In short: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Warning: spoilers for a movie older than most people who will read this!

Colonialist stud Rock Dean (John Bromfield), a guy so 50s macho, he’s having a smoke while he gets vaccinated, runs a plantation in Brazil. After a series of killings the locals believe to have been committed by a monster known as the Curucu, his workers flee the plantation deeper into the jungle. Our porn-star named hero doesn’t believe in monsters, but he still mounts an expedition to its supposed hunting grounds to regain the trust of his (former) wage slaves.

Apart from the colonial stand-by of the native carriers, he is accompanied by chieftain’s son turned “civilised” Tupanico (Tom Payne) and Dr Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland), looking for a head-shrinking drug that just might help shrink cancer as well (seriously). The good doctor is one of them thar independent wimmen, but this being a 50s adventure movie, you know how that’ll turn out.

I call Curt Siodmak's Curucu an adventure movie and not a monster movie for a reason, for while there are a couple of scenes concerning the titular monster, the film spends most of its time not on the tropes of bad monster movies but rather those of bad adventure movies. The monster will turn out to actually be a man in costume, anyway, which at least excuses how bad that thing looks, but even if it didn’t, this would still be much more of a film about actors reacting to archive footage of animals than one about monsters. And certainly more than about actual adventure, as well, for even though this was actually shot in Brazil, Siodmak seems to go out of his way to not use this opportunity for anything but two or three scenes that really make use of the landscape. Otherwise, this might as well have been shot on a soundstage in California; in fact, Siodmak (who really could do much better) shoots the whole affair as if it were.

On the narrative level, this is a talky mess in which very little of interest happens, and the best bits – like an actual dramatic climax – seem to happen off-screen. The film’s racial and social politics are dubious, though not interesting enough to go into them in detail, its plot plods along slowly, and there’s only a sense of adventure if you’re deeply into scenes of actors being threatened by small animals that are never on screen with them at the same time.

So there’s very little at all to recommend Curucu to anyone but the colonialist adventure movie or Beverly Garland completists among us.

The Horror!? 87: The Devil's Messenger (1962)

Some demonic bureaucrat in hell (Lon Chaney, jr.) sends a young, dead woman named Satanya (Karen Kadler) back into the world of the living to deliver three items. Each item causes a different strange tale to happen.

In the first one, an agent sends his client, a famous photographer (John Powell) on a vacation. There the good man not only makes some of his best photos, but also murders a woman. As is the custom in an anthology movie of this type, her picture starts to haunt him.

In the second story, a scientist develops an obsession for a frozen girl. It nearly seems as if she might be alive! Do stories of this kind ever end well?

In the third and last of the stories, a soothsayer predicts that something terrible will happen to a man. At first, he is skeptical, but he gets more nervous with each prediction that comes true.

The Devil's Messenger is an anthology film pasted together from three episodes of a Swedish TV show called "13 Demon Street" that was, as far as I could find out, quite an strange project. The great Curt Siodmak and other Americans went to Sweden and made a little TV show in English for the Swedish market.

Later, a more or less clever American producer paid Siodmak to make an anthology movie of some of the material (I suspect Chaney's scenes were shot for the film and not for the TV show. The sources about the film I could find are divided on the point.). As did happen more than once where Siodmak was concerned, he soon broke with his producer and terrible hack Herbert L. Strock wrapped up the project. It's a nice coincidence that there wasn't much Strock could do to ruin the project, so his filmography contains at least one watchable movie.

Of course, the episodes themselves are neither original nor lavishly produced, but are still products of solid craftsmanship, something that often isn't enough to hold a full length feature together, but works out fine for three nice little horror shorts. Nothing in the movie overstays its welcome or tries for things it can't achieve, so if you don't expect to see a film of the quality of the better Amicus productions, you will have a nice time.

 

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