Forbidden Jungle (1950), by Robert Tansey

The worst jungle adventure movie of all time, and therefore the only one worth watching.

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The White Gorilla (1945), by Harry L. Fraser and Jack Nelson

Just. One. More. Gorilla film.

Okay, technically two gorilla films. The Intruder was weird in that the gorillas just sort of interrupted the murder mystery we were already investigating. The Monster and the Girl had something of the same problem, but wholeheartedly attempted to tackle a fusion of the gorilla picture with film noir. Human Gorilla and The Gorilla Man weren't even gorilla movies, and House of Mystery was probably ripping off the silent incarnations of The Gorilla, aka the worst comedy ever written. Then we have The White Gorilla--a movie which was praised for its accidental experimental qualities by none other than William K. Everson himself. The White Gorilla in itself isn't really a movie--it's a shambles of a narrative cobbled together from tiny portions of original footage, stapled onto large chunks of footage stolen from the 1927 serial Perils of the Jungle, all held together in turn by shockingly lame narrations and "looking out from the bushes" inserts. It makes an appropriate pairing with this week's second film, also a mess of editing posing as a "movie." If the jaw-droppingly dumb spectacle of that wasn't enough, the footage from Perils of the Jungle is also really, really bizarre--its presence provides the only way at present to see what that serial might have looked like, as it's not in distribution, despite surviving in at least one archive.

The "plot" of The White Gorilla is as follows: Steve Collins, jungle guide, has just returned to Morgan's Trading Post in some part of Africa after escorting an explorer named Bradford on a quest for...something. At present, Collins is badly injured from a brawl with a white gorilla--something his comrade's at the post don't believe in. He has to tell the story of the White Gorilla, however, and thus we enter his flashback. We first Bradford and his assistant Hanley captured by some of the natives but freed by the authority of a five-year-old white boy who can apparently talk to animals. Collins follows Bradford as Bradford follows the jungle boy, leading him to a jungle girl, who is threatened by lions. (These lions are the reason why Collins can't interact with the silent film footage--they have trapped in a tree!) The jungle girl is the daughter (perhaps interracial?) of another explorer who was forced to set up permanent camp in the jungle after he went blind. Hanley ends up killing the old man and causing trouble for the group. This leads to their discovering the Cave of the Cyclops, which is inhabited by the Tiger-Men: Africans dressed as tigers ('cause, y'know, tigers live in Africa) such as those they keep in a pit under the cave ('cause, y'know, tigers live in Africa), who worship a pair of cyclops idols (!). The Cave is full of treasure but is guarded by the Tiger-Men, who are only barely held at bay by the jungle boy's mother, who is feigning insanity to set herself up as the Tiger-Men's priestess, as the tribe believes that insane people are sacred. God, this movie is weird. Anyway, in course of spying on the party as they entered the Cave, Collins was attacked by the White Gorilla and only barely escaped. While Morgan and the others go out in search of Bradford and his companions, the White Gorilla returns, kidnapping first a native child and later a girl who is of significance to the frame story bits (Collins' love interest?). Collins, despite his wounds, goes out after her, and manages to finally kill the gorilla. As for Bradford, Hanley, the jungle boy, the jungle girl, the Tiger-Men, and the priestess lady: "All we found in the tiger pit were the bones." Wow, "how fucking depressing" doesn't even cover how downer of an ending that is.

Whew, that's a lot for 60 minutes. In case you can't tell, there's not a plausible bone in this movie's body. Everything is just ridiculous. I suspect these were the "best cuts" of Perils of the Jungle, but if things were as crazy there as they were here, I really hope one of those archives restores and releases that serial to a wider audience. This is yet another movie where I could really just stop after the synopsis, but I haven't touched on some of the other things, like how they dub dialogue over the silent footage, and how the White Gorilla makes farting/kazoo sounds for some ungodly reason. Collins' narration continues even after he's done telling his story; the inhabitants of Morgan's Trading Post laughingly mock a badly injured man for believing in such a thing as a White Gorilla--and I know people knew what albinism was in 1945. The thing is, there were a fucking lot of these types of movies back in the '30s and '40s, with the infamous 1946 Devil Monster being a recut version of 1936's The Sea Fiend--in term an English-language remake of 1935's El Diablo del Mar! It's important to bring up remakes here because Remake Fever was as much a thing then as it is in our era. Keep in mind that there were two versions of The Unholy Three made within five years of each other, featuring virtually the same cast and virtually the same direction. That instance was part of the movement, however, that saw to the remaking of silent films into more relevant talkie versions...with mixed results at times. It is the same trend that The White Gorilla is a dubiously respectable participator in; at heart, The White Gorilla serves as a pure remake of Perils of the Jungle, which director Harry Fraser wrote after all. But by a combination of a hilariously dated "modernizing" methods (by which I mean they would have seemed horribly dated even by 1945's standards) as well as the sheer strangeness of the original content of Perils of the Jungle, we end up with a movie considerably more like A Night to Dismember than the talkie Unholy Three.

I think that's basically all I can say about this one, besides making the by-now obligatory reference to the fact that the White Gorilla costume was reused that same year for minor B-movie fan favorite White Pongo, of which The White Gorilla is sort of a bizarro version. I definitely cannot recommend The White Gorilla in a traditional sense, but at the same time, it really has to be seen to be believed. A new classic for me.

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The Snake Woman (1961), by Sidney J. Furie

I just have to describe how The Snake Woman starts. It can't maintain its hilarity through its whole runtime but that's okay, because what we get at the beginning more than compensates for a little bit of boredom.

We're in good hands right at the gates when a somber narrator informs us that the tale we are about to hear is a legend passed down "from generation to generation," but one "which the residents of the town would rather forget." In 1890, a snake researcher named Dr. Adderson (sic) is conducting strange experiments. By "strange experiments," I mean he's convinced that snake venom is the cure to mental illness, and therefore he's been injecting his insane wife with snake venom. Did I mention that Mrs. Adderson is pregnant? Curiously, much of the poor woman's protest comes from the fact that "we don't know what all that poison will do to me!" Hmm...I dunno, I think we can make some presumptions. She's also worried that the venom will hurt the baby, but Adderson is convinced that being raised by a madwoman is infinitely worse than being deformed or killed by in-utero toxins. Rather unsurprisingly Mrs. Adderson goes into premature labor (very premature, I should say, given that she doesn't look more than a month pregnant), and Dr. Adderson, whose medical credentials are already in question, has to fetch another doctor to deliver the baby. At first they're sure the girl is dead, because she's as cold as ice. Similarly, she has a weirdly shaped mouth and black, lidless eyes. Despite this, she still breathes, and when she's handed to her mother, she releases a hissing sound. The shock of this is too horrible for Mrs. Adderson and she dies. The midwife on hand, Aggie Harker, is rumored to be something of a witch, and she's convinced now that the baby has the power to kill with a glance. Adderson stops her from murdering the child but the old woman gets a mob that's more curious and weak-willed than angry to go wreck Adderson's laboratory. Cue the scene where the mob smash the glass cages of the snakes while setting the place on fire, releasing a large breeding population of deadly animals into their community when the fire chases them away before they can kill them all. Adderson dies when he tries to grab a snake by the head, causing it to bite his hand. Dr. Murton, the real doctor who delivered Adderson's baby, brings the child to a local hermit, who must keep him for the night while Murton goes to Africa to do...something. (Don't worry, it's not plot related, he just doesn't have the right schedule to pencil in idiots orphaning their own babies.) The idea is that Adderson will seek them out in the morning and retrieve the child but they don't know the dumb idiot is dead. The hermit raises the girl, named "Atheris" (an ancient name for a snake), until she's old enough to embrace her full powers as a weresnake. When Murton finally returns it's been years since Atheris scared away the hermit's animals and eventually vanished into the wilderness. Now the town is plagued by mysterious murders, and some white dude whose name I literally can't remember shows up to learn things we can already figure out until Atheris dies.

If you boil our plot down further, then we get this: maniac creates weresnake at expense of his family and the safety of his community, and then an outside agent kills the monster when said monster turns murderous. It's Frankenstein, people--but with a very strange Dr. Frankenstein at that. I hope I'm not alone in thinking that Adderson is fucking cracked. Now, it is true that snake venom-derived drugs have been effective medicinally. ACE inhibitors, for example, used to control high blood pressure, are derived from the venom of the Brazilian pit viper. Adderson cites a variety of ailments that can be treated with snake venom and some of them are accurate (though I have to wonder if such medicine existed at the turn of the century). Note that I used the word "derived," though; as far as I understand you can't just straight up milk a snake and put that right into somebody's veins. Poisons are more complicated than that. Okay, fine, there's a meta-reason--writer exaggeration (it's not like snake venom would turn someone into a weresnake either; mothers who eat honey while pregnant don't give birth to werebees, or wereflowers for that matter). But consider also that Addison hasn't the faintest idea of how to deliver a baby. I get that he's a herpetologist, but he's also performing medical procedures on someone, implying he does have a degree in medicine. Yet I know people who have undergraduate degrees in medicine who know how to deliver a baby. I'm sure in a doctoral program it comes up at least once. So Adderson is both unethical and incompetent as a doctor, but he's both those things as a herpetologist too, as evidenced by his grabbing a poisonous snake incorrectly, leading to his death. I'd say he was emotionally disturbed and didn't know what he was doing, but the double revelation of his wife's death plus the fact that he fathered a snake-human hybrid doesn't even make him blink. He has a heart of stone, that Horace Adderson.

You cannot possibly hope to salvage a movie after that. Even though it loses inertia The Snake Woman is still haunted by the ghost of that bone-rattlingly awful opening. It just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. More and more bullshit. What we are left with in the second half are two interesting details--the first being that Atheris sheds her skin. The effect for the shed human skin is actually somewhat convincing, though they don't show it in great light. The second detail is more a lesson to storytellers and filmmakers everywhere, embodied perfectly in the quick-stop lurch of focus this second half engages in: don't kill off your primary cast halfway through and expect us to care about who replaces them. It's not like Norman Bates also killed off Sam Loomis in the first part of Psycho.

The Snake Woman is yet another breathtaking exercise in copious incompetence. Profit by the laughs it gives you.

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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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Book Club of Desolation #21: Spiridon (1907), by Andre Laurie

And so it is that Bookvember 2017 comes to a close with another book about unusual ants. The Ant with the Human Soul was one of three ant-related texts which I knew would turn up on the site sooner or later; Spiridon is the second of them, and I'm sure that at some point in 2018 I'll be cracking open The Ants of Timothy Thummel as well. This will be part of my new initiative, which is to feature Book Clubs of Desolation every third week of the month. In the meantime, Spiridon is a fun way to close out the year--a strange ethical fable by a man famed for collaborating with Jules Verne.

Spiridon tells the story of Dr. Aristide Cordat, a young French med student who, with the aid of his Asian friend Baron Tasimoura, has brought new medical miracles to Europe. Surgeries that heal terrible illnesses in minutes, drugs that induce swift recovery--there seems to be no limit to the talent of the Cordat-Tasimoura team. We find out why Tasimoura seems to possess superhuman knowledge: he is superhuman. Specifically, he is actually Spiridon, the Emperor of a race of ants living in the ruins of an old Phoenician treasure-tower on an Italian island. After nearly ending up as one of Spiridon's vivisection victims while exploring the tower, Cordat discovered the various wonders of the ants and realized how valuable the giant ant's scientific knowledge could be. Finding that the curiosity was mutual, he helped Spiridon disguise himself as a human so he could become a student of human ways. Unfortunately, human and ant morality differs substantially, and it isn't long before Cordat and the rest of France realize that ants have no compunctions about murder.

Like the best sci-fi, Spiridon is surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that expose how people in the early part of the century were adapting to the still-fluid genre; for example, Spiridon's human-like size and intelligence are not customary to his species, but are instead chemically induced when the Ant Emperor ascends to the throne. The rest of the ants on his island are normal-sized, though they seem to have above-average intelligence, as they are capable of vivisecting Cordat intelligently (as intelligent as vivisection can get anyhow). There's something about the setup that recalls Plato's philosopher-king--the Ant Emperor is given his enhanced abilities so that he is better equipped to govern. It's a system of elitism but it also ensures that the governing elite is best equipped for leadership; Cordat's response to Spiridon's explanation is a wish that intelligence-enhancing drugs were given to human leaders as well, which is hard not to sympathize with.

The way in which the ants' ethics manifest, too, defies a lot of the expectations I had for a work of this time. This book is gory as hell! In fact, this may be one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. I knew I was hooked the instant Cordat woke up in the ant tower next to a goddamn eviscerated corpse--the eviscerated corpse of the brother of one of the main characters, at that! When Spiridon is kidnapped by Joel le Berquin, one of Cordat's friends who becomes jealous of him and wants his secret to success, his threats to vivisect the ant are turned on him when Spiridon escapes; Spiridon straps le Berquin to his own operating table and cuts out his organs. All of this is because Spiridon, while possessed of emotions, is ruled primarily by cold insect logic--he was threatened, so of course it makes sense to turn that same threat around on the threatener...and learn more about human anatomy, to boot! Spiridon manages to come across as a being ruled by an alien sense of ethics without being a Vulcan, which is better than a lot of Laurie's successor would do when writing characters controlled by logic rather than feeling. And indeed, logic was applied to the creation of the character, as Laurie demonstrates a knowledge of ants that helps him guide the plot. Specifically, he knows about the various chemicals used by ants to control their social order and extrapolates that into Spiridon's wonder drugs and paralyzing venom. It just makes sense for ants to be master chemists, because from a certain perspective they already are.

Now, this book does have some noticeable shortcomings. I am concerned sometimes that I talk about bigotry so often that my words have become meaningless after a time, but I honestly don't care, so let's talk about how this is another book where ant class divisions = race. There is a...sigh...charming passage where Laurie mentions that, just as there are divisions in ethics and logic between man and ant, there are also "real gaps of conscience between men of different races." Now, it's certainly undeniable that people of different races are going to be culturally different, but to call it "gaps of conscience" implies that some have better consciences than others, and that, just as the differences between Spiridon and his human compatriots are largely irreconcilable, so too are the differences between races. It read too much like the arguments white supremacists make all too often about "incompatible" cultures, wherein they automatically dismiss the idea that "gaps" between cultures can be accommodated without destroying, assimilating, or prioritizing one culture over another. And I know that's because this is a book from 1907, but the white supremacists of today are using the same lazy excuses people were back then.

The book struggles tonally, oftentimes unsure of whether this is all supposed to be fun and whimsical or dark and bleak. Characters will sometimes speak like they're in a comedy and act extremely aloof about the situation, but there are several instances of people being butchered alive, with their remains left to be found by their friends, family, and coworkers. There is also the character of Pia, whose brother Cordat finds at the beginning of the book, and who swears a vendetta against Spiridon as such. She loses her life trapping Spiridon in a burning building and her death is treated as a tragedy, but the book--spoiler alert--ends with Cordat using the ants' chemical secrets to bring Spiridon back from the dead. He completely invalidates the lives of an entire family who died horribly thanks to a creature who has killed and could kill again not only with a lack of compunction, but with a biological inability to generate compunction in the first place! Keep in mind--Pia and Cordat have romantic chemistry together! The ending admittedly reveals that Spiridon is effectively lobotomized as a result of his death and resurrection; still cognizant and intelligent for an ant, but with a broken will, and therefore unlikely to go around cutting people up again. But it's really unclear who's supposed to be the victor here. At this point our sympathy for Cordat has vanished, yet he dances away into the sunset clicking his heels over all the scientific secrets he's unlocked.

I mentioned at the beginning that Andre Laurie (born Paschal Grousset) was a collaborator of Jules Verne's. When researching Laurie I was surprised to find out that one of the Jules Verne books from my childhood, The Begum's Millions, was written almost wholesale by Laurie! In fact, it's entirely possible that The Begum's Millions' relationship to Jules Verne was simply that the more famous author's name was stamped on the front cover by the authors' mutual editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, while Laurie was in political exile. Spiridon is often described as the work wherein Laurie broke away from Jules Verne's mold, and I take that to mean that maybe this book was something of a rebellion against Verne's scientific optimism. Neither Cordat nor Spiridon give science a good name, and I feel that almost has to be intentional. Maybe Cordat is supposed to be a colossal asshole, consumed, just as Spiridon is, with his own curiosity, rather than the human consequence that can arise from experimentation. It wouldn't be an unusual statement for a book at the time to make.

Then there's the detail that Spiridon spends most of the book in a wax mask and fake gloves. I know it's fiction, but unless Cordat's colleagues were 90% blind I can't imagine them mistaking wax prosthetics in 1907 for real human flesh. These people are goddamn doctors! They should know what a person looks like!

Problems aside, however, Spiridon is by-and-large an entertaining work, managing to avoid being boring despite some rather substantial deviations from the main plot thread at times. It is snappily written for a book from the dawn of the 20th Century, and Michael Shreve's translation-adaptation with Black Coat Press has a good flow to it. In fact, there's more drive to this than the usual Jules Verne novel. I just hope Timothy Thummel doesn't try to say that the ants represent race again.

Speaking of Black Coat Press, December sees the release of my short story "The Curse of Orlac" in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol. 14: Coup de Grace, which stars and references a number of fictional characters who have been mentioned before on this site. For next year's volume I have a story planned which involves Spiridon in some capacity.

In any case: this is kinda it for 2017, then. Man, what a shitty fucking year. But at least the movies were good, and the books were mostly good, right? I hope I've helped make your life a little more bearable in these trying times. I've been watching movies this whole time to get prepped for 2018, and I'll tell you now: it's gonna to be a fucking party. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself yet. We've still got a Top Ten Movie List to do, plus we have to crown Book of the Year!

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Serpent Island (1954), by Tom Gries

I'm going to level with you: outside of Daughter of Horror and a few others, there aren't many 1950s horror movies appropriate for the site that I enjoy. That's why I'm sort of cheating with this one--finding material for both the '20s and this decade will be a challenge next year, assuming I pursue the same format for our Spookyween celebrations. My one justification for including Serpent Island on the itinerary is that it features a voodoo subplot, plus a killer creature sequence at the end. Other than that, this movie is a sailing drama about adventure on the high seas, featuring a scurvy underdog hero who gets the girl at the end. Call me a sucker for voodoo, no matter how mild it is, but there's something about this one that feels like October to me.

Peter Mason is an old marine engineer working dockrat shifts out in San Pedro, CA. One day a woman named Rikki Andre comes up to him asking use of his sailing services; you see, her ancestor was Michel Andre, a gold fence who hid a million dollars in treasure out near Haiti. Using the ship called the Constellation, belonging another sailor she's hired, a rival of Mason's by the name of Kirk Ellis (Captain Kirk, huh?), they set off, traveling to the Seas of Padding. This includes things like gut-punch brawls, shark attacks, and the lamest stock footage hurricane ever. When they land, Mason and Rikki consummate their romantic tension in a surprisingly explicit scene for 1954, but of course, there's voodoo afoot. Pete is captured by the voodoo cult where he learns that their leader is an old flame of his, a woman named Ann Christoff, and she's bound to protect the gold--after all, it constitutes the mass of their sacred idol. Rikki is allowed to see the idol, but is attacked by a boa constrictor; Pete saves her, Kirk is killed by the snake, and the two lovebirds escape the island safely.

Serpent Island is largely notable because it's the first movie that Bert I. Gordon had a hand in producing. As is easy enough to point out there are no giant monsters in this one, even if that boa is pretty big. In a sense, this is one of the most successful monster movies Gordon made--not in terms of monster content, of course--because I actually found some horror in the scene where Rikki is attacked by the snake. They managed to make the actress being choked to death look strangely real. I found it grotesque, but maybe I'm a big sissy--or maybe a crusty print does things to me.

I was pulled into this movie because it has a strange self-awareness about itself that makes it and its characters charming. Pete is well-acted as an aging former sailor with extreme cynicism about life at sea. Rikki is strikingly convincing as a young woman who is figuring herself out. And Kirk is a true bastard like any evil ship captain in a sailing adventure film worth his salt should be. We get this sense of winking from the oddities the script insists on indulging in. For example, after Pete stops a thief from stealing the letter that will lead Rikki to the treasure, he says, "We never did find out who the uncommon thief was; I still have my own ideas on the subject." Yet we never learn those ideas; moving on. How about his later zinger: "My dad always said to never fight a man in his own territory. I never listened to him and that's how I became a success in life." Pete has a sentimental sort of narration over the whole of the film, with pseudo-poetic reflections on all they come across, which seems to be a fixture of sailing segment in these types of adventure flicks. Some of these bits of narration reminded me of Infrasexum in their own way. He also makes jokes which appear to be at the expense of the Republican Party, which earns him a thumbs up in my book.

One last note on the dialogue before I move on. Kirk comes up behind Rikki one night and looks her up and down like a creep. She knows he's there without looking and he asks how she knows. She says, cheerily, "You're real quiet, and so when it gets real quiet I know you're around. If that sounds confused, that's because I'm confused. About a lot of things." Wow! You know you're a master scribe if you've got that in your screenplay, folks.

There's a lot to riff here, because it's a '50s exploitation movie. For example, we see what might have been some of the film's raison d'etre during a scene where Rikki runs out on deck in her nightie, and gives us a big face full of hot lingerie'd booty. There's something for the androsexual, as well, as there's no shortage of Pete's weirdly-shaped shirtless torso. I never really thought I'd get a chance to see Rob Liefeld's interpretation of Captain America extrapolated into real life, but I was not disappointed. Finally, we have Jacques, Ann Christoff's voodoo enforcer, who I like to headcanon is a zombie, just 'cause then I can claim this is a zombie voodoo movie. Every time he makes his sudden appearance I remark on his stunning resemblance to a shaved Mr. T. Because it's a '50s voodoo movie, there is trace racism, including white people being afraid of burly black dudes just 'cause they're burly black dudes. Fortunately, it's not even in the same galaxy as West of Zanzibar.

Serpent Island may be one of those movies which can only be appreciated so idiosyncratically that it's almost not worth it. It may also be a movie I enjoy exclusively because I had to go to surprising lengths to find a copy. If you like sailing dramas with a touch of killer creatures and the threat of human sacrifice, this one's for you. Give it a try.

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Rats: Night of Terror (1984), by Bruno Mattei

Synthesizers and badly-dubbed dialogue are the waters which take us to the world of 225 AB; AB being "After the Bomb." This is a world of Bruno Mattei's making--it's remarkable what he and Claudio Fragasso thought the future would be like. A dark and shabby place, inhabited largely by danger and idiocy. It's no wonder that after-the-end movies were so big in the '80s, but Mattei's unique (or "unique") vision of what humanity and rat-anity would become stands out to me among a vast tan-gray sea of repetitive Mad Max cash-ins. Mark my words, I'm sure there are some "nods" to Mad Max in Rats: Night of Terror that I'm missing, but this is Mattei through-and-through, for better or worse.

Rats doesn't really follow a specific "plot," per se--we mostly just follow a group of dozen-odd "New Primitives" as they attempt to fit in with the surface world after mankind has spent two centuries living underground. (In a reference that doesn't bode well, Mattei mentions that the nuclear holocaust happens in 2015. I'm abstaining from any "two years overdue" jokes.) They all wear outfits that Doctor Who would wear if he regenerated twelve times in the '80s--hell, there's even a girl who dresses like a fucking vampire! They slowly uncover many gruesome secrets about their world, such as the fact that the previous settlers of the surface were all killed by the legions of rats that now rule the ruined former metropolises. And slowly, one by one, the same fate befalls them. Either they damn themselves with their own idiocy by mocking the rats or the rats do weirdly intelligent things like eat through their motorcycle tires. In the end, only a small group of survivors makes it out to witness the ending, which...oh, I'll talk about that.

But to start with, let's just dig into something that nagged at my mind upon rewatching this: what genre is this? I've deliberately tried to avoid horror films in these last few weeks leading up to Spookyween, but it seems I've written myself into a bit of a pickle, as Rats: Night of Terror definitely looks to be a horror film. Post-apocalyptic horror is a natural genre; I mean, swap out the rats for zombies and you've got yerself something mainstream. (And guess what, this movie steals settings and scenarios from Night of the Living Dead.) There are plenty of horror music cues and rotten, half-eaten corpses to go around, plus that delicious ending, but in the end there's a lot of emphasis on the action of fighting off the rats, and also, on the comedy. As we've seen, Claudio Fragasso had a distinct obsession with writing absurd dialogue, up to and through the time that he made Troll 2. And Bruno just kept giving him more leash. I mean, they must have been making some money together, even if it never showed up onscreen. And as such, Rats is a conversational nightmare, fraught with bad lines delivered so poorly it's hard to imagine there wasn't some desire to raise laughs.

Really, how do you explain the scene where the black girl--sigh; her name is Chocolate--gets flour dumped all over her. She starts jumping around, excitedly exclaiming, "I'm white! I'm whiter than all of you!" Then, one of the New Primitives comes across a bunch of rats falling into their water purifier. "Mangy beasts," he says. "That's how our waters get...pahlluted!" Have I talked about this before? Even if I have, it bears repeating. I'm sure I've never mentioned the line, "Computers and corpses are a bad mixture." There are also Ax 'Em-esque sequences of large crowds screaming that go on for such a long time that I can't believe they aren't played for laughs. Then, finally, there's the scene where the leader, Kurt, puts one of the rat victims out of his misery with a flamethrower. I'm pretty sure that there are much more humane ways of killing someone whose flesh has been bitten off than roasting them alive. Incompletely roasting them alive, I should add, as this poor soul lives for several more minutes after being set on fire! I know there's such a thing as the Idiot Ball, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Did Bruno and Claudio read Jack Kirby's Forever People comics or something? There's something about a gang of motorcycle-mounted youngsters having over-ecstatic adventures laden with hilariously unrealistic dialogue that really strikes a familiar chord with me. Of course, these kids don't have superpowers, unless you count Video, who has the power to restore power to computers by pressing random switches.

Yes, I did say "Video." It's astonishing, but I can almost remember all the main characters' names. There's Kurt, the leader, with his scarf and leather jacket; his girlfriend, Diana; Duke, who wants to overthrow Kurt as head of the Primitives; Video, who is a tech wiz; Chocolate, the black girl and heroine of the film; Lilith, the vampire lady; Lucifer, her boyfriend; and there's the bald guy with the third-eye tattoo (a descendant of the girl from Infrasexum, no doubt), and there's also the kind of nerdy guy who gets killed by the water-purifier rats. I should know Bald Guy's name because he almost makes it to the end. But alas, I guess this just means I'll have to watch it again.

So I guess this is also a Power of Friendship movie on top of everything else. Except Friendship doesn't really prevail in the end, does it? Because Chocolate and Video are finally found by masked survivors who are seemingly a group of saviors coming to help them; they poison the rats and save them from the poison in turn. But then it turns out they are Rat People. Huh. Throughout most of the movie, the characters give a strangely human quality to the rats, which may be a remnant of this perhaps having once been a zombie script--maybe Bruno realized that humanization, and decided to make the full jump? In any case, this ending is weird and painfully open. Are the rat-human hybrids friendly? Did they record some of the messages that the Primitives heard earlier in the abandoned buildings? If they can speak English, why do they refuse to communicate with the survivors? Are they mutated rats who have taken on a human-like shape, or are they humans who have adapted by becoming rat-like? Fucking Christ! Why did this movie get no sequel?

Sequel or no sequel though, I don't think I've yet seen a post-apocalyptic movie better than this one. This is quintessential Eurotrash, quintessential Bruno, and quintessential after-the-endsploitation. What have you got to lose?

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Smoking Guns (1934), by Alan James

How much of this "joke" is predicated on prejudice? How much of my amusement is derived from the simple fact that, even after dedicating a quite a lot of words to talking about them, I'm still not used to B-Westerns completely and utterly blowing me out of the water? 2017 is a year for walking against the wind in many things--so it's healthy for me to go on insisting that these movies have some sort of value. I've encountered few fellow trashsters who have found the same sort of passion I have for digging through the tedious and repetitious tides of old '30s cowboy flicks in search of gold. But I'm gonna do my part to make it a thing, damnit! Why should '80s slashers, '70s roughies, and '60s sexploiters have all the fun? At this point I've cast aside my old superstitions. Smoking Guns cements, now and forever, that Westerns can contain the same levels of perverse oddity that afflict the weirdest movies I've featured on this site.

Ken Masters is a young man who has been accused of the murder of Hank Stone's father Silas--however, Ken knows that Hank himself is the killer. When he confronts Stone with that knowledge, he is driven out of town, and he hides himself out in the Amazon rainforest (as you do). A ranger by the name of Dick Evans tracks Ken out to the jungle and arrests him--Ken is only too happy to return to civilization, as he wanted to stay back in town and face Stone far and square. As Evans takes Ken back through the jungle, however, he contracts malaria, and is forced to let Ken shoot their handcuffs off to go find help after it transpires that he's lost the key. Fortunately, Ken is an honorable man, and not only gives the ranger his gun back, but returns with a canoe as promised. Not so fortunately, their voyage down the Amazon becomes sheer horror when Evans decides to open fire into a horde of crocodiles, which sends them after the two. Evans is bitten on the leg, leading to gangrene; Ken knows how to operate but rather than face the knife, Evans kills himself.

Then the movie gets really weird...yeah, it actually gets weirder. Somehow, Ken gets it in his head that he and the dead ranger are dead ringers for each other, despite the fact that their actors have zero resemblance. He returns to civilization disguised as Evans, and runs into the awkward fact that Evans had a girlfriend, the somewhat improbably-named Alice Adams. It doesn't take long before "Dick" reveals that he's rather ill-suited for impersonating a dead man in front of his loved ones, as he's forgotten Alice's nickname of "Kitten," and praises music the real Dick hated while disliking that which he liked. Still, she takes the truth, when he comes forth with it, surprisingly well. From there on out, Ken uses every advantage he gets to close in on his man.

Much to my dismay, the majority of Smoking Guns' goodness is packed into its first half. The second half of the film is a typical B-Western, and not one of the very good ones...long shots of people creeping around in the dark, broken up by protracted, foot-dragging gunfights--and that's saying nothing of the obligatory square dancing scene. Oh, and the racism. I really don't want to dwell on this, so I'll just say that there is a black butler named "Cinders" who Mantan Morelands the hell out of every scene he's in. And because he's in so many scenes, you'll probably want to skip most of this second half with the assurance that it's a '30s Western, and good triumphs in the end. In-universe. In out-universe terms, good did not triumph, because they forced an actor to completely demean himself for the mild amusement of the white audience. So don't be afraid to ditch the second half if you want.

But man, that first half. Was there really so much demand for movies set in the Amazon in 1934 that they needed to spend a good chunk of the story there? Was it impossible, in the days of the Old West, to contract malaria and gangrene within the confines of the United States? Maybe it's not the Amazon...maybe it's just Florida. But I'm pretty positive it is meant to be somewhere in South America. I am absolutely not complaining about any of this. The South America sequence is entirely contingent on a hilarious amount of improbably bad luck for our characters stacked on top of some of the weirdest passes of the Idiot Ball I've ever seen. Keep in mind, we go straight from Dick Evans confidently arresting Ken to his decline into malaria, with the swiftness of the dissolve implying very little time has passed. Evans spends part of this scene laughing insanely as the disease drives him out of his mind. It's an arresting composition, giving us the impression that he was able to make it all the way out here by himself just fine, but the second he joins up with Ken, he starts going insane. This is built up by the fact that he trusts Ken, a fucking outlaw, enough to hand him his gun! It's not like he really needs much persuading to go all buddy-buddy with Ken, as they speak amiably to each other upon first meeting, and he eats Ken's food, even though Ken could've easily rubbed an Amazonian frog on that meat with the intent of prying the handcuff keys off the ranger's cold corpse. Evans' fate is ultimately his own fault as he shows not a single shred of spine in the face of animals who were gonna leave him alone if he didn't fucking shoot them. It's almost impossible to believe this man was a cop. He must have traveled to the Amazon in a goddamn air-conditioned rickshaw.

Then, Ken seriously overestimates his ability to impersonate a man he barely knew. What's more, the deception generally works! People believe that he is Evans, despite having no beard, a different hairstyle, and, let's just face it, a completely different face. And poor Dick Evans, for all the suffering he went through in the course of just doing his job (well, and being an idiot), is completely forgotten, as Ken steals his identity, his horse, and, ultimately, his girlfriend. If there's a theme to Smoking Guns, it's that if you are noble, you will have a good ending, unless your name is Dick Evans. There's such a strange passion and intensity to the direction and action of all these improbabilities that it feels deliberate--almost wholly detached from the absurd cheapness that affected many of the big studios during the Great Depression. This movie was made by Universal, meaning it was one of the better Westerns out there.

And that shows. Contrast that with The Phantom Cowboy or The Irish Gringo and you'll see that there was at least a little money behind Smoking Guns. And yet, the movie had to be on the market fast, damnit. I don't what they were thinking. I just feel, somehow, that they were thinking. Consequentially, Smoking Guns is an essential B-Western, second only to The Phantom Cowboy by the depressing anti-merit of replacing Ptomaine Pete with racism. Fast-forward when you feel like it and keep your eyes peeled for the good bits.

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The Devil Bat (1940), by Jean Yarbrough

I technically talked about this before back in The Monogram Monograph, but it's more that I used imagery from it and that's about it. I wanted to keep elements of The Devil Bat loose in The Monogram Monograph because The Devil Bat is a Producers' Releasing Corporation movie rather than a Monogram one. The one commonality between this and the Monogram movies I've covered on the site is that this is a Bela Lugosi Poverty Row flick. It's a classic of the genre, and while there are plenty of reviews of this elsewhere online, I still wanted to talk about it here because there's a lot to love.

Bela Lugosi is Dr. Carruthers, the "kindly village doctor" of Heathville. At once we see that he is performing good old electrical stimulation experiments on bats, causing them to grow to the size of comically fake bat puppets. While stimulating his bats, he clenches his fist and makes a pouty face, like every scientist does in the midst of an experiment. He receives a phone call from his former coworkers at the local chemical factory, who are inviting him to a party where they intend to give him a $5,000 check as compensation for the success his formulas have bestowed on the company. Carruthers views this gift as an insult--apparently, they began using work of his they previously rejected after he left the company, and consequently made a mint. Carruthers' excuse for missing the party, that he is working on a new shaving lotion, is not a lie. However, he does not share with anyone the fact that he has trained his Devil Bat to kill people who wear this aftershave. "You will stuhrrrike!" he tells his Bat. "Yes...you will stuhrrrike." One by one, Carruthers picks off the members of the cosmetics science team, all while being pursued by a reporter named Johnny Layton, played by Ralph from Reefer Madness, and his comic relief sidekick "One-Shot" McGuire. Will they crack the case before it's too late?

The appeal of this movie to me appears almost instantly, being built into the premise. Only in the 1940s could a theatrically released movie get away with featuring a mad scientist who takes revenge on his coworkers with perfume-powered giant bats. Stack that up with the fact that it's Bela Lugosi as the mad scientist, and of course bad movie fans are going to rave about it--it's one of Lugosi's best performances, too. The only other person who I can think of who'd do just as good of a job as Lugosi would be John Carradine. Lugosi is strangely gleeful in this role, being indeed rather kindly at first, before revealing himself to be a relentless and obsessive maniac. Of course, all of his rage is as campy as Bela ever made it. This is probably his second best role, with the first being, of course, his part in Glen or Glenda. After that it would be Dr. von Housen from Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Lugosi's performance is perfectly suited for a movie about incredibly fake looking killer bats who sometimes turn into stock footage of bats when they're up close.

To examine it in detail: Carruthers is indeed kindly to the very last, almost never revealing his true nature to others. He even puts his life on the line to continue to prove his innocence, accompanying Johnny out into his garden to wait for the Devil Bat to arrive, unaware that Johnny intends to throw the lotion on him. Carruthers is an intelligent supervillain. He knows you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. Unlike an uncomfortable percentage of the American public, he is able to keep his vast and confounding rage under control long enough to complete his goals, or come very near to such. He vents by giving little ironic nods that we the audience will pick up on; there's a running gag of sorts where his victims, unaware of what they've just rubbed on their necks, wish the doctor good night. And he always responds with a resonant, "Goodbye," that only Lugosi could purr out. He also tells one of his victims, of the aftershave, "I don't think you'll ever use anything else." Bela clearly had the time of his life in this role, and it's good to see the old bastard happy after everything he went through in life.

Other than that, a lot of this stuff is par for the course as far as Poverty Row horror goes. It has the same stock library cues as many of the Monogram movies, and the screenwriter and cast never have any idea on how to end a scene. To be honest, my watch-through for this review made me think of one Monogram movie in particular, Lugosi's Black Dragons, which also features Lugosi running around killing people out of revenge. But unfortunately his performance in that is pretty terrible, even if I love the movie for its bizarro Monogram twists. I'm glad I've now seen so much of this guy's wartime output--even at its worst it's given me something to work with.

There's one other moment I wanted to mention before we wrap up...the moment where a scientist proclaims the Devil Bat to be the last survivor of a prehistoric species. Okay...how did he come to that conclusion? Surely there was some sign that these were just electrically-engorged bats? I'm no scientist myself, so I don't know. I just know that this zany pseudoscientific bit reminded me of the conference rooms full of scientists spewing bullshit in the early Godzilla movies. It definitely improved the experience.

The Devil Bat is something like Bad Movie Elementary School, but truth be told I only found it last year. This is a Gateway Drug much like Plan 9 from Outer Space or I Eat Your Skin. Touch it, and it ignites like fire. Hold it in your palm. 

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The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), by Richard Stanley and John Frankenheimer

Let's just get this out of the way: yes, I'm once more cheating on the site by reviewing this big-budgeted star vehicle directed by people who have some rather impressive accomplishments under their belts. However: this adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau is considered to be one of the worst films ever made, in no small part to its legendarily troubled production. I knew bits and pieces of the story behind the creation of this film and that was why I sought it out to begin with--plus, there's always at least a little joy in examining movies that people consider to be the worst ever. Let's face it: the most famous "worst movies ever" are not actually the worst movies ever made, just the ones that are considered famously bad by mainstream audiences. Freddy Got Fingered, for example, is not nearly as bad as Night of Horror, Humongous, or any of the animated musicals based off of the Titanic story. I've determined for myself that sometimes mainstream audiences can be a little spoiled--while also constantly deserving better--and I think today's movie really speaks to that idea. The Island of Dr. Moreau is actually a very impressive effort even if it's definitely still harebrained enough to have pissed off a lot of critics back in '96.

We open on the lifeboat of diplomat Edward Douglas (David Thewlis, whom many of you know as Professor Lupin of Hogwarts), whose plane went down on his way to Asia to negotiate a peace settlement. It's mentioned briefly that the year is 2010, but this has almost no bearing on the story whatsoever. Douglas is witnessing his two fellow survivors, army folk by the looks of them, savagely beating each other to death over the last canteen of water. Soon he is alone when the two inevitably kill each other (with no small help from the opportunistic Douglas himself), their bloody bodies vanishing beneath the waves to be eaten by the sharks. A delirious Douglas is eventually rescued by an apparent drug-addict and self-described veterinarian named Montgomery, played by Val Kilmer. Douglas is to go with Montgomery to the island of his employer, a scientist named Moreau.

Upon arriving on the island, Douglas meets Aissa, a stunning young woman who claims to be the doctor's daughter. Her presence helps bring Douglas a sense of peace, but it will not last long. When he inevitably goes poking around in the night, Douglas learns the secret of the island in the most gruesome way possible when he finds a bunch of doctors helping some kind of humanoid deer-creature gives birth to its braying, horrifying offspring. When he flees the situation worsens, as he finds himself surrounded by dozens by disfigured creatures that are seemingly half-man, half-animal. And indeed they are exactly that. As you may expect, Moreau (soon revealed to be played by Marlon Brando in a performance I cannot adequately summarize) is the man responsible, and Douglas has his chance to meet Moreau the next morning, when the scientist rides up in his draped palanquin, his skin obscured by thick white robes and a garish amount of sunblock. At dinner, Moreau introduces Douglas to his "children," including the exceedingly polite Azazello, made from a dog, and Majai, a diminutive creature made from God-knows-what who resembles something like a severely premature fetus who lived. Moreau has made his creations from splicing human genes into animals, but they must be controlled with a device called "the Pain" which administers electrical shocks to the beast-folk via implants--plus, they must be given drugs to prevent them from regressing back into their bestial forms.

The unstable peace of the island is finally broken when Montgomery and Douglas inform Moreau of a slaughtered rabbit carcass they found earlier. The beast-people live by a strict code of social etiquette called "the Law" which is another buffer against their reversion--one of the codes of the Law is "not to eat fish or flesh," so this is a sign that one of the beast-men is going rogue. This turns out to be a creature called Lomai, who is killed impulsively by Azazello at the trial Moreau holds for him. When Lomai's remains are cremated, a friend of his, a Hyena-Swine hybrid, discovers his implant and thus the source of the Pain. He removes his implant and forms a small gang who does the same. It won't be long before the questions Moreau refused to answer for his children catch up with him, and change the dynamic of who is a man, an animal, or a god in this place.

I think I've now seen basically every version of Island of Dr. Moreau that there is. The 1977 adaptation was passable, the 1933 Island of Lost Souls is a minor masterpiece of great '30s actors, and the 1921 silent German adaptation is a racist pile of feces. Plus there are movies like Terror is a Man and The Twilight People which, while not featuring a Dr. Moreau specifically by name, use the same general character types and situations as H.G. Wells' original 1896 novel. Wells' book is one of the few pieces of Victorian lit from my childhood which can still give me chills to this day, and the general premise is one I'd like to play with in my own fiction someday. And I think that the film's original director Richard Stanley understood the concepts behind the novel extremely well (even arguably improving on some of them), and with some minor divergences in the presentation of the characters, this is a pretty pure adaptation on top of everything--it's certainly more loyal than Island of Lost Souls, which Wells himself lived to see and hate. So it should be said right away that I will have a bias, because I have a certain fondness for the story. What makes it my favorite adaptation of the novel exists within those divergences. So, what did Stanley and Frankenheimer do that made it different?

Well, let's start with the most obvious, and that's Dr. Moreau himself. Marlon Brando apparently wanted to channel much of his previous portrayal of Kurtz from Apocalypse Now in the formation of his Moreau character, and not without reason. Both of them are isolated eccentrics who live in quasi-inaccessible jungles, who are discovered by everyman protagonists who learn firsthand how deep their madness extends before the worlds they've made for themselves collapse. Both Kurtz and Moreau were once considered eminent in their respective fields, but have lost all sense of purpose and reason in a sea of ever-complicating horror. But at the same time, Kurtz did not take on attire which made him look like, as this Wold Newton article has it, "the Pillsbury dough boy wearing drapes." Nor did he affect a mincing what-if-Truman-Capote-was-English accent. What makes Moreau and Kurtz different is that Kurtz's madness is a product of the Vietnam War, whereas Moreau seems to have a lack of motivation. This was one of the most interesting things about the character to me.

In the scene where Douglas meets Moreau, he specifically asks him, "Why are you doing this?" And Moreau is clearly uncomfortable with the question--he changes the topic entirely, to make it about how he "just can't tolerate the sun." Later, at the dinner scene, he gives a deeper explanation, that infusing animals with human traits will create people who are freed from the "Satanic" faults of human psychology. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as what happens to the beast-people is exactly what you'd expect--they have gained enough humanity to walk, talk, and have manners, but they are still close enough to being animals that this creates an existential crisis for them. They have more psychological problems than the average person, and any idiot would know in advance that that was an inevitability. Moreau shows on several occasions, however, that he simply doesn't care--it's the end result of this work that matters, and if there are some fuck-ups in the prototyping he'll coo and purr them back into submission. One clue to the mystery arises in the summary of the Law, where one of the tenets not present in Wells' novel is "not to make love to more than one, or in any which way." So polyamory and homosexuality are apparently off the table entirely for the beast-folk. One could argue that in the case of the former, Moreau is trying to avoid the sort of socialization that animals like lions practice; a lot of animals are naturally polyamorous. But assuming that the "any which way" bit is meant to refer to homosexuality, then we can view Moreau in the context of a social purist, a person ruled by his intolerance of the imperfection of the people around him. This ties in with the film's theme of Christian dualism, "God vs. Satan," as it pertains to Moreau's role as a creator. Moreau thinks he can remake a flawed mankind anew, but no amount of science can give him that power. "He tampered in God's domain," as Ed Wood once put it, and as my MST3K-loving ass put it as the movie ended.

But I don't think the theme of the movie, as it is in other movies about God-domain tampering, is an anti-science one. I think it simply argues against perfectionism. The movie is all about flaws, and related to that, it's about chaos. Why else does beastman M'Ling read Yeats' "The Second Coming" at dinner? Moreau, as hypocritical and flawed as he is, is the lynchpin holding all of this together, and as in the book, his death means the end of social order on the island as a consequence of what he left for his "children." And here we're starting to get into what makes people think this movie is bad. After Marlon Brando leaves the movie, dismembered by his own beast-men, we lose our sense of narrative structure. I'm not the first critic to point this out. Things just sort of stop. We see Douglas trying to find a sample of the anti-regression serum for Aissa, and it takes way too long. We see Val Kilmer slowly go insane from stress and drugs, and this seems to linger unnecessarily. After the hour mark, you could cut out about twenty minutes of the forty which remain, and the movie would flow much better. But you'd still have to make something of the comparatively sloppy editing and continuity that ensues.

I think the real-world reason for this post-Brando chaos, where it seems to become an entirely different movie, is probably a result of Richard Stanley's scenes contrasting with John Frankenheimer's. A lazy, less art-inclined script might be accountable for moments like Kilmer's "I wanna go to Dog Heaven." But just for funsies, let's assume this was deliberate. Suddenly, the shift in editing, acting, and flow are a result of the absence of God. The Maker has been slain, and in his wake reigns disorder. Moreau almost gets posthumous vindication of his godhood in this, even if all of the shit that follows his death cascades out of all of the mistakes he made in his attempts to control the beast-folk society. One could almost see a pro-religion message in this, given that invariably the message at the end boils down to, "I wonder who the real animals are? Man? Or beast?" Have we, too, lost our God? Is that why we are dragged down into the Satanic flaws instilled in us in birth, which make us create the evils of this world?

I myself don't buy that that was what they were going for, because Richard Stanley has indicated that his outlook on life is considerably more mystical. In preparation for this review, I watched the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, which is a fascinating watch even if you don't end up doing anything at all with this movie. The older I get the more I love hearing production stories for movies, and it is my shame to admit that I take special interest in movies with bizarre or horrifying production stories. Island of Dr. Moreau was pretty fucked up, to say the least. How the movie metamorphosized from Stanley's artistic vision of mystic, universal questions to Frankenheimer's relatively commercial New Line product is like a goddamn drug trip. An apt metaphor, as psychedelic drugs were a big influence on Stanley's scripting and directing, alongside his beliefs in magic. For a movie based on the idea of post-theistic chaos to have a production as chaotic as the events depicted in it is one of those magical breaches between fiction and reality that I love looking through history for. Every so often we are hit with something that satisfies our desire to see patterns in everything reminds us that while life creates art, sometimes too does art create life. I don't recall if Stanley talks about this link directly in the documentary but I know his type well enough to feel that he was satisfied by this. Even with the trauma and career damage it brought to him.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is far from perfect. Some of the lines are horrible, the performances vary depending on at which point in the production the scene was filmed, there are some awful CGI monkeys, and its female lead doesn't really get to do anything but look pretty, flinch a lot, and eventually make embarrassingly dubbed-over cat noises. But it definitely deserves a better appraisal than what it's gotten over the years, so give it a try. And don't worry about the art. Just keep your eyes on Brando's insanely campy performance and all will be well.

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Roar (1981), by Noel Marshall

This is one of the weirdest exploitation movies I've ever seen in my life.


Really. This was a fucking surreal experience. I don't know if there's a "proper" way to discuss a film like this--I don't even know if it's proper to call it an "exploitation" movie--but I will do my best. If you aren't familiar with the story of Roar, the succinct version is this: in 1970, Hitchcock actress Tippi Hedren and her then-husband Noel Marshall decided to make a movie dedicated to spreading awareness of the rapid shrinkage of the global big cat population. Over the next eleven years, Hedren and Marshall turned their California home into a private reserve for over a hundred untrained lions, tigers, and leopards (including Togare, the pet lion of Anton LaVey). Then, they decided to make a movie showing these animals doing their thing. And do their thing they did. 100+ cast and crew members, including Hedren and Marshall themselves, were badly injured as a result of maulings and other animal-related incidents. And yet, through Hell and high water, the team prevailed, and the movie hit European theaters in the early '80s to a disappointing return of $2 million against a $17 million budget.

And they kept in a shit-ton of footage of people being mauled.

What's weird is that I wasn't traumatized by this. Don't think of me as desensitized by all the violence I ordinarily observe as part of writing for this site--I can still spot the difference between fake violence and real, and the violence inflicted on human beings in the course of Roar is very real. But the movie is so fucking weird that the sheer grotesquery of the violence never quite caught up with me. This is a movie about contrasts: obvious purpose duking it out against an obvious subversion of that same purpose. It is happy-go-lucky and brutally visceral at the same time. Even as you get caught up in scenes of people enjoying themselves, you are constantly wearing down your fingernails with worry over whether the next inevitable injury will top the one that came before. And then it will break both of those moods to throw something in that's just bizarre. This is a one of a kind movie and even if it's not the most enjoyable movie in the world, for reasons obvious and otherwise, it's still worth a look if you feel your guts can take it.

Yes, the movie has a plot...sort of. In essence, Hank is a Bob Ross lookalike who runs a small African estate along with the film's plethora of wild animals. His friend Mativo is understandably terrified by the situation, but Hank tells him not to worry--this house will make excellent lodging for Hank and his family, when his wife Madeleine, daughter Melanie, and sons Jerry and John all finally arrive as he's requested. Yep, that's right...the man is taking a leaf from the book of Heihachi and literally throwing his family to the lions. (Noel Marshall plays Hank, Hedren plays Madeleine, and their respective kids play their roles eponymously, adding a notable meta-layer to all this.) He doesn't do so out of malice, however, and he does his damnedest to prove to Mativo that the lions are friendly. They just need a little social balance, as Togare, the renegade, frequently steals food from the central "pride" and pisses them off. I say "pride" in quotes as much of these early sequences show the various lions fighting each other. Constantly. (There's a "No Animal Were Harmed" Certificate at the front of the movie and it seems to be genuine--some scenes of animals covered in "blood" actually just show them painted, and none of the scraps between the animals seem to have left permanent injury. Still, one may find their focus on these prolonged intra-animal fights listing after a while.)

We learn quickly that Madeleine and Co. have no idea what lies in store for them. Hank evidently assumes that they'll arrive later than they actually do, as he travels away from the plantation to convince the local government that a mauling incident occurring on his plantation should not halt the proposed ending of lion-hunts in the area. As Hank's family spends several days among the cats, watching them tear the house apart piece by piece, we follow the story of his attempts to make it back to the house as the men who were injured at Hank's place follow him through the brush, sniping down every big cat they see. But in the end, everything's alright, because despite biting, tackling, and clawing them, the lions did not kill Hank's family in their sleep, which means they're friendly. I'm not kidding, that's the rationale they give for why Hank is right about humans and lions being able to live in peace. The lions abstained from eating his wife and children in their sleep.

They were real damn lucky. Like I said, this movie is edge-of-your-seat horror from start to finish. Anyone who has even had a dog knock them down would understand there is something in our brains dating back to when we lived in caves that tells us how rational it is to be afraid of four-legged predators with fangs, claws, and superior strength. I've never been attacked by a lion, but you can really understand the fear the cast is feeling from the visuals--never mind that most of the actors spend most of the movie screaming in some capacity. It is impossible for me to describe this centermost aspect of the film without suggesting that it is a horror movie about an eccentric driven mad by isolation on the African savanna who subjects his family to some Jaws-esque killer creature shenanigans as part of his weird social experiments. But instead, this is scripted as a family feature about a bunch of chumps who learn that their conceptions of the violent, scalp-severing animals they fear are misplaced. Hell, the ending song even says that the plantation is their Garden of Eden! To get a handle on the tone of this film, just imagine that every single time someone is graphically injured, someone who looks uncannily like Bob Ross is in the background, grinning and saying, "Oh, no, no! It's fine! Everything's fine!" Even as he is the one being subjected to tiger-mauling. Similarly, Hank's family's response to see three dozen lions trap them in a house? "Holy mackerel! Look what the cat dragged in!"

But then, this isn't even really a proper family film...one of the few conversations that manages to stay on-script is Melanie complaining to her mother and siblings that this trip will leave her sex-starved. She then goes on to blame her mother for Hank's leaving due to passing that same sexual starvation onto him! This is one of the few scenes in the movie where the cast's attempts at acting aren't horribly marred by their attempts to act around their feline co-stars. This means that every single interaction between human beings has something fundamentally wrong in it--either a performance botched out of fear, or a bizarro line that somehow managed to survive all eleven years of production. To put it simply, this movie is a tonal mess, and therefore it can only be appreciated for sheer spectacle.

What's weird is that the filmmakers, in their undying earnestness and sincerity, actually somewhat succeed in their mission. Taken as a collection of shots of lions unfettered by human influence, the movie shows these creatures as they really are, in ways both good and bad. I will confess to having a certain bias towards big cats because when they do take to humans, they act essentially identical to their housecat cousins. Lions are actually really cute, and for all the violence of the film, there are still plenty of moments where you can see this fact. I understood the general message of the movie to be that we should leave these animals alone, reorganizing our own habits to better accommodate their shared position on this planet...even if the main characters take it a step beyond that by choosing to live with the lions directly. Objectively, the movie fails to prove its thesis, but you can still bits of convincing evidence here and there. The film never convinces you of its opposite point, that these animals should be exterminated--it highlights the cruelty of that act even while refusing to sugarcoat what the cats can do to a human body. I think that's pretty admirable.

Still, though. Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren are aliens, and no one can convince me otherwise. Watch this strange, alien movie, if you can stand the sight of real blood, and know that there is literally no way an experiment like this could be replicated again.

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Sh! The Octopus (1937), by William McGann

As far as I can tell, the Old Dark House subgenre started around 1920--that was the year that saw the stage debut of The Bat, an effort by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood to create an updated adaptation of the former's mystery novel, 1908's The Circular Staircase. The Bat enjoyed tremendous success onstage and inspired not only three films (in 1926, 1930, and 1959), but also the character of Batman, ostensibly. The success of The Bat inspired several other plays with the same formula--a group of varied and variously-savory persons locked in an Old Dark House are menaced by a murderous treasure-seeking costumed criminal--including The Monster and The Cat and the Canary in 1922, which were both notably adapted to film as well. By 1925, we saw the release of The Gorilla, which would go on, somehow, to spawn three film adaptations, including two which are lost. What we are left with as far as The Gorilla goes is the 1939 version starring the Ritz Brothers and Bela Lugosi, one of the most repugnant "horror" "comedies" of all time. But this version serves the same relative function for the film incarnation of the ODH subgenre as its source material did for the stage version of such. While the 1922 ODH plays were already leaning much more to the comedic side than The Bat and The Circular Staircase, The Gorilla seems to have been even more of a parody, being comparatively late to the game. Similarly, ODH movies were in their prime long before 1939, considering that the namesake of the subgenre, James Whale's The Old Dark House, came out in 1932. Despite being the headliner of this group of movies, Old Dark House is yet another parody, but was based off of a mystery novel which I've yet to read, which may be more serious. You can imagine that a parody made long after the expiration of both the source of parody and the parody subgenre itself is going to be a trainwreck.

Sh! The Octopus is another too-late parody of the genre, but unlike The Gorilla, it proves to be one of the most captivating of them all. While it was based on a play of the same title, the credits also name the writer of The Gorilla, apparently because Sh! The Octopus: The Play was a parody of The Gorilla: The Play. Sh! The Octopus thus not only mocks the conventions and tropes of the Old Dark House movies but it also mocks the comedic deconstruction of such. You may think that a parody of a parody would be agonizing, but it's not. If anything because most people who see this film are going to be too distracted by the constant lunacy of this film's construction.

So instead of a maniac with a Gorilla motif, we have a maniac with an Octopus motif, and instead of a creepy old mansion we have a creepy old lighthouse. We meet Paul Morgan, an artist who intends to borrow the lighthouse to paint seascapes; Kelly and Dempsey, two idiot cops, one with a baby on the way; Captain Hook, a one-handed sailor who goes berserk when he hears the ticking of a clock; and many others. As soon as everyone is dragged to the lighthouse, all sense of continuity breaks down and we enter the Vignette Zone. As in, this entire movie is a string of vignettes, which reveal that no one is who they say they are and also that there is a real octopus killing people besides the criminal Octopus! There is a shocking casualness to every twist and turn, because they do not matter. This movie runs 54 minutes and so you can imagine the sort of pace this has when I say that the number of subplots sometimes rival those of a Keeler novel. This is a parody in the purest form--laying out the points you want to parody, one after another, and then parodying them, one after another. It's almost a minimalist work, in that like other minimalist narratives it barely has a story. Along the way we have many hundreds of awful, awful jokes that are nonetheless wayyy funnier than anything in The Gorilla. If anything because the jokes, too, are thrown out with a who-cares sense of initiative. Again, this is a parody of a parody. The jokes are bad because the jokes have always been bad. Good ol' cynicism wins again.

If you don't believe me when I say that this film is cynical, I want you to know that the ending--spoiler alert--is that everyone fucking dies in a massive explosion. Okay, that's not the real twist ending...that would be that it's all a dream. After we see them all die in a massive explosion. I don't even know how to interpret the "it was all a dream" ending anymore--as anyone who's seen Wizard of Oz knows it's hardly a function exclusively of B-movies. It does go to explain the complete disconnect between everything in the main film, so you can commend the filmmakers for using this particular out in a logical way, for once.

Most of the comedy of the film comes from exaggerating the elements of an ODH film to the fullest extent--ironically, in the course of doing so, it begins to precede later developments in horror film, such as the krimi or the slasher craze. There are uncountable plot twists, secret passages, and personality faults spread out throughout the lighthouse and the cast. The lighthouse keeps them all running so they never get a chance to get clues, even as it turns out one by one that each of them could be the criminal threatening the rest. Compare the Octopus to the titular character from the German Fellowship of the Frog, which kicked off the krimi trend in that country--compare the untrustworthy cast to that of an Italian giallo--and compare the crazies who try to warn away the trapped idiots and the dripping blood from the ceiling to similar things in movies like Friday the 13th and its ilk. For better or worse, the Old Dark House movies laid the seeds for the horror films of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, Sh! The Octopus included. Having now seen quite a few of the ODH films, I can say that none of them make me think of movies from the relative future more than Sh!, probably because of how exaggerated it is. There is that belief that famous media is always eclipsed by its imitators--that many of the stereotypes we associate with one genre or another are usually absent in the movies that created or heavily influenced that genre. Perhaps there was a seed in the Western consciousness that demanded a revival of the ideas that were laid bare as the ODH films were stretched out further and further from their roots. In a lot of ways, the ODH films and their turn towards comedy is a product of how Americans felt during the inter-war period. The Circular Staircase was written before World War I and is a more serious work. But after the War, The Bat and other Staircase-derived works become the subject of light entertainment, slowly melting down in that lowest of brows, slapstick. It's suddenly cozy to hang out in a leaky old haunted house in the middle of the night, with exotic butlers, foreboding sea captains, and amiable drunks. One of the ladies of Sh! The Octopus gets this line: "I used to play in caves all the time when I was a little girl!" These are the children of the Spiritualists--the world of the supernatural, and indeed the similarly-forbidden world of the criminal, is a healthy and amusing distraction from the horrors of War. The genre fell apart probably because it got too stupid--again, exemplified by The Gorilla--but also, there's a Pre-World War II anxiety that puts some twitchiness into Sh! I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's there. Few more years and we're back to blowing up the Old Dark Houses, and the Germanic millionaire viscounts are suddenly the bad guys. Horror movies of any stripe did not do well during World War II.

To tie this all back: am I reaching (more than I already am) to say that the American slasher was born in the shadow of 'Nam? Did we suddenly need thrilling/comedic/shitty Grand Guignol images of graphic violence to let out all our tensions from a war we typically regretted? Did we find comfort in the knowledge that Michael or Jason couldn't get us just as we did with the Bat or the Gorilla? Did the cozy haunted mansion that brought us peace become teenage sex in a cabin in the woods--nooks of "risky innocence," free of chemical bombs and blown-up cities? Did the slasher die and become a mangled parody of itself because of the rise of Middle Eastern conflicts in the 1990s leading to dawn-of-the-Millennium warfare that has lasted for an ungodly fucking long time now? Are we too distracted by real world horror to believe in these junky little films anymore? Have I finally jumped the shark? Who killed the Kennedys? Or Laura Palmer, for that matter? Who is Number One? Who shot J.R.--AW, QUIET, KELLY!

Sh! The Octopus is a very entertaining movie which I highly recommend. Not only is it funny and decently acted, it has some pretty amazing special effects and even manages to get some good dynamic shots, which help it escape from the stage-play stiffness that plagued many of the Old Dark House movies. I don't really know if I'm just seeing connections where there aren't there--which I do often--but it feels prescient, and moreso than many of its peers, which are often painfully dated.