House of Mystery (1934), by William Nigh

That the Old Dark House film and the gorilla picture were wedded early on stands to reason. All the time today do we see popular trends welded anxiously onto each other in an attempt to double-dip on certain media markets. I doubt this was the first ODH gorilla movie, but it was far from the last. Indeed, depending on where you look, it seemed almost mandatory for a gorilla to at least be teased as playing a part in the events to come once all the characters were settled in the house. House of Mystery is not a great A-Lister...it's one of the dumb ones. I don't like it for any good reason, and it's perhaps arguable whether I like it at all. This is a rare film where most of my amusement comes from pure gawking, and that probably means it's no good at all.

In one of the weirdest openings I've seen in these films, we start in "Asia, 1913." Archaeologist John Prendergast likes two things here in "Asia": drinking, and dancing girls. When he's cut off from one he turns to the other, in this case seeking out the dancers at the Temple of Kali--pronounced "Kay-LIE" here because white people in the '30s were not great at paying attention to these things. (So we're in India, then, and not just "Asia.") Conspicuously the Temple of Kali features a pair of guys in gorilla suits--they aren't there for nothing, coming to life when Prendergast is brought there after drunkenly killing one of the Temple's sacred monkeys, invoking the curse of Kali when he calls the priests "dogs" and starts whipping them (!!!). Prendergast escapes, taking not only one of the dancing girls with him but also a fortune in jewels. He and the girl seemingly get married, in an amazingly casual subversion of 1910s race relations, and we fast forward to twenty years later. A man named Professor Potter and his wife are looking for Prendergast and believe that he is now living under the name Mr. Pren in a large mansion, having been confined to a wheelchair or pretending such. Alongside an insurance salesman and several other annoying individuals, the Potters go to Pren's house to talk over the terms of finally doling out payments to those who invested in the Prendergast Expedition all those years ago. Unfortunately, it is Pren/Prendergast's belief that the Curse of Kali extends to those who inherit the wealth of the treasure. Thus, all the heirs must stay in his Old Dark House to see the horror of Kali before they can be allowed in on their share. Before long they're all sat down at the seance table, and a gorilla lunges out of the darkness at Mrs. Carfax...

So, I can imagine the first thing you're thinking: are gorillas an actual part of Hinduism? I tried to look into this to see if any sort of research was done on behalf of the screenwriters, and the closest I could come is this: there is a character in a Ramayana named Hanuman who is a monkey-like being in the service of Rama. However, this movie is about the cult of Kali, who, as far as I know, isn't even another avatar of Vishnu, as Rama is. Hindu belief has a less strict sense of orthodoxy than Christianity but as far as I know there has never been an ape cult of Kali in Indian history. This is just the beginning of the movie's many problems.

There's the weird bit where the medium lady's spirit guide is named "Pocahontas," and I'm not sure if she's supposed to be the historical Pocahontas or just a ghost who goes by that name. This is used for a couple of cheap shots equating Indians with American Indians, which is made worse by the fact that the drums that accompany the gorilla attacks are called tom-toms. I found out actually that "tom-tom" comes from Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants to England, where it was adopted by white people as the name for a toy drum and later for part of modern drum kits--so actually this is more accurate than the word's use in the Westerns it's likely to remind audiences of. In the '30s, however, one has to wonder if this is a furtherance of the "Pocahontas" Indian/Indian cross-up.

Regarding the film's racism, then: poor Chanda, Pren's wife, gets treated like shit in this. There's this lovely exchange about her between the girl and the insurance salesman douchebag guy, who--argh--end up together.

Girl: "I don't like the looks of that person."
Asshole: "Person? She looks more like Gandhi's ghost!" (??????)

As far as I know, yes, he is questioning that she's a person. (Also, I'm sure a reference to Gandhi's death won't have a harsh edge to it in fourteen years or so. Asshole.) Now, Chanda came back with Prendergast to become his wife, right? Like...they're married, right? 'Cause we saw them kissing back in India, right? Nooope. It turns out that Lead Gal is the one Prendergast wants, and Chanda is, in the ex-archaeologist's own words, "just [his] housekeeper." JESUS. You can presume from those kissing scenes that he fucked her as soon as he got her back to the homeland, and then proceeded to fuck her in another way by ditching her for other (white) girls. When it turns out that Chanda is the killer, having worked with Prendergast to use trained gorillas to scare off those who are after "his" investment money, you really don't feel bad at all that her last victim is Prendergast himself. When the two of them left India, she was probably about twenty, and so she's in her early forties now, but there's a certain age to her face that would make the film loads better if they decided to do anything with it. Maybe that's why in the end Chanda gets away, with the only assertion that she's caught being a "don't worry about her" from the local cop. Since everyone in this movie is an idiot I'm assuming said cop has no way of catching her and is just trying to cover his ass. Dick.

One has to ask what the makers of this movie thought its appeal was. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what the movie sets out to do. Well, because it's an Old Dark House film, it's basically out to make money off of cheap scares and cheaper laughs. (Seriously, the "comedy" in this is so bad that it nearly becomes good through sheer surrealism.) The slackness of its research suggests that any sort of subtext, including the movie's imperialism (or possible subversion thereof), are probably accidental. Ever since the miracle stories of the days of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the bizarre descriptions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the West has had an obsession with weird tales, and has primordially linked those tales with the foreign. Whether they be from the forest beyond or the next continent over, people from other lands have been associated with the mystical and monstrous. The trend has only been challenged comparatively recently and it will be a long time yet before the racist aspects of tropes such as it die out completely. Even last year's The Mummy showed that studios at least are still interested in marketing the "exotic" as a source of horror, mystery, and unknown evil. However, to go back and try to answer my own question, I can't imagine a group of filmmakers setting out to make a movie which attempts to make funny the misadventures of abusive, idiotic assholes who--at least in the case of Lead Girl--are punished if they have any trace of redeemability. Oh, wait, never mind, I can imagine such people, because that sort of formula has always been used by movie comedies and is still being used today. Arrrrrggghhhh.

Just gawk, folks. Just gawk at how fucking stupid this movie is, and give it no quarter. You will only find entertainment if you expect nothing and give no fucks about your own well-being.

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Giant from the Unknown (1958), by Richard E. Cunha

Ahh. I found myself craving some '50s sci-fi cheese, but not necessarily of the giant monster variety--if anything because I've seen almost all of the giant monster flicks of that decade and the one after. In some of my research the name Richard E. Cunha kept coming up, and for good reason: his short filmography includes some rather promising titles like Frankenstein's Daughter and She Demons, but he also made the infamous Missile to the Moon and was the cinematographer on my favorite shitty adaptation of "The Hounds of Zaroff," 1961's Bloodlust! Giant from the Unknown, with its premise of an inhumanly strong and brutal Conquistador restored from suspended animation, seemed to offer much. It did not, but the way in which it failed to deliver is fun to look at. For better or worse, I actually enjoyed Giant from the Unknown, even though it sucks in a way I wasn't previously sure the '50s could deliver.

Strange murders have been plaguing the small town of (snicker) Devil's Crag. Some speculate it is part of the curse which is said to afflict the area (and it's called Devil Crag? Really now!). A young geologist named Wayne Brooks is in the area and hears about the murders--around the same time he also reunites with an old professor of his, Dr. Cleveland, and his daughter Janet, who we'll get to in a bit. Both Brooks and the Clevelands decide to ignore the advice of the Sheriff (played by our old pal Bob Steele from Big Calibre and probably other movies I've reviewed on this site) to go in search of signs that the old stories that Spanish Conquistadors made it out to this area are true. Ostensibly one of these Conquistadors was an unnaturally tall and strong man named Vargas, whom they called "the Diablo Giant." He will turn out to be our "Giant from the Unknown." As it turns out, the soil of this area is great for preserving life--Brooks has previously found a living specimen of a previously thought extinct lizard out in the area. It is of little shock to those of us who are even faintly trope-savvy that this soil has managed to preserve Vargas, whose legendary size and brutality are both matters of fact. Vargas kills some of Brooks' friends from town which of course leads to his being blamed for the murders. Will Brooks and his comrades be able to defeat the Diablo Giant before the savagery of the 16th Century becomes the new norm of the 20th?

When I've previously delved into the true schlock of the 1950s--the actual bargain-basement stuff, not the giant monsters, for the most part--it's never gone this low before. I'm about to embark on a study of the movies of W. Lee Wilder, Billy Wilder's significantly less-talented brother, as a personal dare to myself, and I'm told not even Richard Cunha delves as low as he, but this was something special. That is to say it's been a while since I've run into a '50s sci-fi movie that has been cardboard due to unprofessionalism before. Many of the bad '50s sci-fi flicks I see are bad because they're overly stuffy or overly padded. Not so here--this movie is just boring because there are long stretches where nothing of interest is happening. But the same demented slant brings the laxness to life here as the same touch of madness brought an entertainment quality to the oddly-similar Phantom Cowboy. Maybe it's just my expectations projecting a meta-quality onto it. Yet there is a quaint charm to the proceedings because as dully and stupidly as the movie was made, it was made with some degree of heart.

After all, there has to be some reason why so much dramatic tension is given to Brooks and Cleveland's research. I know that in archaeological and geological careers one has to move fast to keep getting sources of income or gateways into such, and as such they have to devote a tremendous passion and rigor to their work, but sometimes this movie feels like the Earth will explode if the three explorers don't find proof of those fucking Conquistadors. There's a hilarious scene based on the weird idea that metal detectors have time delays on them for some reason, and there is even a dramatic metal-detection montage. Bet no one was allowed to be seated during that. There's an even better montage right near it, a "dig up the artifacts" montage, which is so pathetically '50s that I loved it.

This movie has two massive problems with it. First, Janet Cleveland may be one of the sexist portrayals of women in a '50s sci-fi movie, ever. She is not only ignorant of science but proud of it; by her own admission she prefers being called pretty to book-learnin'. She is also tasked with all the "household" chores of the science-camp, like cooking and cleaning, and this is played for laughs at her expense. There is the interesting subversion that she's ultimately successful for the men's accomplishments, in that she's the one to discover Vargas' armor (albeit by accident), but is this really a blessing given that Vargas' awakening led to the horrible deaths of several people? As a woman I was so offended by how badly written Janet was that I just assumed she was a parody and laughed the whole thing off. But Jesus do I have to wonder how Cunha treats ladies in his other works--damn.

There is also, uh, Indian Joe, the man who warns the town of the curse. Okay, I get that the reservation system in the United States has always, in one form or another, been nakedly abusive to the Native American populations of this country whom it is supposed to benefit, but in 1958, Native folk were not wandering around talking like Tonto. It is so goddamn weird to have a contemporary Native American of the 1950s speak in this horrible broken English, but I also have to remember that in the early days of the Adam West Batman show I grew up loving, there were the same sort of tropes at play, and that was as late as 1967. Now, there is a truly weird scene involving Joe which is never properly addressed, where he shoots at Brooks, and then claims he was aiming at a rabbit. Despite the fact that he then says he never misses, he doesn't retrieve a rabbit carcass of any kind. I just have to ask why he was so obviously aiming at Joe. And why did he take the chance to do some weird inside-joke quip about not missing when he missed Joe while trying to shoot him? Joe never threatens anyone again for the rest of his appearance in the movie, nor does he seem to hold any sincere ill will towards Brooks--in fact, he calls him his friend, and trusts his word when Brooks says he and the others won't violate the Indian graves! Maybe I'm missing something here but this is a strange scene. What makes it odder is that there is the rather obvious plot hole of what exactly was killing people at the start of the movie when Vargas was only resurrected later, as a result of being struck by lightning. Was--was Joe killing those people? Is that really what they meant to imply there? What the fuck would his motive be for doing that?!

Then there's the ending. Spoilers abound but I have to dissect this bad boy. Vargas is ultimately taken down by one of Brooks' townie friends, who knocks him over a waterfall after beating him repeatedly with a stick, in a "fight" scene which is truly great to behold. When the Conquistador topples over the falls it is represented by--and I am not kidding here--the worst greenscreen effect I have ever seen in my entire life. This is worse than the combined filmography of Bert I. Gordon. This may actually be even worse than every single shot in The Amazing Bulk.

Somehow following this is a scene where Cleveland's desperation for research suddenly returns in force and he requests the Sheriff's help in recovering Vargas' body for study. The Sheriff's reply: "Unfortunately that river opens up into an underwater volcanic crater. No one has ever found the bottom of it." Ah, how convenient. Then, all tension immediately evaporates, and Cleveland is left to recover from his crippling scientific defeat by the happiness that comes with the knowledge that his former student is now banging his daughter.

As a final middle-finger to the audience, the tagline on the original poster read: "It came from another world!" No it fucking didn't. I mean, yes, another world in time, another world in civilization and perspective thereof, but "it" still came from Earth, and it was 1958 and thus there is literally no way that audiences didn't walk out of this at the end cheesed off by the lack of aliens. Though I suspect that was the least of their concerns with how everything in Giant from the Unknown all turned out.

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Black Zoo (1963), by Robert Gordon

As you may expect from my examinations of the lives of Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, and others, I do have a certain fondness for the old hams. Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre--there's something about a good scenery-chew that puts me in the right mood. Of course, these six are relatively well-known, especially if you're familiar with their work in the Universal horror franchises. Not every great horror standby is a Universal veteran, however. I was introduced to Michael Gough (like most) when he was Alfred in the '80s and '90s Batman movies, but I also know him as the Celestial Toymaker from the First Doctor's era of Doctor Who. When I learned he played the villain in one of those killer zoo movies that I learned to enjoy after the fun of Murders in the Zoo, I couldn't resist checking this out. Suffice it to say that Black Zoo is one of the most entertaining blind watches I've had in a long time, full of camp, grotesquery, and genuine scares alike.

Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) is the operator of Conrad's Animal Kingdom, and he's very kindly, too. He explains to his guests that kindness is the secret to training wild animals like lions and gorillas, not force. This is what we call "foreshadowing"--as if there wasn't enough "foreshadowing" from the opening scene of a girl being mauled to death by a seemingly-escaped big cat. As it happens, Michael Conrad is not kindly at all. He is fucking evil. In private he espouses an often-religious reverence for animals, prioritizing them totally and absolutely over humans; consequently he vigorously abuses all of his employees, especially his mute handyman Carl and his wife Edna, who has been reduced to alcoholism by his verbal and physical beatings. Mixed into this is a strange belief that what he calls the "so-called humans" are just other animals in need of training--never mind that he trains his actual animals with sincere kindness, and his human-animals with bitter cruelty. Over the course of the movie Conrad works his way through a crooked realtor intent on forcing him to sell his land, a disfigured, disloyal, rage-crazed cage cleaner played by Elisha Cook, and finally the "shocking," not-telegraphed-at-all revelations about the relationship between Conrad and his handyman. This film does have one truly shocking revelation in it, and it's that revelation which launched Black Zoo out of the rabble and straight into solid-gold A-List territory.

The twist is that Conrad is actually part of an animal-worshipping cult called "the True Believers"! What astounds me about this out-of-nowhere story-jerk is that it's not as out-of-nowhere as it seems; I mean, Conrad hosts funerals for his animals in a goddamn fog-shrouded cemetery, for fuck's sake. Plus, he does have a propensity for playing the organ, rather like a minister. So the True Believers are a group of folk who apparently all share Conrad's crazy "animals are good, therefore humans must live in misery" ideology. Rather like the cults from future A-List review subjects The Devil's Hand and Shriek of the Mutilated, this cult has sort of a racist element to it, in that it is--gasp!--made up of a lot of foreigners. I think in all three cases this is meant to show that the cult has prominence around the world, but each movie usually features a group of racial stereotypes rather than, y'know, ordinary people whose origins are given through exposition. In any case, the sight of the high priest of the True Believers wearing his tiger-skin cowl will leave you in tears. This movie's relatively happy ending still has a dour note to it when you realize there's still a murderous animal-cult somewhere out in the world. Probably one which will try to avenge itself on those who killed one of its members...

As you may well imagine, this is a movie which does not run quiet. On top of the True Believers and Elisha Cook roaring, "I had to kill him!" eight times in two minutes, we also have Jerry Stengel, the John Waters stache-bearing realtor who becomes increasingly violent towards Conrad over selling his land. When Conrad was being abusive to Carl and Edna I was comparing his mean-spiritedness to Trump, but Stengel's swiftness to resorting to crooked tricks to get Conrad's land I think is much more deserving of such comparison. It doesn't help that when Conrad pretends to agree to Stengel's deal, the tickled Stengel offers to take Conrad to a striptease joint (pronounced "strip-TEASE" because '60s) after they sign the contract, which this lesbian read as more than a little gay. (Again, the John Waters stache! Why are you sexually stimulating your business partner unless you're looking for a partner of another kind?) What I like about the exchanges with Stengel is that you end up actually worrying for Conrad, even though there's every indication at this point that he's a total asshole. For all that Conrad does, a closed zoo in the early '60s would have been bad news for all the animals in its keeping, with the possibility of their ending up in the hands of abusive private collectors being very much on the table.

Intriguingly (at least because Michael Gough is involved), this film's climax, where Carl finally gets his against Conrad, rather mirrors the vicious wrestling match between the Doctor and the Master in the last serial of the original Doctor Who series, Survival. "If we like animals...we'll die like animals!" Indeed! It seems that even when the movie isn't made in Britain, the British Filmic Incest Virus strikes again. If you follow British movies and TV, it shouldn't be at all surprising that a movie starring a Doctor Who actor taps into the same vein as one of the later Doctor Who stories. It's not just that it's easy to joke that Britain has a whole five actors, because you always seem to see the same people over and over when watching British film or TV, but it's that you start to notice other parallels as well the harder you gaze into the abyss...but that's a story for another day.

Black Zoo is now the third killer zoo movie I've seen (after the PCP-powered adventures of Wild Beasts) and I'm pleased to say I've enjoyed all three entries from the micro-genre thus far. Michael Gough gives a great performance, even managing to make lines like, "YOU BLOCKHEAD!" legitimately intimidating. I'll be tracking down more of his movies as time goes on, because he fits almost perfectly into the sort of acting aesthetic that I love. Wonderful.

P.S. Yes, there is a man in a gorilla suit in this movie, and yes, he does look conspicuously out of place in the company of the real animals. And yes, he is played by George Barrows, gorilla-suit master extraordinaire, who perhaps most infamously donned at least part of a gorilla suit for the part of Ro-Man in Robot Monster. Truly we're in the hands of celebrities, people.

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The Vampires' Night Orgy (1973), by Leon Klimovsky

This movie does not contain orgies. I mean, it contains night activity that could potentially be interpreted as possibly fulfilling the old, sexless definition of the word "orgy," but to say the vampires of this film have a night orgy is pretty misleading--in two languages, nonetheless! One vampire possibly has sex with a man in this movie, and even then, said man still has his mankini on when he's out of bed moments later, so it's possible the deed went undone. Despite the filthy lies of the title, The Vampires' Night Orgy is a great little trash film, a tremendous improvement over Leon Klimovsky's previous appearance on the site. 

A group of rather unpleasant people are going through the countryside to meet their new employer at their mansion. They clumsily exposit that they are each here to work as gardeners, maids, math tutors, etc. However the bus driver has a rather hilarious heart attack and they are forced to stop in another town, Tonia. Wait, did I say, they're "forced" to stop? I mean they choose to drive 10 kilometers to Tonia rather than make the full trek to their destination because they're, uh, tired. Yeah, much of what happens to the victims of this movie is due primarily to their own laziness (and other faults) rather than legitimate mistakes or circumstances beyond their control. Anyway, Tonia turns out to be pretty creepy--the local inn is obviously prepared for somebody, but the entire town seems abandoned. Doesn't stop the visitors from helping themselves to their booze, though! Eventually the people of Tonia do arrive and prove to be most cordial hosts, though that's after they descend upon poor Ernest in the middle of the night and drink him dry of blood. The mayor of the town, a man named Boris, explains that the entire village was absent last night because they were gathered in the cemetery. He says this presumably to creep his guests out, but fortunately for him, they don't find that suspicious at all, not even when he adds the detail that the town is formally ruled by a "Countess," nor when he produces a roast for them of suspiciously unique flavor when there are no livestock of any kind for miles. (We the audience get to see what happens to the poor bastard who provided said roast, from the meat of his bum leg.) Slowly, the travelers are whittled down, until only two remain--will they escape the den of the vampires before the orgy can begin?

This film is a mess, touching on all the fine ways in which a European horror film can be a mess short of just calling in Jess Franco or Bruno Mattei to direct. The soundtrack, a combination of atmospheric pieces, '70s groove tunes, and porno music, never fits a single scene. The dubbing, script, and editing are all horrible. If you have seen an especially bad Jess Franco you know just what you're getting with this--though it does contain considerably more dialogue than the usual Franco outing.

The scripting is really what makes the cast seem like such shitbags. Again, they end up in the vampires' lair just because they don't want to drive, after spending the late bus driver's last moments bitching to him that he was making them late. As soon as they arrive in town, one of them asks, "What do we do with the body?" The man closest to him shrugs and murmurs out a little, "Eh?" That's probably why the vampires go out of their way to do all but straight up tell their guests that they're vampires--they saw them abandon a dead body to go steal and drink instead. (Does that bus driver have a family, by the way?) Throughout the rest of the movie the characters will continue to stumble onto incredibly obvious signs of vampirism, like Boris drinking a thick red wine which he refuses to serve to anyone else, as they continuously do things which expose them as awful people, like watching each other undress through peepholes.

The peephole thing actually does get a bit of payoff--there's a scene later in the movie where we see an eye watching the characters through the people, and the actor on the other end has their lower eyelid pulled down, so it's just an eye swirling about in a sea of red flesh. Ughhh.

So, yes, this movie does have creepiness. There's also the subplot about Violet, the little girl of the group, who befriends a child who seems to be a vampire at first. But I guess he isn't a vampire, as he tries to hide Violet from the ghouls during a tense scene in the cemetery wherein he accidentally smothers her to death, or possibly breaks her neck. Yep--a kid kills another kid in this movie while trying to help her. That's some real Adult Fear right there. I just wish I knew if that kid was part of the village or not, because that definitely changes the context if he is.

Actually, there are a few characters whose vampire status is unclear. A lot of the villager extras don't have fangs (many of them don't even have teeth) but that's not what I mean. What's the deal with the millers who the big guy who shows up "on behalf of the Countess" keeps butchering for meat? Are they vampires? Is the big guy a vampire, even? If they aren't vampires, do they get paid for this? This isn't an unrealistic possibility because we learn the Countess is pretty free with her money--but how much money does she have if she's willing to keep around a bunch of employees who have to give up their meat (and, presumably, blood) to the local cause? I really like the idea of a vampire city like this having vampire tiers, an internal class structure, where some vampires--possibly those who were poorer in life, before the village underwent its transformation--are seen as more expendable than others, leading to a small society of disfigured vampires left to slowly regain their limbs over the course of centuries, perhaps trapped in one of the city's darker quarters...obviously I'm making up a bit of that idea but in all the "vampire city" stories I've seen, all the vampires seem to be socially equal just by merit of being vampires. This movie tinkers with that a little bit, assuming that everyone in Tonia is meant to be of the undead.

Really, if you've never delved into proper Eurohorror before, this is a good introduction. It has some actual atmospheric creepiness, but is largely a farce of badly-translated and rushed production, which actually has the audacity to try to get its badly-dubbed actors to recite Shakespeare at some point. In that sense it tries to be "artsy," without the necessary self-awareness of art, to magnificent results. Plus, there's a little nudity to give you a taste for what European bodies had to offer in the '70s and '80s. It's beautifully, primally riffable, while also presenting a strange blend of Old World charms that will delight you if you're used to American films exclusively. Even for someone like me who's seen many of these films, it's like being back at the happy start all over again, to see the tropes and accidents played out so perfectly here. Give this movie a shot, whether you're green or a vet--it's a pretty great time.

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The Monster and the Girl (1941), by Stuart Heisler

Okay, I've been mean to you guys. I can't say I'm gonna look at some old-school gorilla movies and then exclusively show you the ones that don't actually have gorillas in them. Of the gorilla movies I watched last year, The Monster and the Girl is probably the best of them in terms of sheer entertainment--it's a double feature all in itself, being punchy noir in its first half, and a sci-fi horror thriller in the second. That makes it pretty bizarre and thus a good fit for the A-List. After this, we'll get back to some of the more usual stuff we do around here, but not before I draw attention to what is surely the most valuable derivation of this exercise in gorilla films: of the four we've looked over, three of them all use the same "hairy" font that this movie does. Interesting...

Young Scot Webster is on trial for the murder of a man named Wade Stanton. We learn from Scot's testimony that he was framed--he was trying to track down a man named Larry Reed, and the trail brought him to an apartment where someone shot Stanton and forced the gun into Scot's hands. Scot's sister Susan gives the full story. She came to the city to "be somebody" and met Larry Reed, whom she quickly fell in love with and married. Except it turns out her beau wasn't planning on footing the bill for their wedding, and indeed there are now several men in Susan's life trying to convince her Reed never existed, who similarly want to be paid for their wedding accommodations. These men are gangsters under the employ of W.S. Bruhl, and it's apparently a recurring scheme of theirs to have "Larry" marry women, rack up high bills in their names, and then vanish, leaving them with a sizable debt, which can only be worked off in one way... (This being a Paramount movie from 1941 they never call it prostitution but you figure out how to read these things at some point.) Scot of course wanted revenge, but the case against him is too stacked, and he's sentenced to death. In jail he's approached by the mysterious Dr. Parry (George Zucco) who wants to extract Scot's brain after his execution. Scot consents to the strange request, having nothing to lose. But then, at exactly the halfway mark, we are in Parry's operating room. A sheet is pulled back. There is a gorilla underneath. Zucco looks down at his brain-in-a-jar and gets ready for the operation...

Ahh. It's sweet, isn't it? This one of those movies that Gets Me. There are quite a few ways in which I use that phrase, when I do use it: sometimes it means a horror film actually scared me, or a shock film actually shocked me. Other times I mean it in a less traumatic sense--it Gets my funny bone, is what I mean. This movie is halfway between. The sudden revelation of the gorilla, and the implicit future which lies in wait for Scot, which swiftly becomes explicit over the next half-hour, is one of the great movie moments of all time for me. After all, it makes sense for the noir film that this movie is to be called The Monster and the Girl for the first half-hour. There is obviously a girl surrounded by several individuals who could easily be called monsters, with either Larry or Bruhl being the biggest contenders for carrying the title's definite article. George Zucco's appearance early on in Scot's trial could potentially help foreshadow the movie's next direction, but one has to think about context. Zucco's primary appearances as a mad scientist--The Mad Monster, Dr. Renault's Secret, The Mad Ghoul, and The Flying Serpent--all postdate The Monster and the Girl. The only prior role which would have contextualized Zucco's appearance for audiences would have been as Andoheb in The Mummy's Hand a year prior. So this would have been a nowhere-twist for its native audience just as it is for those who watch it today.

I realized, while rewatching the film for this review, that the reason why I like these movies is that they are actually extremely pure jokes. Humor arises from a mental gap in expectation, with the expectations in question often relating to learned logic or social norms. That's why comedy is so fucking hard--if you abuse those gaps, it just pisses people off, and you have to avoid abusing those gaps over and over. But in trash movies, people manipulate expectation by accident, and it reveals what I think is a sympathetic sort of worldview. We all have our eccentricities, and in American society at least, we are told to restrain those eccentricities because taking the time to address them stands in the way of makin' money, y'see. (Also a continuously-embarrassed population is easier to manipulate but that's another story.) In trash, people expose those eccentricities--those weird, sideways beliefs about details of life (sometimes mundane, sometimes grandiose) that make them who they are. For better or worse. Trash speaks to a sensibility of individuality, and to a subversion of social norms that is as revolutionary and serious as it is funny. If nothing else, movies like these free up one's imagination. Someone got away with turning this into a gorilla movie halfway through--so why shouldn't your half-baked idea see the light of day? As long as it entertains people?

(I mean it's more complicated than that, but it always is.)

Anyway. I like this movie not only because it suddenly turns into a weirdo sci-fi horror movie (Death Wish with a gorilla is maybe a way of putting it), but because the noir elements on display throughout are actually really well done. It's hard not to love a movie where a gangster tells a lady about to fall out a window: "Watch that first step. It could spoil your makeup." The noir stuff keeps on until the end, including some psychological scenes with the gangsters as they slowly come undone when they realize a huge, strong guy is running around killing their gang in particular, but it's a little hard to take it seriously when there's a man in a gorilla suit lurking around.

The thing is, though, it's not a bad gorilla suit. A lot of other reviews noticed this too: the mask they have for it is strangely emotive, and it helps us hang onto the idea that this is a man in a gorilla's body. Plus the man in the suit is really good at acting like a real gorilla--isn't it nice when you can presume someone watched nature reels at some point to prep up for one of these? Because it's difficult for me to be serious about a man in a gorilla suit, however, I do have to say that watching a gorilla drop down on a man from a tree in a suburban neighborhood is a truly magical sight to behold. It's awesome that the gorilla of this movie is both "good" and hilarious. To have a funny-awful gorilla movie is one thing; to have one that's good but too serious is another; and now I just feel like a glutton.

The Monster and the Girl is a Janus of a movie but at least both faces are nice. I've seen some weird noir fusions now at this point and this is one of the weirdest and best of all of them. If you have a chance to give it a watch, don't miss it.

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Human Gorilla (1948), by Budd Boetticher

You may be noticing around now that I am a bit of a sucker for gorilla movies. There's something fascinating to me, in ways both good and bad, about the obsession movies had with gorillas over the first half of the 20th Century, in a way which I feel is unequaled today. Gorillas were an easy symbol of the exotic and the unknown, and for a while it seemed like it was almost a goddamn requirement to have a gorilla in your movie if it fit anywhere within the horror and mystery genres. People just couldn't get enough fucking gorillas.

Now, there are some relatively clear issues in this: using the gorilla as a shortcut for "the exotic" usually brings up complicated racial issues. In this case "the exotic" usually refers to Africa (though as we'll see in the decidedly odd House of Mystery Southern Asia was not immune), and there's a long history of black people being associated with apes and other subhuman hominids. Consider the fact that King Kong, the most famous "gorilla picture" of all time, wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for the release of Ingagi two years prior in 1931. Ingagi, as I've said often on this site, is a "documentary" about the mating habits of gorillas and...Africans. Yeppp, I still have...issues with that. Of course, King Kong isn't immune to racial criticism either--Kong kidnapping and sexually threatening a beautiful white woman, anyone? (To say nothing of the trampled villagers.) You'd better believe that some hideous thoughts were had in the heads of moviegoers when they saw these gorilla movies.

But by the early 1940s, it had gotten to the point where, as we've seen in The Gorilla Man, movies that didn't even have gorillas in them were trying to get in on the gig--mercifully freeing them from the uncomfortable racial elements in the process while also creating hilarious surprises for the unaware viewer. That failed setup is what makes this second category of "gorilla pictures" fun for me, just as the increasingly bizarre dalliances into Shitty Science in the actual gorilla pictures brings me to laughter. Human Gorilla was originally released under the title Behind Locked Doors, but the title card above indicates it must have seen release under the better title pretty early on. The film is not about any sort of actual gorilla, instead being a film noir about corruption in a local mental hospital.

Reporter Kathy Lawrence seeks out PI Ross Stewart to help her claim a $10,000 bounty put out on crooked Judge Finlay Drake. The caveat is that Drake is presently hiding out at a medical facility run by his friend Dr. Clifford Porter: La Siesta Mental Hospital. Stewart will have to disguise him as manic-depressive ex-salesman Harry Horton to get in, with Kathy playing his wife. It isn't long before he finds out that La Siesta is more like a prison, and a bad one at that--one with torture and abusive staff. Of course, when it's time for patients to disappear permanently, they're taken to the "Human Gorilla," a man named Champ--a crazed ex-prizefighter played by none other than a weirdly-young Tor Johnson! It isn't long before it's Stewart's time to face the Champ. With our plucky investigator escape the madhouse, or will he be caught in Tor's wheels of progress...?

One thing that I'm noticing fast in these film noir PI things is that a lot of them feature similar central leads--I've not read or watched my Hammett or Chandler, so I don't know the proper archetypes here, but I've seen quite a few movies where the PI is a happy-go-lucky obscure first-timer who has a lot of comic relief before he gets real serious on the case. And, of course, he usually ends up dating his female client at the end. This is the sort of stuff that the noir parodies I watched in my childhood took on. It's quite ripe for ripping apart.

I know I still haven't gotten around to Find the Blackmailer, but Ross Stewart is no D.L. Trees. When he's in "comic" "relief" mode, he's really, really creepy. Not even the fact that he's a pretty solid detective can make up for the fact that he is basically a step away from being a rapist. When Kathy proposes (no pun intended) to pose as husband and wife, after telling Ross about what the plan is, he backs her up against the wall and says, "Yes, and I'm always kissing you...publicly, privately, just all over the place." Seeing that written out gives it a double meaning that I really don't like. Then he goes on to add, "You could say I'm manic-depressive--beating you one minute and kissing you madly the next." They've known each other for less than thirty minutes. Add on the fact that Ross is so green that Kathy watches his name get painted on his office door, and there's no reason why she shouldn't just seek out some other detective. One thing that does bug me about these private eye movies is that they always say that they can't hire a detective whose face is known, but surely an experienced detective would a) know how to disguise themselves, and b) keep their identity on the down-low on a consistent basis to avoid this exact situation. I realize that's not perfect logic on my behalf, but I feel bad for these ladies who have to keep shelling out good money for idiots just because Dick Tracy keeps plastering his face everywhere.

Anyway. This movie has a lot of creepiness besides Ross Stewart, as manifested in Larson, Dr. Porter's abusive assistant. Larson takes care of most of the physical punishment around La Siesta, even though Porter gives him a limp admonishment not to harass the patients. Larson beats a man for screaming from nightmares, subjects the patients to long hours of hard unpaid labor, and make loud noises outside Tor Johnson's cell to make him have PTSD episodes. Worse, there's a third man around the hospital, Fred Hopps, who meekly accepts his place under Larson and Porter because his son is a patient at the institute, and Larson abuses the kid when Hopps misbehaves.

There are a lot of intriguing parallels and deviations between this movie and The Gorilla Man. In The Gorilla Man, suspense arises because we the audience know what Craig Killian is in for before he does; in Human Gorilla, we get our suspense from the fact that Stewart knows he should brace for the worst but we the audience don't know what's in that hospital. Both movies feature a bespectacled, psychopathically violent second banana to the main villain; both movies feature another servant of the main villain who is only working for them because they're holding their children hostage, who ends up helping the hero in the end. Both movies also feature the threat of gristly punishment for the imprisoned protagonist--in Human Gorilla transgressions are dealt with by Tor Johnson, while in Gorilla Man the threat is ending up in the operating theatre of Dr. Ferris.

In sum, Human Gorilla is a surprisingly wild ride in its 61-minute runtime, even if its "hero" is a despicable scumbag. It's great to see an early "performance" by Tor Johnson, and what's more is that it has a pretty good double feature to go with it if you can get your hands on a copy of Gorilla Man. It's a piece of solid noir, with a lot of fun twists along the way. Try it!

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The Gorilla Man (1943), by D. Ross Lederman

Oh, right, like I'm going to ignore a movie called The Gorilla Man. This movie is tough to track down, as it is often confused with Bela Lugosi's The Ape Man, also released in '43--but sure enough, I found it. Let's just say there are some substantial differences between this film and the similarly-named account of Professor James Brewster's misadventures in gorilla-human hybridization.

Captain Craig Killian is coming back from a raid with vital intelligence on the next big Nazi push. He is intercepted by an outfit led by Nazi agent Dr. Dorn, and his psychopathic surgeon Dr. Ferris, who make him their prisoner in an attempt to find out what he's learned. The whole time they pose as British doctors, and keep on giving him too much morphine. Doesn't help that our introduction to Dr. Ferris is him experimenting on a dude's brain without anesthetic... Then the gaslighting begins. After learning the intel, the Nazis work to frame Killian for murder and convince his superiors that his information is the product of a disturbed brain. Fortunately, Killian has a stouthearted love of England, and he's a legendary climber, which saved his life on the front more than once--it's for that climbing skill that they call him "the Gorilla Man." All's well that ends well, but you'll be on the edge of your seat until then.

A lot of the suspense of this movie arises from the horrifying character of Dr. Ferris. Seriously, the makers of this film didn't want to fuck around when it came to showing off the sort of sick fucks the Nazi echelons attracted (and continue to attract, unfortunately). Again, his first appearance is him operating on someone's brain with no anesthesia...and then it's mentioned that several of his other patients have died of "heart failure" after visiting his operating theater. He also wears these glasses that quadruple the size of his eyes and make him look like some sort of fucking fish monster. He's specifically mentioned to be a "psychopathic killer" and when Dorn slaps around Nurse Kruger (whose family he's holding hostage, by the way), those freaky eyes glaze over and he has to be restrained before he can kill her. And yes, he does get to murder at least one person in the movie...and he sends a child to be the first to find the body. Brrrr.

Oh, did I mention that Ferris is played by John Abbott? Yeah, Mowgli's Wolf dad from The Jungle Book. Have fun recognizing his voice and seeing your childhood crash and burn before your very eyes.

There's also an interesting twist of sorts, where Killian's excuse to escape the hospital, that he needs to deliver a message from one of his dead men to said man's widow, turns out to actually be true. This is where we need to consider this as a propaganda film, as many of these wartime thrillers were. The focus on the actual war effort arguably makes it a war film that strays deep in mystery territory, rather than the usual reverse; consider films like Black Dragons, which clearly began life as horror or mystery films until war references were inserted by mandate by studio heads. By choosing to pursue an actual narrative outside of just shouting at the viewer that the Nazis are bad, we get to see how bad the Nazis are in person. The movie never gets much further thematically than "Nazis are devious," but it's still a comparatively complicated story that's well-written, well-shot, and well-acted.

Of course, there's another message, too: Nazis are stupid. (They are.) In attempting to get Killian back into their clutches, Dr. Ferris poses as a cab driver, but does nothing to disguise himself save for a shitty Cockney accent. He deserves to get ambushed and decked in the face by Killian. A single glance in the rearview mirror would find him out at once and I assume that's how Killian spotted him.

But there's also the fact that Killian's ex-girlfriend gets killed...that's a little brutal for a '40s movie, and, again, unexpected. Man, this movie has some tone issues. Thankfully, there is not a trace of comic relief, showing that at least someone in this era of movies had a brain in their head for once.

I think it's great that they named this movie The Gorilla Man so that they could convince people it was a monster movie--there's even a poster that shows a gorilla-like monster hand reaching for a screaming woman. Yeah, that never happens in this. Frankly, throwing in a monster or, Gods forbid, a man in a gorilla suit, would slaughter this movie. And because there's a good head at the wheel it never comes to that. I found out that the director, D. Ross Lederman, also made Find the Blackmailer, a surprisingly well-made mystery caper released the same year--expect that up here sooner or later. If you can find yourself a copy of The Gorilla Man you'll be in good hands, if you like mysteries, horror, war movies, or any combination of the above. Check it out!

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The Intruder (1933), by Albert Ray

Why are movies so weird? Well, I suppose because people made them that way. With movies like The Intruder I can get back into the psychosis of trash cinema--the strange neural lapses, the personality tics, that made people make these...things. The Intruder is a screwed-up little movie, a possible relic of that bizarre, magical era where filmmakers didn't really know the new medium they were working with, leading to clunky mismatches of genre that leave the whole affair just downright odd. Trying all at once to be a zany comedy, a mystery movie, and a horror thriller, The Intruder ends up being both implicitly and explicitly disturbing, hard to put into words and yet all the while, shockingly mundane.

We open in the middle of a Godzilla movie, by which I mean we open with a hilariously fake-looking toy ship that looks like it belongs, at best, in the third Blind Dead film, The Ghost Galleon. This ship is the titular Intruder, and not only is there a man aboard with half a million dollars in stolen diamonds, but a murder has been committed as well. It seems like an ordinary stagey '30s mystery, with the detective lining up and interrogating the suspects...and then the weirdness happens. A fire breaks out on the ship and the passengers are lost at sea. Here, they end up on a desert island (?) where they are threatened by a gorilla who makes horrible screeching noises (!) and a wild man with a Tarzan yodel (!!!). (The actual shipwreck scene is surprisingly harrowing, with dozens shown drowning, despite the apparent plethora of lifeboats.) Said wildman lives in a ruined cabin with the bones of his (wife? girlfriend? victim?) "Mary" and "Joe," the man who apparently stood between them. This movie features a wild man wrestling with an inanimate skeleton, screaming angrily. This is all treated very casually up until they get off the island and wrap up the murder/theft.

I'm sure the reasons behind this movie are much more ordinary than I'm imagining. I suspect that this began life as an ordinary mystery B-programmer, but a studio mandate told director Ray to throw in a jungle segment, with a wild man and a guy in a gorilla suit, and so that just had to happen. It all worked to Ray's benefit anyway, as the lengthy divergences we delve into on the island help pad out what would otherwise be a duller-than-cardboard mystery film. It still ends up just under 54 minutes. With the release of Ingagi two years prior, gorilla films and jungle films in general started their vogue. My Gods, this movie was probably trying to cash in on an exploitation movie that said that Africans have children with gorillas.

It was also still pretty popular at the time to have comedy be part of your mystery, and to cross over into horror wasn't unexpected either. That's why we get things like the comic relief drunk uncle, because alcoholism is so fucking funny. This is also why there are lines like, "Now I know why Robinson Crusoe called his Man Friday--they ate fish everyday," in the same context as a murderous caveman and a shitton of people fucking drowning. (Gotta love the shots of the people drowning intercut with several of our main characters standing on the most spacious lifeboat ever. Seriously, you could fit at least four more people into that thing!) This is where another old friend comes out to play: the fact that They Just Didn't Care.

Let's talk about our murderous caveman for a bit. There are several possibilities present in his little story, each more disturbing than the last. It seems pretty obvious that he murdered "Joe," but we don't know Joe's role in things. He could have threatened the Wild Man and "Mary," or maybe Mary originally dated Joe and the Wild Man wanted a different arrangement. The review for this movie on Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings puts forth the possibility that if the Wild Man still stabs Joe's skeleton like he's alive, what does he do with Mary's remains...? Ewww! Add in the fact that we don't know if Mary herself died a natural death and you have an entire secret horror movie packed away on this island.

I just really don't know what to say about this one. Aside from the sheer oddity of how far the script diverges from its original premise, there isn't much to write home about--it's clunky and stage-like, as I said, and the actor's voices sometimes barely rise above the set's sound effects due to the cheap, primitive recording equipment. It never perfectly holds my attention and really likes spinning its wheels, when already most of it is padding. But it's so unique and peerless even beyond its native era by sheer concept alone that it's worth at least one watch. At 53 minutes, how can you refuse?

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The Black Raven (1943), by Sam Newfield

...and we're back!

After I was done writing up the reviews for 2017 I actually had a chance to (gasp!) watch movies for pleasure--that is to say I got to watch the movies I usually watch but without the need to write about them. During this time I continued my exploration of the trash of the 1930s and '40s, eventually stumbling onto the horror-mystery filmography of George Zucco. I previously had only known Zucco for his small role in Voodoo Man and those boring Mummy movies, but I found him to be a hauntingly charismatic actor and every late night after coming home from my day job, I would make a habit of throwing on one of his little hour-long thrillers while my sleeping meds kicked in. I'll be dealing with some of my favorites from the bunch slowly over the course of 2018, and I knew when I made the decision to spotlight some of Zucco's flicks, I would start with The Black Raven.

Amos Bradford is the Black Raven, who runs an inn by the same name. Under that criminal alias, Bradford helps smuggle crooks like mobster Mike Baroni across the border into Canada. Late one night he's attacked by Whitey Cole, an old member of his racket, but he subdues him with the aid of his groundskeeper Andy. Around this time, however, the border bridge washes out, resulting a flock of guests suddenly arriving at the Raven: Horace Weatherby, a suspicious banker with an equally-suspicious suitcase; Lee Winfield, daughter of Mike Baroni's political rival Tim Winfield; Lee's fiance Allen; and finally Tim Winfield himself. There's also a prowling Sheriff, played by Charles (excuse me, "Charlie") Middleton, aka Ming the Merciless. Allen and Winfield clash rather harshly, and Winfield discovers that Weatherby has embezzled $50,000 from the bank he worked for--he steals this money off Weatherby for himself. Is it really that much of a surprise when the old politician winds up murdered when he's so unlikable? Of course, Allen is the prime suspect--after all, Winfield was calling the police to report Allen for kidnapping his daughter just before he was murdered! The Raven, however, is sure the kid didn't do it, and despite his own nature as a crook, he wants to make sure young Allen doesn't get punished for a crime he didn't commit.

Like any good mystery, it's the cast that matters. Zucco is infinitely charming as Bradford, nailing simultaneously the role of a hardened criminal and the heart of gold which lurks within said crook. You can believe he's a good man who was nonetheless willing to sell out Whitey Cole when it suited him. Contrariwise there's little to the engaged couple short of the typical stuff we see in young couples from '40s horror films, but they are plot devices in what is ultimately Zucco's movie. Weatherby, until we find out his dark secret, is kind of a minor hero for retail workers, putting in a speech about how cloying and awful his bank-desk job really was ("I couldn't stand that awful subway with its thick stench of sweat and garlic..."). Baroni does a good job as an anxious but cocky gangster, and Tim Winfield is pure, uncut asshole--robbing a desperate man, and threatening his daughter's fiance to the fullest extent possible. "Lee isn't quite 21," he says, "and kidnapping's a crime. I'll make sure you get the limit!" In 1943, kidnapping meant the chair...yep, that's right! This guy isn't just a crooked politician and a thief, he's willing to have his daughter's boyfriends executed when he doesn't get his way!

Not all the cast is that great. Charles Middleton doesn't get nearly enough screentime, even if his Sheriff does have an interesting rivalry with Bradford. Glenn Strange, the former Frankenstein's Monster himself, is our ostensible comic relief, and while I've seen Strange act outside the Franky makeup before...he's much better hidden in it. His "humor" is so bad it actually took me a few viewings to even recognize that he was supposed to be our comic relief. He's that bad.

But most significantly, there is a road patrolman who is played by none other than Jimmy "Ptomaine Pete" Aubrey. He's only there briefly and he's not that funny, but he's loads better than Glenn Strange. Recognizing Aubrey in things is always a treat, even if they decided not to give him a credit for this one.

There's something right at the beginning which marks this as a PRC movie: it uses the same stock music that PRC, Monogram, and every other Poverty Row studio harvested back in the day. Listening to this movie, you can almost get it mixed up with The Devil Bat and Invisible Ghost and all the rest. Despite its Poverty Row status, it doesn't do dare to do much outside the Hayes Code--even though Amos is essentially a good guy, he still has to die because he committed crimes at some point and such folk must not be suffered to live. There is some blood, though! It's always fun seeing blood in a '40s horror movie. It's like thinking you've forgotten to order a topping on a pizza and you open up the box and see that they gave you extra of that topping.

The Black Raven is a tightly-paced thriller with plenty of great scripting and a genuine mystery. It's a great first George Zucco movie, and it's a great movie for me to come back to as well. I'm glad to be back. Let Zucco blaze the trail into what will be a year of awesome films.

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