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.

[Rec] (2007)

So maybe you saw the 2008 American horror movie Quarantine and thought it was pretty good. Even then, I knew it was a remake of a Spanish film called [Rec]. Now I’ve seen the original and while I still think Quarantine is okay, I’m here to tell you that [Rec] is a 24-carat-solid-gold, plow-pulling, lottery-winning, mind-melting pants-pisser. I jumped out of my skin so often, I’m not sure I can get it back on again.

Manuela Velasco stars as Angela Vidal, one of those cute and perky TV reporterettes who get all the cat-stuck-in-tree human interest stories. She and her cameraman, Pablo (heard, but unseen real cinematographer Pablo Rosso), are doing a piece on what firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires, and this night, they’re called to an aging apartment building because some old woman is frighteningly sick. Like, she wants to bite people and rip large chunks of flesh off and devour them.

And then the corpses she leaves behind become reanimated and pick up her bad habits. And the cops show up, bringing the Army with them, and they seal off the building and won’t let anyone out.

As with the remake, [Rec] is shown to us through Pablo’s camera, so there’re a lot of jittery images, but it works better because co-directors Jaume Balaquero and Paco Plaza make the camera a character and not just a cinematic gimmick. The explanation of the insta-plague is also different in Spanish, and much spookier. Even the language works for non-Spanish speakers because it adds to the confusion.

I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the horror. So will you.

Suburban Legends: True Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Minivans

One of the surprise movie hits of early 2007 was a teen variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window called Disturbia. The title is a hybrid of “disturb” and “suburbia,” and the picture’s tagline is: “Every killer lives next door to someone.”

According to Sam Stall’s Suburban Legends, it’s not just killers that put the “br-r-r-r” in “suburban.” To hear him tell it, America’s small towns and bedroom communities are jam-packed with ghosts, disguised aliens, poltergeists, cryptozoological monsters, gardens/basements/walls hiding rotting corpses, and enough sickening depravity to make Eli Roth reach for a barf bag. Imagine Wally and the Beaver chopping Ward into manageable chucks and feeding them into a wood chipper, and then keeping June locked in the basement, only letting her out to be used as the sacrifice in a Black Mass. And then blaming their actions on the suspicion that their house was built on the site of an Indian burial ground.

And we escaped from the inner city for this?

Stall, who is a solid, amusing if not overwhelming professional writer, divides this collection of petit guignol anecdotes into seven sections, each one emphasizing a particular horror to suburban homeownership—“Inhumanly Bad Houseguests” (spooks), “The Ghoul Next Door” (murder), “Hellish Commutes” (haunted highways), “Backyard Beasts” (non-human spooks), “Really Desperate Housewives” (mad mamas), “Lawn of the Dead” (buried bodies), and “Sundry Cul-de-Sacrileges (everything else).

All of these stories are “true” and many of them are overly familiar from basic cable’s spookshows and true crime lineup. In fact, some of Stall’s short chapters are so brief I suspect all the research he did was watch “Weird America” and “City Confidential.” That said, if you like this kind of thing, you may appreciate having these tales collected into one easily and quickly read volume. In the grand ol’ American way, there is far more violence here than sex so this is a pretty safe buy for kids who are passing through that love-the-macabre stage.

The biggest pleasure I got from the book was finding the source stories for some stuff that has been sold as fiction. For instance, there’s a tale here of a haunted windbreaker that was sold on eBay for $31.50, the obvious inspiration for Joe Hill’s first novel Heart Shaped Box. There are also several what-the-hell-is-going-on-here stories that appear to have been fed into Tobe Hooper’s movie Poltergeist. And the adventures of a man named John List, who murdered his entire family and then just moved on to wed and start another one, look like they may have had an influence on Donald E. Westlake’s screenplay for that terrific, underappreciated thriller The Stepfather (the original 1987 version, with a terrific performance from Terry O’Quinn).

My favorite, though, has to be the tale of poor, sad Philip Schuth, who lived a Geinishly lonely existence with his home-bound mother. When she died, he put her corpse in the freezer and kept it there for four-and-a-half years. She was discovered after Philip got in trouble with the neighbors for smacking a kid who was trespassing on his property. Schuth went to prison, where he acquired the nickname “Frosty.” He was immortalized when an entrepreneur began selling refrigerator magnets with the catch line “My Mom is Cooler Than Yours.”

The book is fun and Stall’s ironic narration lets you know that he doesn’t take all this stuff too seriously, nor does he buy every ghost story at face value. Reading the book is like sitting around the backyard grill when the sun is going down and Uncle Doug starts telling the kids why the old DeFeo house two streets over is said to be haunted. Everyone has a chuckle until Aunt Alice finds a fingernail in her burger.

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Whew—this one’s so derivative it could have been shot with a Xerox machine. It’s yet another:

·        Tale of an overnight ghost hunt in a haunted location

·        Group of numb-nuts young adults who think they can strike it rich by taping their effort to capture a ghost in the camera

·        Collection of things that go terribly wrong

·        Series of deaths as we count down the crew members who get bumped off in desperately unimaginative ways

·        Poorly written, poorly directed rip-off of Paranormal Activity with a soupcon of Blair Witch tossed in for, hell, I don’t know why. 

This motley crew and onscreen talent go to the student dorm where Richard Speck tortured, raped and murdered seven student nurses on the night of July 13, 1966. That’s true, of course—you can find the details easily enough. How you feel about taking such a horrific crime and turning it into such lame entertainment is your business. 

So anyway, seven of the eight team members lock themselves into the building, they say to keep vagrants from coming inside. It makes sense, except for the fact that there is only one key to let them out again. When the director of the project gets sliced in half (why and how we don’t know—Speck didn’t hack on guys) and the key is in his pocket, we realize just how stupid having only one key is. 

Okay, one gal gets ghost raped and murdered, one guy is hanged, one gets chewed up in a drain pipe, and the others get killed in ways that are as forgettable as the characters themselves. Believe me, life is too short to memorize details from movies like this. 

The film we see is what was left behind when the ghost hunters were taken up to that Haunted Mansion in the sky, presented to us courtesy of the Illinois Police Department. Say what? We get this credit at the beginning of the film and since it’s a pretty good guess that there is no “Illinois Police Department” the filmmakers waste no time in shooting the this-is-real-folks-it-really-is in the found footage. 

There are no actor or writer or director credits but the cast is made up of Jennifer Robyn Jacobs, Jim Shipley, Tony Besson, Jackie Moore, Hayley Derryberry, Adam LaFramboise, Mike Holley, Chance Harlem, Jr., and the unseen Nancy Leopardi and Steve Mencich as ghost voices.  Leopardi wrote and Martin Andersen directed.  

It’s all sadly lacking in everything  it shouldn’t be lacking in, and brings nothing new to the party to make up for it. This is the kind of movie that having something else to do for 90 minutes was made for.

Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960)

This may be the creepiest movie you’ve never seen. Made by Hammer Film Productions, it isn’t one of their gothic romps. Those pictures are a lot of fun and you can enjoy yourself immensely either pretending to be scared or just wallowing in their nostalgic glow, but this one is a different manner of ick entirely.

Based on a play by Roger Garis called The Pony Cart, and with a screenplay by John Hunter and direction from Cyril Frankel, Never Take Candy From a Stranger (aka Never Takes Sweets From a Stranger), is the story of Peter and Sally Carter, with their pre-adolescent daughter Jean (Patrick Allen, Gwen Watford, Janina Faye) who have moved to Canada so Peter can take up the post of headmaster at the local high school.

One night, Jean tells her parents that she and her friend Lucille (Frances Green) had visited the Olderberry mansion because Lucille knew there was an elderly man there who would give them candy. Clarence Olderberry, Sr. (Felix Aylmer) promised to give the girls sweets if they would remove all their clothing and dance for him. The girls do (all this is offscreen) but now Jean is worried because she knows they shouldn’t have done it.

When the Carters complain to the police they are told that the Overberry family owns the town and it’s best to just forget about the old man’s little problem and warn Jean never to visit him again. The Carters want more, for the sake of all the town’s children, and force the police to bring Overberry to trial, where the defense counsel (Niall MacGinnis) twists everything Jean says on the stand and makes her look unreliable, at best.

Overberry is acquitted, as the Carters were warned he would be, and before they can move out of town Jean and Lucille go walking in the woods, and guess who they meet? His pursuit of the girls through the woods is chilling, mainly because Alymer, as Overberry, never speaks a word throughout the film. His aging pervert is not so much evil as he is stuck mentally in an evil place. He could easily be in the throes of early dementia. He shakes, he dribbles, he smiles vacantly, and when he sees little girls, he desires one thing only.

If the film were merely the story of a sexual predator on the prowl for children (“merely”?) it could easily be dismissed as exploitation of the worst kind—what a lot of viewers would expect from Hammer. But it’s a true horror movie, the horror enhanced by the town’s willingness to take chances with the lives of children if it can keep the factory open and the citizens working. This is a plot device that has become familiar in scary movies—think of the mayor insisting on the beaches staying open in Jaws—but, somehow, adults getting eaten by a fish is less upsetting, and a lot more playfully entertaining, than an elderly child abuser terrorizing young girls.

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.  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.

THE MAN FROM HELL by Arthur Leo Zagat writing as Morgan LaFay

This is a new collection of nine stories by one of those pulp writers who is known by every fan of the form but is completely unknown by everyone else. Which is a shame because at his best Zagat wrote well, at times even approaching a Bradburyesque poeticism. Seven of the stories in this volume were originally published in Spicy Mystery between 1936 and 1938, and the final two are from Thrilling Mystery in ’36 and ’39.

Spicy Mystery was a weird menace pulp plus sex. In weird menace stories the supernatural doings would be explained away at the end as the machinations of a villain out to get the money/girl/property/Macguffin for himself. Think of it as Scooby-Doo with Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs all the time. Mmm . . . Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs . . .

Sorry. I went away for a moment but I’m back now.

If that type of story doesn’t appeal to you but the horror element does, this may be the book for you as Zagat frequently pulls the rug out by not explaining that the spooky stuff has a natural cause. In the title story, for instance, a writer who is camping in a swamp to accumulate color for his new book is seduced by a woman who seems to have the ability to transform into a snake. Her presence is the result of human tampering, but maybe she’s for real.

In “By Subway to Hell” a young woman suddenly finds herself pursued by green, glowing men through subway tunnels. Zagat sends this tale out of the gate at full speed and it never slows down until we learn the truth about these subterranean monsters. Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense, but who cares? The yarn is an exercise in momentum and atmosphere.

“The Horror in the Crib” seems to start out as a psychological study of a young mother who is losing her mind. We see her in the beginning leaning over her baby’s crib with a pair of scissors in her hand, looking as if she intends to stab the child. Then we realize that this is no normal human infant.

“Her hands clutched the crib’s top bar and her eyes stared down into it. Her slim body was sheathed with ice and a scream ripped from her throat. Tiny reptilian eyes blinked up at her from the beribboned pillow, hooded eyes in a green, grotesque head that was long and flat and triangular, a head split by a fang-serried, malignant grin.”

A couple of other stories in the book also feature human children who are more bestial than your average rug rat. Or maybe that’s just what they are. Human rats. If Zagat had any kids of his own, I wonder what they thought of their old man’s visions of childhood.

I usually read one story a night when I’m working on a single author collection, but I ripped through this one in two evenings. Good stuff.

And don’t be misled by Zagat using a pen name for these stories, the witty Morgan LaFay. He wasn’t hiding his real name because he was writing for one of the Spicy titles. He was just so prolific he had to use several nom de pulps so readers would think they were getting stories by a variety of authors.

One writer, though, was afraid that he might miss sales to the higher paying slick magazines if their editors knew he contributed so much to the Spicy line, so Hugh B. Cave, just in case, signed his Spicy stories as by “Justin Case.” You gotta love it.

The Ghost (1963)

If you like horror movies and are familiar with the films of Barbara Steele and don’t like them, go to your room right now. You’re in time out until I tell you it’s okay to rejoin the human race.

The Ghost was her fifth spook show and a sequel of sorts to the previous year’s The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, also directed by Riccardo Freda. In this one, Elio Jotta co-stars as the paralyzed and dying Dr. H. His wife and her lover, Dr. Livingstone (Peter Baldwin), decide to bump him off so she can inherit his fortune and they can spend it.

But the not-so-good Dr. Hitchcock is no sooner in his tomb than he is out of it again, seemly haunting the couple, especially his wife. Such a waste of good poison, too.

Freda — who deserves to be remembered with Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci — creates suspense with nothing more than sound, things you think you see, outstanding production design, Steele’s gorgeous face, and a budget of about $17. But come on, all you really need is Steele’s face.

If you don’t know her work, shame on you, but you can catch up with some of her early pictures, all easily available on DVD. Look for Black Sunday (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and Castle of Blood (1964). No scream queen was ever better at facially registering a variety of emotions at once. Hell, no scream queen was ever better, period.