In short: The Monster Club (1981)

Horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (disappointingly not Chetwynd-Hayes himself, but at least he’s played by John Carradine) offers a an ailing stranger (Vincent Price) whatever he may need. Turns out the guy’s a vampire called Eramus, who is very thankful for the spontaneous blood donation. He does leave the man alive, though. Because Eramus is a big fan of the writer and feels he owes him something, he takes him to a club visited exclusively by monsters. Between bouts of painful comedy and full musical New Wave-y numbers, the writer gets told three stories.

But, unlike with other horror anthology movies, I’m not going to talk about them in any detail, for if you inflict these lame ducks of stories on yourself, you do at least deserve to get a pained surprise out of them. Which is pretty much the best you can hope for, for the film wastes the considerable talents of many of the people involved in it very efficiently.

The Monster Club is sometimes treated as the last of the Amicus horror anthologies but since it isn’t an actual Amicus production, I find it better to treat it as some sort of sad epilogue made after the fact that pretty clearly suggests the time of the somewhat gentle horror anthology in the Amicus style was over when this was made. That it had to be some of the old Amicus talent – producer Milton Subotsky, director Roy Ward Baker, various actors – doing another Chetwynd-Hayes anthology to deliver this unwanted proof is rather sad.

In this context, I can’t even bring myself to make jokes about the film’s numerous failings – which still makes me funnier than the film’s jokes are – but let’s at least list some of them. There’s the terrible inclusion of the musical numbers in what feels like a desperate attempt at selling a soundtrack album nobody asked for that has no point, fits Ward Baker’s generally old-fashioned direction style not at all, and sucks the bits of interest out of the film the tediously told stories themselves couldn’t quite destroy. The film also shows a terrible fascination with the worst part of Chetwynd-Hayes as a writer: charting the various ways in which monsters might mate and giving the products idiotic names, categorizing things that can only suffer from too much categorization, as if the man were his own August Derleth. Even for someone like me who does enjoy a bit of hokeyness in his horror, this is just too much.

The actors are mostly wasted; the mugging contest between Carradine and Price is theoretically the film’s best feature, but the writing’s so terrible (script by Edward and Valeria Abraham), even the indefatigable Price seems to barely contain embarrassed giggles.

Well, at least somebody got some laughs out of this.

In short: House of Dracula (1945)

Erle C. Kenton’s House of Dracula is the last adventure of the classic Universal monsters before they finished their decline in the most traumatic manner possible, by meeting Abbot and Costello. It’s not a terribly good one, as last hurrahs goes, but it’s also not as bad as it could be. At the very least, House of Dracula (a film not at all concerning the house of Dracula, not even metaphorically, of course) is a watchable and mostly entertaining film if you go in with the appropriate lowered expectations and do have a degree of patience and sympathy for this stage of Universal’s development.

The film’s main problem, as always with the monster mash phase of Universal, is a terrible script that is episodic for no good reason, can’t be bothered to make even a lick of sense, and seems afraid of doing anything even vaguely new with its characters. So Lon Chaney Jr. whines, John Carradine’s – bad but not as bad as in his last outing – Dracula maybe has evil plans or not, and Frankenstein’s Monster (this time around Glenn Strange who is no Karloff, nor a Chaney Jr.) wakes up for a thirty second rampage. The more interesting and sort of new elements of the plot and cast, consisting of actually friendly Mad Scientist Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) turning into an alter ego I can only dub Evilmann while his sympathetic pretty hunchbacked assistant Nina (Jane Adams) nearly becomes the film’s heroine, could have made for a nice film of their own – particularly since Kenton suddenly shows himself as a stylish old-style Universal director whenever Evilmann is on screen. Alas, this is late period Universal, so the usual tired creature pool and the Jekyll and Hyde plot rob each other of the screen time they’d need to breathe.

The Nesting (1981)

During the production of her newest novel, writer Lauren Cochrane (Robin Groves), never exactly a picture of mental health it seems, has developed a serious case of agoraphobia. She decides that the best way to cope with her condition is for her to move from her native New York to the country for a time.

Out in the boons with her friend Mark (Christopher Loomis), Lauren feels strangely drawn to a place where she finds an old, dilapidated, yet beautiful mansion that looks exactly like the house she had in mind when she was writing her latest book, "The Nesting". Fascinated, Lauren decides that the house is to be her new country home. The owner, a senile old coot named Colonel LeBrun (John Carradine in a horrible state) would be quite willing to rent it, yet for some reason, taking one look at Lauren is enough for him to suffer a stroke that leaves him speechless and unconscious for most of the rest of the movie; fortunately, his grandson Daniel (Michael David Lally), rogue physicist, is there to take care of the renting business.

In a turn of events that'll come as no surprise to anyone but Lauren, her new dream home leaves something to be desired. Once the writer has moved in, her nights are disturbed by nightmares and peculiar dreams full of sexual undercurrents, grasping hands and a see-through Gloria Grahame. Initially, these dreams make the writer quite happy, for she has never been able to remember her dreams at all, yet now does so quite clearly. That happiness soon gives place to hysteria, when it becomes less and less clear to Lauren that her dreams actually only are dreams, and not ghostly apparitions. Soon enough, these ghosts find their first victims.

If you know him at all, you'll probably know The Nesting's director Armand Weston for a series of exceedingly dark and intense porn movies made in a time and place when hardcore porn directors had ambitions to make actual movies that just happened to include lots of sex, and weren't at all afraid to make sex look anything but enticing. As every ambitious porn director must, Weston also tried his hand at the horror genre, resulting in this, a pretty strange mix of haunted house movie, evil country yokel film, Southern Gothic not actually taking place in the South, and psychological horror that just might be the most Italian horror movie of 1981 not made by Italians or in Italy.

During its first thirty minutes or so, I thought I had The Nesting pegged as a cleverly directed (say what you will about Weston, but the man knows how to frame scenes so that they show the mental state of his characters) haunted house movie of the type where the haunting and the inner life of the main character are so inextricably entwined there'll be no telling what's supernatural and what mental illness. Sure enough, that's a card the film will continue to play later on, too, as well as trying its hand at pretending to be the story of a woman cleansing herself from post-natal trauma, but at that point, it will have already exploded into a series of increasingly bizarre scenes of screaming and mild mayhem that start with the physically dubious death of Lauren's psychiatrist (it's all very Freudian, really), make a little stop over at the house of a mad country person, guest star a flying cradle, and so on and so forth until its quite impossible to make out what the film really is supposed to be about, or for what kind of mood Weston is going. There's an explanation for most of the film's spooks late in the film, but the reason for Lauren's haunting and the way it actually plays out don't make a lick of sense when brought together, really putting The Nesting on the same level of merry what-the-hell-ness as, say, the films of Lucio Fulci.

Apart from the American movie's much lower level of gore and blood, Fulci's body of work truly is the best comparison I can come up with: there's the same love of sideways melodrama, people acting so weird they are more embodied mental states than characters, actors that can go from terrible to very convincing from one scene to the next, batty dialogue, plot lines disappearing and reappearing out of and into nowhere, explanations that fall ever so slightly short of making sense, flourishes (like Daniel's physicist job) that don't seem to have a reason to exist, and supernatural attacks often disturbing through their wrong-ness. And just like with Fulci, it's all presented in stops and starts, yet imbued with a deep, lingering sense for creating mood, an atmosphere of decay that is only increased by the film's logical missteps and weird pacing.

Now, Weston's film isn't quite as good as those of the maestro at his best. The mood is not quite lingering enough, and the weirdness not quite outré enough to keep a viewer as deeply engaged as Fulci's films can. However, for a film that was probably shot on a shoe-string budget to make use of a fantastic looking haunted house somebody in the production team stumbled upon (I'm speculating wildly here, so if I'm wrong, don't sue me), The Nesting is quite the thing. It's also proof - if anybody needed more of it - that US directors can succeed at the whole "horror as illogical, over-excited mood piece" approach to filmmaking nearly as well as we Europeans do, if they only apply themselves.

 

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Hairy Beasts: Bigfoot (1969? 1970?)

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may turn living matter to stone) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, Feroz Khan's chest and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

But there's time for that later. Now, follow me into the wooded mountains of Nowhere, USA, where a trio of bigfoots - bigfeet as we call them in Europe - is kidnapping women, stripping them down to their underwear (or indescribable-wear), and tying them to trees.

First, the hairy gang kidnaps pilot and exposition fairy Joi Landis (Joi Lansing), then they steal Chris (Judy Jordan), "the girl" of kinda-sorta hippie biker Rick (Christopher Mitchum, still young enough to try and move his face). After getting short thrift by the local sheriff, Rick decides to mount his own rescue expedition, getting unexpected help by "comedic" Southern traveling salesmen Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine in his embarrassing phase) and Elmer Briggs (look, it's Robert Mitchum's little brother John, sporting the sort of facial hair that would nominate this filmlet for the Hairy Beasts project even without the bigfeet!). Now, Jasper may plan on catching himself a bigfoot and get rich through it, but a guy with a gun is a guy with a gun, right?

Turns out hunting bigfeet is more difficult than Rick thought, and it'll need all of his kinda-sorta hippie biker friends, some dy-no-mite, and a lot of walking through the woods to rescue the girls.

Not all that unexpectedly, the month of hairy beasts began a bit painful down here when I thought to myself: "would-be interspecies rapist bigfoot, two Mitchums, bikers, and the living corpse of John Carradine, whatever could go wrong?", and then proceeded to watch Bigfoot, or, as I'd rather call it, Various Groups Of People Walk, Ride, Drive, Or Run Through The Woods Forever.

Now, as even irregular readers of my musings will realize, frequent exposure to films like (the glorious) Don't Go In The Woods…Alone has helped me build up quite a high tolerance for the - oftentimes frightening - sub-genre of the walking-through-the-woods low low budget horror movie, so I feel pretty secure in surviving anything such a film can throw at me without falling asleep. However, Bigfoot is a movie clearly out to show people like me where our limits lie, featuring fifteen (warning: numbers may not be quite exact) boring scene of people moving through the woods for every two boring, static scenes of old coots in front of cheap sets (hello, former western star Ken Maynard in a role that could have been cut like just about everybody else's) mumbling irrelevant nonsense at each other. It's all a bit much, or rather, a bit much of nothing even for my hardened tastes.

It does not help the film's watchability that parts of it seem to be meant as comedic - though I dare not venture a guess which parts specifically beyond the painfully unfunny scenes between Carradine and the elder Mitchum - but as a matter of fact only work as a laxative. Nor are things improved by an acid rock soundtrack that generally has less to do with what happens on screen than the soundtrack of a Los Campeones Justicieros film. Bigfoot is even missing the obligatory soft rock theme song all bigfoot movies are supposed to include (see every other bigfoot movie made in the 60s and 70s).

And even when "director" and "writer" Robert F. Slatzer decides to throw a cult movie fan a bone by including a scene of one of his ratty bigfeet wrestling a bear (I think that's what's happening there, at least - the VHS sourced print I watched wasn't exactly a beacon of clarity), or of Joi Lansing calmly expositing SCIENCE! about the bigfoot as the missing link while tied to a tree and poked by a human/bigfoot hybrid, or the appearance of the big boss bigfoot ("the eighth wonder of the world", Carradine enthuses), he's filming these scenes with such an utter sense of apathy, it's exceedingly difficult to keep oneself awake.

Fortunately, Joi Lansing screeches so much and so loudly during the film's grand finale I woke up again in time. Hooray.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,robert f. slatzer,john carradine,joi lansing,christopher mitchum,horror,the pain,reviews,hairy beasts

The Big Muscle Tussle: Las Vampiras (1969)

aka The Vampire Girls

(This write-up is based on the original Mexican, Spanish language version of the film, which - as far as I've been told - differs considerably from the English language one.)

Throughout February, the members of M.O.S.S. have decided to bring some meat onto their exoskeletons by taking a look at film's most beefcake-y heroines and heroes. After the agents of M.O.S.S. have - among others - already descended into bloody pits of horror, examined the abs and pecs of Italian versions of Greek and biblical demi-gods, and put Dara Singh under a microscope, what better next point of investigation is there than a film featuring the most stylish Mexican luchador, the incredible Mil Mascaras?

Mil Mascaras (Mil Mascaras!), wrestler, pilot of small airplanes and masked fighter for good, makes, as is his habit when not fighting mummies, accidental contact with the world of the Weird. First, he nearly crashes into a driving car that lacks a driver, unless it was driven by the bats that fly from its window when Mil investigates. Then, a bit later, the African wrestling champion - subtly dubbed Black Man - Mil was supposed to fight disappears from his locked dressing room without his clothes, with a few bats fleeing the scene of the crime once Mil has broken down that pesky locked door.

While his manager/assistant/boyfriend (I dare you to watch the scene where Mil and the guy are driving around looking at each other with corny lovebird eyes and not think "boyfriend") and a frightfully incompetent cop (Dagoberto Rodriguez) mock and laugh even when the plot-relevant news show the cop insists on watching while sitting in Mil's living room shows a report about a downed plane from Transylvania that was left by a bunch of bats instead of a pilot and passengers, our hero knows what's up: the vampire threat has returned to Mexico, and if the police won't do anything, a luchador will.

Mil Mascaras is all too right with his analysis too. There are in fact vampires at large, or, to be more precise, vampire women dressed in leotards lead by Aura (Marta Romero) who are out to take revenge on humanity for all the killed male vampires, which, I have to say, is pretty good motivation. If they can get new male blood in the process - preferred is the blood of athletes, it seems - it's just icing on the cake.

The only male vampire left is Branus (John Carradine), a doddering old fart Aura keeps in a golden cage in her throne room, so it's understandable the vampirettes are seeking more pleasant male company.

After the audience has learned a bit about vampire politics, it's back to Mil, who - after some research that costs his secretary Alicia her life, but teaches us that vampires need a specific sort of blood and a fitting climate to survive, has found a graveyard once suspected of vampiric activity (it's one for atheists and evil-doers, you see, so there are no crosses there). There he meets roving reporter and wearer of felt hats Carlos Mayer (Pedro Armendariz Jr, for no good reason given higher placement in the credits than Mil). Carlos has come to the same conclusions as our hero, so they decide to unite their vampire-fighting powers. Their partnership doesn't start off too well, though, for the first thing they do is accidentally (well, kinda, for what did they expect would happen when they break down a wall with bat noises coming from behind?) freeing Veria (Maria Duval) the widow of Count Dracula himself from imprisonment.

Veria soon finds her way to the other vampires and starts a subplot about her and Aura fighting about control over vampiredom. Their big political difference: Veria wants to reinstate Branus (who, as will later be revealed, only fakes part of his dementia) as king of the vampires, while Aura really prefers to find someone a bit more attractive and less pompous. Someone, like, say, a certain masked wrestler, perhaps? He is a perfect specimen after all.

Among the multitude of Mexican masked wrestlers who have had screen adventures of varying quality and insanity, Mil Mascaras has always been my favourite, for he unites the (maybe dubious) charisma of his peers with a quite peerless dress sense. As the connoisseur of lucha cinema knows well, Mil takes his "thousand masks" moniker very seriously, and not only changes his mask regularly and to great effect (my personal favourite in the film at hand being the mask with a circle pattern - only a real hero can get away with literally painting a target on his face) but also has some incredible fashion to go with his masks. Mil's preference for things like torero jackets, glitter and blindingly intense colours either make him the dandy or the glam rocker of the lucha set; both are roles deserving admiration, and if I were in the habit of throwing underwear at beefcake-y guys, Mil would be the one I'd try to hit. Damn you, heterosexuality.

In other words, if one ever had any doubt that part of the appeal of musclemen like the heroes of our theme month is purely and simply sex, one Mil Mascaras movie will make things clear; if one ever had any doubt that muscleman can be stylish and cool, one Mil Mascaras movie will get rid of that, too.

For people less in love with lucha cinema and Mil Mascaras (barbarians, I call them), the big selling point of Las Vampiras will be the appearance of John Carradine, already right in the middle of his embarrassing phase. It's difficult to say much positive about anything the man did at that point of his career, but in Las Vampiras case, I can at least admit that he's putting so much misguided enthusiasm and scenery-chewing self-irony in, it's difficult not to approve. Carradine's interpretation (one might suspect self portrait) of the classic cape-wearing vampire as someone wavering between unruly senile wreck and dirty old man - with a whiff of the alcoholic, of course - has a somewhat disturbing effect. At times, it's brilliantly funny and fun, but in other moments, when the playing of being a senile wreck and Carradine actually being down and out become hard to distinguish, it turns into something I found difficult to watch without cringing, and that did disturb the sense of silly fun I got from the rest of the movie. In a very different film, I would assume Carradine's performance, and the whole gender set-up of the film to be consciously subversive of traditional gender roles as seen in horror movies, but really, who am I kidding here?

For this sort of consideration cannot stand up to the fact that this is first and foremost a classic lucha monster mash, just one where the producers could afford what was left of a former horror star to mug a bit for the camera.

Fortunately and of course, there's nothing at all wrong with Las Vampiras being what it is, especially since it's not just a lucha movie, but a lucha movie made by Filmica Vergara, a Mexican genre production house whose films always had especially low production values, but which also more often than not used these production values to achieve a mood of the bizarre, creating (probably accidentally) a form of cardboard surrealism that holds all of the promises the bare concept of something like lucha cinema makes, yet the genre itself not always fulfils.

So this just isn't a film where Mil Mascaras and some reporter guy have a big fight against beefy vampire slaves, but one where said vampire slaves are dressed up in (literally) red shirts and berets - for no discernible reason, yet to my great delight; a film where a big ritual to find out which of the two main vampire women are going to lead vampiredom from now on consists of a prolonged jazz dance number with a lot of wing-like arm-waving, followed by a torch duel; a film where half of the vampire women like to stand on pedestals, staring into the void, just waving their arms slowly up and down, up and down, whenever something exciting happens (now that I think about it, they are a lot like Harinam Singh's vampire women without the chairs they "fly" on); a film where the vampire king's coffin (all the coffins here look particularly comfy inside) can be recognized by the big fat golden (cardboard or wooden) bat sitting on it; a film where a masked wrestler shoots silver bullets at the fakest of fake bats. In short, a work of deep, ridiculous beauty.

I could now begin to complain about the problematic construction of the film's plot (like the way it wastes Maura Monti in a few scenes as Armendariz' girlfriend, whose only reason to exist is so that Carradine has somebody to kidnap and Armendariz somebody to kiss after the film's climax), the static direction of Federico Curiel (whose films often are shot this way, unless he had one of this creative weeks, which did happen from time to time), or the sometimes clever, sometimes jumpy and rough editing, but the film's technical flaws do nothing at all to ruin the sense of pure joy I get from Las Vampiras, so I won't.

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,reviews,the big muscle tussle,federico curiel,lucha,horror,mil mascaras,john carradine,maria duval,marta romero,maura monti,pedro armendariz jr

Three Films Make A Post: in her eyes...DESIRE! in her veins...the blood of a MONSTER!

Gantz - Perfect Answer (2011): In the second Gantz movie (that in truth is the second half of one very long movie) Director Shinsuke Sato still ignores the fanservice part of the manga he is adapting, and concentrates on the characters and a lot of melodrama that's from time to time broken up by pretty fantastic fight scenes, as well as by a handful of pleasantly weird flourishes. The general tenor in reviews of the film seems to be that there just aren't enough of the fight scenes, but I really prefer the two tour-de-force set-pieces the film does have to the "more blood, more tits" approach; you know, there's nothing wrong with trying to stay classy. The problem the film has in my eyes is one of pacing - it takes a bit too much time to get going (and a bit too much time to actually end once the plot is over and done with), and then hasn't quite enough time left to develop the huge swathes of manga it has decided to adapt. I still enjoy the two Gantz films quite a bit more than most films of the blockbuster league, though.

The Black Sleep (1956): In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea to make a Gothic horror movie about the usual mad science stuff featuring Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and a heartbreakingly ill looking Bela Lugosi. In practice, it's one of those films where most of the old stars are just carted out for a few minutes to remind the audience of better films, and the only one of them with a substantial role - Rathbone as the mad scientist - has the difficult job to not upstage Herbert Rudley too much while still acting like the prototype of Cushing's Baron Frankenstein.

The film's main problem is that there really isn't anything remarkable about it except for Rathbone's performance - the script is tame and lacking in imagination, Reginald Le Borg's direction is characteristically bland, and little happens that could not have happened in a film twenty years earlier in exactly the same way. "Pure retro" was an approach to art with as little power in 1956 as it has today.

Investigation Into The Invisible World (2002): I know, it's an incongruous position for someone like me, who always praises Werner Herzog's documentaries for their respect for even the strangest people and ideas, to take, but I find the same approach taken by Jean-Michel Roux talking to a bunch of eso crackpots and schizophrenics in Iceland pretty offensive. It might have something to do with Roux's visual style too, or rather the way he tries to turn Iceland into the cover of an Enya record (though at least the film's score by Biosphere and Hector Zazou is much above the Enya-level) using post-production effects so aggressively manipulative I was at first thinking something was wrong with my DVD player. To me, the whole project feels like kitsch with pretentions to be art, which is always the worst kind of kitsch as well as the worst kind of art.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,french movies,in short,sf,action,horror,gothic,documentary,shinsuke sato,reginald le borg,jean-michel roux,bela lugosi,lon chaney jr,basil rathbone,john carradine

House of Frankenstein (1944)

Mad scientist and Frankenstein fanboy Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) has been incarcerated for trying to put a human brain into a dog (or was it the other way round?) and has been in jail for fifteen years now. At least, prison life has brought him the acquaintance of a proper hunchbacked assistant, a certain Daniel (J. Carrol Naish), who'd do just about anything for any cackling madman promising him a new and improved body.

Really bad weather frees the duo from its imprisonment, and shortly thereafter they meet Professor Lampini (George Zucco) and his mobile chamber of horrors. As luck will have it, the good Professor drives around with the skeleton of Count Dracula (John Carradine), just waiting to lose its stake and come back to life again. When Lampini shows to be unsympathetic to a change of his travelling destination to somewhere convenient to Niemann, Daniel strangles the man and his master and he take over the chamber of horrors.

Niemann plans to use Dracula to take his revenge on the people responsible for his imprisonment, and surely, the friendly vampire does kill the first of Niemann's enemies for him. Alas, the poor bloodsucker doesn't survive the following coach chase (don't ask). At least our hero madmen escape.

Niemann's next stop is the beautiful village of Frankenstein, where he hopes to find the research notes of his idol. Before he and Daniel can visit the obligatory castle ruin, Daniel falls for "beautiful gypsy girl" Ilonka (Elena Verdugo), who is fastly added to the entourage. I'm sure this will end will.

Later at the castle ruin, Niemann fails at his spot hidden roll, though, and has to employ the help of Larry "The Wolfman" Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who - like Frankenstein's monster - just happens to lie frozen in the ruins of Frankenstein's castle. For a promise of being freed from the werewolf curse, Larry is more than willing to show Niemann what he's looking for.

Afterwards, the merry band - now also including the unconscious monster, for no reason I could fathom - travels to Niemann's home lab, so that Larry can whine a lot and through his awesome power of whining about killing people instead of trying to actually keep himself from doing it, charm Ilonka, Daniel can get jealous and Niemann can plan the big brain switcheroo of '44 - something about putting the monster's brain in Talbot's body and putting Talbot's brain into some anti-climactically caught enemy of Niemann's. Of course, there will come torch-wielding villagers.

House of Frankenstein is the premier example of the late period of Universal Studio's classic monster films, when nobody behind the camera, and certainly nobody from the business side, cared about making watchable films anymore and instead threw any old crap together they thought they could get away with. The order of the day was to cynically milk the last pennies out of franchises none of the involved had ever cared about and an audience the studio obviously loathed.

Viewed from that perspective (and with knowledge of how dreadful most of Universal's genre films of the period were), it is a small wonder House of Frankenstein turned out as entertaining as it is.

The film's entertainment factor certainly has nothing at all to do with the terrible script by Edward T. Lowe Jr. Lowe just randomly throws all Universal horror clichés at the viewer as if the writer had never even heard of words like "character motivation" or "plotting". The script is episodic, sloppy, and makes less sense than the average Dardano Sacchetti script. Obviously, seeing the absence of even the simplest bit of artfulness, concepts like thematic unity between the episodes making up the film are right out. What is most disappointing here, though, is that there is no interaction between the monsters at all; it's strictly one monster after the other. You could think nobody responsible even realized having the monsters interact with each other would be rather fun. Instead, you get a monster meet-up in which the monsters don't meet.

On the plus side, the film is rather energetic and really throws a lot of stuff into little more than an hour of running time, so much of it in fact that some of it just has to be fun, at least for people who like the clichés of classical Universal horror.

I'm not too enamoured of Erle C. Kenton's direction either. Sure, Kenton wasn't the worst of Universal's directors at the time, which is to say that he sometimes accidentally manages to shoot an atmospheric scene, but compare his work here to Val Lewton's contemporary productions at RKO, and you'll see how little thought and care has been put into House of Frankenstein (don't compare the scripts, or you'll want to cry).

Where the people behind the camera don't give a toss, the actors step up to the occasion and do the only thing anyone could do given material like this. They start to chew the scenery with as much melodramatic vigour as possible. Well, at least Karloff and Naish - troopers that they are - do. Carradine doesn't have more than a guest role and just isn't Bela Lugosi (and therefore somewhat boring), while Chaney Jr. is hurt by the script's idiotic assumption that anyone watching will care about his character's plight or the "tragic" love triangle.

Still, having said all that, as a train wreck, House of Frankenstein can be a lot of fun, if a viewer can keep her love for those Universal films which were actually good (or even just passable) at bay. Watching it, I was swinging back and forth between two very different emotions. The first was sadness about what little respect the film showed for some of the early high points of US horror filmmaking that were among its predecessors. The second amusement about the campy excess of it all, something I would have found easier if this hadn't been a Universal film, but something thrown together by enthusiastic but misguided fans of the original films.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,boris karloff,lon chaney jr,j. carrol naish,john carradine

In short: The Unearthly (1957)

Dr. Charles Conway (John Carradine) runs a small, private institution for the slightly troubled. The good doctor is not as kindly as he might seem on first contact, though. He is (surprise!) in fact a mad scientist who only takes in patients nobody will miss and uses them for his immortality experiments. Just implant an artificial gland, apply electricity and you have…Lobo (Tor Johnson). Oops.

Lobo is actually one of Conway's more successful experiments and makes one hell of a factotum ("Time to go bed now!") but he still isn't exactly what the scientist and his (of course mightily in love with the incomparable Carradine - see "Oedipus") assistant Dr. Gilchrist (Marilyn Buferd) are after.

Fortunately, a local physician is quite helpful at delivering young, healthy patients without a family as experimental subjects, so Conway can do science whenever he wants. The newest house delivery is Grace (Allison "50 Foot Woman" Hayes), and boy, does she leave Conway drooling for quite a different thing than science. Even better, chance plays the escaped convict Mark Houston (Myron Healey) right into the doctor's hand. This type of men can be easily blackmailed into cooperation. Or he could be, if he didn't fall for Grace as well. Combine the emotional incentive with nosiness, and you have a problem for our mad scientist.

The Unearthly is a mildly interesting mad scientist yarn, relatively competently directed by Boris Petroff/Brooke L. Peters, but lacking in cleverness or idiocy to be completely convincing. Why people regularly put it on lists with "the worst films" isn't quite clear to me, though. Isn't that the place where Michael Bay films go to die?

The cast is a small festival of 50s monster movie darlings doing their respective things; Tor shambles and moans, Carradine seems conscious and gets one or two good rants in, Hayes is convincing and attractive in that stiff 50s movie manner, and Healey - usually a tough bad guy in his movies - seems to relish his atypical hero turn. Surprisingly, the film even does a vaguely clever stunt casting trick with Healey.

What the film shows of mutants and monsters looks not bad at all, but I can't say that it makes good use of them. It's certainly nice and humane to have the "monsters" until the finale only as victims, but it isn't exactly exciting to watch. In the end, the main problem with the "monsters" is their lack of screen time.

Instead of the goodies, the film concentrates a bit too much on the cat and mouse game between Carradine and Healey for its own good. The writing just isn't sharp enough to carry this aspect of the film, so what should be tense feels just a bit limp.

Having said that, The Unearthly still has enough okay moments to recommend it to friends of cheap 50s monster movies (and who isn't one?) - Carradine is doing GLAND SCIENCE!, after all - you just need to keep your expectations in check. A forgotten classic this ain't.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,horror,tor johnson,john carradine,allison hayes,myron healey

In short: Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)

Mary (Cristina Ferrare) is an American painter living and working in Mexico. When she's not painting her slightly disturbing paintings or dodging the advances of her lesbian gallerist Greta (Helena Rojo), she sneaks around, drugs strangers (mostly men) and drinks their blood. Her last victim wasn't such a swell choice, though. The man was working for the American government, so now it's not only a local police man (Enrique Lucero) with a stick and a bad temper trying to solve her murders, but also an "Inspector from the FBI" (Arthur Hansel), whatever that might be.

At about the same time, Mary meets the spectacularly innocent drifter Ben (David Young). They fall in love and could have a nice life - after all, the cops aren't very bright and Mary's victims total strangers to her - if not for Mary's propensity to get especially blood-thirsty when emotionally disturbed which will cost poor Greta her life.

And one shouldn't forget the strange masked and black-gloved man (John Carradine's stunt double, sometimes even John Carradine himself) whose diet has a lot in common with Mary's and who starts to follow her around with ominous intent.

Mary may have been directed by Juan Lopez Moctezuma, the man who made the screamingly mad and nonsensical Alucarda, but if you are hoping for a similarly hysterical piece you will be disappointed.

This film has much more in common with a slightly costlier version of the deliberately paced, weird and bizarrely clever independent US horror of the 70s. Neither Mary the film nor Mary the character are in much of a rush to reach any goal or plot point directly, instead a large part of the movie consists of building mood through potent nature shots and Cristina Ferrare's weird sort of charisma and being quite circumspect about anything else. Which turns out to be not a bad directorial decision, since what little plot is there is, isn't as Interesting as Ferrare or nature.

Now (and stop me if you've heard this song from me before), I wouldn't call Ferrare a great actress, not even a great bad actress, but she has the strange, zoned out kind of allure you can often find in actresses and actors in films of this type. Her weaknesses don't come into play much. The rest of the actors is just somehow there - nobody's doing a bad job, yet nobody else is truly memorable.

Moctezuma as a director is pretty good at this mood building thing and pretty bad at a well-paced plot. Of course, you shouldn't go into 70s low budget horror with expectations of the latter, so I was not disappointed by the lack of narrative flow.

There's more than enough to keep one interested here. A slightly detached mood, some fine things to look at, two or three suspenseful scenes, a handful of neat ideas, John Carradine being an evil action hero and a classically 70s horror ending are really more than I'd need to recommend a movie.

 

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,american movies,john carradine,juan lopez moctezuma,in short,horror

In short: Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966)

A vampire (John Carradine, in his drunken stupor phase) travels through the American West. When he's hitch-hiking on a stagecoach, an older woman makes the mistake of showing him a photo of her daughter Betty (Melinda Plowman). Obviously, Carradinpire suffers from that old vampiric malaise, the wanting to make any young woman whose photo you see your vampire bride sickness, and "cleverly" arranges an Indian attack on the coach to kill the woman and her traveling companion, whose role as the "long lost relative from the other coast" he's going to assume to get into Betty's knickersfind eternal happiness with the true love of his existence.

It's just too bad that Betty has a fiancee - Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), trying to live a new life without violence as a ranch hand, loved by almost every person of authority he meets (if they wouldn't love him, Courtney would have to act, and we really can't have that).

Billy soon enough understands (alright, is told by German immigrants who lost their daughter to Johnny the rubber bat) the truth about the kindly uncle and is most surely not willing to lose his woman to an undead guy with a goatee.

This is William Beaudine's sister movie to Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. It's just a shame that it is far less entertaining than its sibling. Where the other film wins the hearts and minds of right thinking viewers through copious amounts of glorious wrongness and a grotesque but loveable performance of its lead actress, Billy the Kid's adventures in the supernatural mostly fall flat. The whole vampire business here is realized as rote and boring as possible, never trying to do anything with the genre mash-up potentials of Western and vampire movie. It is most assuredly not improved by Beaudine's flavorless as usual direction, the eventless script or the godawful (in a charmless way) acting.
The film's theoretical star Carradine totters through it as if his vampire tended to only suck the blood of alcoholics, blabbering his lines and giving the same bug-eyed semi-Lugosi stare whenever he is told to emote, thereby reaching the elusive plateau of being so bad that it's just annoying. And yet, he still is the only thing I'd call even remotely memorable about the film. Unless you have never seen a rubber bat before. In this case, you'll also love the rubber bats.

In a sense, it is quite an achievement how painfully boring the film is, still I'd recommend you ignore the siren song of its title or its genealogy and just watch Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter for the tenth time instead. I wish I had.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,western,john carradine,in short

Voodoo Man (1944)

The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a series of disappearances. "Girl motorists" (and their cars) just seem to vanish into thin air, or at least, that's what the comic relief sheriff in his wisdom thinks (if he does think). In truth, Doctor Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi) and his merry band of malcontents - among them his Igor, the dedicated zombie wrangler, unfunky drummer and hair fondler Toby (John Carradine, doing his worst until it is oh so right) and gas station owner and voodoo priest Nicholas (George Zucco, often dressed in the most ridiculous voodoo priest get-up you'll ever see) - kidnap the women to solve a typical Lugosi problem. You see (and you just might have heard this one before), Bela's wife has been dead now for 22 years, but her loyal husband is still trying to revive her by transferring other women's wills to live (that's the technical term) to her body. Alas, not just any donor will do for a project like this. He has not been too successful until now, leaving the poor man with cellar full of young female voodoo zombies in white gowns (not even especially flimsy gowns!) to be hair-fondled and told about their prettiness by Toby and not much else to show.

I'm quite sure Bela would be able to triumph over death given enough time (let's say a few centuries), but as things like this go, he has finally kidnapped the wrong woman. Turns out that it's not a good idea to abduct the cousin of the fiancee of a Hollywood hack (Tod Andrews when he was still called Michael Ames, giving an absolutely perfect impression of a wooden doll with rubber arms; just too bad he's supposed to be human), unless one wants to be pestered by the incredible skill of the "romantic lead" (and golly, does this position deserve its quotation marks) of a Poverty Row movie at doing nothing at all and still being called a film's hero and triumphing over evil (by lying unconscious on the floor) in the end.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who hear about a Monogram picture featuring Lugosi and Zucco and Carradine and jump (not fall) into an ecstatic state of mind quite like being hypnotized by Bela himself and those (poor sods) who just look kinda puzzled and shrug while they're slowly backing away from the person who brought them such glorious news.

I don't know what else I can do for the latter group than to pity them; to the former group I can say that the film is very much like one would expect, which is to say, not a good film at all but still very lovely.

Sure, I'll give skeptics that the plot of the film makes no sense, that the comic relief is as painful as always (though at least lacking in racist stereotypes thanks to the total absence of non-white people - for a voodoo movie from the 40s, that's actually positive), that the young lead characters should be shot on sight, that William Beaudine's direction is as pedestrian as always. But what are these minor questions of quality compared to Bela doing his hypnotic shtick, the gloriously low-key and/or impoverished voodoo rituals (so cheap they couldn't even afford Hollywood voodoo drumming and had to go with John Carradine and Pat McKee performing their own drumming, very badly of course) or the mindbogglingly boring "finale"? Not much, as most people with discerning tastes (a much nicer way to say "I", don't you think?) would agree.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,bela lugosi,john carradine,george zucco,reviews

In short: Moonchild (1974)

I'm not using this phrase all that often, so: What the hell did I just watch? It's the only film by a certain Alan Gadney, artfully photographed, lit and cut, but very confounding.

A young painter (Mark Travis, looking as puzzled as I must have), arrives at a mission that now is used as the strangest hotel not located in Twin Peaks or Japan. There he meets a bunch of strange people (including a fat and priestly Victor Buono and John "The Walker" Carradine). It seems he is caught in an endless cycle of repeating the same basic acts leading to his death over and over, since the time of the inquisition. That much of the plot is clearly discernible, but underlying it, every single character and every single act here is also highly symbolic of something having to do with the search for perfection in a mystical sense.

As far as I could discern, the symbolism is based on some part of the Western magic(k)al tradition, but not being Alan Moore, I barely understood half of it.

Still, it is a fascinating film: The acting is not bad, but so purposefully artificial and absurdly earnest even in the most ridiculous moments that it defies most concepts of good acting and arrives at a place only the most ruthlessly strange ever visit. The technically very proficient (if you ignore one boom mike smack in the middle of the picture), but highly weird (and of course symbolically overloaded) visuals do their best to make this one of the truthfully most trippy films I have ever seen.

Now, I can understand if someone finds the movie overwhelming and kind of irritating, but one thing it certainly isn't: boring.

 

Technorati-Tags: high weirdness,in short,american movies,john carradine,victor buono