Blood Freak (1972), by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawks

Don't smoke too much weed, or you'll turn into a blood-drinking turkey man.

You can support the A-List on Patreon at www.patreon.com/AdamMudman, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MudmansAList.

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973), by Julio Salvador and Ray Danton

You asked for vampires...you can fang me later.
 You can support the A-List at www.patreon.com/AdamMudman, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MudmansAList.

Macumba Sexual (1983), by Jess Franco

Our Pride Twentygayteen reviews come to a close with Macumba Sexual, Jess Franco's even trippier remake of his early Vampyros Lesbos.

You can support the site on Patreon and like us on Facebook to get updates.

Book Club of Desolation #23: Powers of Darkness (1900-1901), by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker (?)

In 2014, Icelandic scholar Hans Corneel de Roos was looking over a manuscript from the turn of the 20th Century that at first seemed to merely be an Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, penned by writer Valdimar Asmundsson. However, he started to notice that the manuscript, entitled Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, made some substantial deviations from Stoker's original text, and it didn't take long to realize that the book was something new entirely, although it was based on Dracula. The resultant text was made available in English with notes by both de Roos and Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. Makt Myrkranna is simultaneously an awesome part of horror fiction history, a superior novel to Stoker's tale, and a suggestion of a possibility I've thought about for a long time: what if there are more books like this one, which serve as alternate versions of more famous works?

The story of Powers of Darkness roughly follows that of Dracula, but it bears repeating for the sake of this review. Jonathan--or excuse me, Thomas Harker is an English real estate agent called out to Transylvania by a mysterious noble named Count Dracula, who is interested in buying property in London. Harker is warned by everyone he encounters along the way that Dracula is pure evil, but he must carry on with his job. You see, Harker is kind of an idiot--even moreso than in Stoker's novel. Dracula is an amiable enough fellow but his castle looks like no one's lived in it properly for centuries. He also gets a hungry look in his eye when he sees Harker cut himself. Pretty standard Stoker stuff so far, but Stoker never mentioned Dracula's triumphant pride in the incestuous of his family, which produces short-lived, stumpy freaks. Nor did he mention Dracula's underground chamber where he and his gorilla-man army sacrifice villagers to Satan. Nor did he mention that Dracula and said gorilla-man army are in league with a conspiracy of noblemen who want to destroy the democratic processes of England to create a world where the serfs serve the nobles again! (I guess Dracula never heard of Wall Street, then.) Will Harker be able to escape Dracula's horrifying fortress to warn his beloved Wilma, or will he be food for Dracula's vampire brides?

"But wait!" you ask. "What about Holmwood and Quincy Morris and Lucy and van Helsing? What about, y'know, the other three-quarters of the novel?" Well, that's the thing about Powers of Darkness: most of the book is Harker trying to survive his weeks in Dracula's castle. There is a second part which features most of the same events as Dracula--the arrival of van Helsing, the vampirism and staking of Lucy/Lucia, the menace hanging over Mina/Wilma, and finally the battle against Dracula and his servants in the shadow of the vampire's castle. Where the end changes is that Dracula's castle crumbles upon his death, and then the nobles who allied themselves with him commit suicide or are murdered, ending his conspiracy. As the introduction and notes posit, this part was likely meant as an outline for what Asmundsson would write later, suggesting that Powers of Darkness in its complete form (assuming that we have today isn't the complete form) would have dwarfed Dracula in length and complexity. As it stands already, Asmundsson's text succeeds at being far scarier than Dracula, perhaps because of its choice to frontload.

Asmundsson understood the Harker parts had the best potential for horror. Dracula's wild, rambling structure gives it the feeling more of an adventure novel than a Gothic piece, which is awkward because it's told, as Powers of Darkness is, through letters and diary entries. It's weird to hear the tale of a frantic carriage chase recounted post-facto in a journal. But the bulk of Powers of Darkness reads like something someone found in Dracula's castle next to Thomas Harker's emaciated corpse--you never know which entry is going to be the last. This is broken only somewhat by the fact that, again, Harker is a massive idiot, as he pointedly does not try to leave the castle until it's nearly too late, even after witnessing Satanic rituals in progress! He is remarkably tolerant of many horrifying supernatural incidents. Sometimes, though, justifying logic breaks through. After all, it's probably more than Harker feels he can't leave the castle, as it's on a high rocky pass in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wolves and God knows what else. There's also the fact that he came here to do a job, and at least at the beginning, much of his response to the ghoulish things he encountered is a very natural sort of confusion--perhaps he's imagining things, or maybe this is some local custom he as a privileged Londoner doesn't understand. Even if he trusts his instincts when he is sure the supernatural is afoot, he can't exactly return to his boss in England emptyhanded and tell him, "Sorry, the client was a Satanic vampire with a gorilla-man army which he was gonna use to tear down the government, no sale."

Now, this book would not be complete without the introduction and notes it provides. Dacre Stoker's introduction was interesting in its argument that Makt Myrkranna was based on Bram Stoker's private notes, and that Stoker and Asmundsson collaborated in the latter's penning of Powers. He brings up the fact that it was popular for Victorian authors to travel to Iceland, as they admired Iceland's astonishing poetic tradition; he also points out that several details from Powers match with unused story bits from Stoker's notes, such as the "hidden red room" where Dracula performs his evil magic, and the blind-mute woman who serves the vampire. However, I would caution against assuming that works such as these are made with the collaboration of the original author, because certain tropes are universal, and there are such things as coincidences. Respect the fanfic, I guess is what I'm saying. On my first read-through of the introduction I was disappointed that Dacre Stoker generally abstained from praising Asmundsson's individual creativity in the parts of Powers that weren't seemingly based on his great-granduncle's work, but a closer look-through on my part shows the integrity of his investigation. Similarly, I found de Roos' footnotes to be cluttery and intrusive at times, but they form a log of the challenges he ran into in translating early 20th Century Icelandic into English. When I studied linguistics I found the bond between Icelandic and English one of the most fascinating my professors discussed: modern Icelandic and Old English are extremely similar. In fact one of my professors told me that if an Anglo-Saxon time-traveler from pre-Norman England landed in today's Iceland they'd probably be able to have a reasonable conversation with someone there.

Overall, this new edition of Makt Myrkranna is an awesome look at vampire fiction history, and one of what I hope will be many discoveries of other pseudo-classics cloned from books that history remembered better. And, similarly, it's better than the original Dracula. Horror fans can't afford to miss out.

Books are pricey, but you can help sponsor the Book Club of Desolation on Patreon! Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to get updates.

---

Image Source: Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to see more reviews like this, you can support the site on Patreon! Plus, don't forget to like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

Valley of the Zombies (1946), by Philip Ford

Doctor X is relatively clunky, because horror in the early '30s was slow. As time went on, however, a more frantic pace could be found as B-movies needed to get their deal over with sooner, as writers took less time in writing, and as studios cut more and more money from these lesser programmers, ultimately reducing features like Valley of the Zombies to the sort of fodder which would play in the ultra-neutered market of TV movies. Fortunately, the existence (and hasty creation) of these B-features means I have lots of short, quick-paced material which is usually primed with the best sort of trashy hilarity. Valley of the Zombies is our shortest stop this Spookyween, at a whopping 55 minutes, but there's worlds to find in it that makes it worthy of looking over during this joyous month.

Terry Evans and Susan Drake are a doctor and nurse who are dating while working their way through their studies. Evans is mentored under Dr. Rufus Maynard, who informs the pair that a large amount of blood has recently gone missing from his supply under mysterious circumstances. After Evans and Drake leave, however, Maynard is visited by a man by the name of Ormand Murks, who appears to have time-traveled a year into the future to get fashion advice from Bela Lugosi in Scared to Death. There's a problem with Murks being here, though--he's supposed to be dead. A former undertaker, Murks was once placed in Maynard's mental hospital for his weird fixation with blood transfusions. As it happens, Murks needs blood because he has learned the secrets of the Valley of the Zombies--he has become the living dead. The vampiric blood-thief decides to take some fresh blood from Maynard himself. Terry and Susan return and stumble upon the crime scene, which implicates them in front of the police. Like you do, the pair decide to exonerate themselves by catching the crook themselves--admittedly, the police aren't much help, as they spend a few hours basically verbally torturing Susan in order to extract a confession, which was a process still pretty legal at the time. They have a clue: Dr. Maynard's body, alongside the body of Murks' other victim (in the form of his brother Fred, who was helping Murks steal the blood vials), has been embalmed. They finally head down to the old Murks Mansion to commence their investigation further, little aware that the last scion of House Murks is waiting for them.

Once more we have the premise not only of a particularly unusual killer abetted by super-scientific principles, but also a film where the primary heroes are also our comic relief. Perhaps taking some backwards inspiration from Nick and Nora Charles, our plucky investigators engage in quite a bit of banter, albeit banter far less sophisticated than the I-Am-Not-Shazam'd Thin Man and his wife ever exchanged. Unfortunately, a lot of this takes the rather sexist form of Susan being scared of everything. Admittedly, if I had spent most of my life training to be a nurse, I'd focus on steeling my nerves against mortal perils like disease and bloodshed, not vampire serial killers hiding in decrepit mansions, so I totally understand where she's coming from. Doesn't mean that Terry has to be a condescending prick as well (though I get the impression maybe we're supposed to find him a bit of an idiot).

What intrigues me the most about Valley of the Zombies is that it is essentially a cinematic form of a Villain Pulp. I'm sure there are plenty of movies out there similar to this (Ogroff possibly counts as one), but let me explain: back in ye olde days of pulp magazines, there were stories which centered around the villain as a protagonist of sorts. Pulp characters were always outlandish, the villains especially so, and with names like Dr. Satan and Dr. Death it was hard to go wrong. So Valley of the Zombies is a Villain Pulp starring Ormand Murks. And he is indeed a pretty neat villain--possibly cinema's only voodoo vampire, Murks is played by Ian Keith, one of the contenders to play Dracula in the Universal film. I think he probably would have done better than Lugosi, but then we'd never have everything Lugosi made after '31. While far from perfect, and hammy to the point where we can't quite take him seriously, Murks has some wonderful moments, including a creepy moment where he gives his best Evil Mastermind face while threaten-asking his brother, "You're going to put me in my grave?" He also embalms his victims for no fucking reason outside of the fact that it abets our protagonists, and because, well...that's what Super Villains do! I love it.

Everything about this movie is lensed in a strange comic melodrama that makes it all feel something akin to a dream. A dull dream at times, unfortunately, but that's a matter of age more than anything. Still, if you want to flash back to the days of nickolodeon B-features and get a whirlwind tour of the weird world of the undead, you can do no better. Valley of the Zombies is the perfect balance of spooky and campy for your cozy Spookyween night.

P.S. I hadn't mentioned its occurrence in the Doctor X review, but that's two for three on films featuring comic relief shenanigans involving pretending to be a morgue corpse. I guess people couldn't get enough of that one in the '40s. Come to think of it, I think I've seen the same gimmick in movies from the '80s as well. I guess some shit never dies...it only waits...to be re-born...

If you want to get horror reviews like these in advance, throw me a little coin on Patreon. And, you can like the A-List on Facebook for updates.

The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

If you want to see more reviews like this and unlock some bonus goodies, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon! Plus, become a fan of the A-List on Facebook to get site updates!

Satan's Black Wedding (1975), by Nick Millard

Nick Millard returns again! This is probably his best film. It feels the most like an actual movie, even moreso than the already-impressive Criminally Insane. From here, Millard's cinematic output becomes no less amazing, but decidedly cheaper--and while Satan's Black Wedding does run into cheap territory at times, it is a wonderfully atmospheric vampire film that rivets you down for a vastly entertaining 60 minutes.

Hollywood actor Mark Gray has been called back to his hometown of Monterey after the untimely death of his sister Nina. The circumstances of her death are rather mysterious--she apparently committed suicide, but all the blood was removed from her body post-mortem, and her finger was cut off. Interrogating his sick aunt, Mark learns that Nina started going back to the abandoned church that they both feared as children, to ostensibly research a book she was writing on "High Satanic Rites." Similarly, the local police detective says that her death was one of many such brutal fatalities afflicting the town--one of these victims had swatches of 200-year-old cloth gripped between their fingers, their face frozen in horror. We the audience already know by now that the local priest, Father Dakin, is a vampire...and so is Nina. Mark will have to fight hard to escape the bloody grip of Satan.

There's a lot that I can praise about Satan's Black Wedding. I haven't watched it as much as Criminally Insane, but I have probably seen it about two dozen times, so it's still up there in turns of ranked rewatches. First of all, let's talk about how it works as a horror film. There's plenty of creepy stuff here. The opening scenes set in the tomb definitely stand out, with Father Dakin whispering "Sanctus diabolis" from the darkness as Nina mutilates herself with a razor. The entire movie is wracked with an audio hiss that highlights "s"-sounds, which actually heightens the spookiness of these Latin whispers; cheapness comes to the rescue. This follows our opening credits, which feature not only a freaky painting but some nicely atmospheric freaky music as well. Most of the movie's first twenty minutes, which set up the various facts of the world these vampires live in, are effectively mysterious, leaving us wanting to know more even though it's not really a mystery what's going on. And the scene where vampire!Nina slowly creeps into her aunt's bedroom is notable to me as well.

The acting, also, is generally pretty good. Nick Millard got someone to competently and convincingly cry on camera! That makes him better than a whole fucking lot of big-name Hollywood directors. I can't think of anyone who does a shit job per se, aside from maybe Mark's aunt's housekeeper, who has to give an extremely phony/racist Latina accent. It may not be great, but there is one performer in particular who I have to give a shout-out to: Ray Myles, who plays Father Dakin. Maybe someday I'll do a Ray Myles appreciation essay. He shows up in a lot of Millard's other movies, and has some bit parts in movies like The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (two titles which just roll off your tongue). I want to know what acting school he went to, because his English accent is one of the most refined I've ever heard. He's a wonderful man to listen to, and an astoundingly controlled actor. Listening to him recite "Dies Irae" at the end sends shivers down my spine. He is too good, and more people should know about him.

Not everything is perfect, but what movie is? The vampires' teeth look incredibly silly, mostly because they also include bottom teeth, giving the impression that they have tusks, or perhaps hillbilly teeth, rather than fangs. Plus, Mark is a moron for not immediately realizing that Dakin is a Satanic vampire--clergymen typically don't get happily excited when recounting the victories of the Devil. So there's a little bit of Idiot Ball play at work here in the script, which is never good. And finally, there's a scene with a policeman who was clearly spliced into the action much later, at a different shooting location. You'll know it when you see it--it's flagged by the fact that it will make you laugh your ass off. There's a very similar scene in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge, featuring the policeman "Kline" who makes a bizarrely pointless appearance via extra-locational splicing, which is a great moment in the MST3K episode for such. Was Millard homaging Wood? The world will never know!!!! (He wasn't.)

But the faults blend in well with the rest of this movie. Everything feels coherent and complete. This is a must-see for the Millard initiate, and indeed for Millard fans as well. It never hurts to burn an hour!

P.S. HAPPY 100 REVIEWS! (Not counting Retrospectives, otherwise we would have passed this 57 movies ago.) I don't think I coulda picked a better director to commemorate a hundred reviews with than Nick Millard. Plus, it bodes well that this was also the week I got to see Jungle Trap. Here's to a hundred more!

If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon! And don't forget to like the A-List on Facebook!

The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

If you enjoyed this review, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

LGBT Pride Triple-Review Special!

Happy Pride, everybody!

As fans of the site may have noticed, I'm pretty bad at theming my reviews around the holidays. And that's because, well, I don't celebrate most holidays, aside from Halloween. Next year I'll try to be better about it. But I nearly let Pride, my other holiday, slip by without a mention on the site. So in order to celebrate Pride Month, I decided to look at three different LGBT-related movies which are all appropriate to the site in some way. There's no time to waste, so let's get started!

Vampyros Lesbos (1971), by Jess Franco:

 

So we're starting with...a Jess Franco film? That may seem an odd choice, but assuredly Franco is going to do much better at delivering an artsy sexy gay vampire movie than many of his peers of trash. Vampyros Lesbos is definitely a questionable choice anyway due to the apparent conclusions reached by the film, but I have my own thoughts on how this strange, surreal piece of cinema fits together.

Linda Westinghouse is a real estate agent haunted by sexual dreams of some weird artsy floor show starring a statuesque brunette in a red scarf. When she reports these dreams to her psychiatrist, he basically says she's bored with her boyfriend and should have an affair. Of course, given what he's been doodling in his notebook in the place of notes, it seems like he wants her to have an affair with him. But this doesn't go anywhere, as Linda decides to take on a real estate case with work that will take her out to Istanbul. She's officially there on business, but the implication is that if she meets the right person on this trip, she'll go all Yellow Pages and let their fingers do the walking, if you know I mean. And for a brief while it seems like her client will be the one to do the honors. Countess Nadine Carody has just inherited an expansive estate from a Hungarian kinsman of hers...the last survivor of the House Dracula. Linda's trip has been weird so far--by the time she's met Nadine she's already had a bad run-in with a hotel employee named Memmet (played by Franco himself!) who claims to have some secret information on the Countess...before revealing that this claim was a ruse to trap and murder Linda! But it's about to get weirder, as Linda first faints at dinner with the Countess, then has sex with her upon awakening. This sex culminates in Nadine biting Linda unconscious and drinking her blood, but Linda wakes up unharmed. Nadine is not so lucky. Her dead body, lips still smeared with blood, lies afloat in her pool. The shock of all this erases Linda's memory and she finds herself in the clinic of a certain Dr. Seward...and yet, the mystery of the Countess is not over yet.

Before trying to actually analyze this, I just want to comment on how this movie is one of Jess Franco's Jess Francoiest films. The dream-like structure of the film even outside the dream sequences, the obsession with the zoom lens, the use of actress Soledad Miranda, the appearance of a character named "Morpho," the casting of himself as a sicko, the Dracula parallels and name-borrowing, and the thematic focus on the supernatural adventure of a sexually-(re)developing young woman in a foreign land are all Franco hallmarks. It even opens with a nightclub sequence, and if that wasn't enough, it's also one of the movies that Franco ripped off from himself--specifically, he would clone Vampyros Lesbos twelve years later with the similarly-entertaining Macumba Sexual. If you need to see what a "Jess Franco movie" looks like as a thing unto itself, independent of just a meaningless name on the Internet, this is a good starting point. Suffice it to say it doesn't really function in the traditional sense of a movie--it's incomparable even amongst the other dream-like films pumped out during the golden age of Eurohorror, save for perhaps the works of fellow sexual vampirism fan Jean Rollin.

So how does this movie treat homosexuality?

It soon becomes clear that the psychic hold Countess Carody has over Linda, and Linda's struggle with it, represents Linda's experience with homosexuality. As a result, the movie is ultimately about a group of people, Linda herself included, trying to cure her of her gayness, and ultimately succeeding. It's also about the homosexual urge as something predatory. But that isn't to say that Franco is being anti-gay in the movie. Indeed, there's little to suggest that a life with men is a good thing for Linda either. After all, this movie is primarily about deception, particularly deception as it comes from men. Linda's psychiatrist is a pervert who prefers to get his dick hard during their sessions rather than actually treat her. Memmet's offer of insight into the strange situation turns out to be a trick to try to rape, torture, and kill her. And Dr. Seward, the occult/psychiatric expert who is this film's seeming van Helsing (despite having the name of a different Dracula character), is revealed to actually be using Linda's connection to the Countess to try to force the Countess to make him into a vampire himself! Other than that, the other men we see in any sort of detail are the Countess' mute assassin Morpho, and Linda's boyfriend. The latter isn't a bad guy, he just seems a little boring, and she doesn't appear to be overly interested in him (notice how she basically never smiles at him). That deception theme is important in that by complicating the motivations of most of the characters, it forces us to question its lead "villainess"'s motivations as well.

It could be argued that the film is simply sexist, giving us a female protagonist who is victimized ceaselessly by men who face almost no consequences for their actions. But we are supposed to sympathize with Linda, and I think we're supposed to sympathize with Nadine, as well. In one scene she tells Morpho how she became a vampire--a few centuries ago she was in a war-wracked city, where a group of men were running around raping people. Nadine was among the victims but suddenly Dracula appeared and saved her, at first simply feeding off of her but eventually making into a vampire. As a result of her rape and her negative experiences with Dracula, Nadine is disgusted by men. Yes, this is a huge cliche, but in my mind it's valid for someone to identify as gay after such a traumatic event (the film definitely never suggests that all lesbians are rape victims, or that Nadine would be happy with men if it weren't for that darn trauma). Nadine's phrasing is particularly key: "[The rapist] was my first man. It was horrible." How are we not supposed to sympathize with her after she says that? That it's haunted her for so many decades afterward only speaks further to the fact that she's more complicated than she first appears.

Further confounding the character of the Countess is the strange red kite that keeps following Linda. Because it's red, I suspect it's probably meant to stand in for Nadine's red scarf, which is pretty much confirmed by the film's last shot, which shows the kite crashing to the ground. But to me, that has a tragic dimension to it. The kite flies free throughout the film, and in the end, it is grounded. The woman who could have set the Countess free has gone back to her boring drip of a boyfriend, fully convinced that the world she showed her was evil, even though she's not smiling as she sails away with him. It's because Franco used a kite specifically for this imagery that I see this--or it could be I'm grasping at straws.

Maybe the appeal I get from this film is much more mundane. Maybe it's just that as a gay woman, this film lets me believe that there's a Turkish island out there where there are lesbians with the physique and charisma of Soledad Miranda just waiting for other frustrated gay women to show up and go skinny-dipping with them. Maybe.

Thematic studies aside, Vampyros Lesbos is just a really fun movie. I will probably address more of its content when I tackle its aforementioned clone, Macumba Sexual, which I think I enjoyed more than this one. If you're a Woman-Loving Woman and you want a weird, artsy vampire movie to tickle your horror bone and perhaps a few others with it, this is a pretty good way to go.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1982), by William Asher

Our next movie is much more transparent about how it stands on gay people...and never before have I seen LGBT themes incorporated so flawlessly into a slasher. Well, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning) is sort of a slasher...it fits in best with that genre even though its psychological ruminations are much more advanced than even the most devious slashers that have come previously. No succinct statement will summarize this movie, so it's best to crack it open and see what comes out.

Billy Lynch is three years old when his parents die in a rather visceral car crash, leaving him in the care of his aunt Cheryl. Mercifully, Billy grows up with a relatively normal life, until he begins to reach the end of his high school career. He has a lot going for him, even if there's also a lot against him as well: he's in a solid relationship with his girlfriend Julie, and he's due to pick up a full ride at the college of his choice on a sports scholarship. But a lot of people pick on him for being so close to the openly gay basketball coach, and Cheryl is rather overprotective of him, to say the least. We'll be slowly finding out that Cheryl falls into the Margaret White/Pamela Voorhees school of parenting rather quickly, beginning with the film's inciting event of her failed seduction of a serviceman who comes by--when she is rebuked she kills him, and claims that he tried to rape her. The cop assigned to the case is Detective Joe Carlson, who begins his life in this film as the stereotypical unnecessarily-skeptical movie-cop before revealing himself as something else. Carlson hates gay people, to the point where he finds it unavoidable that Billy is gay (because he's friends with a gay person) and that his homosexuality caused him to murder the serviceman. What's more is that as Detective, Carlson answers to virtually no one in the local jurisdiction, meaning that not even other cops can stand in the way of his prejudicial crusade. But even his dedication can't surpass that which Cheryl has for ensuring that her nephew stays with her forever...as her lover.

I was skeptical of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker at first, despite the extensiveness of its opening car crash sequence. Up until Cheryl's murder of the handyman, there's nothing to indicate that this movie is particularly special one way or the other. There are suggestions here and there of Cheryl's unhealthy interest in her blood relation, but it really is that first murder that causes all Hell to break loose. From there, the movie hardly lets up for a minute, bringing us new horror with every new scene. It slowly turns out that Billy's whole life has been a lie, and that no one can be trusted.

Indeed, this entire movie could be called Billy's Unending Nightmare Train. Everything in the movie is coordinated to show that the world is against Billy, even insinuating that Detective Carlson's claim that Coach Landers is sexually interested in the notably-younger boy is true. (It isn't.) But what's interesting is that the focus of the film is on Aunt Cheryl instead...Billy's story is portrayed almost incidentally to hers. It's as if director Asher is trying to get the audience to go along with the world's general dismissal of Billy's trauma, which in turn helps us recognize the horror of his experiences when we realize how the film's gaze treats him. Focusing on Cheryl gives us the added benefit of seeing how deep her madness runs.

And it runs down to her mind's Marianas Trench. Better pens than mine have sung the praises of Susan Tyrrell as Aunt Cheryl, so the only thing I'll say is that you have to see her for yourself. Similarly, rather than spoil the movie extensively in my analysis of the LGBT themes, I will simply say that this is a movie that clenches you up and lets you feel that evil will win in the end. As I mentioned above, this film wears its LGBT feelings on its sleeve, and thankfully this is one instance of an '80s horror movie where there was some progressive sense in the heads of the filmmakers. I love happy endings.

If there are any faults in this movie, it has to do with the weird sequence where Cheryl and Billy's neighbor comes over and learns about some of Cheryl's darker secrets. This neighbor lingers in the scene in a way that suggests the writers lost track of her and what she was supposed to be doing here, and she dies way later than seems logical. This scene bogged down the movie for me a bit because I had trouble following what was going on, but I may just be an unintelligent creature. You'll have to find out for yourself! If you're queer like me, the ending will probably make you stand up and cheer. So I guess you'll have to get all the way through the movie or something...

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), by Toshio Matsumoto

Sometimes, you just gotta dive deep into the artsy.

I actually have a pretty strong taste for art films. I'm finding that I really just love MOVIES and so I see as many of them as I can...not everything is the sort of stuff that washes up on this site. Admittedly, I'm pretty skeptical of art films because, as you may have surmised on your own time, a lot of them are pretentious nonsense. Jodorowsky turns me away with real animal corpses and sexist mommy issues; Godard's "style" is actually just coded sloppiness; and I'm not even going to bother with Terrence Malick. But I enjoyed David Holtzman's Diary, every Truffaut movie I've seen so far, and now, Funeral Parade of Roses. Roses is not merely a contender for placement on this site due to my liking of it, as well as its "underground" (i.e. unwatched) status...it also contains sequences of graphic violence! All of its intriguing vectors come together at the end to make an unforgettable experience that is particularly hard to classify.

I say "hard to classify" as a leading statement into this next paragraph, where I normally summarize the plot. While Funeral Parade of Roses does have a plot, there are other elements which crop up throughout the film that have to be discussed separately. Our main narrative concerns Eddie, a young trans woman who is dating their boss, the cis dude manager of the dance club they work at. Eddie is in the process of forcing their paramour to dump his other girlfriend, another trans woman named Leda. Over the course of this story we see Eddie's adventures through drug-filled queer dance clubs and incidents both tragic and comedic as their backstory unfolds, involving childhood humiliation at the hands of their mother. All of this leads to literally Oepidal aspirations and a final gory ending.

But intercut with this are scenes where the camera pulls back from the action to reveal the production in progress. During this time we have interviews with the cast, who give comments on their own experience as gay men, as trans women, and as drag queens. (Many of the queer characters describe themselves as all of these throughout the film, reflecting that '60s stances on sexuality, gender identity and transvestism were considerably more fluid than what we have today. I have described Eddie and Leda as trans women because their assumption of female identity transcends the performative nature of drag [even while not contradicting it either]. They call themselves gay even though, at least in my mind, a trans woman attracted to men would be heterosexual. But identity is the sole property of the one who has it, so my view, even as a trans woman, should not be considered universal.) Many of these sequences are beautiful and sincere glimpses into a world nearly fifty years away, so different and yet so familiar. These meta-sequences are tied in with a film club that screens the movie as it's being made, comparing it to the works of Mekas and Pasolini. It is the definition of self-aware--and the story changes completely.

So we have a gay trans adaptation of Oedipus Rex, inside a dramatization of the making of that adaptation, that comments on itself mid-production. The earliest impression you get from this combination is that it helps to provide a different context to the more problematic elements of that Oedipus narrative. Eddie's gender identity is heavily implied to be the result of their not being able to live up to the masculine example set by their late father. So this early trauma is what has made Eddie-pus the King, or more properly, the Queen--and the hubris of that leads to their awful fate. That's definitely a negative portrayal of trans life, in my mind. But we aren't watching that movie, are we? We're watching the movie about the making of that movie. The interviews with the cast reveal that a lot of them view their roles rather frivolously, and don't view it in political terms. It's a chance for them to take a classic story and adapt it in a way that's relevant to who they are as queer folk. This is the story of how queer folk choose to tell their stories.

Any good art movie should look nice, and this movie is no exception. There's a lot of great stuff to look at. Take the divergences into the bizarre art gallery chamber that Eddie sometimes teleports too, full of creepy paintings of distorted faces. A narrator talks to us about the notions of "masks" and how our true selves interact with the world. This is intercut with scenes of Eddie and other trans women out shopping, completely indistinguishable from their cis counterparts. I only wish I was as pretty as them. Their shopping trip ends with a confrontation with a bunch of catty transphobic ladies, but this is played for comedy in the trans women's favor. These shifts in tone occur as often as the shifts in imagery. For all the negativity the story brings us to, there's one scene which will stand out for a lot of you: a scene where characters move in fast motion to a sped-up version of the William Tell Overture. Yeah, just like that scene in Clockwork Orange. Because Kubrick, by his own admission, stole this scene where he made Clockwork Orange two years later. What does that say about art cinema?

The last thing I'll say before shooing you off to watch this yourself is that I am obligated to explain the title somewhat. This movie contains a literal Funeral Parade of Roses, possibly even a couple of them, but in Japanese "rose" (or "bara") is a slang term with roughly the same meaning as "pansy" in English. That suggests a derogatory meaning, but the reverence the film gives to floral roses and to funerals shows that the message of the title is the same as the rest of the movie. Queer people are beautiful, and we are valid. You can call us flowers, but that's not an insult. We'll make movies that'll bowl you over.

So dive into the artsy! Dive deep; let it soak into your skin. Let your mind be blown!

And if you couldn't get enough gay from these movies--let's face it, there's never enough gay--I also recommend Ben & Arthur, Fleshpot on 42nd Street, and also future review subject Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things, a hysterical high-camp drag murderfest with some literal Killer Queens. I'm glad these movies are out there, to make me laugh, to make me cry, and to make me think. NOW GO FORTH AND BE PROUD, MY QUEERS.

You could have gotten this post a week ago! Consider becoming my Patron on Patreon to get early access to posts plus other special goodies!

The Face of Marble (1946), by William Beaudine

I have come to a horrifying discovery: for the last seven months, there has not been a single week gone by where I have not seen a film featuring John Carradine in some capacity. From Vampire Hookers to The Bees to Voodoo Man and Universal Horror and beyond, the one-time Grapes of Wrath star won't leave me alone, which is no surprise: the dude was in a whopping 351 fucking movies!! That I would cross his timeline not once but dozens of times in my quest to consume mid- and low-budget/quality movies of every stripe is not inconceivable, as Carradine, while appearing in high-classic movies like The Grapes of Wrath, was also an actor of the Nick Cage school in that he refused to decline work under any circumstance. One that I saw awhile back was The Face of Marble, another Monogram film, apparently the last of their 1940s horror run. My eagerness for the movie swelled when I saw it was a good ol' John Carradine mad scientist film--not as unrestrained as the unrelenting hamminess of House of Frankenstein, but an example of the man at work. Face presents Carradine in one of his more intriguing roles of a mad scientist who is not mad, or even angry.

Dr. Charles Randolph and his assistant David are hard at work at the age-old scientific dream of bringing the dead back to life. This is all without the knowledge of Randolph's notably younger wife Elaine, though she nearly discovers the nature of her husband's experiments late one night when he and David are trying to resurrect a dead sailor fished out of a storm from the water body the Randolphs ostensibly live next to. They are, incidentally, nearly successful, though the appearance of the "patient" is changed. Specifically, the color drains from his face, which becomes seemingly immobile, granting him a "face of marble." Unfortunately the resurrected man deresurrects not long after his restoration to the land of the living, which is disheartening for the simple fact that Randolph and David are always under threat of intervention from the authorities. In fact many of Randolph's colleagues eagerly tell him they will call the cops on him whenever they feel he steps too far, a fact which he accepts genially. While Randolph is kind, and his work is entirely for the betterment of humanity, he is still desperate to conclude what that one promising night offered him, so he makes the hasty decision to kill and attempt to revive Elaine's dog Brutus. The process fails again, at least at first--but after a few long moments, Brutus comes back again, not only feral but with the ability to phase through solid matter. Who must drink blood in order to sustain his existence. I haven't even mentioned how Elaine's housekeeper Maria is a voodoo priestess who puts a curse on David after he burns one of her fetishes! (And that's fetish as a "magical object"; this movie kinkshames not.) This particular subplot is the one which brings us to our climax, when the voodoo curse backfires and kills Elaine instead of David. And so Charles and David must again turn to their experiments in hopes of undoing what has been wrought...

As you might expect, this movie is a little confused about what it wants to do, though I should say it is rarely confusing. Events transpire frankly, with no illusions about what's going on but without serious elaboration on some of the zaniness. While we occasionally get typical Hollywood pseudoscience like "Electrolysis of the blood cells is occurring more rapidly than I dared hope!", this movie recognizes that it is first and foremost a fantasy horror film. Consider: it has not only voodoo, but a ghost, in the form of Brutus the Intangible Vampire Dog. It tries to appeal to the rising culture emphasis on science fiction at the time while still invoking the supernatural eeriness that dominated the horror films of years past. But no matter what genre it adopts, there are still two questions that arise from the matrix of interlocking ideas that builds The Face of Marble: what were they smoking when they came up with this shit, and how did the pitch for this film sound?

It was Monogram, so I doubt there was too much forethought, but what's intriguing about The Face of Marble is that it's not that bad of a horror movie. I doubt it will really scare anyone, but it functions rather elegantly as a character-driven mystery. It's yet another of those "what will happen next" sort of outings, and everyone puts a reasonable performance in, John Carradine especially. The horror in the movie arises less from Charles Randolph's controversial actions than the consequences that befall him for the hubris inherent in those actions; he is a good man who loses everything, making this a tragedy. And in many great tragedies, the punishment of hubris is a theme. All of the weird events that affect the Randolph house--the voodoo and the strange fate of Brutus--could be manifestations of some form of cosmic justice against Dr. Randolph's transgressions. At least that's my way of trying to tie together the various disparate elements of this story.

Plot-wise the film is still a mess, if nothing else for the above-mentioned fact that the least-fleshed-out subplot of this sea of subplots is the one responsible for the climax. You would think that the movie would reach its peak with the authorities busting in on Randolph at the peak of his success, given that everything, including Brutus' bloodthirstiness and ability to walk through walls, keeps leading the police closer and closer to the doctor's secrets. Instead, Maria, a character who has no real motivation to speak outside of vague allegiances to evil voodoo gods, is the one who thrusts the burden of perfecting the revivification process on the protagonists. If there was a bridge between ghost-Brutus and the voodoo then mayyybe I could buy that Maria's story is in any way relevant, but this film needed an antagonist, and if the mad scientists couldn't be evil and the Hays Code stopped the writers from pitting their heroes against cops, then apparently a two-dimensional voodoo witch was sufficient.

As you expect, this movie has some unfortunate racial issues which shouldn't be overlooked. Not only do we have our villain's evil arise from her foreignness and the religion she brings with her, but there's also a butler named Shadrach who is a stereotypical Cowardly Negro. He's not in this movie much and the filmmakers seem aware of the delicacy of overusing comedy (especially shitty racist comedy) in what is supposed to be a supernatural/mad science spectacle. Shadrach's relative absence from the film prevents it from becoming a Mantan Moreland slaughterhouse, but I'm still a little surprised to be seeing this type of shtick in a horror film from '46--it seems late, well beyond the nightmares of King of the Zombies and the like. But the past is always destined to let me down, it seems.

Generally, however, The Face of Marble is not a letdown. It was probably viewed as garbage when it came out, and it's definitely garbage now, but it's still a fun ride. I can only wonder what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think when they come across their own grimy bootlegs of our era's unfettered polyheaded weirdness like Ghost Shark.

If you like the site and want to see more awesome stuff like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 3 (The Wolf Man)

The Wolfman--a tragic victim of a werewolf's bite, marked with the sign of the pentagram. Endlessly throughout this series will you hear the familiar rhyme:

Even a man who is pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a werewolf when the wolfsbane blooms

And the moon shines full and bright

I liked the first one in this series when I was younger, so let's see how this goes! 

(Part One of this Retrospective, and Part Two)

The Wolf Man (1941):

As time goes on we can see that there are tiers to the Universal Horror films--I would consider Son of Frankenstein as A-tier, The Ghost of Frankenstein as B-tier, and Bride of Frankenstein as WTF-tier. With The Wolf Man being another A-tier contender, it seems as if my previous suspicions of Universal were misplaced. I know what I have yet ahead of me, but fortunately this one is good enough to keep me feeling nice for awhile.

Larry Talbot is the prodigal son of a wealthy Welsh family. His father, Sir John Talbot, was grooming Larry's brother John Jr. for the position of running the House of Talbot, but unfortunately John the younger died in a hunting accident. Larry has returned home to learn the ways of tending to the old house. Using his father's telescope, Larry sees a beautiful woman, Gwen, and decides to go into town to be sort of creepy to her. Larry, played by Lon Chaney Jr., is charming but damn if he isn't creepy to Gwen by today's standards. Despite his shortcomings, Gwen begins to fall for him, and we can feel sympathetic when he is attacked by a wolf...actually a werewolf, a Romani man named Bela, played by Bela Lugosi. Larry clubs the werewolf to death with the wolf's head cane he bought from Gwen shop, but he is bitten, and soon, he inherits the curse of the werewolf. We follow Larry as he tries to both hide and solve his curse, before he turns on those closest to him, with the aid of Bela's mother Maleva.

The main tragedy of The Wolf Man is born from the fact that Larry is torn from the life he built for himself in America, and while this tear is based on obligation it still means that he is coming across an unexpected fortune. And yet the trip to obtain this shaky fortune leads him to the threshold of a terrible curse. Chaney does a good job of showing the progress of Larry's desperation--at the end, he is begging his father to lock him up in his room, like the animal he believes he's become. Sir John's refusal to do so leads him to tragedy as well: using the silver cane he bashes his son to death, only realizing the monster's identity when it is too late.

The Wolf Man feels like a legitimate movie, and it is a concise and well-plotted narrative. All of the major performances, and pretty much all of the minor ones, are well-done. Realizing that werewolf stories were not terribly popular prior to this movie's release--even taking the 1935 release of Universal's previous wolf-man effort, Werewolf of London--helps one realize how truly influential this movie was. It's tough to find faults in it, and while I won't watch it often, I'll probably reach for it more than most other films if I feel like a werewolf flick.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943):

Two grave robbers have heard tell of valuables that were buried with werewolf Larry Talbot. When they try to steal them they expose Larry's uncorrupted corpse to the light of the full moon, which brings him back from the dead. Of course, the curse of lycanthropy has not left him, and he seeks Maleva, the Romani woman from the previous film. She in turn leads him to the town that contains/borders Castle Frankenstein (variously called Frankenstein, and Vasaria, and basically any number of other names roughly equivalent to the number of Frankenstein films), where she hopes Ludwig Frankenstein will cure him. But Ludwig is dead, and the villagers do not hide that this is a blessing to them. All the same, Larry finds himself in the ice-caves under the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, where he also finds the Monster, trapped in ice. (Did Ludwig install a freezer unit that went rogue when the villagers dynamited the Castle? Why are there ice-caves down below? Were they scared of using the sulfur-pit trick again?) He frees him, assuming for some reason that the Creature can lead him to Frankenstein's supposed werewolf-cure. The Monster is now played by Bela Lugosi, though ironically there is no evidently of Ygor's persona surviving--I can't imagine that being frozen in ice will do a brain any good. While this is a bust Larry nonetheless learns there is another surviving Frankenstein, Elsa. We then have a musical number, because this movie is not very good. Finally Larry finds the notes of Frankenstein, but they are useless to him. It isn't too long before the scientist who chose to help him, Dr. Mannering, becomes fascinated by the Frankenstein Creature, and can't bring himself to destroy it, just like Ludwig Frankenstein. And with Larry still unable to control his transformations, it would seem we're speeding fast into a Monster Mash.

And yet this climax is, like almost everything leading up to it, flat and boring. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man repeats a lot of stuff we've seen before, and doesn't even have a relevant title. Still going with the idea that the filmmakers know Frankenstein is the scientist/family and not the Monster, yes, Larry does meet Frankenstein, but honestly Elsa is such a non-character that I just don't care--she does nothing to influence the plot and she's only barely teased as a love interest for Larry. I think I conveyed that Ghost of Frankenstein didn't strive to accomplish anything, or even entertain: I was unprepared for the sheer lack of depth that this movie would lay upon me. There's nothing charming or even comically bad here, just the checking-off of boxes: the stop-motion wolf-man transformation sequence, the Frankenstein Monster wrecking things, the cameos of mysterious Romani folk, the hateful villagers, the self-pitying from Larry. Despite not expecting the quality drop this early, I was still expecting exactly this sort of movie when I set out on this quest. It's a shame that The Wolf Man wasn't made earlier--while that would probably subtract from its present quality, it would mean at least that it got sequels that had a chance of being better than this. I've heard nothing but bad things about House of Frankenstein or House of Dracula, except from people who I really don't share film taste with at all, and so I suspect this is the beginning of the end.

In essence, nothing about Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man will entertain you unless you feel like you need more of the raw basics of The Wolf Man and the later Frankenstein films. To which I ask you, why don't you just rewatch those movies?

Weirdly, this movie is said to take place four years after The Wolf Man, meaning that film is actually set in the late 1930s. On a more mortifying note, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Elsa was the name of Wolf Frankenstein's wife, meaning that, yep, Wolf married a woman with the same name as his sister. Now, I'm sure that happens--I mean, some guys are going to have sisters and wives named, like, Mary--but suddenly Wolf's sudden embrace of the Frankenstein evil suddenly makes a bit more sense. The man has problems, dude!

House of Frankenstein (1944):

At least Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man gave us room to work up from. Trapped in a German prison are Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and the hunchback Daniel (J. Carroll Naish, aka Dr. Durea from Dracula vs. Frankenstein). Dr. Niemann is a fan of Dr. Frankenstein, having gained his knowledge from his brother, who had been Frankenstein's assistant--they never specify if it's Fritz, Karl, or Ygor. He promises Daniel a new body, and after the two break jail they kill circus-master Bruno Lampini, with Niemann impersonating him. Lampini's death leaves the pair with a dangerous artifact--the skeleton of Dracula, staked through the heart. (Evidently Marya Zeleska didn't do such a good job of burning her father's body as she thought, unless these are the sun-bleached bones of Alucard.) When he's inevitably resurrected--now with the form of John Carradine rather than Bela Lugosi--he forms an alliance with Niemann: Niemann won't stake him, and Dracula will kill the scientists who scorned Niemann. Eventually, however, the village fights back, and Dracula is killed by sunlight before he can reach his coffin. Thus "part one" of the movies ends, and we follow Niemann and Daniel as they travel to Vasaria/Frankenstein/whatever the village from the Frankenstein movies is called. (In this film, Vasaria is a separate town from Frankenstein, when previously those were names for the same town! Doesn't that help clear things up?) Daniel falls in love with a girl named Ilonka, a thing which appears to be mutual despite his hump, while Niemann finds the ice caves under Castle Frankenstein, where both the Monster and Larry Talbot have washed up after falling off a cliff in the last movie, being frozen in ice. Sounds familiar? Also, seriously, where did those ice-caves come from? Anyway, Ilonka ditches Daniel for Larry, after he and the Monster are thawed out, and Niemann and Daniel set about reviving the Monster so that they can finish out Niemann's revenge. And I know this summary is long enough, but I need to describe the particulars of this plan. I'm far from the first to point out how shockingly, hilariously stupid this scheme is, but I will repeat it again so that I can hopefully further signal boost the sheer idiocy this movie veers into:

Niemann plans to trap the brain of one of his enemies in the body of the Frankenstein Monster. He then intends to transplant Larry's brain into the body of the other man he's kidnapped, so that that man will have the curse of lycanthropy. But...that just means that he'll have given one of his enemies a much larger, stronger body. And it also means that he'll just being giving Larry a different body. I mean, unless the Monster's body corrupts the brain in its head and that's why the Monster no longer acts like Ygor, whose brain it has...but that subverts the idea that the Monster is destructive because it has a criminal's brain, suggesting instead that it's the Monster's body which is evil...AH! They just didn't care! They. Just. Didn't. Care!

Anyway, Daniel tries to warn Ilonka that Larry is a werewolf, but she freaks out, claiming he's jealous, and calling him ugly. Jesus. This eventually leads to Larry falling in love with Ilonka, but he is mindful of the curse. Then another strange thing happens: Larry says that he must be killed by a silver bullet, which is obvious enough, but he also says that the bullet has to be fired by someone who loves him. That turns out to be what kills him, when Ilonka shoots Larry in self-defense, dying from werewolf-inflicted wounds in the process. A grieving Daniel strangles Niemann, failing to notice the escape of the Monster, which kills him and kidnaps Niemann. The Monster and Niemann escape the inevitable mob of villagers but don't get far, with both of them drowning in quicksand.

House of Frankenstein is better than I've made it sound, though I hope I've conveyed the fact that this movie has so much going on that it at least manages to evade being boring. There are a lot of subplots happening, quite a few of them well-fleshed out, with Daniel's tragic love for Ilonka being one of the best. We have a much better cast than we did last time, with everyone turning in a much better performances, save perhaps Lon Chaney. Sadly, Larry Talbot gets virtually nothing new added to his character, and all of the drama of The Wolf Man has burnt out at this point, so it crushes his character and any chance for an arc completely flat. All the same, Boris Karloff, J. Carroll Naish, and John Carradine turn in wonderful performances, which overcome the expected faults of the movie. These include the wince-worthy moment where an idiot side character expresses his wish to own a set of stocks to "keep the wife in line." (Fuck you, 1940s.) More notably, the movie also suffers from repeating things we've seen before, just with different characters. Instead of Ygor using the Frankenstein Monster as a hitman, here it's Dr. Niemann using Dracula as a hitman. Instead of Larry Talbot thawing the Monster from the ice-caves, it's Niemann thawing out the Monster and Larry. So it goes.

As I said, this movie is entertaining enough as a shitty movie that it's all pretty forgivable. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was not effective as a horror movie, but that was to be expected--the horror genre had been largely neutered by the 1940s. But it didn't really work as a monster rally either, and that's probably because it had to serve as the prototype for what this movie would become. Once they had the structure down, they were able to produce something better. I hope they don't squander what they learned...

Obligatory title nitpick: yes, the House of Frankenstein technically appears--if you count the worn-down, blown-up ruins of Castle Frankenstein as an appearance. Really, it's just those weird, weird ice-caves that show up. I can see them using this title to set up a sub-series within the series, the House of Whoever movies, but this is the first of the House movies to appear. Yet another thing they didn't care about, but which I don't care much about either.

House of Dracula (1945):

This is what I came for, yet I was still not prepared. I'm normally loath to reduce my reaction to a film something shallow and pithy, but let's keep this short--if nothing else so that I can get on with my life. House of Dracula sucks. There.

Dr. Edelmann has three peculiar patients: the first is the vampire Count Dracula (John Carradine), who wants to stop being a vampire; the second is Edelmann's own assistant, the hunchback Nina, who wants to stop being a hunchback; and the third is the werewolf Larry Talbot, who wants to stop being a werewolf. No, there is no explanation as to why Dracula and Larry are alive again. We get a wide variety of distractions, mostly consisting of Larry's boring Wolf Man rampages through the countryside. We slowly, slowly find out that Dracula doesn't want Dr. Edelmann to transfuse him his blood to cure his vampirism--he wants to transfuse his blood into Edelmann, so that he becomes this weird sunken-eyed creature who goes back and forth between good and evil. And it is evil!Edelmann who chooses to track down and revive the Frankenstein's Monster. More drawn-out events occur until Edelmann kills Dracula and Nina, Larry (who is cured of his lycanthropy at last) kills Edelmann, and the Monster, more inconsequential than ever, dies as Edelmann's house (which cannot in any way be called a House of Dracula) collapses on him.

I'm of the opinion that every show should be canceled after three seasons. Only rarely have I found exceptions to this: Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, or The Twilight Zone. Or Doctor Who, which shouldn't have been canceled after 26 seasons. House of Dracula feels like a show on Season Five when Season One wasn't really that great to begin with. We are so far away from the source material at this point that it's hard to sustain interest, and I think no one knew that better than Universal. They didn't really expect this movie to find an audience, I think, and God, does it show. I wrote few notes on the movie (and you can see how much effort I put into recapping the plot), and all I can really say is that at least the vampire effects in it are good. They have it so that John Carradine will drape himself in his cape and then be stop-replaced with a cartoon, which turns into a bat. Why, oh, why, could John Carradine not be in more of this movie? He doesn't give as good of a performance as he did last time around, but he's a great Dracula, which is why people still watch him in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. 

Other thoughts: um. It was sad when Nina died? But I mean, we ultimately got nothing from her aside from "it's sad that she's a hunchback and doesn't want to be," and that she seemed nice. Er. Uh. Introducing the concept of vampire-blood making one evil is kind of cool? Too bad it ripped off Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without actually porting those movies in. Um. Hm...God, I really have to reach...

This one broke me, I think: all I have is rambling. I just have one thing to say about it before I try to just forget about it: I really don't get why people would enjoy this one, even taking in the "excuse" of "well, duh, it's bad" that I keep seeing used for a lot of these later Universal pieces. It reuses the ending footage of The Ghost of Frankenstein, for God's sake! I attacked Dracula for assuming idiocy on behalf of the viewer but House of Dracula brings that to an even deeper low. And this isn't even the worst of it. Movies were in sorry shape indeed in 1945 if this was considered passable fodder--a thin, weak clone of a clone of a clone, shittier than a Monogram or Roger Corman movie, barely memorable, barely even bothering to tick the boxes like its predecessors. Now let's see what sort of atrocities 1948 will set upon me.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948): 

...o-kay. It wasn't that bad.

Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) are two shipping workers who have been charged with delivering crates containing Dracula (Bela Lugosi for the second and final time) and the Frankenstein's Monster. The monsters come to life and escape, with Dracula having befriended the Monster so that he can make him into his slave. Aiding him in this is Dr. Sandra Mornay, Wilbur's girlfriend, who has a perfect brain to transplant into the Monster, one which is so stupid that it will have no choice but to obey Dracula--natch, she is talking about Wilbur, because Lou Costello characters are dumb! Along the way is Larry Talbot, who is a werewolf again (so much for that happy ending, House of Dracula!), and who is hunting Dracula and the Monster. It isn't long before Chick and Wilbur are unwitting captives of what Larry warns them is "the House of Dracula." By the end of it all, Larry and Dracula plunge into the ocean, which apparently kills them, while the Monster dies on a burning pier, but it's not over, because Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Well. Not yet, technically, but spoiler alert, Vincent Price is in this movie and it is awesome.

Fortunately, I was spared a miserable experience by my own low expectations. I was primarily used to bad comedy of the '30s and '40s, namely the Ritz Brothers, and as a result I was expecting jokes that I'd heard from my 80-year-old customers at the grocery store on top of heaping loads unbearable slapstick. If anything because the ache of some of the comedy from previous Universal movies, I found this to be pretty funny. I wasn't rolling on the ground or anything--we're talking a hit every ten minutes, tops, and even then not a belly laugh. But Abbott and Costello have a strong sense of how comedy is supposed to work, even if their material doesn't do wonders for me, and God, it is a relief to see someone in a comedy film act like a goddamn comedian after all this time. Practicing and training things like timing, and body language, and delivery, can almost sell all of the material, even the obnoxious screaming--almost every comedian I've seen in the last two years should be taking notes. 

It's interesting to see how the comedy actually betters the horror that the movie occasionally reaches for. Most of this attempt at dramatic atmosphere is through Larry Talbot, who Lon Chaney gives more life than he has in the last two films--making him into sort of a supernatural bounty hunter, one with a curse, even, is a pretty nice step, so of course this is the very last film Larry appears in. Thus far, people have laughed in Larry's face over his request to be chained up whenever a full moon comes, but Bud and Lou are common folk! They're not as tight-assed as all those cops and scientists. They actually do it, though of course they undo it moments later and it is played for surprisingly effective laughs. The movie is not heavy on deconstruction in its parody, but it has its moments.

The monsters get much more to do, and more heft given to their actions, than in House of Dracula, making it a nicer end for the series than that film...though you have to ask how sad it is that a parody of the series served as a better conclusion than its last serious entry. It's as official of a line-up as you could ask for, with Lugosi returning as Dracula, and the Monster being played by Glenn Strange, as he has been since House of Frankenstein, thus giving him as many turns as the Monster as Karloff himself. The focus of course is more on shenanigans than the monsters fighting, and in case you didn't notice I sort of gave up on thematic analysis a few films ago. And I'm still not looking forward to the two remaining Abbott and Costello movies on my list, either, because those are notably closer to when they called it quits. For now, I get to pick up on what that ending leaves us with, and watch something good again. After all, the series isn't quite over--but you'll forgive me for failing to notice our next franchise.

Come back next time to see--or rather not see--the horrors and crimes of the Invisible Man!

---

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