The Devil Bear (1929)

So last year Gold Ninja Video sent me an email with the following synopsis:

A mutiny breaks out in a ship over a chest of gold.

In the fracas, the boat crashes along the shore of Ontario’s Lake Superior.

From the wreckage emerges a hulking, snarling figure, caged no more!

Now, with freedom clenched between its razor-sharp fangs, the furry beast escapes into Canada’s dense wilderness. Where it shall be bestowed a new name by all those who lay their terrified eyes upon its deadly form… THE DEVIL BEAR.

Oh, and the Devil Bear is a gorilla. 

Well, that closing line certainly sealed the deal.

The history of The Devil Bear is strange and patchy at this remove. Apparently started as a project titled The Spirit of the Wilderness, it was to be a history of Canada’s transformation from wild frontier to urban modern. Thunder Bay Productions promised a state-of-the-art production facility in Ontario, and more movies. After initial well-received nature footage, Spirit sort of faded from view along with Thunder Bay Productions, and then suddenly The Devil Bear made its debut in Buffalo, New York.

The aforementioned mutiny happens during a storm on Lake Superior, with the mutineers beating the captain badly and making off with the chest. The gorilla is the captain’s pet, Borno; neither the synopsis or the movie bothers to tell us Borno saves the captain in the ensuing shipwreck and cares for him in a cave. The Captain, quite addled after his beating, builds a ship’s wheel out of wood.

That bit will be teased out and scenes of Borno in the forest will bewilderingly interrupt:

The actual plot of the movie that involves a young geologist, Bill Sifton (Carroll Nye), who is trying to prove a mine has gold. He is in love with the daughter of a local missionary, Werta (Dorothy Dwan), and we’re going to recognize Sifton’s treacherous partner as one of those nautical ne’er-do-wells from the beginning of the picture.

The plot gets even more complex from there, with treachery, murder, and more scenes of Borno roaming around the woods (he is never explicitly – or subtly, for that matter – called “The Devil Bear”). Borno will eventually carry Werta off to the Captain’s cave and I think we’re supposed to supply “DEVIL BEAR!!!” over the wild gesticulations of the Native American Servant reporting the damsel-napping.

Everybody winds up at the cave, there will be a to-do, the Captain will get conked, returning him to sanity… and doggone if he isn’t the brother of the judge who’s been helping Sifton all this time!

Borno escapes into the woods, where he may remain to this very day, lurking, stalking… in fact, he may be behind you right now.

BOO!!!

Haha hahaha! God, the look on your face!

This is all, incidentally, based on “an autobiographical story” by Sargeson V. Halstead, the founder and head of Thunder Bay Productions. He either had a fascinating life or, you know, is lying.

Gold Ninja’s Justin Decloux says he believes this is an “interim” picture, made between the dominance of silents and the surge of talkies. There is, in fact, a lot of talking in this movie, with the intertitles becoming few and far between after the initial introductions. This puts me in the position of having to figure out what specifically the hell is going on for most of the movie. Sifton heads to the big city to talk to the man we eventually learn is The Judge (I had to find out by reading the packed-in booklet), and a sudden alternate love interest in the Judge’s… daughter? Niece? We’ll eventually learn, almost by accident, that her name is Grace. This led me to expect a much more nuanced denouement than the one I got. But this is the print that The Library and Archives of Canada possessed, so let’s be happy with what we got.

It is a well-made movie. There are a lot of seasoned pros in the mix, not least of which is Dorothy Dwan, who was married to Larry Semon and starred in his rather bizarre version of The Wizard of Oz. Though not credited in the titles, Charles Gemora played Borno. There are some nods to Murnau in double-exposed sequences, and there is quite a bit of outstanding outdoor photography.

And hey, a guy in a gorilla suit.

Lost classic? Mmmm… perhaps? I’m just glad it exists, really.

June 1, 2026
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

N: Nightshot (2018)

About a third of the way through Nightshot, my son looked into my office and commented, “That looks terrifying.” My response was “Does, doesn’t it?” and the rest was…

Hm.

Nightshot purports to be an urbex video (that’s urban exploration for all us oldsters), where our host (Nathalie Couturier) leads her cameraman through an expansive, abandoned hospital while talking about the history of the horrors that took place there. It seems your typical mad doctor was doing obscene experiments involving pregnant women. At some point Nathalie cheerily announces to her cameraman (and therefore, her audience) that she herself is pregnant, so go ahead and write the rest of the movie yourself. Pretty sure Dr. Freudstein is involved.

My major issue here is that Nightshot is advertised as a one-take movie, and I have some doubts. Once again, whenever we are near something spoooooooky the camera glitches out and the audio goes wild, a major difference being these things also affect our urban explorers (and nice work on the audio effects). These are ready-made opportunities for a cut, so pull the other one. Those are still some extended takes, though, so mad props to Nathalie, who literally carries the movie. If I’m wrong, her achievement is all the more laudable.

Secondly, Nightshot did find itself a hell of a location, to be sure, but as we get deeper into the story, the Blair Witch curse sinks in and we seem to just be wandering endlessly through it. There are rooms that are tricked out for maximum creepiness and story advancement, but man I got tired of that one hall.

One of the tricked-out rooms has a Ouija board in it. Nathalie starts spinning out some bullshit about the spirit board for her audiences, and the Ouija gets so offended it flies across the room. That part I liked.

Never a good sign.

Third, as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Nathalie is suffering a miscarriage. My wife and I survived two of those, so I am not appreciative of its use as a plot device.

There is some genuine horror there at the end, but that just seems to play out the Evilspeak model of “get through the bulk of the movie so things can go nuts in the final ten minutes”. I’m not a fan. Nathalie Couturier, though – you can stay.

 

 

October 19, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

K: Kadaicha (1988)

A group of Australian teens have a problem; they are each having the same dream about a tunnel leading to a torchlit chamber covered in aboriginal markings, where a tall figure is chanting. The figure turns, revealing it is a rotting corpse, and it forces something into their hand before they wake in fright. Upon awakening, they find a kadaicha, a crystal inscribed with, again, aboriginal markings. And whoever finds a kadaicha will die within 24 hours.

There’s a whole lot of familiar tropes in this movie, made four years after Nightmare on Elm Street, and possessing many of the markings of it and its imitators. Our main character, Gail (Zoe Carides) is the daughter of the real estate hustler who masterminded this plagued locale, and as she researches the cause of her friends’ death (and eventually her own imminent doom), she finds the development is built over, basically, an Indian graveyard.

To its credit, the movie makes it a little more than that, with an eye towards Australia’s troubled history. There was a massacre and then a counter-massacre, then a counter-counter massacre, and there are some very angry bones in that chamber. Gail finds there were many indigenous protests about the development, but dear old dad basically just bricked up the hole to the chamber and built over it.

So the neat twist is that the aboriginals weren’t threatening the development with ghostly retribution – they were trying to warn whitey not to do it, because they knew the place was cursed with a capital K.

Kadaicha – eventually re-titled Stones of Death – keeps its political outrage simmering just under the surface, a vital difference making it watchable as more than a Nightmare  wannabe. Director James Bogle manages, in between the typical teen cut-ups, to craft some some nicely weird sequences – the spider POV is especially nice – and turned out an effective little thriller.

October 16, 2023
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J: Jack the Ripper (1976)

Klaus Kinski is a deviant weirdo who is a caring doctor by day and a murdering psycho rapist at night. No, that’s the character he plays, but I can see where the confusion lies.

Jack the Ripper is a Swiss/German film directed and partially written by Jess Franco. The poster proclaims “Only NOW Can It Be Shown Like THIS!“, meaning that Kinksi can now rip off all an actress’ clothes before raping and murdering them, often at the same time.

Kinksi is Dr. Dennis Orloff (yeah, Franco wrote this part), tending to his impoverished patients by day, and then being tormented by visions of his mother, who was a prostitute that also wanted him in on the trade. After these nipple-filled nightmares, there’s nothing left for him but to go out and kill. One of his victims is Franco standard Lina Romay, who lasts the longest of his victims, even getting a production number in what looks like the worst cabaret possible on the budget.

As a Franco film, it follows the template of The Awful Dr. Orloff, except without the mad science angle. No, this Orloff is just in it for vengeance against his dead mother. The police are also notably useless as in the original flick, and Inspector Worthless’s girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) strikes out on her own to find the killer, without telling the Inspector. Nudity will ensue.

Everybody in the movie is a better detective than the Inspector. There’s a blind man character that would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Even the itinerant fisherman played by the musically-named Howard Fux is better at the game than the Inspector.

Reportedly shot in a week, Franco has no time for his usual zoom lens fetish, so the movie feels more like an actual gothic thriller, sort of a boring Hammer flick. A lot of time is spent on the police work and supposedly risible dealings with witnesses, while we wait for Kinski to whack out again. Despite his off-screen infamy, Kinski was a very good, serious actor, and he brings the appropriate level of intensity to his role. There’s some good stuff in here, especially Kinski’s cat-and-mouse game with Romay in a foggy wood, but if you’re familiar at all with the actual Ripper case, man, are you going to be pissed…

October 15, 2023
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I: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)

It may not be the classic definition of a Hubrisween movie, but If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is a prime example of a conservative horror story. Of course, Stephen King has already posited that all horror stories are ultimately conservative, but this is a horror movie designed to strike fear in a certain demographic.

This is the title of a sermon delivered by Mississippi Baptist minister Estus Pirkle, and it’s all about how evil Commies will take over the US of A unless its thoughtless sex-education-class-attending masses come to Jesus. This takes the form of vignettes gleefully showing the atrocities that will take place after such a takeover, including massacres, drunken soldiers invading homes, and in a crowning moment, puncturing the eardrums of children who were attending a clandestine prayer meeting. That is punctuated by the child actor vomiting, which rumor has it was not supposed to happen.

My God, they pithed him like a frog.

Probably the worst thing to its Baptist audiences is the scene where Comrade Teacher (Wes Saunders) demonstrates to a class of inexpressive children that prayer to God will not get them candy, but Comrade Castro is happy to give them all the candy they want.

“Comrade Castro will give you all the crap Halloween candy you wish!”

The atrocity footage is brought to us courtesy of exploitation legend Ron Ormond, who had earlier brought us such worthy entertainment as Mesa of Lost Women, Please Don’t Touch Me, and Girl from Tobacco Road. Ormond crashed his single-engine plane into a field and survived, though seriously injured. This was what could be termed a come-to-Jesus moment, and from that day forth, Ormond was a Christian, eventually teaming up with Pirkle for a trilogy of films – following was The Burning Hell (which also deserves a Hubrisween slot) and The Believer’s Heaven.

Also in the mix is Judy (Judy Greer), a young lady who is attending church just to keep up appearances (we know Judy is a unbeliever because she’s dating the Sex Education teacher). Pirkle’s tale of forthcoming doom and getting covered with red paint provides Judy with her own Ron Ormond moment, and Pirkle brings her down to the altar of save her soul.

SINFUL!

Footmen was meant to be shown at prayer meetings and revivals, and this is the moment when the lights went up and people would march up to their own altars and accept Jesus. It never played actual theaters, so there are no end credits; in fact this why Pirkle never released it on video or DVD – he felt that there should always be someone at the altar after the movie’s end, waiting to receive the lost lambs for their salvation.

All good, I suppose. Pirkle is especially good in the scenes with Judy, projecting care and empathy. What gives me pause is the statistics he claims with absolute authority are true, such as the exact number of Americans the Commies intend to kill when they take over, which is a tactic used by far too many pundits and idiots in the present day.

Pirkle’s message of salvation is undercut by pronouncements like that, and by members of his non-acting flock, all things that have made it fodder for latter-day sampling and bad movie watchers. But there is a rawness to Ormond’s conservative nightmare passages that give it some power even in these Pirkle-less times.

October 14, 2023
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H: House by the Cemetery (1981)

I have questions.

It’s tempting to just let that be the review, but where’s the fun in that? And that’s what we’re here for, right? Fun.

About that.

I saw House by the Cemetery back when it was released on VHS. Didn’t think much of it. Years later, I would find out that transfer had the reels out of order. Ah. No wonder. Though I assigned re-watching it in its intended order a very low priority, I finally found time, and did.

About that.

I have questions.

So Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Marco) takes on his former mentor’s research. uprooting his child and wife to move to New England, to the very same house the mentor bloodily murdered his mistress and then hanged himself.

To his growing dismay, Boyle finds out the deceased had totally forsaken his original research to instead look into the history of the house’s former owner, a Dr. Freudstein, who was infamous for insane, illegal surgeries, and OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, HE’S IN THE CELLAR WE ALL KNOW HE’S IN THE CELLAR Y’ALL JUST GO TO THE CELLAR ALREADY

Ahem.

That part I can manage. That part I understand. There are three people credited with the screenplay, and even with the reels in the right order, the movie feels like three different scripts were shuffled like playing cards, and then handed to the film crew.

It is a creepy movie. I must give it that. There’s some genuinely unsettling stuff in here, and that’s not necessarily the gore scenes. There is a wonderfully eerie ghost story embedded in House by the Cemetery, but it feels like, as I said, pages from another script

But I have questions. A lot of my questions are perfectly encapsulated in a quote from the movie’s page at Imdb:

What is with the rapidly vanishing blood in this movie? Why is Boyle looking for Freudstein’s tomb miles away when he already knows it’s in his living room? What the hell is up with Ann, anyway?

This movie is the Picnic at Hanging Rock of gore movies.

So no, I didn’t find myself suddenly liking it.

October 13, 2023
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F: Feed the Light (2014)

Sara (Lina Sundén) is a desperate woman who breaks into the Malmö Institute armed only with a knife and a set of lockpicks. She’s looking for her daughter, whom her recently-divorced husband has taken into the nondescript building. When the Chief (Jenny Lampa) mistakes her for a new hire, Sara finds that Malmo is much weirder than she thought; her job is to sweep up the sparkling dust that drops from the facility’s lights, because the dust “attracts vermin”. She also witnesses one of the other workers get covered with the dust, and the vermin – a swath of darkness – enters the worker’s body and he dies in an explosion of blood.

She enters into an uneasy alliance with the head janitor (Martin Jirhamn), who reveals that things can get even worse: the reason her cell phone was confiscated by the Chief is not because it would interfere with Malmö’s machines, but because the phones can be used to unlock the seemingly nonexistent door to Level Two. Sara has found her husband (Patrik Karlson), now significantly older, because he got lost in Level Two, where time can move… oddly. Level Two is where their daughter is now trapped.

And you do not want to go to Level Three. That’s where the Light lives.

Feed the Light is a fascinatingly low-fi tale of cosmic horror. The black-and-white presentation (except for the occasional burst of color, see the bloody demise above) is going to immediately make most cineastes think of David Lynch, and that’s an association that’s not far wrong, with demented behavior, existential dread and a trove of unanswered questions. It’s not as ultimately incomprehensible as Lynch, but it is as accomplished.

And it’s always good to find a movie that can turn a lack of a multi-million dollar budget into an asset, rather than a disadvantage.

October 11, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

D: Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972)

Dracula is doing Dracula stuff so Dr. Seward stakes him in his vampire basement lair, turning the Count into a dead bat. Soon after, Frankenstein moves in, finds the bat, and revives Dracula with blood. Frankenstein seems to hope to somehow parlay his new vampire toys into his ultimate goal, a perfect being, which probably thrills the Monster to no end. After the Monster tries to kill Seward, the injured doctor is nursed back to health by gypsies. Complicating matters is the fact that Seward and Frankenstein are both idiots and didn’t check any of the other coffins in the basement so there is a rogue vampire lady running around.

The gypsy fortuneteller tells Seward that he will be the one to conquer the bad guys right after the wolfman comes to help. The wolfman is actually of little help, but Frankenstein decides fuck this noise and stakes Dracula again (this time reducing him to a skeleton, which just shows you can’t trust Seward with anything), kills the Monster with electricity (is this even possible?), and then vanishes from the movie so Seward can come in with his torchbearing gypsies to find that all the work has been done the end.

The Wolfman sees the synopsis above and wonders “Who writes this crap?”

It would be tempting to call Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein a fever dream of a movie, but in fact it feels like a movie of a fever dream experienced by a sick child after watching a Halloween marathon of classic Universal horror movies. It has that nonsensical flow – especially the inclusion of a werewolf just because. Howard Vernon’s Dracula always has the same expression, which is as unnerving as it is absurd. Count Dracula as Halloween mask.

I have spent my adult life simply waving off Jess Franco movies, and welp, here I am, trying to deal with his work in a more accepting manner. There is no denying that he knows where to put his camera and how to use stuff like camera dollies and the like. It has been put forward that the first act of the movie is largely dialogue-free and could have easily been a tribute to silent horror movies. Then Franco gets his hand on the zoom lens and all my good intentions get enraged all over again.

I’m going to try Franco again in a few letters, and maybe I’ll finally see what other critics I respect seem to see in the guy. This time, I do have to say I was never tempted to just shut it off, which is progress of a sort.

October 9, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

C: Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973)

Dracula (Paul Naschy) moves into a deserted castle and immediately starts making vampires. He is aided in this by by a carriage-load of young hotties suddenly stranded by an accident and the death of their driver. Vampire stuff ensues.

Count Dracula’s Great Love is a quite unusual vampire story; although the setup above points toward a typical Hammer-style gothic tale, it quickly unwinds into novel territory. Great Love‘s central conceit is that Dracula’s immortality is not based on eternal life, but instead on a cycle of reincarnation, with the Count living and dying over and over again until a virgin falls in love with him for himself.

Also, she gotta take a knife to the neck.

One of our hotties falls for him but, alas, she is no virgin. There is another, however, who fits the bill, and that is where things start getting really weird. There is a subplot about reviving Dracula’s daughter, even to the point of kidnapping a local girl and sacrificing her to revive said daughter, but his Great Love doesn’t like that, so he abandons it. Sorry, local virgin!

Eventually, Dracula has killed all the other vampires in his employ and the virgin still won’t give in, so Dracula stakes himself to start the cycle all over again and the virgin is sorry, boo hoo hoo.

“Your coffins are right this way. ROOMS! Rooms. I meant rooms.”

Snarky recaps aside, this is held up as a high point for Naschy as an actor and Spanish horror in particular. Those are both true, and it has to be admitted, this most unusual twist on the mythology was refreshing, and certainly worthwhile.

October 8, 2023
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B: Blair Witch (2016)

Which reminds me, one of these days I’ve got to watch Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows before the DVD rots in its case.

So it’s 15 years since those three intrepid student filmmakers went into the woods and disappeared, but now a memory card has been found in those woods and the hectic surviving footage seems to take place in that strange deserted house in the end of that movie. Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) thinks he caught a glimpse of Heather in that footage, so off we go to the woods again, with James’ friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is making a documentary about James’ search, and two cannon fodder friends (Corbin Reid and Brandon Scott)

Perhaps you thought “Now wait a minute” about James’ hope of finding Heather after fifteen years. Hold that thought, you’re going to be needing it again.

I hope you got it laminated so it doesn’t wear out.

They meet with the couple who found the memory card (Wes Robinson and Valerie Curry), who insist on going with them. Say goodbye, everybody!

“Goodbye, everybody!”

James’ main objective is to find this mysterious house, which has eluded search parties and other investigators. It is fifteen years later, so we have new tech, like trail cameras and a drone to help.

None of these are going to help (as you surmised).

Now, I like found footage movies – when they work, I find them very involving. Director Adam Wingard works the new tech angle for all its worth, and even adds a bit to the lore by having the Witch fuck around with time as well as space. This also seems to be the year for filmmakers punching my claustrophobia in the head and taking its lunch money, the bastards. But still, Blair Witch is going to make you use that phrase “Now wait a minute” so many times that honestly, that should have been the subtitle.

Though I admit Blair Witch: Now Wait a Minute would have been a hard sell.

October 7, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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