In short: The Comancheros (1961)

After arresting professional gambler – and man with an awesome name – Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) for killing a man in a duel in Louisiana, Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne) repeatedly finds himself pushed into teaming up with the guy. Especially once the Ranger he gets the mission to break up a very particular gang of arms dealers known as Comancheros that rile up (and arm) the Comanches. The usual stuff about growing respect and understanding happens, of course.

This John Wayne (and Stuart Whitman) vehicle is the final movie directed by Michael Curtiz, director of many a great movie and some that annoyed me considerably (and may still be great movies if you’re not me) and it is very much a mixed bag. It’s certainly  one of those Westerns that doesn’t play very well today ideologically, its crappy treatment of Native Americans having a certain whiff of conviction instead of being a mere genre trope, which doesn’t really surprise given its star’s real life politics.

Structurally, it’s a bit of a mess, often playing more as a series of scenes connected by very tenuous strands than a proper narrative or a character piece. On the positive side, at least half of those single scenes are very strong indeed, particularly whenever the film posits Wayne - at this stage of his career still not a great actor but one who had gotten very comfortable with the possibilities afforded by his considerable screen presence - as a guy who is actually hiding quite a bit of wisdom about matters of the human heart he has won through hard experience under his tough guy exterior. There’s some good Western action too, though the Indian attacks tend to the overly generic, and Curtiz doesn’t always seem to have the staging as well in hand as he could.

The film is also spending too little time on its most interesting character, Pilar Graile (Ina Balin), the daughter of the Comanchero leader as well as the instant love of Whitman’s life and the problems of being an independent (clearly raised Libertarian, poor kid) woman falling in love but wanting to keep control of her life. Balin is great with what the film gives her, really making much of the fact the script isn’t portraying her character as a shrew nor as an idiot once she’s properly in love. I really want a remake that’s all about her.

In short: Mean Johnny Barrows (1975)

Dishonourably discharged from the army after he punched out a white guy who tried to murder him with a landmine (seriously), Vietnam war hero (and former nearly football star) Johnny Barrows (Fred Williams), soon finds himself homeless on the streets of his old home town. Early on, Johnny meets Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), a football acquaintance who offers him a job. But it’s clearly doing dirty work for the mafia, and Johnny has his principles. But as it goes, principles can be washed away by poverty and the general shittiness of one’s surroundings, so after further travails, Johnny will eventually take on the role of a hit man for Mario’s clan during an attempt of the aggressive Da Vinces (with Roddy McDowall of all people playing the youngest son) to muscle in on their territory. Don’t worry, the Racconis are the good Mafiosi, though, who only ever made money with numbers games and fought against drugs. Insert humungous eyeroll here.

This is the first of Fred Williamson’s twenty or so direction credits, and for its first twenty minutes or so, it actually feels like a minor highpoint of blaxploitation filmmaking. Williamson shoots as well as plays Johnny’s downward movement in the first act with great strength and conviction, bringing the shittiness of the black experience to life through fine direction and a performance that expresses much of the unfairness of the character’s life without any need for speechifying. It’s still not subtle, mind you, but it’s not about subtle things. As a bonus, there’s also a short cameo by Elliott Gould in which he dresses like a lost version of The Doctor – and calls himself the Professor to boot – teaching Williamson the ins and outs of being homeless by acting really, really weird.

After that, the film unfortunately spirals pretty quickly out of control and turns into a series of, sometimes weird and awkward, sometimes pretty fun, mafia meetings where the actors seems mostly to be farting around, horrible martial arts fights, long and badly written speeches told with soulful facial expressions quite in contrast to their badness by Williamson, a couple of decent action sequences and pointless plot twists, where nothing hangs together thematically or as a narrative anymore, the film losing all momentum as well as showing little of the impressive filmmaking chops of the first act.

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: The Cat Creature (1973)

A thief (Keye Luke) breaking into the sanctum sanctorum of a recently deceased collector of antiques and occult stuff steals a curious amulet carrying the head of Bast from the neck of a mummy. Little does he know that this awakens a rather grumpy priest with the ability to turn into a murderous little kitten who then proceeds to kill everyone who even comes near the amulet.

Curiously, the priest's activities concentrate around the occult shop of Hester Black (Gale Sondergaard), despite Hester not having bought the amulet off the thief when he offered it. At first the cat-shaped priest only kills Hester's shop assistant, but soon it - and various cat-shaped phenomena - seem to threaten Hester, her new shop assistant Rena Carter (Meredith Baxter), and everyone around them, too.

The police in form of Lt. Marco (Stuart Whitman) is on the ball, and even clever enough to call in Professor of archaeology Roger Edmonds (David Hedison) for academic help, but except for Rena and Roger falling for each other, there's really not much happening with these two until a lot more people have died.

The Cat Creature is one of the lesser movies Curtis Harrington directed during his creative TV movie making phase, with a script that is certainly one of Robert Bloch's weaker efforts too, even though Bloch returns to Egyptian pseudo-mythology of a type he used in some of his best pulp stories a few decades earlier (though, alas, there's no Cthulhu Mythos connection in this particular case).

The film's mythology and the nature of its supernatural threat are some of its strengths, actually, with some fun not-actually-Egyptian made up mythology and a pretty cool monster conception. The problem lies in the execution, particularly in the slowness of the film's middle part where Roger and Marco are "investigating", which is to say, do little beyond arriving too late when somebody has been killed off, and Roger and Rena have a romance that needs to be a core part of the film but never feels like it at all.

Harrington for his part rides some of his hobby horses, so there are the expected appearances of Old Hollywood actors (with Sondergaard's performance as the clear high point), and the children of Old Hollywood actors, as well as many an atmospheric scene that attempts (and often succeeds) to use techniques of Universal horror and Val Lewton productions in the context of 70s TV. The latter approach gives the film some quite effective scenes, but again mostly gets lost in the film's middle part where one can't help but get the impression nobody involved really knew what he actually wanted to do with the film.

Where the moody scenes of cat-shadows are sublime when they do happen, Harrington also delivers something ridiculous. The scenes of what science terms catnosis are incredibly ill-advised, pre-dating a particularly ridiculous scenes from Harrington's later Devil Dog in all the wrong ways. For most of the running time, it's also quite impossible to see the rather adorable black cat at the film's centre as threatening at all, all the loud yowling on the soundtrack notwithstanding. It's also an old truth that cat attack scenes aka cat wrestling never work, a rule that still holds true.

Given all these problems, The Cat Creature still provided me with enough fun for an unassuming TV movie, if not always the fun it was probably meant to provide me with.

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