Soul Cinema - Blacula Double Feature!

Blacula is everything you're looking for in an exploitation film. First it's a major part of the sub-genre "Blaxploitation" which in the late 60's and early 70's especially created low-budget entertainment for black audiences and others who wanted to see different faces in familiar stories. Blacula is directed by Willaim Crain and based on what I've seen by him, I have little to complain about. He tells his stories clearly and with limited confusion, something low-budget films often fail on.

The central strength of this film is William Marshall in the lead role of Prince Mamuwalde who along with his princess Luva visit Dracula who is an unknown quantity. Mamuwalde wants to convince Dracula to help him end slavery but of course the sadistic Dracula has other plans. He turns the Prince into a vampire and then locks him away in the bowels of his castle for hundreds of years. Needless to say when he emerges thanks to two hapless antiques dealers. Unleashed on the modern world "Blacula" goes about getting his fill of blood and creating vampires in the wake.

He is opposed by the cops led by Thalmus Rasulala an actor with the chops to stand up to Marshall's character with some level of credibility. These two are joined by a strong cast with the likes of Denise Nichols and Vonetta McGree. Smaller parts are a pleasure to watch with Ketty Lester as the most memorable taxi driver you'll ever see and Ji-Tu Cumbuku was is a delight to see but adds nothing to the plot that I can remember. The legendary Elisha Cook is around as a morgue attendant and Gordon Pinsent of Red Green fame is a cop.

This is a top-of-the-line thriller, not really scary all that much but with lots of bombastic scary-like bits that entertain immensely. But Blacula was not done. 

William Marshall is so convincing as "Blacula" and brings such heft to the part that you know that even a movie titled Scream Blacula Scream can't be all bad. Actually for a "blaxpoitation" bit it's not bad and once again casting saves the day. Tagging in to help Marshall this time is the vivacious Pam Grier and Don Mitchell (of Ironside fame). They are all mingled in and around voodoo and it's by use of this practice that the deadly Blacula once again treads the night.

This one also has the charm of a movie which doesn't take itself too very seriously. The animating villain is a loathsome cat played by the novice Richard Lawson, a douche who is jealous that he hasn't been named head of the local voodoo cult. He lost out to Pam Grier and from where I sit, it was a wise move indeed. He uses his powers to revive (wrong word I know) Blacula who immediately makes him his vampire slave. One of the funniest scenes is where this utterly vain character realizes for the first time that as a vampire he cannot see himself in a mirror.

Other victims come and go and go and come and the cops get involved. We get a finale with zombie-like vampires battling cops in the passages of a large mansion and it's above average stuff for movies of this ilk. Michael Conrad is a hoot as the obligatory decent white guy and he and Mitchell have actual chemistry. The director of this movie is Bob Kelljan who also directed both the Count Yorga movies and some of the same gimmicks show up here.

This one is a ton of vampire fun if you give it a chance.

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

Rip Off

Soul Cinema - Blackenstein!

Blackenstein (don't you just love the title) is a flick I've been eager to see for many, many moons. I caught part of it one night on a late-night fright show once years ago, but by and large the movie has escaped me. Every once in a while, I get on a Frankenstein kick and want to check out all the versions I can and this one was always a gap in my knowledge. But no more!

Now despite starring a Lone Ranger, the ironically named "Ivory Stone" and the perfectly named "Roosevelt Jackson", I cannot say this is in any way a "good" movie by any measure normally applied to cinema. But it's a pretty nifty diversion and offers up a "Frankenstein" who is almost noble and a "Frankenstein's Monster" who is especially sympathetic. A woman (Ivory Stone) wants her boyfriend, a veteran horribly wounded in Vietnam to get special medical treatment and her former mentor (John Hart as "Dr. Stein") has just the right techniques to possibly help if he will. He does, and does so with the appropriate and balanced motivations, to help a patient in pain and then to further his understanding of the science he is seeking. Others such as his not-so-nice butler Malcom (Roosevelt Jackson no less) manage to corrupt that process and of course as in every such movie mayhem erupts.

"Blackenstein" is played by Joe De Sue, a hapless non-actor who just sort of looks out of his face most of movie, even when he's nibbling on a victim (yes, this Creature is a cannibal). That and the mostly catch-as-catch-can sets really limit what can be seen, that and the meager lighting in any scene not on an interior set (or room). The tried-and-true Frankenstein electrical equipment fashioned by Kenneth Strickfadden so many years before for the Universal classics and I guess will be used a year later in Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks. Blackenstein is not a good movie, but it's still fun to watch.

On another note, the DVD I watched had a lot of information about the producer of the movie, a guy named Frank Saletri, who was a known Hollywood lawyer and who might just have had ties to the mob that got him murdered in the early 80's. One great detail about the movie is that much of it was shot in Saletri's house which had been originally owned by Bela Lugosi and is a wild bit of architecture. The house has since been razed to make room for roads. The bodacious Liz Renay also makes an appearance in all her bosomy glory. This is a movie that's worth seeing for a lot of reasons. 

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

Rip Off

Soul Cinema - Dr.Black - Mr. Hyde!

Dr. Black / Mr. Hyde from 1976 is a better-than-I-expected blaxploitation movie. The reason is Bernie Casey who gives a sensitive portrayal of Dr. Henry Pride, a madman, a man driven by the pain of the death of his mother and his compulsion to save the world. He's a good man (or appears to be) who goes over the line, who forgets the dignity of other human beings and imagines the necessary momentary evil act is worth it for the greater good. It's a deluded attitude, but not one the viewer cannot immediately dismiss. For a movie directed to a black audience this surely has more resonance.

Though the co-star of the movie is Rosalind Cash who plays another doctor who cares for Dr. Pride, the real power in the movie comes in the relationship between Casey and Marie O'Henry who plays the classic hooker with a heart of gold. She becomes the object of obsession of the Doctor who wants her to help him test a new drug to cure liver damage, but she quite logically and reasonably says no. And when he insists things get ugly.

The slow descent of Doctor Pride steadily presented, his self-destruction is on the screen for us to watch until he realizes he is lost and gives into the drug which turns him "white" and gives him great power, at least power to do harm. In a potent but somewhat uncomfortable finale at the Watts Towers, our hero-villain climbs the towers in a King Kong fashion as the authorities seek a final solution to the rampage of Dr. Black / Mr. Hyde.

I've seen a lot of deep analysis of the messages this film (also called The Watts Monster) delivers to diverse audiences, and I don't reject them, but best of all it's a compelling story pretty well told.

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

Rip Off

Monster Mash - 1957-1972!

Let me state for the record that I am not a "Monster Kid", that generation of youngsters (almost all boys it seems) who were just the right age (ten or eleven or thereabouts) to suck in the delectable badness of monsters when the craze broke in 1957. I was too busy being born that year to concern myself with such things as Frankenstein and Dracula and other beasties of the night. But when I did finally sprout up in the middle 60's there was still enough of of the old monster glamour to attract my attention and then in the early 70's there was final burst of monstery awfulness to glom onto before it sputtered out for a time. Mark Voger in his Twomorrows tome Monster Mash-The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 touches on many if not most of the aspects of society which were touched or transformed or even given birth by the shocking interest in monsters. 

Like so many things in our culture the sudden and abiding interest in ghouls and goblins was television's fault. It began with "Shock!", a package of fifty-two horror and mystery films from Hollywood's golden era making its way to the small screen. These tepid films, mild by almost any era's standard, were still seen as just possibly too much for the tender psyches of America's youth and to avoid widespread condemnation but yet still reap some profits the folks who put this together didn't offer it to national TV but rather to regional stations in syndication. Those individual stations hired ghost hosts of sundry kind and put the shows on at the least objectionable hours they could find in the television landscape. Still the youth found these movies and gobbled them up with glee. Suddenly Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy among many others were shambling around in America's living rooms and it was good...for business. 

The cavalcade of monster items was...well monstrous in size. There were masks, board games, card games, comic books, television shows, toys, candies, cards, paperbacks, and even specialty magazines dedicated utterly to the fad. First and foremost among these magazines was Famous Monsters of Filmland from Warren Publications. In fact Famous Monsters of Filmland is the outcropping on which Jim Warren built his little black and white empire that eventually gave us Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie, and most importantly Vampirella. Forry Ackerman was Jim Warren's partner of sorts in the venture and in fact it was the "Ackermonster's" vast collection of horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies which was the essence of the magazine. The "Monster Kids" had a leader and in the letters pages of FM, a place where they could congregate and compare notes. Other mags like Castle of Frankenstein and Monster World are given some space as well. 

One of the amazing things about Famous Monsters though was that as influential as the articles and stills might have been, the Captain Company might have been even more so to the collective memories of the "Monster Kids". Captain Company was the mail-order side of the Warren operation and showcased many monster and fantasy products that kids might order and certainly would want to order. Like the wishbook from Sears every Christmas season, this was a poor kid's window into what was possible. 

I wanted so many things from the Captain  Company but perhaps nothing so much as the life-size posters of Frankenstein by Jack Davis. There's one for Vampirella too by Sanjulian but who'd dare bring that into a home overseen by a God-fearing Mamma! Not me. 

A lot of space is spent discussing and showcasing the wonderful Aurora model kids which allowed "Monster Kids" to actually collect and build their own versions of these awesome monsters. 

That extended to such strange quasi-monster things such as Rat Fink created by car designer and artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. Rat Fink's imitators are given some space as well. Goofy and gruesome about covers it. 

Marvel monster comics get a few pages with my personal favorite Atlas-era monster "Fin Fang Foom" getting a page all to his titanic self. But aside from the monsters there's no coverage of Marvel's other supernatural and monster endeavors nor is there any talk of DC's revival of mystery and ghost tales at their shop. Perhaps this has to do with the somewhat arbitrary cut-off point of 1972 but still there was much done by the "Big Two" before then. 

Getting a lot of love though and properly so are the Warren magazines which followed on after the success of Famous Monsters. Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella all get some discussion and some tasty artwork from Jack Davis and other talents of the time. 

A great many pages are devoted to the TV monsters such as The Munsters and The Addams Family. Voger suggests the appearance of these two shows almost simultaneously on home screens marks the apogee of the monster craze in America and it's hard to dispute this point, though monster stuff stayed around for a long time in some form or other. The John Astin interview was a highlight and there's much more on the actors in both series. 

And clearly the author was a monster fan of Dark Shadows, the ABC television soap opera which weirdly normalized the vampire and made it suitable faire for the living rooms of America. The succees of Barnabas Collins and other stars of the show are discussed at length and several interviews or portions of same are highlighted. Voger and his late wife have talked to a lot of folks over the years and that material bears fruit in this tasty tome. 

Jonathan Frid's vampiric mug is a great way to wrap up this month-long Halloween celebration. Mark Voger has fashioned a fun look at the monster craze, a fad that lingers still in the general background of modern American society. While monsters have become less faddish, they have become oddly normalized in a way that 1960's America would've found stunning. Voger's fannish book does a decent if incomplete job of showing how that happened. 

Rip Off

Monsters Crash The Pajama Party!

Once upon a time before the advent of home video and multi-plex cinemas the movie theater was a central gathering point for a community. It was an important location for entertainment of various kinds and offered all ages something to look forward to, something to enjoy together. Those days are largely gone and sadly despite the amazing convenience of access to entertainment in the modern era there is lacking a certain shared experience. One thing which was a staple of the movie theater for decades, coming to an end as the Reagan era was about to begin was the "Spook Show". 

The Spook Show was a clever and sometimes hamfisted blend of live entertainment and film focusing on things that went bump in the night. It was a way to package vintage horror movies and give the theater goer a little some different. These shows were magic acts and seance acts which had mutated from their beginnings in the 1920's and afterword and had become more jovial and ironic. They promised ghosts and goblins and zombies and vampires and monsters galore. But we knew they didn't mean it really and that was fine, it was a gag and the audience was well enough in on it. Some of these shows veered toward the gruesome  it's true. 

In 1965 the thirty minute flicker Monsters Crash the Pajama Party was made by a few pros and an avalanche of amateurs as a supplement for Spook Shows. It told a simple tale of a gang of sorority girls who decide to spend a night in a haunted house. Their boyfriends accompany them and then leave with full intentions of returning to frighten their ladies.

But no sooner have the girls changed into their teddys than a mad scientist sends his pet gorilla and his other monstrous assistants to capture the girls for his own nefarious ends. The boys arrive in the nick of time and so the mad scientist is forced to send his minions into the audience to find his prey. The lights go out and before you know it the screaming really begins. It's a nifty gimmick to justify some quick scares and it gives young couples a decent excuse to cuddle closer together.  Here's a link to the trailer. 

Something Weird Video has captured this film in all its malicious glory and passed it on to later generations. Something I'm very grateful for. Along with the half-hour movie we get an absolute bushel of strange and wonderful extras. 

There are two interviews with two of the old Spook Show ghostmasters -- Phillip "Dr. Evil" Morris and Harry "Dr. Jekyll" Wise and they are both hilarious and somewhat informative. There are beaucoup trailers and images related to the old shows and their advertising, even some handbooks on how to put on your own Spook Show. My favorite goodies are vintage home made movies from the 1920's, 1940's and 1960's. These are silent and show how dedicated fans can be. They are helped immensely but the soundtrack of  music from the Dead Elvi. There's even some vintage home made 3-D -- my dvd came with two pairs of glasses. 

There is even a full-length B-movie titled Tormented included in this bizarre collection. It's a ghost story starring Richard Carlson of It Came from Outer Space fame. His dead jilted girlfriend is not happy about his upcoming marriage and does her dead-level best to stop it. For a Bert I. Gordon movie it's not bad.  

You can get another version of the DVD, not quite as rich in extras along with a rousing CD in this collection of some of the many horror themed rock songs from years gone by. There is a lot of crossover between these two but there is some stuff specific to both also. Love the chaotic cover which evokes those old posters quite effectively. Nifty stuff for a Halloween Eve! 

Rip Off

Svengali!

"Svengali" is a word I've known all my life I suppose -- the name for a ruthless man who holds sway over a young woman for his benefit alone. I had never had occasion to explore its origins nor see any of the several films featuring the word as title. Now at long last I have fixed that oversight and to exceedingly good effect. The Svengali I am looking at is the 1931 movie from the Warner Brothers group which casts John Barrymore as the notorious hypnotic musician and Marian Marsh as his beautiful victim "Trilby". Trilby is in fact the title of the novel by George Du Maurier from the which the essence of this story is taken. 

In the movie we first meet Svengali and his today assistant Gecko when a naive woman by the name of Madame Honori comes to confess her love for Svengali who rejects her despite her having thrown over her  husband. Apparently her refusal of a money settlement gives us the insight into the rapacious nature of Svengali who has clearly had relations with Honori and now utterly rejects the desperate woman. We have established our villain and Barrymore is one of the most pure cads I've seen on screen. The story shifts to a gaggle of painters including Taffy and Laird and the young Billee. They are friends of a sort with Svengali but his cleverness is always evident. Enter a beautiful model named Trilby and both Billee and Svengali are at once taken with her. She loves Billee and they are a couple until he finds her modeling nude for a group of painters and in a fit of puritanical jealousy rejects her. (At this point I lost all sympathy for Billee who shows himself to be a self-absorbed prat.) She falls under the hypnotic sway of Svengali who from that time is in control of her body and soul. The story shifts forward in time and we find that Svengali has made Trilby into a successful singing star. But because he is hounded by the relentless Billee Svengali throws over that career and the two fall into less successful venues. It seems the hold Svengali has on Trilby is damaging to them both and the denoument is surprisingly dour for a movie of the period. 

The thing that attracted me instantly to the film was the way Barrymore plays Svengali. He's magnificent in the role, giving the villain an evil charm. And when he exerts his hypnotic will on Trilby from across the city it is one of the scariest and most compelling sequences I've seen in a classic horror flick. I kept thinking that the compelling connection between Svengali and his slave Trilby is exactly what Tod Browning's Dracula should have been. In point of fact Barrymore as Svengali looks more like Stoker's Dracula than the urbane Bela Lugosi, though that's a quibble. I've seen Barrymore in his silent horror outing as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it's remarkable, but he's won me over completely with this outstanding performance. 

Rip Off 

The Alien Dead!

I will not waste a whisper of breath attempting to convince you that Fred Olen Ray's 1980 science fiction horror flicker The Alien Dead is a good movie. It ain't! But it is a splendid example of cinema that is so blisteringly bad that it goes out the other side of the continuum and becomes entertaining. The movie is really an amateur effort marked first and foremost by the presence of (even then) vintage sci-fi icon Buster Crabbe. It was Crabbe's presence that got me to sit through it the first time and it's partially because of my adoration for his long history of work that made me buy a dvd loaded with extras that tell the story of how this movie came to be. 

First it was made in 1977 and 1978 by Fred Olen Ray in the Orlando, Florida area using local venues and such as sets. Most of the action takes place out of doors freeing the company of worrying overmuch about lights and other technical limitations. The movie also is clearly the product of different production period with different kinds of access to equipment. There's one section which was shot as proof of concept which is incorporated into the movie, and several others shot after the final production concluded to lengthen it and to spice it up to meet the expectations of movie going crowds. 

This movie is the kind that's supposed to supply gore and perhaps softcore sex, but don't worry as there is precious little of both if those things make you blink at this kind of flick. If they are selling point for you, then the lean efforts to supply a few naked breasts are curious and the gore is limited significantly by budgets, or the lack of same. 

The plot is dead simple. A houseboat of Yankee partiers is hit by a meteor or spaceship (this is uncertain) and the resulting dead populated the rivers and such munching on alligators for sometime. When that resource dwindles to near nothing they seek sustenance on land and that's when the movie begins. We follow our intrepid reporter hero and his girlfriend as they ramble about encountering variations of the threat all the while the local sheriff (Buster Crabbe) and deputy manage to miss nearly all the action. 

There are echoes of Night of the Living Dead of course, but also the flavor of older 1950's movies from the heyday is evoked as well. There is a great deal of tragedy and the ending is a bit of a puzzler, but I cannot tell if that was intentional or not. This is not a movie for those who like good quality cinema, but it is a movie for those who revel in watching eager amateurs attempt to make something entertaining and failing often but succeeding more than you'd expect. 

Rip Off 

True Monsters Stories?

I am an unabashed fan of the 1972 monster-mash The Legend of Boggy Creek, the every stylish and oddly effective saga of a "Bigfoot"-like creature in the depths of the swamps and creeks of Fouke, Arkansas. This is a real myth in a real place, so the film has a gritty quasi-documentary feel which adds some verisimilitude to a what would have been other wise a pretty rough and tumble affair. I cannot really describe the movie accurately, it's a blend of legend reprise, folk singing, melodrama, and horror. The most potent sequence concerns two families sharing a house near Boggy Creek which is repeatedly haunted and attacked by the Fouke Monster. I well remember seeing this in the theaters and the scene in which a hairy arm reaches into the house to try and snag an unwary family member terrified me then and still gives a chill. I was able to finally get this on DVD a few years ago and have enjoyed it more than a few times since. Likely will again after I finish this post. 

What I was never able to see was Charles B. Pierce's official sequel titled Boggy Creek II and the Legend Continues. This movie is made in 1985 a decade and more after the original and after two unofficial sequels I have not seen and cannot comment upon. But at no point does this movie even remotely capture a mote of the real eerie sense of dread that oozes out of the original. This is not a faux-documentary but a ham-handed attempt at a straight adventure tale which has a professor and three students try and locate the creature. The director Pierce takes the lead role and frankly neither his acting nor demeanor are not up to the task. Instead we have what might be a comedic parody of an adventure. In the first movie the Fouke Monster is hinted at and glimpsed in bits and parts letting our imaginations make up a beast far more frightening than anything the moviemakers might've created. In this one the witless band of monster hunters find creatures around every corner almost literally, and we get good looks at them much to our dismay. I recommend the movie for laughs and for the very handsome and healthy college girls who join the band of hunters. 

Charles Pierce's real sequel to The Legend of Boggy Creek is actually the 1976 movie The Town that Dreaded Sundown. This is another documentary style movie in which we follow police of Texarcana, Texas as they attempt with little success to capture a serial killer who sadistically attacks young lovers in remote locations. This too is based on real accounts of a real "Phantom Killer" and feels it, showcasing the chilling touch of the real horror that human beings can bring upon one another without the need for the supernatural assistance. The depiction of the attacks is gruesome and grueling at times to watch, despite too much reliance on day-for-night shooting. Ben Johnson is the star and he's fine as a Texas Ranger doing his utmost to stop the villain. He is joined by Andrew Prine (star of every other movie made in the 70's) as doughty deputy of the town of bordering Arkansas. Dawn Wells of Gilligan's Island fame is a very believable victim. One odd aspect is the director Pierce in an acting role in the film as a comedy-relief cop, an odd addition to a movie in desperate need of its tension.

I can heartily recommend all three of these movies, the first and last for the effective storytelling and the second for its unintentional comedic results.  Now to find that copy of The Legend of Boggy Creek.

Rip Off