Past Misdeeds: Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After some carnival impresario-like mugging of our host (and director and producer) William Castle, the film introduces its hero. Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a successful Victorian physician and specialist in the treatment of paralysis.

Unexpectedly, Cargrave receives a letter written by the love of his youth, Maude (Audrey Dalton), who would have become his wife if not for a greedy father without the proper faith in Cargrave's future career. Maude is now married to a certain Baron Sardonicus and lives in one of those imaginary Central European countries full of people with utterly incongruous accents I know and love from dozens of other movies.

In her letter, Maude invites Cargrave to her husband's estate, but gives the invitation an urgent undertone that convinces the physician to close his practice at once and run off to the continent. Why, one could think he is still in love with Maud.

In Europe, the good doctor soon notices some peculiarities. The local citizenry fears his host as if he were Dracula himself, and it doesn't take too long of an acquaintance with the Baron's lifestyle to understand why. It's the usual combination of gothic ghastliness - a sinister servant, Krall, (Oskar Homolka), a permanently locked door, the total absence of mirrors in the house, experiments with leeches on the house maid. And those are the things Cargrave experiences before he finally meets Sardonicus himself (Guy Rolfe). Sardonicus is a very unpleasant man with the peculiar habit of hiding his face behind a waxen mask and with more than a whiff of the sadist about him, as the screeching town girls he likes to secretly entertain will agree.

There's a good reason for the Baron wearing a mask, though. His face is disfigured, paralysed in a permanent deathly grin he acquired when he robbed his father's grave of the lottery ticket that bought him his title. Obviously, Sardonicus needs Cargrave's help, and he is willing to threaten his own wife to get it.

Given that Mr. Sardonicus is a William Castle production, it is self-evident that it has a gimmick every carnie barker would be proud of. When the movie made its initial matinee run, cards picturing a hand showing thumbs up or down were distributed in the audience. At a certain point shortly before the end, Castle appears on screen again, asking the audience to vote if poor old Sardonicus is in need of further punishment by presenting the appropriately positioned thumb to him. After a gleeful pretence at counting the votes, the audience then is presented with the film's only existing ending, which is of course the "more punishment" one. There are rumours that a more redemptive ending does actually exist but is now lost, but the way Castle's counting scene is set up alone should make clear that there's just no chance for that; if you think otherwise after having watched the film, I have a nice bridge to sell you.

It's not my favourite Castle gimmick - that would be the ones in The Tingler - it does however give the film a gleeful charm that helps loosen up its sometimes a bit talky proceedings.

That doesn't mean the gimmick is the movie's only virtue. Probably inspired by the success of that other great cheapskate director/producer Roger Corman's House of Usher, Castle makes a trip into gothic horror, a field he usually didn't work in. There are a few differences between the two films' approaches to their sub-genre, though, and certainly one in quality and artistic vision, the latter just not a thing very close to Castle's heart. The most important difference, however, is that Corman uses colour - or rather COLOUR! - where Castle makes a black and white film (although I doubt this was anything other than a budgetary decision). Corman's film is very much screaming "new Gothic" through this alone, while Sardonicus looks much more like Castle is going for a continuation of the visual language of the classic Universal horror film, although with the addition of open sadism and relatively daring content most of its old brethren just couldn't get away with. There's an emphasis on stylish but cheap artificiality in the sets that looks to me very much like the Universal style without the verticality of the sets the older films could afford. I'm a firm believer in artificiality as a stylistic element in films as long as the artificiality serves the building of mood, as it does here, so I found this part of Sardonicus quite satisfying.

The film's photography is equally moody and satisfying and at times unexpectedly beautiful, again showing the influence of early Universal and the cheap semi-noirs Castle started his career with, albeit with less emphasis on shadows, and more on sharp contrasts and interesting framing.

Not as satisfying are the more sensationalist moments, not because I have any ethical problems with them (which would come as a surprise, wouldn't it?), but because they don't really agree with the film's more subtle aspects. The more of Castle's films I have seen, the more I come to the conviction that the man should have trusted in his own ability to be subtle from time to time, even if he (probably rightfully so) believed his kid audience to be averse to subtlety. On the plus side, Castle's lack of restraint grants the viewer moments of silliness like the beloved flying head dream sequences you'd usually connect with cartoons.

As is often the case with Castle's films, there are also some quite memorable dialogue scenes that present a sharpness and a cynical view of humanity you don't usually expect to find in exploitation films aimed at teenagers. Ray Russell's script (based on his own novella) is particularly interesting, building a castle made of classical Gothic tropes, cheap Freudianism, extreme but thematically fitting psychology and dialogue that is a bit stiff but deeper than it strictly needs to be. One could criticise that there isn't much happening in the film, but gothic horror is all about mood and theme, with little need for plot or action beyond having everything go to pieces in the end.

The acting is also pretty good, with Ronald Lewis giving (and that might very well be a first) a sympathetic and even vaguely charismatic hero in a sub-genre that usually has no time or interest for making its heroes memorable, Guy Rolfe granting his Sardonicus just the right mixture of sadism, sarcasm, desperation and even a bit of humanity and Oskar Homolka relishing the opportunity to lay it on really thick as the sinister factotum.

Audrey Dalton on the other hand seems to struggle with most of her dialogue and is never able to make Maude an actual human being.

All in all, Mr. Sardonicus is one of the better films in Castle's filmography, especially for people with an interest in Gothic horror beyond the initial Universal wave, Corman and Bava.

Puppet Master 4 (1993)

Warning: if you’re an adherent of the mighty Sutekh (though I’m not convinced the film doesn’t actually mean Sobek), this’ll probably piss you off royally.

Wunderkind scientist Rick Myers (Gordon Currie) has retired to Puppet Master Toulon’s old hotel to develop true artificial intelligence. He doesn’t realize it, but he is actually sitting on the mother load in that regard, what with Toulon’s living puppets and his magical serum (consisting of whatever the hell the franchise entry at hand wants) just stashed away in various corners there. For some reason, Egyptian god Sutekh has already started to kill off Rick’s colleagues working in other labs with some rather impressive magical puppets of his own because Toulon’s secret was stolen from said godhood this time around (wherever will it come from in film number six?), and he seems to be too impatient to wait with killing people until he actually has a reason to. Or something.

Rick doesn’t know that at this point of proceedings, though. In fact, he only stumbles upon Toulon’s puppets and the mysterious serum once his love interest Susie (Chandra West), her friend, channeler Lauren (Teresa Hill) and Lauren’s boyfriend, Rick’s old university enemy Cameron (Ash Adams and his truly frightening hair) arrive and Lauren throws a mediumistic hissy fit when confronted with Toulon’s doll depository. Soon enough, Rick plays laser tag with some of Toulon’s puppets, and Sutekh’s killer dolls arrive. Fortunately, Toulon has calmed down a bit in his time being dead since the last few films, and so his helpful ghost provides Rick with his own little puppet army including a secret weapon known as Decapitron.

For some bizarre reason this had an R rating in the good old US of A at the time when it was thrown into video stores, but to my eyes, Jeff Burr’s Puppet Master 4 is something like the family friendly rebirth of the little franchise that could (make horrible films of high entertainment value for ages), where the puppets now – for a time – really turn into the good guys (even the film’s tag line says so), and the Big Bad is basically a less frightening Skeletor and his actually somewhat creepy puppet representatives. There’s bodily harm involved, but the body count is astonishingly low (and even lower as you might have thought once you pop the sequel in) and the tone is generally more in tune with the Sunday matinee gee-whiz idea of horror filmmaking. This isn’t a complaint, mind you, for Burr does exactly this sort thing rather well.

This Puppet Master being directed by a generally competent (and often more) guy this time around, the film isn’t as bug fuck crazy as some of the other films in the franchise. At least in comparison – we still get Guy Rolfe’s head projected onto a doll, the embarrassingly cramped and shoddy place where Sutekh lives (being a god obviously doesn’t pay) and a main character whose reaction to a bunch of living puppets with creepily sadistic weapons is pretty much the opposite of being creeped out.

Thanks to Burr – as well as acting that’s just a bit bad instead of astonishingly horrible – Puppet Master 4 actually is a high point of the franchise, with a plot that actually has a decent amount of dramatic pull, direction that’s not by David DeCoteau and therefore actually invested in making a film that’s somewhat entertaining to watch. Why the film even has a sense of pacing that works out quite well for it! Sure, it’s not the greatest horror film ever made, but it’s entertaining, and for once in the franchise, the general silliness does not seem to be caused by nobody involved giving much of a crap about doing anything beyond providing the basis on which to sell doll-shaped merchandise.

Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge (1991)

Welcome to backlot Berlin in 1941. Mild-mannered maker of living puppets Toulon (Guy Rolfe) and his beloved wife Elsa (Sarah Douglas) are putting on anti-fascist puppet plays for the little ones. Note: if your brain already starts to dribble out of your ears now because of historical idiocy, do not continue with the film.

Not surprisingly, this does awaken a degree of interest in the Toulons from Nazi circles, who also quickly cop to Toulon’s puppets actually being alive by virtue of Toulon haven’t mastered the skill of hanging up curtains. Toulon’s puppet science is exactly what one Dr Hess (Ian Abercrombie) needs to perhaps lead his project of creating viable Nazi zombie soldiers to success, so Hess would really rather get Toulon alive; GESTAPO Major Kraus (Richard Lynch) on the other hand – in the film’s most historically accurate element - just wants to kill everyone. During the resulting Dramatic Developments™, Elsa is killed by the Nazis.
Toulon manages to escape and starts on a plan to murder as many of the Nazis with the help of his puppet buddies.

Puppet Master III is a much more entertaining film than it has any right to be, more often than not managing to surmount a cornucopia of flaws by the sheer power of dubious yet awesome ideas. The main strike against it is of course that it is directed by David DeCoteau, a guy who could not and still can not shoot anything decently, like the living return of William Beaudine. There’s the expected aura of vague disinterest surrounding every scene that is certainly not helped by the fact DeCoteau can’t even squeeze in any of his trademark as-much-as-possible nudity of extremely vapid looking young men, which usually are the only times when his films come alive. Not ideal for a purported director of horror films.

As is his wont, DeCoteau does his best to drag down even the most exciting bits of the film through the sheer power of visual blandness, an impossible number of needlessly cramped shots (as if this thing were exclusively filmed on one meter by one meter sets), no clue about atmosphere and so on, and so forth. Just imagine a film made by someone without any visual imagination or much of a sense for drama or fun, and you get the drift.

Additionally, there are also flaws DeCoteau isn’t responsible for: the budget of a Full Moon production of 1991 just isn’t one that could provide for a decent period piece, so everything looks even cheaper and shoddier than a comparable Full Moon film taking place in the then and there would have; the script neglects to truly capitalize on some of its great ideas and tends to add meandering to the direction’s dragging; I’ll grant the thing its historical stupidity for being made by Americans and only aiming for a pulp Nazi thing anyhow.
After this list, I’m rather surprised by how much I did in fact enjoy this thing. But then, what the film’s got going for it is easily understood. For one, it’s the sheer pulpy fun of the killer puppet versus Nazis plot, something whose basic weird energy even DeCoteau’s direction can never completely sabotage – too huge is the power of seeing our favourite killer dolls shooting, slicing, leeching, drilling and so on and so forth Nazis, too ridiculously over the top is Richard Lynch doing the naziest of all Nazis. There’s a delightful sense of the weird and the perverse running through many of the film’s details (which ironically are also the parts of the film I wish the script had done more with, but you take what you can get). This does, after all, feature a scene where our perhaps ever so slightly mad hero uses the life force (soul?) of his dead wife to turn the doll he gave to her to commemorate their love into a leech vomiting (while making sex noises) killer puppet with a much better hairstyle and dress sense than before. That isn’t just Weird but also the kind of potent metaphor for the failings of the human heart you can only do in films as this which are absolutely not beholden to good taste, sense, or sensibility. Toulon’s explanation of the origin of his other dolls as housing the souls of his Nazi-murdered friends fits nicely in there too, and even though the film is too dumb to ever realize how horrible and sad this idea actually is, it’s still there, and for my taste strong enough to make up for many of the film’s failings.

Your mileage may of course vary, but I find myself drawn to the film’s shameless – and at this point in the Full Moon puppet world still blessedly untouched by irony – strangeness, its pulpy nature (even if it is pulp with hugely reduced energy thanks to its director), and perhaps even the all-around tackiness of much of the production.

The Stranglers of Bombay (1959)

Indian during the times of the East India Company. Large numbers of people are disappearing every year without a trace, but since these people are Indians and of no commercial interest, the authorities, such as they are, don't care about them. At least, most of them don't. The rather decent colonialist Captain Harry Lewis (Guy Rolfe), not a man willing to just dismiss tragedies like the disappearance of the family of his servant Ram Das (Tutte Lemkow) years ago, has been assembling data regarding the disappearances for years, but - also thanks to the complete disinterest of his superiors in the matter - has only come to the rather vague suspicion that a cult could be responsible for the disappearances.

Unlike Lewis, the audience knows right from the title screen that the disappearances are murders, or rather ritual sacrifices, committed by the Thuggee cult of Kali, an influential and secret group that counts among its members the former regional ruler (Marne Maitland), as well as the potter from around the corner. Too bad nobody gives a toss.

However, once whole caravans of trade goods begin to disappear, and the British traders become rather angry, Lewis's boss Colonel Henderson (Andrew Cruickshank) starts to take an interest in the matter. Lewis hopes that Henderson will charge him with the necessary investigation, but is sorely disappointed when the freshly arrived upper class twat Captain Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson) gets the job based on his superior qualifications - that is, having gone to the right school and being the son of an old friend of Henderson's.

Even when Lewis by chance finally acquires some evidence that could actually get the investigation somewhere, Connaught-Smith dismisses it and him out of sheer classist bull-headedness. At this point, however, the case has become so personal for Lewis he decides to rather step down from his position in the East India Company immediately and make his inquiries as a private citizen than to cope with this bullshit any longer while people around him are dying.

Even though Terence Fisher's The Stranglers of Bombay will never win the coveted award of "Denis's favourite Hammer non-horror movie" it still is a very entertaining, often tight and exciting, film from a studio and a director pretty much incapable of making anything boring. In this particular case, lurid pulp adventure fantasy - the existence of an actual thuggee cult of the size and type parts of the colonial authorities bragged about destroying being rather dubious -, researched historical fact (this is the curious case of an historical adventure movie with an actual historical consultant in the credits), and thriller and horror elements make for a rather interesting mix and enable Fisher to stage the always loved "native rituals", some rather low-key action, as well as giving him the opportunity to include moments that would not be out of place in a straight horror movie. Of the latter, there's especially a scene of surprisingly explicit revenge eye-gouging that would have found a place of honour in any of Hammer's or Corman's pieces of Gothic horror.

Hammer's historical adventures are often a bit more thoughtful than they strictly needed to be, and Stranglers is no exception. At least, it's not the expected thing for a film made in 1959 to suggest that the East India Company's politics in India were morally dubious, and at best consisted of ignoring all problems of the areas they supposedly governed as long as their money flow wasn't hindered. It's even more unexpected to see this sort of critique uttered this clearly. This being a Hammer film, the evils of colonialism are also connected to the ineffectuality and plain badness of the upper classes; I'm a bit disappointed the script didn't also put a cowardly vicar in.

Of course, despite its at least in part quite progressive politics, The Stranglers is also still a film where all Indian roles are played by white people in brownface, where the only mixed race character is a cult member, and where the "Indians" who aren't evil may be treated with a certain degree of respect - they are generally persons with actual motivations - but are still treated as persons below the British characters by the film. Still, for a film made in 1959, especially an adventure movie made for an audience that probably couldn't care less about these things, The Stranglers is admirably willing to be complicated.

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On WTF: Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Please imagine me grinning and chomping on a cigar.

Find out what happened when the lovely William Castle was trying to catch some of that Corman gothic magic - alas without Vincent Price - in my review of Castle's Mr. Sardonicus on WTF-Film!

 

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