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K: Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

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This was a movie I had seen as a child, way back when; I remember it played on NBC in a Prime Time slot, re-titled Kiss of Evil, and I recall being rather confused about the whole thing. Turns out I was seeing a version that had been massively tampered with, and I direct you to this IMDb page for the details. I eventually figured out the true title was Kiss of the Vampire, have now finally watched it again, and was relieved to find out it made a little more sense.

One of the scenes heavily cut for sensitive American viewers is the opening, a funeral in your typical Hammer turn-of-the-century cemetery. One cloaked fellow watches from a distance, and the village gossips whisper that “he’s been drinking again.” This fellow walks to the graveside as the service concludes, takes the shovel and proceeds to smash the shovel down into the coffin. Whatever is in that coffin screams, and impossibly, blood gushes out. The frightened villagers run away, crossing themselves.

After the credits, we are introduced to our – well, not heroes, but our main characters, Gerald and Marianne (Edward de Souza and Jennifer Daniel), who are traipsing about in their motorcar, on their honeymoon. Marianne is a terrible map reader, and they are lost and eventually run out of petrol. This is observed by a telescope in a nearby dilapidated château. They have the car towed to a nearby, nearly deserted hotel, where they find themselves the only other tenant besides the alcoholic Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans), whom we all recognize as Mr. Shovel Chucker from earlier.

George and Marianne are invited to dinner by the owner of the aforementioned château, Dr. Ravna; they find the interior of the mansion to be quite lovely, and Ravna and his two children very handsome and genial. Of course, given the pre-credit sequence and the title of the movie, we are pretty damned sure they’re vampires, and as the movie progresses, we find they are vampires with a penchant for very elaborate and rococo plots.

Delivery of the rather exotic petrol will take several days and the Ravnas invite George and Marianne to a lavish masked ball. Make no mistake, the entire purpose of this ball is to get George drunk, and then drug him, while Ravna puts the bite on Marianne. When George awakens, he is told there is no such person as Marianne, and that he is a miserable drunken sot and should leave forever.

Even the innkeepers are telling him he came to the hotel alone, but Professor Zimmer is having none of that, and gives George the index card version of what is going on; Ravna is the head of a cult of vampires – all the other attendees of the ball are members of that cult. The vampire Zimmer skewered with the shovel was his own daughter, and he has been laboring over his ancient texts to find a magic spell that will “turn evil against evil”.

A whole lot of Kiss of the Vampire seems like a bunch of 60s Hammer films were put in a blender. The same setup would be utilized for Dracula: Prince of Darkness three years later (also written by Anthony Hinds) and Zimmer must cauterize a vampire bite, much like Peter Cushing in Brides of Dracula. The major elements that set this one apart from the others is the treatment of the vampires as a religious cult, right down to the flowing white robes, and that spell woven by Professor Zimmer, which culminates in an attack on the château by a flock of the finest rubber bats available from the local Woolworth’s.

It’s that final attack that impressed me as a kid; it’s unusual enough to make a lasting impression in a childhood spent watching monster movies. Sadly, the movie proper doesn’t live up to the extraordinary scenes bookending it. The actors are a solid lot, but lacking the convincing gravitas of either Cushing or Lee. Once all the subterfuge is put aside, and Zimmer and George go on the offensive, the story becomes much more involving – but by that time, it’s almost over. A diverting enough movie, but definitely not one of the brighter jewels in the Hammer crown.

(The only trailer I could find on YouTube is so dark as to be worthless. Here instead, is a speed-ramped version of the closing sequence set to Chimo Bayo’s 1992 “Bombas”. The Internet. Go figure.)

Kiss of the Vampire on Amazon

October 16, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hammer, hubrisween, kiss of the vampire . Author: drfreex . Comments: Comments Off on K: Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

J: Jason X (2001)

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Hey, you know me: I hate slasher movies.

This is an ancient enmity. I liked Halloween. I despised the first Friday the 13th, which was a monstrous mega-hit, and which spawned something like a hundred copycats in the next two years. This is a continuing pattern in my life; back when I was an avid gamer, I preferred RPGs, and suffered through a wave of side-scrolling shooters, then a wave of fighters. Good thing Zelda and Final Fantasy took a chunk of time, because there was precious little else available for folks like me.

So it was with slashers. A friend of mine hated horror movies until I forced him to return to and watch The Howling to its conclusion (he had left early upon discovering it was a werewolf movie oh jesus don’t get me started), and then found myself dragged by this new convert to every slasher that came out. He was hoping to catch that makeup effect buzz again, you see, but not every movie could afford Rob Bottin or Tom Savini, nor did they try.

My major problem with slashers is they’re just so mechanical, quite often not even bothering to switch up the proceedings from the last slasher movie you saw. At their very worst, they earned the charge of misogyny directed against the genre as a whole. The fast track to horror is to menace or victimize a woman, which allows first-time directors and hacks to get the response they want, simply and lazily. Do the same to a man and the audience response tends toward “Why isn’t he fighting back? What a wuss!” So when men fall into the victim column, they tend to get killed quickly, suddenly.

I know slashers have their fans. I’m not one of them. Twilight, Glee and Dancing With The Stars also have their fans. I am not one of them. And yet, I have seen all the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies. Nightmare because I appreciated the fantastic elements, and Friday because… I’m an optimistic idiot. (Didn’t watch any of the Halloween movies past III because I’m not a complete masochistic moron)

I watched Jason Lives because Hollywood finally caught up with me and Forever Evil by realizing that an unstoppable killing machine needed to be a zombie. I was almost charmed by whichever one was Jason vs Carrie. I was pissed off all over again by Jason Takes Manhattan because, finally! A new venue! Jason takes a walk through Central Park at night! Jason versus a New York SWAT Team! Annnnnd then I saw it and it was just another body count flick and a wonderful opportunity squandered.

But say what you will about Jason and Freddy, at least they didn’t discriminate in their activities. Men and women were grist for those gruesome mills. Which brings us to Jason X, the by-now almost inevitable “Jason in Space” movie.

Jason’s been captured, and since multiple attempts to execute him have failed, it is decided to simply cryogenically freeze him. All well and good until David Cronenberg (literally) shows up to study his regenerative abilities instead, just in time for Jason to bust loose and kill everybody except for Dr. Final Girl (Lexa Doig), who despite being mortally wounded, manages to freeze Jason and herself.

Regenerative abilities nothing, they should study how Jason gets that machete so frickin’ sharp, punching right through the reinforced steel door of the cryogenic chamber.

455 years later, a spaceship crew discovers the cryo chamber and take Dr. Final Girl and Jason on board. This is some sort of archeological enterprise with an eye toward profit, manned largely by (horny) students and some ~~cannon fodder~~ soldiers. Dr. Final Girl is healed by nanotech, and though she’s not ideally profitable, Jason would be, as even in the future he is a notorious killer. So of course they let him thaw out.

This set-up from The Thing isn’t the last movie they’re ripping off here, either, as the soldiers on board quickly shift into Aliens mode and try to track down Jason in this astoundingly cavernous ship. They also sling around an uncomfortable amount of bullets for a pressurized space vessel, but since Jason also dismembers the pilot so they crash through a space station that supposedly represented salvation, I have to say that this particular ship was built to last. At least until the story necessitates it breaking up to move the story along.

I remember absolutely none of the character names because they’re all going to be dead in a drastically short amount of time – this has the highest body count of any of the Friday the 13th movies – though I do remember the female android Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), who has a Pinocchio complex (she’s in love with her creator and vice-versa). She has all the good lines, and when she’s upgraded to a well-armed warbot, actually takes Jason out. She is every nerd’s wet dream, and I am a nerd. Then Jason is repaired by malfunctioning nanotech, so we now get to rip off The Terminator.

All this borrowing from other movies actually works in Jason X‘s favor; the filmmaker’s hearts are in the right place, and the borrowings actually feel like homage rather than desperation. It does stray into the realm of the too-cute, though: one of the characters on the chopping list in the Alien segment is named Dallas, the doomed space station is the “Solaris Station”. My favorite part. though, is going to remain the holodeck replica of Camp Crystal Lake the survivors rig up to distract Jason; it even includes vixens with 80’s hairstyles indulging in the exact actions which always spelled doom in the earlier movies. “Do you want to have pre-marital sex? We looooooove pre-marital sex!”

So Jason X is that oddity for me, a Friday the 13th movie that actually entertained me while still managing to be a slasher movie. Still terminally stupid, but it never thought I was stupid, which gets it a higher grade, in my book.

(I’m trying to remember if “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” was already a cliche by this point)

Jason X on Amazon

October 15, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: friday the 13th, hubrisween, jason x, slasher . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

H: The Haunted Strangler (1958)

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If you’ve been reading my babblings for any length of time, you know that my childhood occurred during the Great Monster Revival of the late 50s-early 60s, sparked by that upstart medium, television and its dependence on older movies. Oh, how I recall poring through every issue of TV Guide, seeking out horror movies, especially those gems I read about in Famous Monsters of Filmland, the Universal cycle of the 30s.

I watched them all, but I can’t say I really appreciated them until I was older. The thing I’m reaching for here is Frankenstein, which has become something of a touchstone for me. I didn’t really give it a serious rewatch until Universal put out a deluxe version in 1999, and a lot was suddenly made clear to me, particularly why the Monster had garnered our sympathy all these years, and that is due in no small part to director James Whale and a 44 year-old actor making the most of a long hoped-for and worked-for break: Boris Karloff.

Karloff proved to be an actor of great sensitivity who was immediately typecast; he made his peace with that, referring to it as a trademark he was given for free. He worked steadily through the 30s and 40s, but in the opening years of the 50s, he was seen as less useful, relegated to supporting roles. He moved into television, and his first love, theater. When he did return to movies, it was in drivel like Voodoo Island and Frankenstein 1970 – so it must have seemed a very pleasant change when, in 1957, he agreed to do two movies for producer Richard Gordon which feel like welcome throwbacks to a bygone era: Corridors of Blood and The Haunted Strangler.

Karloff plays James Rankin, a successful novelist and social reformer in 1880 London. His newest project concerns one Edward Styles, a one-armed man hanged twenty years earlier as the Haymarket Strangler (before you ask the very same question I did, his victims were only “half-strangled, then slashed to death”). Rankin feels that Styles was railroaded, and his research puts him on the trail of a Dr. Tennant, who autopsied the Strangler’s victims and seemed to know far too much in his reports. Tennant disappeared soon after Styles’ execution, and Rankin discovers the missing doctor’s kit, which has its scalpel just as obviously missing.

Rankin suspects what the audience has known since the movie’s opening: the scalpel was placed in the coffin with Styles’ corpse. Since no one will believe his theories, Rankin resorts to bribery to exhume Styles in the prison cemetery in the dead of night. He finds the scalpel, but his triumph turns to horror as his body twists and contorts, and soon he is apparently possessed by the spirit of the Haymarket Strangler, once again preying on dance hall girls after an absence of twenty years.

Despite its low budget, The Haunted Strangler manages the look of a much more expensive picture. The supporting cast is full of solid British performers like Anthony Dawson and Vera Day, but the movie rests solidly on Karloff’s shoulders, and he once more grasps the opportunity – no pun intended – with both hands. He’s nearly 70 years old during filming, suffering chronic back pain and emphysema, but nonetheless turns in an astoundingly physical performance. Oh, I know that’s not him doing the John Wilkes Booth leap off a balcony onto a stage, or hurling himself through a window, but the later scenes when an increasingly distraught and violent Rankin is committed to an asylum, wrestling with orderlies, you would swear you were watching an actor half his age.

This also brings up what has become one of my favorite Karloff stories: he and director Robert Day were discussing the transformation scenes, and how they could be accomplished with what little makeup they could afford – it is a plot point that Rankin is unrecognizable while possessed. Karloff’s solution was elegant in its simplicity: he took out his lower dentures and sucked his face into the resulting void. He had done something like this earlier in his career, when he was playing Frankenstein’s Monster, in fact: to get the proper cadaverous look, he removed a dental bridge and sucked his cheek in. Simple, inexpensive, effective.

So consider The Haunted Strangler the Jekyll-and-Hyde story Karloff never got to make. There is a major plot twist three-quarters of the way in that I admit caught me flat-footed, and that happens rarely for me, so familiar am I with the tropes of the horror movie. Karloff had other memorable roles ahead of him, but not many – The Sorcerers and Targets (and arguably The Terror and The Raven), so it is very nice to see him in great form in a tidy little thriller.

Also, there was no place to put it in that last paragraph, but I find him absolutely hilarious in The Comedy of Terrors, but, again: supporting role. And now, as is usual, I find myself fighting the impulse to replace every single movie I’ve planned to watch for this project with Karloff movies.

Monsters & Madmen on Amazon

October 13, 2014
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: boris karloff, grip of the strangler, hubrisween, robert day, stranglehold . Author: drfreex . Comments: Comments Off on H: The Haunted Strangler (1958)

F: Feast (2005)

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Hey who doesn’t love spam in a cabin movies?

Okay, the actual term for flicks like this is “submarine movies”, because they involve characters confined in a single space for the majority of, if not all, the story. The mighty Joe Bob Briggs came up with “spam in a cabin” to describe The Evil Dead and its progeny, and in the world of horror movies, it is perfect.

You’ve got a dive bar/drinking hole/gas station in the middle of nowhere, or as we call it, West Texas. You have a motley collection of characters, some regulars, some not. And you have a new character barge in the front door with a decapitated monster head, informing everybody that hell’s-a-comin’, and they should board up the windows.

By this time, the movie has taken the express route by way of introducing each character with a freeze frame and a text file telling us their name, occupation, and life expectancy, just in case you weren’t aware you were about to watch a snarky horror comedy.

The thing is, those supers also lie, as this guy who just came in the door is named “Hero” (Eric Dane), and he tells the assemblage in the bar that “I’m the guy that’s gonna save your ass,” just in time for a monster to reach through a nearby window and rip his head off – with a Wilhelm Scream, of course. (The supers also tell us of one character, Beer Guy (Judah Friedlander), “Losers and dorks die first, and he’s both”, and he winds up surviving until the final battle). Then, in the first assault on the bar, a child is killed, and you’ve been served notice that all bets are off and anybody can die.

To its credit, Feast has a pretty impressive cast, including Balthazar Getty as an anti-hero named Bozo, Henry Rollins giving a spot-on performance as a clueless motivational coach, and Jason Mewes as a short-lived character named Edgy Cat, and hey, look at that, Clu Gulagher as Bartender. The actors without significant marquee quality are a solid lot, too, especially Navi Rawat as Heroine and Krista Allen as a waitress appropriately named Tuffy. Movies like this live and die on the quality of their performances, and nobody hits a sour note.

Inevitably, sometimes you’re going to hit the “Come on!” button, but for the most part, the story is reasonably logical, or as logical as you can get with monsters wearing dead animal parts lurking around a desert bar. Where the movie possibly fails – and this is going to depend on the audience – is that it wants to blend in the suspense and character comedy of Tremors with the over-the-top gore of Evil Dead and then add in the gleefully perverse outrageous qualities of Bad Taste or Dead Alive/Braindead (you’re going to have to watch the unrated version, as I did, to get the full effect of that). The thing is, you need a lot of skill and savvy to pull that sort of thing off, and what we have here are some first-time filmmakers.

This is the result of the third go-round for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s reality TV show, Project Greenlight. Writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, and director John Gulagher (Yes, Clu’s son) pitched Feast and made it (maybe the boys were just tired of coming-of-age movies). This team went on to make two DTV sequels, and (urgh) Piranha 3DD. The writers now have four Saw movies to their credit. But this is the first, so it gets a little rough at times. There’s a lot of St. Crispin’s Day speeches that get undercut, and that gets a little old.

Then, you have to be amazed it looks and plays as well as it does. It’s a low-budget affair, but also with some pros in front of, and behind the camera. And the pressure of film production was made even harder under Reality TV circumstances, meaning there were at least two camera crews, and often more, on that crowded set, so there would always be a bright light and camera on you even when you were trying to solve problems.

Horror fans and gore hounds are going to find a lot to like here. Casual viewers, stick with Tremors. Speaking of which…one of the meta threads of Feast involves our group deciding that surviving the night is a lot more important than figuring out where the hell these things came from. Gail Anne Hurd, who executive produced Tremors, said that was the one thing she always caught hell for: not explaining the origin of the graboids. So I thought that was kinda ballsy, and sort of realistic of Feast. Then this trailer goes ahead and gives the backstory the movie never does:

Feast on Amazon

October 11, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: feast, hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

E: The Eye (2002)

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I suppose it will be about another thirty years before we get another crop of fin de siècle movies, though, unlike the turn from the 19th century to the 20th, I can’t put my finger on what era truly came to an end with that turn. Possibly the illusion of an untouchable America? The complete demolition of sanity in social discourse? I’m not that much of a big picture person, I can’t really predict what lessons will come out of that crucible. I watch horror movies, so that period for me is when the West started pilfering Asian horror movies for fun and profit.

I guess that started with 1998’s Ringu, translated in 2002 by Gore Verbinski as The Ring. Thereafter followed several domestic transfers: The Grudge, Dark Water, and tonight’s exercise, The Eye. I almost always find the original more compelling, so that’s what we have here.

The Pang Brothers, Oxide and Danny, are two astoundingly prolific filmmakers with 23 movies to their credit in only fifteen years. The Eye is their fourth movie (and, symmetrically enough, they’ve made three sequels for a total of four, though their connection seems pretty tenuous).

Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee) is a young violinist who has been blind since age 2. She receives a cornea transplant, and even in the early stages of blurry vision, she starts seeing unusual things. As things get clearer, she finds that not only can she see the ghosts of people haunting the places of their death, but she also sees a faceless black figure who escorts recently deceased spirits to the beyond.

That’s a pretty typical horror movie set-up – The Sixth Sense and “I see dead people” was only three years before – but what elevates The Eye above the norm is not only Lee’s expressive and sympathetic performance, but the layers of detail the Pangs bring to the table. I like, for instance, her therapist Dr. Wah (Lawrence Chou) holding up a stapler and asking her what it is. Curious, she reaches out for it, but he tells her, “The minute you touch it, you’ll know it’s a stapler. We have to work on your visual vocabulary.” Mun can neither read nor write Chinese, only braille. Her first question to the attending nurse is “Is there a mirror in the washroom?” The Pangs did their research.

Our heroine isn’t just seeing ghosts, either. When she wakes from the obligatory nightmares, another room is superimposed over hers. And one of the best, most chilling moments is when she realizes that when she looks in the mirror, she isn’t seeing her own face, but the face of the woman whose eyes she now sees through. Finally, for her own peace of mind, she decides to trace this donor and find out why her spirit seems to also be restless.

Most impressive is that the Pangs give us a happy ending, then you realize there’s still almost fifteen minutes left in the movie; and what comes after is as inexorable as it is horrifying.

I wasn’t blown away, but I was impressed. There’s a lot to like here, and no, I do not feel at all impelled to check out the Americanized version.

Oh, yeah, “Based on a true story”. According to the Pangs, the true story was that a woman, blind from birth, had the operation and could see for the first time in her life. Though recovering normally, she killed herself within a week. That is the basis of The Eye, and about as far as our “based on a true story” goes.

October 10, 2014
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: hubrisween, pang brothers, the eye . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

D: Dangerous Seductress (1995)

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I had intended to watch The Dead Pit for the letter D, but holy hell, is that ever not an undiscovered gem of the VHS era. I had no problems with the actors or Code Red’s traditionally terrific transfer, it’s just dull. There’s an undead surgeon dragging people to a basement laboratory and it’s dull. The heroine looks like a buxom Claudia Christian with ridiculously scanty sleeping attire and it’s still dull. It was the Unrated Director’s cut and it ran over an hour and forty minutes and

I bailed after 30 minutes of dull and put in something insane and Indonesian.

By way of contrast, let me put it this way: in the first fifteen minutes of Dangerous Seductress, we have a thrilling car chase ending in a bloody crash, a gooily reanimated witch, blood drinking, and an attempted rape. There’s no way it can possibly keep up this pace, but it is bracing after the stultifying fare that preceded it.

The car chase is a trio of jewel thieves on the lam from the cops after their heist. The pursuit is apparently the fault of the driver, because the guy in the passenger seat keeps slugging him for it. I suppose there is no greater indictment of the mental faculties of the average criminal than repeatedly clocking the guy who is driving during a high speed chase. Well, eventually things run their course, as it were, and the getaway car, and criminal body parts, go flying.

One of the pieces of jewelry is a locket, and once blood drips on it, it starts smoking, so you know something’s up. A severed finger also stands on end and hops over to the locket to be eaten (makeup effects artist Steve Prouty, in an interview on the Mondo Macabro DVD, is amused that the finger he designed to crawl is put to such absurd use). This in turn causes The Evil Queen (Amy Weber) to reassemble her skeleton and play-doh-like flesh to assemble over it, like the resurrection in Hellraiser on a strict budget. It’s not entirely successful, as she’s still a half-rotten corpse, but an obliging dog comes by and attempts to steal a nice leg bone, with the result that his head is ripped off and his blood drunk.

There are still forces keeping her confined (represented by underground hands holding her legs). so it’s lucky for her that in Los Angeles, Susan (Tonya Lawson) fights off her abusive drunken boyfriend when he tries to rape her. Lucky because she flies to Jakarta to join her model sister Linda (Kristin Anin). No no, hold on, I’m getting to the lucky part. The beaten and bloody Susan calls Linda during her birthday party, and Linda’s boyfriend Bob has brought along the occult adviser for his documentary, Beko (Mick Camichael), who gives her a book about local legends and rites.

Ah, you see where we’re going? Susan, finding the book while Linda is at a shoot in Bali, finds a rite to make her the ultimate seductress with power over men. This involves lighting candles in front of a mirror, which becomes a gateway to our old friend, the Evil Queen, who agrees to give Susan this power if she’ll supply her with blood.

That’s our setup. Susan keeps going out on the town in Linda’s most fetching outfits, finding horny men, and exsanguinating them in various nasty and cost-effective ways (Prouty’s work was apparently limited to the finger and half-corpse props, both of which are pretty cool). Eventually Linda comes back home and finds out what’s going on, and there’s a bizarre showdown with the mirror, with burning books, pixie dust and visible wires, all leading up to the biggest WTF ending since The Gates of Hell.

This was Indonesia’s last attempt to break into international film markets by aping western movies, a strategy that almost succeeded with Lady Terminator, which was by the same director, H. Thut Dilal (not to mention a movie that ends in similar delirium, Mystics in Bali). There are no fewer than three American actresses featured, and a whole bunch of Anglo actors to get sliced and diced. Sadly, it’s doomed to failure because it’s a half-hour of berserk horror movie supplemented by an hour of music videos as Linda models and Susan dances her way into her victims’ groins. Luckily, Msses Anin and Lawson are lovely to look at, so it’s not a complete waste of time.

Except we’re here for a horror movie. Well, I’ve seen worse. Hell, I started the evening with worse.

No trailer to speak of, so what the hell:

October 9, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: dangerous seductress, h. tjut djalil, hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

C: Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

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Why yes, it has taken me an inordinately long time to watch this movie – Hammer’s first gothic horror, and a film that arguably kicked off the horror boom that would blossom in the 60s. During my younger years, this was understandable, since the local TV channels seemed to have no problems showing Horror of Dracula (and especially Brides of Dracula) over and over again, but the Hammer Frankensteins seemed to rarely crop up. In Curse‘s case, never. So, when it was finally released on DVD in 2002, I snatched it up – and proceeded to ignore it for 12 years.

Don’t judge me, ye’ve not had my life.

Rather famously, Universal threatened to sue this upstart British company if they dared to imitate their 1931 tentpole, and this was actually a good thing. I’ve read accounts that claim that the initial concept was to do a black-and-white movie with Karloff as the Monster – hell, Hammer even calls it “The Creature” so they couldn’t be accused of ripping that off – and the threat of litigation forced them to create something unmistakably their own.

First of all, the movie is in color – a semi-big deal in 1957. It starts the Hammer look of a subdued color palette against which any bright color – especially blood red – really pops off the screen. Costume designer Molly Arbuthnot has a ball with some amazingly textured fabrics. There are no lab coats and rubber gloves in this milieu, our mad scientist does his bloody work in frock coats and cravats, white cotton gloves.

The movie begins with a desperate Baron von Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) telling a priest his tale on the eve of the Baron’s execution; the extended flashback which forms the movie proper takes its time, beginning with Victor Frankenstein as a young man, the last of his family, inheriting a vast fortune and hiring a brilliant science tutor, Paul (Robert Urquhart) who eventually becomes his collaborator in fringe science. After successfully bringing a dead puppy back to life, Paul is ready to publish, but Victor wants to go even further – to create life itself, using pieces of corpses as a framework.

Now, that is a hell of a leap, and if anyone doubts Peter Cushing’s skills as an actor (PS, if you do, you’re an idiot), the fact that Cushing actually pulls this off should provide more than adequate proof. His Frankenstein is quite the amazing portrayal, in fact – a rich nobleman used to getting his way, capable of great charm but so cocooned within his wealth and privilege that he can’t see the potential harm in anything he does, and in the pursuit of his ultimate goal, it becomes no surprise that murder becomes just another tool.

Paul, at first uneasy about his former student’s new experiments, eventually refuses to have anything to do with this horror, but Victor forges on, even when Paul deliberately tries to sabotage the process by damaging the brain of a brilliant, aged scientist Frankenstein has killed so that his creation can have the brain of a genius. Frankenstein’s first attempt to animate the Creature fails because his equipment – a riot of pre-Victorian galvanism and colored bubbling liquids – was built to be operated by two people. While he tries to convince Paul to help him, a lucky lightning strike surges through the equipment, and a surprised Victor Frankenstein is soon confronted by his own success – which instantly tries to murder him.

This is also one of the best fruits of the threatened lawsuit from Universal: the creation of a new visage for the Monster. Apparently in complete desperation, makeup artist Phil Leakey created this new version directly on Christopher Lee’s face at the last minute, using traditional supplies like cotton and spirit gum, very much in the tradition of the classic Universal monsters. Striking, horrifying and completely its own… creature.

Christopher Lee was cast as the Creature largely due to his impressive height (they almost cast another actor, Bernard Bresslaw, who was two inches taller than Lee). Now, I have the utmost respect for Christopher Lee: he has led an amazing life, recently turned what? 92? And is still kicking ass. But. I have always considered him an actor of limited range, but undeniable and truly impressive presence, That is a quality which must not be underestimated. And sadly, this role would not have given him an adequate showcase anyway: that lawsuit again, and though Lee’s Creature does have its moments of pathos, it falls to him to simply be murderous – there is no trace of Karloff’s incredible, often sensitive performance in 1931.

The story does get a bit meandering: the Creature escapes, kills a couple of people (the first one being a blind man, the polar opposite of a similar sequence in Bride of Frankenstein – take that, Universal!), and Paul shoots it through the head. This is no obstacle to Frankenstein, however, who simply resurrects it again after, once more, repairing the brain Paul had damaged. Victor uses the monster to rid himself of a troublesome maid attempting to blackmail him into marriage; it is for that murder that Frankenstein will be remanded to the guillotine at movie’s end, the monster having escaped once more, attempting to murder Victor’s bride, and finally winding up in the scientist’s convenient acid vat, erasing all evidence of the brute who actually killed the maid. Paul keeps quiet about the Creature, too, realizing death is the only way to stop the obsessed Victor.

Having mentioned Victor’s bride, I should take a moment for Hazel Court, who plays Elizabeth. Lovely and talented, Court appears in several gothic horror movies, and she is, sadly, particularly wasted here; Elizabeth exists only as a reason to keep Paul in Castle Frankenstein, hoping to protect her from the horror of Victor’s experiments. Like Lee and Cushing, she was a veteran actor at this point, and probably used to such things. Check out her filmography at the IMDb – her talent was recognized, at least.

Speaking of Cushing and Lee – this is the movie that kicked off a close friendship that would last the rest of their lives, reportedly sparked into existence when Lee complained he had no lines and Cushing responded, “You’re lucky. I’ve read the script.” They had appeared in the same movie at least twice before, but never on the same set on the same day. Both were devoted fans of Looney Tunes, and I don’t know about you, but the idea of these two men imitating Sylvester J. Cat and Tweety-Pie between takes is something that keeps me warm on cold winter nights.

The last thing that sets Curse of Frankenstein apart from its Universal forefather is an interesting reversal: both spawned many sequels, but in the Universal series, it was the Monster that remained the same, while the doctors around it changed. It was the exact opposite in the Hammer series: the monster would change, but the doctor (with one notable exception) was the constant: Peter Cushing, building on this complex, nuanced performance over the course of the next fifteen years.

Buy Curse of Frankenstein on Amazon

October 8, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: christopher lee, curse of frankenstein, hammer, hubrisween, peter cushing . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

B: Beast of Blood (1971)

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So what we have here is the direct sequel to the 1968 Mad Doctor of Blood Island, so direct that it literally picks up where the original left off. Dr. Bill Foster (John Ashley, but of course) is returning home, but the monster, who stowed away in a lifeboat at the end of the first picture, can’t stand it anymore, reveals itself and starts killing people. Fuel gets spilled, and the boat blows up, with Foster and the monster the only survivors. Unconscious. Foster drifts on some debris; the monster is washed up on Blood Island and staggers into the jungle.

Fortunately, Beast of Blood loses that beyond-irritating abuse of the zoom lens every time the monster appeared in the first movie,, throbbing in and out with the monster’s heartbeat; unfortunately, it also loses the monster for most of the movie.

It’s not human and it’s got an axe! …Wait. Wrong movie. Sorry.

Foster returns to Blood Island one year later, having heard rumors that the Green Men, experimental subjects of the Mad Dr. Lorca from the last movie, are still causing problems. His investigations are hindered by Myra, a journalist from Hawaii (the incredibly white Celeste Yarnall) and helped by the fierce native woman Laida (Liza Belmonte), who isn’t afraid to use her bolo knife on the Green Men (and is, incidentally, who pulled Foster from the drink and nursed him to health a year before). Lorca’s stronghold, sealed up since the last movie’s concluding fire and explosion, still has something going on inside; Foster and crew find a tunnel leading away from the compound into the jungle.

Myra gets kidnapped by a gang of toughs and taken into said jungle and up into the mountains, where the scarred Dr. Lorca (Eddie Garcia) is still plying his nutty trade. He has the monster, Ramon, too – though the beast is still homicidal, and Lorca had to cut his head off to calm him down – literally. The body and head are still alive, machinery pumping that weird green chlorophyll blood into both, while Lorca – for some rationale which is never explained – keeps trying to transplant heads from the contaminated Green Men he keeps in a cage onto the monster’s body.

John Ashley is usually a pretty serviceable leading man in these things, but I got really irked by his continually turning down Laida – who is pretty much the ass-kicking Pam Grier of Filipinas in this – for the incredibly vanilla Myra. Hell, she’d need flavor enhancers to even qualify as vanilla.

The major problem with Beast of Blood is the monster and mad science comprise perhaps a quarter of the movie – the rest is intrigue and action as Foster tracks the bandits in Lorca’s employ back to his new stronghold, then a commando force of sailors and natives attack and there’s a lot of orange blood slopped around. It’s a problem shared with director Eddie Romero’s next movie, Twilight People, where the movie’s supposed main storyline, an Island of Dr. Moreau rip-off, is supplanted by a Most Dangerous Game rip-off.

Eddie Romero actually does make very entertaining movies, they’re just not always the movie you bought a ticket for. Beast of Blood can work as a double feature with its predecessor, Mad Doctor of Blood Island, but you also might have to pack an extra helping of patience to get through both.

Buy Beast of Blood on Amazon

October 7, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: beast of blood, blood island, eddie romero, hubrisween, john ashley . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

A: Attack of the Aztec Mummy (1957)

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I spent much of my younger days in South Texas – we’re talking almost all the 60s and a couple of years into the 70s. There was a heavy Mexican flavor to life down there, even moreso than the rest of Texas. A lot of my school chums were Hispanic, my first great love in life was a Latina named Dolores. It’s therefore odd to me that I didn’t learn Español or more about the culture through sheer osmosis. What did pass before my lily-white eyeballs on the local TV channels was pretty interesting, but was mainly limited to running Neutron movies in an afternoon slot.

Though I remembered seeing ads for the K. Gordon Murray imports like Santa Claus, I never got the chance to subject myself to any of them. They never seemed to come to the Rialto, and I suspect if any of them ever came to town, they were at the “other” movie theater, the one that seem to continually show movies starring Cantinflas. The ads were all in the great metropolis of Corpus Christi, which seemed to get all the good stuff, like all-night horror movie marathons at drive-ins. I gazed at those ads in youthful wonder, and one of the titles struck me as being probably the greatest title ever: The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy. My brain assembled out of whole cloth the most incredible monster movie ever.

That amazingly-titled movie, I would discover many years later, was actually the third movie in a trilogy, and when I finally watched it, I would discover that it was not as amazing as its title, but was still pretty delirious in its own way, and it serves as a primer for Mexican genre cinema. But we’re here to examine the first movie of the trilogy, La momia azteca, or as it is known in these parts, Attack of the Aztec Mummy.

Dr. Almada (Ramón Gay) a specialist in nervous disorders (I have to assume), is addressing a congress of scientists about reliving past lives through hypnosis, which means he read The Search for Bridey Murphy in an airport at some point. Trouble is, he is presenting this with absolutely no evidence, having put no one under hypnosis, simply going on hearsay because he is a horrible scientist. On top of that, none of the other scientists at the meeting will allow him to hypnotize them because, we are told, it is too dangerous! Scientists are such wusses.

Before Fox News can hire Almada as a science consultant. his fiancee, Flor (Rosa Arenas) volunteers to undergo the regression therapy. Almada hypnotizes her, and she is attended by her father Dr. Sepulveda (Jorge Mondragon), and Almada’s cowardly assistant, Pinacate (Crox Alvarado), with all the solemnity and tools of a surgical team. I remember seeing a stage hypnotist at the Laff Stop back in the 80s. He had none of this safety equipment or medical professionals so he must have been a raving psychopath, endangering us all like that.

ANYWAY. It turns out Flor is the reincarnation of Xochitl, an Aztec maiden chosen at birth as the consort of the god Unpronounceable. Popoca (Angel di Stefani), a large warrior, loves her and begs her to run away with him before she can be sacrificed to Unpronounceable. Their lovemaking is interrupted, Popoca is given a potion that will drive him mad, and he is cursed to watch over Xochitl’s corpse and the sacrificial golden breastplate and armband she wears forever. After a big song and dance (directors love creating musical numbers for ancient civilizations. Ever notice that?), Xochitl is sacrificed, and Almada proves what a dreadful scientist he is by letting her relive the sacrifice. Good thing he has a crack surgical team with him.

Almada is smart enough to realize his needed evidence is in reach, and uses Flor’s newfound memories to locate the sealed sacrificial chamber in a nearby Aztec pyramid, where Xochitl’s skeleton remains, until now undisturbed. Almada lifts the breastplate and skedaddles, unaware that the shroud in the corner is starting to move.

Now all of this seems pretty much standard Universal (and later Hammer) mummy boilerplate, right? well, it only seems that way because I haven’t told you about The Bat yet.

The Bat is a master criminal that Exposition Radio tells us about at the movie’s opening (after the obligatory narration that tells us this is based on a true story). The Bat heads up an organization of criminals, and does things like vivisection and sewing stuff onto animals that don’t belong. The radio then informs us “Society is duly alarmed.” The Bat is always lurking about, black clothes, black cape, black fedora, black wrestling mask, looking very much like he wandered in from a 1940s serial. He frightens Pinacate several times during the nighttime visit to the pyramid, making him think he’s seen a ghost.

Almada presents the breastplate to a group of scientists, proving his theory and basically going, “Nyah nyah.” The scientists are properly impressed, but then they start going on about mummy curses and the Higher Power of God. These are terrible scientists. Almada wants to translate the markings on the breastplate, which seems to point the way to some cache of Aztec gold (which is the reason The Bat and his underlings want it). However, Almada needs the armband to complete the analysis, so it’s back to the pyramid.

In the chamber, Dr. Sepulveda notices the shroud in the corner and asks, “Where’s the mummy?” At this point, the three men hear something shuffling in the dark…

Whatever you may think of the rest of the movie, with its costumed villains and superstitious scientists, this scene, where the Aztec Mummy sloooooowly shuffles into the light, is really good horror movie stuff.

Then the men try to hold the Mummy off with their flashlights and he starts going “Raaar!” like the Frankenstein Monster and we’re back to monster basics.

Though the men make their escape and think they’ve sealed Popoca in the chamber, the determined Mummy gets out and retrieves the breastplate, and notices Flor, the spitting image of his old flame, and takes her along, too. Everybody chases the Mummy back to Mummy Central, where Popoca is preparing to sacrifice Flor all over again, but Sepulveda holds the Mummy off with a crucifix (!) until everyone gets clear, then he tosses a stick of dynamite into a nearby fire.

The crucifix has been explained to me as a symbol representing the higher power of God and goodness in the universe, not strictly a symbol of Christ’s execution. I’ll buy that, but harder to swallow is why The Bat is simply caught by the cops on the way to the pyramid, a fairly ignominious end for a super villain.

Except! This is the first movie in a trilogy, remember! The Bat will escape! The Aztec Mummy is a lot tougher than elderly scientists and TNT! Pinacate is really a masked hero called The Angel! The Bat probably has a robot hanging around somewhere!

I told you these movies were more delirious than you suspected!

Like any good time bomb, The Aztec Mummy also managed to make me delirious in a different way several weeks after I had seen it. During the (to date) last Crapfest, Host Dave showed the El Santo movie El Vampiro y El Sexo/Sex and the Vampire, and after about thirty minutes of deja vu, I realized I was watching an unannounced remake of The Aztec Mummy, substituting Dracula for the Mummy, and adding several cups of feminine nudity into the mix.

But back to our black-and-white, non-salacious subject: I found this on YouTube, and it is a nice explanation and exploration of these movies. It’s slickly produced and has the feel of a supplement from a DVD. Anybody know the source?

Buy La Momia Azteca on Amazon

October 6, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, the aztec mummy . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Coming Distractions

Well, I did keep telling you that come October, you would be getting heartily sick of me.

Internet madman Tim Lehnerer started a Halloween movie challenge last year while deep into October. Deep enough that he called it “Hubrisween” and the name stuck. This year two other hapless movie bloggers will join him, and one of those is me.

Starting next Monday the 6th, this blog, Tim’s Checkpoint Telstar and Gavin Smith’s Terrible Claw Reviews will update daily, each day reviewing another horror movie, starting with the letter A and progressing on through Halloween and the letter Z.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Just look for this banner, or one like it:

And if you were wondering what might be waiting for you on Monday, here’s a preview:

See you Monday. And every freakin’ day thereafter.

October 3, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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K: Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

J: Jason X (2001)

H: The Haunted Strangler (1958)

F: Feast (2005)

E: The Eye (2002)

D: Dangerous Seductress (1995)

C: Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

B: Beast of Blood (1971)

A: Attack of the Aztec Mummy (1957)

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