Past Misdeeds: Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The archaeologist father (John Van Pelt) of a gal named Betty Marsh (Mary Russell) has disappeared on an expedition to find a lost Indian city in the American South West. Just when Betty and a few friends of her father's - all Professors of something or other, it seems - are beginning to set out on a search expedition for him, Professor Marsh's partner in archaeology stumbles in and gasps something about having located and hidden (read: stolen from the native people it belongs to) a gold treasure guarded by "the whistling skull", and him and Marsh having been captured by a "cult of Indians". Before the man can get into more details, somebody extinguishes the lights in the windowless room all this has taken place in and knifes him in the back with a sacrificial dagger. Looks like not everyone in the room is a friend of Professor Marsh. But hey, at least the dead guy was carrying a coded map to the good Professor's place of captivity.

Betty isn't too impressed by one little murder and decides to go through with her search expedition anyway. She also has found some steadfast friends to help her through any physical troubles, three upright - or as upright as a group of people that includes a guy traveling with a ventriloquist doll can be - cowboys known as the Three Mesquiteers (Robert Livingston, Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune). Now, there's only the knifing traitor among the expedition and the small problem of the evil cult to deal with.

I'm not too experienced with the B-westerns of the 30s, so you'll have to find someone else to put the brilliantly titled Riders of the Whistling Skull into the broader context of its genre at the time, or explain to you who the hell the Three Mesquiteers were besides the heroes of a series of (popular, it seems) Republic western movies, or why one of them is moonlighting as a ventriloquist. What I am experienced with are genre mash-ups that try to make up for their low budgets by enthusiastically throwing elements of different genres (here: Western, adventure and weird menace) together to give an audience in search for cheap thrills - usually the best sort - their money's worth. After all, I have seen my share of lucha movies. Fortunately, Riders is exactly a genre mash-up of the sort that Mexican popular cinema would roll with a few decades later. If they'd replaced the three cowboys with Mil Mascaras wearing an astonishing assortment of eye-gouging fashion, this could be part of any of my favourite series of lucha films.

As the lucha movies I'll just imagine it has inspired, Riders suffers from some typical b-movie problems. The unthinking racism of the culture of its time in the portrayal of the Indians is quite annoying (all Indians are evil, "half-bloods" even more so, etc.), and just applying a little thought will also let one realize that the heroes of the piece are morally in the wrong, stealing other people's gold treasures and all. I can't take this sort of thing too seriously in a film like Riders that isn't really arguing for racism as much as unthinkingly reproducing the morals of its time, though, and so have no problems just letting these evils slide, which is probably one of the luxuries of not being a Native American myself.

Furthermore, the acting - especially of the minor characters - is rather stiff, with some of the assorted Professors being the worst offenders. To my complete surprise, none of said Professors is used for comic relief; Riders has other characters to do this dirty work, and they are as unfunny as every comic relief character in the history of cinema, ever. On the positive side, the film is so short - with a running time of just 53 minutes - that its comical interludes are never longer than thirty seconds in a row. The "comedy" is still causing quite a lot of pain.

However, that's all the negative aspects I can find in the movie. Everything else is golden, at least if one is willing and able to make one's peace with the clichés and traditions of popular cinema of a bygone era. If you are at least willing to try - I obviously do - you might find in Riders of the Whistling Skull a film that is trying its darndest to make liking it easy for you.
The film's sprightly pace makes it easy to overlook its not always logical plotting. There is hardly a minute going by in which nothing with entertainment value is happening, be it shoot-outs, energetic bouts of fisticuffs or the sort of "weird ritual" you can stage on a five dollar budget. I'm quite fond of director Mack V. Wright's use of some fine dusty canyons, mountains and hills. The landscape is well enough photographed to make a cheap movie look that much more impressive. Sure, these locations might be for minor westerns of the 30s what Bronson Canyon is for cheap horror films of the 50s, but I haven't seen enough of the former to have much of a problem with that.

Cheap and fast entertainment is what Riders of the Whistling Skull promises, and cheap and fast thrills is what the viewer gets. Honestly, what more could one ask of a film like it?

Unknown Island (1948)

During World War II, then-Airforce-pilot Ted Osborne (Phillip Reed) observed what looked like living, breathing dinosaurs on an island in the South Pacific. Now that the war is over, Osborne has convinced his fiancée Carole Lane (Virginia Grey) to finance an expedition to that island so that Osborne can film and photograph the dinosaurs - for science (and, one suspects, fame that'll let Osborne step out of Carole's financial shadow).

The whole expedition is a bit of a low budget affair, though. Osborne and Carole bring in no personnel of their own, and instead hire the shady alcoholic Captain Tarnowski (Barton MacLane) and his ship and crew to help them do the job. That just might be a decision the couple will regret later on.

On the other hand, one can't say this particular business relationship is starting off too badly. Turns out Tarnowski knows a guy who visited Osborne's island, too, but barely escaped with his life and sanity intact. John Fairbanks (Richard Denning), as he is called, now spends his time penniless and drunk and thought mad in a corner in the same bar where Tarnowski does business. Somehow - I suspect the involvement of a lot of alcohol - Tarnowski is able to convince Fairbanks to take part in the expedition too.

Once everyone's at sea, the problems begin. Tarnowski shows a rather unpleasant interest in Carole that'll only get more unpleasant the longer the trip takes, while Tarnowski's "Lascar" crew doesn't particularly enjoy the thought of visiting this particular island, and starts a dramatic, yet easily quelled mutiny.

Things don't improve once the group finally arrives at the island. Not only are the surviving crewmen still pretty mutinous, and their Captain still a pig, the dinosaurs population is pretty aggressive too. And that's before Crash Corrigan and his giant sloth costume attack.

Will anyone survive the expedition?

Despite its somewhat ironic (and today, highly google-unfriendly) moniker, Film Classics was one of the better distributors of Poverty Row films. At least, the films wearing the "Film Classics" logo are usually on the more professional and less boring side of the extremely cheap persuasion.

Unknown Island was even shot in Cinecolor, whose emphasis on red and green tones and little else isn't exactly spectacular from a modern point of view, but must still have cost a bit of money this sort of production usually didn't have to throw around. It also suits Virginia Grey quite nicely, so there might be a reason for its use there. Or somebody was out to win the title of "first dinosaur movie in colour".

Be that as it may, the film was directed by Jack Bernhard (also responsible for at least two pretty entertaining b-noirs with Blond Ice and Decoy), whose direction does not show him as any sort of visionary, but as a guy trying to get through the problematic work of making an entertaining movie out of cardboard and wobbling dinosaur suits with professional dignity intact, which obviously puts him leagues above directors like William Beaudine. Bernhard does know how to keep an adventure movie like this going without filling it out with footage of people pointing at library footage of monkeys and hippos.

Instead, there's quite a bit of pointing at the film's back-projected special effects, but what's not too like about looking at T-rex costumes constructed so that the suit actors can only waddle in them as if they were giant penguins (teke-li-li)? Even if you ignore the monsters' (with Corrigan's sloth as the big exception) bad movability, the effects leave a lot to be desired. It's impossible to get a feel for how large any of the monsters are supposed to be. Especially the giant sloth seems to shrink and grow depending on the scene. On the other hand, the sloth is a good looking monster (of a reddish colour - not white as half the Internet says, by the way)that works well with the film's colour scheme.

Of course, the film is about as much of a stock adventure film as possible, with all the character types (though Carole is fortunately a bit more feisty than her movie's era seemed to like its women), the casual racism, and the lazy psychology you'd expect. Thing is, it's also snappily done, well-shot and pretty entertaining inside the borders of its place and time. Plus it features a giant sloth wrestling a dinosaur.

 

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On WTF: Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937)

If there's one particular time and sub-genre of film I know next to nothing about, it's the b-western of the 1930s.

Obviously, my lack of knowledge doesn't hinder me from writing up my thoughts on a movie, especially when it turns out to be a weird western and has such a wonderful title as Riders of the Whistling Skull. My write-up on WTF-Film goes into all the details.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,western,reviews,adventure,mack v. wright,robert livingston,ray corrigan,max terhune,other places