Phone, aka Pon (2002)

This effective ghost story from South Korea approaches overkill but doesn’t go over the line. It also presents one of the best creep-out performances from a child, ever.  

Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) is a reporter who has just completed a series of articles about a ring of pedophiles. A man who is outraged by the stories (we assume because he’s close to, if not a member of, the ring) keeps bombarding her with threatening phone calls. Her best friend Ho-jeong (Yu-mi Kim) invites her to move temporarily into the new house Ho-j has just finished decorating and in which she and her husband Chang-hoon (Woo-jae Choi) will soon take up residence. Ji-w accepts, hoping to hide from her tormentor. 

But after the move, something odd happens. Ho-j’s young daughter Yeong-ju (Seo-woo Eun) answers a call on “Aunt Ji-won’s” mobile phone. Whatever she hears shapes her face into a mask of terror and she begins screaming.  After that, she fluctuates between happy little Yeong-ju and something else, something that develops a creepy, sexually charged affection for her father and bitter jealousy for her mother. Note here that the Yeong-ju can’t be more than six years old. 

As the air grows thicker and the story moves toward its grotesque finale, we learn that Ji-won’s mobile phone as been assigned a number that was given previously to a couple of people who died violently. There seems to be something in the number 6644. There are the ghost of the teen Jin-hie (Ji-yeon Choi), a girl who seeks vengeance because of a sordid, failed love affair; lots of rainy nights, and enough sudden apparitions to satisfy the most fervent lover of K-horror. The scene when Jin-hie succeeds in possessing Yeong-ju is terrifying not only within the context of the story but also because of the intensity of young Seo-woo Eun. You won’t believe what you’re seeing. 

The film was written and directed by Byeong-ki Ahn, and it is a masterful piece of work. If you’re not already familiar with the South Korean horror renaissance of the 1990s-early 2000s, this is a good place to start getting acquainted.

Violette Noziere (1978)

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary.  The real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a dully colored Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not an overheated crime, but a clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one, with its horror residing just under the surface.

 

Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)

Murder in the Red Barn was the perfect vehicle for Tod Slaughter’s introduction to movie-goers. It was one of the Victorian melodramas in which he had been barnstorming the provincial theaters for years, the play having been based on an actual 1828 murder case. Since he had been portraying the villainous Squire Corder so long on the stage, Slaughter had made the hypocritical landowner one of his signature roles.

The film is introduced as if it were a play. A host walks on stage from the wings and offers to introduce the characters. Each is greeted with applause. Even Corder takes a bow under the proscenium to the approbation of the theater audience. This literal stage-setting, which will never be referred to again, only adds to the film’s time-machine feel. Just as the movie’s creaky plot and characterizations take us back to British neighborhood cinemas of 1935, the faux theatrical introduction would have removed audiences of 1935 back 70 years to the days of mid-Victorian melodrama.

At the village dance, Squire Corder appears to be the very soul of amiable generosity. Surely then as now audiences knew not to trust any man in a melodrama who seems to be that pleasant and courtly. He will certainly prove to be Up to No Good. Actually, you can see it in Slaughter’s body language. He stands stiff-backed, head erect, arms held oddly in front of his torso looking for all the world as if he were a praying mantis.

All goes well for Corder at the dance until he makes the mistake of allowing a gypsy woman—where would these pictures be without gypsy women—to read his palm, in which she sees death and the Squire hanging from the end of a rope. Talk about your buzz kills . . .

Next we cut to a humble cottage and see the lovely village maiden Maria Marten (Sophie Stewart)—where would these pictures be without lovely village maidens—telling her mother that she is off to choir practice. But—cue the organ—she is really sneaking off to Corder’s manor house because the cad has been promising her a life of luxury and respectability in London when he weds her, which he has absolutely no intention of doing after he gets what he wants from her. Have some Madeira, m’dear.

When Maria’s father (D.J. Williams) finds out that there was no choir practice that night, they gypsy lad Carlos (Eric Portman), who is smitten with our heroine, lies to Farmer Marten and says that he was with Maria. He’s trying to protect her but it isn’t made clear why spending night time hours with him is better than anything else she could have been doing.

Livid, Farmer Marten calls on the Squire and asks him to run the gypsies out of town.

This scene is a grand one for Slaughter as he gets to scale the heights of justified hypocrisy. He paces back and forth in his parlor, his steps stiff and forced as if he were counting “one, two, three, stop, turn, speak, pace back, one, two, three.” He dabs gently at his nose with his handkerchief, then paces to the bell cord, tugs on it manfully, and deliberately paces back. It’s stage movement of the most mechanical sort but it is oddly mesmerizing.

Slaughter is like the modern computer generated Scooby-Doo at the heart of the drama. He’s too large for the other actors. He stands out because he doesn’t seem to be quite real, and yet all the other characters in the movie accept his presence. His hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his way of underlining every laugh and condescending lip-curl are the most unsubtle ways of virtually commanding center stage. This is a Tod Slaughter film the way John Wayne’s later pictures belonged entirely to the Duke. He exists on his own plane, and the spotlight follows him wherever he goes.

Now we cut to a gaming room in London where Corder is experiencing a terrible run of bad luck at the dice table, losing toss after toss to a dandified Dennis Hoey (later Inspector Lestrade to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes). So busted does Corder become, he determines to marry a wealthy, plain, psalm-singing old maid for her money. When the winner of his fortune gives him but one month to pay up, it becomes clear that poor Maria is old news.

Of course all sexual action has taken place off screen but we can tell by Maria’s shamed demeanor that she and the Squire have been involved with some slap and tickle, and soon it will become obvious to the entire village. Her father, declaring her a “wanton,” throws her out of his house. She hastens to the manor to claim what is her due by former promise, but Corder dismisses her distress with a delicious “I meant what I said at the time.”

“You shan’t kick me into the gutter,” she cries, thinking her despair will melt his cold heart. So certain is she that Corder will do the right thing, she drives away the love-struck Carlos, who offers to marry her.

The Squire tells Maria to meet him that night at the red barn and they will slip away to London. When they meet, a storm is raging. Where would these pictures be without raging storms? Maria senses that all is not well with Corder. Slaughter allows his shoulders to hunch as he hisses, “Didn’t I promise to make you a bride? You shall be a bride, Maria. A bride of death!”

She screams. He shoots her with a dueling pistol. He digs a hole in the barn and buries her as thunder and lightning crash and flash. Director Milton Rosmer even places his camera in the grave so we can watch Corder as he shovels dirt onto our faces.

From this point on the movie hastens to its close. Maria is missed by her grieving parents. Carlos is tracked down and accused of causing her disappearance. He remembers seeing her with the Squire on the last night anyone saw her. The town officials take Corder and Carlos to the barn where Corder’s dog Tiger begins to sniff around a patch of disturbed earth. Corder offers to dig around to prove that there is nothing amiss and he digs up the pistol he had inadvertently dropped in the grave.

When the corpse is exposed—not to us but to the characters on screen—Slaughter give us a nicely overwrought mad scene right out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t stare at me like that, Maria,” he gibbers. He is finally led away, barking mad, by the authorities.

But he has one last horrible indignity awaiting him as he is led to the gallows. He doesn’t see it coming—if people in old-fashioned melodramas like this had an ounce of imagination or self-restraint, there wouldn’t be any old-fashioned melodramas like this—but you’ll spot it as soon as you hear that the hangman is too sick to attend to his duties and so a “volunteer hangman” has been procured for the day.

As it is with other of Slaughter’s lead roles, in the end there’s a grandeur in Squire Corder’s evil. He covers all the bases: snobbishness, vanity, lechery, violence, greed, hypocrisy—he’s the complete villains of Charles Dickens all rolled into one. Slaughter is sui generis, and you wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

House Hunting (2013)

It’s a tale of two families—Hays and Thomson.  Charlie Hays (Marc Singer) has his hands full with a new(ish) wife, Susan (Hayley DuMond), and a teen daughter, Emmy (Janey Gioiosa), who hates her.  Biological mom ran off with another man.  Charlie works for a company (bank? investment firm?) that foreclosed on a farm, house and 70 acres, and Dad is taking the family out to look at it, thinking he may want to buy. 

Other family.   Don Thomson (Art LeFleur) is a grouch who is being dragged from one open house to another by his wife Leslie (Victoria Vance) and his teen son Jason (Paul McGill).  As he stands, smoking, in front of a suburban mediocrity that looks pretty much like the one they just left, a man wearing one of those hideous arctic hats with earflaps—mukluks for the head—and leading a dog on a leash approaches him.  They agree that the neighborhood sucks and the man gives Don a card with an address on it, an address for the perfect place, a farm on 70 acres. 

The Hays family arrives at the house first, but they are immediately followed by the Thomsons.  The two men appraise each other as rivals for the property, but neither of them goes into the building beyond the foyer, and then they decide to leave. 

As Charlie drives away from the house, a young woman rushes from the woods in front of his car.  He smacks into a tree, but gets out and goes to her, sees that he didn’t hit her but that still she is covered in blood. 

Don pulls up behind him.  Since Charlie’s car is too scrunched up to drive, Don offers to take him and the young woman back to the house so they can call for help.  The young woman, Hanna (Rebekah Kennedy), tries to flee in fear.  When they ask her why, the families discover that she has recently had her tongue cut out. 

All seven people cram into Don’s car and head back to the highway, but end up every time they try back at the house.  Which apparently doesn’t want them to leave.  In the pantry, they find seven cans of beef stew.  They think they see the man with the hat walking his dog, but when they shout at him to stop, he disappears. 

A month later, a month of no communication with the outside world, there continue to be seven cans of stew on the shelf every day. 

Until the day there are only six. 

The film was written and directed by Eric Hurt, who plays around nicely with the devices of the traditional ghost story.  What he does best is suggest a meaning for what the families are going through while keeping a definitive explanation just out of reach.  The best ghost stories don’t tell you what you you need to know in order to make the oddness understandable.  That’s not the way ghosts work in real life (so they tell me).  It’s said that the difference between a fictional ghost story and a real one is that the fictional haunting makes sense and the actual one doesn’t.  Hauntings don’t always happen out of a need for spectral revenge, or for the completion of some unfinished business. 

If you need an explanation in this case, imdb says that the film’s script is loosely based on Sartre’s play No Exit.  You can extrapolate a meaning from that. 

The acting is fine and production values are good.  There’s not a lot to be said yay or nay about either thing.  The real pleasure comes from watching a contemporary ghost movie that looks further back for inspiration than last week’s episode of some ghost hunting show on cable TV.

Popcorn (1991)

Popcorn makes the major mistake of placing high-camp burlesque versions of 1950s-style horror and science fiction movies—the kind using outlandish ballyhooish gimmicks to sell tickets—in the center of a quasi-legit slasher movie. The slasher part of the whole is not entirely serious as it’s a black comedy, but the parody movies-within-the-movie creamy filling are flat-out silly and so much more obviously funny than the chocolate coating that the whole thing melts in your hand.

Jill Schoelen (who had co-starred in the Robert Englund Phantom of the Opera in 1989) is Maggie, would-be screenwriter. She is a college student still living with her mom Suzanne (Dee Wallace). When Suzanne finds out that the struggling campus film department wants to put on an all night horror-palooza to raise money, she suddenly hesitates and asks Maggie not to get involved. Maggie wants to take part in the fund raiser. After all, they intend to run three schlocky gimmick flicks, recreating the original William Castle-ish stunts—shockers in the seats, a giant mosquito that buzzes the audience, and foul odors pumped into the theater to accompany a Japanese import called The Stench. Yeah, who’d want to miss that?

Ray Walston delivers a high energy cameo as Dr. Mnesyne (he remembers the good old days of motion picture promotion), proprietor of a movie memorabilia shop and owner of all the artifacts the students will need in order to pull off the promotional stunts. Walston is very much like the Devil in Damn Yankees.

While going through cases of stuff, one of the students finds a film can bearing a warning Not To Open, which is, of course, immediately ignored. A small reel of film is inside and when they project it they discover it’s part of a notorious movie made 15 years previously by Lanyard Gates, indie director and professional wacko. The movie was called The Possessor. To get revenge on everyone who ever doubted his talents, Gates presented his final film without an ending—an ending he intended to create live on stage by murdering his wife and daughter and everyone else he could. Somehow the theater caught on fire and Gates, as well as several people in the audience, were killed.

When she sees the remaining snippet of The Possessor, Maggie realizes that she has been dreaming it and quickly jumps to the conclusion that she is, in fact, Lanyard Gates’ daughter. How she wasn’t killed by the evil genius is explained in a quick bit of we-better-tell-the-audience-what-the-hell-really-happened-or-they’re-going-to-be-pissed exposition. And it seems that Gates is still alive, too, and plotting to kill everyone in the film department, a move that will spare future audiences hours of dreary independent art cinema.

The rest of the cast includes Tom Villard as Toby, the nerdiest of the class movie geeks; Elliott Hurst as Leon, the one in the wheelchair; and Freddie Marie Simpson as Tina, department flirt and student kootchymama (“people wonder how I manage to make straight A’s”) to department chair Mr. Davis (Tony Roberts). Derek Rydall is along as Mark, Maggie’s sort-of boyfriend and ineffectual hero.

To save some money on production costs, the picture was shot in Kingston, Jamaica. It’s based on a story by Mitchell Smith and screenwriter Alan Ormsby was set to direct until he lost the job after about three weeks of shooting and was replaced by Mark Hellier.

The film is a watchable failure, never generating anything like thrills or chills. That it has a cult following tells you more about movie cultists than it does about quality cinema, and I suspect people get a kick out of the movie parodies—I suspect this is where Ormsby’s heart really lay. You can watch this one once, but you’ll go back to Joe Dante’s Matinee, which also contains a burlesque movie-within-a-movie, over and over again.

The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)

There is one comic bit of surreal silliness in TBMWGY that endears it to my heart. Peter Lorre stars as Dr. Lorentz, who is town coroner, sheriff, mayor, justice of the peace, and just about everything else. He is the grandest of Pooh-Bahs and wears a black frock coat and stiff hat with a short crown and wide, circular brim. And he never goes anywhere without putting a Siamese kitten in his inside coat pocket.

Fortunately, no explanation is ever offered for this nuttiness, nor is the kitten ever put to any use—not even as a paperweight, as is the one in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Boris Karloff is Lorre’s co-star. King Karloff plays Prof. Nathaniel Billings, a crazed but amiable scientist who works in a “B” movie lab in the cellar of a rapidly fading colonial inn. He uses traveling salesmen in his experiments, attempting to—it’s been a week since I last saw this movie and damned if I can remember what it is Prof. Billings is trying to do. Doesn’t matter. It’s just silly.

His money running short, Billings sells the inn to perky Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a working hotel. She is followed by her ex-husband Bill Layden (Larry Parks) who wants to talk her out of the deal but then decides to stick around, Nancy Drew style, to uncover The Secret of the Old Inn.

Assisting the professor as house and groundskeepers are Amelia and Ebenezer (Maude Eburn and George McKay), she obsessed with the chickens she doesn’t have and he with being mysterious.

When Bill stumbles over what he takes to be a corpse in the basement, he calls the local police and Lorentz shows up. By the time the official gets to the inn, the body is missing.

From this point on, the action is farcical, nothing makes much sense and it doesn’t matter.

Karloff and Lorre seem to be having a good time spoofing the kinds of films they were better known for, although my teeth start grinding every time Karloff had to stoop and pick up a corpse—he had severe back problems from Frankenstein on. Parks, who later became one of the actors most damaged by HUAC when he admitted to having belonged to a Communist cell from 1941 to 1945, is boyish and was undoubtedly held in adoring awe by junior high girls. Donnell, whose second film this was, continued as a “B” movie queen until she moved to TV in the mid-1950s. And “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom adds his trademark air of punch-drunk je ne sais quoi.

The movie was directed by Lew Landers, who followed Donnell’s career path and ended up directing over 150 “B” films and TV shows. He’d partnered with Karloff on The Raven in 1935. Landers (who worked under his birth name--Louis Friedlander—for his first 9 pictures, 1934-36) is one of the few guys in Hollywood who turned out so much product with so little inspiration. Only Bela Lugosi’s over-the-top raving and Karloff’s understated masochism in The Raven give that sole Landers’ effort a chance at immortality.

As for TBMWGY, well, this one is for old school horroristas on holiday and small children who want to see “a scary movie” that isn’t really scary at all.

Horror Hotel (1960)

Here’s a nice little gem that hides in plain sight. It’s a public domain picture that can be viewed via the Internet, and that shows up frequently as part of those 100 Horror Movies for $20 DVD sets you find in second hand book stores, nestled into discount bins, and at truck stops. I suspect its very ubiquity is what keeps people from watching it, let alone taking it seriously.

That, and the fact that it’s over 50 years old, in black and white, and was made on a budget that probably didn’t exceed $40,000.

The movie is Horror Hotel, aka City of the Dead. It was the first film made by Vulcan Productions, which would soon change its name to Amicus and become Hammer’s most serious rival. It was released in 1960 and featured Christopher Lee, who was already a star in Europe.

Lee plays Prof. Alan Driscoll, who teaches classes on the history of witchcraft at a university on the American east coast. The picture’s prologue is his tale of Elizabeth Selwyn, burned at the stake in the village of Whitewood in 1692. Right. As IMDB reminds us, witches weren’t burned in the New World . But so what? This is Horror Hotel, not a History Channel documentary.

Driscoll convinces one of his students—an attractive female student—to spend her vacation time in Whitewood so she can do some first hand research, absorb some local color, and maybe get sacrificed to Satan. Nan Barlow (Venetia Stephenson—her name is actually “Stevenson,” misspelled in the credits) goes to Whitewood, checks into the Raven’s Inn , chats with the innkeeper Mrs. Newless (Patricia Jessel, who would play Domina in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), and then quickly disappears. Her brother Richard (Dennis Lotis) follows to find out what happened to her, and then finds himself needing to rescue book store owner Patricia (Betta St. John) from the clutches of the local witch cult.

The script is by George Baxt from a story by Milton Subotsky, whose name in the credits is the best hint that we’re in Amicusland. Director John Llewellyn Moxey shows us just how much can be done—or disguised—with lights and a fog machine. When Nan first arrives in the village and drives by a cemetery that is under a thick layer of fog, we agree completely when she mumbles, “Spooky, isn’t it?”

As she strolls along, no one ever seems to enter the frame in front of her. People materialize from the shadows behind her, stop, and watch her silently. This is a Puritan Massachusetts of the mind, with an almost Lovecraftian aura of clamminess. In one shot, hooded choristers glide through the fog. Yes, it sounds corny, but somehow it works. This may all be hokum witchcraft, mocking the church and not predating it as real Wiccan does, but Moxey makes us believe it. In Whitewood, at least 50% of every shot is black; when the light is in the center of the frame, it is being crushed.

The template for the script is Psycho—young woman on a quest comes to an isolated hotel; when she vanishes, a sibling comes looking for her; sibling meets another attractive young woman and comes to her rescue. There’s even a decaying old woman in a chair for the dénouement. The picture was released in the UK about four months after Psycho, more than enough time in the world of low budget filmmaking to be heavily influenced.

Meet it at least halfway and Horror Hotel works. Just don’t bring too much baggage.

H6 (2005)

Superficially, H6: Diario de un Asesino (Diary of a Serial Killer) resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel, but look a little deeper and you’re likely to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer under the surface resemblance. Besides, the release of H6 predated Hostel by eight months.

I suspect the similarities are coincidental. An abandoned “guest house,” or hotel, becomes the scene for torture and murder in H6, just as a youth hostel was the trap luring students to their doom in the Roth film, but the impersonal nature of hotel rooms make them practically perfect locations for the deaths of lonely people.

Fernando Acaso stars as Antonio Frau. We meet him first as a young man ripping into a frenzied argument with his girl friend. She wants to leave him because of his unrelenting jealousy. When threatening and pleading fail to change her mind, he strangles her.

Cut to a lawyer’s office 25 years later. Frau has been released from prison and is signing the papers that will let him take control of some property he’s inherited from an aunt he never knew. The property is an urban guest house—actually, the attorney tells him, a brothel. With a plain front facing onto a narrow street, the building appeals to Frau, who sees in it an opportunity to carry out his great work.

His first night there, he finds a vagrant in one of the rooms, a young man who claims that he just slipped in to spend the night before leaving town the next morning. Frau offers him something to eat and drink, and his guest winds up dead and dragged into a room the walls of which are decorated with paintings of over-sized skulls. The place may have been a brothel, but it appears to have entertained a clientele with peculiar tastes.

Frau marries a woman he’s known for two weeks. Francisca (Maria Jose Bausa) doesn’t love this 42-year old, odd but not-quite-too-odd man—how could she?—but she is 35 years old and wants to escape her smothering father. Her wedding day marks the first time she has been inside the guest house. Frau tells her that he doesn’t have keys to all the rooms, including H6, which seems to her to be just another strange but not suspicious element in her new life.

Yes, the locked room that is off limits to the new bride is a deliberate reference to the story of Bluebeard. Frau’s guide to murder is the real life French serial killer Henri Landru, known as Bluebeard for his habit of killing his wives. Landru kept a damning diary, a habit, among others, Frau emulates.

He suggests that Francisca keep her nursing job on the night shift of a hospital. She is willing as she has been having an affair with a married doctor there for years. Adultery is not murder, of course, but we quickly see that Francisca is not quite the desperate old maid in distress we thought she was.

So while maintaining a relatively normal relationship with his wife, Frau is inviting prostitutes into the guest house at night, temping them in with a smile, a genial manner, the promise of something to eat, and easy money for satisfying his desire for a kind of sex he doesn’t want to mention to his wife. He has a talent for sizing up the working girls and telling them just what they want to hear. Once in the building, they soon find themselves being taken to room H6. Yes, the walls and floor are covered with sheets of plastic, and the table in the center of the room has straps on all four corners, but hell, this guy admitted to being freaky. What’s the harm? A girl’s gotta make a living.

First time writer/director Martin Garrido Baron knows what few people working in this genre want to admit—that to a certain extent, the victims of monsters like Frau are complicit in their fates. Not that they know and welcome what’s in store for them, but that they allow their needs and desperation and experiences with pretenders to override the warning signals. Allowing a stranger to strap them down in what could easily be a torture chamber may be dismissed as being just part of a day’s work, but it’s also the first step towards a tragic inevitability. We watch what happens with the same grotesque voyeurism Roman audiences brought to a play by Seneca.

As in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, H6 isn’t explicit about what Frau does when he cranks up the old 18 inch Craftsman—the story is told in screams and blood splatter—but we do learn from Frau’s diary entries that he likes to continue having sex with his victims even after he has amputated their legs—and that may tell you more than you want to know about this guy and this movie.

The film is dark and claustrophobic, physically and psychologically, but after the oppressive morbidity that permeates the action, the end delivers a black humored shock that you won’t see coming. The real surprise is that it drags human nature to a lower level even than that displayed in room H6.

The curious thing about most American horror films is that they contain an odd optimism that allows the audience to leave the horror in the theater. It’s that whew-I-survived reaction that students of the genre mention so often in interviews. But H6 shows us again that films from other countries don’t necessarily play out that way. Think of Audition and The Vanishing and Wolf Creek.

As Frau tells Francisca, there are a lot of evil people out there. And they won’t kill you because they hate you. They just don’t care about you.

The Black Cat (1934)

The Black Cat is one of those pictures that, because of its miniscule budget, could get away with things the big boys wouldn’t dream of attempting. You can find elements of sadism and Satanism in films made before 1934, but locating one with those things plus pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia would make a tougher search. The only title that comes immediately to mind is Alice in Wonderland.  Just kidding.

The film opens in a train station in Mitel Europe. Geography is as blurred in this film as are other elements, but the setting is Austria. Newlywed couple Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells) are asked to share their train compartment with Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) who is on his way to visit a man he has hated since World War I. With a hint of reluctance, the couple agrees.

As Joan sleeps, Werdegast, who has alternated between being mysterious and icily polite, stares at her, finally reaching out to move his hand over her hair in a phantom stroking gesture. Peter catches him at this and the doctor apologizes with the explanation that she reminds him of his own wife, lost to him during his stay in a prisoner of war camp. Not for the last time, Peter looks at Werdegast with suspicion.

Arriving at the next station, the three travelers discover that they will now have to share a bus ride. As they roll on through a wicked thunder storm, their driver tells them that the country around them was one of the most horrific battlefields of the late war. Suddenly, he loses control of the vehicle and it crashes, killing him and knocking Joan unconscious. Carrying his wife, Peter follows Werdegast to the home of the man he has traveled to see, Hjalmar Poelzig, Austria’s greatest architect.

At the house, a stark, sterile Bauhaus monstrosity, we see Karloff (as he is billed, with no first name given) for the first time since the cast was introduced before the story began. Then, we just saw the back of his head as he sat at the organ. Now, we see him lying in bed next to a young woman. She is between Karloff and the camera, and the image is blurred slightly as we are looking at the figures through an opaque curtain.

Both figures are on their backs, looking stiff as death. We will be reminded repeatedly that Poelzig is death personified. When he awakens, he sits straight up, like a corpse in a John Carpenter movie. He rises from the bed, wearing black pajamas. It may not be subtle, but it ladles on the atmosphere.

Wedergast introduces Peter and the still unconscious Joan, and explains about the accident. Poelzig, who constantly looks as if he knows something the others don’t—and it isn’t warm and fuzzy—shows Peter where he can deposit Joan for the night. The three men engage in some stiffly polite pleasantries and we learn that Poelzig’s house is built on the ruins of a fort that he commanded during the war, and then turned over to the Russians. His men were left as prisoners, Wedergast included. The doctor then spent 15 years behind bars. This is the treason that he has journeyed so far to avenge.

Suddenly, Joan appears in the room. She is wandering about in a light trance, not indicating too much interest in where she is or how she got there. Peter rushes to her side and, before leaving the room, kisses her.

This action gives us one of the most memorable moments in the picture. The couple is standing upstage in a medium shot. In the immediate foreground is the out-of-focus figurine of a nude woman, seated and with her arms stretched behind her to the base of the figure. The pose is sexually charged, as if the woman were inviting a lover to come to her. Suddenly, the camera focuses on the figure and the couple goes blurry. When Poelzig’s hand grasps the figure tightly, the image on screen is a certain representation of lust.

At this point the story by screenwriter Peter Ruric begins to turn blurry as well. We’ve had the sense of being in some gothic Cloud Coo-Coo Land all along, but now Ruric and director Edgar G. Ulmer twist the entire enterprise a couple of notches above normal.

We discover that Poelzig is the high priest of a cult of devil worshippers and that on the night of the dark of the moon he intends to sacrifice Joan to his lord. We learn that after betraying Wedergast to the enemy, Poelzig ran off with the doctor’s wife to America, then Spain, than back to Austria. When she died and a few years later, Poelzig married Wedergast’s daughter Karen (Lucille Lund), and she was the young woman we first saw him sleeping beside.

As Poelzig tells Wedergast his history for the 18 years since the end of the war, he takes the doctor into the bowels of the old fortress. They move downward into the former gun turret room and we see the source of the film’s true horror.

Poelzig has had more women than Wedergast’s in his life, and all but Karen have died. The architect has preserved their bodies and but them on display in glass coffins. But the corpses are not lying on their backs. He has found a way to suspend them, surrounded by glass, so he can visit them and see their preserved beauty from any angle. Unger has lit the scene as only a German trained in Expressionism could. We see Poelzig’s face reflected back at him from the glass, as if his own spirit were also entrapped with his late wives.

The two rivals for the dead play a game of chess for the Alisons. Wedergast loses and it seems like Joan will be sacrificed at the Black Mass. Poelzig’s acolytes have gathered—watch the crowd carefully for a quick look at an uncredited John Carradine—but, of course, there is a rescue.

After finding out that Poelzig has murdered Karen for trying to make friends with Joan—no, it doesn’t make a bit of sense, but by this time we’d be surprised if it did—Wedergast manages to overcome his enemy and prepares to skin him alive. Misunderstanding Wedergast’s attempt to help Joan, Peter shoots the doctor, who concludes that he will have to forego a slow death for Poelzig. He gives the Alisons five minutes to get to the road before he pulls the inevitable lever that blasts the house and its guests to hell.

It’s remarkable to think that the Peolzig house was decorated for a mere $1500, but Ulmer’s set design and the art direction of Charles D. Hall were photographed by John J. Mescall to look both rich and Spartan as a tomb.

An uncredited Jack Pierce worked on makeup. Only Karloff’s is notable, and Pierce has him looking Satanic from head to tow.

Karloff is thin to the point of gauntness as Poelzig, and he moves with perhaps more grace and fluidity than he ever will again. He also emphasizes his natural lisp and the impediment becomes another indicator of the character’s flawed emotional state.

Lugosi had the hero—at least, the anti-hero—role so he is less interesting here than he would be a year later when re-teamed with Karloff in The Raven. In that one he would play the madman, and play it to the hilt. He does have one affecting moment in The Black Cat, however, when he sees the displayed corpse of his wife. The sorrow and pain Wedergast expresses is well acted and quite touching.

One last observation.  No, the film has absolutely nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe, despite the title. That was just to make the picture more commercial. And it worked, a lesson that wouldn’t be lost on Nicholson and Arkoff at American-International a quarter-century later.

The Black Cat is one of the most unusual horror films to come out of Universal. It touches on sub rosa themes that horror movies even today tend to avoid. It’s also the best film Karloff and Lugosi made as equal co-stars and, I’m pleased to say, it is a fine showcase for the much-maligned David Manners, who also played it straight in Dracula and The Mummy. This is one of best of the Universal thrillers.

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

Yes, it’s the pulp-infected world of Sax Rohmer brought to the screen for the 27th time by 1932, when The Mask of Fu Manchu was unleashed by MGM. Rohmer’s trashy but surprisingly readable novels and stories have provided the basis for over three dozen films, serials, and TV programs (Stephen King has him beat by over 50 titles, but King may not have the staying power.).

There are powerful stirrings in the East and British authorities fear that if a potent symbol of Oriental unity is discovered—say, oh, the legendary lost mask of Genghis Khan—unstoppable waves of the Yellow Peril will flow over the West and Civilization As We Know It will be submerged for generations to come.

Note right off the bat that the mask of Fu Manchu is really the mask of Genghis Khan, but we can’t let little things like that stand in the way of a good time.

Anyway, Scotland Yard worries that the mask could fall into the hands of the arch fiend, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Devil Doctor, Chinese genius, doctor of philosophy, medicine, theology, and just about every other damn thing you could be a doctor of, so top cop of the Empire, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) is sent to find the mask first.

That last sentence was long enough so I didn’t add the parenthetical thought “before James Bond” to the idea of the top cop, but the relationship isn’t that far off base. Watch Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu try to outwit each other and then think about Bond and Dr. No. You’ll see what I mean.

Okay, so Nayland Smith sets out with a team from the British Museum to find the mask and bring it back to London while Fu Manchu and his “insignificant daughter” Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) want to use it to encourage their followers to take over the western world.

To this end, they lie, cheat, steal, murder, kidnap and torture (she’s especially fond of this as the pain of men brings her at least to the point of orgasm).

What happens will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever sniffed the pungent aroma of decaying pulp magazines, and whether or not you enjoy the journey to film’s conclusion will depend greatly on your appreciation of or tolerance for 1930s melodrama that is more camp than a field full of tents.

The Mask of Fu Manchu was one of nine pictures Boris Karloff made in 1932, and the evil genius was his first horror movie role after Frankenstein the previous year. He and Loy, 18 years his junior, are famously on record as saying that neither of them could take anything about the film seriously, and many’s the take that was ruined when one of the other of them got a fit a giggles over the script’s ludicrous dialogue.

As a general rule, that kind of insistent corpsing (theatrical slang for laughing on stage during serious moments) is amusing for about five minutes and then becomes a pain in the ass, but none of Karloff’s and Loy’s incredulous amusement wound up on the screen.

Which is not to say that you can’t see any of it. Both of them try so hard to sell their characters’ villainy it must be because they know that if they can’t make themselves believe in their own decadence, no one else will, either. They snarl, they leer, they open their eyes as wide as Cecil Holland’s slant-eyed makeup will let them. Karloff waves his opulent fingernails gracefully and Loy quivers with the expectation of torturing white men before turning them into sexual playthings.

The film is an acquired taste, but once acquired it becomes a cornucopia of period movie delights. Truly is it said that some pictures you come to love not in spite of their weaknesses, but because of them.

Most films that have aged this badly have disappeared. This one survives because it has Karloff in it. Loy is always a plus, and it’s a treat to see her in one of her pre-Thin Man exotic vamp roles, but most of the movies in which she played the wicked seductress have gone to that great celluloid recycling dump in the sky.

Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books have managed, just barely, to stay in print, but the interest of readers alone wouldn’t have kept a movie this dated alive and on television for over 70 years.

No, I suspect it’s Karloff’s presence combined with Cedric Gibbons’ simple but evocative art direction—and the repeated reproduction of curiosity-inducing stills from the film in early 1960s issues of “Famous Monsters of Filmland”—that have kept this one’s pulse thumping.

The Mask of Fu Manchu is still entertaining, even if, for most viewers, it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, it remains today what it always was: a pretty lousy movie.

But if you still get a kick, or even a small thrill, from Doctor. X, The Mystery of the Wax Museum, or The Vampire Bat, and you can overlook the painful stereotypes and clichés that make up the Yellow Peril subgenre, Rohmer’s criminal genius may be able to cast his spell on you.

The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)

Even buffs who are major Hammer enthusiasts don’t have much affection for The Stranglers of Bombay (1960). It’s not a horror picture, but Hammer produced many films that are outside the genre.  With just a slight nudge, it could be a horror movie.  Set in colonial India during the 1830s, the film is based, with the usual cinematic looseness, on the efforts of William Henry Sleeman, an officer with the East India Company, to discover and then eradicate the cult of thuggee.

The Sleeman substitute is Capt. Harry Lewis, played by Guy Rolfe, one of those wonderful Brit actors who move from good films (Nicholas and Alexandra) to bad (Snow White and the Three Stooges) with the surety of a Slinky going downstairs.  His wife is the faithful and always understanding Mary (Jan Holden); his commanding officer the decent but too-frequently obtuse Col. Henderson (Andrew Cruickshank); and his rival in the company, the man chosen to investigate a history of mysterious disappearances, is Capt. Christopher Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson).

Representing the other team are the High Priest of Kali (George Pastell, who had been exotic and evil for Hammer the previous year as Mehemet Bey in The Mummy), and the oily Patel Shari (Marne Maitland, who would be demoted to the rank of Beggar in the following year’s The Terror of the Tongs).

Having used his own free time to investigate these disappearances for several years, Capt. Lewis suspects a cult of killers who ingratiate themselves in small numbers into merchants’ caravans along the road, then murder their victims with a silk cord, burying the remains off the highway. Capt. Connaught-Smith doesn’t believe that a conspiracy of that magnitude could exist, ignores Lewis’ report, and puts himself and, by extension, the entire empire at risk. In an attempt to rescue the stubborn soldier, Lewis himself would face death but for the marginally motivated help of a thug who decides to make amends for his past crimes.

The movie clocks in at a swift 81 minutes, and very little of that time is spent in back story or explanation. Either the audience was expected to know about the cult of Kali, or director Terence Fisher and writer David Goodman assumed that everyone knew Orientals were capable of the most insane horrors and no time needed to be spent pointing that out.

And yet, for all its captures and escapes, the film builds very little sense of urgency. We keep expecting a grand confrontation between an army of thugs and an army of Army, but it never happens. Even the final combat between Lewis and the High Priest is over in a snap. One of the villains gets tossed onto a burning funeral pyre, and he just screams once then lies there. At this last moment, Fisher makes no attempt whatever to disguise the fact that he’s working with a relatively small cast for an historical epic.

But the picture is fun and a sly reminder that movies made essentially for kids can get away with almost anything. Even very little.

Strait-Jacket (1964)

By 1964, the year Strait-Jacket was unbuckled and America tried it on for size, producer/director William Castle had a half-dozen horror movies under his ample belt, and none of them were “A” pictures. He’d seen Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 17 times, pointing to the screen each time while mumbling, “I want one of those.”

He grabbed writer Robert Bloch—after Homicidal in 1961, Castle had broken ties with screenwriter Robb White, who had delivered five of his horror scripts—and Bloch set to work on a story loosely suggested by the Lizzie Borden axe murders of 1892.

Perhaps Castle saw the approaching wave of “hag horror,” generally “B” creepers starring fading actresses who still had the big name but could no longer command big parts in big movies. He signed Joan Blondell for the role of axe murderess Lucy Harbin. Before shooting began, Blondell had an accident that prevented her from making the movie, and Castle went after one of the stars of Baby Jane, Joan Crawford.

Crawford was willing to accept the part, but she demanded cast and script approval. Castle agreed. So arrogant was Crawford, she gave the small role of Dr. Anderson, Lucy’s psychiatrist, to Mitchell Cox, a vice-president of Pepsi Cola, a non-actor but a personal friend, without telling Castle what she was up to. It’s to Cox’ credit that he comes across on screen no worse than many professional actors in “B” horror flicks, and he seems to be having a great time. He’s no Boris Karloff, but he’s no Paris Hilton, either.

Anne Helm was cast in the important role of Lucy’s estranged daughter Carol, but Crawford didn’t like her and out she went. Diane Baker had worked with Crawford in The Best of Everything (1959), and with Susan Hayward in Stolen Hours (1963), so she knew her way around a diva. Crawford liked her and “suggested” her for the role.

The movie opens with a flashback, a trick Robert Aldrich, the director of Baby Jane, would use for his second foray into hag horror, Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, later that year. We see Lucy’s husband (Lee Majors in his first screen role) flirting and drinking with a young woman. He invites her to his house because his wife is out of town and not expected back for a day or two. The adulterer and his lover make a little whoopee, unaware that they are being watched by three-year old Carol (Vicki Cos).

Then Lucy comes home early. Crawford makes her first entrance in a way that she must have loved. The camera is aimed at the steps that come down from the passenger car of a train. When Crawford steps into the frame, all we see are her legs—and nice looking gams they are still for the 58-year old former dancer. The shot also gives us our first dose of Robert Bloch’s signature black humor. Stenciled above the steps, just below Lucy’s feet, is the admonition “Watch your step.” Listen, too, for lines like “She’s dying to meet you,” and “Sanity is relative.”

When Lucy returns to her house, she finds hubby and his gal in bed. Shocked, she stumbles from the house and trips over a tree stump, imbedded in which is an axe. Bracelets jangling, she pulls the axe from the wood and goes back into the house. We see the outlines of the sleeping lovers in shadows on the wall as Lucy hoists the axe above her head and takes off each of theirs with two manic blows. She then goes to work in earnest.

There is absolutely nothing realistic about these murders. The heads are severed from the bodies too easily and there is no blood splatter as Lucy whacks away. Since Castle cuts a couple of times to close-ups of Carol’s terrified face, maybe we are seeing the crime as the little girl saw it, with full emphasis on her mother.

Okay, Lucy goes to an asylum and Carol is sent to live with her mother’s brother (an amusingly jovial Leif Erickson) and his pinch-mouthed wife (Rochelle Hudson) on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. (Bloch has more fun by letting us know that Lucy’s maiden name was “Cutler.”)

Twenty years later, Lucy is declared sane and she comes to live with the Cutlers and Carol. Carol shows her around the farm and you have everything you need to know to plot the rest of the picture yourself by the 20 minute mark.

Carol decides, in a move reminiscent of Vertigo, to re-make her dowdy mom in the image of what she was when she wielded the chopper. Lucy starts wearing loud print dresses, dangling bracelets, and a black wig with a mid-‘40s hairstyle. Then she begins hearing voices chanting “Lucy Harbin took an axe and gave her husband 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave his girl friend 41.”

One night she wakes to find two disembodied heads and a gory axe in her bed. Not too surprisingly, she takes to drinking a wee bit too much.

On the afternoon she meets Carol’s fiancé Michael (John Anthony Hayes), Lucy gets tight and flirts shamelessly with the younger man. This scene is the most memorable for viewers who like the picture for the wrong reasons—i.e., its camp value—as Crawford pulls out all the stops. She drapes herself over Hayes and even runs her fingertips around and between his lips. This was apparently not in the script nor the direction, and Hayes wondered what God had wrought, and he wondered it in a big way.

To make matters worse, Lucy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, shows up on his way to a fishing trip and the former patient gets upset. Lucy runs off and the doctor goes outside to look around. He soon loses his head over the place to the accompaniment of the sound of jangling bracelets.

Handyman Leo Krause (a wonderfully dim and degenerate George Kennedy) finds the doctor’s abandoned car and blackmails Carol into letting him keep it. He, too, is soon headed off, and then the film rushes to its conclusion with villainy revealed and honesty triumphant.

You don’t really know the movie is working as well as it is until you get to the murders and find yourself growing apprehensive. Castle’s best moment comes in a scene that finds Lucy watching Leo decapitate a chicken. The sound of the spinning blades on the weather vane builds throughout the brief scene until it reminds you of the jangling of Lucy’s bracelets. By the final reel, every time someone bends slightly at the waist, you expect an axe to enter the frame.

I suspect the participants had four ways of looking at Strait-Jacket. Crawford saw it as a star vehicle, while the supporting cast saw it as a paycheck. Castle saw it as an entry to “A” filmmaking, and Bloch saw it as a huge, sick joke. Viewers today don’t care much about what the supporting cast thought. Castle was wrong, while Crawford and Bloch were dead right—especially Bloch. It’s in the joke that the film is still most enjoyable.

I get the impression from reading Bloch’s later work that the reality of psychopathic murders had taken much of the fun out of creating imaginary ones. He was no longer making deliciously macabre statements like “I haven’t had so much fun since the rats ate my baby sister.”

Come on now … even a rat’s gotta eat.

The Cabinet of Caligari (1962)

Robert Bloch’s screen credits include TV scripts for the series “Star Trek,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Night Gallery,” and “Boris Karloff’s Thriller,” and several screenplays, most notably for William Castle and Amicus Productions. I couldn’t begin to guess how many of his novels and short stories provided the basis for how many film, TV and radio adaptations, but the primary one is Psycho. He missed the opportunity to adapt his novel because an agent with MCA, looking to promote in-house talent, told Hitchcock that Bloch was unavailable, which wasn’t true.

You can’t turn out as many short stories, novels, radio/TV/movie scripts as Robert Bloch did without your foot slipping of the curb once in awhile. Such is the case with The Cabinet of Caligari, (Twentieth Century Fox, 1962) a re-imagining of the silent Expressionistic classic rather than a straight remake. The film has its supporters, but reading them is an exercise in tepid timidity, as if no one really likes the picture all that much, but no one wants to damn it, either.

Glynis Johns (probably best remembered as Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins) stars as Jane Lindstrom, a young woman who, at film’s beginning, is ripping along the highway in her sports car. The first shot is from her POV as the car moves through a tunnel and then emerges into the sunshine of the afternoon.  This “light at the end of the tunnel” motif hints at the plot, which the astute viewer familiar with the 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari will quickly realize.

Jane’s car blows a tire and she is forced to hike several miles along the road until she arrives at the home of the mysterious and sinister Caligari. He asks his female assistant Christine (Constance Ford) to see to the car. Christine takes a male worker with her to locate the vehicle. They are gone no longer than five minutes of screen time, representing a period of the same length for Jane and Caligari, and then Christine reenters to say that the car needs major repairs to the steering.  It took Jane hours to hike from the car to the house, but it takes Christine minutes to drive to the car, check it over for damage, and then return. Is this a major continuity error or is it a clue that all is not as it seems at Casa Caligari?

Jane stays the night, and then the next night, and soon realizes that neither she nor any of Caligari’s other guests can leave at will. Her host has now become a full-time villain, torturing her with embarrassing questions and even allowing another assistant, David (Lawrence Dobkin) to use a cane to beat an elderly guest (Estelle Winwood) to death.

Jane’s only comfort comes from Martin (J. Pat O’Malley), a genial guest, Mark (Richard Davalos) a young guest for whom she develops an attraction, and wise, kindly Paul (Dan O’Herlihy), who finally admits that Caligari is his patient.

Jane’s escape attempts are blocked at every turn. As she grows more panicked, the odd angles of the house are accentuated and the lighting grows more shadowy. Every move comes weighted with sinister meaning. After Jane discovers the real identity of Caligari and the nature of his relationship with Paul, the film speeds to a hasty conclusion that is risibly naïve.

The director, TV veteran Roger Kay, has ambitions beyond his capability to realize them, and Robert Bloch’s screenplay is an obvious attempt to mine the Psycho mother lode one more time. It’s only fair to note that Psycho was not Bloch’s first journey to Wackyland. His first novel, The Scarf in 1947, was a psycho serial killer tale, and one of his best short stories, “Lucy Comes to Stay,” was also in that genre. If you ever come across his story “Final Performance,” perhaps the ultimate crazy killer yarn, you won’t soon forget it.

If Cabinet of Caligari is a valiant effort in a losing cause, Bloch stepped up to the plate again two years later and slammed out a more recognizably Blochian script for that wonderful ham, William Castle, and the rapidly failing one-time star Joan Crawford. The film was Strait-Jacket (Columbia, 1964).

West of Zanzibar (1928)

Known always for extravagantly melodramatic plots—and especially when he worked with frequent director/collaborator Tod Browning—Lon Chaney often delivered pictures that would raise eyebrows even today. Here’s one of them, more an examination of abnormal psychology than a traditional horror movie, and one of world cinema’s most lurid pleasures. 

Ah, lurid. Now there’s a word you don’t see very often.

And that’s a shame because it calls to mind some images and feelings that, if you didn’t use the word, would require complete sentences to convey. Plus, how can you write about the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney film collaborations without using the term “lurid melodrama”? Maybe you can do it, but you’ll be sweating blood before you’re through.

West of Zanzibar and The Unknown are the most lurid of the team’s productions, and among the most lurid mainstream Hollywood movies of all time. In the former, Chaney stars as Phroso (a name re-used by Browning in Freaks), a vaudeville magician in a baggy clown costume. As we watch Phroso perform what will become his signature illusion—making a woman disappear from a coffin-shaped box standing upright on the stage—Chaney emphasizes a comic, almost Chaplinesque—way of moving. He shuffles along, then stops to look back over his shoulder at us in the audience.

Browning, an old carnie veteran himself—his gag was allowing himself to be buried alive and then resurrected 24 hours later—cuts to the rear of the coffin so we can see how the trick is done, with a revolving back panel that allows Anna, Phroso’s wife (Jacqueline Gadsden—her name has also been given as Jacqueline Hart and Jacqueline Daly; such is fame in the movies) to exit the box while a skeleton swings around as a substitution.

Backstage after the performance Anna reveals to the magician that she is leaving him to run away with Crane, a dealer in ivory (the always remarkable Lionel Barrymore, who will do a gob-smacking turn in drag in Browning’s 1936 The Devil Doll). Phroso pleads his case but gets into a shoving match with Crane, who causes the performer to lose his balance and fall from the second story onto a table below.

Over a year passes and we rejoin Phroso. As a result of the fall, he has lost the use of his legs and now gets around by scooting himself along on a board with wheels under it. He receives a message that Anna has returned with a baby and that he can find them at a church. He rolls up to the altar where Anna lies dead. The baby girl sits next to her.

From here we jump forward eighteen years. Phroso, now known as “Dead-Legs,” has moved to equatorial Africa where he lives with Doc, an alcoholic physician (the undeservedly forgotten Warner Baxter) and two factotums, Tiny (Roscoe Ward) and Babe (Kalla Pasha).

Phroso has changed, and not for the better. His head has been shaved and his face and pate are covered with stubble. He has become hardened and cruel, berating his companions—especially Doc—and treating the natives, who regard him with some awe because of his reliance on stage magic, like slaves. It must be said that Browning’s depiction of native Africans is far from sympathetic. They are ghastly stereotypes--cowardly, childlike, and brutal--and are only in the film to provide an unreasoning danger always ready to break out.

Anna’s baby, Maizie, is not part of this uber-dysfunctional family. Phroso, despising her for her entire life as the offspring of his unfaithful wife and Crane, has shipped her off to be raised in a brothel/dive in Zanzibar. As you can see, I didn’t emphasize the word “lurid” for nothing.

But now Maizie has grown into a surprisingly innocent young woman (the beautiful but unfortunate Mary Nolan), and Phroso has sent Tiny to retrieve her with the promise that she can finally meet her father. Tiny, pretending to be a missionary, brings her back to Phroso’s camp, where the crippled man treats her like dirt. He gives away her clothing to the native women, he makes her eat off the floor, he humiliates her however he can and gets her addicted to alcohol. Tiny and Babe act as if this bizarre behavior is perfectly normal, but Doc, smitten with her beauty and decency, wants to rescue her.

Just as we come to assume that Maizie’s fate is to be reduced to sub-human status by Dead-Legs’ sadism, we, along with the girl, witness a native ceremony and learn that whenever an important male in the village dies, he is cremated along with his wife or daughter. Then we learn that Crane is in the area trading for ivory, and all becomes clear.

Dead-Legs has been hijacking Crane’s goods and deliberately letting the ivory dealer know how he can be found. Crane shows up to deliver a warning to desist. The relative hierarchy of whiles over blacks is made clear as Crane is carried over a mud puddle by his native workers so he can avoid staining his white trousers.

When he meets Dead-Legs and realizes who he is, Crane slaps his hands together and lets out a whoop of joy. As cruel as the man in the wheelchair, he takes pleasure in his old rival’s devolution into a crawling, sweat-stained creature of the jungle. When Dead-Legs introduces Crane to Maizie, the old magician rejoices in his brutal treatment of the young woman. Crane himself thinks Phroso is keeping the girl as his mistress and gets a kick from what he must see as a sado-masochistic ménage.

To continue discussing the film’s plot at this point would reveal some of its secrets. It’s a relatively short picture and the final reel speeds by. Perhaps the movie’s brevity is the result of material censored from the final cut. Scenes of Phroso’s dehumanization were excised—him begging for money and being beaten, as well as the debasement of being forced to work as a carnival geek (his employment as a human duck was re-used by Browning in Freaks). Shocking as these scenes would have been in 1928, their inclusion would have gone a long way toward explaining the man that Phroso becomes. Without them, the extremity of his hatred of Maizie seems bizarre, but it is what makes the film more than just a sordid revenge tale.

West of Zanzibar exists beyond reason. Its ferocity is akin to that of the most hideous Jacobean revenge tragedies, crossing the border at times that separates horror from black humor. The screen practically drips with sweat, and madness seems to be the norm.

Chaney’s performance is remarkable, and not just on the physical level. Dead-Legs is a masterpiece of evil and insanity. Every smile is forced; every gesture of kindness is a calculation. And it isn’t a performance that is grounded in Chaney’s grease paint and false beards. It springs from Phroso’s psychological make-up.

Chaney and Browning would approach this level of perversion only one other time, in the gob-smacking The Unknown. But West of Zanzibar is the more subversive film.

You can’t watch The Unknown and not be aware of the Chaney character’s profoundly abnormal psychology until close to the end. You can watch West of Zanzibar and think that you’re reacting only out of pity to Maizie’s plight, or that the acting is keeping you riveted. If there’s anything else at work in the back of your mind, you don’t want to know what it is.

Chupacobra vs The Alamo (2013)

Well, if it barks like a dog, wags its tail like a dog, and growls like a dog, it’s a chupacobra. But it could also be a dog. 

I know that “original” Saturday night movies on the Syfy Channel are supposed to be intelligence-challenged, but lordy, this one is so brain dead it makes Uwe Boll’s Bloodrayne series look like the work of Luis Bunuel.  

We know that the story is set in San Antonio, TX, because, well, it’s the Alamo, dummy.  Also director Terry Ingram gives us a few establishing shots of the skyline, which include what was called the Transit Tower when I was born in the city. (It’s now the Tower Life Building). He also shows us the Alamo, although when we go onto the grounds it sometimes looks as if the heart of the city is out in the country somewhere and made of wood. Uh, no way. 

Erik Estrada, who has traded in Ponch for paunch, is bike-riding DEA agent Carlos Seguin, the howevermany greats grandson of Juan Seguin, who was a hero on the gringo side during the Texas Revolution. Carlos is breaking in a new partner, Tracy (Julia Benson). They discover that a large pack of chupacobras are using drug smuggling tunnels to cross the border from Mexico and invade Texas. Writer Peter Sullivan guesses that viewers know what a chupacobra is because the discussion of them rips past us pretty zippingly.  

Carlos, of course, has a toothsome 17-year old daughter, Sienna (Nicole Munoz) with whom he has a rocky relationship. You know the drill: “Since your mother died I’ve had to be both mother and father to you, and I’m a cop and I get called away at all hours of the . . . “ His oldest is Spider (former Power Ranger Jorge Vargas), a guy who runs an auto repair shop the cabinets of which are loaded with automatic weapons, and who slips down to Mexico every so often just to massacre drug cartel members. He collects his gang to help halt the flow of cryptozoological beasties from south of the border, down Mexico way. 

No kidding—every drawer in every cabinet in the shop is stuffed full of firepower, but when the leave to help Carlos they don’t even close the doors. You know the local gang bangers had a ball looting that place. 

But back to the action. Before it’s all over, Carlos will rescue Sienna and Spider, Spider will rescue Sienna and Carlos, Sienna will sure be cute, and most of the supporting cast will become chupacobra chow. 

The grand battle royal comes at the end on the grounds of the Alamo. Or so they tell us.  

Anyone can tell from the title that this thing isn’t to be taken seriously. The acting is mostly just spouting dialogue, the writing was pretty obviously done on scratch paper, the special effects are laughable, and the director’s main job seems to have been to keep the actors from bumping into the furniture, which he was able to do, for the most part. It’s funnier in concept than it actually plays. 

Now I’m ready for Larry Wilcox starring in Bigfoot vs The Space Needle.

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (1970)

Oh, those wacky 1960s, a time in which it seemed theater and film could go way out, man. Way, way out. Maisie Mosco’s play Happy Family — which, if there is any justice in the world, wasn’t a success onstage — became a movie in 1970 that redefined the word “obscurity.” Hammer horror buffs will recognize the name of its director, Freddie Francis, but Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly is no Hammer. More of a bent, rusty nail, actually. When Britain’s National Film Theatre sponsored a Francis retrospective season, no one could locate even a videotape copy of this one.

The four title characters live in a decaying mansion somewhere in England. Sonny and Girly, both in their late teens or early 20s, go on the prowl at the local playground and pick up homeless men, drunks and hippies (remember them?); bring them home; and force them to become “New Friends” or even members of the family. When the current New Friend tries to escape, he is killed as part of The Game. Despite their chronological ages, the siblings act and talk like pre-adolescents. Mumsy and Nanny are so stereotypically pre-war Brit, they’d make Mary Poppins puke a spoonful of sugar.

Also known as simply Girly, it sounds creepy, and could be if the movie weren’t trying so hard to be mysterious in a zany sort of way. My guess is that the play was long on black comedy in the absurdist manner so popular at the time, and Francis’ tendency, naturally enough, was to play up the horrific aspects, and the two approaches to the material do not mix well at all.

The movie has a good cast of Brit character actors, led by Michael Bryant as the newest New Friend. Vanessa Howard is a very sexy Girly, in a creepy she-wants-to-cut-my-head-off kind of way. Oddly enough, my guess is that everyone involved thought they were making an art film. No cigar.

HARRY DICKSON, THE AMERICAN SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE HEIR OF DRACULA: adapted in English by Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier

Cast your mind back to Germany, 1907. As he is everywhere else, Sherlock Holmes is a remarkably popular fictional character so when you see for sale a new story magazine called Detective Sherlock Holmes und seine weltberühmten abenteuer (Sherlock Holmes' Most Famous Cases), you just have to take it home.

I suppose that unsophisticated readers believed they were buying a new collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—but unfortunately, Sir Arthur’s attorneys were not among that number and so, in order to avoid a lawsuit, the magazine changed its name after the 10^th issue to Aus dem Geheimakten des Weltdetektivs (The Secret Files of the King of Detectives).  The Great Detective was still named Sherlock Holmes, and his Watsonesque sidekick was named Harry Taxon.

Several of the original German series were translated into French, and by 1927 the stories were being translated into Dutch-Flemish and published as Harry Dickson de Amerikaansche Sherlock Holmes (Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes). The “American” part derived from the fact that Harry was born in New York.

In 1928, Belgian author Jean Ray (real name: Raymundus Joannes de Kremer), best known then and now for his horror stories, began translating the tales into French. When Ray grew tired of dealing with 2^nd-rate plots and prose, he began writing his own Harry Dickson yarns.

And that brings us, at last, to this Black Coat Press edition of four of Ray’s Dickson tales, three novelettes and one short story, translated by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier. The yarns first saw print between 1933 and 1937, and you would be hard-pressed searching American pulps of that era to find more rip-snorting barn-burners than these.

Harry Dickson has at least as much in common with psychic detectives like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Karnacki as with the scientific detectives that followed in Conan Doyle’s wake. Robert Downey Jr’s recent outing as Holmes bears more resemblance to Dickson than he does to the traditional representations of the Sage of Baker Street.

In “The Heir of Dracula,” Harry and his assistant Tom Wills do battle with the Red Eyed Vampire in a haunted house near Hamburg. Harry is drawn into the case when a murderer named Ebenezer Grump is about to be guillotined and pleads with the Great Detective to complete the execution as quickly as possible because if he doesn’t die soon, something worse than death will overtake him.

In “The Iron Temple” Harry and Tom are back in London and have to deal with some monster that fell from the sky in what appears to be a spaceship. Its appearance is so terrible, it can kill with a glance—and then something else arrives that is so much worse, it can kill the monster.

The last novelette is “The Return of the Gorgon” in which a mad sculptor uses human beings as the building blocks of his art. The mad sculptor is Matthew Jarnes and here he has captured a journalist named Renders. He’s placed Renders’ into the body of a sculpted centaur, the man’s head protruding from the centaur’s neck.

“’Be careful!’ advised Jarnes. ‘That mixture of boiling plaster and melted wax must be delicately poured over the head of our Fallen Centaur. First, it must fill the hole around its neck, then slowly cover his head. We’ll keep the eyes for last in order to preserve their purity of expression of unimaginable fear. Yes, my friend,’ he added, speaking to Renders, “you’re going to die, horribly so! The expression of sheer terror that I see on your face will be preserved faithfully in stone for all posterity to marvel at!’”

Ah, but how does Jarnes fix that expression just the way he wants it? “’[I use] a mixture of talcum powder, camphor, plaster of Paris and soap powder. It immediately congeals inside your mouth, stops you from screaming, and freezes your face into an expression of unbearable agony—which, in your case, will not last long. I call in a pain fixer!’”

Paging Dr. Roth. Dr. Eli Roth.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t warn you that even the most supernatural of the tales could have a weird menace, Scooby-Doo ending. I’m not saying they all do, but if last page explanations that include that chance make you angry, well, prepare to lose a bit of your temper.

I think the stories are fun with an over-the-top, Saturday matinee serial, monster kid joie de vivre that some of us just can’t seem to outgrow. The tales clip along at a speedy pace, the plots are outrageous and the characterizations are pure pulp—and I mean that as a compliment.

I’ll read more Harry Dickson, if Black Coat Press decides to give me more, but I’d really like to see them publish some new translations of Jean Ray’s original horror stories.

Black Coat Press specializes in new translations, many by Brian Stableford, of 19^th and early 20^th century French pop literature. Sitting on my end table right now is Gustave Le Rouge’s Vampires of Mars.

I gotta go. See you later.