Devil Doll (1964), by Lindsey Shonteff

There may have been a few of you last week who read my review for The Devil-Doll and thought to yourselves--"Hmm, that doesn't sound like the movie I watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000." Wrong Devil Doll! This is, like a few other inhabitants of the A-List, one of the movies that Joel/Mike/Jonah and the Bots introduced me to. This indie British chiller is nothing special, but it has enough trashy weirdness that it makes for a pretty entertaining watch even outside the riffs of the Satellite of Love.

The Great Vorelli is a stage hypnotist who works with a ventriloquist dummy named Hugo. There are many early intimations that Vorelli's shows are more than a little upsetting. First, he hypnotizes a dude into mentally taking the place of a Chinese person who the man saw executed. The trauma isn't permanent--the man forgets everything once Vorelli snaps his fingers--but it's hard to imagine any audience that would want to watch something like this. Then, when Hugo comes out, he and Vorelli prove to have a mutually abusive relationship. Admittedly, the audience still applauds wildly in the wake of his "comedy" routine that's about as funny as a math test. What is truly impressive about Vorelli's act is that he can ventriloquize (sure, we'll call it that) through Hugo without even having to touch him. It's like the doll is really alive.

But our story doesn't truly begin until Vorelli has met Marianne Horne, a wealthy girl who he hypnotizes into an expert dancer. It's clear that Vorelli has some sort of perverse lust for her, and when we meet Vorelli's other assistant, a 30ish woman who only covers half her ass onstage, we start to understand what sort of man Vorelli really is. It's clear that his current assistant has been drained of all hope and life by Vorelli's cruelty, and Marianne is about to be put on the same path. Marianne is scared of Vorelli--she says that much to her reporter boyfriend, an American named Mark English (an American named English...was that someone's idea of a joke?). But he telepathically compels her to come visit him, so she can invite him to her aunt's charity ball. During this time he shows as a wine called "Blood of the Virgin," and he begins to hypnotize her he repeats that the wine is "deep...rich...red...warm..." Ughhh. Nothing happens yet, but after a once-again depressing excuse for a show at the charity ball, where Hugo actually threatens Vorelli with a knife, Vorelli drags Marianne further under his spell and rapes her. Hugo, whatever he is, has had enough. He goes to find Mark, and tells him to look up what he was doing in 1948 Berlin. Mark sends a reporter friend to Berlin to investigate. Meanwhile, Vorelli ends up in some rather confusing soup when Hugo kills his washed-up cheeky assistant, to frame him for murder. Not only is this point basically forgotten, but it paints Hugo, a sympathetic character, as a murderer. It contributes to a surreal noir-like griminess that haunts the movie even outside of Vorelli's shows.

It becomes clear that Hugo was not always a dummy--in the late '40s, in Germany, he was Vorelli's assistant, after the man spent a prolonged period of time studying both medicine and mystical techniques in soul-transference. Eventually, during a show, Vorelli killed Hugo in a way that trapped his soul in the dummy. Now Vorelli intends to do the same to Marianne, apparently so he can get her family's money. What?! I would assume he would want his "bride-to-be" to keep her human body for as long as possible, given what he's done to it so far--and what he has a habit of doing to his female assistants. For a movie with this much sexual grime oozing up from beneath, it's a little jarring for the film to claim that the primary interest of this villain is money.

But anyway, this is all leading up to one of the best fight scenes of all time, pitting man vs. dummy. I can't possibly describe how ludicrously awful this fight is, so I will encourage you only to seek the film out for yourselves. It's a sight to see.

Devil Doll is an ever-welcome combination of cheap sleaze and effective atmosphere. Vorelli's show at the beginning is murky, smoky, and sweaty--there is no music, save for the ominous thumping beat we the audience get to hear. It would be an astonishingly eerie experience to watch a man force another man to believe he's going to be shot in the head in silence, in the dark. This movie seems like the sort of thing that would be decently shocking in early-'60s Britain, if anyone actually saw it. Plus, Hugo is a scary motherfucker--when Vorelli calls him ugly, he unfortunately does have something of a point. I'm not saying that this is horror gold, but the mixture of the sleaze with the oily, claustrophobic atmosphere is interesting to watch. Especially when it all falls out and becomes funny again. Invite Tod Browning over and you'll have yourself a zany double feature.

Oh, and I'll quote it before you know it: "Ham! I love it."

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The Legend of Spider Forest (1971), by Peter Sykes

How can you resist a title like THE LEGEND OF SPIDER FOREST? Fortunately the movie is every bit as unhinged as its title.

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Book Club of Desolation #18: Benighted (1927), by J.B. Priestley

Spookyween has come and gone, but Bookvember rises anew! We've gone fairly light on books this year, but this month we'll be making four stops to the Book Club of Desolation. Starting off our celebration of bizarre literature is Benighted. It was from Benighted that we got the 1932 film The Old Dark House, which everyone likes for reasons I'll never understand. The Old Dark House is, despite being the Trope Namer, a late addition to the Old Dark House subgenre; though the form would persist into and through the 1940s, the ODH film's peak was really in the late '20s. This year has seen me take a liking to these creaky old mysteries, and as such, I wanted to dip into the literary origins of this cinematic cluster; Benighted was one of those which was still available and which was actually readable. Mary Roberts Rinehart, I'm sure I will get to you at some point--but for now, let's just get the crap out of the way.

Indeed, Benighted is very crappy. That may be due to the fact that it bears a very close resemblance to The Old Dark House, only it manages to be less funny, more boring, and most damningly, it lacks Boris Karloff. But it was, however, readable, in a way that the original 1925 stage play of The Gorilla (for example) simply wasn't.* Our principle characters are Philip and Margaret Waverton, two travelers who are joined in their voyage through rural Wales by young Roger Penderel. The trio end up going through a heavy rainstorm, finding the sole shelter for miles in the form of mysterious old Femm Manor, ruled over by the bombastic, unbalanced Horace Femm and his religious fanatic sister Rebecca. The travelers are eventually joined by two other travelers whose names I can't remember. I do know that one of them is named Gladys, and she ends up as Penderel's love interest for all the jack diddly it ends up meaning in the end. For the rest of the book, the travelers endure the strangeness of the Femms and their disfigured alcoholic butler Morgan until events reach their violent pitch.

The primary issue which readers may run into concerning Benighted thankfully manifests itself right at the start. Simply put, the book is dull, with the opening driving scene which takes our three heroes to Femm Manor reaching Manos levels of absurd length.** Trust me, it makes you wonder about the literary audience of the late '20s when the first chunk of the book is just Priestley finding new ways of saying "It's raining." And this sets the pattern for the rest of the book in another way: too much of the material printed is wasted on re-summarizing what a ghastly storm this is. I would argue that most of the book is spent describing the weather or having characters talk about the weather. And when they talk--dear God.

This is yet another book which I have spent my precious reading time on this year which features a Party of Roving Twits. You probably know the kind, even if you haven't read any of the abominable thrillers of the '20s and '30s which feature the archetype (and which I keep reading because I'm an idiot with high hopes). Everyone who isn't a pretentious asshat is foppish and disengaged to the point of inducing aneurysm. I tried to find conversations between the protagonists that were both interesting and relevant, and was completely without luck. I hate books where all the women do is scream and all the men do is make faux-Wilde pithy observations on everything. Especially when both insist on using such unbearably Caucasian similes as "strange as a mandarin."

Which is sad, because there is at least some good stuff here. Our ostensible villains, the Femms plus Morgan the butler, are the ancestors of the Sawyers of Texas, the Merryes from Spider Baby, and all the other degenerate families living in isolation spread out over 90 years of horror fiction. There's a great part where we learn that Rebecca's religious obsessions may stem from the fact that when she was young she would witness her father and brother bring women home to conduct orgies! I guess I can hardly blame her after that. But too little time is spent with these folk, and this creates a sizable schism in the text. Really, it's almost like Priestley wrote two books--one, a spooky Gothic horror-thriller, and the other, a soppy romantic drama about idiots--and fused them together in layers like an Oreo mishap. Characters will engage in pointless dialogue...then be trapped in a flooding room...then, more pointless foppishness...then, Morgan attacks somebody...like I said above, I shouldn't have hoped for much when The Old Dark House was such a fitfully boring film.

If you distrust my opinion and want to read overlong accounts of people drinking gin, Benighted may be for you. But honestly you really should run away from it fast. I haven't entirely given up on the books and plays which inspired the ODH thrillers, but damn if this doesn't make me want to.

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* For those of you who mourn the loss of the first two adaptations of The Gorilla which predated the 1939 Bela Lugosi/Ritz Brothers travesty, don't. The original play's primary form of humor outside of the usual "cowardice is funny" shtick is making fun of black people. It was a repugnant read and I'm sure both the 1927 and 1930 versions preserved this rubbish, if I know anything about the films of the late '20s/early '30s.

** Quick! Someone remake Manos: The Hands of Fate as an old-time Old Dark House movie! You can add the gorilla from House of Mystery! It'll be great!

Image Source: Valancourt Books 

The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947), by Denis Kavanagh

Frankly, if I like this, I'm an idiot. Some permutation of that supposition comes up basically every third review at this point, but c'mon. They couldn't even get the name of the house right in the title. Let's just get out of the way, because all the other reviews of this movie (all three of them) all make light of this: the house in the movie is called Rammelsham Hall, not Rashmon Hall. Yes, yes, that's a problem with the U.S. distribution title and the movie is really called Night Comes Too Soon; but this is proof nonetheless that The Ghost of Rashmon Hall starts with idiocy, and ends with idiocy. This is a movie where I like it not for its entertainment value, but for what it makes as a summary statement. I.e. I don't like it as a movie, I like it as the idea of a movie. This is a theme which will repeat in Wednesday's review, too, which is a movie which I only enjoy for the first few minutes! But sometimes, you have to let yourself miss the forests for the trees. Let's find out why exactly Rashmon Hall is a mess even outside of its title.

The plot is extremely basic. A group of friends have met up at old Rammelsham Hall and are waiting on the last of their group, Dr. Clinton. When he finally arrives, they begin talking about ghost stories, and Clinton informs them that the very house they are presently sitting in is haunted. He begins to tell the tale of his young friends John and Phyllis, whose story we will follow for the rest of the film, save for occasional interruptions from Dr. Clinton. The young couple are looking for a new home to move into after being married, but there's a significant scarcity of available houses. The world's most poorly-acted real estate agent lets them know that he does have one other property for sale, but he seems very hesitant to send it off. It could have something to do with the fact that the cornerstone of the house not only gives the name of the house's builder and first inhabitant, Rinaldo Sabata (presumably a relative of the Western gunfighter), but it states that the occupation of that same man was "Necromancer"! As Clinton's narration says: "A necromancer is one who draws power from evil"--or, y'know, the dead, but semantics schmemantics. Anyway, the two begin to notice strange phenomenon in the house. Mysterious shadows, auto-kinetic doors, unexplained noises--the usual. It gets so bad that eventually John calls in Dr. Clinton, who helps him learn the house's secret. Rinaldo Sabata's wife took on a sailor as a lover, and Sabata killed them both and chained their ghosts and his own to the house. By destroying a compass (?) the curse is lifted and the spirits can move on. Back in the present, Clinton's guests refuse to believe the tale, until Clinton reveals that he himself is a ghost--

Hang on.

So let me get this straight. A man who has known almost every character in the film for years has been dead this whole time?! How does that make any sort of sense? As far as I remember, John and/or Phyllis were once Clinton's students...was he a ghost back then, too? The only way I feel this can work is if Clinton died on his way to the party at Rammelsham, but there's nothing to imply that in the script except for the fact that he shows up late. And even then, that's such a glancing detail that there was no way for an audience, starved of the ability to rewind and replay things, to pick that up in 1947. Maybe this is supposed to be like a comedy, where the last scene is "non-canon"; it's just meant to be a last "note" before the movie ends. But I can't buy into that because that's lazy filmmaking. Of course, it's not like this film isn't lazy to begin with.

In my Phantom of the Convent review, I briefly touched on the particular brand of mildness found in British horror films from the '30s and '40s. I also talked about how Mexican movies tend to draw on the mythology of Mexico's European heritage in a way that American movies tended to avoid. Ultimately, I feel the same principle applies to many European movies, even beyond the 1940s. Many of them adapt an Old World story with comparatively few embellishments. Consider, for example, the filmography of Britain's foremost horror star, Tod Slaughter. His most famous role is from the 1936 Sweeney Todd adaptation; while his other big roles in movies like Maria Marten and Crimes in the Dark House are based off of lurid true events of the 19th Century or else mid-Victorian literature. Presumably this was to facilitate audience familiarity with the material so they weren't baffled by things like vampire ghost dogs. In British movies, too, there's a sense of theatricality, audience participation, and general "merriment"; the fact that Tod Slaughter's movies are usually described as melodramas rather than horror films, despite their horror elements, is a testament to a difference in how Brits prefer or preferred their ghost stories. One has to remember that until comparatively recently, telling ghost stories was a tradition of Christmas--consider of course the famous Dickens novel, but also the reference to "scary ghost stories" in "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Horror to the Brits was a sign of comfort, perhaps because of its ability to bring people closer together. And thus is Ghost of Rashmon Hall a deliberately straightforward creaky old horror story, with, again, few embellishments beyond basic ghost tropes. It even bills itself as "a plain down-to-Earth" ghost story, such as that written by "Lord Lytton," alias Edward "Dark and stormy night" Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, this movie is ostensibly adapted from Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunters and the Haunted," with the point of the haunting stemming from an object which must be destroyed to lay the ghosts to rest being one of the story's few points left intact by the movie. Much else is changed: the circumstances of who the ghosts are is different, and the main characters in the film are a married couple instead of the short story's solitary narrator. And of course there are no flashbacks to one of the characters telling the story in the house's parlor in Bulwer-Lytton's piece. But indeed, both tales are very plain ghost stories, such as those which British melodrama audiences would enjoy. At least until the ending, in the film's case.

I was fascinated by how this movie reminded me of other movies. The basic premise, of course, is a prototype for The Amityville Horror, which serves to remind me how truly lazy the Amityville story was. However, its use and overuse of shadow, plus some legitimately spooky imagery--and the fact that I liked it--reminded me of Ghosts of Hanley House. I feel the two would make a pretty solid double-feature. But weirdly, one movie which it reminded me of in particular is Byron Quisenberry's The Outing, which I'll review at some point. That's another movie which is almost needlessly slow, that refuses to innovate or stand out no matter what. Yet, it manages to generate genuine creepiness, and is unexplained in a way that leaves you wanting to rewatch it. In particular, the final shot, where we pan slowly to a wine glass just before it shatters under an invisible force, reminds me of the weird final shot of The Outing where we slowly pan over to the painting which may or may not reveal who the killer is. I plan on rewatching Ghost of Rashmon Hall a few more times to see if there's anything I missed. I strongly doubt it, but we'll see.

Unfortunately, the key to that bizarro ending may be lost forever. Supposedly the film originally ran 57 minutes, but it was cut down to 49 minutes for American release, and the original British version was subsequently lost. Lost films will always bug me, no matter how insignificant they are. The Ghost of Rashmon Hall is as insignificant as it gets, but I fully believe those eight minutes probably had something good on them.

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"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 2 (Frankenstein)

We continue our look back at the Universal Horror franchise with what may be the most famous movie monster of all time, the Monster of Frankenstein. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, just as Dracula was adapted from Bram Stoker's novel, Frankenstein is usually seen as a lightning-charged morality play on the dangers of tampering in God's domain. How does it and its sequels hold up after all this time?

(If you didn't let Dracula suck your blood with Part One of this Retrospective, click here!)

Frankenstein (1931):

Tastes do change. I had only one thought on Frankenstein when I first watched it as a young'un: zzzzz. But four movies in, and this is the most fascinating I've seen so far. Frankenstein is not perfect, but it's much easier to understand why this one is hailed as a classic, while Dracula leaves me scratching my head. Not only does Frankenstein have superior character development and story momentum than the Dracula series, but it's shot better and its world feels more immersive. It's astonishing to consider that the two films were made in the same year, when one is so animated and the other so lifeless.

We open with a scene where a completely unnecessary narrator gets up on stage and alerts us that the ensuing movie will be strange beyond our comprehension, weird and terrible, blah, blah. "It might even horrify you!" he warns us. We then go to a cemetery, where Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchback assistant Fritz creep on a cemetery, intending to steal the body for an as-yet-unknown reason. The film takes merciful time in unfolding the awful truth, that the two are stitching together body parts to make a new body, upon which Frankenstein will endow life. Unfortunately, when Fritz is given the task of finding a brain for the creature, he steals the brain of a criminal rather than a healthy person. (Even into the 1930s it was still generally believed that there was a physical difference in the structure of a criminal's brain compared to a non-criminal's. Now we know that's not really the case.) Frankenstein doesn't learn he's using an abnormal brain until later, and before the horrified eyes of his professor Dr. Waldman, fiancee Elizabeth, and best man Victor, he brings life to the body. Of course, it doesn't take long before Frankenstein loses control of his creature, and Fritz is killed. It's decided the creature must be killed, but that's before it escapes. And thus the famous rampage of the Monster begins...

Rewatching Frankenstein surprised me, as I remembered it being much more sympathetic to the titular character and much crueler to the Monster. Yet much like the tragic novel the film is based on, this movie does a good job of establishing that Frankenstein is the Monster. When we first meet the Creature he is rather innocent, craving the warmth of the sun and fearing fire. There is a suggestion that he is not bound to his abnormal brain and that he could be taught humanity--hell, the sequel to the film shows that he can learn to speak, so what's to say he's nothing other than a child in an adult's body, in need of nurturing? Yes, his stiff motions and crude vocalizations make him hard to relate to, but the Creature is more relatable than Fritz or Frankenstein, who whip the Creature and scare him with fire. Yes, the Creature kills a child, but it is by accident, and he is clearly horrified by the act of doing so. Finishing out the tragedy is the ending, where the Monster is killed by nothing short of his worst fear, fire. He screams not in anger or vengeance at the mob that burns the windmill he's trapped in, but in terror. As in the book, he's a Monster only in name, a victim of a heartless creator and a misunderstanding mankind.

Which makes it odd when the producers go out of their way to make Frankenstein sympathetic. I assume this was born out of a desire to give the audience a human character to follow and be comfortable with. He's still an asshole, but he's far from the self-pitying sociopath of Mary Shelley's original novel. The character of Frankenstein then becomes inconsistent from one half of the film to the next--they set him up first a grave robber, obsessed with his own experiments and prideful enough to believe himself to be equivalent to God. But in the second half, we're supposed to care for him because, well, he's Elizabeth husband-to-be and we're supposed to care for her, and also, we're supposed to care because he feels guilty about what he's done. But intriguingly, we get the impression that Frankenstein never would have started the cycle of abuse leading to the Monster seeking revenge on him if he had never learned that the Creature had an abnormal brain, with this tidbit having been passed on by his unwanted friends. If only he had been given the isolation he wanted, and had the chance to mold the Creature in his own image fully, things may have been different. Even if we also get the impression that, like his literary counterpart, Frankenstein is way more concerned with the glory of creating life than parenting, failing to understand that creating a life involves giving that life good chances in the world as well.

Making Frankenstein the hero also casts some doubt on the commonly-perceived theme that one must not tamper in God's domain...many forget that that idiom comes not from Frankenstein, but Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster! Oh, yes, it would have been controversial to include the infamous "Now I know what it's like to be God!" in a 1931 film--that's why it was censored in its original theatrical cut and many cuts released in the years that followed. But by a variety of factors--whether it be the secularization of Western culture over the last eight decades or the popularization of the Mad Scientist as a fun and amusing stock character, whose menace has become cliche--Frankenstein has lost some of his horror as time has gone on. He is still a grotesque figure, but I don't fear him because he's blasphemous; I fear him because he's cold, refusing to put heart outside of manic passion into his work, and of course also because he digs up and stitches together corpses for a living. That will always be creepy.

Perhaps there's a reason to fear the science of Frankenstein after all, however, even if you're not frightened by science encroaching on God, because there's a weird prescient thing in here that I haven't heard other people comment on before. Yes, the Creature is animated by electricity, but also a ray: a ray which Frankenstein says is beyond the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The Frankenstein's Monster is given life by gamma radiation! Certainly the movie monsters of the 1950s were derived from seeing the horror of atomic weapons in action, but it's amazing to me that Frankenstein managed to slip it in first, fourteen years before Hiroshima. History works in mysterious ways...

Bride of Frankenstein (1935):

What the hell is this? No, seriously. I daren't hope for any of the later ones to be this weird--Bride of Frankenstein is one of the most baffling and stupid movies I've seen in my whole life, which means that it was a thoroughly entertaining sit.

Bride of Frankenstein begins on a bad note, with an introduction even more ludicrous than the one at the beginning of Frankenstein. Instead of a guy on a stage, we're suddenly trapped in that old house where Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were trapped on the night of that fateful storm, wherein Mary wrote Frankenstein and essentially created science fiction. Lord Byron, portrayed as the gayest aristocrat set to film since A Clockwork Blue got to Louis XVI,  rolls his r's like Sylvester McCoy on cocaine as we see a jarringly bad montage of scenes from Frankenstein, as he recounts Shelley's story. Shelley says that the story is not yet ended, and thus we reach the actual story. We begin where the first movie left off--with the burnt windmill. Here we are subjected to the movie's massive tonal issues as we see a prolonged sequence of the villagers bickering with acting so bad that I can't tell if this is comic relief or not. Then, we cut to the father of the little girl drowned by the Creature in the first film, as he decides to venture into the ruins of the mill. This leads to a horror sequence where he falls into the dark watery depths of the building, where he is drowned just as his daughter was, by the same thing that killed her. From there we follow more comic relief segments laden with astonishingly bad acting, leading up to Henry Frankenstein (not dead, surprisingly) meeting the sinister Dr. Pretorius, who begins to encourage Frankenstein to return to his experiments and create a Bride for the Monster. He shows that he's an even greater master of science than Frankenstein, in an extremely bizarre sequence where he shows some miniature comic-relief homunculi, which he has grown "as Nature has...from Seed." (So he or someone else jerked off into some jars, apparently.) As this happens we see many long vignettes of varying tones featuring the Monster prowling through the countryside. Eventually Pretorius and the Monster join forces to bring Frankenstein's talents once more into practice. Soon the Bride of Frankenstein('s Monster) is complete, but is a match made in Heaven...or Hell?

Imagine if the sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was Troll, or perhaps more properly, a version of Troll that has some scenes cut in from Troll 2. Bride of Frankenstein is such a wildly broken movie that it's hard to believe it was four years in the making, let alone four months. Not only does it have absolutely no sense of where to place comic relief, it doesn't provide nearly enough material for the comedy to relieve us from anything. Not even the plot makes sense: in the beginning, when he's first recovering, Henry tells Elizabeth that he wishes his experiments could have gone even further--he was sure he could even find the secret of eternal life. But later, he begs Pretorius not to force him into continuing his work. Perhaps it's meant to be that Elizabeth's hammy reaction to Frankenstein's persistence changed his heart but I don't think that was properly explained. Never before have I seen such a jarring fusion of what is seemingly two different narratives, short of a Godfrey Ho movie. Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel that's also a parody that's plagued with the same cloning of scenes that Dracula's Daughter experiences, only brought to frivolous extremes. It's like if H.G. Lewis was put in charge of sequelizing the 1931 film thirty years too late.

If it weren't for the fact that much of it is padding, I would be able to appreciate Bride as a whole based solely on its entertaining parts. Genuinely good moments include the famous scene where the Monster learns to speak (and smoke cigars) from a blind hermit; and literally everything with Pretorius is fun. (Curiously, there is a convincing argument that Pretorius is written as gay. That makes two gay villains in sequels to Universal franchise-starters.) But other than that, we are forced to follow one of the ladies of the angry mob who screams shrilly at everything like an Invader Zim fan finding Hot Topic for the first time. You are begging for her death at the end of this movie, and it never comes. And again, there is much padding. Long shots of the Monster running across forest sets, or coming across random villagers who make much ado about him. It's a long 75 minutes, somehow. 

I don't know. This movie feels like something that should have never been released, and you know me--I love that stuff. I can pretend that this is not related to the other Universal movies and take it in a trash film. If you come here expecting a serious sequel to Frankenstein, however, you are as shit out of luck as one can get in this world.

Son of Frankenstein (1939):

It's alive! This movie is alive! It has energy and passion for what it's doing and by God it's actually worth watching.

Henry and Elizabeth Frankenstein had a son, the ominously-named Wolf Frankenstein. Wolf, along with his wife Elsa and son Peter, have decided to move into the old Frankenstein House, neighboring the blow-up watchtower that once served as his father's lab. The entire village hates all the descendants of Frankenstein, but Wolf is undeterred. There's sort of a Let Me Be Evil moment in Wolf's decision, when presented the opportunity, to continue to his father's work--a grave-robbing hunchbacked survivor of a hanging named Ygor (played by Bela Lugosi) leads him to the comatose remains of the Creature, in the ruins of the Frankenstein family tomb, which is weirdly located under the wrecked laboratory. Evidently the Creature was merely buried by the explosion from the end of the previous film. He and Ygor are friends, building on the friendship between the blind man and the Monster seen before. But in this case, it's clear that Ygor sees the Monster as less than equal, taking advantage of his apparently-scrambled brains to use him as a mindless hitman against those who hanged him. (Brain damage is my explanation for why the Creature suddenly can't talk anymore.) Tensions boil over until Wolf kills Ygor, coming to his senses when the Monster kidnaps his son, to throw him into a sulfur pit just as he threw the little girl into the lake. When we conclude, we get our happy ending, with it seeming as though the curse of Frankenstein is over at last.

There are some great scenes in this movie. One of the early ones is a part where Wolf is getting a tour of Castle Frankenstein, and he is introduced to a portrait of his father (who is painted to at least dimly resemble Colin Clive, Henry Frankenstein's actor). Wolf and the butler talk about how it was lightning which gave the power of life to Wolf's father, even as a tremendously violent thunderstorm goes on outside. Similarly, there's the subplot involving the movie's de facto protagonist, Inspector Krogh. Krogh you may remember from Young Frankenstein, which most closely parodies this movie over the first two--he's the one-armed policeman! Krogh's arm was torn off by the Monster when he was a child, ruining his aspirations of becoming a General. When young Peter Frankenstein is telling the story of how the Monster visits him at night, he refers to the Monster grabbing his arm--Krogh, who is protective of Wolf's son, winces at the thought of it, even though the Monster clearly didn't go as far as it did with Krogh. There's depth to this movie which the other five I've reviewed thus far lack. I have little to say about this one save that it actually feels like a studio movie which justified its budget. I encourage you to check it out as a good movie, unlike Bride of Frankenstein which should be watched for how hideous it is.

As far as continuity, then: assuming Wolf Frankenstein to be in his mid-thirties, and the events of the film to be set near to when it was shot, Frankenstein must be set in the early 1900s. This is ignoring the fact that that shitty opening to Bride of Frankenstein has Mary Shelley telling the story of the first film, and unless in this reality she set her story in the future that means the events probably took place in the late 1790s. So, that's non-canon. It's interesting then, that both Son of Frankenstein and Son of Dracula retcon the placement of their first films to the late 19th or early 20th Centuries.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942):

I wrote my statement about the lifting of the curse of Frankenstein in the review for the previous flick totally unaware that the opening lines of this movie were, "There is a curse upon this village! The curse of Frankenstein!" No, Universal, The Curse of Frankenstein gets made by another company. And from what I've heard, Hammer's Frankenstein movies would be relief from this thing. The Ghost of Frankenstein was not made with the yearning for visual spectacle like Dracula, nor as an authentic attempt at horror like Frankenstein. It wasn't really made with anything in mind, even if it still has some moments of note.

The movie opens with angry villagers feeling like their recent crop failures and deformed births and whatnot are caused by the taint the Frankenstein family left on the land. They believe that this is also the fault of Ygor, who survived being shot and now lives in a hollow space under the sulfur pit that the Creature fell into (!). Ygor helps free the Monster from the hardened sulfur before the villagers blow up Castle Frankenstein--when the Monster is rejuvenated by lightning, he takes it to gain further strength with the assistance of Wolf's brother Ludwig. In the process the Creature is arrested (!) and put on trial (!!). But it's not long before Ludwig gains possession of the Monster, and not long after then when he is haunted by the titular Ghost of Frankenstein (who doesn't even sort of resemble Colin Clive!). The illusory Frankenstein tells his son that the Monster was evil because of its criminal brain--because fuck my analysis, apparently--which gives Ludwig the notion that he should give the Creature a brain transplant, so that Henry's work is not wasted. Ygor desires to be free of his damaged body, and also to be united with his "friend" forever, so he wants his brain to be the one occupying the Monster. Would it be a proper horror movie without that desire coming true? Except Ygor didn't factor on what would happen if he and the Monster had a different blood type...

The Ghost of Frankenstein feels rather like a lot of the monster movies that would be made in the '50s and early '60s, by such folk as Roger Corman. While Son of Frankenstein was grand opera, Ghost of Frankenstein is an episode of Beverly Hillbillies. It's a disappointing contrast but by merit of being relatively unoffensive, albeit pretty dumb, it's simply forgettable. Especially forgettable is Lon Chaney Jr.'s turn at playing the Monster, with Boris Karloff never returning to the role after Son. He legitimately spends most of the film standing around with a mild grimace, staring into space and doing nothing. Man, it's good that he picked up a new brain--compared to what we've seen before, the Monster is borderline lobotomized. Chaney's performance is an avatar of the film itself, which is generally just boring.

That's not to say that the screenwriters inserted some fun bits here and there, if anything to keep themselves going. Probably the most notable scene I remember features the trial of the Monster, where the judge--who's ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped by the Monster but returned safely due to her befriending him--argues about how he refuses to let the court use his daughter to try to talk to the Monster. As he goes on and on, his daughter goes up to the Monster and begins questioning him herself, rendering him speechless. It provoked a little bit of a laugh out of me. As Stockholm Syndrome set in for the Dracula series, however, so too does it seem to be for the Frankenstein series. Ghost of Frankenstein is hardly great and it can't stand on its own, but it was not as bad as I expected.

Continuity time: Ygor mentions having worked with Henry Frankenstein, which is odd, because Henry only worked with three assistants: Fritz, Bride's Fritz stand-in Karl, and Ludwig, also from Bride (did Henry name his son after his fellow graverobber?). Fritz was a hunchback before his neck was broken, and that was the fault of the Creature, not a mob of angry villagers. Karl was a hunchback previously as well and was also killed by the monster. So presumably Ygor is the little-seen Ludwig? Who knows...the filmmakers probably didn't care nearly as much as I do. This movie also technically marks the death of the original Frankenstein's Monster--the body still lives, but the brain of the creature from here on out is that of Ygor. I'll remember that, but will the filmmakers...?

Next time, the moon shines full and bright and the wolfsbane blooms, with the Wolf Man! Featuring the ends proper of the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises with the monster rally films.

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Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 1 (Dracula)

In my looks at trash films from the '30s and '40s, I've made references to the Universal Horror movies, namely to kick them around a lot. But as I get older in this world and feel a need for literary integrity, even on a forlorn blog such as Ye Humble A-List, I feel like I should start making more connections in my writing and displaying more honesty with my work as a whole. As a result, I should probably stop kicking around movies that I haven't seen in a long time, or haven't seen in their entirety, especially when it's a relatively broad franchise as Universal Monsters. In fact, starting today and continuing over the next four days, I'll be taking a look no less than 24 films--no easy feat, even while being six shy of the 30 I looked at in last year's Godzilla Retrospective. Many of these films I haven't seen since I was a kid--others I haven't seen at all. Hopefully we'll find some gems among what largely consists of bad memories for me. So without any further ado, let's start with the first of the first: Dracula.

Dracula (1931):

I always hated Dracula, ever since I was a child. I think I hated Frankenstein more simply because I found the monster to be completely uninteresting. He lacked the admittedly-thin charisma of Count Dracula and so that film was just a little better. Watching Dracula again now confirms that I wasn't entirely wrong in that hatred: at the very least I can't understand why people would rank this higher than, well, most of the later adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel, including and especially Dracula vs. Frankenstein. While the film spends a lot more time, money, and effort on establishing setting and atmosphere compared to the films that followed, it can't escape the fact that it is a flat and dull thing even compared to Stoker's original tome. A lot of the mechanisms used to film it are stodgy and tired by today's standards, and there is little artistic merit to the film outside of visual spectacle.

We open with a real estate agent named Renfield making the knee-knocking journey up Borgo Pass, Transylvania to Castle Dracula. In an atmospheric scene reminiscent in some ways of the shots of isolated peasantry in The Witches' Mountain, we see the villagers express their hammy horror over the prospect of voyage there. Once he is there we learn that its inhabitant, the sinister Count Dracula, has bought Carfax Abbey in England, and once Renfield signs over the paperwork to him to complete the transaction Dracula's partially vampirizes him, turning him into his human agent. Once in England Renfield is placed in the asylum of Dr. Seward, coincidentally Dracula's neighbor at Carfax. Dracula soon meets Seward and his daughter Mina, as well as Mina's fiance Jonathan Harker, and their friend, Lucy Weston. After this establishment the movie begins to sort of suck, with scenes happening honestly sort of at random. We see Dracula feed on Lucy! Then we see Dracula ask Renfield to do something for him! Then...we see him feed on Lucy some more! Eventually, we meet the extremely dull Professor van Helsing just as Lucy is vampirized and staked, leaving Mina next on Dracula's menu. It leads to a final confrontation with Dracula and Renfield in the spooky old crypt...and a stake in the heart.

I started talking about how this film thrives largely on spectacle, and that in turn is tied to the fact that this movie shot down any hopes I had of the early Universal movies escaping the cheap, crass commercialism I usually associate with their later entries. Yet Dracula, for indulging spectacle to the degree it does, is one of the many reasons why it feels like a commercial film of today--a Transformers for the 1930s. I say that because everything is too flat, too arranged, to be as artsy as it seems to think it. Dracula's emergence from his coffin is legitimately chilling, but it is so unlike the cramped shots that comprise the rest of the film that it seems like nothing but a trailer moment. In fact the shot I'm referencing is in the original trailer for the film! In addition to trying to dazzle us with eye candy, the film cheats on its suspense at times. Notably there is a scare when Dracula sneaks up on Renfield, who is walking backwards through the expansive entrance to Castle Dracula. Why is he walking backwards? I'm sure he's supposed to be taking in the admittedly impressive space behind him (even I have trouble believing it's a movie set), but that's communicated poorly by both Frye's performance and the staging of the shot.

Like a lot of modern blockbuster stinkers it also assumes too much idiocy on behalf of the viewer: for example, they have to explain that Renfield has gone insane, as if him clutching a coffin and calling Dracula "Master" weren't enough. Also, I am far from the first person to comment on this, but Dracula's castle has fucking armadillos in it. One of my middle school teachers, who screened the film in a science class because I live in the United States, tried (somewhat vehemently) to justify that in the '30s few people had seen armadillos and they were frequently used in '30s horror films as a placeholder for what was tantamount to Freud-uncanny horror--maybe what it would be like to come face-to-face with a goblin shark or some other monstrosity of the deep that we've pseudo-popularized today as the poster child for "strange animals." Well, let me tell you, I have seen a lot of fucking 1930s horror movies at this point, and I have never seen a single one of them try to pass off armadillos as the National Vermin of Transylvania--sadly, that explanation makes more sense that the suggestion that they're supposed to stand in for rats, which the studio "couldn't afford" for some reason. (Write me a novel on the Rat Crisis of '31 where there were so few rats available that it was cheaper to get armadillos.) Call me prejudiced to the past, but did they really think that showing these dopey, cuddly little creatures wouldn't shatter the mood they were struggling to establish, unless everyone watching the movie was that terrified of mammals they'd maybe occasionally seen before?

Finally, the film is just dull, and I realized why. In the novel, we follow Jonathan Harker to Dracula's castle rather than Renfield, and Harker escapes Renfield's fate. Hence we have a central character to follow even as the novel branches into many subplots as we see the letters and diaries of the various characters linked to Harker. Here, the main hero is van Helsing, and because he clunks through the whole film without any energy, we suddenly realize how weak the rest of the cast is when we try to get one of them to be the hero instead. Harker and Mina get no characterization; Dr. Seward is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things; leaving our other protagonist to be Renfield. Fortunately, Dwight Frye's performance is involved and has good physicality, even if I was laughing at how cheesy his parts are even as a ten-year-old. Actually, most of my memories of this movie from age ten that are in any way positive come from laughing at the awful acting of the side cast. The main cast is mediocre, generally, but characters who only get a line or two of dialogue are usually evidence enough to make me question the idea of Hollywood ever having standards.

(And yes, even I will admit that van Helsing's verbal and psychic duel with Dracula is very good, and actually reminded me somewhat of the similarly-slow but nonetheless dramatic duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in A New Hope. But this scene works largely because it's where the writers poured their most effort--it has the best dialogue of the whole film.)

I've also had the distinct pleasure of seeing Universal's other 1931 adaptation of Dracula. Back in the day studios would create non-English versions of their films before the popular practice of dubbing or subtitling took hold, with completely different casts and crews. And so was born the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, which is a far superior film in almost every way, even though they are virtually identical save for cast and language, being as near to a shot-by-shot recreation as possible. By this I mean the acting is better, although one complaint my theater audience commonly had was that Bela Lugosi was significantly less goofy than Carlos Villarias, who plays the Count here--the Internet seems to agree. But c'mon, it's Bela Lugosi, and he was the epitome of goofy ever since he got his big start here. While Lugosi certainly has very good moments in Dracula (his awkward English often gives him an uncanny, inhuman oddity which later Dracula performers, especially Gary Oldman in my mind, definitely aimed to replicate), he was better in some of his Poverty Row movies. His most compelling performance wouldn't come until years later, in Glen or Glenda. (And as an aside, yes, seeing the 1931 Dracula--either version but especially the Spanish one--on the big screen does make a huge difference in how you watch it. For all its faults: its screen presence, combined with how fresh it must have been in 1931, do make its sizable cinematic impact very believable.)

Dracula's Daughter (1936):

When my family rented the Universal Horror Dracula Collection from Blockbuster back in the day, we watched Dracula and Son of Dracula. I can only suspect that I insisted on skipping Dracula's Daughter because it was about a girl. Well, if I had watched that movie then, I'd probably be one step closer to realizing that I was a girl, for indeed, Countess Marya Zeleska is one groovy lady. Dracula's Daughter is a breath of fresh air after Dracula, showing how Universal mercifully learned how to make movies and not just filmed stage plays in the span of five years. There are still many problems but the general experience makes this probably the best Dracula film of the original three.

We continue right at the end of Dracula, with the police discovering the bodies of Renfield and Dracula. Van Helsing (now "Von Helsing") doesn't disguise his role in the latter's death, and he is arrested. Over the course of ten painful minutes of lame mid-'30s comedy with the bobbies, we are introduced to Marya Zeleska, who steals Dracula's corpse and burns it. She is his daughter, and she views the vampirism he passed onto her as a curse. Yet the destruction of the remains of Dracula do not break the curse, and once more she is forced to feed--a fact her manservant Sandor mocks her over. Along the way Von Helsing recruits Jeffrey Garth, a fellow psychiatrist and one of his former students, to help defend him in his trial for Dracula's murder. His psychiatric methods may be the key to curing Marya's vampirism, as well...yet in trying to cure her obsession, he becomes the subject of it. Soon it's off to the castle in Transylvania--where he must obey her or die.

This movie is instantly more kinetic and lively than Dracula, which is nice for hooking viewers like me. I think I figured out part of the problem: the first film was made in a time when music was not a feature of movies, especially horror movies, since the silent era had only recently ended. This second film was made when movies with sound were cemented as the norm, and as such there is almost constant music in the film. Sadly, the soundtrack is often misplaced, giving weirdly dissonant tones in a movie that already suffers from tonal whiplash. One moment we are out on the foggy moors, watching Marya burn her father's corpse, her eyes bright in a cloud of smoke. Then whacky slapstick music is playing, and the cops are talking about how cowardly they are! What's more is that this kinesis isn't spread through the movie--it has a looong middle, even if there are many scenes throughout that make it worth it. The ending is worth it, too, being well directed. Plus, the acting is generally better, including Von Helsing's, even if he still gives pretentious pseudo-philosophical lectures about how stupid it is for people to disbelieve in vampires. We also get actual characters, with hobbies and motivations, and not just people inserted because they were in the book.

The movie suffers in places from a problem that happens in many sequels, where they have to shout out famous lines or scenes from the first film...like if you're watching a Kevin Smith film, chances are someone's gonna say some variant of "I wasn't even supposed to be here today!" I didn't like it when it happened here but that's just because I still don't like Dracula. The Countess gets to say "I never drink...wine" and crawl her fingers out from under a coffin lid...just like in the first movie! Except it feels clumsy, and oftentimes these shoutouts are rushed or delivered poorly, almost as if they were studio mandates that the director wanted to gloss over. Dracula's Daughter feels much less commercialized than its forebear, and ironically that's probably why it's comparatively forgotten. Which is too bad, because there's actually some interesting thematic stuff here.

The first is the more obviously touted concept of magic vs. science. Ultimately science wins, but there's still an interesting scene where Marya warns Jeffrey that her powers of mesmerism are not hypnosis, as he's been calling it, but something "far older...far greater." Magic still has power even if science has now reached the point where it can conquer it. Thinking about that in the context of Frankenstein makes this even more interesting, as the Frankenstein series, especially Bride of Frankenstein, have comparisons between old-world powers and the rising new world of machines and chemicals.

The second piece worth noting is the implication that Marya is bisexual. In the scene where she corners her shirtless female art model and says, "I have a jewel--very old, and very beautiful--I'll show it to you," you can't help but wonder if she's going to drop trow, as it were, and reveal something that's not just a hypnotic pendant. This is played for horror, if it is indeed intentional (we the audience already know that this topless girl is on her way to a throat-suckin'). This wasn't unprecedented: Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, a much better vampire story, was published in 1871, twenty-six years before Dracula. In it there is no question that the titular Carmilla is a lesbian. Audiences would know the codes planted here, and some of them would have even read LeFanu's novella. This is not positive representation--Marya is bisexual only as a predator. In the 1930s it would have been popular belief that bisexuals were monsters, like vampires. Obviously as a queer person I find this uncomfortable, though I know that queer representation amongst vampires got better over time.

Though it makes some questionable choices and drags in places, Dracula's Daughter is well-made enough and complicated enough to reach my bitter old heart. And yet, this was technically the last of the three Dracula movies I sat through, so perhaps time will tell yet that I am merely caught in Stockholm Syndrome. Decide for yourself with my warnings.

Son of Dracula (1943):

Son of Dracula kind of surprised me because I was expected a much more coherent link to Dracula--wouldn't you? Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention but as far as I saw it wasn't so much about the Son of Dracula and more like Dracula in disguise whose identity is partially divined by historical knowledge of the vampiric history of the Dracula family. That may sound like picking nits, but one of the key revelations of this film is that the villain is none other than Dracula himself! Surely that rules out the possibility that he is Dracula's son, right? (Unless squicky time-travel is involved?) And yet by merit of the title, most of us seem to go with the idea that the family relationship is specified in this movie when I don't feel like it is. This may be one of just a few flaws of Son of Dracula, but sadly, these few flaws generally sink what should be a decent film, one which surpasses its source material.

At the Louisiana plantation of Dark Oaks lives Katherine Caldwell, who is in some sort of cahoots with the mysterious Count Alucard. Alucard's presence causes the sudden death of Katherine's elderly father, but despite that (and perhaps more alarmingly), Katherine blows off her fiancee to take up with Alucard instead. Frank, the jaded man in question, tries to shoot Alucard but bullets are as effective on him as they'd be on a ghost--Katherine, standing behind the immaterial Alucard, is shot instead, but her death proves to be temporary. After all, Alucard is the same man as he whose name is his spelled backwards, and Katherine originally contacted Alucard with the hopes of becoming a vampire and gaining eternal youth. Katherine's family has already contacted Professor Laszlo, our merciful replacement for dusty old Professor van Helsing, and it will take a confrontation of the ages to destroy both vampires.

First the good, which crops up in an unlikely place You may be wondering how Lon Chaney Jr. fares as a European vampire. I mean, look at him! I chose the poster I used for a reason: Lon Chaney Jr. shares acting schools with Alan "The Skipper" Hale, not Bela Lugosi, and it's predictable that any attempt of being actually creepy is beyond him. As we'll get to in The Wolf Man, Chaney did best when he was playing sympathetically innocent losers who got wrapped up in something awful. And his elder sister had taken the angsty vampire gig already in 1936, so there's little room for him to beg to be freed of his curse. Yet he does his best to play an aristocrat, albeit one with an American accent; he keeps the movie afloat, and that he has actual chemistry with lover/victim Katherine helps too. Katherine herself is an engaging character, because she represents the promise that Dracula makes to van Helsing in the 1931 film, concerning Mina: "She will live through the centuries to come, just as I have." It's intriguing to see someone--especially a woman in the 1940s--be shown with the ambition to become immortal even at the cost of becoming a monster, while still being somewhat sympathetic. There had to have been some reason why Katherine's family and fiance find her sudden turn to darkness odd--she was evidently a person they wholeheartedly loved. Yes, she's largely unconcerned with her father's demise, but if she becomes eternally young she'll outlive her entire family anyway. She seems to truly love Alucard, and he probably excites her not merely because he'll give her eternal life, but because he is another immortal to spend eternity with. She doesn't know the full extent of his evil until it begins to corrupt her soul as well--a natural consequence of vampirism.

And yet there is also bad...and it is bad. Son of Dracula introduces racism to the franchise: while the Dracula story was largely based on British fears and biases against Eastern Europeans in the first place, this movie has an American touch and as such we get lots and lots of voiceless, objectified, "happy in servitude" butlers and maids of color wandering in the background. There is one named black person whom we focus on, and she is a voodoo queen named Madame Queen Zimba. Yep. And she drops dead in foreboding of Alucard's approach soon after she is introduced, which, when reported by Katherine to the other white characters, is met with one some of the sickeningly heartless apathy I've ever seen. I don't recall if a character actually says, "Who cares? She was just a Negro," but they come close to it. I shouldn't be surprised: this is four years after Gone with the Wind, arguably the second most famous adaptation of a Klan apologist novel. (Oh sorry did I offend GwtW fans again whoops I don't care)

On a lesser note, it's also odd that the film at its conclusion chooses to frame Frank as the hero of the story, when all that he did was go into a berserk rage and accidentally kill his girlfriend (before later purposefully killing his girlfriend). The movie frames it as his loss even though he was still wildly irresponsible around Katherine. Even if Alucard hadn't been a vampire and his body was affected by bullets, at close range, the bullets probably would have pierced Alucard and struck Katherine anyway! The weird "it's sad that this man must now go through life single" ending contrasts this recklessness as well as the fact that I don't buy his grief as much as the movie wants me to.

And then there's the thing about the title. Ignoring the question of whether Alucard is the Son of Dracula or Dracula himself, the reference to the Dracula family mentions the last one dying in London...in the late 19th Century. Dracula's Daughter, set literally moments after the end of Dracula, features 1930s cars, even if Dracula seems to generally preserve the Victorian setting of the novel. Universal Horror continuity is famously broken but I still want to chart it out nonetheless, because it's fun. I love bad continuity. I'll do an X-Men Retrospective sometime. Kidding.

Again: if it weren't so racially offensive, Son of Dracula would be quite enjoyable, and I would consider it an unsung classic among the Universal sequels. Unfortunately, in today's world, I can't take the film's treatment of black people lightly, even if "it was another time."

By the way, this part of the review contains a hypnotic code-phrase that causes all fans of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to now see Castlevania's Alucard as Lon Chaney. You're welcome!

Next time, we see lightning strike with the coming of Frankenstein!

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Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki

Book Club of Desolation #12: The Pepsi-Cola Addict (1982), by June Gibbons

My process for this site is pretty simple. I look for movies or books I think I might like, and if I like them enough, or find them notable enough, I review them. To my knowledge, that's just the general critical process for a site like this. A natural aspect of this process is the Holy Grail Development Event. When you know what you like, you know what you'll probably love. There's always just one more thing out there, one more score, that will bring you critical artistic bliss. The perfect movie. The perfect book. And it's a tricky thing, the Holy Grail Development Event, which, in all honesty, could probably stand with a better name. The Internet is a thing now. Unless it's like The Weird Ones or something and every print was destroyed in a huge fire, or it's some penny dreadful published back in the Victorian period, you can find basically anything if you're willing to dig deep, risk viruses, and take a blow to your wallet.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict is basically the reason why I ended up doing the Book Club of Desolation. Yes, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was the first hint I had that these books existed. Yes, Harry Stephen Keeler showed me I'd have enough material for it. But when I began my research I knew that this was what I would build to. And now that I've gotten it done less than a year...what do I do for an encore? Well, something that makes me feel less guilty. This is one of those books where a lot of the meat of it is in the story behind it, so without further ado...

You may have heard the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons. Known as the "Silent Twins," the pair refused to talk to anyone but each other, and people who listened in on them heard them speak a language of their own creation. They were hugely dedicated to each other and, in essence, had a death pact of some variety. The twins were separated and placed in a mental health facility after they went on a crime spree which included committing arson. Eventually they determined that of them must "sacrifice" themselves in order to "be free," and in 1993 Jennifer died of unclear complications possibly related to other health problems brought on by her antipsychotics. Afterwards, June became much more expressive, and has gone on to live an apparently average life.

Before their crime spree, however, the girls wanted to be writers. Jennifer produced The Pugilist, Discomania, and The Taxi-Driver's Son, along with a play and some short stories, while June wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict. Their work appears to have been published by New Horizons, a vanity print-on-demand press in their native Wales. Only Pepsi-Cola Addict is known to survive--because they were print-on-demand titles the amount of extant copies would be based on the number of copies that sold. Consequently, if Jennifer's books never sold, or only sold a copy or two, they may be gone for good. But Pepsi-Cola Addict exists, floating around as a bootleg. And sure enough, my copy is a bootleg, because I don't have access to the British Library (for geographical reasons exclusively, of course). I can say that it is one of the most incredible books I've ever read, and the fact that it has an astonishing story of authorship makes it all the better. That's saying nothing of the age of the writer. Pepsi-Cola Addict is a rush of pornographic comic book action, featuring some truly odd plot decisions pulled off with a remarkable skill. It is a true lost gem.

Preston Wildey King is a young teenager in love. However, he is also an addict. Preston loves Peggy and yet cannot quit his fixation with Pepsi cola. He steals it and steals to buy more, and often fantasizes about drinking huge quantities of the stuff. At times, he channels both Burroughs and Cleland as his Pepsi addiction resembles that of heroin, while also taking on sexual dimensions. Preston is also joined in his ennui by his friend Ryan. His best friend. His...best...friend. Ryan wants to rob a store but he also wants to bang Preston. This is not a hinted thing--there is oral sex in this book, and it is not of the hetero variety. There is a long and detailed series of events, all extremely delirious and laden with snappy Bogartesque dialogue. (Casablanca is maybe just a little influence here?) The inevitable happens. Preston bangs his lusty 30-something teacher. Then, he goes to jail as the robbery catches up with him. And we sink into nihilism, as a handful of pills washed down with Pepsi carries sweet Preston from this world.

I've glazed over a lot but that's because, like Don't Go in the Woods, the book's sheer oddity is hard to summarize. Every sentence is crafted with an odd precision, stumbling over amateurish metaphors while also evoking actual drama and pathos for our characters. The weird magical awkwardness of early teenagerhood, better in memory than in real life, comes back to you while reading, even if you didn't run into quite as crazy of shit when you were fourteen. Think the experimental passages of "Adams Farr" combined with a hatred for living a la Nathan Schiff. And while there are some stumblings, Gibbons keeps things moving, and shows that she has a remarkable intelligence alongside being well-read. It supports the notion that there is a connection between intelligence and mental illness, and that this is literature (convincing literature) about mental illness adds a certain layer to it all.

Of course, that sounds exploitative, but I prefer to look at the Gibbonses from the perspective of a fellow mentally ill person. I wish to celebrate their work as triumph with or over their illness as well; it's an expression of what mental illness does to a person. It's pretty clear that it affected Pepsi-Cola Addict and we can't get away from that. As a person with anxiety and depression (with some stuff probably stretching deeper than that), I am fascinated by what other mentally ill people produce. Even something like this, which many would decry as wallowing trash, is part of our voice. It shouldn't be ignored.

Plus, it's an important artifact of writing from a teenage author. My criticisms of "Canon" from my Don't Go in the Woods review apply here--literature written by youth always needs a closer eye, so that more of them may be considered classics. The work that young people do astounds me, much in the same way (though not the exact same way) that first-time work by very old people does. I hope I'll get to do Old People Goofing Off sometime soon as well. (This isn't really "Goofing Off," of course. But it's Kids Doing Great Things and that's what counts.)

I do hope there is a new edition of Pepsi-Cola put out at some point, and I hope Jennifer's works are rediscovered as well. Of course, I won't accept anything that doesn't benefit June Gibbons, or whomever or whatever she wants the new editions to benefit. But this should not be a book condemned to bootlegs, bless those bootlegs all the same. If you can find this, read it. I have built hype and yet I have faith the book can own up to it. It must be read to be believed. Track it down.

Thank you for stopping by for Bookvember! We'll see you again soon in the Book Club of Desolation...for now, get ready for December, when we'll take a look back on some moments from the life of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Book Club of Desolation #11: The Ferocious Fern and Other Stories (1943), by C.B. Pulman

One of the most indispensable sources of knowledge I've found in my quest to fill out the meetings of the Book Club of Desolation has been Chris Mikul's Biblio Curiosa, a zine dedicated to exposing the weird writings and weird lives of some of the forgotten writers of this world. I encourage you to look into it when you have a chance, if you're interested in seeing a good hard look at some unjustly--and sometimes justly--forgotten regions of literature. Through Biblio Curiosa I came across Clement Barker Pulman's The Ferocious Fern, a book apparently composed of plant-themed stories. I had no idea what to suspect when I found a copy, and suffice it to say that it delighted me. The Ferocious Fern is a lost minor classic, deserving a wider distribution than it ultimately obtained...I don't know if I can do the book justice in this review alone. In celebration of Bookvember I've decided to fill in the otherwise scanty information on this book for an Internet audience--I hope to be informative more than anything else!

Some brief notes before I talk about the individual stories, one at a time. The book does have something of a plant theme to it. Many of the stories have references to nature and natural themes, which ties in with its status as a regional work. I'm told the label of "regional literature" is kind of considered to be literary poison, and indeed, the thick Britishness that Pulman employs, along with the tedium he sometimes invokes in his lengthy description of rural English life, can be a bit of a deterrent. But Pulman's charm is intoxicating and you recognize quickly that he is a writer very much in charge of what he's writing. The regional/rural quality of his stories suggests a peace that he craves, in refuge from some of the horrors this world presents. To some degree, the book has some indescribable qualities, so perhaps it's best that I simply disclose my notes about the stories.

The titular story, "The Ferocious Fern," is an interesting choice for opening the collection. For readers unfamiliar with Pulman--i.e. everyone--it's a fantasy story, and as we'll learn, Pulman is good at genre fiction when he chooses to do it, and it's a shame that the rest of the stories in the collection aren't like this one. But it's also probably a bit of a good thing, since I found "Fern" to also be charmingly awkward from a writing perspective. My first thought was that Pulman was someone who read often but wrote rarely, probably a botanist or gardener. Later stories shot up that opinion because he really does show that he's someone who refined his craft, but "Fern" is a little clunky here and there. Plus, it doesn't have an entirely original premise: an unseemly fern turns out to be sentient and evil (or at least misguided), and kills a man. (Don't be mad that I spoil the ending, as Pulman himself does it on the inner flap and back of the book.) However, Pulman manages to have an interesting theme, one of conflict between magic and science. Two vague explanations are given for the fern's behavior, one being that chlorophyll and blood are not dissimilar (therefore allowing for predatory plants just as there are predatory animals), the other being that the plant figures into a 17th Century prophecy involving the Eve of St. John. The scene where the mysterious backwoods landlady talks about the prophecy explanation is effectively chilling, because Pulman suggests a secret, creepy world that exists far beyond the secure bubbles of our precious cities. It's very much like the quiet-but-real magic of The Witches' Mountain. I loved it.

"Murgatroyd has his Dinner" lacks horror or fantasy elements, but carries on the plant theme, and is one of his feel-good pieces to boot. Murgatroyd gets the wrong dish served to him at a restaurant, with unexpected results. Like many stories in the collection, it's more a scene or vignette than anything else, and thus really needs to be experienced for itself.

"The Speck" is a return to horror, albeit without paranormal elements. A man trapped on an island begins to hallucinate that the specks on his furniture are moving around. It was this story that made me realize why I was so quick to label Pulman as amateurish when I started the book: this is the sort of horror story I wrote when I was ten. When I first decided to be a writer, I was obsessed with deriving terror from subtle emotions. Being probably more bored than anything else, I had this habit of observing my emotions and my reactions to quiet observations, like looking at patterns in furniture. My conception of horror at the time was something "loud," or at least obviously horrific. The stories I could come up with for the patterns of my furniture and how I felt about them was sort of an untapped market, I felt. I think a lot of that must have been the fact that I was reading a lot of British literature at the time, which is usually "quieter" than what we see in America. To see that emotional obsessiveness put on paper by another writer was pretty awesome.

"Nothing Much in the Post" is another psychological horror story, of another kind. What the story ends up coming down to is what is surely a firsthand account of the London Blitz. The descriptions of bombs dropping puts this story among some of the best war literature I've ever read, period, and if for nothing but the account of the Blitz contained in this story, this book should be remembered. This is also a platform for Pulman to examine some of his views on class. Most of the time it seems like he's one of the good guys--the poor are sympathized with more than the rich, usually.

Next is "The Sound of a Voice," a story where unfortunately Pulman loses a bit of his pace. It is a ghost story with some of the leftover regional creepiness of "Ferocious Fern," but it is also overwhelmed with a sort of Dickensian sentimentality that I feel has aged poorly. There are a lot of descriptions of men's choirs choosing the songs they want to sing, and they are all supposed to be old favorites to the reader, and yet modern readers are unlikely to recognize or know the words to most of them.

"The Maid Goes Out" is another story about classism, though it is more optimistic than "Nothing Much in the Post." One of those ones that you have to read to experience. Brace yourself for some cheese--but otherwise know that this is a good one.

"Audience for an Exile" is another feel-good piece, albeit a somewhat complicated one. The exile of the title is an Eastern European refugee named Vestrovic, who is a wizened master piano player. One of the locals of the English village he lives in asks him to play a piece that no one else in the village can--playing the piece causes Vestrovic to walk back through his life, including to visions of a concentration camp. I assume that Pulman was aware of the Holocaust and this is a reference to it. The finale has an air of victory to it, but it's a fascinating avenue to travel down. I want to reread this to make sure I get everything out of it.

"The Road" is less optimistic and less interesting. In essence, an old roadman is called to plow a mountainous road so a doctor can reach a sick man in time. As the roadman plows his path through the mountain, he reflects on how hard his life has been. I may have missed something, but I find that unlikely: this one is as tedious as plowing a mountain, which may have been Pulman's intention--but it doesn't make the story very good.

Regrettably, "Tale of an Idiot" is another one that doesn't hold up well to time, and it suffers from perspective issues. It centers around Daft Davie, a mentally handicapped man who ends up helping to save a burnt town due to apparently being able to talk to water and use divining rods to dig wells. The story's theme, in essence, is "mentally handicapped people are useful too!" but repeatedly referring to a disabled person as "daft," "mad," "crazy," "stupid," or "an idiot" will probably bring about some cringing. As I said, the perspective jumps around too much as well, making it difficult to make sense of the events. And the usual vagueness as far as the supernatural events is a weakness rather than a strength in this case: I was left wondering if Davie did have some sort of superhuman ability, but not in the way that I felt that Pulman knew the answer. The story felt hollow or unfinished.

Thankfully, we're on solid ground from here on out. "The Great Quiet" is the story of Hamlin, a tortured poet whose desire to work in silence leads him to the realization that the mortal realm will never be quiet enough for him. It has a first person narrator, which is a nice departure from the norm, and through this narrator we have some interesting subtexts here. The narrator is ostensibly Hamlin's butler in his spooky old house on the hill, but there is something beyond just a desire to serve in him. I seriously read the narrator and Hamlin as lovers, and I have a bias, being queer myself, but there's something about how the narrator reacts to being shoved out of Hamlin's life by his obsession that screams "jilted." And there's a mutual connection between them that's not entirely a boss-employee sort of thing. And no, the narrator is not Hamlin's maid, because Hamlin has a maid whose femininity is always put in a different context from that of Hamlin and the narrator.

"The Apple Thief" is essentially a thriller, and it is a good one. Fate has constantly forced two men, Cawthron and Hemingway, to fight each other, ever since Cawthron stole an apple from Hemingway years ago. Hemingway is now the dictator of a small island called Tierra, while Cawthron has decided to pose as a socialist rabble-rouser to incite a rebellion and get Hemingway killed. I will not say anything further because this story is excellent and really shouldn't be ruined. Again, it is a testament to the fact that, at least for me, Pulman was better at genre fiction than he was at his literary vignettes, if anything because I feel like his conflict is better presented and more interesting when he tries something like a fantasy story or a thriller. But that's just me.

"Faltering Furrow" is another regional vignette but has more depth than some of the others we've seen so far. A farmer strives hard to cut straight furrows on his father's farmland so that he can prove to his father that he's worthy of inheriting the property. The twist to this one is almost cruel, and that's why it warrants attention.

"Wind Struck" ends up slipping a little again, because not only is it a love triangle story but it is a love triangle story that uses weather metaphors. It really doesn't help that the female love interest that the triangle sides fight over is presented in a flat, sexist fashion. Fortunately, the prose is some of the best that the book has, so it's worth checking out for that.

"The Square Watch" may well be the best in the collection, if anything because it shows how much imagination Pulman possessed. He was a good recorder of a life that probably doesn't exist anymore, save for in Britain's deepest depths, and "Ferocious Fern" showed that he could conjure up fantasy worlds, but this one takes the cake. As the title suggests, it may be a time-travel story. At its very least, it's a philosophical, pseudo-scientific reflection on the nature of time, written in a compelling and fascinating way. Professor Oughtershaw seeks the last of a set of thirteen Roman coins, because they may be the key to solving his model of time--and the personal stakes he has in it.

And finally, we have "Love and Mr. Portway." Dull, depressed Mr. Portway encounters his double, the robust, trophy-wife-marrying Mr. Forthergill, and relates to him the story of the only real excitement he's had in his life: an encounter with a beautiful young woman in the woods during a rainstorm. The twist at first is a comedic one, before a second twist unleashes the most hilariously depressing final sentence I've seen in a book in a looong time. It is a great way to end the collection and it's a great story in general.

I hope that provides some insight into a book that I hope reaches a wider audience. In fact--hm. I'll stay quiet for now.

If you have the chance to find this book, give it a shot. It's a tough thing to love, as you may have seen, but it doesn't disappoint.

Now, as you may expect, I've saved the best for last with Bookvember...the very best. The Ferocious Fern is a holy grail of sorts, but there's magic in our futures. Till next time...

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Image Source: Kearn's Rare Books