In a twist which I'm sure will shock you, I'm a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And I have been ever since I discovered it by way of Manos: The Hands of Fate. Yep--I saw Manos before I saw the MST3K of Manos. Like a lot of shows that I'm a fan of, I haven't seen every episode of MST3K, and now for the first time in eighteen years, the episode roster is expanding (and the new series is wonderful). I'm sure I'll be fully caught up someday, given that I made it through all 800-odd episodes of Doctor Who even though both shows have had plenty of moments of DEEP HURTING. Let's face it, MST3K hasn't always featured the most...interesting movies in its long run. Every show has its filler episodes--not everything can be a Pod People or a Teenagers from Outer Space or a Pumaman; nor, for that matter, can every episode be a Red Zone Cuba, a The Starfighters, or a Monster a Go-Go. It's not the episode weren't funny, it's that the movies were cardboard; too bland to be either good or bad. MST3K had a strange thing going where it propped up some of the movies it featured, even if it just needed some of them to fill out the schedule. Since it discovered so many films, I feel like there's something special to its roster, even when it comes to these movies which could never justify their existences to me. Space Travelers, Racket Girls, The Human Duplicators, Superdome, The Projected Man, San Francisco International, 12 to the Moon--these movies were notable only in how un-notable they were. Hell, I could even find a place in the world for The Deadly Bees. It was based off a novel which was a thinly-veiled Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and was originally meant to be a Christopher Lee/Boris Karloff vehicle, meaning that technically one of those two could have ended up playing Holmes, which is kind of a fun prospect. But these others were so flat, so shallow in their meaning, that it was remarkable to think of them existing. Where I could find purpose and popular awareness, as in Space Travelers, which won an Academy Award and had Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman, the movie was usually so boring that this didn't matter.
And for a while, The Dead Talk Back was one of these "purposeless" movies. I could never stay awake during that episode, knowing only the bittersweet mercy of its not being violently, hatefully dull, like The Starfighters or Castle of Fu Manchu. I don't know why I rewatched it except for the fact that I've tried to return to the purposeless films with the hope of proving my theory that there's meaning in everything. It brings me a little comfort, y'know? Even if it's not typically relevant to anything in particular. In any case, I did a little research on The Dead Talk Back and was compelled by its story, more than I was for any of the other films I was looking into. The Dead Talk Back was made in 1957 but didn't see release until 1993, when it was rescued by Sinister Cinema (who also brought us Drums O' Voodoo). But if it weren't for the MST3K episode a year later the movie would be as forgotten as 1963's House of Dreams, another Sinister acquisition.
At first glance, it seems no big loss that The Dead Talk Back is forgotten, and to be frank...it isn't. It's something you can share with friends, sure, but it's not like it will go on to enter your friend groups' bad movie in-joke canon. There aren't many overly impressive lines or moments--it's an atmospheric thing, an ongoing, overhanging, continuous thing. The Dead Talk Back likes to play games with you, and if you get into its rhythm the games can be fun. For example, sometimes it lets you think it's a good movie until there is a horrible line-read or a monstrous cut and it exposes itself again as cheap shit. Don't expect too much of it, or it will blow a gasket. But curtail ye now your skepticism, for we are about to enter the Spirit World...
We have an opening scene which one would think would set up the events of the mystery about to unfold--if it does, we'll never know, because it's too dark to see anything, and I don't think the people we see are the characters we meet later. In any case, we swiftly move on to the laboratory of Dr. Henry Krasker, a criminologist who may not be a Mad Scientist but is at least a Ham Scientist. He tells us various tidbits about ghosts, past lives, and the Fourth Dimension, but his greatest achievement is a crystal radio that can talk to the dead. After establishing Krasker as our narrator, we meet another narrator, police lieutenant Lewis, who tells us that the film is a police recreation of the crossbow murder of model Renee Caldwell. Renee stayed at the same boarding-house as Krasker, and we meet the various other dwellers of the house, for all it will turn out to matter: Mrs. Coleman, the landlady, and her daughter Mrs. Stohl, who has two kids of her own; Raymond Milburn, a smart rich kid worried about losing his inheritance; Christy Mattling, a wild-eyed religious fanatic who misuses Bible quotes and is easily the most entertaining character in the movie; Harold Younger, a quiet, apparently mentally ill young man; Fritz Krueger, whose entire personality is that he is a pervert; and Hope Byington, Renee's friend. Each of the characters are interviewed and we learn that at least some of them could have done it: Milburn dated Renee and was worried about his family disowning him for it, Mattling of course thought Renee was a non-Christian whore, Younger's last two marriages broke up due to his chronic fits of rage, and Krueger (father of Freddy?), is implied to be a child molester capable of anything (he "battered" a "very, very young" girl). The proto-giallo despicability of the central cast means anyone can be the killer. Along the way the police scoop up a shady photographer named Patini, but he turns out to be a false lead when he confesses that he found Renee's body but was not the killer...explaining why we spent so much watching him try to escape arrest, right? It is decided, as they've discussed the whole film, to let Krasker intervene, and use his machine to ask the victim himself was happened. He explains that his mechanism works on the principle of mind-over-matter, also known as "telekenis." Soon all the suspects gather together to speak to the dead...but do The Dead Talk Back?
I believe that The Dead Talk Back was born of the same trend visited by three other bits of MST3K fodder, all made in 1956 or '57: namely, The Undead, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and The She Creature, which were all riffed in close proximity to each other. All three movies are concerned with the theme of hypnotic regression, either to a past life, a primitive state, or both. In The Undead, a woman is sent back in time to a former incarnation from the medieval age (which leads into a confusing and stupid history-alteration plot); in the other two films, hypnotic therapy and/or showmanship turns someone into a monster, either a werewolf or some sort of weird fish-lady. These films were likely inspired by the then-current revival of spiritualism brought on by the case of "Bridey Murphy," in which housewife Virginia Tighe claimed to remember a past life as a 19th Century Irish woman. Seance culture always looks for a chance to become relevant again and so the grand tradition of the past life regression came back, along with other attempts to probe into the world beyond. It didn't last very long, but interest in occultism has existed in all eras, even conservative ones like the 1950s. But The Dead Talk Back branches in another direction--the opening scenes, and indeed a lot of the scenes where Krasker does his thing, precedes the paranormal-slideshow documentaries of the '70s, serving up Bigfoot, aliens, Illuminati, and psychic stuff over the course of 30 to 120 minutes. And indeed, by referencing communion with the dead, reincarnation, living burials, and "telekenis," The Dead Talk Back is trying to push the buttons of all the self-proclaimed experts of the unknown, while also trying to make a compelling plot.
The plot is, admittedly, more nuanced than I first suspected. There is a sort of crapsack world dimension to this movie as there was in Criminally Insane, in that a lot of people turn out to be awful. Indeed, basically every man but Lewis and Krasker turns out to be scum in some capacity, while the female characters, save for Renee, an implied alcoholic who slept around in her relationships, are almost immediately portrayed as innocents. Even the good guys rage a little too hard: one of the cops exclaims, "Whoever did this should go down without a trial!" People have such little control over their passions in this universe. On top of this is a strange sexploitative angle the movie decides to don for itself. Renee isn't a bad looking woman, and before she dies we sure get a lot of scenes of her rolling around in bed in tight-fitting clothes. Not like she's about to be gruesomely murdered with a crossbow or anything. Similarly, we get a female character who wears a long fur coat, but slowly removes it while talking to the cops to reveal something skinnier and tighter. It's like it wants to go a bit into Ed Wood territory but the water's too cold. C'mon! You could do sexploitation in the late '50s! This stuff is so tame, but there is some darker stuff for its era, like when it reveals that Renee was pregnant when she died, because I guess that wasn't a cheap shock trope at that point. Rest assured, I doubt a reference to the wasting of a fetal soul was enough to stop this movie's release, even with the risque curves, religious mocking, and invocation of the dead. This is no Daughter of Horror here: no one was going to be shocked by this, much less chilled.
I want to talk about the ending--consider that your spoiler warning--but I wanted to talk about the acting in this first. The acting is horrrrrrible. This is possibly the worst acting I've ever seen in a '50s movie--a slurred degenerate version of the type of stuff Ghost of Hanley House held high. The sloppy editing is the second most obvious fault but the acting eclipses it by far. And it is hilarious. Extras who are clearly the cousins and grandparents of people from the cast stagger over their lines so badly that you instantly realize they had no time or budget to reshoot takes. I've already mentioned Krasker's butchering of "telekinesis," but he speaks it with such confidence that it can't be a flub. The actor just never heard anyone speaks the word before, not even the director. Though there are long moments of nothing, pay attention when someone starts talking. It will knock thine socks off.
Speaking of this movie's director: he seems to have made two other movies, both spiritualism documentaries. His first, 1957's The Body is a Shell, seems to have a narrative, but I can't find it anywhere. There is a tie-in book to it available on Amazon which advertises being related to the movie, and if I can afford it, maybe I'll pick it up someday. If you want me to review it, you can:
(Just gotta do that every now and then. And hey, thanks!)
So, the ending--spoiler alert. This is why a lot of people who saw it through MST3K hate it (aside from the fact that it's boring). The Dead do not Talk Back. It is all a trick. Though Krasker does sincerely believe he will one day find a way to communicate with the dead, for now, his machinery is all for the purpose of manufacturing hauntings to help the police get confessions. Here's the problem: in both circumstances, the method of extracting a confession wouldn't hold up in court. If Krasker did have the ability to talk to ghosts, the judge wouldn't believe him, and his machine seems to be such crap that he wouldn't be able to demonstrate it in the actual court itself. If he can't talk to the dead, then the use of his machine seems a little coercion-y to me, but admittedly all the participants are there of their own free will, so if they crack under pressure it's their own damn fault. Well...except Patini. He says he's there against his will, and even if he's really not, it'd make hell in court if he told that story to his lawyer. It sure is good Patini doesn't turn out to be the killer. But then, the justice system of this movie is a little dumb: one of the cops threatens to use the third degree on someone, which a lot of cops have been threatening in a lot of the movies I've watched recently. In these films everything turns out fine as long we get to jail, fine, or kill someone. So this is all for moot. It's a crime movie: you catch the criminal, and if you want to be all legalese about things you watch a court procedural.
This movie strikes me as an infinitely more entertaining variation on another movie I watched purely for curiosity purposes, Scared to Death from 1947. I checked it out because it was the only color film Bela Lugosi starred in. It was another crime thriller that tried to play a supernatural angle to hook in a couple of other markets on the side. In this case, the movie was presented to us by the ghost of the victim at the beginning of the film. This was probably meant to make us think Bela Lugosi was going to get up to spooky shenanigans as well. In the end, it was just boring and fraudulent. The difference is that Scared to Death was too professionally edited, too well-acted, to be anything but mediocre. The Dead Talk Back has much more silliness and shoddiness, so it feels "authentic." While also being strange and different. As a curiosity, and as a trash film, The Dead Talk Back has been neglected for too long. I say it's worth another look.
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