1943).

Now imagine watching it right after watching Spooks Run Wild, and six other Lugosi films, and explain to me why I enjoyed it so much. I certainly can't explain it. Everyone hates this film, and I'd always thought with good reason. How it (and Spooks) cobbled together 8% of the votes in our poll - the same as Voodoo Man for God's sake! - was an annoying mystery to me, and I must say that the prospect of this coming over the horizon as I plodded through The Ape Man filled me with something like dread. A couple of times I could have sworn it was Huntz Hall in the ape make-up, so preoccupied was I with the thought of it.

In the event, I had a lot of fun. Maybe it's because I watched Spooks in unhelpful daylight, whereas it was dark by the time I got to this baby. Maybe it's because I'd forgotten how much I'd had to drink by this point. Whatever the reason, I was pleasantly surprised to realise that just as I thought the film was getting going it was actually two thirds over already, and I hadn't been bored once. (It does sound alcohol-related, I know.)

Ava Gardner - Huntz Hall's sister, everybody - is getting married, and her husband has bought her a house out in the sticks. The only drawback is the house next door, which the previous tenants were convinced is haunted. ("But you know how old people are," the estate agent explains sympathetically.) In fact, it's a nest of Nazis, headed by the 'Gosi, running a covert printing press operation, producing seditious leaflets called WHAT THE NEW ORDER MEANS TO YOU!

Despite the ambiguous exclamation mark, these guys are deadly serious, and just in case any intruders stumble upon their secret they have equipped the house with a variety of hokey ghost effects, including the ever-popular 'portraits with holes in the eyes for someone to look through', and that essential proof of a supernatural presence: the double-sided rotating painting of Napoleon, on one side of which he is wearing a coat while on the other he's carrying it folded over his arm. It may not sound terrifying to you now, but time the switch properly and it's a cinch. I've seen the proof.

This is to the best of my knowledge the only film in which Lugosi sneezes in big, tonsil-baring close-up. He's doing the old 'standing motionless in a picture frame' routine, when Sunshine Sammy Morrison puts a feather duster in his face. Just imagine the kind of movies he'd have been making if he hadn't been one of the biggest stars of the National Theatre of Hungary.

"Why do I have such idiots around me?" he asks at one point.
.Ava needed a holiday to get over Ghosts on the Loose
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A fitting finale, Voodoo Man (1944) is my favourite Lugosi Monogram film, as well as the newest to me, and how it ended up sharing fifth place with the two East Side Kids films is a mystery to set alongside the aerodynamics of bumble-bee flight and the career of Alan Parker. This is a really fascinating, pretty spooky, classy-looking and endlessly surprising classic of low-budget horror. That's what it is.

The first time I watched it, as I sat open-mouthed through its superb opening scenes, I couldn't believe how much like Texas Chainsaw it was, and how keenly it anticipated that whole 'people stumbling into a backwoods nightmare' sub-genre.

There's been a series of disappearances of lone female motorists, and we learn what's been going on in the first scene. Whenever a fresh looker turns up at George Zucco's middle-of-nowhere gas station, he first checks they are strangers in the area and then telephones Lugosi. Using a series of fake detours, the driver is then corralled into an ambush, where two goons (one of them John Carradine!) grab the girl and drag her through an earthy tunnel into Lugosi's house. (The first one we see being subjected to this ordeal is Terry Walker, no luckier than she was as the maid in Invisible Ghost.)

Now, up to this point, we have a totally unusual and really creepy movie. From here, admittedly, the Monogram factor - and the innate good taste of forties Hollywood - kicks in to the horror's detriment: Lugosi wants to use the girls' souls as a means of reanimating his zombified wife; and there's lots of cod ritual, with Lugosi and Zucco in robes with stars - and hands - painted on them.

But though it never quite regains the truly eerie atmosphere with which it began, it still remains a zippy, entertaining thing, with a number of perverse touches (like Lugosi's habit of keeping his zombified failed experiments in their own little alcoves, which Carradine likes to visit and - well, we're not sure what he does with them, actually.)

.Bela Lugosi and George Zucco making asses of themselves

Lugosi never loses faith in George's powers as a necromancer, despite the fact that the ritual has so far failed at least eight times, the household's burgeoning collection of zombie babes ample testament to his ineptitude. (They were the wrong types, he insists, without saying who or what are the right types; he just remains convinced that whatever the right type is it will sooner or later pull up at his gas station.)

In fairness to him he has got the old 'getting two pieces of string to tie themselves together unaided as if by stop motion animation' routine off to a fine art, though it would seem to be, at best, only peripherally relevant to a soul transplanting ritual, and it's the more vital part - actually transmuting the souls - that he hasn't quite got the hang of yet.

Meanwhile, we have as the central male character a screenwriter for Banner Productions, whose boss (called S.K!) has tasked him with turning the mystery into a horror script. Driving to meet his fiancee (Wanda) he instead runs into her cousin (Louise) and when their car breaks down he goes off to get some petrol and she is abducted by the goons. Wanda, at her blasé best, pays little attention to the story, but when Louise is found wandering the highway in a catatonic state the two decide to investigate, after the local sherrif opines that, as each new disappearance occurs, the case is "getting monotonous".

Currie, who had been the spunky lead of The Ape Man, here gets the secondary role of the largely catatonic cousin in favour of McKay, luscious and wide-eyed but one tenth as good an actress. Their roles really should have been swapped, and if Currie was anything like the no-nonsense personalities she usually played I'll bet she was mightily annoyed by the casting. For much of her role she does nothing except stare blankly and walk about in flowing robes. McKay could do that splendidly, while Currie would have made lighter work of the dialogue. It also might have improved the dramatic structure of the piece if, as in Psycho, the man was searching for his fiancee and his co-investigator was her relative.

But this is to look for fault with a film that deserves to be far better known, and vastly more appreciated than it is.

At the end, the hero returns to S.K with his script before going on honeymoon, and when asked to nominate a likely star for the forthcoming production, suggests Bela Lugosi, providing a neat little coda indeed to the Lugosi marathon.

And so that concludes not only the marathon but Monogram Month itself. I hope you've enjoyed these excursions into this much maligned yet defiantly loved little studio.

I'd like to thank whoever's been looking in, and, most of all, I'd like to thank Monogram Film Productions:

... gone ...

... but not forgotten.

“It ain’t Gene Krupa!” – Mantan Moreland and ‘King of the Zombies’

2010-03-31T04:44:00.001-07:00

What would they have thought - any of them - if they had only lived to see it?
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A few years ago, the first six films in the Monogram Charlie Chan series were issued on DVD in a box-set delightfully named Chanthology. The most eye-opening thing about it, besides the delicious quality of the prints (yes, Monogram product gleamed and shone like any other movie on its first run: they didn't always look like they were photographed through the perforations of wet lavatory paper and sound like they were overdubbed in the kitchen of a fish and chip shop), was the bizarre fact that via some long, winding and deeply ironic path, the copyright on them has devolved to MGM.

MGM!

What two studios could have been further apart! What would Monogram have given, what would they have paid, simply to have these films appear, as they now do, with the MGM lion roaring approval at the start?

All that effort, all that frustration, all that envy... swept away by the ignorant caprice of copyright law and the oblivious sieve of time. Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you... They say that if you have enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, then eventually Monogram Charlie Chan films will be brought to you from MGM.

The box-set gave us a much-needed chance to re-evaluate these films, which suffered even in comparison with the Fox Chans. Few bodies of cinema have been subjected to such foolish and ignorant criticism as the Chan series generally, but these were movies that even Chan fanatics looked down on. The truth, as Ken Hanke's definitive study of the series bravely pointed out, is the Monochans are different from the Fox titles, but by no means negligible.

For many who dismiss the films, chief bone of contention - above and beyond Chan himself - is Monogram's decision to give make a regular character of black comic relief Birmingham Brown, played by Mantan Moreland, who keeps improbably running into Chan before eventually becoming his chauffeur.

You don't need me to tell you why Moreland is frowned upon by many today; but perhaps you may need reminding that he is terrific: a superb, intuitively funny actor, one of the great character actors, and comic actors, of his day. He needs no whiny defence or contextual justification: the man is hilarious. Okay, he is never allowed outside of the groove specifically carved for the black supporting actor, but we all know that.

Now look at how good he is.
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Ironically, perhaps, Moreland was included not to alienate but to attract black audiences: his presence insured the films major release-status in Harlem and other predominantly black territories, where he was hugely and rightly popular. Like Stepin Fetchit, Willie Best, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson and other controversial black comic actors of the period, Moreland has a divine comic sense and an enormously likeable screen presence; he always makes the most of what he is given, and he is often given room to do a comic party piece.

As they go along, the films increasingly incorporate authentic ethnic comedy scenes, where Moreland and another black performer do some variation on one of his stand-up routines, notably the old chestnut where he asks the other guy a question and then responds before he has a chance to answer but in full awareness of what the answer is.

(You can see him do this in a stage setting with Nipsy Russell in a wonderful compilation of black variety acts called Rhythm and Blues Revue which, though shot as late as 1954, begins delightfully with him peering around the curtain and calling "Mr Chan! Mr Chan!" He does the same routine almost word for word with Ben Carter, playing his brother Ben, in the Chan film Dark Alibi.)

Willie Best, whose involvement with the Chans goes back to the early days of the Fox films, also shows up a few times in the Monograms, either as Birminghham's brother Chattanooga, deputising when Moreland was elsewhere, or even, in Shanghai Chest, as 'himself': Moreland meets him in jail, where he is being held for loitering. (He later explains that he was loitering in a bank at midnight.) Best is certainly talented, but Moreland is the fresher, more inspired performer, and Monogram very soon realised that if they left him to do pretty much what he wanted everyone would benefit. These vignettes have the feel of authentic black nightclub humour for which the film stops to make room: these are scenes for black audiences to laugh at, not to enable white audiences to laugh at blacks. It's a reminder that Monogram were canny enough to recognise the Harlem audience was one worth catering to.

Moreland takes centre stage in the Chan films with evermore authority and assuredness as the series goes along. The Golden Eye - boasting some very funny business with him dressed as a cowboy and trying to close an overstuffed suitcase - even ends with him walking up to the camera and talking to the audience, while Chan and the rest assume fixed positions in the background.

In addition to the Chans he was also teamed regularly with Frankie Darro in a series of action adventures: Moreland worked all over in forties cinema, but it was only really Monogram that gave him the star treatment he deserved.
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Moreland is at his very best in King of the Zombies (1941), a Monogram horror that, if it had only starred Lugosi as was originally planned, would probably today be regarded as one of the most professional horror pieces the studio ever turned out.

Moreland is certainly the chief attraction in the movie as it comes to us today (especially since the Lugosi role was given to the geezer who played the strong man in Freaks) but if the film has one claim to fame above all it is that it was, bizarrely and inexplicably enough, Monogram's only Oscar-nominated horror film.

Technically it was not their only Oscar-nominated film. The screenplay for their controversial life of Dillinger got a mention, presumably because of the controversy (nothing changes), and since the company known as Allied Artists was merely Monogram renamed, then let us not forget that it was Allied Artists that made Cabaret. (How many people know that Cabaret was a Monogram movie, I wonder?)

But back in the forties, when the studio's films stood more chance of being melted down and made into mandolin picks than of getting any kind of award, the fact remains that Edward Kay's music score for King of the Zombies ended up being tapped for one of the little gold fellers.

There is no obvious reason for why this happened - it sounds like any other semi-adequate Monogram score and much of the film has no music at all - and there must be more to the story somewhere. But there it is.

Who read out the nominations that night? Imagine, oh I don't know... Loretta Young doing it, immaculate in pearls and floor length gown. "Edward Kay, for King of the Zombies..." and a polite ripple of applause from the floor. And then to lose out to some nobody called Bernard Herrmann! Like anybody ever heard of that guy again. There ain't no justice.

It's just one more odd thing about a deeply odd movie all round. As well as borrowing liberally from the previous year's Bob Hope film The Ghost Breakers, it also anticipates the central plot motif of '43's I Walked With a Zombie, to say nothing of the innovation of the flesh-eating zombie nearly thirty years before George Romero. ("It's the witching hour," says slinky Marguerite Whitten in her little maid's outfit, to the easily shaken Moreland: "It's their feeding time, and they likes dark meat!" Zombies don't normally eat anything - the film itself stresses this point - so Monogram really are blazing a new trail here.)

. Basically, Mantan and two boring white men crash their plane in the jungle and find that they have in fact landed in the middle of a graveyard. They walk a few feet to a mansion owned by a sinister German called Dr Sangre - sorry, strike that: a sinister foreigner called Dr Sangre (America weren't actually in the war yet.) To their amazement he knows before they tell him that their plane has crashed - not much happens on the island that he doesn't get to hear about, he explains, though the fact that they crashed the plane in his own garden probably gave him a bit of a head start on this occasion.

Sangre's wife mopes about the house in a perpetual state of somnambulism, and also mooching about is Joan Woodbury, here filling our hearts with joy by affecting a foxy little European accent, as Sangre's niece ("by marriage", she stresses.) Joan thinks the root of her aunt's trouble might be not voodoo but garden variety hypnotism, and so steals into the doctor's library one night to read up on the subject. Luckily, she finds a book called Hypnotism right where you'd expect to find it: next to a human skull and the doctor's trusty copy of of Columbian Historical Novels Volume XIII.

What we perhaps don't see coming is that as well as a necromancer Sangre is also a Nazi - sorry, I'm doing it again: a representative of a villainous foreign power - who is holding a US admiral hostage and trying to obtain military secrets from him. No thumbscrews for him: he intends using voodoo as a means of transmuting his soul into Joan Woodbury's body and getting the information out of her instead: it may not be a more reliable way of doing it, but he'll surely have more fun trying.

Joan's partly right - he does use hypnotism to make Mantan think he is a zombie, leading to some very amusing scenes where he bosses the other zombies about. So many potentially spooky scenes in this movie are allowed to play as comedy, purely to accommodate this wonderful performer: even the big horror climax cuts to a shot of him peering from behind a table. Don't let the billing deceive you: Moreland's the star of this show.

Incidentally, Marguerite cures him of his zombie delusions by giving him salt with his food. Because, as we all know, "if a zombie uses salt, he dries up and gets dead again." A bit like a slug. (Take note, Romero: much less messy than blowing their heads off.) One of the two white guys, however, gets turned into a zombie for real, but, this being Monogram, he's back to his old self by the end, despite being killed, buried, zombified and then shot at point blank range.

As usual, and as is only right, Moreland gets the last laugh: "If there's one thing I wouldn't want to be twice, zombies is both of 'em!"

Going up, going down, going west, going nowhere: The rest of Monogram

2010-03-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Of the many sources I've consulted and cribbed from during this series of articles on Monogram, by far the most useful has been Ted Okuda's invaluable Monogram Checklist.
This eccentric labour of love - and it's exactly what it seems from the title: one long, book-length list of every film they made - seems to capture exactly my feelings about the studio. He clearly considers them important and cherishable enough to make the devotion of preparing a book-length list of their productions worthwhile, useful and somehow necessary in the face of so much general disinterest, but at the same time sees no contradiction between the rightness of the effort involved and the equal rightness of welcoming the reader to the finished work with a 'historical overview' that begins:

If mentioned at all by film historians, the Monogram product is usually dismissed in a cursory manner - which is understandable, since most of their output was cheap, vulgar, inept and ultimately forgettable.

Okuda's meticulousness and the democratic lack of over-emphasis on any particular star, strand or genre results in a very different angle on the studio to the one with I was most familiar.
For instance, am I correct in thinking that almost anyone who is asked what kind of films the studio made would think of Lugosi first, the East Side Kids second, perhaps Charlie Chan third, and then everything else, all lumped together, coming in a hazy and distant fourth? That's certainly how the books I tend to read play it. But the horror movies we consider so central to the studio's ethos were only a tiny percentage of their total output; they actually made fewer films in the horror genre than in practically any other to which they turned their collective hand.
The overwhelming majority of their films, it would appear from a browse of Okuda, were westerns. I'd say for every horror, or even sub-horror spooky mystery, there must be two dozen oaters. Maybe more.

So perhaps western buffs have their 'own' Monogram, running parallel to the horror buff's Monogram; perhaps 'Monogram' means 'a cheap western studio' to just as many dedicated movie fans as those to whom it means 'a cheap horror studio'. If so, it would certainly be with better cause.
I asked The Tainted Archive's Gary Dobbs, the fastest draw in Wales, about this. He confirmed that "when western fans usually talk about Monogram it is as part of Poverty Row, and they are lumped in with other such studios who churned out cheap, action packed, adventures sometimes in as little as ten days."
But Gary also reminded me that, as well as that parade of B-western stars like Bob Steele, Tex Ritter, Buck Jones, Ray 'Crash' Corrigan (sans ape suit) and Tom Keene (riding the valley between the twin peaks of King Vidor's Our Daily Bread and Ed Wood's Plan 9), the studio played host on no fewer than 16 occasions to John Wayne.
He also pointed out that many of the titles - through the sheer accident of Wayne's continued viability as a star draw - remain widely available on DVD in bargain editions. Any low cost 'John Wayne collection' is likely to include a liberal smattering of his Monograms, just as is the case in the many comparable Lugosi collections available. So there's good cause indeed for associating Monogram with Wayne at least as much as Lugosi.
Of course, Wayne was no more a big star than Lugosi in the periods they worked for the studio. But the big difference was that Wayne's glory years were ahead of him, Lugosi's behind. A widely-recognisable name at Monogram is invariably on the way up or on the way down, though in truth Wayne wasn't really going anywhere all this time: I'm sure he saw his future in Monogram-level westerns, until the freak of Stagecoach lifted him instantly from one cinematic strata and deposited him in another.

Either going up or going down... Actually, a perusal of Okuda's index shows a perhaps surprising scarcity of actors and actresses in the ascendant starting out at Monogram, in marked contrast to the mournful parade of the other sort passing by in the opposite direction. It may be a bit of a myth, in fact. Really only Ginger Rogers in The Thirteenth Guest, already making her mark in Warners musicals, and Ava Gardner in Ghosts on the Loose, already signed to MGM when Sam Katzman decided to cast her as Huntz Hall's sister, stand out from the crowd.
Then there's the strange case of Lon Chaney Jr, who was potentially on the up - still billed as Creighton Chaney and being compared to Clark Gable in the fan magazines - when he played the hunky hero of Sixteen Fathoms Deep (1934, an action drama set, according to Okuda, "in the highly competitive sponge-diving industry") but hurtling back down again when he made a surprise return to the studio in '48 for - of all things - a remake of the same film. This time, though, he was cast as the villain. Hollywood, my friends, Hollywood.
But most of the studio's lead players were headed in neither direction: as Wayne looked set to be, they were born at Monogram, lived at Monogram and died at Monogram. Great guys like Regis Toomey, Lyle Talbot, Eddie Nugent, Dave O'Brien, and that wonderful roster of starlets I celebrated here.
The likeable Talbot had real potential, but only ever got a half-hearted shake from the big-leaguers. He's in several Warners crime films, loads of westerns, a ton of television, and both Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda. He always gives good performances at Monogram: a relaxed rapport with one's female co-star was often a huge challenge for Poverty Row actors, but he sparks nicely off Ginger in Thirteenth Guest, and Thelma Todd (in one of her always great but all-too rare dramatic leads) in the highly recommended aviation drama Klondike (1932).

Most of these Monogram leads alternated work at the studio with bits and walk-ons in the majors. The Bomba the Jungle Boy series, beginning in 1949, starred Johnny Sheffield, 'Boy' to Weissmuller's Tarzan. The great Walter Catlett secured six supporting gigs as conniving Mayor Colton in a series of small town family comedies headed by Raymond Walburn: Father Steps Out, Father Makes Good, Father Takes The Air et al. Beginning with Three of a Kind in 1944, Sam Katzman attempted to make a new comedy team out of big studio second bananas Billy Gilbert, Shemp Howard and 'Slapsie' Maxie Rosenbloom. The results, if reports are fair (and let's face it, they're usually not), were not joyous.

Then there was Leon Errol.
Cast adrift somewhat after the appalling death of Lupe Velez cut short the Mexican Spitfire series at RKO, he was all too happy to jump ship to Monogram for more series work in featured comedy support.
Joe Palooka, Champ (1946) cast him as conniving boxing promoter Knobby Walsh, opposite former golfer Joe Kirkwood Jr in the title role of the hick he promotes. Based on a long-running comic strip (and previously adapted for the movies in 1934 with Jimmy Durante and Stuart Erwin, to say nothing of Thelma Todd and, oddly enough, Lupe Velez), Monogram kept Errol busy in eight Palooka assignments between '46 and '50, treating him well enough to allow one of his celebrated dual roles in Joe Palooka Meets Humphrey (1950) as Lord Cecil Poole, a direct lift of his Lord Epping in the Mexican Spitfires.
The better-than-average supporting casts included the likes of Eduardo Cianelli, Elisha Cooke Jr, Joe Besser, Lionel Stander, Douglas Dumbrille, Trudy Marshall, Donald MacBride, Clarence Muse, Eddie Gribbon, and, in most of the series, Elyse Knox, a Monogram favourite best known to Universal fans as the heroine of The Mummy's Tomb.
Errol missed only one of the series during this period: 1948's Joe Palooka in Winner Takes All, for which William Frawley stepped in as Knobby Walsh, but two more were made after his tenure (he may have pulled out due to illness: he died in 1951) for which James Gleason took over the role. As for Kirkwood, who had made his way through every film of the series, the next stop was television, and twenty-five episodes of The Joe Palooka Story.

There's something especially sad about seeing an old comedian toiling on the Monogram treadmill. Incredibly, Harry Langdon wound up there on four occasions in the forties, twice in the relatively dignified capacity of guest appearance in what passed at Monogram for an all star revue and once in a similar capacity but the less salubrious environs of an East Side Kids movie, but on one occasion in his own bona fide vehicle: Double Trouble (1941) as a character called Alf Prattle in a film Monogram hailed as "a double-play on the nation's funnybone."
Today, Langdon, when remembered at all, is remembered somewhat paradoxically as a forgotten comedian, but to twenties audiences the thought of him ending up in such a position would have been as unthinkable as Chaplin doing so. Okuda's unglossed synopsis is heart-breaking: "Two British refugees (Harry Langdon and Charles Rogers) get jobs at a canned bean manufacturing plant and manage to lose a valuable gem in one of the cans."

And the list goes on. One time romantic lead Nils Asther, General Yen no less, was drinking the bitter tea of support work in a Monogram Charlie Chan come the forties. 1932 WAMPAS hot pick Mary Carlisle shifted almost immediately to Poverty Row, appearing twice for Monogram in '33 and '34 (the latter year in a college-set romantic comedy called Girl O'My Dreams alongside our old pal Creighton Chaney). Edmund Lowe clocked up four leads for the studio between '42 and '46, as a brain surgeon turned pilot, an international jewel thief, a magician turned investigator, and a gang boss in the King Brothers' notorious 1945 Dillinger. Lee Tracy, many years after his drunken decision to take a whizz from his hotel balcony on location in Mexico had cost him his shot at being an MGM major, was back in the newspaper offices, his natural home, for Monogram's High Tide (1947). Skeets Gallagher consented to support work in the eccentric (and recommended) musical trifle Zis Boom Bah (1941) and, for his pains, got his name mis-spelled in the credits. In the same movie Huntz Hall plays a character called Gallagher: they spell the character's name correctly.

But the most striking and poignant of all cases of 'fancy meeting you here' was the strange saga of Kay Francis at Monogram.
Just how did she, of all people, end up at 4376 Sunset Drive? The jury is still out on the question.
The massively elegant, languorously erotic Francis had been a seductress at Paramount before the Code and a woman's picture stalwart at Warners thereafter, a huge star to whom millions of women looked for fashion guidance and a kind of byword for effortless chic. What she wasn't was someone like Joan Crawford - so desperate to hang on to stardom that she'd rather make films like Trog than no films at all.
Whatever drew Francis to Monogram it certainly wasn't the desperate desire to hold on to a career she didn't much care about. Needless to say, Monogram were thrilled to have her, and her three films for the studio - the last films in which she ever appeared - were all bigger-than-usual hits for the company thanks to her presence in them.
The decisive factor may have been that the films would allow her to produce: she struck a co-producing deal with Jeffrey Bernerd, provider of Monogram's emotional thunderbolts and scorching exposés, and the closest thing the studio had to a woman's picture producer.
Together they did the best they could with Divorce (1945; "Should husband-stealing be a crime?"), Allotment Wives (1945; "Pretty to look at but poison to love!") and Wife Wanted (1946; "See how fake 'friendship clubs' and 'date agencies' lure the lonely-hearted into shame and extortion!").

Perhaps just a brief note of clarification here for British readers, for whom the title Allotment Wives will probably sound a good deal more hilarious than it does in America. Rest assured, this is not a drama about men who think more of their vegetable patches than their long-suffering spouses. The title refers not to weekend gardening but to a wartime scam whereby fast women would cynically marry naive servicemen so as to receive regular dependency payments while he is on service, then dump him when he returns...
... though the film was actually a quickie spin on Mildred Pierce, with Return of the Ape Man's Teala Loring as the daughter, and the duplications extending even to Kay's Joan-alike hairstyle.

That concludes my ramble through Monogram's other worlds, and I can think of no better way of signing off than returning to Okuda, who rounds off his historical overview thus:

On the whole, one would be hard-pressed to defend the Monogram output; most were dull, shoddy efforts produced by those whose sole interest was to obtain a fast buck. But as inept as the majority of their product was, Monogram apparently appealed to their target audiences, as they succeeded where so many other independents had failed. And even if most of their films don't deserve a second (or even a first) look, they should be acknowledged and catalogued, which is the primary reason for this book.

And with that he's off, dutifully cataloguing all 723 of the studio's films.
No further explanation is attempted, no real justification ever offered for why films that "don't deserve a second (or even a first) look" nonetheless "should be acknowledged and catalogued".
Some might even argue - more fool them - that if there was ever a good working definition for a body of cinema that shouldn't be acknowledged and catalogued, it is precisely the one which doesn't deserve a second (or even a first) look. Why bother cataloguing something you'll never look at again, and regret looking at in the first place? From this he makes a living?
The truth, of course, is that Okuda knows that no justification for his labours could possibly make sense for those immune to the studio's charms, and for the rest of us, none is necessary. He just knows that this is a story worth preserving. I agree wholeheartedly, and if you find his book as hard to put down as I do, chances are you're in agreement too.