MACABRE (1980)

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

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

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

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

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

FREAKSHOW (2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of you sickos will eccch with delight.

FREAKS (1932)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HANNIBAL RISING (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I sure?

Hell. I just scared myself.

Parasomnia (2008)

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

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

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

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

Mark of the Vampire (1935)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971)

Well, you can’t hit one over the fence every time at bat. The House That Dripped Blood is the third of Amicus Productions’ portmanteau horror anthologies, and it’s at best a shaky single achieved as the result of a fielder’s error.

The script is by Robert Bloch and based on four of his short stories: “Method for Murder,” “Waxworks,” “Sweets to the Sweet” and “The Cloak.” The last two are classic Bloch, but here, the scripts are weakened, especially in “The Cloak,” by producer Max Rosenberg’s insistence on putting humor onscreen and keeping the horror off.

The cast makes the film sort of worth watching. Denholm Elliott stars in the first story, about a writer of horror stories who begins to think that his creations are coming to life. Peter Cushing and Joss Ackland are in segment two, about a creepy wax museum and the nutjob who operates it. Christopher Lee tops a tale of a man trying to live with an adolescent witch, and Jon Pertwee and Ingrid Pitt finish off with a comic vampire yarn.

The film contains no thrills or chills — not even a weak shiver — and is for Cushing/Lee fans only. Note that Vincent Price was originally offered, but turned down the role of the snotty, egotistical horror movie star eventually played by Pertwee. Price got his chance to burlesque hammy actors two years later in Theatre of Blood, and that one’s a must-see.

Dumplings (2004)

Wow. Just wow.

Set in contemporary Hong Kong, Dumplings is the story of Mrs. Li, a former TV star who is married to a man 15 years her senior. She’s 35 and he lost interest long ago in favor of his 20-something secretary/bimbo.

To regain her youth, Mrs. Li begins a regimen of eating dumplings — bite-sized, meat-filled, dough-covered — cooked by Aunt Mei, who appears to be in her early 30s. The dumplings are reputed to restore one’s youth, vigor and sexual attractiveness. Mrs. Li is at first repulsed by the lumps of dumps floating in broth, and we become so as well as hints begin to drop as to just what the meat in the concoction is. Aunt Mei — who, we discover, was 20 in 1960 — is a former nurse with a straight line to mainland China, where abortions are still performed in the thousands.

Written by Pik Wah Li (under the name Lillian Lee), who wrote the novel on which Farewell My Concubine was based, and directed by Fruit Chan, the film is — on the surface — about a power struggle between two women. Under the surface, it’s a biting revelation of how the rich, beautiful and powerful use the poor, pitiful and helpless. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let ‘em eat jiaozi.”

This one is as disturbing as any movie you’re likely to see unless you go so far underground even I won’t follow you.

Sick Nurses (2007)

If you’re like me, and are willing to admit it, the title of this flick alone will land it in your Netflix queue. Then there’s the poster, depicting a pair of sexy, blood-spattered nurses. To hell with the queue — this one’s for instant streaming.

Sick Nurses is a horror film from Thailand and if the action took place in the real world, it would make very little sense. We’re in a hospital that seems to house no patients — just a half-dozen hot young nurses and one doctor who make a living harvesting and selling body parts. When one of the nurses who thinks the doctor is hers exclusively finds out that he is going to marry her pregnant sister, she cracks up and threatens to reveal their illegal operation. The other nurses kill her and, on the seventh day after her death, she returns to enact her revenge on everyone.

At this point, this goofy little film gets a bit more serious as directors Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat go all surreal with the visuals. The hospital’s empty halls stop looking like ways to keep the budget down and start looking like corridors of the mind where bad things, and only bad things, ooze out of the walls or float along the ceiling.

But the quasi-artsy imagery never completely overcomes the over-the-top quality. What began as a camp comedy becomes a camp black comedy with lots of gore, long streaming hair and garter belts.

The Raven (1935)

At the pinnacle of his insanity in The Raven Bela Lugosi, as the mad surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin, screams out, “Poe, you are avenged!” But who will avenge Poe for the misuse of his name in this monster mish-mash of mad scientist, torture chamber, haunted house, and ugly-faced butler clichés?

When the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934) turned out to be a hit, Universal concocted a story “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” “The Raven.” Unfortunately, the new script, credited onscreen to David Boehm alone, although there were seven other contributors, including Dore Schary and Guy Endore, was one of the most insipid from Universal’s golden age of horror.

Lugosi is Dr. Vollin, whose reputation as a brilliant surgeon proves to be more a curse than a blessing. When Jean (Irene Ware), the daughter of Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) crashes her car and her life is in the balance, the young woman’s doctors tell her father that Vollin is the only man who can save her life. Vollin has given up his practice to devote himself to research and at first refuses to help. Thatcher plays on his vanity and Vollin agrees to operate.

Within a matter of weeks, Jean is up and perfectly well again. Vollin misreads her gratitude as passion and determines to wed her. Thatcher, at first thinking like Vollin that Jean loves him, tries to dissuade the older physician from encouraging her attentions. When he realizes that it’s Vollin who is doing the chasing, he become horrified and warns the doctor to keep away.

The good-natured Jean, who is a ballerina, choreographs a dance called “The Spirit of Poe”—dressed in a costume that makes her look like a Margaret Brundage “Weird Tales” cover girl--to show her appreciation to Vollin, who is such a admirer of the writer’s that he has created life-sized replicas of the torture devices mentioned in Poe’s tales.

Discovering the extent of Vollin’s fanboyism is one of those hold-the-phone moments. This is a man who boasts about building and owning working torture devices and no one appears to find it in the least peculiar. Books, okay. Miniatures, okay. But a full-sized pit and pendulum set-up? “Death is my talisman,” he says. He first saw Jean lying still as death on the operating table, as good a stand-in for a morgue slab as the wealthy necrophile can find.

Paging Dr. Krafft-Ebing—call for Dr. Krafft-Ebing.

Now it’s time for Karloff to make his entrance into the story. He is Edmond Bateman, on the lam from the law after shooting his way out of prison and killing two policemen in the process. He’s also shoved a burning acetylene torch in some fella’s face, pretty much on a whim. Yes, he’s the one we end up feeling sorry for, which just goes to show what a fiend Vollin is.

Bateman is in some kind of dive or speakeasy. We can’t hear what’s being told to him, but we find out later that he is in search of a doctor who can alter his face enough to avoid recapture. He goes calling on Vollin.

Why? When a killer needs a crooked doctor, why does Vollin’s name enter the conversation? Vollin agrees to help Bateman when he gets the idea that if he makes the escaped con look ugly, he will be more apt to perform ugly acts. Vollin takes Bateman to his hidden operating room and reassures the con that a simple operation on the nerve endings of his face will alter his appearance, and it will take only ten minutes. The desperate Bateman agrees.

When the bandages are removed we see that the right side of Bateman’s face has been altered, but not for the better. Thanks to an uncredited Jack Pierce, Karloff’s face seems to have been melted. The actor completes the image by tipping his head slightly to the right, as if the neck muscles could no longer hold it upright. He shifts his shoulders forwards to create a stooped, hunched look.

Bateman first sees his new face in a series of mirrors that have been installed around the walls of the circular room. Each is behind a curtain, and the curtains are drawn one by one revealing a curved line of reflections. The moment is effective, but the question arises, why would Vollin have such a place in his house unless he’s made a hobby of distorting people’s faces and then forcing them to stare at repeated images of their new ugliness?

From this point on the film becomes more and more a reflection of Vollin’s mind, and as such it becomes less and less sane. The doctor lures Jean, her father, and her fiancé to the house for a weekend party—along with two other couples of such lesser importance it is difficult to fathom why they invited along unless they represent a plot development that was cut from the final film.

But now the house, with its secret doorways, hidden torture chamber, steel shutters, and traps in the floor, becomes huge. There is no end to the torture chamber, which goes on forever into the shadows.

Vollin straps Judge Thatcher—perhaps named as he is for a representative of solid American respectability and sanity in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—onto a slab under the swinging pendulum, and he locks Jean and her fiancé (Lester Matthews) into a steel-walled that will crush them to death.

Vollin and Bateman have the inevitable falling out over the girl’s fate and only those who deserve a horrible fate receive one.

There are two attractions to The Raven. One is the pairing of its two stars, both of whom are credited at the film’s opening by their last names only. They are still working well together although Lugosi’s over the top hysterical mania is less convincing than Karloff’s soft-spoken, hesitant, almost reluctant murderousness.

The film’s second pleasure is its heedless rush to barking madness. Director Louis Friedlander’s (later billed as Lew Landers) lack of restraint stands out in a field that has since given us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as the benchmark of cinematic no-holds-barred lunacy.

The Raven is a 12-year old boy’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, all they-think-I’m-crazy-but-I’ll-show-them-how-sane-I-am-heh-heh-heh screeching and posturing. It’s not possible to take it seriously, nor is it in the least frightening at the visceral level. But it is fun and, taken with The Black Cat, it makes a nice showcase for its two leads.