Son of Ingagi (1940), by Richard C. Kahn

*

1930 saw the debut of Ingagi, a sewn-together cinematic mess of stock footage and staged vignettes which serves as a good contender for the title of the first Mondo movie. Technically the Mondo genre started in 1962 with Mondo cane, but Ingagi carried the usual Mondo motifs: a fraudulent "true story" premise; copious stock footage; animal violence (according to some accounts); and, of course, real human exploitation. I've always felt wary of Mondo movies because, while they are technically from the same kingdom of being as the other exploitation movies I watch, it's sort of like saying that a cat is in the same class as an octopus or a spider. Like. Mondo movies feature real animal death, real human death--both caused on occasion by the filmmakers (caused often, I should say, in the case of the former). Mondo filmmakers have participated in human trafficking to make their movies. Ingagi typified that by having its primary selling point be a supposedly real sequence wherein an African tribe marries their women off to the titular Ingagi, a larger-than-average gorilla. They then proceed to beget gorilla-human hybrids, represented by black children with fur glued to their faces. All fake, with gorilla suits and everything. But presented to an audience who wanted it to be true, to confirm their ugly beliefs as authentic.

Ingagi is mostly lost today and that's probably a good thing. I say "mostly lost," because there are at least two prints said to remain in existence, and the film has enough demand where those prints may once be used to spare the film before they degrade beyond repair. But in my opinion, it should be presently exclusively as a historical document--a significant part of the history of exploitation cinema, and, similarly, an artifact of erroneous beliefs on race that were spawned by prejudicial and hateful social conditions. I'm thinking something rather like the DVD release for the Warner Bros. censored shorts. They could be respectful about it even while realizing there's no way to be perfectly respectful.

I'm not here to talk about Ingagi, however, because like 99.999999% of the living human race of the present, I haven't seen it. I'm here to see a film which, at first glance, must seem like a sequel to Ingagi. Unless there's something I don't know about, the two films are unrelated, at least as far as plot continuity goes. Think of Son of Ingagi instead as the anti-Ingagi--a movie which, instead of being a slander against black people, is created by and produced for the benefit of black people. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that this was the purpose behind Son of Ingagi's creation, during the period of the segregated "race films"--some accounts suggest the opposite, that Son of Ingagi was made to celebrate Ingagi, which, like many jungle films of the time, was appreciated by black audiences. It's possible that both are true. It's possible to be a fan of something and yet want to do it better.

Let me tell you, the cast and crew of Son of Ingagi did it do it better. Whatever Ingagi looks like, Son of Ingagi is more riveting and compelling than whatever was put to film in that 1930 outset. Son of Ingagi is a manic mess to rival the weirdest and lousiest of the Monogram '40s pictures. It is a fun fantasy thriller and you really shouldn't miss out on it.

We open with the wedding of Bob and Eleanor Lindsay, and one of their guests is Dr. Helen Jackson. Jackson is a miserly woman who is extraordinarily wealthy but refuses to pay her lawyer, Bradshaw, more than $5 per session, even when he writes out her will. Her will, incidentally, is made out to the Lindsays, because for all her bitterness Jackson is mostly lonely at heart, and was charmed by their decision to invite her to the celebrations. She was also friends with Eleanor's parents, and helped them marry. This will become important later; first we have to learn about Dr. Jackson's trip to Africa. A visit from her thieving brother Zeno reveals that not only did Jackson steal a fortune in gold from several countries of the continent while adventuring out there, and she's also brought something a bit more animate from back there: the implicitly titular Son of Ingagi, N'Gina, a half-man half-ape represented by, no joke, a guy in a ski mask with fur taped to his sleeves. (Interesting that "N'Gina" is a near-acronym of "Ingagi.") N'Gina is used as Jackson's private enforcer while she perfects a scientific formula of some kind which is the conclusion of her work. It seems N'Gina drinks the potion, which causes him to go berserk and kill the good doctor. Unfortunately, it does sound pretty suspicious for Jackson to suddenly amend her will to feature two strangers as the sole beneficiaries, just days or hours before her mysterious and violent murder. Between the police, the Lindsays, and Zeno, N'Gina has a lot of people he wants to kill. Will our couple get their happy ending...or will they find themselves the victim of a horrible monster?

This movie is defined in a lot of ways by the quality of its performances, and indeed, there are a lot of different types of performers on display here. There's a brief cut, during an amusing scene where the wedding party decides to crash the Lindsays' wedding night (!!!), to a performance by a swing/jazz group called the Four Toppers. If their music doesn't say "the beginning of rock and roll" I don't know what does, and they're amazing to see in action. I know that the origin of rock is an intense debate, but the genre wouldn't exist without black people and "race music"; race music in a race film. Most of the musical culture we take for granted in America was created by black people, to be frank, and there is really just something about this performance which prefigures rock in a way that I haven't seen before in any early '40s music I've heard...anyway, I digress. The Four Toppers are awesome, and they bring even more class to already classy cast.

Laura Bowman as Dr. Jackson is especially great. I want to look for more of her movie appearances. She is simultaneously cheesy and wooden, and it works well for the prototypical '40s mad scientist, in a very Bela Lugosi sort of way. She brings us a particularly artistic scene in the film, which is, incidentally, her death scene. When N'Gani closes in on her, we cut back towards the cool, calculated face of the ape-man, and her wide, panicked eyes. It's a little silly-looking, but as he strangles the doctor an inkwell falls from her desk and spills out--resembling nothing less than blood in black and white. It's a clever way of having a bloody death in a necessarily-bloodless film. (Thanks, Hays Code.)

Once again, I wish I knew more of the origins of this movie, and how the thinking came about for the title. I've always liked movies that are cash-ins/sequels/fan-films which also criticize the movie they're based off of. Is Son of Ingagi some sort of meta thing for Ingagi? Or was it played straighter than I anticipated? (Generally the film is ruled out as a sequel, for at no point is it suggested that N'Gani is a gorilla-human hybrid, a literal Son of the gorilla Ingagi--the general implication is that he's the missing link, meaning he is more of an evolutionary throwback.) I've found no production details on this film whatsoever, nor have I been able to divine the true relationship Ingagi had to black audiences of the '30s and '40s. Someone help me out! Sometimes the most beguiling thing about B-movies of this vintage is that we know nothing about them. But I want to change that. There's got to be something of interest here.

Movies like Son of Ingagi laid for the ground for movies like Sugar Hill and other blaxploitation films. I am fascinated by these race films of the '30s and '40s, not merely for their role in the history of blaxploitation. I also feel like they stand as a statement of important history in our country; as soon as there was film, there were people of color working on it as eagerly and skillfully as their white counterparts. Watching these movies calls up many similarities to other films I've seen from the Golden Age of Hollywood--and it really makes me wonder. I don't claim to be immune to perpetuating racism; I am white and have white privilege. I fight against racism, however, because I am faced persecution of my own and I know it's not right to let that happen to others. And so, fellow white people, when I see movies like these, I see how undeniable it is that black people are just like us. For someone to be unable to see black people as having the same qualities and thoughts and feelings as us white people, while also preserving a vital difference and diversity, is incomprehensible to me. Once, I was worried that showing off these cheap movies would be racist; I would be celebrating movies that showed nadirs of talent, which would surely count as poor representation. But in my mind, movies that are wrought with cheapness, and mistakes, show another dimension, a positive one, to the imagination, ambition, and talent of filmmakers. It shows a tenacity to not give up despite budget limitations; it shows people having fun with their friends. Anyone who sees these films and takes them as justification for barriers between people of different races is in the wrong. Trash is universal; everyone can make it. And we humans--we make it so good.

* This title card's improper cropping is a fault in the YouTube version of the film, not my version of the image. This is due to a fault in the print scan used for the video.

The Monogram Monograph: Part I

Karl Colomb Kessler always had such difficulty believing that this was a real psychiatrist's office, and not due to the issues that brought him here. Long ago he had surmised that there was too much optimism in this post-War period. During the War, people were less naive, and would disbelieve that, in the long run of things, very little progress had been made in the field of psychology, comparatively. Long ago they had imprisoned people in Bedlam—a name now so infamous it was synonymous with Hell. While he was certain it was merely his usual luck that brought him here and not an inevitability in the offices of the help he needed, he saw Kessler as the last ghost of the infamous hospital at its absolute worst. He had no idea whether or not Dr. Dran had intentionally smeared gasoline or some other such fluid over the bare bulb that lit the grungy room they sat in. Gas was expensive, even after the end of rationing, and evidently light-bulbs, good ones at least, were expensive too. Whatever was on that bulb made the whole room gasoline-orange where there was light, and there wasn't much light to speak of.

The orange light made everything look like a nightmare. A Halloween nightmare, where one is out trick-or-treating and the streets are pinched too tight...and none of the houses are lit. It's just you, all alone in the dark, but with the magic of the night still in the air. Halloween will never leave you, until midnight strikes and November 1^st begins. So it's not good to be alone and vulnerable on the holiday's streets after the sun goes down.

The bent, warped, too-cramped look of the room was replicated on the face of Oliver Dran. His face flickered like a caricature on a jack-o-lantern of a washed-up horror film star. He was more like a lamp in the night than a man. He was hard to take seriously in both his poverty and his appearance. And yet all the same he had helped him make great progress on his dreams. He could leave the house for things besides his appointments; he could wait in public without crying or choking himself. He could get out of bed in the mornings. There was just one problem they kept running into: Oliver refused to give ground and confess that there had once been a Virginia.

That was where they were today. Kessler couldn't have had anything but a bad day thus far. His work day had gone poorly, and it had done nothing less than break down that which he'd built up. This sort of mess, the one in his head, was cyclical, and yet unpredictable—ups and downs were something everyone had, but to stumble into the Marianas Trench from the peak of Everest was different. Sometimes he remembered things like long-term career goals, and forgot the grinding chittering pain that came from the haunt of failure. He was no longer fully crippled—though it was still a fitting term in a sense. Times were shaping up and even if it was still all just like being thrown in Bedlam, piss on the floor and maggots in the bread,¹ “cripple” was becoming a bad word, and that was good. It was used all the time as an insult, so much that its neutrality was in constantly question, at least to him. And yet he was familiar with the feeling of watching dreams float by like clouds. A useless hobby after a certain age. From those who brought him the embarrassment that made him sob and made them all call him “goddamn loonie” he'd learned that a certain vital essence faded after too many years of neglect of the self. The ego was a hungry bitch, at the heels, begging for scraps, and biting you if you let it go hungry for too long.

He knew all this, and yet the walls were still up too high. He was here, trapped in a state that stoned their damn cripples, under a gasoline-orange light besides a caricature on a pumpkin. Talking about Virginia, and not even remembering what went wrong today, or what his job was.

“Let's go over your family again. Do you want that? It would be as per Dr. Freud's theories...”

“No.” The room bent and warped like old wood under rain.

“Again, it would stand to reason that you would desire a strong feminine presence in your life,” Dr. Dran said frankly. “You lacked a mother to raise you. You were abandoned at birth, the illegitimate child of a burglar by the name of Clarence Clancy Clementine.”

“And he incidentally chose to give me my alliterative name in mockery of the cruelty of his own,” Kessler whispered. “So Virginia is not my wife, but my mother?”

“Perhaps.”

“We've been at this too long for 'perhaps.'” His tone was tired.

“Maybe then Virginia is another of your selves. Another of the inhabitants of your head, Karl.” His tone was accusative.

Kessler tensed up. He knew that the answer was in yet another dream-therapy session—but he didn't want to go under when Oliver was agitated, in case his feelings affected how he treated Kessler in such a vulnerable state. He was a short-tempered man and, in some sense, he was all that Kessler had. A cheap office meant cheap bills. Wherever it was that he worked (for all it mattered), it did not pay well. Probably because of his condition. He did have to call out sick quite often.

“So you say I have a feminine side.”

“We all do, Karl.”

“But I am a man. I am sure of that. And all of the other me's, which the walls keep away from me, they're all men, too. Emil Nardo, Frederick Brenner. Dr. Melcher.” His voice slipped over that last name a bit.

“Yes, the Good Doctor,” Dran said. “And his two...alter egos.”

“Yes, in the classical sense. Nardo and Brenner are like Melcher's doubles, like Poe's 'William Wilson'...or else disguises.”

“Your adversary had disguises, doubles...all alternate versions of himself. And in turn, alternate versions of you.”

“Yes. Because the walls keep Me fragmented.”

Dr. Dran clicked his pen. “I write 'Walls' in capital letters in my notebook, Mr. Kessler.”

“Well, don't.”

“Why?”

“Capital letters mean something is special. Don't give the Walls any more power than they deserve.” And he realized how he'd pronounced “Walls.” “Oh, goddamnit.”

“You know, walls can be good, Karl. They can keep us safe sometimes. We all have them.”

“But I know these Walls aren't the good kind. They were not part of my...of the...original Creation.”

The horrible face frowned. “The Creation? Now it sounds like we're getting in Biblical territory. Angels and demons.”

Kessler sighed. There was no calming Dran now. He would just have to put himself in the hands of fate, and hope that Dran would accept the honesty of his dreams and their meanings, where he would not listen to his waking self.

But they were going in circles again, as they always did. That was the truth he was afraid to face; this was a room for realizing such truths, and he was always alone when he made realizations. Once more they built Walls between them. Once more they would see the same men they always saw: Frederick Brenner, high-voiced and kindly-seeming but a deadly killer; Dr. Melcher, a Nazi and butcher of flesh, monstrous in all forms, the king of the three; and Emil Nardo, a savage, skeletal mobster, also a Nazi, his face crossed by long vertical lines, his eyes nearly triangular and his teeth cut to scraggly points. They each had stories, and these stories were what kept Kessler saying the same things over and over again, to each identical customer that passed the front of his square and standard desk. (That was what he did for work!)

He knew every inch of the stories of the dreams at this point. Sometimes it was obvious where the dreams spawned the fears and anxieties of his waking life, but on other occasions they just didn't mesh. They seemed part of an external context, a sequence of events from outside, like movies were. He knew the stories of the movies of his dreams.

Frederick Brenner had once managed a homeless shelter in the Bowery neighborhood of New York, using it as a front to recruit people for a gang that he ran. On top of that, he employed a former scientist who knew the secrets of life and death—apparently the money from his criminal profits were used to fund research on creating zombies. (Each of these dreams were in black and white, he and Dran had determined, and each seemed pass roughly an hour.) Then there was Nardo, who began life merely as a stage magician, until he was discovered to be a valuable agent for the Nazis. When he turned to being boss of a gang of Nazis, he had a couple of run-ins with a gang of boys from the East Side of New York, who undid his plans that involved faking hauntings for various purposes. Dr. Melcher, then, started off a mysterious killer of American industrialists. His motives were unknown until slowly it transpired that he had been affiliated with the Nazis, and served as a plastic surgeon operating on members of the Black Dragon Society, turning these Japanese agents into white men. The Dragons betrayed him and threw him in prison, though he kept his surgical tools; using these he had traded places with one of the dream-selves Kessler had of himself, a prisoner of the Black Dragons called Colomb. That dream ended with Colomb being killed by the Black Dragons, while the evil Melcher roamed free with his name and face, taking vengeance on the Dragons one by one but with a plundered face.

And that was the hitch they kept trying to figure out. Karl really was all of these men. Brenner had another name, Karl Wagner, who was a good husband and law-abiding citizen when he wasn't down in the Bowery. He remembered Nardo's career as a magician, a legitimate one, until he was slowly twisted by need and hate into Emil Nardo, thumb-breaker and enemy of democracy. And of course he had been Colomb.

In many of the dreams he was Charles Kessler, a kindly man whose wife had run away from him. But he still saw her, and seeing her overwhelmed mind...whenever her face struck his eyes, he would be compelled to go out...and kill...

He woke up loving the woman whose face brought that impulse to him. He knew her, and she had been his. But at the same time, the loneliness of her absence was enough to begin filling his mind with mental illness's archetypical voices. The quiet but forceful urges to make the dreams happen in reality. It was hatred for that loneliness; and hatred against the self for hearing the voices. For letting the voices come over him and make him abnormal.

Here he was, summarizing them as if they were movies. He even had titles for some of these films. Bowery at Midnight for Brenner/Wagner. Emil Nardo was captured in Spooks Run Wild and Ghosts On the Loose (named for the ghosts he faked as part of his Axis missions). And Melcher/Colomb was from Black Dragons. Charles Kessler was the subject of Invisible Ghost, which had been ripe for interpretation—Dran reasoned, probably correctly, that “Charles” was the “true” Kessler, as shown by sharing his surname, and therefore Kessler considered himself an “invisible ghost” of some kind...likely a social one, hidden away by the impulses of his illness.

Anyway. He had meant to focus on the fact that Virginia had been real.

She had to have been. He was a creative man but he hadn't ever known a woman like her; he couldn't carve her smile or make up her laugh. He had only forgotten her eyes, but that was a small price to pay to remember the rest of her. She broke his repetition. She was always fresh and new and promising unknown adventures.

To have one's mind and friends and family and coworkers all say that one's wife wasn't real was too much. He needed help.

He closed his eyes. All this had passed in a moment, and now, Oliver Dran cleared his throat to propose another hypnotism session, to again look back at the faces of the triumvirate, or to strangle Virginia and everyone else as Charles. And to remember the thing that appeared at the end of every dream. The Monogram.

The Monogram was a combined symbol, “A” and “B” on top of each other, in what Dran had perplexingly called a syzygy. It always appeared for a single moment, a single frame, at the end of the dreams. As if it was the name of the company that produced his dreams. In a metaphorical way, he figured it was his mind knowing the answer but only telling him in code. Such was the way of dreams, as per stereotype and all else.

Karl wasn't an artist by even the farthest stretches of his fevered imagination, but he'd tried to draw what he'd seen all the same, on a napkin in a diner one hazy early morning:

Not a good drawing at all. Not in any world of an infinitely variable Existence.

But it was a representation of what he saw, right down to the stars at the border. “A” and “B.” Any letter could mean anything; that was the premise of algebra and literature alike. But it was the key, and he just needed to find a way to turn it.

Before Dran could speak, Kessler turned his head and spoke hurriedly: “Oliver, I'm sorry, but I think I would like to look at an alternative provider.”

Dran froze, his eyebrows narrowing. “Fine. I'll write you a recommendation. The number for my associate, Dr. Dexter.”

“First name?”

Dran didn't reply, at least to that. “He is another dream-hypnotist—but he is the man who taught me.”

“What was his name again?”

Dran growled. “Dr. Dexter.”

Kessler's mind flashed back to something he was sure had reality to it: “Wasn't there was a Dr. Dexter who...subjected himself to inter-species hormone transplants? He began to transform into some sort of ape-man, or something similar...”

“That sounds like merely one of your dreams, Mr. Kessler. Please take this note—call upon me again only if it is a matter of grave importance.”

Before Kessler knew it, a psychiatric relationship of some years came to a close. He was in the sprawling gray hallway of the apartment complex for Dran's now-locked office.

He was trying to remember where he had heard the name Dexter. Another name was coming back to him now, at light-speed: another doctor, James—James Brew—

“Agh!”

The interruption jarred the thought loose, and his long hours of sleeplessness made the name slip away from him. The interruption was a man who appeared suddenly before him. He had an inoffensive look to him, being somewhat short. What was more was that he was scrawny, with thick spectacles and an unseemly mustache. He was grinning eagerly at the sight of Kessler.

“I'm Mr. Marvel,” he said.

<< Prologue                                                                                                                        Part II >>

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1. In Bedlam (more properly Bethlehem Royal Hospital), there was an emphasis on vegetable-poor diets due to beliefs in humorism at the time, along with infections spreading as a result of chaffing from restraints. Patients would become further traumatized and physically emaciated as a result of this; doomed in many cases never to recover. Conditions such as these, with elaborations from 20^th Century technology and “sensibility,” are still employed in hospitals designed to ostensibly cure patients with autistic disorders and or who are homosexuals. - Dr. Kruthers

Book Club of Desolation #13: Frankenstein's Tower (1957), by Jean-Claude Carriere

OKAY AFTER THIS I PROMISE I WILL STOP TALKING ABOUT FRANKENSTEIN

I'd heard about Jean-Claude Carriere's Frankenstein series about ten years ago--before I was published a couple times by Black Coat Press, I read the entirety of their sister site, Cool French Comics, to stay up to date on all the remarkably neat characters dreamed up by the European pulp market. I learned of "Gouroull," Carriere's name for the Monster, and how Gouroull was much more violent than Shelley's depiction, or Universal's, or even Hammer's. Needless to say I was always fascinated by this, but English translations were only available as of last year! It's taken sixty years for Carriere's pulp series to reach our shores, and as of this writing, the reprints aren't even done yet! And while Frankenstein's Tower is not as fantastic or trashy a work as I hoped, it is still a book worthy of interest and a good hook for the start of a series.


Helen Coostle is a young woman traveling out to the Irish countryside town of Kanderley to holiday with her grandmother. She is a curious girl, but is nonetheless a Victorian lady, and thus is not that much of a femme fatale badass. While she is fascinated by the thrilling story's of Kanderley's old tower, which once belonged to Dr. Victor Frankenstein (now decades dead in the Arctic), her amusement turns to dread when an old vagabond takes her to the abandoned museum he lives in, revealing that one of the museum's lost exhibits was a glass casket containing the Monster of Frankenstein himself! Though she's assured that the Monster can't awaken as long as he's in the casket, he begins to haunt her nightmares, especially when she hears the sinister muttering of the word "Gouroull": the guttural sound which seems to be the name the Monster has taken for himself. Of course it isn't long before someone breaks into the museum and shatters Gouroull's coffin. Once more the Tower of Frankenstein has a resident, and it won't be long before Helen joins him...perhaps as permanent company...

Frankenstein's Tower is interesting because it shows to me that there is some parallel between trash cinema and "trash literature," for all that means: I would assume that a violent pulp series about the Frankenstein's Monster would be considered "lowbrow" enough to be considered such, even though how lowbrow it is is debatable. Frankenstein's Tower is arguably what I would think a pulp novel by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin would read like: sleazy, yes, but also patiently paced and "artsy" (read: light) in its scares, relying chiefly on atmosphere. And probably a little crazy, too. It is a full translation of Eurotrash onto the page, for all the good and bad that represents. For a lot of its length it's not particularly interesting, but when it heats up, it's worth it. Like the madman-in-the-police-station scene from The Awful Dr. Orlof, or EVERYTHING in SS Girls, the trashier elements help counterbalance the negative backflow of the High Brow. For example, there's a long sequence where Helen is kept in suspense over whether or not Gouroull is going to rape her. Sleazy and disturbing: yes. After this suspense is the book's ending, however, where the police decide to flood the tower with deadly snakes in an attempt to kill Gouroull--surprise, it fucking backfires and nearly gets Helen and everyone else killed.

It is a very quick read, and that's because it's written with a pulpy directness that I envy. The downside is that "pulp professional" has always reminded me too much of Ian Fleming: in case you didn't notice, I like my weird books eccentric and energetic, not dignified and...manly. Since the start of the pulp era, male pulp and paperback writers have toiled under the delusion that the masculinity of their writing will be increased if everything is portrayed as flatly and technically and dryly as possible. Normally this goes hand-in-hand with implicit and/or overt sexism which is why these books are repulsive to me. While he has a commercial staccato going for him prose-wise, Carriere avoids the sexism of his '50s highbrow peers, because Helen is a likable and believable protagonist. She spends a lot of the book as a damsel in distress, and being full of fear, but dude, it's the fucking Frankenstein's Monster. He tears people's arms off. I'd probably be screaming too.

To flesh out my cracks about highbrow stuff, though: the English edition comes with fore- and postwords written by Carriere. I don't really know what to make of 'em, to be honest. The man seems to take himself a bit too seriously, but he is one of the Great French Filmmakers apparently so maybe he has some entitlement to that. I feel like a super-artsy take on Frankenstein would be interesting, though this isn't it. It's interesting that he tries to do a thematic dissection of Frankenstein before launching into a book which is a straightforward thriller about the Monster, which doesn't really study the Monster in any depth.

But like I said, I'll probably check out the other books in the series. I've never seen the original French editions but these are good translations. They flow as naturally as any book written in English, and you could probably plow through one of these in a few hours. A fascinating read if you like pulps, European horror, and Frankenstein, with a few of the good old Weird Plot Decisions spliced in.

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Image Source: Amazon

The Monogram Monograph: Prologue

From the papers of Dr. Paol Kruthers, dated Feb.-Aug. 1947; digitally archived as of XXX. XX, 2017. Links have been added to relevant sources to facilitate comprehension of text.

“The patient was first admitted to Heathville General Hospital on August 4^th, 1946 after being located by Heathville, VA local; he had previously disappeared from his home shortly after an appointment to the office of a man whom he referred to as 'Dr. Dexter' three months prior to his admission. Attempts to track down the individual known as Dr. Dexter ended in failure.

“It has taken me the last six months to properly hear the full account that the patient prepared, and while I originally intended to publish a transcript of his full account, the transcript was so full of circular repetitions of previous incidents and the like that it would have not merely been tediously lengthy but also unreadable. Fortunately, I have received permission from the Hospital to deviate from medical norm in my monograph on the patient's case and exercise my skills as a writer to pen the monograph as an informal creative piece, to better accommodate my present mental state. This monograph, thus, will also be something of a therapeutic exercise for myself, as part of my negotiations with the hospital regarding my recent professional lapses. I thank Heathville General for this permission and assure them that I will not betray their trust.

“There is no need for me to elucidate further on my own troubles. My monograph is more pressing, and of greater value to the psychiatric community—suffice it to say that Mr. Kessler may present the most fascinating instance of schizophrenia I have seen amongst the mentally troubled. His elaborate ability to conjure up entire worlds of fantastic creations beyond some of our most skilled fiction writers is almost certainly linked to his obsession with persons who are alternate incarnations of each other. I will spare any sort of thematic analysis for the end (like any good paper or story), but hearing Mr. Kessler speak reminds me of an idea that I had once—that we are all much larger than we seem to be, and that there are other people who are our components, or whom we are components of. It is moments like these that do remind me that perhaps there is something to that old saying that I am not meant to be part of the psychiatric community, but again, I digress. I should note that my journey to obtain a complete version of Kessler's story was not without challenge, as the patient spends most of his time now trapped within a coma; somehow still sustained, this endless sleep must be burdensome to him. His body is twisted in an unnatural position similar to the meditation poses of Buddhist monks—all attempts to remove him from these positions regularly have failed and the staff of Heathville General have abandoned trying.

“The monograph will be given a layer of footnotes and annotations where relevant. The narrative covers the dawn of Mr. Kessler's mental disorder, regarding his wife Virginia, and his reference to Dr. Dexter by another professional, Dr. Oliver Dran (deceased), including the patient's own elaboration of the intriguing connection between his relationship with his wife and an apparent anxious problem involving intrusive thoughts of a murderous variety. It will then move onto his journey to the 'B-Side,' and what that represents, concluding with his association with the most prominent of his other selves, 'Dr. Melcher,' and how that process allowed him to rally against the cumulative source of his delusions and anxieties, in each case documenting his alternate personae.

“Mr. Kessler's case represents more prominently than any other in my experience the important dichotomy our field seeks to solve: the minimum requisite we ask of ourselves, as medical officials, to grant hope to our patients. I wish that Mr. Kessler's case gave me hope, and that in slaying that final demon in his mind he was free of his problems. And yet unfortunately Mr. Kessler will remain our patient for some time. It has not been long since he has told me his tale, and so perhaps by the time of this monograph's publication, there will be some improvement. Nonetheless, it seems as if Mr. Kessler's intentional quest into the heart of his problems has ruined his psyche, rather than rescued it.

“And yet we must still apply our minds to the hopeless and attempt to extract some notion of rescue from it. That is the goal of academic research. With our boundless imaginations we must find a way to save ourselves from the nightmares within us, the endless hordes of bats that flutter at our psychological windows at night.”

There.

That is good for now.

Certainly I will have more hard data to add to this prologue to provide reasoning for my “dramatization” of the life of the unfortunate Mr. Kessler. And certainly I will purge these self-referential diversions, along with the self-pitying commentary on my current employment peril. I will change nothing by botching a chanced risk.

There have been other psychiatric professionals who have fictionalized their monographs before. I just cannot cite them now because the hour is late, and I am embarrassed by wasting typewriter ink on getting sidetracked so easily.

It is time for the first draft. All of the above still stands. It's time to tell the Kessler Story.

I will annotate whatever I type up, as per my usual process—a first set of footnotes to lay the ground for the real text and its own real annotations. I should believe that I can write this with the same professionalism as my other monographs.

It is late, and rather than transform this foreword-turned-journal into an exercise in exploring what I want to discuss in this journey through Kessler's awful dreams, I find myself meditating on my own. I have already revealed in that section I wish to use that this as an exploration of my own troubles, which I do believe are at the root of my professional discord. It is difficult to examine the minds of madmen when one is going mad from insomnia oneself.

And yet if I need to cite my own experiences to complete this monograph, I will have my notebooks full of descriptions to cite. All that work spent trying to figure out what it is about bats. I keep dreaming of the bat, night after night, and I've done everything to look into it. I've looked at the etymologies of everything one can call a bat in every language that I can speak. I have studied bats in every mythology encyclopedias write of; and of course, if any one psychiatrist before me has written on interpretations of bats in the schools of Jung, Freud, or any of their contemporaries or successors, I have looked it over.

There is presumably something mundane in mankind's fear of bats. Presumably it's just the matter that our most ancient ancestors would have seen the vampiric members of their order drinking the blood of our cattle, and associated that over time with our repulsion from uncooked blood and cannibalism and the disease potential therein. Similarly, bats are denizens of the night, which holds the monsters of our caveman memory. No matter what, everywhere one goes, bats are symbols of dread, darkness, and evil. The natives of Mexico saw bats as symbols of the underworld; in most of Europe they were the familiars of witches; in Tanzania there is the bat-spirit popobawa, which chases and sodomizes innocent people. Bats are a symbol of darkness and darkness represents our fear of ourselves, our own opposition to our super-ego and obedience to our id. The underworld is our fear of death, witches our dreaded femininity, and sodomy our sexual angst. And yet I understand that someday I will die, I accept my inner femininity wholesale, and my wife and I enjoy ordinary relations. I—

It is late, and my doubts come back along with my nightmares. I have been too self-centric, as well as self-pitying and self-referential. I once more desire a career and a life. I do not know if I will achieve that.

All of this is down to the bat.

If I can kill the bat, which kills those I love in my dreams, night after night, then I can kill the bat that is the shadow over my work.

                                                                                                                                                   Part I >>

The Monogram Monograph: Preface

From 1941 to 1944, Bela Lugosi appeared in nine horror/mystery films produced by Sam Katzman for Monogram Pictures. They included Invisible Ghost, Spooks Run Wild, Black Dragons, Bowery at Midnight, The Corpse Vanishes, Ghosts on the Loose, The Ape Man, Return of the Ape Man, and Voodoo Man, and each was a reflection of Lugosi's private failings and triumphs as an actor whose career had shriveled away many years prior, never to properly return. They also each contain some amusing and fascinatingly complex plots, topped with ludicrous twist endings that would make Harry Stephen Keeler blush—it's for these two reasons that they are memorable in any way. During the winter of 2016, when I had completed my reviews for Spookyween and Bookvember, I had a chance to binge Lugosi and Katzman's “Monogram Nine” and got hooked at once--they lit a fire inside me. Rather than review each of the films individually, I decided to experiment with the inspiration they gave me. This story, The Monogram Monograph, is the result of that experiment. So settle in for a chapter a week for the next couple of months! The story is set in the same continuum as my previous stories Dieselworld and Words from the Inner Circle, but you won't need to know those stories to get this, even if it widens the view.

The story will be hosted on the A-List for free. However, should you enjoy the story enough to want to leave me a tip, you can...

Without further ado, then, I will turn to the testament of Dr. Kruthers...

Sugar Hill (1974), by Paul Maslansky

I think I've said it before, but I am grateful to my fellow critics. Obviously, I would have never seen these films if someone in the world hadn't recommended them to me, however indirectly they did so. If your main hobbies are like mine and include watching movie reviews to cover up for the pain and horror of being utterly insignificant, you'll begin to recognize cinematic trends, sub-trends, and sub-sub-trends within the big chunky genres you previously took for granted. Studying blaxploitation for example will lead one to the genre's outset as the "race pictures" made between the 1910s and the 1950s, starring all black casts and marketed to all black audiences--films that reinforced segregation but nonetheless encouraged and enabled black creators and black representation in the media. Race pictures became blaxploitation in the early '70s, arguably beginning with the mandatory Black Panthers initiation watch subject Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. Blaxploitation has continued long since the death of '70s funk, or at least, genre films made by and starring black people have continued. Some that come to mind are Black Devil Doll from Hell, Tales from the Quadead Zone, Devil Snow, Ax 'Em, and Don't Play With Me. Because these are movies that I like they are probably not the most flattering examples of this, but I considered them all to be truly wonderful films. You can even see movies today that get theater showings which arguably carry on the blaxploitation spirit, in the form of the films of Tyler Perry, which, despite being shredded by critics, do get high audience scores and even get the dubious distinction of top billing at my workplace's Redbox.

And of course there were and are blaxploitation horror films. That is one of those sub-trends I mentioned above: in 1972, of course, we had Blacula, which heralded such films as Blackenstein, Ganja and Hess, and Abby. There had been earlier black-produced horror films, such as the ever-elusive Drums o' Voodoo from 1934, but this new vein was often crossed with the badass protagonists and dicey gang politics of the crime-oriented blaxploitation movies. This is the ground from which Sugar Hill grows, and admittedly I have not seen any of the other famous '70s Blaxploitation movies, by the simple merit of Sugar Hill ranking higher on my priority lists. The reviews always made it sound like a blast, and a blast it is. If Blacula and the others are as good as this, then I have a lot to look forward to.

The plot is pretty straightforward, especially by blaxploitation standards, save for the zombies. Black people own a club, white people wanna steal it. In this case, it's Diana "Sugar" Hill and her boyfriend Langston who own Club Voodoo, subject of intended theft by white crime lord Morgan. When Langston refuses to give in, Morgan kills him, prompting Sugar's quest for vengeance. Fortunately, the voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse can help her. Sugar makes a pact with the witch and Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of the dead, to receive an army of turkey-killing zombies. Soon everyone in town is paying for the price for offing Sugar's man. Will Sugar manage to find her special brand of justice?

By the end of the thing you'll be hoping she does. The film casts its leads well. While the entire cast puts on a good performance, the black actors shine the brightest, especially Marki Bey as Sugar Hill, who presents a genuinely sympathetic, attractive, and badass voodoo queen, and Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi, who is one of the hammiest hams to ever beautifully ham. Those two are charming and you get attached to them. Baron Samedi in particular is a very strange and intriguing character. He is in some ways a continuation of the character of the same name from Live and Let Die, and that version of Baron Samedi was the only reason why most of us watched that movie to begin with. Sometimes he goofs off; sometimes he's menacing; sometimes he's mocking, especially when he's talking to white people. When white people think they can boss him around, he starts talking like, well...let's just say it's sort of like a banned Warner Brothers cartoon. It's kind of jarring to hear, but the movie makes it clear that all parties know that he's doing it to piss these people off. Because what are they going to do? This isn't a guy calling himself Baron Samedi--he is a legitimate voodoo loa. Weapons are not going to work on him. He calls them out on their racism, and when they try to shove him and Sugar down for that (instead of, y'know, stopping the whole being racist thing), they are killed by zombies. Baron Samedi's got a system, and the system works.

Helping you root for the heroes is the fact that the white people in this movie are bastards. Sure, sometimes they have a glimmer of respectability, but basically all of them spout the n-word whenever they get a chance, and pull all sorts of bullshit about "betters" and the like. Worst of them all is Celeste, Morgan's girlfriend, who is so racist that even he shrugs her off like a rotten corpse. She drops the n-bomb more than anyone in the film, and takes a personal jealousy in Morgan's wandering eyes when Sugar's around. Naturally, she is saved for last, and her implied fate is so dark that I laughed at it out of astonishment. But you really can't feel bad for her.

That her death is memorable is impressive, given that whenever someone dies in this movie it's pretty great. That's because the zombies in this movie are great. They have these weird silver cups over their eyes, and they also have cobwebs all over them, even though they all seem to have been buried sans coffins in earthen graves. (Are underground spiders a thing? Should we fear them?) I swear to God that the first scene of the zombies rising from their graves goes on for ten minutes. For however long it is, it's not long enough. Intercut with scenes of these zombies crawling from the earth are shots of Mama Maitresse and Sugar Hill getting really excited over the prospect of having an army of zombies, along with Baron Samedi's sweet, sweet mugging. Whenever these zombies kill someone, it's usually done in a way that resists repetition, making each individual kill scene satisfying. The quirkiness of some of these deaths, along with their roots in vengeance, reminded me in a lot of fun ways of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Which is funny because I also realized that this movie almost shares a plot with Bad Magic. I guess a lot of revenge horror films have similarities.

If you want to get a good taste of archetypical '70s exploitation, Sugar Hill is a great start. If I have somehow failed to convince you, I should say that this movie's is a Motown funk piece called "Supernatural Voodoo Woman." The movie also contains a large, large building called "the Voodoo Museum and Research Library."

P.S. Originally this review was meant for January until I had to do some schedule rearranging for the site. In the course of it I forgot that February was Black History Month. I find it to be a happy coincidence that I post this now. I'd say that a movie where a bunch of black people avenge themselves on some racist white gangsters with zombies is a good anti-racist text. 

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 5 (The Mummy)

The Mummy series is last not only on our list, but the last chronologically speaking as well; its final film, released in 1955, was the last breath of Universal's first wave of horror films. From here Universal would explore other options (they'd already started by the time of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948), and now The Mummy is to be remade as part of the new Universal Horror Shared Universe that is ostensibly in production.

On a more personal note, the Mummy series was the one I was looking forward to the most, simply because it was the one I knew the least about! Let's see if the wait was worth it...

(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

The Mummy (1932):

"Boo! Hiss!" some of you may say. "The Mummy isn't really part of the Universal canon! The Mummy series is about Kharis, while The Mummy tells the story of the mummy Imhotep!" Well, as I said in the last entry, technically none of the Mummy films are expressly canon to the Universal horror-verse, being only linked by the tenuous thread of Abbott and Costello. At the same time, I feel like it would not only be pedantic to avoid watching The Mummy before checking out The Mummy's Hand, but it would take away the chance to have some fun, too.

We open in the desert near Cairo in 1921. Three men, Sir Joseph Whemple, Dr. Muller, and Ralph Norton are excavating the tomb of the Egyptian high priest Imhotep, who was apparently buried alive for sacrilege. Dr. Muller appears to be a student of the occult (sharing actor Edward Van Sloan with Dr. van Helsing, and basically doing it exactly the same), warning the two not to open the box they discovered near Imhotep's sarcophagus. Not only does Ralph do exactly that when the other two step away, but he reads off the ancient scroll, the Scroll of Thoth, that he finds within, with the expected consequence of awakening Imhotep. Ralph is driven mad and Sir Joseph abandons the site. But twelve years later, Sir Whemple's son Frank has come back to the camp to continue his father's studies. He is abetted in this by an Egyptian scholar named Ardath Bey, whom the audience is supposed to notice bears a striking resemblance to Imhotep after a shower and makeover--he leads Frank to the tomb of the ancient princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. When she is excavated and carted off to the British Museum, Ardath Bey ingratiates himself with Sir Whemple so that he may stay in the museum overnight, allowing him to perform a ritual of some kind to the mummy of Ankh-es-en-Amon. This begins to stir feelings in one of Dr. Muller's patients, a woman named Helen, with whom Frank begins to fall in love--Helen is the reincarnation of Ankh-es-en-Amon, and she is drawn to Ardath Bey. It was a forbidden relationship with Ankh-es-en-Amon that resulted in Imhotep's premature mummification--or at least, he was sad when she died and tried to use the Scroll of Thoth to bring her corpse back to life. (It's not really specified if she returned this sentiment in life.) By the time we've learned this, we already know that his power is no joke, apparently crushing Sir Joseph's heart. Next he has his eyes set on Frank, so that no man can interfere with his relationship with his resurrected bride...

I've sort of always thought that mummies were cool, and I think I have to conclude that the only reason why I feel that way is because I saw this when I was a kid. Sure, I clearly remember falling asleep, but watching it as an adult, it's not that boring. It has a slow pace, but I've been watching these movies for awhile and I'm used to it by now. The mystery of who the Mummy is and what he wants unfolds at a comfortable and rational pace, and we are kept in some classic suspense that Hitchcock himself would be proud of: I've already mentioned the fact that only we, the viewers, can know that the man who meets Frank to lead him to the Princess' tomb is probably Imhotep in disguise, so we feel horror upon making that recognition since we already know from that haunting opening scene that Imhotep is supposed to scare us shitless. Leading on from that, there's the bit where Ardath Bey dismisses himself from Sir Joseph's office when he realizes the two are not alone--since we know he's Imhotep and Imhotep is scary, we can assume that Ardath Bey's sudden resentment of company is due to the fact that he was going to kill Sir Joseph. But since this movie is good--and good movies make us care about them--why should we care if Imhotep does kill these people?

That leads us to a question you may be asking: how does this movie treat the archaeologist characters? The excavations of real-life mummy sites were oftentimes more disrespectful than the grave-robbers who cracked some of those tombs over the centuries before Westerners started poking their noses in the cemetery-spaces of brown people. One man's scientific preservation is another's theft, and I've read enough to be wary of how exactly certain museums acquired their artifacts. (Never trust an institution that has bought and will buy stolen art off the Nazis, that's what I always say.) Well, surprisingly, the movie is relatively sensitive to such things. They may not care enough to have the Egyptian nobles be played by, y'know, actual Africans, but Helen is notably offended by Frank's glee in his ghoulish description of plundering the tomb. Indeed, his talk of the act doesn't paint him in a heroic light, as he focuses on her treasure above all her other possessions, and it doesn't sound anything but profane when he talks about removing her bandages. Intriguingly, removing Frank as the hero (as the movie would lead us to believe he is, as he is the designated Young White Male Love Interest) shifts protagonist status to Helen instead, which is apt, as she is ultimately the one responsible for stopping Imhotep. Her disgust over Frank's assault on a sacred place reinforces to us modern viewers that she's the hero, and if her being the one to destroy the Mummy was meant to be a sign on behalf of the filmmakers that she is the hero, then that means they take a stance against grave-robbing as well. Hell, this even fits into early Universal's anti-science motif, as Frank and others justify their taking of tomb artifacts back to Britain as being FOR SCIENCE!!!!

Overall, The Mummy is an impressively good horror film, being the most successful at actually scaring me of the five series-openers. I can see where my fascination came from.

The Mummy's Hand (1940):

The Mummy's Hand is a pseudo-remake of The Mummy, and while the debate over the quality of remakes over originals has found compelling arguments on both sides that have left me a cold centrist, I can easily say that if you wanted to rule that movies should never be remade, even partially, this film is solid proof that remakes are shitshows, pure and simple. 

We open with a man named Andoheb meeting with his father, the High Priest of Karnak, who seeks to pass on his ancient knowledge. He tells him the story of Kharis, a priest of ancient Egypt, and the movie almost immediately derails itself by telling Kharis' story almost entirely through stock footage stolen from The Mummy. Yes, Kharis' story is basically the same, with Ankh-es-en-Amon replaced with a princess named Ananka, and the Scroll of Thoth replaced with the sacred tana leaves, but that's no excuse--Kharis actor Tom Tyler looks nothing like Boris Karloff, and though they strain to hide his face, it's easy to see that that's Boris Karloff. Anyway, it is the sacred tana leaves, brewed into a juice, that have carried out what appears to be the central goal of the Karnak cult, which is to keep Kharis' mummy alive. Three leaves brewed will sustain his life, but nine leaves will give him the power of movement. After introducing this, we meet our heroes for this movie, a loose cannon archeologist named Steve Banning and his comedy relief Brooklyn sidekick Babe. They are unbearable pricks and spend most of their introduction showing this, with Babe in particular demonstrating that some actors really are completely blind and deaf to the barest concept of humor. They, along with a scientist named Dr. Petrie and a woman of some occupation named Marta (who naturally becomes the Necessary Heterosexual Female Love Interest, so people are not suspicious of two men who keep close company with one calling the other "babe"), travel to the tomb of Ananka, where Andoheb awakens Kharis. Ultimately he wants the Mummy to capture Marta because he has fallen in love with her, and plans to make she and himself immortal, Kharis' own destiny of destroying the profaners of Ananka's tomb be damned. Unfortunately none of this comes to pass, and all of the designated protagonists live when Babe guns down Andoheb and Banning burns Kharis to a true death.

The lack of effort put into this movie, I think, can be placed on an obvious detail I noticed while watching. Universal evidently felt like they had mined the Mummy concept clean in their 1932 effort, and nonetheless sallied forth by making the opening few minutes of the film out of stock footage from The Mummy and fusing in elements from Dracula. Think about it: Kharis is a vampire. The tana tea is a parallel to blood; he can only operate under the light of a full moon (thus ruling out walking in daylight for him); and he begins the film as a relatively inert creature in a creaking tomb who must be fed. His presence is even highlighted by wolves, described as nothing less than "the children of the night"! Even if you believe that the Cult of Karnak and Dr. Andoheb are original additions, they essentially represent Dracula's Romani servants from Bram Stoker's original novel of Dracula. Throw in a heaping dash of the tonal problems from the Invisible Man series with some horrible comic relief, and you've got something nearly as bad as The Invisible Woman. Because there are still some interesting makeup effects, good performances, and well-used atmospheric shading, it's not irredeemable, but I would never watch it again. I can't believe they took a monster as neat as a Mummy and reduced it to a cheap sideways clone of one of their most poorly-executed monsters. I can only hope for improvement.

The Mummy's Tomb (1942):

If it was ludicrous for The Mummy's Hand to open with stock footage of The Mummy, then surely it's just straight-up moronic for The Mummy's Tomb to open with stock footage from The Mummy's Hand! No joke, the first twelve minutes of The Mummy's Tomb's 59 minute runtime is comprised of little but opening credits and stock footage. An older Steve Banning--probably about thirty years older if the appearance of his son, John, is any indication--tells his family the story of Kharis, which seemingly justifies this borrowing. After this we see an elderly Andoheb, evidently more bullet-proof than the previous film let on, mirroring the ritual he had with father in the prior film as he passes on control of the Cult of Karnak to a younger man named Mehemet Bey (played at least by a Turkish actor this time, Turhan Bey). It's not long before Mehemet Bey revives Kharis--who survived that all-consuming fire just fine, wrappings and all--to destroy those who profaned the tomb of Ananka. This means that Kharis not only kills Steve Banning, but his friend Babe as well! And Babe's death is long and drawn out. Unfortunately the filmmakers decided that doing something like showing the progression of generations in a franchise was too interesting, so we have Mehemet Bey fall in love with John Banning's fiancee Isobel and kidnap her to make the two of them immortal, in defiance of Kharis' wishes. (It's not like this repetition of history goes without comment--Kharis is clearly taken aback by the prospect of his present master following the fate of his first.) Somehow this all leads to the formation of an angry mob--did I mention this movie is set in Massachusetts?--with literal pitchforks and torches, which go on a hunt to burn the Mummy. Mehemet Bey is shot and killed by a minor character who had like maybe two scenes beforehand, and John Banning kills Kharis with fire. Then John and Isobel are married, as if we cared, represented in the film by a newspaper showing a photo of the two characters standing next to each other.

Everything about The Mummy's Tomb is completely pointless, beginning with the title. Only in flashbacks to The Mummy's Hand do we see Kharis' Tomb in any way. There is no genuine conflict because the characters spend most of their time trying to find out who's been killing people, but we already know who is it because they just fucking show us Kharis killing these people right away. Similarly, the film, which again is shockingly brief, jumps between story threads so frantically that there's no character development whatsover; the only reason why we care about anyone in the film is that they are opposed to Kharis and Mehemet Bey, and because they are related to characters from The Mummy's Hand, who I hated anyway. Piling on even more shit are scenes which appear to have been left in the film by accident. How do you explain the scene where Kharis rustles some bushes near a couple making out in a parked car (see how goddamn old this trope is?) only for said couple to drive off without incident, never to be seen again? At least I think we never see them again, and I'm pretty sure they aren't John and Isobel. Even if they are, I've already explained why I don't care. 

And whereas The Mummy's Hand was willing to make Kharis a metaphorical tana-leaf vampire out of a lack of creativity as far as escaping the Dracula mold went, The Mummy's Tomb's use of an angry mob shows that Universal was desperate to hang onto audiences by reminding them of Frankenstein. It's the same sort of obvious commercialism that afflicts so many of these films--I know I shouldn't be surprised, because these are sequels to movies that generally weren't very good anyway, but for The Mummy's Tomb to be even cheaper and lazier than The Mummy's Hand still feels like a harsh blow. I'm willing to give this movie credit because it was okay with killing off the meatheaded prick of an Indiana Jones wannabe and his mutant Lou Costello clone foisted on us in Hand, as old men no less, and in pretty drawn-out and horrible ways. Normally I find that killing the protagonists of a previous film in a series is done for crappy shock value, and that's probably why it was done here, but it was still pretty dang satisfying.

The Mummy's Ghost (1944):

We begin once again with an elderly Andoheb passing on the duties of Karnak (now called Arkam in a Vasaria/Frankenstein sort of thing) to a man named Yousef Bey, played by John Carradine. This time there is no stock footage but we need the story of Kharis and Ananka and their cursed love again. I'm surprised the filmmakers managed to remember that story accurately, when they couldn't recall that Andoheb is supposed to be pretty conclusively dead twice over now. Yousef Bey vows to fulfill the will of Kharis and of the gods of Egypt and all that stuff. We then go to a class taught by Professor Norman, a character from The Mummy's Tomb who I didn't bother mentioning because I didn't remember him. He is apparently teaching archeology and history when he explains what happened to him in the last film, and how he found out that the living dead are real--when he ends the class, he says, "Next time we'll be covering something more scholarly and curricular than living mummies." Can you imagine attending a class that reveals that there is/was a force on this Earth that could bring people back from the dead and keep them alive for centuries and then having to go back to memorizing dates and writing essays on the patterns on bits of pottery? Anyway...Kharis and Yousef Bey go to steal Ananka's mummy, but it collapses to dust, which I guess means that her soul has moved on to a new body. Hm...perhaps it's that Egyptian girl Amina, who keeps having fainting spells near the scene of Kharis' murders? She's really important, after all! She's the possible love interest of Tom, one of Professor Norman's students. Yeah, that's real important, especially now that the professor is dead. (His murder lacks even the dull amusement of his being an annoying character who deserved death.) Now, once Yousef Bey has Kharis kidnap Amina, would you believe that he falls in love with her and seeks to make she and himself immortal so they can live in eternal marriage? I guess now that Ananka's reincarnation is the girl on the line, and Ananka was Kharis' girlfriend, Kharis is willing to be the one to kill his own disciple. And because each of the Mummy films must rip off another Universal film (with this one already having taken the reincarnation plot from The Mummy), we have a sad twist ending, where the Generic White Male is left sans girlfriend, just like in Son of Dracula. Aw.

Okay, backing things up a bit on that ending: it is actually a little shocking that they'd be willing to condemn the female lead of the film to such a horrible death (which now that I realize it is the same fate as the Monster and Dr. Niemann in House of Frankenstein). But it's not that Amina drowns in quicksand with Kharis, but that she apparently ages rapidly at his touch, so Ananka's lost time can catch up with her. So by the time she and her past-life lover descend into their boggy new tomb (meaning that in a way this means that Kharis wins, since re-entombing himself and Ananka was his goal), she has aged to a mummy herself. It's a remarkably savage image for such an otherwise blunted movie, but what follows wrenches it a little bit: there's a voiceover line that warns that those who invoke the wrath of the gods must suffer a cruel and horrible death. At what point did Amina do anything to invoke the wraths of the gods?! As far as I saw, she was the victim here. I have no idea how to read this, beyond the obvious fact that They Just Didn't Care. Hell, even John Carradine is flat in this, and John Carradine has saved and/or benefited basically every movie I've seen him in. Where it not for the distance they were willing to go for one last shock with Amina's death, and for the fact that it doesn't waste an egregious amount of its runtime being stock footage (actually the movie appears to be stock footage-free, meaning that maybe they finally learned something), I would be willing to condemn this movie just as I did its two predecessors. We must be grateful for small mercies.

The Mummy's Curse (1944):

The Mummy's Curse is cursed to yet another rocky start, though it is mercifully not the same rocky start as the other Mummy films. We begin in a swampy area populated by Cajuns and Creoles, who oppose a corporate plan to drain the swamp containing the bodies of Kharis and Ananka. Wait, we're in Louisiana? Weren't the previous movies set in Massachusetts? And wait, now they're saying that the two Egyptians were entombed in the swamp twenty-five years ago, meaning that The Mummy's Ghost is set in 1919...and The Mummy's Hand is set in the early 1890s?!? Bullshit! But at least it isn't opening with stock footage or a training session for the next Priest of Arkam. That comes later, after we're introduced to our two archeologists, James Halsey and Ilzor Zandaab, who have come looking for the Mummy and put more stock in the local superstitions about the Curse of Kharis than the company operators. Of course, because Dr. Zandaab is Egyptian, we learn he is really the High Priest of Arkam, and as soon as he is introduced he wanders off to the conveniently-nearly abandoned monastery...where his student Ragheb has brought the Mummy of Kharis. Now we come to the reciting of the duties of Arkam (borrowed nearly line-for-line from the other movies), complete with stock footage pried from The Mummy, now looking more aged than ever. (It's almost like you shouldn't reuse footage from twelve-year-old films or something.) Kharis, renewed by tana brew, goes on a killing spree in an attempt to retrieve Ananka, whose Mummy also wandered from the swamps. Exposure to sunlight, however, has turned Ananka back to a living girl, though she seems to have the mind of Ananka and not poor Amina, whose body she's hijacking. So surprise, Ananka actually gets a little agency in this film, as she's decided upon gaining new life that she's not terribly interested in letting Kharis manhandle her body anymore. Swimming in all this is another subplot where Ragheb falls in love with Betty, one of the workers on the swamp-draining project, but Dr. Zandaab wisely reminds his pupil that selfish sexual interest and having Kharis as a coworker rarely mix (even though Kharis isn't interested in the girl the Priest is after this time!). So Ragheb kills Zandaab, and Kharis, in trying to kill Ragheb, kills himself along with his intended victim by breaking down the monastery and burying them alive. This causes Ananka to turn back into a Mummy--so much for agency--and Dr. Halsey, who has basically not been a character at all in this film getting banging rights to Betty over some of the most brainlessly sexist ending dialogue I've ever heard.

You may notice that I seem hopeful at the start of that synopsis, suggesting that this movie only has a bad start by its decision to mutilate the timeline of its series. Indeed, I was praying that the divergence from the ordinary formula, beginning with the passing on of the Priesthood of Karnak/Arkam, leading into Mummy murders for the sake of Ananka, leading into the Priest fucking things up and being killed by the heroes/Kharis, would be a consistent one. While the movie does break away from that formula, it embellishes it only slightly, moving some incidents around in the film and making it two Priests of Karnak instead of one. It doesn't matter--it's too brief to establish characters, and absolutely no effort is put into making it scary. I'm no longer counting novelty as a valid excuse for sparing a movie.

As this series has gone on, I've desperately scrambled to come up for any sort of justification of the existence of Kharis, beyond an interest in Egyptology when the Mummy films were made. Again, he is basically a slow-moving Egyptian Dracula, and even that defining feature gets sanded down as time goes on. He then starts to embody what the Frankenstein's Monster became, the supernatural hitman. Interestingly, Kharis is a hitman in his own quest--he's controlled by a higher power, but the Priests of Karnak use their control over him to attain what are ultimately his goals. Because the Priests of Karnak are apparent servants of Ananka, there must be a revenge angle against Kharis in using Kharis to retrieve and re-entomb Ananka, as Kharis was turned into a Mummy for trying to bring Ananka back to life, which was viewed as a heinous crime. So the Priests and Kharis are naturally going to have an antagonistic relationship--they need each other so they can find spiritual peace, but one is surely aware that he is just a glorified thug, and the other views said thug as a trespasser on what he holds sacred. But the fact that I've had to mull this in my mind for four movies now when this should be more clearly explored in the movies themselves shows that the sequels to The Mummy's Hand were generally flukes, born out of a desire to make money for than anything else, and I won't even start on the notion of people actually being fans of these movies. In my mind, I can't understand in any way why these movies are remembered with the same fondness and prominence as the Frankenstein or Invisible Man series. 

What I'm forced to conclude is that Universal was desperate to replicate the success of The Mummy but never applied logic to the process of making a new Mummy character. After all, what are Kharis and his Priests of Karnak if not Imhotep split into two characters? You have the slow murderous Mummy and the mysterious well-spoken sorcerer. Together, there is effective menace--a physical presence in the conflict and a mystical one as well. But none of the Priests we see have any character traits aside from "evil, Egyptian, and horny," and Kharis, having had his tongue cut out when he was mummified, never gets any character development, instead just being a foot-dragging strangle-murderer. There are many more better movies featuring evil horny people and strangle-murderers than this. By basing the series on a Mummy that exudes no threat or interest, it's no wonder Universal shit the bed so hard with these four. I've worried about the coming of Abbott and Costello--because I'm not sure there's anything at all for them to parody.

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955):

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is the last official Universal Horror film related to the original five franchises, and the second-to-last movie that Abbott and Costello made together. One can't expect the dignity of what we started with--long absent is The Mummy, along with Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. But fortunately, the movie is at least a little funny, and it is significantly superior to all the Mummy films bar the 1932 original, so it's not an awful end by any means.

Bud and Lou are in Egypt attending some weird, horrible dinner theatre when they overhear that the famous Dr. Zoomer is looking for two men to join him on an expedition to the Tomb of Princess Ara, which he has discovered by examining the Mummy of Klaris. (Yes, that's Klaris, not Kharis, and he seems to be a distinct Mummy.) Also overhearing this are the Followers of Klaris, who seek to regain their Mummy master's stolen body and stop people from reaching the Tomb of Ara. They retrieve Klaris, but fail to obtain the medallion that could leading clever explorers to the Tomb. Our explorers aren't terribly clever, but after some run-ins with the vicious treasure-hunter Madame Rontru they find their way to the Tomb as Rontru's prisoners. The leader of the Followers of Klaris, Semu, continues to hunt Bud and Lou to get the medallion, while Rontru's men decide to overthrow the cult by disguising one of their number as Klaris and placing him in Klaris' sarcophagus. But Bud and Lou get the same idea, knocking out and replacing the replacement. So there are three mummies together at the end when Madame Rontru's dynamite, wielded by an unknowing Klaris, blows up the Tomb and reveals the treasure of Princess Ara. Using this treasure Bud and Lou turn what's left of the Tomb into a nightclub, somehow receiving no complaints from academic and governmental boards for this desecration of a significant historical site.

I'd like this examination by reaffirming what I said at the beginning: this is better than all of the previous Mummy movies that came before (except the original), possibly combined. It has a much larger budget and is shot and acted better. It has momentum, action, characters with traits, purpose, and multiple sets and settings, which is more than I can say of The Mummy's Hand and all the films that followed it. What is more--and this hurts the film a little bit--the Mummy is actually an effective monster. Klaris is much more mobile than Kharis, and his makeup is vastly superior; in a true horror film, the distorted moan-screams he keeps making could actually be scary. Making Kharis mute was a terrible decision. Yes, silent monsters can definitely be terrifying. But a Mummy seems proper when it's gibbering horribly as it lurches towards you, assuming you want to take the lurching approach. Klaris also has a genuine cult at his fingertips, one which reveres him rather than treats him like a hitman, and which consists of much more than two members at a time. (Seriously, are the Priests of Karnak Sith Lords or something? You can hire more guys, you know!) Because this is a good comedy, not everything is played for laughs, so we get to see the cult's rituals, and it's a nicely atmospheric scene. Never mind the fact that the ritual sequence betrays that the filmmakers don't know the difference between Egypt and India--not only is there a gag with an Indian rope trick before the ritual scene, but during it the Followers of Klaris dance in a distinctly Hindu-like fashion, even doing the multi-armed Kali dance that shows up in so many Western films. Unlike The Mummy's Hand, however, humor concerning "Eastern" cultures is not unleashed with the intent of degrading and belittling those cultures. It's just nice to see effort put into the mythology of the Mummy, when the last time that was actually bothered with was 23 years ago. 

And again, it is pretty funny. Sure, even I can tell that Abbott and Costello are recycling old material, but I've never heard it before and I liked it. Since 1951, Abbott has become a better actor overall, putting more energy into his performance (which helps his humor), but Costello has lost some of that energy. He doesn't get to shine as much as he does in the previous films, but that's simply because he doesn't get as much limelight time as the other plot threads. You can't go in expecting top shelf comedy, but if it made me laugh, it can't be too bad. It still feels like a longer movie than it is, but there are enough hits for it to justify its own existence.

So that's the Universal horror series! Do I have any lasting regrets? Honestly, not really. If you don't like something, it's best to make sure you experience it first, and I'm glad I broadened my horizons. For the most part, I can understand why these movies are beloved. Some of them are decently successful at what they do, whether it's making us scared, thrilled, or amused. And their monsters are enduring, and not just for visual reasons. Dracula, Imhotep, and Kharis represent the prospect of an ancient, dead evil coming back to menace a world that has forgotten it; Frankenstein's Monster reflects the horrors of man, as he is a victim of cruelty who learns to be cruel and to victimize people; the Wolf Man is the fragility of life, the horror of what it would be like to be cursed; and the Invisible Man shows us where blind arrogance and hunger for power will lead us. Surround that with the usually-impressive imagery and you've got something to fuel the imagination with.

And before you ask, I did consider taking on some of the other monsters associated with Universal. There was also Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but none of the famous Jekyll and Hyde adaptations of the 20th Century--the 1920 version with John Barrymore, the 1931 version with Fredric March, and the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy--were Universal productions, contrary to popular belief (and my own!). I also mulled over examining The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels, but those movies aren't set in the same universe as the others. All the same, I do have one more thing to offer. It's time for a bonus review!

Bonus:

House of the Wolf Man (2009):

House of the Wolf Man was made to star Ron Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr.'s grandson, in an unofficial continuation of the Universal Horror series. In 2009, when I was more closely affiliated with the sort of horror community that fetishized the Universal films, this was a pretty big deal. It toured for one night only at Monster Bash, the annual movie monster festival that I never attended but kept hearing about. However, shortly after its release on DVD, it became sort of a rare item, as it went out of print and used copies became pretty expensive, even now being outside my comfortable price range. It's taken me eight years now to find a bootleg that won't put a virus on my computer (hardly abetted by the fact that I forgot about it till I started working on this retrospective). I'm sure that there are plenty of Universal fan films meant to continue the series, possibly including some featuring relatives of original cast members, but this one always stood out to me as the worthiest contestant for the title of "truly" continuing what Universal laid down. Is it worth it? We'll just have to see!

On a dark and stormy night, several people come to Reinhardt Castle under a notice that they are to inherit the Castle. The present owner is Dr. Bela Reinhardt, and his guests are siblings Reed and Mary Chapel; foxy Elmira Cray; obnoxious nerd Conrad Sullivan; and machismo-sick racist Archibald Whitlock and his squad of African manservants. (Sigh...) It isn't long before the guests realize they are being spied on--also, it can't bode well that the good doctor owns a book by Abdul Alhazred. (Universal Lovecraft, huh? Wonder how they would have handled that...) Dr. Reinhardt then reveals over dinner that his heir will be chosen by process of elimination; thereafter, Whitlock and his servants discover mysterious wolf tracks outside. Hm...

Things grow more complicated when Elmira meets a witch who lives in the Castle, Dr. Reinhardt's mother and her grandmother. Her brother was Bela the werewolf from The Wolf Man (she owns the wolf's-head cane from that film), and with the aid of a wealthy German Baroness she came to America, where she married the Baroness' cousin Peter--not Peter Reinhardt, but Peter Frankenstein. (Peter was last seen as a child in Son of Frankenstein.) But Reinhardt is not merely a Frankenstein--he is a werewolf, and the reason why all the guests' mothers are dead is because he killed them, and he was able to kill them because they were his wives. Yep--all the guests are half-siblings, and Frankenstein has brought them here because he wants to see if his offspring will be werewolves through genetics. If they are not, it apparently means that werewolves are the product of magic, not science. As he chases his spawn through the castle, killing them one by one, Elmira uses a key she received early to free the Frankenstein's Monster (with the help of a rhyming lunatic). The Monster holds the Wolf Man at bay, in a real physical brawl, but Conrad, one of the two survivors with Elmira, is dying. It seems there's one way he can survive, and perhaps it has to do with the mysterious fellow in the cape with the sharp teeth in the doorway...

One thing that I will give House of the Wolf Man is that it is unrelenting in trying to copy the Universal films as closely as possible. On one hand, it gives the movie the refined touch that ought to come with a fan production of this caliber. On the other, it means the movie not only replicates the groaning boredom that comes with a Universal production, but the racism as well. They try to veer off from the racist portrayal of the African characters by having Whitlock seem genuinely sad when they die, but it's still pretty painful to watch. If you really wanted to humanize them, you would have had at least one black guy who speaks non-fragmented English in the main cast. But I suppose anyone who proposed that was shouted down with cries of that breaking the mold they tried to copy.

Complicating things further is the fact that while the movie is overall a well-scripted effort, with lots of good character moments alongside the twists and turns, the acting is...well. Let's just say that if you ever had to do a video project in high school, picture that. They were lucky to get some real theatre kids in on this one, but even Ron Chaney, the ostensible star of the piece, is pretty bad, resembling something somewhat akin to Goldman from House of the Dead 2 (which admittedly works for the role). And the ladies were clearly hired more for their physical attributes than their acting talents, because this is a low-budget horror movie made by men (why, even the predictability is predictable!). Yet I get the impression that everyone on the cast tried their best, and I found it charming in its own way, with the characters having enough individual personality that even stilted acting could sustain them. I should say that the guy who plays Dracula, the late Michael R. Thomas, does a great Bela Lugosi impression--his voice is pretty spot on. The worst I could say about the acting is that I have seen worse. What is odd to me about the script is that it's set about two generations after the events of The Wolf Man, if not later, so it's probably taking place sometime around the early '80s at least. So why are people dressing and speaking as if it were the early '40s? Maybe they're doing it ironically and all desperately trying to out-hipster each other. Who knows.

And yes, I will say it: the monster fights are very, very cool. (Apparently people didn't like the out-of-nowhereness of Dracula, but the rhyming madman in the cellar is the key, I think. You see I think this person is supposed to be Peter Frankenstein, the guests' grandfather--a brief, anomalous piece of rhyming voiceover says that wherever Elmira's great-great-grandfather's creation appears, Dracula will "await invitation" to combat the Monster. Elmira freed the Monster, and thus, Dracula has come to destroy it.) It's a hard movie to accept 100% and there were some choices made that should not have been made in 2009. But I liked it well enough. I mean, hey! It's in an actual House owned by an actual Wolf Man!

Notably, there is also a licensed Universal Horror novel written by Jeff Rovins called Return of the Wolf Man, which serves as a sequel not only to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but also White Zombie, The Monolith Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, and others. I'm sure I'll read it someday, if anything because I've heard it's not very good.

And while I normally don't rank the movies I watch, I decided to do so this time around. Behold, the final statistics:

Awesome/Trashtastic: Dracula's Daughter, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy
Good (But Not Awesome): Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns, Invisible Agent, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, House of the Wolf Man
Not Horrible: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, The Mummy's Ghost
What is This Rubbish: Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The Invisible Woman, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Curse

Six of 24 are great, and only four of those are included because I consider them to be great horror movies (Bride of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein I only appreciate as bad movies). To be honest, that's better than I was expecting. It's only too bad that seven of them are some of the worst films I've ever laid eyes on, with special shoutouts to The Invisible Woman and The Mummy's Tomb. May I never see anything like them ever again.

Thanks for reading! Next time I'll be back again with something a bit more germane to my usual interests.

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Image Sources: Wikipedia, Classic Movie Posters, Universal Horror Wiki, Monster Bash