Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)

aka The Offspring

Librarian and Southern small town historian Julian White (Vincent Price) gets a surprise visit by a journalist (Susan Tyrrell) who wants to interview him about his niece Katherine (Martine Bestwick). Katherine has just been executed for a string of murders she committed, and since she grew up under Julian’s care, he’s rather expected to have some insight into her state of mind.

What the old gent actually does is start onto a series of short tales to explain that the town of Oldfield where all of this takes place is and has been home to a cornucopia of murders and depravity, so Katherine’s case should come as no surprise.

Of course, this being a horror anthology, these tales are its segments.

The first tale, “Stanley” concerns the misadventures of mild-mannered and repressed grocer Stanley (Clu Gulager). At home, he is taking care if his ailing sister Eileen (Miriam Byrd-Nethery) who radiates incestuous intensity – at least she seems to be really into passive-aggressively dominating her brother. On his grocer job, Stanley is pining after his boss lady, Grace (Megan McFarland). He even manages to go on a date with her, but when she rebukes him, he murders her and later does the necrophiliac thing. Which really will have some rather unexpected results nine months later.

The second segment, “On the Run”, follows ne'er-do-well Jesse Hardwick (Terry Kiser), who has incensed a couple of rather brutal gangsters, as well as his girlfriend. Chased into a swamp and shot, Jesse regains consciousness in the care of an older black man named Felder Evans (Harry Caesar), a hoodoo practitioner. Sniffing around Felder’s cabin, Jesse finds out that his host must be at least two-hundred years old. He presses Felder to teach him the trick to this sort of longevity. The old man does agree at first, yet Jesse’s generally shitty disposition does sour their relationship rather violently. Which, obviously, isn’t a great idea.

Tale number three, “Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements” (disappointingly enough not featuring any Lovecraftian content) concerns the tragic romance of the titular carnival’s glass eater, Steven (Ron Brooks) and local beauty Amaryllis (Didi Lanier). Unfortunately, this is no normal travelling carnival but one belonging to a witch (Rosalind Cash) – only going by Snakewoman – who grants her various carnies (all with a problematic past) carny super powers and shelter in return for her dominance over them, and perhaps a bit of mutilation. As you can imagine, her glass eater attempting to run off with a girl does rather displease the woman.

Finally, we have “Four Soldiers”, wherein a group of Union soldiers under the brutal, drunken leadership of Sgt. Gallen (Cameron Mitchell), encounter a group of war orphans – most of them demonstrating scars of war themselves – dwelling in a dilapidated mansion. The children manage to take the men prisoner, as per the rules set by the mysterious “Magistrate” they say they serve. Children being children, they do like to play games with their captives.

As directed by Jeff Burr (who would of course later go on to Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures as well as specialize in horror sequels of dubious renown yet not always dubious quality) and written by Burr, Darin Scott (whom you might know as writer and producer of the brilliant Tales from the Hood among other things), Mike Malone, and C. Courtney Joyner (another future Band alumni), From a Whisper to a Scream is a pretty wild and gruesome bit of US Southern horror.

In mood and style and it marries EC horror – nearly a given in US horror anthologies – with Southern Gothic, leaning on the pulp gruesomeness of the former instead of the somewhat more subtle and elegant ways of Southern Gothic, where terrible fucked-up shit happens, but usually does so with a pretence of civility. This one rather feels mad like a wild dog, aggressively leaning into the most gruesome elements of the material, cutting away the politeness and ambiguity that to me seems as much part of your typical Southern Gothic piece as are incest, necrophilia and the horrors of slavery and what came after. As an approach this makes perfect sense for a horror movie from the 80s, of course, and not just commercially. While this never feels like a movie seeing it as its main goal to hammer home a political point, it really does put a lot of effort into portraying its American South as a place with a history literally drenched in blood, and suggests this as the worst possible influence on the people living there.

Helping in this effort is some really rather great low budget filmmaking by Burr, who drenches nearly every frame in fecundity and sweat, and lingers on the decaying locations with a lot of wicked enthusiasm and quite a bit of style.

I also can’t help but admire From a Whisper’s absolute willingness to go into creepy, gruesome and pleasantly uncomfortable places and really go there. Even though this isn’t a gore fest – I suspect mostly because it couldn’t afford to be – this is not a film cutting to black politely. There’s a real, admirable, pulp energy and ruthlessness running through all of the film’s segments, as well as a wonderful, and wonderfully gruesome, sense of imagination.

Thanks to the curious economics of anthology horror – where getting a great actor for five affordable days can be enough to shoot a segment – and some great casting choices, there’s also at least one really great performance in every segment. Price is of course the international treasure we know and love, but there’s also Gulager’s go-for-broke outing as Stanley, Harry Caesar’s calm and off-handed warlock, Rosalind Cash’s grand, horrible, villainess. Hell, even Cameron Mitchell puts obvious effort into creating a man of very specific vileness here, instead of coasting by on drinks and general professionalism.

So, to me, this is one of the great underrated anthology films.

In short: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Medical doctors in 1920s London are killed in various peculiar and grotesque ways. It does take some time until the inauspiciously named Detective Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) figures things out, but the only thing these doctors have in common apart from their titles is that they all took part in an operation which left their patient, one Victoria Regina Phibes (various very fetching photos of Caroline Munro), very dead indeed. It is the dead lady’s husband, the supposedly dead renaissance genius Dr Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) – assisted by the beautiful, talented and fashionable (that’s important) Vulnavia (Virginia North) - who is committing the murders, inspired by the biblical plagues no less. In between bouts of vigorous organ playing and monologues to his dead wife, of course. Will the police catch him before he manages to teach the last of the medicos, Dr Vesalius (Joseph Cotton) a valuable lesson from his bible studies?

I’m actually rather surprised I’ve never written even a tiny piece like this about this particular high water mark in the career of the great Vincent Price, as directed by Robert Fuest in his own career best moment. It’s high pop art in look and feel (some would say high camp), a film so stylish and stylized, so clearly understanding how the funnily grotesque and the macabre are related, it is still a feast for horror kids of all ages and tempers. It’s not a film for anyone of my kind of taste to simply enjoy but one to feel completely at home in, a comfy chair/favourite blanket combo of absurd murder methods, bright, popping colours, and production design that is at once strange, bizarre and makes absolute sense in context. Of course Dr Phibes would have his own tin robot band, and of course he’d have an organ that not just glows in the most intense red but also moonlights as a practical elevator perfect for dramatic entries and exits.

Price is absolutely brilliant here (as he so often was), projecting a grotesque operatic grandness even though the script by James Whiton and William Goldstein – in one of those perverse decisions that can turn out to be pure genius – lets Price use his wonderful voice only occasionally, in a scratchy form, when he’s plugged into his self-made voice box. But no matter for our hero, he can use body language just as well and nuanced in its bigness as his voice, gifting the film (and the audience) a performance that’s just as bizarre and perfectly right as the rest of this pretty perfect movie.

In short: Scream and Scream Again (1970)

A serial killer stalks the clubs of London, listening to funky tunes and luring attractive young women into his sports car to drain their blood. Plodding Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is on the case but police procedure is little help against the weirder aspects of the case. Perhaps young assistant medical examiner Dr Sorel (Christopher Matthews) will be of more use.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with a man trapped in some kind of medical facility who loses one of his extremities after the other. We also spend a little time in an unnamed Eastern European country where things are rather more fascist than communist. Here, we witness how one Konratz (Marshall Jones) kills his way to the top with his evil version of the Vulcan nerve pinch.

Eventually, these plot lines…well, actually, no, they don’t really converge, and only a very polite viewer will not call Konratz’s sudden appearance in London in the final act utter, pointless and awkward bullcrap.

I understand that this Amicus production directed by Gordon Hessler has found some admirers over time, but I have no idea what’s to admire here: the slow pacing of what should be a potboiler? The decision to slow things down even further by the film’s constant changing between totally disconnected plotlines? The inability of the script (by Christopher Wicking) to actually unite any of it? The total randomness of what will go for an explanation of what’s going on in the end?

Though one might call the film’s chutzpah even calling itself a film admirable. There’s really no connective tissue to any of what we see at all, things just happen for no reason, Peter Cushing pops in for a scene, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price for three, connections are insinuated but don’t make any kind of sense. It’s all very much like a dream – not an interesting one, alas, but just a crap assortment of random nonsense that’s not even interesting to look at.

Music Monday: Monster Mash Edition

Madhouse (1974)

Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) has built a nice career in Hollywood for himself by starring in a series of horror films in which he plays one Doctor Death, as written by his close friend, the former actor Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing). When Paul’s fiancée is murdered by someone wearing his Doctor Death costume, most of the world, including himself, is pretty sure he is indeed the man responsible.

After years spent institutionalized, and some time of private seclusion, Flay has convinced Toombes to return to acting and the role of Doctor Death in a British TV show produced by the despicable (so, very much a classic producer type) Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry, squeezing much slime out of a not terribly deeply written part). Paul is really doing this in the name of friendship for Flay. For his friend seems to have hit on hard times financially and, as we will learn after a while, privately with a rather arachnid situation concerning his wife Faye (Adrienne Corri).

Things do go wrong very quickly, for someone dressed as Doctor Death begins to kill off various people Paul meets (sorry, Linda Hayden!), while our protagonist’s public behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Which is what happens to a guy who isn’t too sure if he is actually committing a series brutal murders.

This AIP and Amicus co-production directed by Jim Clark does have a pretty bad reputation, so I found myself positively surprised by the film when I finally got around to watching it, after literal decades. Sure, it’s not at all on the level of comparable Price vehicles like the lovely Doctor Phibes films or Theatre of Blood, but more often than not, this is a rather delightful bit of meta horror. It is perhaps not as deep as one would like, and sometimes a bit ploddingly paced, but otherwise, I find very little to dislike here.

Price is certainly putting – as was his wont – a lot of energy into his part, portraying Toombes as a bit of an unluckier version of himself, providing nervy energy, big emotions, and a truly frightening shouty mouth, while also keeping the guy sympathetic and likeable.

One might have wished for a bit more of Cushing on screen, but what’s there is as perfectly delivered as always. Plus, there’s a pretty incredible moment I won’t spoil even when talking about a movie nearly fifty years old that’s all Cushing’s right at the end of the movie, a moment silly, darkly funny, perfectly macabre and oh so well delivered. And really, as a fan of both Cushing and Price, it is a great joy to see both of them interact at all.

There are a handful of truly great moments like that very last scene sprinkled through the whole of the film, usually mixing that dark humour, a grotesque or macabre idea, and a tinge of melancholy with perfectly appropriate overacting by Price or Corri.

If I wanted to criticize anything, it’s that Clark (who is much better known as an editor) is rather too workmanlike a director for the material at hand. Certainly, someone with a bit more verve and style behind the camera could have made even more out of the sense of melancholia for things lost that has turned grotesque for quite a few characters, and could probably have given the murder set pieces a bit more weight and dynamics. However, that’s what stands between Madhouse being a great entry into the Price canon instead of merely being a good and interesting one, and so feels like a bit of a non-complaint.

Let's start October with some old-timey spookiness.

Featuring Vincent Price and Ida Lupino.

In short: The Monster Club (1981)

Horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (disappointingly not Chetwynd-Hayes himself, but at least he’s played by John Carradine) offers a an ailing stranger (Vincent Price) whatever he may need. Turns out the guy’s a vampire called Eramus, who is very thankful for the spontaneous blood donation. He does leave the man alive, though. Because Eramus is a big fan of the writer and feels he owes him something, he takes him to a club visited exclusively by monsters. Between bouts of painful comedy and full musical New Wave-y numbers, the writer gets told three stories.

But, unlike with other horror anthology movies, I’m not going to talk about them in any detail, for if you inflict these lame ducks of stories on yourself, you do at least deserve to get a pained surprise out of them. Which is pretty much the best you can hope for, for the film wastes the considerable talents of many of the people involved in it very efficiently.

The Monster Club is sometimes treated as the last of the Amicus horror anthologies but since it isn’t an actual Amicus production, I find it better to treat it as some sort of sad epilogue made after the fact that pretty clearly suggests the time of the somewhat gentle horror anthology in the Amicus style was over when this was made. That it had to be some of the old Amicus talent – producer Milton Subotsky, director Roy Ward Baker, various actors – doing another Chetwynd-Hayes anthology to deliver this unwanted proof is rather sad.

In this context, I can’t even bring myself to make jokes about the film’s numerous failings – which still makes me funnier than the film’s jokes are – but let’s at least list some of them. There’s the terrible inclusion of the musical numbers in what feels like a desperate attempt at selling a soundtrack album nobody asked for that has no point, fits Ward Baker’s generally old-fashioned direction style not at all, and sucks the bits of interest out of the film the tediously told stories themselves couldn’t quite destroy. The film also shows a terrible fascination with the worst part of Chetwynd-Hayes as a writer: charting the various ways in which monsters might mate and giving the products idiotic names, categorizing things that can only suffer from too much categorization, as if the man were his own August Derleth. Even for someone like me who does enjoy a bit of hokeyness in his horror, this is just too much.

The actors are mostly wasted; the mugging contest between Carradine and Price is theoretically the film’s best feature, but the writing’s so terrible (script by Edward and Valeria Abraham), even the indefatigable Price seems to barely contain embarrassed giggles.

Well, at least somebody got some laughs out of this.

Past Misdeeds: Diary Of A Madman (1963)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section (like, for example, why I didn't even mention Guy de Maupassant's original story in this one).


France in the 19th Century. A group of mourners attend the burial of magistrate and hobby criminal psychologist Simon Cordier (Vincent Price). Cordier left the group his diary - of course containing the mandatory horrible truth - to explain some strange occurrences surrounding his last few months. Thus endeth the unnecessary framing device and the actual action (or what goes for it here) begins.

Cordier, as one of the men who had sentenced the murderer Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens) to death, is invited by Girot to visit him a few days before his execution. The murderer had always stated that he wasn't to blame for his deeds, but was coerced to them by an invisible, evil force that controlled him. Not surprisingly, Cordier never did believe this story, and isn't getting any less sceptical when Girot now repeats it. Alas, Girot is telling the truth, as his greenish glowing eyes when the ranting session turns violent only too clearly demonstrate.

Cordier manages to survive Girot's attack and knocks the man out. Afterwards, however, the magistrate's life turns strange. He can't stop thinking about what Girot told him; the killer's process files mysteriously appear on Cordier's desk; the locked-up portrait of the magistrate's long dead wife and child reappears at a place in his study where it hasn't hung for more than a decade. Eventually, a mocking voice out of nowhere (Joseph Ruskin) introduces itself to Cordier, and explains that it is an Horla, a creature from another dimension that feels drawn to evil - in Cordier's case his feeling of guilt for having (or only thinking to have, the film's not really clear about that) driven his wife to suicide after the death of their child, for which he held her responsible - and uses mind control to let the evildoers do more evil. Which, frankly, seems a bit unnecessary and a mite illogical, what with them supposedly being evil already. Now, if the film would explain that the Horla feeds on the darker human emotions, this whole thing would make a bit more sense, but Diary's script doesn't believe in doing things the sensible way.

To prove its point, the Horla puts the mind-whammy on Cordier and makes him crush his budgie to death. The very next day, the magistrate does the sort of logical thing people in horror films never do - and that seems quite out of place in a movie typically as thoughtless as this one - and visits a psychiatrist.

The Freud surrogate recommends Cordier to take some time off from his exhausting job, and spend some time sculpting as he had done when he was younger. It's a decent idea, really, or rather would be, if the Horla weren't an actual living being instead of a hallucination.

In his new life as an amateur artist, Cordier soon enough meets and is instantly smitten by artist model Odette Mallotte (Nancy Kovack). She's just trying to sell him a picture she modelled for, but instead  of buying it, he decides to hire her as a model for his first new work. What Cordier doesn't know is that Odette is married to the penniless painter Paul Duclasse (Chris Warfield). That's alright, though, because Odette would be perfectly willing to leave her husband for a richer one, especially one as malleable as Cordier seems to be. Unfortunately, the Horla has rather more unpleasant and violent ideas about what Cordier should do with Odette and Paul.

You'd think that a somewhat larger and somewhat more reputable studio like United Artists would have had no problems emulating the success of AIP's (and Roger Corman's) Poe adaptations, especially when they were willing to hire the star of these films, the greatest actor in horror film, Vincent Price. Alas, the studio heads must have somehow overlooked that the quality of the AIP films had quite a bit to do with Corman's enormous creative powers (and at that point in his career, his willingness to use them) and scripts that were written with actual intelligence and care.

In the place of the visionary Corman, UA set Reginald Le Borg, a director who had begun his career cranking out indifferent films of every genre for Universal, and went on to crank out equally indifferent TV jobs for the thankless grind of 50s TV. One can't help but suspect he worked cheap and fast, without that nasty habit of still trying to make a movie worth watching the Corman bubble had brought to AIP. "Indifferent" is also a fine word to describe Le Borg's work here. There's not exactly anything wrong with the man's direction; there is unfortunately, nothing right with it that exceeds pointing the camera in the right - though never an interesting -direction and having competent lighting, either. In not a single scene does the director seem interested in building a mood - be it a spooky one, an ambiguous one, or a dramatic, an exciting or a just plain entertaining one. The camera points, Le Borg shoots, and that's all. For some reason, he also lets his actors pretend the French currency is called "The Frank" (yep, just like the first name), because there's nothing that makes fake France more believable than not even trying to pronounce it (or any of the character names) right.

Fittingly, Robert E. Kent's script is just as indifferent, and badly structured too boot. Too many scenes are completely superfluous, or tend to run on long after they have expressed what they wanted to express (which never is much, anyhow).

The script's troubles begin with the utterly unnecessary framing device that might as well just not be there, for all that it matters to the proceedings, and continue into that most cardinal of all scripting sins: setting up interesting psychological circumstances for a protagonist and then deciding to just not do anything with them, because one would prefer some stiff operatics about a gold-digging woman, her painter husband and the woman who truly loves him. No, I have no idea why I should care about the painter's best friend/would-be wife either - the film certainly isn't telling me. It's all just a draggy mire of misused opportunities.


And - worst of all - not even acting hero Price seems to be immune to the air of boredom surrounding the film. He's not bad, mind you, he's just neither using his control of thespian nuance, nor his patented thoughtful overacting. The star is mostly just there, going through the motions, getting paid. I won't blame Price much for not giving a good performance here, though. Even the most enthusiastic actor can do only so much surrounded by people caring so little about the quality of the film they are making.

The Tingler (1959)

Somewhat, okay, majorly obsessed pathologist Dr Warren Chapin (Vincent Price) and his assistant David Morris (Darryl Hickman) are, when they aren’t just doing autopsies, hot on the heels of Chapin’s weird pet theory about something that grows along a person’s spine when they are in the grip of pure terror. In fact, Chapin is convinced that whatever this force - let’s call it “The Tingler”, why don’t we – may be, it can actually crack one’s spine quite easily.

We will soon enough learn the Tingler is some earworm-like thing that lives inside of every human body and grows to rather unpleasant size when a person is in terrible fear. The only thing that can loosen its grip around your spine is screaming. So, PSA: please scream a lot.

Complicating Chapin’s research and the plot is the William Castle typical hate/hate relationship between the scientist and his wife Isabel (Patricia Cutts), including the expected murder attempts, for in Castle movies marriage is the kind of hell that turns even the mild-mannered into wise-cracking murderers. Not helping anything is Chapin’s willingness to test his theories by dosing himself with that new-fangled drug known as LSD. Our protagonist’s acquaintance with a silent movie retro cinema owner named Ollie (Philip Coolidge) and his mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn), the latter of which rather tempts the good Doctor with her horrible aversion to blood and her inability…to scream, keep things even more lively.

The Tingler is certainly the goofiest of William Castle’s sort-of adult oriented features. This is after all the film that sees Vincent Price injecting himself with LSD and mugging himself adorably and admirably (as always) through a very bad trip, and that features an underarm-long big rubber earworm as its monster (of course to be wrestled by Price at one point). On the Castle gimmick front, it’s the movie where Castle apparently (or not) did some electrifying things to some cinema seats and that features a couple of scenes where the screen turns black and Price and a bunch of screamers encourage the audience to do the same, for the Tingler is right in the cinema with them.

Like most Castle films, inside of these parameters, this is actually a very well done low budget movie that zips along wonderfully from one scene to the next, and where every single scene contains at least one fun thing. As usual with the director The Tingler also looks rather great. Castle, at this point already an experienced hand who had learned his craft making studio films like the Whistler movies, is just very good at staging theoretically preposterous scenes of the macabre, using all the tricks German expressionism via noir had taught him while adding a sense of sardonic humour to the proceedings. So a scene like the murder of Martha which should be patently ridiculous is just great fun to watch, feeling, as does Ollie’s final fate, a bit like an EC comic come to life without the ultra violence. Castle is often a genuinely imaginative and clever director too, in the finale creatively intercutting the silent movie Tol’able David (I have no idea) with the Tingler business going on in the cinema.


Plus, one has to admire the pure chutzpa with which Castle integrates a movie theatre into the plot so to be better able to sell his gimmick. But then, I cannot believe anyone could watch this and not love Castle at least a little bit for it.

House of 1,000 Dolls (1967)

Original title: La casa de las mil muñecas/Das Haus der tausend Freuden

Tangiers, Spain, I mean Morocco. After a friend of him is murdered while looking for his kidnapped girlfriend, who he suspects has fallen into the hands of white slavers and brought to Tangiers, US criminal pathologist Stephen Armstrong (George Nader) takes it on himself to solve the case. Stephen doesn’t think much of the efforts of the local police under Inspector Emil (Wolfgang Kieling), though he will eventually learn that the good Inspector is rather more clever than he gives him credit for.

Of course, the fiendish plan the white slaver operation and their mysterious unseen mastermind, the King of Hearts, use to grab unwilling young women for Tangiers’ House of 1,0000 Dolls (winner of the price for the creepiest brothel name three times in a row), is so absurd no sensible policeman would expect it. For the syndicate has acquired the services of stage magician Felix Manderville (Vincent Price) and his assistant Rebecca (Martha Hyer). Manderville finishes his shows by letting a (young, pretty, and female) audience member disappear; and sometimes they really disappear, getting knocked out and shipped off in coffins to Tangiers. It’s so stupid a plan, it is understandable it can only be uncovered by an American tourist like Stephen.

House of 1,000 Dolls, directed by Jeremy Summers (apparently a hard-working TV director with a handful of low budget genre movies to his credit) and Hans Billian (mostly involved with German softcore porn and assorted genres) is a Spanish-German co-production managed by the German Constantin Film, apparently with some involvement by AIP as well as Harry Alan Towers. It was mostly shot in Spain, which provides a lot of rather attractive locations shots that don’t look terribly like Morocco but also don’t terribly not look like Morocco.

It’s a bit of a mess of a film, working from a script that borrows elements of the Eurospy film, and the German Krimi in its Edgar Wallace adaptation guise and adds some very mild titillation of the bikini girls in peril getting whipped type. To make things more commercially viable, the film throws in the typically boring George Nader – who was semi-big in Germany thanks to playing FBI agent Jerry Cotten in a series of adaptations of German Heftromane starring the character (rather neutered pulps, more or less) – and a not terribly excited looking Vincent Price for star power. On paper, the film should be rather awesome, but its pacing is sluggish, and many of the scenes seem completely random, as if the writers had just added bits of the different genres they were plundering without any care for connectivity.

Which wouldn’t be all that bad – and even par for the course for Eurospy films - if these random bits were all as awesome as the incredibly stupid plan of the bad guys, the neat little intro scene concerning Pricean shenanigans in a funeral parlour, or the straight-facedly bizarre sequence where two of the girls make a break for it (in high heels and underwear, obviously), but there’s rather a lot of filler, investigation scenes that go nowhere fast, and a script that assumes an audience cares for the identity of a criminal mastermind it never sees doing anything (a mistake the German krimis whose criminal masterminds were visibly active even when they were not visible never made).


It’s not a terrible film, mind you. Price is obviously a joy even when he’s only picking up a pay check, and at least the whole thing looks and sounds good.

Three Films Make A Post: WARNING: If you've ever been hypnotized, do not come alone!

Devil in the Dark (2017): Tim Brown’s film concerns two estranged brothers trying to rebuild bridges by going on a camping trip in an area that has a dark connection to something strange that happened to the younger brother when they were children. Something monstrous has been calling to them.

This is one of these perfectly decent, competently realized horror films that just never manage to truly capture anything dark, interesting, or insightful, plodding along well enough through its running time without ever hitting the right spot that would turn the film exciting in any way, shape or form. In this particular case, I’d argue this would have been a better film if it had started from where it stops and went onwards from there (probably with strategic flashbacks), because the last minute or so actually does manage to capture the imagination.

The Creature Below (2016): This British Lovecraftian indie is not as slick as Devil in the Dark but felt much more interesting than the US film. While the story isn’t particularly original when you know your Lovecraft pastiches, there aren’t terribly many long-form films going that way. Director Stewart Sparke manages to tell a tale of cosmic horror on a personal scale, trusting in a good performance of lead Anna Dawson to portray her character’s slow descent into properly Lovecraftian madness. There’s some awkwardness with a not exactly ideal sound mix, the special effects aren’t always great (unless in those moments when they absolutely are), and the verbatim quotes from HPL in the dialogue don’t really work, but these aren’t exactly show stoppers in indie horror of the really independent sort. Otherwise, the film is atmospheric and flows well and even ends on a high note in one of its best shot scenes. Okay, and on iffy CGI, but I didn’t find myself caring about that at all.

House of Wax (1953): André de Toth’s film is probably the best wax figure cabinet horror movie ever made (which is actually a surprisingly strong field as sub-sub-genres go), featuring as it does silly 3D gimmicks, what is one of the founding – and thoroughly great - performances of Vincent Price’s career as a horror actor (I do count his radio performances, nit pickers), an early larger – and pleasantly creepy - outing for Charles Bronson before he took that name, comic relief that is often not terribly odious, a wrily presented sense of the macabre, and a use of colour in a period set horror film that to me seems to prefigure things like Corman’s Poe cycle or the part of the Italian gothics that were shot in colour.

De Toth being de Toth, there’s also quite a bit of barely suppressed subtext concerning eroticism and male obsession with an imaginary ideal (potentially sublimated into art) that really shouldn’t work with the gimmicky nature of the kind of cinema that uses ping pong balls swirling at the camera to really prove its 3D merits but does.

Cry of the Banshee (1970)

Welcome to 17th Century England! And you know what that means by now. Right, it’s witch hunting time. Our witch hunter of the night is one Lord Edward Whitman (of course Vincent Price), sadistic maniac and father to a family that’s already seen as at least a bit cursed by everyone around before the plot even begins. Regular murder and torture of harmless pagans (because this is one of these movies where a witch cult did indeed exist but consisted of pretty damn lame ersatz hippies) is a bit of a family sport too, for Edward’s son Sean (Stephan Chase) is his dad’s main henchman and clearly just as unhinged as the elder Whitman.

Sean likes himself a bit of rape on the side too, and doesn’t even keep away from his stepmother, Lady Patricia (Ess Persson). After what we can suspect but don’t exactly know to be only the first rape of many, Patricia is heavily traumatized, with the house’s groom Roderick (Patrick Mower), a mysterious foundling with a strange power over animals, the only man she still feels safe with. Before she was destroyed in this way, Patricia was one of the few household members who didn’t approve of the regular dose of violence and torture for dinner (I’m not speaking metaphorically). Now it’s only Whitman’s daughter Maureen (Hilary Dwyer) who disapproves, though not too loudly, and she’s easily distracted by a love affair with Roderick.

However, just about at the time when Edward’s other son Harry (Carl Rigg) - who also doesn’t exactly approve of his family’s inherent violence – returns home, the witch hunter finally messes with the wrong witch. Breaking up a gathering (I think it’s supposed to be more like a harmless hippie orgy, but it’s just too harmless to even call it an orgy) of the followers of priestess Oona (Elizabeth Bergner), he lets his men murder about half of them, sparing the life of the rest for reasons the script never makes us privy to but that just might have to do with the plot really needing to get going any minute now.

And wouldn’t you know it, a few hours later, Oona and the rest of her people are suddenly all into Lord Satan and beg him to send them an avenger. Turns out Roderick is one of the Good Folk, or something, and only needs a bit of magical convincing to give that damn family what for.

If all this sounds rather convoluted and circumspect, with a lot of elements that don’t quite make sense, and many an idea that is never quite properly developed, then you’ve got the right picture of Cry of the Banshee. And oh, the titular banshee is of course more a sort-of werewolf, too. Everything’s very vague, very convoluted and never makes as much sense as it probably would like to. Parts of the film (whose end credits list the Whitman’s as “The Establishment”, I kid you not) are clearly meant to convey some sort of message about contemporary youth revolt, probably something like “don’t burn those harmless hippies, or they’ll turn evil” but it’s neither coherent in what it wants to say nor very imaginative in the way it does so. Parts of the film feel like a dry run for the following year’s brilliant Blood on Satan’s Claw but the only actual relation between those two is a historical and thematic parallel, because Cry of the Banshee never really seems to know what kind of film it actually wants to be, with the deeply unpleasant rape and torture scenes and Vincent Price probably the commercial reasons for its existence, thanks to the much more successful (in any sense of the word) The Conqueror Worm from a few years earlier.

Yes, it’s AIP trying to cash in on its own successes again, and like it was with the late Poe adaptations, they left the mess to Gordon Hessler to direct. As happened so often in that man’s career, the resulting film is a prettily (but not too prettily) shot mess with single scenes that belong in a much better film and which suggest Hessler could have made much more of himself than the hired gun he ended up being. Like most Hessler films I’ve seen, things start out promising, with the effective cruelty of the beginning, the actually horrifying rape scene, and Vincent Price giving a kind of greatest hits performance of Evil Vincent Price. The middle act however is a boring drag full of scenes that are re-establishing things the film already established before, and a plot that seems to be treading water in an attempt to somehow get this thing to full length, until the people involved seem to wake up again for a finale as cruel and bleak as only horror movie endings in the 70s were.

From time to time, there’s a good scene in the middle part too. Lady Patricia’s death is an obvious highlight, as is some throwaway business about weeping women that establishes more about the times the film takes place in and Edward’s character than half an hour of the rest of the film did. On the other hand, the film’s pagans/witches are probably the worst mixture of people who look like they don’t even have the guts to be proper hippies making whiny noises while throwing their hands up in the universal gesture for “whoosh, I am lame” imaginable, and don’t become any better or different when they turn vengeful, whining at poor Lord Satan for all they’re worth. It’s too bad, really, for there are two good horror movies – one about a family fucked up even for a horror movie family and one about the whole establishment versus hippies as told by witch hunt metaphors thing – lurking under the surface of Cry of the Banshee.

None of them does ever really come out, though.

Return of the Fly (1959)

After the unhappy death of his mother, Philippe Delambre's (Brett Halsey) uncle Francois (Vincent Price) finally tells the young man the truth about the mysterious death of his father, fly head and all, as seen in The Fly. The whole fly head business would rather explain Philippe's phobia of flies, one assumes. Instead of following Francois's warnings to not follow in his dad's footsteps in Tampering in God's Domain™ - or words to that effect - Philippe now decides to go all out and finish the experiments his father started.

It makes sense, too, for Delambre senior did after all invent a fully functioning matter transmitter, not a thing to sneeze at even when it is not safe to use on organic matter. Amazon drones are nothing compared to it. Not that anyone involved with film would have noticed. Unfortunately, Philippe partners with the wrong guy. Alan Hinds (David Frankham) turns out not only to be that most horrible of things, British(!), but also a gangster out to steal the Delambre family invention.

Of course, when Philippe realizes all is not well with his supposed friend and partner, he soon ends up in his own matter transmitter, sharing the space with a fly the rather nasty Alan deposits there. A fly person rampage ensues, and it falls on the shoulders of Francois and a Inspector Beecham (John Sutton) to save the young man-fly.

Where other reviewers seem to see Return of the Fly as some kind of insult to the original movie (I can't help but ask myself if they've seen a different original movie than I have, for the first Fly isn’t exactly a deep work of art either), to me Edward Bernds's movie is a fine example of how to use a miniscule budget well, if not ambitiously.

The plot is of course very silly, but then, show me a SF/horror movie of this era – or really any era - where that's not a given. The screenplay does turn the silliness of the proceedings into a well-paced and tight little film of the kind that knows what you can do on a limited scope and how to do it well. From time to time, it even manages to suggest a bit more complexity to its characters than generally typical of its time and place, and adds some mildly macabre flourishes to spice things up, like making "Alan"'s criminal middle man a mortician (cue fun and games with a coffin and a sheeted body, because there’s nothing horror movies love to play around with than death). It's not much, but it does provide the film with character and suggests a degree of imagination beyond the obvious “oh hey, let’s make a Fly sequel”.

I'm also quite happy with every film from the 50s that does neither feature a square-jawed hero (here, we get Vincent Price and a rather sober cop instead), nor a monotonous off-screen narrator, nor the traditional icky romance. There is a bit of the latter here, though the romance isn't icky, and it's not used as filler to additionally frighten the audience with horrifying ideas about men and women.

As a further attraction, there's Vincent Price in one of his always appreciated good guy outings, a situation Price always seemed to relish quite a bit, with Return of the Fly no exception. Though really, Price made the impression of relishing whatever he did in most of his films, far from the bored kind of performances you’d get out of – say – Christopher Lee more often than not.

Here, Price is in fact the film's true hero, and Price admirer that I am, it would need a film to be much less competent and entertaining than Return of the Fly is to turn me off.

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On WTF: Diary Of A Madman (1963)

If there's one rule, one law, one order you can hold onto in this sad and tragic little life, then it's the superiority of Vincent Price over all other horror actors. Never did he give a bored performance, never did he just appear and cash in his cheque. Or so I thought, before watching Reginald Le Borg's Diary Of A Madman, a film so full of indifference even the glorious Mister Price was infected by it.

If you want to hear the details of my painful experience with this one (and who doesn't want to read me suffer?), please head on over to WTF-Film.

 

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The Mad Magician (1954)

After having spent the last few years of his working life making props for other people's stage shows in the employment of the rather nasty Mister Ormond (Donald Randolph), Don Gallico (Vincent Price) is finally beginning to make his life's dream of a career as a stage magician come true. He's got a charming assistant in Karen Lee (Mary Murphy), a gimmick imitating famous other magicians built on his ability to make life-like masks, and a thrilling new trick called "The Lady and the Buzzsaw", so nothing can go wrong.

Unfortunately, Don isn't much of a businessman and doesn't realized that whatever he creates while still in the employ of Ormond - say a sensational new trick - belongs to Ormond. Ormond, being the nice chap he is, waits with telling this to Don until right before the saw is supposed to buzz.

After that fiasco, Don continues to work for Ormond until they get into an argument that goes into a few more of the very peculiar problems between the two men, like the fact that Ormond stole Don's wife (Eva Gabor) years ago and is now unhappily married to her. One might ask why Don is still working for the guy, but that would mean putting much more thought into the film than the people making it did.

Anyway, two men are having a row, there's a convenient buzzsaw nearby, so of course Don uses it to kill Ormond. And of course this won't be the magician's only murder. He does, after all, have a tendency to do rather silly things like lose Ormond's head, and walks around masked as the people he has killed, making himself much more problems this way as he would have if his victims just disappeared. Still, it takes the combined intellects of Karen, her cop boyfriend (Patrick O'Neal) and the mystery writer Mrs Prentiss (Lenita Lane) - into whose pension he has moved in in his Ormond disguise for no good reason at all - to catch Don.

If you have seen Vincent Price in 1953's much superior House of Wax, you can imagine what kind of thoughts must have led to the creation of The Mad Magician. These movies would of course be the inspirations for a long row of films about mild-mannered artiste types losing their minds and getting bloodthirsty to which beloved hero of the house Vincent Price lent his remarkable talents.

Alas, The Mad Magician is neither a House of Wax nor an Abominable Doctor Phibes. Old workhorse John Brahm's direction is just a bit too pedestrian, with nary a flourish of creativity on display. Brahm doesn't even attempt to built the Gothic mood of dread and doom the film would require to work, and instead goes for a style that probably could have worked for a script that was more of an actual mystery instead of the random conglomeration of nonsense the one for the film turns out to be.

Not much in that script makes any sense at all. Gallico's masquerading as his dead victims isn't even explained as an attempt to distract from their being dead, and most of the plotting and characterisation just come over as lazy (even in the context of a cheap early 50s horror film), quite as if writer Crane Wilbur had had to deliver three set pieces and didn't care at all about putting any thought into connecting them.

Given how shoddy and underdeveloped much of the writing feels, I still have to give Wilbur and Brahm credit for the amount of agency and competence the female characters - or at least Karen and Mrs. Prentiss, Claire being the usual femme fatale - are allowed to have. It is, after all, they who solve the murders and even safe cop boyfriend's life during the final punch-out, something that just wasn't done in US movies of the 50s. Men in the film are either morally corrupt, mad, or utterly ineffectual. I vaguely remember the gender roles in the also Wilbur-written The Bat (also with Price as the bad guy) to have been similar, which could make Wilbur's work as a director and writer something worthy of further exploration for me.

Then there is Vincent. Price is in his element in a role like this and does his typical ultra-nuanced over-acting, even if the script doesn't give him as much to work with here as one would wish for. He builds up his character's softer side as much as possible and makes him as sympathetic as he is able to, and then goes into his (few) mad outbreaks with true relish, like a kettle that finally blows. It is even a bit creepy (in a feel that decidedly lacks in creepiness in every other aspect) to watch how Gallico's confidence grows with every murder he commits, as if growing strength of character and growing moral abhorrence were intrinsically entwined in his case. That idea doesn't seem so much to be part of the script as something Price develops alone through his performance. It's quite a thing to watch.

Alas, to get at the core of Price's performance, the surprising female characters, or the handful of moments of acceptable silliness, one has to slog through many a pedestrian sequence. It was still worth it for me, but less patient viewer's mileage will vary.

 

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