PRIVATE BUCKAROO (1942)

A minor effort in the wartime genre of musical morale booster and armed services recruitment propaganda. The musical numbers are worth seeing, but the film largely winds up being a rehash of Abbott & Costello's BUCK PRIVATES without Abbott & Costello. It does, however, retain the Andrews Sisters who provide many musical highlights, including a jammin' jitterbug version of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." The opening sequence, in a nightclub where Harry James and Helen Forrest perform "You Made Me Love You," has some fine comedy work from the unlikely team of Mary Wickes and Shemp Howard, best known as one of the Three Stooges. The main plot thread involves the Harry James band getting drafted. Singer Dick Foran is turned down at first due to flat feet, but when he does get accepted, he winds up being a pain in the ass, thinking that he's better than everyone else and deserves a cushy job. Of course, he learns his patriotic lesson by the end. Joe E. Lewis plays a rival for Wickes' charms, Ernest Truex is an eccentric who lives near the Army base and Jennifer Holt is his niece, who winds up sweet on Foran. A very young Donald O'Connor plays an underage soldier who gets to do a dance number with the James Band. There's a cute running joke about trumpeter James not being able to play "Taps" in the morning. Most of music is fun, and the oddest number hands down has the whitebread Foran singing the gospel song "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." [DVD]

SH! THE OCTOPUS (1937)

This comical "detectives in an old dark house" flick is a B-movie with mostly B-talent, and does not have much of a reputation, but something about it hit me the right way. Instead of a haunted mansion, the dark and sinister setting is an abandoned lighthouse which is, one rainy night, being visited by new owner John Eldredge. Though he expects the place to be empty, he finds a dead body hanging from the middle of the tower. In short order, the place fills up with all kinds of folks: cops Allen Jenkins and Hugh Herbert, a hysterical woman (Marcia Ralston) who claims that the dead man is her stepfather, a old sea captain named Hook (George Rosener) who, yep, has a hook and freaks out when he hears clocks ticking, an old lady (Elspeth Dudgeon) who was Ralston's nanny, and assorted other hangers-on. Somehow, all this is tied up with a mysterious crime figure called The Octopus (and maybe with a real octopus, whose tentacles keep slithering out from around corners and secret panels) and a radium death ray invented by the dead man. Oops, I forgot that Herbert's wife, whom we never see, is in labor, which turns out to be one of the most important points of all. Things quit making sense pretty quickly, and almost no one is whom he or she seems to be. If you've seen similar movies, like THE GORILLA or SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE, it won't take long to figure out where the story is heading, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the trip--the movie is supposedly based directly on the same play that THE GORILLA was, though it plays out much more like BALDPATE. I can't make any claims for this as a classic, but frankly I had more fun watching this than watching the more famous THE OLD DARK HOUSE. There are a couple of genuinely creepy moments, including one spectacular facial transformation special effect, achieved in real time with make-up and lighting filters. The trick ending will seem like a cop-out to some, but if you're expecting it, it's fun to see how they get there. Jenkins and Herbert play off each other nicely, and Herbert has a fun slapstick scene involving turtles, frogs, and a seal. Eldredge is a rather colorless hero; Dudgeon (who had a small but important role in THE OLD DARK HOUSE) is the most effective supporting player, aside from that rubbery (and mostly offscreen) octopus. At under an hour, this is a good way to pass some time on a rainy night. [TCM]

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975)

This fantasy adventure (which intelligent design advocates would boycott today) feels like a missing link between the 50's and 60's stop-motion work of Ray Harryhausen and the elaborate CGI worlds of Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK and Peter Jackson's KING KONG. The dinosaurs here seem to be mostly miniatures or full-size models, and while they're not as effective as the digital creations of today, they move in a more realistic fashion than the mythological creations of Harryhausen. The plot is taken from a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs and involves the discovery of an island where evolution has run rampant. Set during WWI, the film begins at sea in a dense fog with a German submarine sinking a British supply ship; a handful of survivors (including husky American Doug McClure and British scientist Susan Penhaligon) take refuge on top of the sub when it surfaces and wrest control from German officer John McEnery. They decide to head for a neutral coast but McEnery sabotages the compass and seesawing power games ensue, the upshot being that the sub winds up in uncharted waters. Lost and worried about dwindling fuel and food supplies, the motley group comes upon an island that McEnery assumes is the mythical continent of Caprona, inhabited by dinosaurs and cavemen at varying degrees of biological advancement, with more evolved creatures present as they head north. They kill and cook a plesiosaurus, manage to communicate with a relatively friendly caveman, and discover oil which they hope to use to get back to civilization, but external dangers and internal strife cause our group problems, leading to an exciting climax. The acting is decent, with McEnery and Anthony Ainley (as an untrustworthy German lieutenant) standouts. Penhaligon has a nothing role and can't do much with it. McClure plays the hero with stolid conviction. The effects and sets might not pass muster for today's viewers, but I found the film, the kind I associate with the long Thanksgiving weekends of my childhood, to be more fun than I expected. [TCM]

THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952)
BLACKBEARD, THE PIRATE (1952)

By sheer coincidence, I saw these two archetypal pirate movies, made in the same year, on the same day. I had ordered CRIMSON PIRATE from Netflix after reading some very positive comments about it, and the day it came, BLACKBEARD popped up on Turner Classic Movies, so I thought they would make a nice pairing. Instead, viewing the two just strengthened my resolve to avoid pirate movies (I may be the only person in America who found PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN to be a total bore, though I will admit that Johnny Depp does a good Keith Richards). CRIMSON has some plusses, mostly rich Technicolor, the physique of its star Burt Lancaster, and a tongue-in-cheek tone, but I was a little weary of all the capital-F fun by the end. The plot has pirate Lancaster and his crew hijacking a ship belonging to a baron who is on his way to put down an island revolt led by El Libre, but when they find that the ship has more arms than riches, Lancaster works out a scheme in which the pirates will sell the arms to the rebels, then, for a fee, betray the rebels and El Libre to the baron. Once on the island, Lancaster falls in love with El Libre's daughter (Eva Bartok), faces up to his band of pirates who are tired of playing politics and just want to get back to plundering, and decides to double-cross the baron. The swashbuckling antics are well executed by the athletic star and his mute sidekick, Nick Cravat, who in real life had worked with Lancaster in the circus, and the opening scene, in which the pirates have splayed themselves across the ship pretending to be dead plague victims, is excellent. But the rest is just too much sound and fury to too little purpose. Torin Thatcher and Christopher Lee are standouts in the supporting cast. [DVD]

Oddly, Thatcher, whom I know best as the villain in the 60's fantasy JACK THE GIANT KILLER, is also in BLACKBEARD. This movie isn't as colorful and doesn't have as much "fun" action going on, but it has a stronger plot and a sense of real danger, with more actual death and dismemberment going on. Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in a 1950 version of TREASURE ISLAND, is the title character, scourge of the shipping lanes, and much sought after by the former pirate Sir Henry Morgan (Thatcher) who has renounced pirating and vowed to capture Newton for the King. Meanwhile, Keith Andes is a doctor who believes that Thatcher hasn't really left his wicked ways behind and is out to get evidence against him. Andes winds up a prisoner of Newton's (and a useful one since he's a doctor), along with the lovely Linda Darnell, adopted daughter of Thatcher, who may have some hidden treasure with her. Indeed, she does, and Newton tries to spirit it away so as not to have to split it with his men. After some fierce fighting, Newton pulls off a deception by killing a look-alike to make it seem as if he's dead (with his head hanging in the public square), but he doesn't get the last laugh after all, with a grimly comic finale, particularly dark for a 50's film. Andes makes for a fairly dashing good guy (though not as studly as Lancaster), but Newton is always front and center and doesn't let a single scene get stolen from him. His performance is wildly over the top, and it seems as if he single-handedly created the "Arrrrrrggh..." stereotype which has been milked so often since--he starts practically every line of dialogue with that sound, and though it's fun in the beginning, it gets a bit tiring. Irene Ryan (later Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies) gets some mild laughs as Darnell's companion, and William Bendix is OK as Newton's sidekick. I believe I've had me fill of pirate movies for a while. [TCM]

THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942)

Technically, this Hal Roach comedy is classified as a short subject, though at 45 minutes, it's a only a few minutes shy of a B-movie second feature of the era, and it apparently played some theaters as the first half of a double bill. It has been charged over the years with being offensive, but I don't think it's any worse than TO BE OR NOT TO BE or THE PRODUCERS--though, obviously done on the cheap, it's not nearly as well made or creative as those films. The Board of Directors of Hell has decided that Hitler would make a better Devil than the Devil himself (Alan Mowbray), but the Devil asks for the chance to go to earth and trick Hitler (Bobby Watson) into committing one good deed, rendering him unfit for the job. The Devil appears on Earth as Hitler's valet and joins Mussolini (Joe Devlin) and a Japanese dignitary named Sukiyaki (George E. Stone) as they try to outwit, double-cross and even kill Hitler. The good deed that Satan tries to arrange comes by way of freeing a young couple (Douglas Fowley and Marjorie Woodworth) from a concentration camp sentence. There's lots of slapstick and prancing and ethnic slurs and witless humor, and perhaps the first instance of a Hitler character saying some version of the phrase, "Heil myself!" Mowbray is a very colorless Satan; Watson, who made a living in the 40's playing Hitler in comedies and drama, is OK; Devlin and Stone, both experienced character actors, fare the best here, though Stone's over-the-top Japanese portrayal hasn't aged well. Not really a very good movie, but interesting from a cultural and historical perspective. [TCM]

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939)

A historically important landmark as the first openly anti-Nazi Hollywood film; it was produced before the war when the Nazis were largely reviled in America, but the country was still officially neutral and Germany had not yet invaded Poland. Hollywood studios didn't want to risk losing the lucrative foreign markets so, though there had been movies with vaguely Middle European enemies, none had gone so far as to name the Nazis as villains. This film was based on a series of newspaper articles written by FBI man Leon Turrou which detailed the breaking of a Nazi spy ring in the U.S., and though it doesn't actually name real names, it does follow the real-life outlines of the case quite closely. The film was so controversial that Jack and Harry Warner were accused by Congress of warmongering. While it's certainly no stylistic masterpiece for the ages, it is a fast-moving spy movie for at least half of its length, and, while lacking much in the way of thrills or action, it is mostly compelling, interesting, and contains a handful of good performances.

The film begins in a documentary newsreel fashion by swiftly introducing us to most of the characters we'll be following for the next 100 minutes. In a Scottish village, we see Mrs. McLaughlin (Eily Malyon) receiving and resending mail for a Nazi spy ring. Next we visit a German-American social group meeting at which Dr. Kassel (Paul Lukas) is whipping up support for Germans who want to "save" America, who want to make America "our America." Lukas uses the overexcited style of Hitler in his speechifying, and is not above encouraging heavy-handed tactics to quash dissent, as we see in a scene in which Ward Bond gets roughed up after he speaks out at a meeting, saying "We don't want any --isms in this country except Americanism." Lukas is soon made head of American spy operations and told to wrap his fascist messages "in the American flag," and to incite race and class hatred. Next, on a German ocean liner on its way to America, we meet Schlager (George Sanders), his mistress Hilda (Dorothy Tree) and two Gestapo agents, who intimidate the captain of the ship into following Nazi orders. Finally, there's unemployed Kurt Schneider (Frances Lederer); his wife objects to his "sitting around and thinking" all day, but he's biding his time as a minor spy until his friend (Joe Sawyer) agrees to get him military information to pass on to his contact, Sanders. Lederer hopes to prove his worth to the Nazis and to make good money, but Sanders gives him chump change and little respect, so Lederer tries to go over Sanders' head and sends some spy info directly to Malyon in Scotland. Unfortunately, a clever mailman has alerted authorities to the wide array of foreign mail she receives and she's busted, which leads to the FBI being called in on the trail of the spy ring.

The energy flags a bit during the second half of the film, which focuses on Edward G. Robinson as the FBI man tracking down the ring members. Lederer is busted when he naively poses as the "Under-Secretary of State" in an attempt to smuggle passports, and Robinson uses some basic psychology to make the poor schmuck feel more important than he really is to get him to talk. Sanders escapes and Lukas, who is betrayed by his wife, talks to the feds and later gets on a ship for Germany, certain to face the music from his superiors. Lederer and some of his associates are put on trial, and the film ends anti-climactically with an odd little conversation in which Robinson and U.S. attorney Henry O'Neill express the surreal absurdity of their adventure. Though the documentary style of the film works against any real depth of characterization, the central trio of Lukas, Sanders, and Lederer are always quite watchable. Sanders, in particular, is striking; he has a modified Prussian buzz cut, and I'd swear that his nose or chin have been altered to give him an even more sinister look; his voice never drips with his usual patina of sarcasm and irony and he completely disappears into his role. German actress Lya Lys has a small role as Lukas' mistress, and John Ridgely, one of my favorite Warners supporting players, has a line or two as an Army hospital clerk. This runs on Turner Classic Movies quite a bit, but it would be nice to have this on a DVD, with a commentary track, given how much has been written about the film. [TCM]

REMBRANDT (1936)

I know nothing about the famed Dutch painter Rembrandt, played here by Charles Laughton, but a quick perusal of an encyclopedia entry tells me that this film is more fiction than fact. Nonetheless, this is a well-acted and nicely shot film, directed by Alexander Korda, who also directed Laughton in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII. The episodic film begins with Rembrandt, well known and respected, at the peak of his career and in the midst of working on a portrait of his wife, who is ailing (and whom we never see). As he delivers a long, adoring ode to his wife to his friends in a tavern, he is summoned to her deathbed. At the funeral meal, he continues the painting as though she's still posing. What follows is a series of narrative snapshots from the rest of his life. His long-awaited, gigantic, and expensive painting of the Civic Guard of Amsterdam ("Night Watch") is reviled by the Guard members for making them look undignified. His loyal housekeeper (Gertrude Lawrence) becomes his lover, but they cannot marry until his young son comes of age because of a clause in the will of his wife that would leave him bankrupt if he did. He has a beggar (Roger Livesey) pose for a portrait of the biblical Saul. Afraid he's going to lose his house to creditors, he goes back to live in his provincial hometown but feels like a misfit. On his return to Amsterdam, he is struck by the sight of a kitchen maid (Elsa Lanchester), paints her, and ultimately takes her as a lover, igniting Lawrence's wrath. Lanchester figures out a way for him to get around his creditors, who try to claim any new work of his for themselves, by setting up her own gallery of his work which he has given freely to her. By the end of the film, he is aged and alone except for a benefactor who gives him money for food (which he promptly spends on art supplies). The penultimate scene, with Laughton proclaiming, "All is vanity" to a table of carousing youths who have included him in their drinking, is Laughton at his best. The look of the film is painterly, with lots of bright light and vivid textures, apparently meant to conjure up Rembrandt's own technique with light. My favorite moment is Laughton, in a reverie, talking not entirely happily, about the burden of living "in a beautiful, blinding, swirling mist." The movie is also worth seeing for Gertrude Lawrence, the actress played by Julie Andrews in STAR! and parodied by Ann Sheridan in THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, giving a rare screen performance. [DVD]

THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS (1938)

Mild romantic comedy which for me is more irritating than funny for two reasons: its fake feminist plot trappings and the performance of Robert Montgomery. He's a struggling shipbuilder married to a successful theatrical agent (Virginia Bruce). He snags a dream job that involves moving from New York City to New Bedford, and he assumes that his wife will give up her job and move with him. She, however, actually likes her job and wants to keep it, which leads to strife and separation. Her boss (Warren William) tries to help her and a battle of lawyers follows with some standard-issue trickery ensuing between the two sides. The sticking point winds up being a suggestion that she pay him alimony since she's making more money. When an ailing but beloved uncle (Harry Davenport) comes to visit, Montgomery agrees to spend the night to make the uncle think everything's fine, but Bruce's lawyer (Alan Dinehart) uses the occasion to snare him in a legal trap (sort of the opposite of the "Gay Divorcee" trap, using his presence at her place to imply that he's living with her and therefore not eligible to get alimony). I was disposed to like the film because Bruce is so appealing and her character clearly likes her career, but then things get resolved by biology: she finds out she's pregnant and decides to follow Montgomery away from the city to be a wife and mother. The moral of this tale can be encapsulated in one line of dialogue at the end: "Nature--that monkey wrench in the machinery of women's independence." Binnie Barnes and Lee Bowman do fine as friends who try to swoop in on Montgomery and Bruce. Montgomery is at his most doltish and irritating, but I do like Virginia Bruce, so I guess I'm glad to have seen this. [TCM]

THE WHISTLER (1944)

Nifty little B-thriller, the first in an 8-film series based on a popular radio show. Despite the title, this was not a superhero or detective series, but a suspense anthology (think Twilight Zone atmosphere but without the fantasy elements) which told crime stories with ironic twists. The title character was the narrator (think Rod Serling never showing his face) who would also sometimes comment on the action; once in a while we'd see him from a distance, strolling along and whistling mournfully. In this one, Richard Dix (who starred in most of the films, always playing different characters) is a man who, depressed over the apparent death of his wife at sea in a Japanese attack, hires someone to kill him. The middleman (George Lloyd) farms the job out to seasoned hitman J. Carroll Naish who begins staking out his prey. When Dix gets a telegram telling him that his wife is alive in a Japanese prison camp and is being shipped home soon, he's ecstatic and sets out to cancel the hit. Unfortunately, Lloyd was a cop killer who was himself killed by cops just after setting up Dix's hit. Dix thinks Lloyd's girl (Joan Woodbury) can help him stop the hitman, but she thinks that Dix set Lloyd up, so she's not much help, and in fact endangers his life by involving him in a log mountain road chase with police. When Dix drops out of sight to escape Naish, the newspapers say that he has amnesia and Dix's loyal secretary (the always wonderful Gloria Stuart) tries to find him. The hour-long film moves along nicely, though the climax, as in many B-films, is rushed and choppy and the production values are about average for a second-feature. [TCM]

WHITE CARGO (1942)

If you're only going to watch one "tropical melodrama" in your life, it should probably be THE LETTER, but if you decide to watch a second one, make it this one. I have a weakness for this kind of movie in which Americans, stuck in the Equatorial climes working at a rubber plantation (as in this film) or searching for riches or cruising on a ship, come to some kind of grief, usually involving romance or guns or both. This one, based on a 20's play, is a lot of fun; it's not quite campy, like the the Jon Hall/Maria Montez jungle films, because its humor is usually deliberate and the acting is restrained. Set in 1910 Africa, the film begins with Walter Pidgeon, the local magistrate, waiting to welcome the new plantation manager, young and energetic Richard Carlson, who is replacing Bramwell Fletcher, a burned out alcoholic. The cynical, tightly wound Pidgeon predicts that Carlson will soon wind up just like Fletcher, destroyed by "damp rot." (There is a running gag involving Pidgeon's violent reaction to Fletcher constantly saying "Blasted hot today," and later Carlson irritates him in the same way saying, "When I get acclimated...") Carlson is warned about the notorious exotic half-breed Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr), but when she comes slinking into his shack, he goes slack-jawed with lust. Eventually, Carlson marries Lamarr (there appear to be virtually no other women in the area), but she soon gets restless and starts flirting with Pidgeon. When nothing comes of that, she sets about slowly poisoning Carlson. Some reviewers claim that there is a love triangle among the three leads, but I didn't see much evidence that Pidgeon actually wanted Lamarr, though he may be jealous that Carlson has a wife in their godforsaken corner of the world, and it seems clear that Lamarr has no real affection for either of the men, above and beyond any money and trinkets she can get. The film is rather stagy, with most of the action taking place in just a few interior rooms, but it all does feel effectively hot and grungy, especially with all the sweating flesh (mostly Carlson's). The role of Tondelayo is usually cited as the one that Lamarr is best known for, and she certainly looks striking with her dusky makeup (she's supposed to be half-Arabian, raised by African natives); it also helps that she is always shot in shadow or with a shadow across her face, making her look mysterious. Her acting talents, such as they were, don't get much of a workout. The youthful and sexy Carlson is fine, as is Frank Morgan as a well-meaning but frequently drunken doctor, Henry O'Neill as the local Reverend, and Reginald Owen as a skipper. Pidgeon is the weak link as far as I'm concerned; he is wooden and unappealing, and substitutes volume of voice for expression of emotion. But the movie is still great fun, though not for a second to be taken seriously. [TCM]

GIRL ON THE RUN (1958)

My partner and I have been having a lot of fun watching reruns of the 50's detective series "77 Sunset Strip" on the American Life cable network. The show follows the adventures of two private eyes, Stu Bailey (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) and Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith, quite the hottie, one year after he played Mame's nephew in AUNTIE MAME) who operate out of an L.A. office next to a nightclub called Dino's, which practically serves as their waiting room. The two are swinging bachelors who are always finding some innocent girl or femme fatale to flirt with. The show is probably better remembered these days for the character of Kookie (Edward Byrnes), the flip, hip young guy who was always combing his hair while he parked cars at Dino's, called everyone "Dad," and often helped out on cases. This film was apparently the 90-minute pilot for the show; according to online episode guides, it was aired as the first episode in October '58 and as far as I can tell, never received a theatrical release, but despite the presence of Zimbalist and Byrnes, it bears only a tangential relationship to the series that followed. Zimbalist gets involved in the case of a young singer (Erin O'Brien) who has fled Seattle after seeing the murder of a star witness in a major criminal case. She winds up in L.A. under an assumed name and Zimbalist tracks her down for a man (Shepperd Strudwick) who claims to be her boyfriend. He's not, however; he's the DA on the Seattle case who has a nasty secret or two of his own. Byrnes plays, not Kookie, but Kenneth Smiley, a cold-blooded killer who nevertheless has an amusing scene in which he remains behind in a theater long enough to finish watching a Daffy Duck cartoon. Also in the cast is Barton MacLane (one of the cops who made trouble for Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON). It's a little slow getting started, and I missed Roger Smith, who never shows up, but there are some good fisticuffs and chases, and the show does set up the Zimbalist character as a scholar of Sanskrit, a plot detail that crops up during the run of the show a couple of times. It's also nice to see Byrnes get a chance to stretch a little beyond his insolent hipster persona. [TV]

TASK FORCE (1949)

Though made after WWII, this is the kind of movie that Hollywood pumped out in the years before America was officially engaged in the war: a quick history of a particular branch of the military or of a military breakthrough. Here, Gary Cooper serves as the focus for a story about the development of the aircraft carrier as a practical addition to the forces of the United States Navy. The film begins with Cooper retiring and then flashes back to 25 years earlier when pilots were just learning to land on the first carrier of its kind, the Langley. Some Navy brass and Congressmen are against developing a carrier fleet, and Commander Walter Brennan enlists Cooper to go to Washington to do some sweet talking; instead he gets into a spat with a powerful lawmaker (Stanley Ridges) when he speculates that Japan might have sinister intentions and a carrier fleet would be a perfect defense. We follow Cooper over the years as he gets demoted to a desk job, put back into a flying job, suffers through a crash, marries Jane Wyatt (widow of a fellow Navy pilot), and continues promoting aircraft carriers (and continues to antagonize Ridges). Of course, Cooper's predictions about a sea war with Japan come true and his career comes to its peak when he winds up on the Enterprise, the last carrier left in action. The bulk of the film is in black & white, with the last reel (about 20 minutes worth) in color, for no apparent reason. Cooper was entering what I think of as his "old man" phase and he's not particularly convincing as a young man. There's a decent supporting cast which includes Wayne Morris, Bruce Bennett, and John Ridgely as fellow pilots, and singer Julie London as Morris's gal. It's predictable (you just know that some tangential character is gonna die at Pearl Harbor so that "this time, it's personal") and a fair amount of newsreel footage is worked in toward the end. Not a bad movie, but at two hours, not one I'd care to sit through again. [TCM]

NIGHTMARE (1964)

This Hammer thriller has elements of PSYCHO and DIABOLIQUE and works well enough for most of its length. The film has a great opening sequence of a young girl (Jennie Linden) being led through shadowy hallways by the voice of her mother, who traps her in an asylum cell. This turns out to be a recurring nightmare of Linden's, who years ago witnessed her insane mother stab her father to death. Her boarding school decides to send her home to her guardian (David Knight) for treatment to ease the dreams. Once there, however, she is haunted by a ghostly vision of a woman in white that no one else seems to see, and also by a tableau reminiscent of her father's death. When Knight's new wife arrives, she looks just like the creepy ghost, and Linden promptly stabs her to death and is sent off to an asylum, just as her dreams seemed to foretell. Of course, this is just the first half of the proceedings, and we soon learn that things and people aren't what they seem. When Linden escapes and heads for home, matters build to a fairly effective climax. Even if the plot does become predictable, it is fun to figure out who wants to help Linden and who wishes her harm. Chief among these folks is Brenda Bruce as a guardian from the boarding school, and Moira Redmond as Linden's companion and nurse. Linden has a few too many repetitious scenes of hysteria in the first half, though generally the acting is OK. The moody black and white cinematography is a plus. [DVD]

NIGHTMARE CASTLE (1965)

Routine Italian gothic thriller with the queen of 60's horror, Barbara Steele, in a dual role. This isn't exactly a bad movie, but it has nothing to make it stand out of the pack. Paul Muller is your average mad scientist married to your average dark-haired knockout (Steele), and engaging in your average arcane experiments involving reversing the human aging process. When he discovers that his wife is having an affair with the hired help (Rik Battaglia), he tortures them, kills them, and pulls out and preserves their hearts. He uses their blood to turn his aging assistant (Helga Line) young, and then, I think, takes her as his lover, but discovers that his wife's will leaves the castle to her nutty twin sister (also Steele, in a bad blonde wig). When she arrives, he seduces her and plans to drive her completely over the edge, but it turns out that the strange ghostly figures she reports seeing are actually the ghosts of the dead lovers. The acting is indifferent, the sets are cheap, and the atmosphere is so-so, but if you stick with it, the pace does pick up in the last half-hour and things build to a decent climax. Mostly for Barbara Steele fans. [DVD]

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1972)

Another pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (see THE CREEPING FLESH below), though in separate episodes of a horror anthology film. As a short-story lover (Ray Bradbury's collections were the first "adult" books I read), I like the idea of an anthology film, but in practice it doesn't come off all that well, with rare exceptions like the 1945 DEAD OF NIGHT, and this film is not one of the exceptions. The four tales all take place in a mysterious house which, despite the title, never comes close to dripping blood. The wraparound story involves a Scotland Yard inspector (John Bennett) looking into the disappearance of a horror film star (Jon Pertwee, best known as the 1970's Doctor Who) who had been living in the spooky old house. We then see the stories of three previous residents. The first tale features Denholm Elliot as a horror writer renting the house with his wife (Joanna Dunham); he's trying to finish a novel about a strangler but his efforts get derailed when the fictional killer seems to be coming to life and popping up all around the house. The secret here is easy to figure out, but it's still a fun story and the underrated Elliot is fun to watch. In the second tale, two old friends (Cushing and Joss Ackland) become obsessed with visiting a wax museum which has a model of Salome that resembles an old flame from their past. Lee stars in the next episode as a widower who hires a nanny to keep an eye on his young daughter, who may or may not be practicing voodoo. Finally, we go back to the frame story about an actor who buys a second-hand cloak to inspire him in his current role as a vampire; he finds out that clothes do make the man, or in this case, the vampire. Overall, about average for this kind of film--the screenplay by Robert Bloch is fine, but the production values could be better, and the direction by Peter Duffell is quite made-for-TVish. [DVD]

THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

This Victorian horror/sf film which co-stars Hammer favorites Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee has a few too many subplots going for its own good, and its horrors are more subtle than some fans of the genre like, but it's worth watching for good performances and interesting (if not always successful) narrative threads. In a rather surreal opening, Cushing is painting horrific Dali-like portraits on the wall of his laboratory and telling a visitor that he has made the startling discovery that evil exists as a bacteria and he has it under his microscope. The main story then unfolds in flashback as Cushing returns to England from New Guinea with a skeleton of a primitive humanoid, and based on his readings in the local folklore, he believes it belongs to a race of creatures of pure evil. While washing off one of its hands, Cushing discovers that when water drips on it, its flesh re-composes, and he cuts off one of the fleshy fingers for further study. At the same time, he has to deal with dysfunctional family matters: his long-institutionalized wife has died (in an asylum run by Lee, his brother), and he is concerned that her illness will be passed down to his innocent daughter (Lorna Heilbron), who has just been told about her mother's secret illness. He makes a serum out of the cells of the skeleton that he thinks will serve as an antidote against evil and injects Heilbron with it. For one reason or another (the serum, or heredity, or the realization that such a huge secret had been kept from her), she snaps, runs away, and heads to town to act like a slattern. In a third plot line, Lee, who plans to steal the skeleton from his brother, has to deal with an escaped maniac, who winds up crossing paths with Heibron and setting up the climax of the film which ties all the plot threads together in a more or less satisfactory way, including a scene inspired by Val Lewton's THE BODY SNATCHER in which the skeleton winds up out in the rain and, of course, reconstituted and ready to find its missing finger. Cushing is really the star of this one and he acquits himself nicely with a nuanced portrayal of a man who thinks he's doing the right thing, for both his own flesh and blood, and for mankind, but who makes a monkey's breakfast out of everything (and, come to think of it, there actually is a monkey running around in the movie). Some critics take exception to the film's equating sex with evil (the sheltered daughter's slutty behavior is certainly seen as her first step toward total evil), but I saw the movie saying that the real problem was Cushing's well-intentioned sheltering. At any rate, the film's soup of repression, inherited insanity, sexual desire, and primal evil makes it difficult to assign meaning here, and indeed the movie is best viewed as an archetypal Cushing/Lee mad scientist movie. [DVD]

GOKE--BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL (1968)

Monster movie fan that I am, I had never heard of this Japanese import until I saw it on Turner Classic Movies' schedule last month. I figured, what the hell, and watched it expecting at best a sublimely bad movie, but instead it turned out to be a creepy and fairly compelling film, though in essence, it's just a long Twilight Zone episode. The film is set on a passenger jet where the mixed bag of travelers (psychiatrist, politician, arms dealer, space scientist, etc) are discussing the sad state of the world--wars, assassination, suicide terrorists--while the plane is flying through an increasingly apocalyptic-looking blood-red sky, and birds begin suicidally smashing themselves against the plane windows. Suddenly, even more hell breaks loose: just as the pilot gets a message that a bomb may be hidden on board, a man with a gun (Hideo Ko) storms the cabin, and a UFO zooms over the plane, sending it crashing to the ground. And all this happens before the credits! The survivors are left with little food or water, not knowing where they are. The gunman escapes, finds the glowing UFO, and in a trance, walks into it, to be confronted by a pulsing silver-blue blob. In one of the coolest effects ever, the man's face splits in two and the blob slithers in, taking control of him. Eventually, others get taken over in an old-fashioned vampirish fashion, tensions mount in the plane as the civilized surface of the passengers is worn down, and a creepy apocalyptic scene provides a satisfying ending. There is a strong anti-war theme running throughout the film, with newsreel footage of Hiroshima and Vietnam spliced in here and there during heated discussions. A young blond American woman takes pity on the split-faced guy because his face reminds her of the fatal wounds of her soldier-husband, who died in Vietnam. The politician gets on everyone's bad side, especially when it is revealed that the arms dealer has pimped his wife to him. According to Robert Osborne, this film inspired a scene in Quentin Tarentino's KILL BILL. Overall, a nice surprise, well worth searching out. It's on a Region 2 DVD, which may bode well for an American release someday. [TCM]

THE CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN (1963)

I lived in Tucson, Arizona for a few years in the mid-60's and our local Saturday night Chiller Theater would occasionally throw some Mexican horror films into the mix. I have vivid memories of only one of those, this atmospheric film which betrays a number of horror film thefts, influences or homages, depending on how generous the viewer is feeling toward the filmmakers. Off the top of my head, I count references, in plot or visuals, to Dracula, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, The Wolf Man, Fall of the House of Usher, Eyes Without a Face, and Black Sunday, and the film has the general feel of the American International B-movies of the era. All that makes the movie a nice thick Gothic soup, watered down a bit by a low budget and a sub-par English dubbing (though apparently there is a recent DVD release in Spanish with English subtitles). In a prologue, we see two men and a young woman riding in a coach through a foggy woods, stopped by a hideous wailing woman dressed in black with either jet-black blind eyes or empty eye sockets (I was never sure which). Her brutish companion unleashes some killer dogs and all three passengers are murdered. Cut to a nearby isolated hacienda, lived in by Selma (Rita Macedo) and her crippled manservant, the two killers from the previous scene, though the woman's eyes are now normal. Selma's niece Emily (Rosita Arenas) and her new husband Herbert (Abel Salazar, also the film's producer) arrive for a visit, summoned by Selma and brought by a coachman reluctant to approach what he calls the "Witch House."

The various plotlines, perhaps due to the vagaries of the dubbing, were sometimes difficult for me to follow, but here's what I was able to glean: 1) Selma is the descendant of a witch, killed hundreds of years ago by a lance through the heart; she keeps the witch's skeleton in the basement; 2) According to legend, on the eve of Emily's 23rd birthday, the long silent bells in the hacienda tower will toll and Emily will be able to resurrect the dead witch; 3) Selma's husband has fallen under the family curse which turns all the males into wolfish beasts, and he's imprisoned upstairs. Emily is told that Herbert will suffer the same fate; 4) Selma periodically transforms into the black-eyed witch figure and kills, needing human blood to thrive. Even if the plot remained disconnected, the individual sequences are all well staged, with shadows and shrieking and a good Gothic air to the proceedings, though the hacienda sets are a bit spare. A backstory flashback scene, which uses brief clips from earlier Salazar films presented in negative, is quite effective, conjuring up similar flashback scenes from the Universal Mummy series. One shot of Selma walking through a giant cobweb is cribbed directly from the Lugosi DRACULA. The music veers between effective and overdone, and the acting is no better than the genre calls for. Worthwhile viewing. [VHS]

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1956)
aka THE CREEPING UNKNOWN or THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT

This is the first of a series of SF films featuring the character of Prof. Quatermass, the head of a secret group of British scientists who are conducting experiments in outer space. The film opens with a young rural couple whose outdoor make-out session is interrupted by a huge crash-landing missile. Quatermass (Brian Donlevy, playing him as an mean and arrogant man who is used to getting his way) and his group arrive on the scene and we find out that they have sent up the rocket with three men on board without any kind of official approval. Only one of the men survives; the other two appear to have been reduced to small blobs of jelly. The survivor (Richard Wordsworth), who never speaks, experiences some weird skin and bone changes, is cold to the touch, and doesn't seem to be able to react to people. His wife smuggles him out of the hospital without realizing that he has essentially been taken over by an alien life force, and is able to drain the life out of plants, animals, and people. He escapes and winds up on the loose as he transforms into a gigantic jelly blob. The climax takes place in Westminster Abbey where the blob is perched, like a faceless Jabba the Hutt, on some scaffolding not far from where a TV news crew is broadcasting a special on the Abbey. I suspect that this film was a bit ahead of its time, with its theme of alien organisms infecting and changing human beings (the influential INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS came out the same year). Its dank, bare bones, black-and-white look keeps the film admirably low-key. Quatermass is unlikable and unsympathetic, which was most likely intended by the filmmakers (at one point, he says, "There's no room for personal feelings in science") though Donlevy's gruff, one-note performance certainly adds to that. Jack Warner plays a mostly sympathetic police inspector, Margia Dean is the astronaut's wife, 10-year-old Jane Asher appears as a young girl menaced by the alien, and Gordon Jackson (later the beloved butler Hudson on "Upstairs, Downstairs") has a small role in the climax as a BBC-TV producer. I liked the tension between the restraints of society and the law, and the unbridled impulses of the scientists, and I also liked the ending, in which, despite the "meddling in God's domain" message of the narrative, Quatermass vows to keep exploring the great unknown. [TCM]

CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

Despite this movie's title and the pedigree of its production company (Hammer Films), this is just barely a horror movie. It's more a Gothic Freudian Dickens tale with a wolfman instead of a pickpocket at its center. A long opening sequence focuses first on a beggar (Richard Wordsworth) who arrives in a Spanish town during a holiday which has been called to mark the wedding feast of the Marquis's daughter. The Marquis at first appears inclined to be generous, but soon the beggar is thrown into jail and left for years to rot, totally forgotten. The story then shifts to the jailer's mute daughter (Yvonne Romain) who winds up in his cell and is raped by the beggar, who has become completely deranged. She goes off to live in the woods, but dies while giving birth on Christmas Day, which is considered a cursed day for childbirth. The boy grows up into a werewolf, but the love and compassion of his guardians stop his evil transformations. However, as an adult (Oliver Reed), he discovers that feelings of lust trigger his lycanthropy. He falls in love with Christina (Catherine Feller) and the two have an affair, despite her betrothal to someone else, but when things don’t go his way, Reed's transformations cause trouble for all. The film is slow-going, especially if you're only watching it for blood and horror; most of the werewolfery is saved for the last 10 minutes of the film. Reed is excellent--I agree with one IMDb reviewer who says that Reed may be the best actor ever to play a werewolf--and the makeup is quite good. The rest of the acting and the general production values are about par for a Hammer film. Overall, an interesting variation on the usual Hollywood werewolf story, but not totally successful. [DVD]

CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961)

A Roger Corman quickie, and as such, sorta fun. Given the title and posters, one might expect this to be a traditional low-budget monster movie, but actually it's a comedy with a monster roaming in and out of the proceedings (mostly out until the last 10 minutes). It clearly had a sub-B picture budget and the dialogue is all dubbed in (a pet peeve of mine), but surprisingly, this was fun to watch once--I don't know that I would want to sit through the whole thing again. Several online critics have noted that the movie plays out like a spy movie spoof, although it was made at the very beginning of the spy movie boom, and the movie is best appreciated in that spirit. Secret agent XK 150 (Robert Towne) narrates this misadventure concerning a gangster (Antony Carbone) who is hired to help take a big chunk of stolen gold out of Cuba in the aftermath of Castro's revolution. On board Carbone's boat is a small crew, the group of thieves, Agent XK 150, and a sexpot femme fatale (Betsy Jones-Moreland). Carbone gets the bright idea to keep the gold for himself by killing off the Cubans one at a time and claiming that a sea monster is to blame. Little does he know that a real sea monster is following the boat, leading to a climax in which the real monster kills just about everyone except the secret agent. The monster is ludicrously bad, like a swimmer covered with a big carpet, with ping-pong balls stuck on for eyes, and it's clear that we're not meant to take any of the menace seriously. The single funniest scene is when the sexpot croons a lounge song, which just happens to be called, "The Creature from the Haunted Sea," and she keeps singing it even while a group of would-be pirates are slaughtered right behind her. I also loved the narration that introduces the crew: we're told that Carbone once tried to nominate Mussolini for president on the Republican ticket, that Jones-Moreland was caught pushing heroin at Boy's Town, and that young Happy Jack (Robert Bean) got his facial tic from watching too many Bogart movies. My favorite character is Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson), the son of a vaudeville-era bird mimic, who communicates mostly via animal noises; it's a one-joke bit that remains funny throughout. There are many good one-liners, such as the agent (who emphasizes to us that XK 150 is not his real name) telling us that "it was dusk--I could tell because the sun was going down," or one character telling us that he found his new girlfriend in Puerto Rico "living in a sort of sorority house by the docks." Though the special effects are mostly ineffective, shots of the monster underwater attacking some swimmers look like they may have influenced Spielberg in JAWS. The Robert Towne who plays the agent is the same Robert Towne who wrote some of Corman's films and later went on to write CHINATOWN and SHAMPOO. Good for a few laughs, but not for chills or thrills. [DVD]