SPICY MYSTERY, February 1936

Pulp magazines now are enjoying their greatest flood of popularity since the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs kick-started the pulp boom of the 1960s. Falling between the pricey original magazines still in existence and the acceptably priced reprint editions are the exact replicas. These match the original mag’s dimensions and page count, and include everything that the first purchaser bought 55-85 years ago: all the ads, the letters to the editor, the not so-inspiring interior art and the hyperbole.

One of the leading producers of pulp replicas is Girasol Collectables, which puts out three replicas every month at a $25 or $35 per. Honestly, that’s a little steep for me, especially since other folks are doing it cheaper. Whining aside, I just finished reading Girasol’s replica of Feb. 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery. Look at the H.J. Ward cover painting of a terrified, gorgeous rehead in a sheer nightgown drawing away from a hanged corpse and tell me that you don’t want to read the stories that lurk behind that cover. It's supposed to illustrate a story called "Batman."  Go on, tell me – I dare you.

The cover story has nothing to do with any other Batmen with whom you may be familiar. In fact, the art has nothing to do with the story, but who the hell cares. The tale, from one of Spicy Mystery’s regular contributors, is about a man who thinks he’s a bat. Hey, you want your fiction to make sense, try something by Henry James.

This issue also contains stories by E. Hoffman Price and Robert Leslie Bellem. Price was a first rate pulp writer who continued publishing fantasy novels into the 1970s. Bellem’s story uses the theme of reincarnation. He is best remembered as the creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, from the pages of Spicy Detective magazine. Bellem also wrote for Spicy Western and Spicy Adventure. Perhaps you see a pattern.

Now, let’s approach that word “spicy.” The Spicys frequently were sold under the counter – one more glance at that cover art and you can see why – and went for the comparatively high sum of 25 cents. Every story contained several references to female breasts – the size, appearance and feel thereof – but it’s all PG-13 stuff that would make most kids today giggle. Spicy Mystery was a weird menace title and so its tales often would contain a blend of sex and violence that some readers might still feel is objectionable. But not you, you perv.  Weird menace is actually an inbred descendent of the English school of Gothicism

This issue contains no partial stories. Every tale is complete, and even the ones that don’t hold up too well are fun.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend some time ogling the hot blonde under attack by what looks like a gigantic grasshopper on the cover of the Feb. 1938 issue. It’s an assignment for my art appreciation class.

MACABRE (1980)

Macabre is Lamberto Bava's first solo directing credit and it arrived in the year of his more famous father's (Mario Bava) death.  The film is late giallo and lacks many of the genre's traditional touches, but Lamberto manages the suspense well and delivers some genuinely creepy moments.

Bernice Stegers stars as Jane Baker, a New Orleans wife and mother who leaves her kids in the care of the yard man one morning so she can tryst with her lover, Frank. While the two of them are playing Ride ‘Em Cowboy, her adolescent daughter (Veronica Zinny) drowns her little brother in the bathtub. Someone calls Jane, who gets Frank to drive her home. On the way, they’re involved in a freak accident and Frank loses his head. Literally.

One year later, Jane is released from an asylum and moves into the old house where she and Frank used to meet. The blind landlord, Robert (Stanko Molnar), who has a crush on her, is glad she’s back until he starts hearing the sounds of passion issuing from her apartment as she calls out Frank’s name.

At varying points, the movie could become a ghost story, a psycho kid story, a creepy landlord story, or a nutty woman in the upstairs apartment story. Actually, it blends elements from all of them together. Unfortunately, Bava gives in to the temptation of tossing in a last-second kicker designed to shock that just doesn’t work and futzes with the story as we expect it to end given the way it's built to that point. Bad move.

Filmed in New Orleans, the flick lets us see parts of the city that aren’t the French Quarter, and that’s nifty. It’s a near-miss that works for 88.5 minutes out of 89.

FREAKSHOW (2011)

Well, here’s as ghastly a helping of grue and depravity as you’re likely to find this side of the Inferno.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

This bowlful of rancid ghoulash is an updating of Tod Browning’s career-buster, Freaks.  (See the discussion of that one elsewhere on this blog.)  Suggested by the short story “Spurs” by Tod Robbins and director Browning’s personal history with a traveling carnival, Freaks told the story of a circus aerialist who feigns love for a dwarf so he will marry her and leave her his European fortune when he dies, which she will arrange to have happen shortly.  The other sideshow attractions discover what she’s up to and nothing good comes of it.

This new version tells essentially the same story only this time the femme fatale is attached to a group of criminals who have gotten security jobs with the circus.  They plan to steal the box office receipts, kill anyone who gets in their way, and then light out for parts unknown.  Hank (Dane Rosselli) leads the gang and he encourages Lucy (Rebekah Kochan) to play up to circus owner Lon—as in Tod Browning’s favorite actor, Lon Chaney—(Christopher Adamson) to keep him unsuspecting.  Just so everything remains as hideous as possible, Lon is afflicted with boils all over his body—and to hear Lucy tell it, that means every part of his body.

As in the original, Lucy can’t keep the charade going when the freaks in the sideshow throw an engagement party for her and Lon, announcing that from that moment on she will be accepted as an honorary one of them.  They pass a loving cup from which all the misshapen group drinks, and when it comes to her she is driven daffy by the thought of imbibing freak spit.  She tells Lon what she really thinks of him and his menagerie of misfits, then goes screeching off to her tent.  Knowing that Lucy may have blown their chance for a big payday, Hank forces her to go groveling to Lon and beg his forgiveness, which he appears to grant.

Ah, but his friends have overheard Hank and Lucy plotting, and when one of the criminal gang kills one of the freaks and tries to cover up the murder, Lon is told what is going on.  Justice of a particularly twisted and horrific kind prevails.

The film was written by Keith Leopard and contains a few bits of over-the-top humor.  One of the villains meets his end at the hands—and teeth—of Margaret the Cannibal Girl (Amanda Ward) and, yes, that’s right, the character is Margaret the Cannibal Girl.  How exotic.  Drew Bell directs cleverly, leading us to a denouement that is as gob-smackingly ghastly as it is inevitable.  Even horror fans with strong stomachs may want to find an excuse to leave the room during the movie’s final reel.

The rest of you sickos will eccch with delight.

DEAD MEN WALK (1943)

This is the kind of picture that separates the true horrorista from the dilettante.  Sure, anyone can sit through a couple of hours with one of the honest-to-god classics, but it takes a special kind of nerve to stay put for 64 minutes of a PRC giggler.

PRC was Producers Releasing Corporation, which Wikipedia generously calls “one of the less prestigious Hollywood film studios.”  When you got to the bottom of the barrel, you dug through the wood to get to PRC.

One of the studio’s primo directors was Sam Newfield (originally Neufield) who, along with his brother Sigmund, owned a chunk of the outfit.  In 30 years, Sam directed something like 300 films, 15 of them in 1943 alone (Dead Men Walk, The Black Raven, and a bunch of westerns.)  Dead Men Walk’s screenwriter, Fred Myton, was a slacker, with only seven produced credits in ’43—two horror pictures and five oaters.   

Okay, I hear you ask yourself, was there anything about this flick that makes it stand out.  Good question, and the answer is “Yes.”

It stars George Zucco and Dwight Frye, actors who had both seen better days. 

Frye is Zolarr, a retread of his most famous screen role, Renfield in the Lugosi version of Dracula.  Zolarr is the servant of Dr. Elwyn Clayton who, being dead, is relatively easy to take care of.  Frye’s main purpose is to hysterically cry “Yes, master” or “Help me, master” depending on his predicament of the moment.  It’s been only a decade since Dracula, but Frye hasn’t aged well and looks as if he could drop dead on a bus at any moment, which he did later that year.  He did manage to give us five films in 1943—after this one came Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, and three tiny and uncredited roles in others.  Frye had been a successful comic actor on Broadway during the 1920s and longed for a chance to do comedy on screen.  You can see the comic chops in Fritz, in Frankenstein.

Zucco is good guy Dr. Lloyd Clayton and evil twin Elwyn Clayton.  Elwyn is a follower of Satan (nothing good ever comes of that) who is killed by Lloyd and then returns from the grave as a vampire, a situation which gives Zucco all the room he needs to give us his best Tod Slaughter imitation.  Eyes wide open, ramrod straight, chortling at every thought of revenge, Zucco is absolutely worth the price of admission—which, admittedly, in a PRC film, isn’t much.  Another Broadway star fallen on hard times in Hollywood, Zucco was a fine character actor who only once got the kind of screen role he deserved—as Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1939.

The picture is essentially another re-hash of Dracula with touches of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tossed in to make it look different.  There ain’t much to it, folks, but Zucco and Frye are always fun to watch, and Zucco is extra special this time out.  At 64 minutes, you might enjoy it.  If it had gone to 65, not so much.

FREAKS (1932)

Freaks was first released 80 years ago. I think I’ve avoided giving away the movie’s biggest surprise, but there are a few fairly insignificant spoilers ahead.

Freaks is a movie that has to be seen either more than once, or not at all. It generates a kaleidoscope of reactions when seen for the first time, and it’s impossible to sort them all out with a single viewing, which will overwhelm you emotionally—but it takes repeated visits to this surreal masterpiece to determine an intellectual response. 

It’s a movie that’s rich with anecdotes. One has Irving Thalberg, the film’s uncredited producer, telling director Tod Browning that he wanted to make the horror movie to end all horror movies, and then saying, when he saw the finished product, “Well, I asked for it and I got it.”

One story has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was under contract as a writer at MGM when the picture was made, bolted from the studio commissary and threw-up when the unusual cast came in for lunch. Another version has it that Fitzgerald felt more at ease with the cast of Freaks than he did with the studio big shots and so sat with them and lunched at their table.

Some say that Tod Browning exploited the cast (only Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady, went on record later as saying she regretted her participation in the production) while others claim that Browning, a former circus and sideshow man himself, befriended the performers and set them up for life by turning them into international celebrities.

One thing is certain: no other Hollywood film has ever generated legends like these.

As the story opens, we are moving slowly through a sideshow. The indoor talker, who bears a striking resemblance to Tod Browning, begins to tell his audience the back story of the show’s most unusual attraction. He and his audience gather around the top of a walled pit from the interior of which a light is shining up. Then we slip into the past …

A well-tailored dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles, who had worked with Browning in the silent version of The Unholy Three) is engaged to Frieda, another dwarf (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister in real life). Despite his betrothal to Frieda, Hans is smitten by Cleopatra, the circus’ star aerialist (Olga Baclanova). Cleopatra encourages the little man’s attentions because he is willing to loan her money and buy her presents.

Cleo’s casual cruelty is the talk of the circus. Everyone knows that she is playing Hans for a sucker except Hans, who continues to harbor the delusion that she likes him.

Unknown to Hans, Cleo is actually romantically involved with Hercules, the strong man (Henry Victor). We first see Hercules as he wrestles a bull, the animal’s horns representing both the phallus and the traditional crown of the cuckold.

Finally, Frieda confronts Cleopatra and begs the big woman to leave Hans alone. She lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune and we can see on Cleo’s face that she decides to change her amused encouragement of the little man to a determined attempt to woo him. She soon maneuvers Hans into a proposal, which she accepts with a plan to poison him and steal his money.

The wedding feast provides the background for the film’s most celebrated and quoted scene. Cleopatra, Hercules, the freaks and the other circus normals who have befriended them are gathered around a large table under the big top. Cleo and Hercules think the event is one huge joke, knowing as they do what they intend for Hans.

But then another dwarf stands on the table and brings a loving cup to everyone gathered. They each take a sip while chanting the words that make Cleopatra a member of their community—“Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us.” When the loving cup is thrust toward Cleopatra she rises, the full horror of what they’re saying dawning on her. “You. Dirty. Slimy. Freaks!” she screams, silencing the crowd.

Obviously, the party is over and soon the only ones left at the table are Hercules, Cleopatra and Hans. The drunken strong man lifts Hans from his bench and puts him on Cleo’s shoulders telling the woman to give her new husband a horsey ride back to his wagon. (The movie is adapted from a short story called “Spurs” by Tod Robbins and this “horsey ride” is at the center of the original tale.)

Hans soon falls ill, but the freaks have overheard the plotting of Hercules and Cleopatra. Off screen they tell Hans what his wife and her lover are up to and one dark stormy night the freaks take their revenge.

The film ends back at the indoor sideshow. A woman looks down into the pit and screams. Then Browning shows us the nature of the freak’s revenge. I won’t go into any detail, but is it absurd? Oh yeah. Effective? You better believe it.

An overview of the plot, which is a standard morality/revenge tale, does nothing to prepare you for viewing the film. The cadre of freaks is made up of dwarfs, microcephalics (referred to in the movie as “pinheads”), Siamese twins, people who are armless and legless—and in one case, both—a bearded lady, an hermaphrodite, and persons the descriptions of whom are beyond my vocabulary.

The characters play their reaction to the sideshow performers several ways. Some of the normals abuse them. Some are casually cruel and some are deliberately so. Other normals befriend the freaks. Wallace Ford and Leila Hyams are Phroso the clown (a name used by Lon Chaney in Browning’s silent West of Zanzibar, also with a circus background) and Venus, the bareback rider, who, while sometimes a bit patronizing, are intended to represent acceptance.

More problematic is Browning’s attitude as evidenced in the film. We first see the freaks, described as “children” although several of them are anything but, frolicking on a picnic. As they skip around in a circle they look for all the world as if Browning wanted to parody the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, Max Reinhardt’s film of that play wouldn’t be made for another three years, but the suggestion of Arcadian fantasy turned into a sick joke is inescapable.

In fact, any joke involving the freaks must come across as black humor. One of the Siamese twins, Daisy Hilton, is married to a clown (Roscoe Ates) and the second twin, Violet, becomes engaged. The two men ask each other to bring their wives over for a visit.

But sometimes the joke is used to suggest that there isn’t much difference between one world and another. We first meet the half-man/half-woman Joseph Josephine as s/he strolls between the wagons and Roscoe is changing out of the costume of a Roman lady. The male/female combination is emphasized.

And occasionally the humor is just as bizarre as the visuals. When Phroso comforts Venus, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, she tells him, “Say, you’re a pretty good kid.” “You’re darn right,” he responds. “You should have caught me before my operation.” Whatever that may mean.

There really isn’t much of horror in this horror movie, although there is a lot of unease beginning when the freaks figure out that Hercules and Cleopatra intend to murder Hans. Everywhere the big woman turns, there are two or three of her unusual enemies watching from the shadows.

Things turn more grotesque during the climactic storm when the wagons carrying Cleopatra and Hercules tip over in the mud. One of the little men throws a knife at the strong man, dropping him and allowing several more freaks to swarm over him. Cleopatra rushes off into the woods before she is brought down. In one shot, an armless/legless man is seen squirming through the mud in pursuit of the villains. He is carrying a dagger in his mouth—but how does he intend to use it? It’s a pure nightmare vision, all visceral intensity and no logic.

Originally, Browning intended a tree to fall on Cleo, thereby giving the freaks the opportunity they need to carve her up. Hercules was supposed to be seen in the epilog singing like a counter-tenor, having been emasculated. As the film now stands, Hercules is last seen being attacked. Only Cleopatra survives to become truly, “one of us.”

But perhaps as shocking and horrifying as the appearance of the freaks to audiences of 1932 is the film’s sexual innuendo. Cleopatra is blatantly sexual. When Hercules comes to her wagon, she offers to cook some eggs for him. She turns to him, puts her hands on her hips, thrusts her breasts toward him and asks, theoretically about the eggs, “How do you like them?”

Pre-code audiences were used to stuff like that, but they hadn’t been exposed, in mainstream films at least, to the necessity of public sex when Siamese twins cohabitate with their husbands. The idea of a dwarf and a “big woman” having a sexual relationship can still generate some ribald snickering, but there’s undeniably something off-putting in the mental image as well.

Part of this problem springs from the tragic gut-feeling that the freaks are somehow less than human, a delusion that the movie tries so hard to correct. But the question is: can it? Can any film move audiences completely beyond the unwanted and unwarranted notion that there is something unnaturally wrong with people who look so different?

Browning’s camera jumps in and out, and tracks with the movement of the characters with a freedom he had rarely allowed himself previously. But during those last moments, when the freaks wreak their vengeance, the camera stands still, their faces lunging at us in close-up, and even the most sensitive ones among us are likely to push backward in our seats to put as much distance as possible between us and the grotesque image on the screen

"We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes"

Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read, assuming that you don’t hate pieces that begin “Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read” and go on to something else instead.  This is where I tell you that something you know about Paycho is dead wrong.  I’m writing it, but I don’t know if I believe it or not.

Well, hell, it’s Halloween and if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween, when can you?  Oh yeah, St. Patrick’s Day.  Okay, if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, when can you?

Here’s the bit of revealed wisdom about Psycho, and I mean revealed repeatedly, in just about every critical essay ever written about the film: the least involving, most boring, most unnecessary scene in the entire movie is the penultimate one in which Simon Oakland, as psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (you never knew the character had a name, did you?) tells the cops, Lila, and Sam that all is not well with Norman’s inner child.

Wait a minute—you have seen the film, haven’t you?  If not, don’t read further, even if you can’t resist pieces in which the fourth paragraph admonishes you “don’t read further.”  Beyond this point are spoilers.  And I promise that I won’t use that gag again, the one in which I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning, even if you tell me that you love it when I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning. 

Anyway, that scene in the movie is universally reviled as being unnecessary because it spells out in agonizing detail what the audience has already figured out, i.e., that Norman is a member-for-life of the Ed Gein Fan Club.

But I would like to suggest that in 1960, when the film was new and the world was still able to keep the mask of sanity in place, audiences may not have known as much about what ailed the kid as we do now, and that we know more about it today because Norman introduced us on a pop culture level to this type and degree of mental aberration.  Putting oneself into the mind set of obviously historical characters is hard enough and yet still easier, in some ways, than recapturing the thinking of characters who were contemporary when the film was made but have retreated into history since.  Norman looks, talks, and acts enough like us now that we see him as a 21^st. century man, but he is far from that.

Okay, now we come to my particular hobby horse, the theory that appeals to me greatly while at the same time lacking in rational believability.  For this it’s best that you watch the scene, but I’ll try to describe the relevant action.

Richmond enters the room in which his audience is gathered.  He comes in from the left and crosses to a central position in the room.  Over his right shoulder we see a picture on the wall and, above that, a light fixture.  The fixture has two prongs for the light bulbs, reaching out to left and right from a sort of metal centerpiece.

Oakland doesn’t move around much because Richmond wants to remain in the center of our, and his listeners’ attention.  He occasionally takes a step or two toward the camera to speak directly to Lila (Vera Miles) or to react to something Sam (John Gavin) says, but before he returns to his original spot in the room, he moves a little closer to the light, allowing us to see more of it.  Then he will take a step toward us and resume talking.

His explanation of Norman’s peculiarities is loaded with psychobabble, but whenever he has a point to make that he thinks is particularly telling—“So he began to think and speak for her,” “After the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep,” “These were crimes of passion, not profit”—the lamp on the wall appears directly over his head, sometimes even forming glowing horns.

Here’s what I see: a cartoon in which someone is expounding an idea he thinks explains the ways of the world, with a light bulb coming on over his head to let us know how bright he thinks he is.

It’s as if Hitchcock, whose earliest job in films was providing illustrations to adorn the dialogue title cards in silent movies, is winking at us, letting us know that he thinks all this psychiatric gobble-de-gook is just whistling in the graveyard to hide our fear of the boogie man.

As Richmond snaps a cigarette out of a pack to light up and take a bow, Hitch cuts to the outside of the room and follows a policeman carrying down the hall a blanket for the chilled Norman.  We cut to the inside of the room where Norman, as Mother, sits before a blank wall.  As Richmond delivered his monologue in front of a wall with a couple of items on it—one of which served to ridicule everything he had to say—Mother delivers her monologue in front of a wall that is blank, as empty as a serial killer’s conscience, as spotless as a freshly cleaned bath tub.

There it is.  Do I really believe Hitchcock intended the scene with the doctor to be read this way?  I wish, but no.  I think it’s there to explain to the unworldly what the hell has been going on.  But do I think Hitch was aware of the cartoon cliché regarding the light bulb over the head?  Sure I do.  Maybe he set and blocked the scene the way he did because unconsciously he wanted to suggest that Dr. Richmond was just too content living in his jargon of earthly delights.   

You can’t have too many ways of looking at a film as rich as Psycho.  And it is Halloween.  Trick or treat.

THE RUINS (2008) and LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

     No horror film of 2008 was anticipated more than The Ruins, which means that if it failed there was going to be a long drop to the bottom. It did. It was.

     What happened? The movie was based on a bestselling novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan, and Smith wrote the script himself. For some reason, he signed it Scott B. Smith. As in “Johnny B. Good”? It’s not that the script stuck too close to the book; Smith changed up many elements. Should we blame it on the director, Carter Smith? This Smith didn’t bring much to the picnic, but plenty of horror movies about college kids in peril are poorly directed and no one seems to care.

     For me, the problem is embedded in the story’s hook.

     Our four American students, two couples, are on holiday in Mexico . At poolside they meet Mathias (Joe Anderson), a young German whose brother is off visiting a Mayan ruin, a pyramid that has only recently been discovered and is the exclusive archaeological site of a small group of scientists. Mathias is going to join his brother the next day and he invites the Yanks to go with him. Sounds like fun, right?

     When they get there they climb to the top and look around. No brother. No archaeologists. And when they climb down and try to leave, the local Indians won’t let them. Guns, bows, arrows, knives, that sort of thing.

     Back on top, they start finding remains of a deserted camp, and then body parts, and then it becomes clear that the plant that is encasing the ruin is not your average African violet. It will trap you and eat you. If you have an open wound or sore, it will grow into your body and mess you up from the inside. It can even mimic sounds to try to trap you.

     And at that point I threw up my hands and tried, unsuccessfully, not to laugh. The plant wants to make Stacy (Laura Ramsey) jealous my mimicking the sounds of her boy friend

     Eric (Shawn Ashmore) making whoopee with Amy (Jena Malone). And how, you ask, does a plant know what those sounds are? Yes, you may ask.

     I also suspect that many audiences were turned off by the high voltage cruelty of the violence. Mathias breaks his legs. The last member of the student quartet is Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), a medical student who decides that the legs have to come off in order to keep the plant from killing the victim. This entails breaking the leg bones with a large rock and then cutting the limbs away with a small hunting knife. It’s one of the most queasy-making scenes since the advent of torture porn.

From the film’s first frame, we spend 90 minutes watching four human beings disintegrating, with primal screaming every step of the way. Smith and Smith provide us with no comic relief—the picture is relentlessly grim. Even Seneca tossed in a few chuckles. It may have been the darkest humor of all time, but these guys won’t give us that much.

     Hard to believe, given the fact that sound reproducing, man-eating plants register pretty low on the Terror-O-Meter—so when it comes to meat-munching ivy, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.

     Now our second feature is a certified drive-in, B movie classic—Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Not the musical remake. This LSH is the original black and white, shot in two days, 14^th-billed Jack Nicholson, star on top of the Christmas tree beaut.

     The plots of the two films are essentially the same. Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) works for Gravis Mushnik (Mel Welles), the “Skid Row Florist.” Yeah, that’s a sample of the movie’s innate silliness. Seymour is a human Shmoo—ordered around, yelled out, psychologically abused by the older man. All for ten bucks a week. What a deal.

     The shop’s only other employee is Audrey Fulguard (Jackie Jospeh, who made a career of sweet-natured dimbulbs). She has a secret crush on Seymour . He likes her, too, and shows it by naming the new plant he created “Audrey Junior.”

Unfortunately, Audrey Junior is part Venus flytrap and demands blood in order to thrive. The more blood Seymour gives it, the larger it gets—and the more blood it demands. Finally, Seymour has to knock off the neighbors to provide skid row Miracle Gro. Seymour’s conquest of Audrey depends on the plant because the plant has become a local attraction. Money flows into the shop and even Mushnik is happy. Until, that is, the night he sees Seymour feeding body parts to his new Flower of Evil.

     The musical is a Faustian fable, the moral of which is “Don’t feed the plants.” Corman’s and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith’s moral is, borrowing from another musical, “Morals tomorrow; comedy tonight.”

     Griffith ’s script is a lot funnier than you expect it to be, with gags you have to be on your toes to get. Dick Miller plays Burson Fouch, a man who comes into the shop looking for something to eat. He eats flowers. A movie about man-eating plants features a character who is a man eating plants. That’s not even a visual pun. I don’t know what the hell kind of gag that is, but it works.

     Jack Nicholson enters late and doesn’t stay long. He’s Wilbur Force, a Peter Lorre-esque masochist who calls on the skid row dentist (John Shaner) because he knows the guy will inflict the maximum amount of pain. Nicholson is funny, as is much of the film, in a Mad Magazine sort of way. You’ll enjoy him but, trust me, you will not see two Oscars in this guy’s future.

     Corman famously shot the film in two days and part of the intervening night. It looks cheap and rushed, but not that cheap and rushed. Corman’s pictures are like those crafts you see at Farmers’ Markets that are made out of empty milk cartons. You know it’s something modified and you may like to look at it, but it’s perfectly plain that, at heart, it’s an empty milk carton.

     And yes, as in the musical version, Audrey Junior talks. The voice is supplied by writer Griffith, who also plays a couple of uncredited roles. What, you expect Roger Corman to pay for additional actors? Please.

     This is a subversive little gem—well, rhinestone anyway—that is not only a memorable way to spend 75 minutes, but is also a finger in the eye of big budget floparoos from the same era (Cleopatra, I’m looking at you.)

     Which reminds me, I haven’t watched Carry On, Cleo is a long time

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP (1999)

Between 1890 and 1900, a plague of bad luck and madness settled over the area around Black River Falls, Wis., about 68 miles west of Plainfield, Ed Gein’s stomping ground. Based on Michael Lesy’s book, Wisconsin Death Trip is a documentary that tells the story of dangerous, eccentric, insane happenings of that time and place.

I especially like the story of the farmer who committed suicide by digging a small hole in the ground, placing a stick of dynamite in it, lighting the fuse and then lying down with his head over the hole. And there’s former schoolteacher Mary Sweeney, aka the Wisconsin Window Smasher, who traversed the state several times, breaking panes when the mania came upon her to do so. One trip cost window-owners over $50,000.

Locals are continually being hauled off to the Mendota Asylum, from which they frequently escape by just walking away or, more drastically, by hanging themselves.

Many of the film’s visuals are derived from period photos taken by Charles Van Schaik, including a lot of children in their coffins, and the narration by Ian Holm comes entirely from newspaper articles and obituaries of the time. Many of the incidents are re-created using actors.

This is easily one of the most unusual pictures you will ever see, but don’t expect a lightning pace or answers to your questions. No one seems to have figured out what was going on, beyond economic hard times and real estate sellers who lied to the under-educated Norwegian immigrants about the value of the land they bought sight unseen. And maybe lead in the water. This is one creepy movie.

Joe Dante

Not too long ago director Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling) programmed a 7-part film festival, called “Dante’s Inferno,” for the New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood . Twelve movies, mostly from the B to B- range, made the cut and the whole thing wrapped up with the screening of a 259-minute fruitcake called The Movie Orgy. It had originally run 7 hours. Here’s how Dante defined it on Tim Lucas’ “Video WatchBlog”:

“This [is] the first, one nite only public showing in many years of my first project. In 1968 when ‘camp’ was king, Jon Davison and I put together a counterculture compendium of 16mm bits and pieces (TV show openings, commercials, parts of features, old serials etc.), physically spliced them in ironic juxtapositions and ran the result at the Philadelphia College of Art interspersed with parts of a Bela Lugosi serial. The reaction was phenomenal. This led to The Movie Orgy, a 7-hour marathon of old movie clips and stuff with a crowd-pleasing anti-war, anti-military, anti-establishment slant that played the Fillmore East and on college campuses all over the country for years -- always the one print, viewed through a haze of beer and controlled substances. We called it a 2001-splice odyssey. It's still a pop time capsule that will bring many a nostalgic chuckle from baby boomers and dazed expressions of WTF?! from anyone else.”

There was no plot to The Movie Orgy so audience members could spend a lengthy break in the rest room, step outside to smoke a cigar, or go home to feed the dogs and when they got back to their seats they knew they hadn’t missed anything. You know, like watching Star Wars, Episodes 1-3 back to back.

Certainly Dante’s films have garnered a loyal fan base since Piranha in 1978. Most of his pictures pull off the wonderful trick of parodying popular genres or specific movies--Piranha spoof Jaws—and being a certifiable example of the genre at the same time.

No one in my part of the country seems interested in sponsoring a whacktrospective of this sort. I tried a few years ago to generate some interest in the idea of a series of short retrospectives and put together some single-weekend programs (on the themes of the influence of vaudeville on early talkies, and various aspects of film noir) but money for advertising wasn’t forthcoming and the project suffered a quick demise.

I would love to have been able to attend “Dante’s Inferno,” but even more I’d like to see a retrospective of Dante’s films.  So many people write him off, looking at his work and seeing only the genre trappings—and too often, the disappointing box office returns. I think, however, that were they to look a little closer they would realize that the films contain a thread of themes that repay attention, and more significantly a repeated approach to the material that is steady and refreshingly off-kilter.

There’s absolutely nothing to prevent you from staging your own Joe Dante Film Festival. Here are my six favorites, counting down to number one.

Masters of Horror: Homecoming (2005)

            This is an approximately hour-long episode of the premium cable series. The corpses of dead soldiers return as zombies and win the right to vote. Losers get their brains eaten. Solid political satire with a concept Swift might have loved.

Explorers (1985)

            One of Dante’s, or anyone else’s, oddest films. It starts off like a Spielbergian nostalgia-rama about a group of boys who construct their own space ship out of dreams, wishes, and star dust, and then morphs into the most unexpected cinematic shaggy dog story since The Last Laugh. Odds are you’ll hate it (most viewers do) but after you quit being pissed off at the way Dante’s played you, you may enjoy the joke.

The Howling (1981)

            Released the same year as John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London , and with a similarly black humored approach to its subject, Dante’s film, co-written by John Sayles, is just wicked. Watch it once for the story, a second time for Rob Bottin’s hotdamn prosthetic effects, and once more for the inside jokes and cameos. You still won’t be tired of it.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979)

            Alan Arkush is the credited director, but Dante and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!) helped out. Dante and Arkush came up with the original story, which concerns the last days of a southern California high school brought low by dat ol’ devil music and The Ramones. Note a handmade recruiting poster on the wall for the People’s Temple. They’re offering free Kool-Aid. Never has the anarchic spirit of rock ‘n’ roll been so much fun.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

            Six years passed before this sequel to the 1984 hit Gremlins came out, and although Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was still involved, this time the movie is almost pure Dante. The jokes are faster, slyer, and much more satirical, and the entire enterprise is wildly surreal at a level Dali would have appreciated.

Matinee (1993)

            For me, this is the great one. It’s my childhood—except for the fact that the kid involved actually has a date. Young Gene (Simon Fenton) has turned the makers of cheesy horror movies into his personal friends. It’s 1962, his dad is in the Navy, and his family is based at Key West when the Russians decide to ship missiles to Cuba . Luckily for Gene, horror director Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), a stand-in for that wonderfully loony Hollywood showman William Castle, has brought his new shocker Mant! to town for a try out. Woolsey’s movie within the movie is a feast of lousy special effects and overwrought acting from genuine stars of ‘50s-60s sci fi—Kevin McCarthy, William Schallart, and Robert Cornthwaite, with Cathy Moriarty as Woolsey’s perennial leading lady.

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I guess there’s something inherently schizophrenic in a story about a guy who is one person during the day and another person at night, and Ghost Rider displays its schizo qualities from beginning to end. Its overwrought visuals are interesting in a comic book splash panel sort of way and star Nicolas Cage hits the dialogue notes right, especially with the lines one suspects he wrote himself. But writer/director Mark Steven Johnson can’t seem to decide whether the Ghost Rider can stand alone or whether he needs camp to stay the night.

Cage is Johnny Blaze, stunt motorcyclist. As a young man he rode with his dad in circus sideshows, but when he found out that Papa Blaze was dying of cancer, he sold his soul to Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda—yup, old Wyatt himself--trying really hard not to let his dialogue break him up) in exchange for a remission of the disease. The cancer vanishes overnight but dat mean ol’ devil man than allows Blaze the Elder to die in a bike accident. I would love for him to have been killed by a shotgun blast from a redneck in a pickup, but that would have been just too cheesy, rider.

Johnny grows up, still riding stunt bikes on the southern circuit, a sort of boll weevil Knievel. Then, Mephistopheles’ son Blackheart (Wes Bentley) decides to oust his old man, claim 1,000 of the worst souls and take over the world. Mephistopheles calls in Blaze’s debt and makes him the new Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter, assigned to stopping Blackheart in exchange for release from his contract. If any of this makes sense to you, you need to seek professional help.

Enlisting the aid of a cemetery caretaker (Sam Elliott, who chews his scenes with the same gusto Caretaker chews his plug) and trying to explain his predicament to unbelieving love Roxanne (Eva Mendes, who easily comes off the worst in the cast because she’s the one who can never quite cover up the fact that she thinks this is all absurd), Blaze becomes one mean motor scooter.

Watching the film, I could never get beyond the belief that Mark Steven Johnson had a lot less to do with what ended up on screen than Cage did. An admitted fan of the “Ghost Rider” comic book, Cage had to have a tattoo of the character covered by makeup so he could play it. Much of his natural goofiness comes across. It’s hard not to believe that Blaze’s Elvis accent, love for jelly beans sucked out of a martini glass, video tapes of chimps acting like martial artists, and constant background music supplied by The Carpenters didn’t originate with the actor. Maybe the film sat on the shelf for two years because no one could figure out how to reconcile Johnson’s footage with Cage’s add-ons.

Russell Boyd’s photography provides some nice visuals, the effects are frequently sub-par in a nice “B” movie way, and the actors appear to be having a good time. I especially liked Elliott’s Caretaker, who spends most of his work day doing what all stereotype manual laborers’ do—leaning on a shovel.

I don’t know whether or not Ghost Rider is an accurate adaptation of the comic book, but I don’t care either. I just wish it had taken one path or the other—camp or seriousness. As it is, it isn’t a flat tire, but the air is leaking out pretty rapidly.

HANNIBAL RISING (2007)

Well, it isn’t “Hannibal Risible,” which I was afraid it might turn out to be. The latest chapter in the Hannibal Lecter saga almost fails because of a miscast director (Peter Webber, “Girl With a Pearl Earring’) and almost succeeds because of great cinematography from Ben Davis and some gloriously sleazy characters. It exists somewhere in the middle—watchable but never memorable. Anthony Hopkins put his brand on this character as surely as Anthony Perkins did on Norman Bates.

The film begins in Lithuania in 1944. The war is on and Hannibal, who appears to be around eight years old, flees the family castle, moving into a hunting lodge with his parents and young sister Mischa. Advancing Soviets arrive only to be fried by German aircraft. The parental Lecters are killed as well. Then five local collaborators show up and decide to hide out at the lodge.

But it’s winter and times are hard. In order to survive, they eat Mischa, whom they claim will soon die of pnuemonia anyway. More bombs fall and one of the snackers is killed and the other four scatter. Hannibal is rescued by the good guys and then spends the next ten years in an orphanage established by the Soviets in his family castle. He finall runs away to find relatives in France.

He locates an aunt by marriage, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li) who is conveniently able to teach him how to decapitate scumbuckets with a Japanese sword. Now that all the pieces are in place, let’s get ready to rumble.

From this point on the film is a series of revenge murders, and not just against those who ate Mischa. It seems that Hannibal has developed an aversion to all bullies as well.

Thomas Harris, who wrote the novels these films were based on, wrote the script and  does some interesting things with it. Even knowing what kind of monster this young man will turn out to be, we can’t help but sympathize with him the way we do with other out-of-control revengers. As long as he has a good reason and the killings don’t cross an undefined border of sadism, we can go along with them. Harris knows this and moves Hannibal slowly to the point where he and we have to say sayonara.

But the moment does come, and while it seems inevitable, it’s still shocking. I can’t be more specific. Sorry.

Gaspard Ulliel plays Hannibal adaquately but not spectacularly. He comes across like a good actor protraying evil in a movie he thinks is kinda silly. I could sit next to him in a restaurant and never think he’s about to order some fava beans and a nice chianti. On screen, his madness is all in his facial expressions, and they are limited to two.

Gong Li adds some class to the essentially thankless role of aunt/ennabler, and Dominic West is convincing as the French cop who understands Hannibal’s tragedy but wishes he’d commit his murdere outside of France. Rhys Ifans, as the chief villain, is so slimey he makes your average garden slug look like a strip of beef jerkey.

It’s all mid-tier nastiness.  A Hannibal Lecter story could be a lot worse than this, but a couple of them have been a lot better.

UNCLE SILAS by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1864)

We forget sometimes that writers were producing popular literature hundreds of years ago, especially when a novel that’s been around for a century or two is still in print. Longevity makes it a “classic,” but readability and a thumping good narrative is what give it longevity.

Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas was one of the last significant attempts at a full-blooded gothic novel after Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 and before the phenomenal revival of the form in Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.

As the story opens, young Maud Ruthyn is living a blandly idyllic life (you figure it out) with her wealthy father. When he dies suddenly, she is told by his odd Swedenborgian friend Dr. Bryerly that she must go to live at the run-down estate Bartram-Haugh, the home of her paternal Uncle Silas. Silas will care for her until she reaches her majority, at which time she will inherit her father’s money. In the intervening years, Silas will be paid out of the estate for her upkeep.

One problem: if her own father was eccentric, Maud’s uncle is nuttier than a rest stop at Stuckey’s. In fact, most of his neighbors think that, years before, he slaughtered a Mr. Clark, to whom he owed money, as Clark slept in one of Bartram’s guest rooms.

Two problem: if Maud dies before she gets her inheritance, Silas gets it all. If she marries Silas’ repulsive son Dudley, Silas gets it all by taking it away from Dudley.

The novel is an interesting blend of the gothic—detailed landscape description, characters who wear evil the way Paris Hilton wears stupid, and a crumbling, near-ruin of a country house—and the more popular for the time sensation novel—a domestic setting, mysteries to be solved, and a sinister servant in the person of the French tutor Madame de la Rougierre. LeFanu plays with the supernatural—he is the author of the wonderful vampire story “Carmilla,” so he could play with the best of ‘em—but the book is really a study in psychological suspense.

Yes, the dialogue can get pretty stilted in that patented second-tier mid-Victorian author sort of way, and the three-volume stretching is all too obvious when Maud and Silas have confrontation after confrontation that are all cut from the same pattern: Maud accuses someone in the house of tormenting her, Silas listens and then dismisses her complaint as coming from just a silly little girl, she becomes angry, he becomes sullen and insulting, she rushes from the room. It’s the sort of thing that comes with the territory, but it is more than made up for in the parts that LeFanu could really get into to—those subtle hints that the mold and rot of the house and grounds have infested the souls of Silas and his household.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the corruption and madness that have been growing in Silas all his life have tainted his physical surroundings.

Every fan of modern horror owes it to him/herself to look backward now and again to see where the contemporary genre came from. Many of the original gothic novels are deadly slow and about as chilling as a midday hike across Death Valley, but Uncle Silas isn’t one of them. Many of today’s go-for-the-jugular grossout-a-paloozas aren’t near as creepy.

"Wolves of Darkness" by Jack Williamson (1932)

Most pulp fans agree that Weird Tales’ most significant rival in the realm of dark fantasy was the short-lived Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, which lasted only 10 issues from 1931 to 1933. Perhaps the strongest novelette published in Strange Tales was Jack Williamson’s always-fascinating “Wolves of Darkness” in the January 1932 issue.

Clovis McLauren has received a telegram from his father, Doc McLauren (one-time professor of astrophysics and currently an independent researcher), asking for help with an experiment. Clovis rushes to the small town of Hebron, Texas, and arrives on a snow-covered night and asks the station agent for help getting out to Dad’s ranch.

The agent does all he can to talk Clovis out of visiting the ranch, especially at night, but the younger man finally determines to find his own way. He hires farmer Sam Jenson to convey him to his father’s place. On the way, they are attacked by a pack of wolves. Jenson is killed and Clovis is horrified to see a beautiful young woman running with the pack. She is Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant.

“Her head was bare,” Clovis tells us, “and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.

“And her eyes shone green.

“They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.

“Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.”

Now, of course that’s overwritten in that grand, penny-a-word way of the pulps, but it also adds to the eerie suspense Williamson has been building from the beginning. Tod Browning’s film of Dracula had hit theaters about a year before this novelette was published, and the opening scenes reflect the movie quite closely: Innocent stranger arrives at country town and the locals tell him not to go to the castle — or, in this case, ranch. He goes anyway and is followed by wolves
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When he arrives, he is welcomed by Doc McLauren and Stella (think Dracula and his vampire bride) and given a meal in which they do not participate. And just as the film displays several telling details, Williamson give us this carefully placed observation: “Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.”

But you sense a shift from the supernatural to the science fictional as Clovis talks more and more of Doc and Stella acting and speaking like aliens. Williamson presents us with a grab bag of popular genres, from the supernatural and science fiction to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the physical grotesqueness and pain of weird menace:

“Her teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh ownward,” Clovis tells us about the torture his father demands that Stella institues when his son refuses to help him. “Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel her teeth gnawing … gnawing….

“She did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe — blood which, from time to time, she ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. Occasionally she stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick her lips with a dreadful satisfaction.”

And later, when Clovis escapes, he is pursued by the wolves and what appear to be zombies:

“Judson, the man who had brought me out from Hebron, was among them. His livid flesh hung in ribbons. One eye was gone, and a green fire seemed to sear the empty socket. His chest was fearfully lacerated. And the man was — eviscerated! Yet his hideous body leaped beside the wolves.”

More and more, we sense that these are not just ordinary wolves. We assume they are werewolves, but as the adventure progresses we begin to question that explanation. Will the final answer come from the horror genre or from science fiction?

“Wolves of Darkness” is one of Williamson’s most popular early novelettes and it has been reprinted many times. You can read it for free online. Enjoy.

The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)

There is one bit in this little programmer that scared the hell out of me when I was eight years old. The picture opens and closes with a close-up of actor Arthur Shields in werewolf makeup. He turns to the camera and says . . . Well, it won’t make any sense unless you know what he’s responding to, so I’ll save the punch line for later.

1950s B movie goddess Gloria Talbott stars in the title role. She’s Janet Smith, returning on her 21^st birthday to the home she left long ago. Accompanying her is fiancé George Hastings (John Agar); greeting her is her guardian and old family friend Dr. Lomas (Shields), who has for her some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Janet is an heiress; the bad news is something she never knew about her father—that he was the infamous Dr. Jekyll. Fearing that she may have inherited the gene that made him turn into a monster, she now refuses to marry George.

Complicating matters even more is the fact that the villagers, led by handyman Jacob (John Dierkes), want to kill her to prevent any more of those Jekylly murders. And, of course, the killings do recommence.

I guess we’re not supposed to know that Lomas is the guilty party—in true weird menace form, he wants to claim the money and property—but his appearance in werewolf drag at the beginning pretty much gives the game away.

The true villain attacks Janet, but to maintain the picture’s last secret I will not reveal whether or not she is rescued. So there.

With the demise of the monster we are informed, quite seriously, that nevermore will a creature so vile and deadly roam the countryside—and at this point we get that close-up of Shields as the werewolf turning to look us directly in the eye and saying, “Are you sure?”

Director Edgar G. Ulmer’s daughter thinks that Shields and her dad tossed the bit in as a joke, but for some reason I cannot explain it shot down my spine like a bolt of electricity hitting a wet golfer. I never carried the fear that monster movies engendered back home from the theater, but that night visions of a wolfman laughing at me because he and I knew he was real, and no one else believed it, kept me awake and tossing. My step-dad said that was it, no more horror movies for me—an admonition that was forgotten by the time the next one hit town. To this day, the question “Are you sure?” makes me nervous and sets me to looking for a gun with a silver bullet, or a mallet and stake.

Working from a script by Jack Pollexfen, Ulmer does his usual wondrous job of fashioning a respectable house out of moldy crumbs of gingerbread. There’s no way he could hide the non-budget entirely—every exterior shot of the house exposes an obvious miniature. Fog is used as much to hide cheapness as it is to create atmosphere. We see from these exteriors that the house is isolated—it’s a low rent Baskerville Hall—but during one interior scene, Hastings and Lomas are seated at a lamp table in front of a window, and through the curtains outside automobile traffic can clearly be seen zipping past.

I doubt that even an eight-year old, seeing the movie for the first time today, would be frightened by it. It’s purely a nostalgic pleasure with little to recommend it despite Ulmer’s direction and good efforts from the cast. It is, though, a good example of the kind of picture kids ate up during the late 1950s, and then chuckled over when it landed on late night TV a few years later.

Am I sure?

Hell. I just scared myself.

Parasomnia (2008)

I’ve been following the career of horror director William Malone since his Tales from the Crypt days. He’s got a good eye for the creepy visual. Check out House on Haunted Hill. Unfortunately, he’s got the story sense of a 6-year-old — check out House on Haunted Hill — and doesn’t know when to stop. His endings leave a lot to be desired. And by “a lot,” I mean everything.

In Parasomnia, Dylan Purcell stars as Danny, who is wandering around in an asylum one day, gawking at the creepy inmates as if it were Bedlam, circa 1750. He sees Laura (Cherilyn Wilson), who suffers from the title condition, which keeps her asleep most of the time. Her doctor (Timothy Bottoms), who has never heard the phrase “medical ethics,” tells Danny her story, and the young man sneaks her out so she won’t get caught in the MacGuffin.

Now the guy in the room next to hers is a serial killer named Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick). So dangerous is this monster, he’s kept standing up in chains and masked so he can’t hypnotize the staff. Right, he’s in the room next to a sleeping girl. This place is not on the shortlist for Asylum of the Year honors.

Anyway, when Danny takes Laura home, Volpe escapes to track her down and kill everyone in the world. Jeffrey Combs is wasted in the cop role. Malone has outdone himself because not only is the ending bad, the rest of the flick is, too. Okay, there are some nice visuals when we get to Volpe’s Dr. Phibes-ish lair, but my God, this thing is stupid.

Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Some film reviewers try to slip by saying that the actors in the movie seemed bored. What that generally means is that there is nothing in the plot or characters to energize the interest of intelligent or experienced actors—or audiences.

Well, the actors in Mark of the Vampire appear absolutely catatonic and I would guess that the staff and crew weren’t far behind. Among classic horror films with any kind of pedigree, this may be the worst. And if it’s true that director Tod Browning lost interest in Dracula after the death of its intended star, Lon Chaney, this somnolent remake of Chaney’s original London After Midnight, also directed by Browning, is a Nyquil cocktail.

The name above the title is Lionel Barrymore’s. He’d worked with Browning before (The Show, 1927; West of Zanzibar, 1928) and would again (The Devil-Doll, 1936) but I wonder if he wanted to make this one, if he’d lost a bet, signed contracts in his sleep, had to do what MGM told him to do, or just wanted to help a pal after the fiasco that had been Freaks (1932).  Barrymore plays a police detective posing as a doctor and his performance is so hammy you expect it to come with a hunk of Swiss between two slices of rye. 

The story is set in 1934. Sir Karell (Holmes Herbert) has been killed and his blood drained, apparently by a vampire. The Professor (Barrymore) has been called into the case by Inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) because they fear the monster may return to kill Sir Karell’s daughter Ilsa (Elizabeth Allen).  Of course, she has a worried fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth) and the household is rounded out by the usual 1930s staff of comic relief servants.

The villains next door are the vampire team headed by Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and the wide-eyed Luna (Carol Borland). Their abode is filthy and bedecked by cobwebs. Opossums hiss and scurry, representing, I suppose, mutated rats. Lugosi and Borland, in mostly non-speaking roles, even descend a grand staircase, passing through (off camera) a large cobweb without breaking it.

Any single element of this movie, no matter how insignificant, that reminds the viewer of Dracula is purely intentional.

Lugosi is said to have disliked what was done with his character and petitioned Browning to make changes, but the director stuck with the script as written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert, John L. Balderston, H.S. Kraft, Samuel Ornitz, and Browning himself (the latter four uncredited).  Even with the talent involved, the screenplay is such a mess, determining whether director or actor was right is a waste of time.  Nothing could salvage this stinker and I suspect that everyone but Lugosi knew it. Without Chaney’s unique talent for verisimilitude through makeup and gesture, this one became silly on page one.

Only the cults of Browning and Lugosi have kept this one breathing as long as it has—those pus one of the most gob-smackingly out-of-left-field endings you’ve ever not-quite-believed you were seeing.

Mark of the Vampire is a must for classic horror and/or Browning and/or Lugosi fans, but even at a little over an hour it will tax the patience and credulity of anyone else. I mean, I’ve seen it a half dozen times and I still don’t believe it. It just reminds me how much, like Browning, I miss Lon Chaney.