THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)
aka THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

The aristocratic Nicolas, now the Duc de Richleau, is meeting his younger friends Simon and Rex for a reunion, but when Simon doesn't show up, they grow concerned and head off to his house where a party seems to be in progress. Simon rather awkwardly tries to play off the situation, claiming that he's having a meeting of an astronomical society, but Nicolas soon realizes it's actually a coven of Satanists, led by the notorious Mocata, and Simon and the beautiful Tanith are about to be given a demonic baptism. They manage to wrest Simon away and get him to sleep with a crucifix around his neck for protection, though Mocata is able to exercise his will from miles away to have Simon nearly strangle himself with the crucifix. The next night, Nicolas and Rex watch a black mass at which the devil himself, in the form of a goat-man, materializes. Joined by Simon, the men take Tanith away to the home of Nicolas' niece and her husband, but even with a chalk-drawn magical protection ring, Mocata conjures up a gigantic spider to scare them, then spirits away the niece's little girl. The angel of death appears (a skeleton on horseback) and takes Tanith, and for the rest of the film the three men try to find the little girl and bring Tanith back from the land of the almost-dead.

Good devil-worship horror movies are hard to find. The best-known one is probably ROSEMARY’S BABY, which is very good but is more creepy suspense than horror. THE SEVENTH VICTIM, one of Val Lewton's well-regarded B-films, is really a grim and cerebral character study. THE BLACK CAT with Karloff and Lugosi is a good film but the Satanic element is fairly slim, relegated to the last few minutes. Some would count THE WICKER MAN but that's really more a pagan horror film. There is a very good TV-movie, BLACK NOON, which I'll be reviewing on Halloween, leaving this film as probably the best Satanic horror movie to date. It's based on one of the best occult novels ever, The Devil Rides Out by British author Dennis Wheatley. The book, which I read many years ago, is long and full of wild, occult incidents, and the movie necessarily condenses the storyline considerably. The budget for the effects can't do justice to the book, but there are still a number of good setpieces to be had here, including the apparition of a large black demon-djinn in Simon's observatory/ritual room, the attack of the spider, and the black mass/orgy. The acting is good, especially Christopher Lee who takes his role as the Duc de Richleau seriously. Beefy Leon Greene (as Rex) and the handsome Patrick Mower (as Simon, shown at right, in a mirror, with Lee) provide good support, and Charles Gray (Rocky Horror's narrator) looks the part of the sinister Mocata, though he doesn't get to do much except glower at people. If you like blood-and-thunder occult melodrama, this is one of the best (and I also recommend the book which transcends the pulpy banalities of most of Wheatley's other occult books). [TCM]

THE BLACK ROOM (1935)

The Berghman family lives under a terrible curse: when the male children are twins, the older one--the one delivered first--will be killed by the younger one in a gloomy onyx-walled place in the mansion known as the Black Room. When Frederick has twins, Gregor and Anton, he tries to defy the prophecy by sending Anton, the younger one, away to be raised elsewhere, and by walling up the Black Room. Forty years later, Gregor has become a hated figure by the townspeople: he is a shaggy, dissolute fellow who is suspected of luring wives and daughters from the village into his castle, from which they are never seen again. When an uprising seems near, Gregor sends for the kindly Anton, crippled from birth by a paralyzed arm, for help. Gregor says he intends to go traveling and hand over the title of Baron and all his lands to Anton. Actually, Gregor has found a secret passageway through a fireplace into the Black Room; a pit in the middle of the room is where he dumps the bodies of his female victims, and after he lures Anton in, Gregor throws him in the pit to his death--so there's no way the prophecy can come true, right? Gregor than impersonates Anton, mild manner, paralyzed arm, and all, and plans to marry the lovely Thea. However, a certain young lieutenant who is sweet on Thea may have something to say about that, as might a certain large hound that belonged to Anton and who can tell that something's not right.

Though packaged in an "Icons of Horror" DVD set, this film isn't really horror as much as a period-piece Gothic melodrama, but it's a little gem anyway for at least two reasons. One is the look of the movie; Columbia, a small B-ish studio at the time, seems to have gone all out on the costumes and sets, though it looks like it might have been shot over at Universal, as the grand sets resemble those used in the 30s Frankenstein films, and the director, Roy William Neill adds some stylish camera moves here and there. The other big plus is Boris Karloff (pictured in both roles) who delivers one of his best performances in the dual role, and as some critics have pointed out, he practically plays a third role, that of the evil brother masquerading as the good brother. Marian Marsh and Robert Allan are adequate as Thea and her protector, but Katherine DeMille (Cecil's daughter) steals a scene as Gregor's saucy gypsy lover who meets a bad end in the Black Room pit. An enjoyable thriller. [DVD]

THEM (1954)

In a New Mexico desert, a little girl has been spotted wandering aimlessly with a doll in her hands. Cop James Whitmore and his partner Chris Drake find her, seemingly in a trance, not responsive and unable to speak. They then find her home, an empty trailer which has been smashed up, and both men notice a strong smell and occasionally hear a weird whining noise in the distance. A bit down the road, a general store is found similarly smashed up, the proprietor dead. Whitmore goes back to headquarters, while Drake, alone at the crime scene, hears the whining noise, sees something horrible from his car window, screams, and is killed. It's discovered that both dead men had formic acid in their bodies, which is also the source of the strange smell. When the little girl sniffs some formic acid, she becomes agitated and screams, "Them! Them!" FBI agent James Arness is called in, as is scientist Edmund Gwenn (with his daughter Joan Weldon), and soon they're all face to face with gigantic killer ants, apparently mutations caused by nuclear testing in the desert. A plan to bomb the ants' huge underground nest is carried out, but two queen ants escape and make their way to the sewers of Los Angeles where Whitmore and Arness, joined by the Army, try to kill the last of the ants before they can spawn and, as Gwenn quotes from the Bible, there will be darkness and destruction, and "the beast shall reign over the earth." One of the earliest of the atomic-mutation monster movies, made the same year as the Japanese GODZILLA, this is also one of the best. The ants themselves as a special effect are OK, but it's the above B-level writing and acting that make this work, as well as a strong directorial style from Gordon Douglas. The first half-hour or so feels like a traditional crime drama, and the long opening sequence in the desert, which plays out first in bright sunlight and then in a wicked dust storm, works very well. Craggy Whitmore and handsome Arness make a good pair of heroes, and Gwenn is fun as the voice of science. The little girl (Sandy Descher, above) has almost no dialogue, but she gives a good creepy performance; in fact, she's almost more memorable than the huge deadly ants. [DVD]

DAUGHTERS OF SATAN (1972)

Tom Selleck (at left, and several years away from Magnum PI fame) is a

museum agent working in Manila. He finds a painting of a trio of witches being burned at the stake in 1592 and though it's a piece of junk, he buys it as a curiosity because one of the witches looks exactly like his wife (Barra Grant). She freaks out when she sees it, and soon strange things start happening: a housekeeper who looks like one of the other witches in the painting shows up out of nowhere to be her housekeeper, a big black dog—which she somehow knows is named Nicodemas—starts hanging around, and she hears voices out of nowhere. Soon, a woman named Kitty, who sees the same therapist that Selleck does, is yelling about being forced to kill, and sure enough, she's the spitting image of the third witch. The images in the painting (which include the big black dog) begin to fade, and death and violence surround Selleck and his wife. Yes, Grant and the other two women are apparently reincarnations of the dead witches and they're ready to recommit themselves to the coven and get revenge by getting rid of Selleck—though how that would constitute revenge was never clear to me, unless Selleck is a stand-in for the Phallocentric Chauvinistic Pigs who kept the witches down over the centuries.

This feels like a TV-movie, with the added attraction of some bare breasts now and then, and way more evil imagery than network TV would allow. There's a nice opening scene of a naked woman being tortured by Satanists, and a later scene in which Grant has to spit on a crucifix. Elements of the earlier Rosemary's Baby and the later The Omen make this film seem like warmed-over seconds, and Selleck, hairy and baby-faced and dressed in ass-hugging slacks, doesn't quite seem to know how to play his part. None of the acting is above average, and there are plotholes galore, but a creepy atmosphere is developed often enough to make this a decent choice for October viewing. [TCM]

THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)

In a small Cornish village in the late 19th century, healthy people are dying and the young doctor (Brook Williams) can't explain why, partly because the townspeople won't allow autopsies. Williams' mentor (Andre Morell) arrives from London to help. It turns out that the local squire (John Carson) and his fox-hunting buddies are using voodoo to kill off folks and bring them back from the dead as zombies to work in his mine. The young doctor's wife winds up as one of the undead, and Morrell's daughter (Diane Clare) is put in danger by the studly Alex Davion, the squire's chief underling. There is some class consciousness here, as the townspeople and the doctors are all intimidated by, and to a large degree, under the thumb of, Carson and Davion, so the script is a tad more serious than some of the other Hammer horrors of the era, but the proceedings of the first half are rather slow. Things pick up later with a creepy scene of masses of the undead rising from their graves, and a decapitation scene that is fairly explicit for its day. The plot structure is right out of Dracula, with good doctors (whose women are in danger) doing "wild work" to get rid of the villain, though in this case not a supernatural creature but a mortal using magic. The voodoo rite scenes are effective, and the actors all adequate, with Morrell at the top of the lot, and Davion giving an interesting sexy swagger to his Renfieldish role. [TCM]

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

This B-film from early in the 50s sci-fi cycle begins with some overheated narration about the miserable biped that is man, the possibility of miracles, and a desert that turns people into "dead things." Then we see a dehydrated man (Robert Knapp) and woman (Mary Hill) staggering along near death in the Muerto Desert. They are rescued by a hunky American oil worker (John Martin) and doctored up by a relatively handsome doctor (Allan Nixon) at the AmerExico Field Hospital. Knapp starts ranting about gigantic insects in an underground laboratory, and a rather torturous flashback begins. Mad scientist Jackie Coogan is indeed performing experiments in a lab on the Zarpa Mesa, injecting people and animals with spider venom. Harmon Stevens, a former colleague of Coogan's, visits him and sees a giant spider, a group of dwarves who do the doctor's bidding, and some crazy aggressive women, all created by Coogan. Stevens becomes a subject of experiments but manages to escape. At a cantina, an exotic woman named Tarantella does a bizarre dance, and a clearly addled Stevens takes her, Knapp (who's a pilot), and Hill hostage and makes them fly him to the mesa to get revenge on the mad doctor.

That story sounds more coherent in the re-telling than in the playing out. In addition to the tangled, nonsensical plot (and plotholes), there are other bad movie pleasures: terrible performances—some overheated, some practically nonexistent—cheap sets, bad monsters (there's really only one here, a huge spider puppet that barely moves), sexy but wooden women and men. Tandra Quinn, as Tarantella, doesn’t give a performance as much as writhe and stare. Coogan, a former child star who went on to later fame as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family, is disappointingly bland as the mad doctor. Stevens is the most fun as the pop-eyed man who spends most of the movie in a mild trance. The irritating guitar and piano score, which never seems to stop, was recycled by Ed Wood in his movie Jail Bait. Truly a bad movie for connoisseurs. [DVD]

BERSERK (1967)

Joan Crawford runs a traveling circus in England. One night, the star aerialist falls to his death, hung by his tightrope, in an apparent accident. Crawford is excited that the news will increase their audience, but her partner (and lover) Michael Gough wants out of the business. Beefcakey American Ty Hardin auditions for the tightrope job by walking the wire with steel bayonets underneath him. He gets the job, and the attentions of Crawford. At the next stop, Gough is killed by a spike through the head and Hardin angles his way in to replace Gough as her business partner. The public does indeed begin to show more interest in the circus, as do the police, and Crawford's daughter (Judy Geeson) who shows up, having been expelled from her boarding school. The next gory death is that of busty circus queen Diana Dors (beware the cutting-in-half trick). Can the Scotland Yard inspector (Robert Hardy) find the killer before the entire circus is decimated? This is better than its reputation as a "scream queen" vehicle for an aging star. Though Crawford is a bit laughable when flirting with Hardin (who was 25 years younger than her), otherwise she's fine in the part, and is still in pretty good shape in her skimpy circus outfits. The circus scenes which provide filler between arguments and murders are actually fun to watch, and the color cinematography is good. At least one of the deaths is a shocking surprise; the identity of the killer, not so much, though it takes some odd narrative convolutions to explain everything. [TCM]

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)

This is certainly one of the best Hammer horror films, thanks to a better-than-average script, good acting, and some nicely unsettling shock scenes. It opens with one of those shocks: a doctor gets out of a carriage and walks up to his office door where a man in hiding uses a scythe to cut his head off, though all we see are gobs of bright red blood spatter against the doctor's door sign. Of course, Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is behind the death. He is trying to transplant brains into dead bodies, but when a burglar breaks into his lab and discovers the above-mentioned head and a green (and naked) dead man in a large vat of preservative, the cops are on the scene. Frankenstein gets out of Dodge (or whatever Mittel-European town he was in), finds another town to terrorize, and blackmails Karl, a young medical student who has been dealing cocaine on the side to supplement his income, and his girlfriend Anna into letting him take over their boarding house for his experiments. His goal: to take the brain out of his once-brilliant colleague Dr. Brandt (who is currently in an asylum) and put it in a different body—he thinks that Brandt's insanity is due to physical pressure on the brain, and once it's in someone else's head, he'll be sane and can help Frankenstein with his work. Brandt's brain is successfully transplanted into Dr. Richter's body, but Brandt's wife stumbles into the middle of things, and though Brandt/Richter is no longer insane, things get emotionally complicated for him. By the fiery finale, almost the entire cast is dead, a gloomier-than-usual ending for the Hammer studio.


The problem with some Hammer films is not enough plot; here, there is almost too much, but it's nice for a change to have characters we care about. It's also interesting to have Frankenstein be an unambiguous bad guy. Cushing does a nice job as an arrogant bastard who doesn't care a whit about anyone or anything else except his own ends. Most startlingly, he rapes Anna (Veronica Carlson) in a scene which seems to exist only for exploitation. Simon Ward (who later played Winston Churchill in YOUNG WINSTON) is OK but rather emotionless as Karl, but along with Cushing, acting honors go to Freddie Jones (above left) as Brandt/Richter; the subplot involving his wife has real emotional power, something rare in a Hammer film. There is lots of blood and gore (for the late 60s) and several good setpieces, including the burglar in the lab at the beginning, the dead body of Brandt bursting out of the ground during a water pipe break, and the destruction at the end. It doesn't have much that comes directly from the Frankenstein mythos, but it's still a grand Hammer horror. [Streaming]

THE PREMATURE BURIAL (1961)

Middle-aged Guy Carrell (Ray Milland) is a little spooked about his family history; the men in the family tend to come to sudden and violent deaths. When Guy was a child, his father had a heart attack and was buried in the family vault in the basement of their mansion, but that night, Guy heard his father screaming that he was still alive, and now Guy believes he suffers from catalepsy, a condition in which the victim appears dead but isn't, and has a strong fear of being buried alive. His sister Kate (Heather Angel) is certain that the young Guy just had a nightmare and is afraid for no reason, but she lives with and is highly protective of him. As the movie begins, Guy witnesses a grave being exhumed, and it's revealed that the body in the coffin had indeed not been dead and the person had bloodily tried to scratch his way out of the coffin, to no avail. Because one of the gravediggers (and, as we discover later, also a graverobber) is whistling the folk tune "Molly Malone," Milland begins freaking out every time he hears the song. Feeling he is in no state to inflict himself on someone else, he cancels his plans to marry the young and sexy Emily (Hazel Court), but she won't take "no" for an answer and enlists the aid of Miles (Richard Ney), a family friend, to shake him out of his morbid paranoia. Guy marries Emily, but calls off a planned honeymoon trip to Venice to retreat into a hillside vault and build an escapable coffin; eventually he is talked into making a stab at a normal marriage and agrees to the Venice trip, until the pitiful mewings of a cat that is trapped in the walls of the house freaks him out. Obviously, someone is trying to drive poor Guy mad, but who?

This is about par for the course for the American International Poe films of the 60s. Roger Corman directed and the movie looks good, especially the sets and color scheme (the purples here and there are especially striking). The plot, very loosely adapted from a Poe story, is a run-of-the-mill mystery melodrama hidden by the horror element of the buried-alive theme. The main way in which this differs from the others is that Ray Milland is the lead rather than Vincent Price; Milland is fine, though it would be nice if at least once, the lead was close in age to his romantic interest. Ney is lackluster, leaving Angel and Court to take acting honors as they make us wonder which one is the heroine and which the villain. There is a creepy premature burial dream sequence, followed later by a real one. If you haven't already seen most of these Poe flicks, I wouldn't start with this--its draggy spots are draggier than usual because the campy Price is absent--but it's not a bad October choice. [DVD]

CRACK IN THE WORLD (1965)

Scientists at the Inner Space Project (headquarters for which seem to be located somewhere in West Africa) have plans to shoot a nuclear missile into the earth's core to tap its magma as a new power source. The head honcho (Dana Andrews) is gung-ho, but his younger protege (Kieron Moore) has serious doubts, worried that the earth's crust has been weakened too much by nuclear testing. Stuck between these two is the lovely Janette Scott, currently married to Andrews, but the former lover of Moore. Andrews wins the day when the project is given the go-ahead by the British government; the missile firing is successful, but soon a series of strong earthquakes are triggered in the vicinity and it's discovered that a deep fissure has opened in the ocean floor which could rip the planet apart. Like many a sci-fi film of the 50s and 60s, a romantic triangle serves as the primary subplot; this one has a shade more meat on it than most. Andrews is older but still looks like a realistic mate choice for the much younger Scott; her main concern is that she wants a child; his main concern, which he hides from her, is that he's dying of cancer. Moore (relatively hunky for a British B-actor of the era) is bland but young, healthy, and proven right in his concerns over the project. This had a decent budget for the time, back in the pre-Star Wars days when sci-fi films never had lots of money to play with, and it looks good with fine sets and good cinematography. It skimps on the special effects until the end when we get some good miniature work. The uncertainty about where the film is set is irritating--people keep jumping into helicopters and heading off to talk to a government minister (Alexander Knox, good as always) and zipping right back to the project. I first thought the project was in Australia, but when we see a map of the quakes, it seems clear that the missile must have been set off in Africa. The ending was a good idea that could not be well realized on screen back then, though with today's digital effects, it would be easy to pull off now. Extra points for having two leads mentioned in the opening song of Rocky Horror. [Streaming]

FRANKENSTEIN 1970 (1958)

In order to raise money to buy some nuclear power equipment, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) has allowed a team of filmmakers onto his estate in Germany to film a horror movie. The director (Don Barry) flirts with the leading lady, which pisses off the script girl, who happens to be his ex-wife. Gottfried (Rudolph Anders) is the estate overseer—he was tortured during the war, resulting in the scarring of his face, and was forced to take part in terrible Nazi experiments; now Gottfried is worried that Frankenstein is secretly using his new equipment to continue his ancestor's experiment with creating life. (Well, of course he is; his name is Frankenstein.) The Baron seems to be generally friendly and agrees to do a cameo in the film, and even agrees to a live TV feed from the castle, but when folks start disappearing—first Shuter the butler, then the script girl, then a photographer—Gottfreid fears the worst. Yes, the Baron has reanimated the monster, and needs body parts (brains, eyes, etc.) to complete it. When the leading lady goes missing, the director calls in the police and it's not long before the Baron gets his punishment for tampering in God’s domain.

This film is set in 1970 only because the filmmakers thought that personal nuclear reactors would be readily available by then; otherwise, there is no attempt made at futurizing things, though this might be the first Frankenstein movie that does have a relatively modern-looking lab. The screenplay has potential (the Nazi background, the romantic triangle tension) but the characters are flat, and even the usually reliable Karloff doesn't seem happy here, going through his paces slowly and with little spark. The opening, a creepy monster chase through a dark woods, is nice but it turns out to be just the crew shooting their film. Another good scene involving Karloff delivering what seems to be a madman’s soliloquy is another fake-out. The monster is disappointing, basically a big mummy with a boxy head and no eyes, though the last shot of the film, when the dead monster's face is unwrapped, provides one glimmer of what might have been with a bigger budget and more enthusiasm from the filmmakers. The film does look good in widescreen format. [DVD]

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)

In a small New Mexico town, nightclub singer Jean Brooks and her manager/boyfriend Dennis O'Keefe concoct a publicity stunt: in the middle of an act by dancer Margo at an outdoor cafe, Brooks comes strutting out with a leopard on a leash and sits down at a table. Margo, not easily rattled, dances toward the leopard and (literally) shakes her maracas at it. That spooks the beast which runs off into the night. The leopard was on loan from Abner Biberman and O'Keefe feels bad about the incident, but he feels worse when later that night, the animal kills a young girl just outside her family's home. A strolling fortune teller (Isabel Jewell) keeps foreseeing doom for Margo, who just laughs at her. Soon, however, the leopard has struck again, attacking a girl who was accidentally locked in a graveyard. O'Keefe and Brooks feel guiltier, but when Margo finally does meet her death in a third brutal attack, O'Keefe tells the local sheriff that he thinks a human being is behind it all; sure enough, Biberman finds the leopard which had been shot dead days ago and could not have caused the last two deaths. Brooks volunteers to be the bait in a plan to bring the killer out in the open.

This is generally considered one of the weaker of the Val Lewton B-horror movie classics of the 40's, though it has a famous shock scene in the killing of the first girl which rivals the famous pool scene in CAT PEOPLE. Young Teresa (Margaret Landry) is sent out at night by her mother to get some cornmeal. She is scared of the dark, but nevertheless goes across town to get the food, and after a couple of false scares, comes upon the leopard. She races home, but when she gets to her door, it's locked and her mother, assuming the girl's screams are out of baseless fear, takes her time letting her in. Before the mother can get the lock undone, Teresa's screams have stopped and a thick pool of blood begins seeping in under the door. The sequence is magnificently done, though I find the mother's struggle with the door at the end an unconvincing way to draw the scene out. The graveyard sequence, though not as famous, is just as tense: On her birthday, Consuelo (Tula Parma) goes there to put flowers on her father's grave and to have a secret rendezvous with her lover (the handsome Richard Martin). She dawdles on her way and he's gone when she arrives. She stays, lost in thought, and is left when the caretaker locks up. A passerby hears her screams, but to no avail.

I think the problem with the film is that it is too ambitious. For starters, there are several potentially interesting characters, but none of them, not even the leads, are fleshed out very well. There are also thematic threads which are left floating. The role of random fate is mentioned several times (and the camera frequently seems to follow characters at random) but goes nowhere. The killer's motivation is nebulous, to say the least--he just couldn't help it! The climax, occurring during a gloomy parade ceremony filled with slowly marching men in cowls, is rushed. The pluses include great sets (mostly stagy but effective), solid building of tension in all the stalking scenes, and Margo (pictured at right) who, despite having little dialogue, is memorable--and those castanets make a nice visual and aural touch. The screenplay is based on a novel by noir author Cornell Woolrich, and the film does have a good noir look. It's certainly worth an hour of your time. [DVD]

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958)

Alison Hayes is rich, has a devoted butler, owns the world's most fabulous diamond (the Star of India), and for some reason is married to a passive, conniving lout and lives in a small house on the outskirts of a nowhere little town out West. Her husband (William Hudson) is keeping a floozy (Yvette Vickers) at the hotel in town, and doesn’t care who knows. Hayes has developed a drinking problem, or more to the point, re-developed it after a spell in a sanitarium, thanks to Hudson's fooling around. One night, when sightings of a giant fireball in the sky are being reported around the world, Hayes is out driving in the desert and sees a giant glowing sphere land on the road, and a space giant comes out of it and tries to snatch her diamond from around her neck. She heads to town in hysterics and no one believes her. Vickers decides this might be a good time for Hudson to do a little gaslighting, drive Hayes crazy, get her committed, and thereby get his hands on her fortune. But when the space giant returns, he snatches Hayes along with her diamond, and when she is returned, she begins growing to become the 50-foot woman of the title, and is out for revenge against Hudson and Vickers.

Despite this film's reputation as a B-classic, it's pretty bad; it could almost pass for an Ed Wood production except the acting is fairly solid. Critics love to claim this as a feminist take on the traditional man-into-monster movie, and there is potential for a fruitful reading that way, but the weak screenplay and low budget don't allow for the fleshing out of any characters or subplots. This is the kind of movie in which not much really happens on screen; most events occur off-screen (or in the past) and we're told about them in long stultifying dialogue scenes. Hayes and Vickers do the best they can with what little they're given, and though it's Hayes you’ll remember as she strides through town in her toga, ready to wreck havoc, Vickers is the more interesting character—and the better actress. Hudson (pictured with Hayes) works up some good, slimy anti-charm, though as with the lead females, he'd be more fun if he had more to work with. Frank Chase makes his role as the obnoxious comic-relief sidekick deputy bearable. This all could have still worked nicely if the special effects had been good, but they are terrible. The giants are mostly transparent double-exposures, and despite the cool poster picture of Hayes ripping cars off of a freeway, her rampage scene looks like it was shot by high-school kids in someone's back yard. Had Hayes thrown herself completely into the role, this might have been a high camp classic, but it’s not even that good/bad. [DVD]

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980)

I'll start October's horror movie reviews off with this archetypal trashy-fun B-monster movie. It's JAWS meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, with a little bit of ALIEN thrown in for good measure. In a small fishing town, tension is whipped up when the owner of a cannery (Vic Morrow) wants to expand against the wishes of a Native American group, led by Anthony Penya, concerned about the ecology. Morrow has hired a scientist (Ann Turkel) to come up with ways to accelerate the breeding of salmon, but her experiments have gone awry (umm, duh, she's tampering in God's domain) and, unknown to her, produced dozens of humanoid sea creatures who begin rising from the depths to kill human men and mate with human women. The first cool thing that happens is that some of the horror movie rules are violated: children and animals do get killed. On a very JAWS-like fishing trip, a young boy becomes the first victim of the monsters when he falls from the boat and is snatched underwater (in a nifty backwards-motion shot). Then a big old friendly dog is killed and left on the beach in a hideous mess, rather like the first swimming victim in JAWS. Then a bunch of the fishermen's dogs are slaughtered, except for Penya's which leads to suspicions that the Indians are behind the deaths. Two young lovers are attacked on the beach: the boy gets half his face ripped off and dies, and the girl gets raped and survives. The climax occurs during the annual Salmon Festival when a horde of beasts attack everyone and everything in sight. Just when you think all the creatures have been killed, there's a shock twist ending that, despite being shamelessly ripped off from ALIEN, is quite effective.

Gore and nudity are the drawing cards here, with heaping doses of both. The best "Eeek!... Yuck!" moment is when a monster rips a man's head off his body. The beach rape is quite graphic--it has to be for the ending to make sense. With a low budget, the filmmakers have been clever and made most of the "money shot" scenes very short so the cheapness of the effects is not terribly noticeable, with the ripped-up dog being the best example. The festival finale is non-stop screaming and killing and is quite fun. The acting is terrible all around: the hero is a pudgy, going-to-seed Doug McClure, far from his days as a blond hunk in the 60s and early 70s. The female lead, Ann Turkel, is terrible, and everyone else seems like an amateur except Morrow who is OK but doesn't really get to chew the scenery like you expect him to. The monster outfits are best when just glimpsed, and look rather shoddy when dwelt upon, but that didn't stop me from having a generally good time with this as a beer-and-pizza flick. The production was overseen by the unbilled Roger Corman. [DVD]

I KILLED THAT MAN (1941)

Cheapie Monogram mystery with a few good supporting performances and a moderately clever plotline to recommend it. As convicted murderer Ralf Harolde is led to his death, he tells a roomful of men gathered to witness the execution that he's going to name the man who paid him to commit the murder, but a poison dart kills him first. DA Ricardo Cortez makes the men submit to a strip search but finds nothing. The field of suspects is quickly narrowed down: is it Gavin Gordon, a representative of an anti-death penalty group (which consists solely of himself)?; is it Harry Holman, a candy-store owner who knew Harolde when he was a kid and who had in his possession a cigarette holder that could have been used to shoot the dart?; maybe it's George Pembroke, a laid-back (maybe a little too much so) businessman who has just recently been appointed to the parole board. Cortez enlists a reporter he's sweet on (Joan Woodbury) to help him crack the case, and together they do. I usually like Cortez, but he comes off as bland and colorless here. At least Woodbury has some energy. Both Gordon and Pembroke are good, as is Iris Adrian as the dead man's ex-girlfriend who knows a little too much for her own good. George Breakston, who had a modest career in the 30s as a child actor, has a couple of nice comic relief scenes as Cortez's switchboard operator who has all kinds of theories about the case, based on true crime books he's reading. A point of interest for librarians: the clue that cracks the case open involves a library book call number. If you overlook the bare-bones production values and style (except for a nifty use of triple-split screen during a phone conversation), it's diverting enough. [TCM]

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1948)

A colorful, moody, romantic fairy tale which is too long for its own good. On the Spanish coast, an exotic woman named Pandora (Ava Gardner) drives a drunkard to suicide when she spurns him. She then goads Stephen, a race car driver and her current paramour, to push his car, named Pandora, off a cliff for her. He does, she just about has an orgasm, and then agrees to marry him. However, soon Pandora becomes fascinated with Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), a Dutch artist whose schooner is anchored in the bay. She likes to think he might be the incarnation of the mythic Flying Dutchman, a figure who is doomed to roam the earth eternally. Impulsively, she strips naked and swims out to his boat; coincidentally (or is it?) he is in the middle of painting a portrait of the mythic Pandora in her likeness when she arrives. She's a little freaked out, but soon he has become a member of her band of pals, one of whom is the academic Geoff (Harold Warrender) who has an ancient Dutch manuscript about the Flying Dutchman. [At this point, the story of the Dutchman is told: a 17th century sailor (played by Mason) returns home from his travels, assumes his wife to have been unfaithful, kills her, and is charged with murder. In court, he rails against women (generally) and God (specifically) and is sentenced to death, but on the morning of his execution, he has a vision in which he sees that his wife had actually been faithful to him. He walks out of his cell, is led onto a ship, and is cursed to sail alone unless he can find a woman who loves him and is willing to die for him. Every seven years, he can land for six months in an attempt to find this woman.] No sooner have Pandora and Stephen set the date for their wedding then a celebrated matador named Mario comes to town and woos Pandora. (If you're keeping track, that's three men Pandora is juggling, though Hendrik seems to be the only one she's not sleeping with.) Melodramatics occur, and Mario kills Hendrik one night at his villa. Imagine Mario's surprise when Hendrik shows up at the bullfight the next day. This unbalances him in the ring and he is gored to death by the bull. Finally, on the very eve of Pandora's wedding to Stephen, Mason says he has to leave. She finds out that Mason is indeed the Flying Dutchman; will she venture out to the ship or stay on land and marry Stephen?

Except for the fantasy element, much of this feels like a Fitzgerald narrative about the rootless aimless rich and their careless behavior. Some of the things critics don't like about this movie are the things I like. The film is often faulted for its somber tone, but I think if the proceedings were taken any less seriously, it would all fall apart or become cartoonish. James Mason is very good; the beautiful and sexy Gardner is often faulted as being wooden here, but that's nearly beside the point: it's her face and body that drive these men around the bend, and her sometimes affectless performance is spot on. At a full two hours, the movie is too long, and it seems like when a scene isn't working dramatically, the director just cuts to a close-up of Gardner and all is forgiven. Nigel Patrick is fine as the racer and Marius Goring is good in what amounts to a cameo as the suicidal drunkard. This Technicolor movie always looks good, though on the Kino DVD, the colors occasionally come and go in pulses. If you don't mind the length and the moodiness, I recommend this. [DVD]

REGISTERED NURSE (1934)

Bebe Daniels is married to a boorish alcoholic (Gordon Westcott) who gets seriously hurt in a drunk driving accident, forcing her to go back to work as a nurse. She becomes a popular employee but hides her past, so two doctors thinking she’s at liberty pursue her: the playboyish Lyle Talbot (pictured with Daniels) and the more stable John Halliday. When an insane patient is operated on, Daniels freaks out; it turns out that her husband is in an asylum. With her secret out, Halliday agrees to operate on the husband to try and restore him to sanity, but a meddling patient (Sidney Toler), thinking he's doing Daniels a favor, plants the idea of suicide in Westcott's head, leading to disaster. This pre-Code melodrama moves along nicely, if predictably, and has some diverting characters, including Beulah Bondi as the older head nurse, Minna Gombell as a hard boiled nurse who's engaged to marry a policeman, Renee Whitney as a flirt, and a couple of wrestlers known as Sonovitch the Terrible Bulgarian and El Humid the Bone-Crushing Turk—real-life wrestler Tor Johnson, who found B-movie fame in the 50s as a member of Ed Wood's repertory company, plays the Bulgarian. A couple of amusing lines: Talbot is referred to at one point as having "muffed the op," and someone asks Bondi if she'd like a "bosom caresser"—that is, a drink that warms you "all the way down." [TCM]

THIS ENGLAND (1941)

This episodic look at the history of one English village was intended to be a morale-boosting propaganda piece in the early dark days of WWII. It begins with an American reporter (Constance Cummings) arriving at the village of Claverly collecting information for a morale-boosting propaganda piece of her own. She doesn’t think she’ll find much—she asks if one of the "yokels" can show her around—but when farm owner John Rookby (John Clements) agrees to share the village’s history, she gets a story of the resilience of the English in the face of invasion and hard times. She and Rookby and his farmhand Appleyard (Emyln Williams) make it through a bombing raid in a tavern, and later as they look out over Beacon Hill, we're told four episodes from the past, all involving Rookbys and Appleyards, all with the same actors (including Cummings) from the modern segment. In 1086, the villagers rouse themselves against an occupying Norman invader who has threatened to disturb their livelihood by forcing all the village men to stop their own work in order to build him a road. In 1588, during the attack of the Spanish Armada, a beautiful shipwreck survivor is accused of witchcraft and treachery by Appleyard. In 1804, the Industrial Revolution upsets things, with older folks lamenting that young people won’t stay on the farm anymore. Rookby becomes rich and loses touch with the villagers, and is blamed when Appleyard’s infant son dies of malnutrition. The final sequence is set during WWI with Armistice Day celebrated as the last of its kind since the World War must clearly be the war to end all wars. A final shot in the present day confirms the heartiness of the English people and the continuity of their way of life.

Like most movies in which propaganda concerns are placed first, or even most anthology movies, this is not totally successful as art. The first segment is the most interesting, partly due to the coherent story, and partly because it features 13-year-old Roddy McDowell in his last film in Great Britain before he came to Hollywood (pictured above with Cummings and Williams). The 1588 episode lost me along the way; I wasn't sure how the hounding of a woman to suicide tied in to the overall theme of overcoming adversity, though it does end with news of the Spanish retreat. The WWI story is the shortest and least compelling—though the print I saw was almost 10 minutes shorter than the length that IMDb reports for the film, so some material may have been missing. The acting is OK, with Emlyn Williams (at left), also a well-known playwright (he wrote dialogue for this movie), stealing all his scenes, except from McDowell. Williams was also quite good in MAJOR BARBARA the same year. [Streaming]

THE AFFAIRS OF ANATOL (1921)

Anatol and Vivian are on their honeymoon (with her flirty behavior, Vivian is, as a title card tells us, "putting too much honey in 'honeymoon'"). At a nightclub called the Green Fan, Anatol runs into an old grade school pal, Emilie, who has become a gold-digging jazz baby, and is being kept by Gordon, a much older man. Deciding he needs to save her from herself, Anatol takes her under his wing, much to Vivian's dismay. Gordon tells Anatol to go ahead and perform his "noble rescue work" and he'll be back in a few weeks to "pick up the pieces." At first, Emilie seems ready to change, claiming she was dazzled by "the Fairyland of Wealth" into which Gordon placed her, but soon she's taken up with Gordon again; Anatol smashes her room up good, after which Gordon proposes to her. However, this experience doesn’t cure Anatol of his need to be a white knight, and when he and Vivian decide to spend some time out in the country to repair their relationship, he falls into the same trap with Annie, the wife of a farmer who is also a church treasurer; she has spent church money on nice clothes and now needs to pay it back or her husband will be in trouble. She throws herself into the river but Anatol saves her—there is a comic scene of Vivian watching as Annie, who is pretending to be unconscious, primps in a mirror. Once again, Anatol gets taken in by a supposed innocent. The film wraps up with a third segment involving sexy dancer Satan Synne who is actually the most innocent of all of Anatol’s "affairs": she's desperate for money to pay for operations on her critically ill husband, a wounded soldier.

This episodic comic melodrama was directed by Cecil B. DeMille; it was of interest to me for its two main stars: Gloria Swanson, who plays Vivian, the wife; and Wallace Reid as Anatol, both pictured above. Reid, who was a popular silent star, was in an accident a couple of years before this film was made and became a morphine addict; he died in 1923 at the age of 31. This is the only Reid film I've seen so far, but he seems to have been far from his peak—his looks and build were declining by this time; still, he is adequate for the part. Swanson has little to do except be insulted by her husband's behavior, though she does get to indulge in a little side fling of her own near the end of the film. Agnes Ayres as Annie looks surprisingly modern, like she might pop up in a movie tomorrow. There are some color-tinted scenes and title cards, and a couple of elaborate scenes set at nightclubs. Basically fun for silent-movie fans, though at two hours, it does drag a bit in the middle. [DVD]

CALL OF THE FLESH (1930)

Maria (Dorothy Jordan) lives in a convent in Seville; her older brother Enrique (Russell Hopton) visits to wish her well as she is soon to take her vows, but she's not absolutely sure this is the life for her. One night, she hears singing and cavorting over the convent wall and sees the dashing Juan (Ramon Novarro) performing at a café and she immediately loses her heart to him. Juan lives with his musical mentor Esteban (who thinks Juan is wasting his vocal gifts) and toys around with Lola, his singing partner. The next day, while out with some street kids indulging in some whimsical thievery in the marketplace, Juan meets Maria. They spend the day together and that night, when Juan discovers her story, he puts her to bed alone, determined to be more a brother than a lover to her. However, when her real brother finds out Maria has left the convent, Juan, Maria, and Esteban flee to Madrid where Juan tries for a career in opera. Eventually, he and Maria get engaged, but Esteban shows up, accuses Juan of making a harlot out of her, and takes her back to the convent. Maria and Juan are both miserable; she wastes away while Juan finally has an emotional breakthrough and gets a standing ovation one night when he is called upon to step into the starring role in a opera, though he faints offstage. Will these kids get back together before one or both of them die of heartbreak?

This romantic melodrama has little going for it except for a bravura performance by Ramon Novarro, who acts with depth and does a grand job of singing. Unfortunately, Jordan (pictured with Novarro) comes off like a rank amateur (particularly bad is her over-the-top melodramatic fit as she listens to Novarro's singing for the first time) and she and Novarro have little chemistry. Renée Adorée, who died of TB just a couple of years later, is slightly better as Lola, and Hopton makes the most of his two scenes as the brother. The film feels a bit long, but it's a must for Novarro fans. [TCM]