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.

The Primal Essence: The Mudman's Top Ten New Views of 2017

2017 saw a lot of growth for the A-List! I found a comfortable schedule wherein I could squeeze in three reviews a week, and I intend to hang onto that schedule for as long as I can. I opened a Patreon, which has been an exciting experience so far. I posted a bad movie sci-fi novella. I was able to find nine weird books to talk about--not as many as I'd hoped, but that's what next year is for. It was a marvelous time and I can't tell you how glad I was to have this site to go back to whenever the real world came down too hard on me. The fact that so many of you kept showing up week after week made it all the better. I may curate its entries, but it's really you guys who build my A-List...you're all on my A-List of People. You are the finest souls I know.

The movies on this list are the cream of the crop. They tore my heart from my chest and shook up my soul. I hope you track them down if you haven't already because they will reshape your life for the better. Well, actually, it's for the worse. But in a good way. Capiche?

FROM BEST TO BESTEST:

#10 - I AM HERE...NOW, by Neil Breen

It is only out of a stubborn respect for the later entries of this list that Mr. Breen ended up at the number ten spot...otherwise this one would be much higher. I Am Here...Now was the best possible introduction to Breen I could(n't)'ve hoped for. I've seen some pretty bizarre Ancient Alien stories over the years, but this one takes the cake--Breen is a sign that Weird Film is far from dead, even as the Intentional Bad Movies try to take their cut from the legacy spawned by the people whom Breen now succeeds. May self-awareness never touch you, Neil, ol' buddy. I'm so glad I have the rest of your filmography to discover.

#9 - THE PHANTOM COWBOY, by Robert J. Horner / SMOKING GUNS, by Alan James

A dirty stinkin' tie! I knew I had to have one B-Western on here and no matter how much boiling down I did I couldn't pick one of these over the other. Smoking Guns is definitely the "better" movie, but the sheer shittiness of The Phantom Cowboy makes it feel truly alien. I'm starting to doubt I'll find Westerns weirder than these two, but if these are the best there are I'm in good company. I've definitely raised a lot of eyebrows in my time talking about the movies I watch with the people I know in Real Life. They've never been raised higher than when I tried to describe these two.

#8 - DRUMS O' VOODOO, by Arthur Hoerl

'Cause the drums make me happy...drums make me happy...my feelings on the so-called "race pictures" have shifted somewhat since I wrote this review due to some things I've learned about them (i.e. creative control was not in the hands of the actual black performers as much as I thought), but there's no taking away the talent from Drums O' Voodoo's cast. Aunt Hagar is still one of my favorite movie characters of all time, and to my dying day I won't forget the time she fucking sassed off Jesus. At this point, I feel I've seen every voodoo movies there is, but there's something deeply special about this one. I'm (ideally) getting a new copy soon, which may be from a different print...I may have to write something up if it turns out the lost footage is in this version.

#7 - JUNGLE TRAP, by James Bryan

I don't like getting hyped for movies because it's so easy for those sorts of hopes to get dashed. But not when James Bryan and Renee Harmon are at the helm. My heart nearly exploded when I learned this was a thing and it was a tough sweat waiting for it to come out. But it was worth it. Farewell to a pair of great careers...you guys made my life, one last time. Oh, how I wish you still had one left in you.

#6 - SWEET TRASH, by John Hayes

Now we're slipping into the New Weird. For me, that is. I spent so much of my life thinking I'd seen all the greats, but then this year came along and I started to see some trippy fucking shit. Sweet Trash is apparently not overly beloved even among trashsters, which is saddening. This movie dips into territory both grim and hilarious, often without warning, in the best of ways. As far as boggy-surreal nightmares go, this one just barely beat out Disconnected and Euridice BA 2037, which would make a great triple feature with this.

#5 - NIGHTMARE ALLEY, by Edmund Goulding

Gotta have at least one legitimately good movie on here. I guess this Ty Power guy is hot stuff, huh? Well, even if I had known that at the time, I would've been swept off my feet by this movie. A clammy, greasy, disconcerting expose of circus life, this one fits in perfectly with some of my other favorites from this year like The Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X, but this one is the best of all of them. I've been watching a lot of Hollywood dramas from the '40s now in the wake of sitting down for this three times in a row. I hope they won't make me sick.

#4 - BLOODY WEDNESDAY, by Mark G. Gilhuis

When I was writing the list I kept putting this on here for some reason. I'd take it off, asking myself, "Wha...really?" Then I would rewatch it and remember everything. For a while I would just quote that goddamn teddy bear, voice and everything, and sometimes people would hear me and worry about my health. Simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious movie about mental illness I've seen, Bloody Wednesday is so unsure of what the heck it's supposed to be that it becomes a psychedelic trance. I've found for myself a new classic of the slasher (?) genre, which isn't an easy feat these days.

#3 - INFRASEXUM, by Carlos Tobalina

Yes, I like this one more than Flesh and Bullets, because I'm a sucker. It's almost unbelievable to me that this was Tobalina's debut. This is a ballsy film to make under any circumstances, and yet porn is a weird thing, and thus he built a whole career out of this. I wasn't expecting to get a Pseudo-Philosophical Voiceover-Journal Inner-Quest Movie that also had a disembowelment scene, but at this point, I should know better. Art and trash go well together and this is a great example of how they pulled that off in the late '60s.

#2 - GRETTA, by John Carr

No explanation. It's not even based off the book--it just exists. It's like 35 movies got stuck in a blender and the director drank the result, and the camera implanted in his brain recorded everything he saw afterward. Or, alternatively, it was originally an 8-hour mega-epic like von Stroheim's Greed and they cut out too many reels. Why should we care about this occasionally-creepy romance when there are killer beetles...and vice versa? Better yet, it has a "sequel." If you count movies that recut other movies to make them even more confusing as "sequels," that is.

#1 - THE TELEPHONE BOOK, by Nelson Lyon

The best. The Holy Grail. This is why I got into reviewing movies. I laughed, I screamed. I could go on forever but The Telephone Book is really good, okay? Every new scene brought fresh surprises that I could never have expected--which is really what cinematic media is meant to be about. For a movie about sex, it felt like sex...it kept building, and building, and building, and then there was that ending and there was such joy. A vulgar, mind-boggling cartoon brought to life, I'll never see anything like it again; but then, I was lucky enough to see it in the first place. 

AND THE BOOK OF THE YEAR IS... *DRUMROLL PLEASE*
...
...
...

THE UNHOLY THREE, by Tod Robbins

Man, I sure read a lot of bullshit this year. How could the Book of the Year be anything but this when the competition was Space Jason and voodoo sharks? The Unholy Three is a weirdly kinetic pulp pseudo-masterpiece, whose presence on this list means I can live with myself for not including The Unknown. Lon Chaney is a powerful figure even when he's not directly involved; and besides all that Tod Robbins is an accomplished enough writer to keep me hooked. Next year I'm gonna grab a copy of Robbins' "Spurs" to take a look back at the origin of Freaks, and this book will get a mention, as I've said, when I get to touching on Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll. Robbins also wrote a book called Mysterious Mr. Martin, which looks like a delight. More to follow!

So that's 2017! See you next year! I loved all the time we spend together and I can't wait to start again soon. In the meantime, you can check out the $1 tier on my Patreon to hear some of my Movie Thoughts. Otherwise...keeping dreaming, true believers!

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.

You can continue our study of the Spookyween spirit ahead of the game with Patreon Early Access. Plus, you can 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.

West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

If you want to get the rest of the Spookyween reviews early, now's a good time to subscribe on Patreon! Plus, like the A-List on Facebook to get cool updates.

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!

Book Club of Desolation #15: Jaws: The Revenge (1987), by Hank Searls

If you know anything about this book, you know the one reason why I'm reviewing it.

Follows the plot of the movie, really. Ellen Brody is the widow of Sheriff Martin Brody, who has ostensibly died of a heart attack after fighting a couple of different sharks off Amity Island. Their son Michael has also previously had shark trouble, and he's retired to the Caribbean to work on some marine research. Now it's Sean Brody's time to face the shark...an encounter he does not survive. A grief-stricken Ellen is starting to believe, perhaps rightfully so, that sharks have a thing for her family specifically, and so she goes south to join Michael and get away from Amity. She ends up meeting Hoagy Carmichael (who is immediately recognizable as Michael Caine's character even to people who haven't seen the movie), a pilot who will prove instrumental in her defeating the shark. And, inevitably, the shark is defeated. This is a simple paperback tale of good versus evil, so there's relatively little nuance to the plot presented.

With one exception.

There is a significant deviation from the film version of Jaws: The Revenge, aside from the addition of a Haitian cocaine-smuggling subplot which I don't remember going anywhere beyond filling pages. We finally learn why the Brody family has been beset by so many sharks: VOODOO, MOTHERFUCKER. Yep! Years ago, before the events of Jaws, Martin Brody threw a voodoo charm belonging to a houngan named Papa Jacques into the ocean, pissing Papa Jacques off enough to put a curse on Martin and his whole family. Every shark that has attacked Amity Island thus far has been a spirit-shark pulled from Papa Jacques' soul. I can't make this up, nor can I envision the writing process. It must have been agony for Searls, having to turn the worst Jaws movie into a 300+ page novel...adding the cocaine subplot ought to have been enough but there was still something missing. In a postmodern moment his mind must have chanced upon deconstructing the whole thing and asking why there were four sharks haunting a specific family on the East Coast over a twelve year period. Really, a curse does seem to be the only way to explain the bad luck of the Brodys. You can almost overlook the fact that this plot explanation is born of the fact that Jaws shouldn't have had sequels in the first place. If there had just been one shark attack, or hell, even just two, it wouldn't have been suspicious. But Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge bumped up the shark vengeance count on the Brodys to four, and then you do sort of need a reason. Not like anyone would care.

Unifying the four Jaws films like this raises a particular problem. Papa Jacques is now the main villain of the Jaws series, and Hank Searls must make that a believable thing. He doesn't. Papa Jacques barely gets dialogue--he just lurks around being sinister-looking. (There's a lot of racist dialogue focusing on his black skin, usually with the apparent intent being that makes him more sinister-looking.) It's hard to get menace out of a character who is responsible for a number of deaths because he had his magic charm thrown in the water; even if he does possess real mystical powers, that's such a petty grudge that it undercuts any menace he could present as a powerful wizard type. If Jacques was a charismatic character, with a large following and presence a la Thulsa Doom from the Schwarzenegger Conan, then I could suspend my disbelief, but that would still change Jaws: The Revenge into a different story entirely--either a Mansonsploitation-style thriller, or some kind of fantasy story. If you take this novel as canon, you now have to believe that magic exists in the Jawsverse. Indeed, it is the entire impetus for the plot of all the movies.

In case you didn't click that TV Tropes link above, this book is the Trope Namer for the Voodoo Shark: when a plot hole is "patched" by an even bigger plothole, like, say, casually revealing that magic exists in the setting of Jaws. This is the one thing that keeps this book memorable at all. Otherwise, it is the sort of book that I really hate reading, which is the airport novel. This is the sort of thing I could get for four bucks off the "bookshelf" at the local grocery store. I'm getting too snobby for my own good here, but this is an overly dry book that is "realistic" because it uses a lot of technical terms. Ooh, you know what the different parts of a boat are called. That makes your story so much more compelling, and it totally makes me forget your characters are planks of wood.

Read this book, if you must, for the same reason I did, which is voodoo sharks. Otherwise, you'll probably just be lost in a sea of endless do-nothing subplots while a shark creeps around semi-ominously.

P.S. Expect Peter Benchley's original Jaws novel on the site at some point, too. I've heard it's--how to phrase this nicely--kind of a turd. Marvelous!

---

Image Source: Amazon

Drums O' Voodoo (1934), by Arthur Hoerl

Let me start at the beginning.

I don't know why I became obsessed with Drums O' Voodoo (alias Louisiana alias She Devil). It surely must have cropped up in my research when I commenced this long '30s/'40s horror kick I've been on lately, but I have no idea how that's possible, given that this is one of the least-written about titles I've ever come across, which, trust me, is saying something at this point. There's my answer, I think: when I find rare movies with interesting details about them, which no one else has seen or reviewed in a generation or three, I want to track it down. The title already had me; its status as a '30s race film perpetuated things. (A desire to watch an all-black horror movie from the early days of film while tracking down a copy of Drums O' Voodoo spurred my watching of Son of Ingagi.) Slowly, I learned more and more about it, including that: 1) it was based off of a stage play by J. Augustus Smith, who also acts in the film; 2) after one week, that play was either pulled for censorship reasons or booed offstage, not sure which; 3) the director of the film was the writer of Reefer Madness; 4) this is considered to be the first all-black horror film.

That last bit, though! How am I only the--to the best of my knowledge--second critic to write about this movie on the Internet? I really can't find anything to contradict the idea that Drums O' Voodoo is the first black horror movie, even if its horror elements are relatively toned down...from what I know, if there was any predecessor, its identity is lost to history. And I say that with the knowledge that many of the movies made by black people, or even involving black people, are similarly lost to time. The best alternative to Drums being the first that I could find is this: in 1924 the black auteur Oscar Micheaux made A Son of Satan, about a man forced by a bet to spend the night in a haunted mansion, a la Ghosts of Hanley House. This however was apparently more of a crime movie, with long sequences of domestic violence and nightclub degeneracy. It may have been a remake or rerelease of a 1922 film called The Ghost of Tolson's Manor, which definitely sounds like a horror film, but about which even less is known. Both films are lost and contemporary reviews don't specify if they feature real supernatural elements. Whatever the case, I am simply glad that Drums O' Voodoo is not among the roll call of Movies Lost. Indeed, a lot of sources will even say that this movie doesn't exist anymore, but it most assuredly does! Even with some lost films, where there's a will, there's a way...especially if "way" means "unlisted VHS tape." So here we are!

Myrtle and Ebenezer want to get married, but the whole world's against them. You see, a sleazy mobster type named Tom Catt--yes, really--rolls into a small Louisiana town and opens up a juke joint which as his base of criminal operations. He quickly fixes his eye on Myrtle and intends to make into one of his girls whether she likes it or not. Meanwhile, Ebenezer's grandmother Aunt Hagar (Laura Bowman, who played Dr. Jackson in Son of Ingagi) is a voodoo priestess, who warns the couple that Myrtle's mother had a curse on her that kills the bearer when they have children; hence why her mother died bringing Myrtle into this world. This curse is hereditary and so Myrtle's marriage to Ebenezer would be her death sentence. Myrtle's uncle Amos Berry, the local minister, wants to keep his niece safe from Tom Catt, but is unable to do so because Catt has some good ol' blackmail to hang over him--years ago, Amos spent four years on a chain-gang for murder. In spite of this, Father Berry is willing to go to any distance to get Catt out of his town, and that includes joining forces with Aunt Hagar and her voodoo cult.

It is the last sentence of that synopsis which provides the most intriguing detail about the plot of Drums O' Voodoo: voodoo is presented almost entirely as a positive force. A mysterious and ancient force, with secrets that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to the generally public, but a positive one all the same. Aunt Hagar, and, it seems, her cult, are an accepted part of the community, and she's free to come and go from the church to meet with Father Berry whenever she likes. And that's the thing about it, too: this is a movie where the clergyman protagonist is in league with a voodoo sorceress! But then you think about Sugar Hill, which also portrayed voodoo in a positive light (albeit one of revenge), and it makes sense. To people who practice voodoo, and people who know people who practice voodoo, or live in places with strong relationships with voodoo like Haiti or New Orleans, voodoo is certainly the religion of evil the movies usually make it out to be. Additionally, a lot of branches of voodoo have incorporated Christian beliefs, so relationships between Christian and voodoo communities are often better where voodoo is comparatively common. Amos still condemns voodoo in some way now and again, but one major theme of the film concerns how the "White God" (as the film's narration calls Them) exists concurrently with the "Black Gods," the "jungle gods." There's even a scene where Father Berry tells Aunt Hagar something about "Jesus told us to forgive our enemies." Hagar replies: "Yeah, well, Jesus didn't know Tom Catt!" A '30s film where a voodoo practitioner gets away with sassing off Jesus Christ himself--yeah, this was worth it.

Actually, this movie has a lot going for it where it would have probably been heinous in its time, proclivity for polytheism aside. Our first introduction to Myrtle is her in the juke joint dancing to jazz in, horror of horrors, a miniskirt! Hell, it was a big deal to show off someone dancing in a miniskirt in a movie in the mid '60s, much less the mid '30s. While there's definitely a lot in the script to add credence to the "booed offstage" theory regarding the short life of the play version, this stuff, plus some other stuff I'll get to, is enough to suggest that someone set up an obscenity charge. Maybe that was a total shitstorm. I wish I knew more.

And I wish I knew more about this movie in general--about its production details, yes, but also about the plot. You see, unlike a lot of my reviews, I haven't spoiled the ending of this one, and there's a reason for that. The ending of Drums O' Voodoo may be impossible to spoil, ever, because there is clearly much footage lost, which seems to include the proper conclusion. Now maybe the producers of my VHS copy had access to a faulty print, but Turner Classic Movies says that footage was cut. And how--IMDB and TCM alike list the movie as 70 minutes, and my copy doesn't even make it to 50! While this leads to one of the most hilariously jarring conclusions of all time, the idea of this movie missing over twenty minutes of footage is disheartening to say the least. The fact that we don't know how much was lost to censorship and how much was lost to film decay is almost worse than not knowing what was on those missing frames. TCM helpfully fills in the blanks, revealing that what's missing is only an extrapolation of what we already see (it's not like there were going to be hidden zombies or anything), but still. That's why I'm especially disappointed that no one else has talked about this movie. If the missing footage is still out there, no one is looking for it, and even if it was found by accident no one would care.

I can understand why even people who have seen this wouldn't care. Drums O' Voodoo has plenty o' faults, with the biggest one being one which afflicts so many old horror movies based off of stage plays: it's essentially a filmed version of the play, with no strong use of the effects that film can offer. There are times where you will find it merciful for a shot of two characters talking to be suddenly interrupted by the dynamic change of showing one of the characters in close-up instead. And when all the characters are hugged together on the cramped "backyard" scene with its terrible, obvious matte painting background, you will suddenly feel like you're sitting in front of a stage. Adding to the tedium this induces is the fact that a lot of the movie is dedicated to a church scene. In fact, the church scene, wherein characters sing, dance, quote scripture, and accuse each other, is arguably the primary scene of the movie, just because of how much time it eats up. That's upsetting, because this scene, once the gospel music stops, draaags. I do not enjoy listening to Biblical sermons even if I find a movie's religious themes interesting. It was a mistake for the filmmakers to spend so much time watching the characters at church when they could have been developing them as people or doling out voodoo vengeance instead.

And yet there is a lot to love. There are fun performances, interesting backstories, and that voodoo cave set has some actual atmosphere to it. There are also some fun trash qualities, like the fact that the movie has a weird humorous approach to naming its characters. It's hard not to fall for a slick, sleazy crook type from the city with a groovy name like "Tom Catt," and I can't believe that the insistence on calling Amos Berry "Elder," or more specifically "Elder Berry," was an accident. It's not fully played for laughs but it kinda sets a tone in your mind. Similarly odd is a character named Brother Zero who we meet during that lengthy sermon sequence. Brother Zero may have the highest-pitched voice I've ever heard in an adult man, and I don't know if this is supposed to be funny or not. The first time he spoke, I had to take a break just to give myself time to "...what?" IMDB tells me that Brother Zero's actor, Fred Bonny, had a lengthy and successful career in vaudeville prior to this, so it probably is supposed to be comedic. Finally, there is the scene where the town lays a trap for Tom Catt and get ready to hang him, so he doesn't whisk away any more girls. Aunt Hagar stops them so that they aren't tainted with unjustly-spilled blood, but not without going on a verbal beatdown against Catt, basically saying that the townsfolk should hang him for how worthless his soul is, and how even though she saves him today, the voodoo spirits will catch up with him eventually for his crimes. She doesn't spare a breath in letting this guy know that she hates his guts. Aunt Hagar is awesome all the way through, and I am officially a Laura Bowman fan for life.

More people should know about Drums O' Voodoo, for all its drawbacks. It's not a great movie, but I am glad to have seen it. It is available from Sinister Cinema even if it's not on their website. (Don't order it from Loving the Classics, the only other source I've found to ostensibly sell it, as the Better Business Bureau and others list them as having scammed a lot of people.) It's a forgotten piece of history, and it has stuff to offer even besides having that distinction. Check it out!

Sugar Hill (1974), by Paul Maslansky

I think I've said it before, but I am grateful to my fellow critics. Obviously, I would have never seen these films if someone in the world hadn't recommended them to me, however indirectly they did so. If your main hobbies are like mine and include watching movie reviews to cover up for the pain and horror of being utterly insignificant, you'll begin to recognize cinematic trends, sub-trends, and sub-sub-trends within the big chunky genres you previously took for granted. Studying blaxploitation for example will lead one to the genre's outset as the "race pictures" made between the 1910s and the 1950s, starring all black casts and marketed to all black audiences--films that reinforced segregation but nonetheless encouraged and enabled black creators and black representation in the media. Race pictures became blaxploitation in the early '70s, arguably beginning with the mandatory Black Panthers initiation watch subject Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. Blaxploitation has continued long since the death of '70s funk, or at least, genre films made by and starring black people have continued. Some that come to mind are Black Devil Doll from Hell, Tales from the Quadead Zone, Devil Snow, Ax 'Em, and Don't Play With Me. Because these are movies that I like they are probably not the most flattering examples of this, but I considered them all to be truly wonderful films. You can even see movies today that get theater showings which arguably carry on the blaxploitation spirit, in the form of the films of Tyler Perry, which, despite being shredded by critics, do get high audience scores and even get the dubious distinction of top billing at my workplace's Redbox.

And of course there were and are blaxploitation horror films. That is one of those sub-trends I mentioned above: in 1972, of course, we had Blacula, which heralded such films as Blackenstein, Ganja and Hess, and Abby. There had been earlier black-produced horror films, such as the ever-elusive Drums o' Voodoo from 1934, but this new vein was often crossed with the badass protagonists and dicey gang politics of the crime-oriented blaxploitation movies. This is the ground from which Sugar Hill grows, and admittedly I have not seen any of the other famous '70s Blaxploitation movies, by the simple merit of Sugar Hill ranking higher on my priority lists. The reviews always made it sound like a blast, and a blast it is. If Blacula and the others are as good as this, then I have a lot to look forward to.

The plot is pretty straightforward, especially by blaxploitation standards, save for the zombies. Black people own a club, white people wanna steal it. In this case, it's Diana "Sugar" Hill and her boyfriend Langston who own Club Voodoo, subject of intended theft by white crime lord Morgan. When Langston refuses to give in, Morgan kills him, prompting Sugar's quest for vengeance. Fortunately, the voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse can help her. Sugar makes a pact with the witch and Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of the dead, to receive an army of turkey-killing zombies. Soon everyone in town is paying for the price for offing Sugar's man. Will Sugar manage to find her special brand of justice?

By the end of the thing you'll be hoping she does. The film casts its leads well. While the entire cast puts on a good performance, the black actors shine the brightest, especially Marki Bey as Sugar Hill, who presents a genuinely sympathetic, attractive, and badass voodoo queen, and Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi, who is one of the hammiest hams to ever beautifully ham. Those two are charming and you get attached to them. Baron Samedi in particular is a very strange and intriguing character. He is in some ways a continuation of the character of the same name from Live and Let Die, and that version of Baron Samedi was the only reason why most of us watched that movie to begin with. Sometimes he goofs off; sometimes he's menacing; sometimes he's mocking, especially when he's talking to white people. When white people think they can boss him around, he starts talking like, well...let's just say it's sort of like a banned Warner Brothers cartoon. It's kind of jarring to hear, but the movie makes it clear that all parties know that he's doing it to piss these people off. Because what are they going to do? This isn't a guy calling himself Baron Samedi--he is a legitimate voodoo loa. Weapons are not going to work on him. He calls them out on their racism, and when they try to shove him and Sugar down for that (instead of, y'know, stopping the whole being racist thing), they are killed by zombies. Baron Samedi's got a system, and the system works.

Helping you root for the heroes is the fact that the white people in this movie are bastards. Sure, sometimes they have a glimmer of respectability, but basically all of them spout the n-word whenever they get a chance, and pull all sorts of bullshit about "betters" and the like. Worst of them all is Celeste, Morgan's girlfriend, who is so racist that even he shrugs her off like a rotten corpse. She drops the n-bomb more than anyone in the film, and takes a personal jealousy in Morgan's wandering eyes when Sugar's around. Naturally, she is saved for last, and her implied fate is so dark that I laughed at it out of astonishment. But you really can't feel bad for her.

That her death is memorable is impressive, given that whenever someone dies in this movie it's pretty great. That's because the zombies in this movie are great. They have these weird silver cups over their eyes, and they also have cobwebs all over them, even though they all seem to have been buried sans coffins in earthen graves. (Are underground spiders a thing? Should we fear them?) I swear to God that the first scene of the zombies rising from their graves goes on for ten minutes. For however long it is, it's not long enough. Intercut with scenes of these zombies crawling from the earth are shots of Mama Maitresse and Sugar Hill getting really excited over the prospect of having an army of zombies, along with Baron Samedi's sweet, sweet mugging. Whenever these zombies kill someone, it's usually done in a way that resists repetition, making each individual kill scene satisfying. The quirkiness of some of these deaths, along with their roots in vengeance, reminded me in a lot of fun ways of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Which is funny because I also realized that this movie almost shares a plot with Bad Magic. I guess a lot of revenge horror films have similarities.

If you want to get a good taste of archetypical '70s exploitation, Sugar Hill is a great start. If I have somehow failed to convince you, I should say that this movie's is a Motown funk piece called "Supernatural Voodoo Woman." The movie also contains a large, large building called "the Voodoo Museum and Research Library."

P.S. Originally this review was meant for January until I had to do some schedule rearranging for the site. In the course of it I forgot that February was Black History Month. I find it to be a happy coincidence that I post this now. I'd say that a movie where a bunch of black people avenge themselves on some racist white gangsters with zombies is a good anti-racist text. 

Voodoo Man (1944), by William Beaudine

There are three kinds of people who know about Bela Lugosi. The first will praise him as a film god--he was Dracula, and the original, at that, not taking in that Max Shreck fella. The second will decry him as a hack. The third, probably most populous of three, will simply ask you, "Who?" All of these are valid responses; no actor lasts forever, and he turned in a mixture of both shitty and wonderful performances. If you want to see him shine, check him out in The Devil Bat and Bride of the Monster; he is poorly represented by The Ape Man and, in my mind, Dracula. In my mind, his ability to turn in either a stunningly bad performance or a stunningly amazing one is compelling--it's through Lugosi that I've been on my '40s horror kick recently. I may be reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel, as '40s trash is some of the most painful of the bunch, but sometimes barrels are worth scraping. The search has exposed me to the odd impoverished wonders that are Bowery at Midnight, Black Dragons, and today's film, Voodoo Man.

Voodoo Man (along with Bowery and Black Dragons) was the result of a nine-film contract Lugosi signed with Monogram Pictures producer Sam Katzman. Monogram, along with Devil Bat producer PRC, were the literal Poverty Row of Hollywood, and each of the horror films they produced were rushed by any other company's standards, poorly edited in both production and scripting, and generally just cobbled together in the worst of ways. The Monogram Nine cemented Lugosi's status as a B- or C-actor, though he probably hit that when he made his first outing with Monogram with Mysterious Mr. Wong, which I have briefly discussed before. All the same, he manages to reel in a good performance in Voodoo Man, being one of many assets that this make a surprisingly good time.

As in the previous Monogram film, 1942's The Corpse Vanishes (featured on MST3K!), Lugosi plays a Dr. Orloff-esque scientist who has to restore life to a sickly female relative (his wife in this case). However, whereas The Corpse Vanishes saw Lugosi's Dr. Lorenz was doing the ol' harvest-their-glands trick that we also see in The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire, here Dr. Richard Marlowe has become the titular Voodoo Man. With the aid of his houngan George Zucco and brain-damaged henchman John Carradine, he strives to restore his dead wife from the grave. He kidnaps beautiful young women by means of roadblocks set up by crooked gas station workers under his employ, and also a machine that can short out car batteries at a range. He keeps the women in suspended animation until he needs them to transfer "mind to mind...soul to soul...life...to...DEATH!" Along the way, a sheriff pokes into things somewhat effectively, and the friends one of the victims eventually learns kindly Dr. Marlowe's terrible secret. And, of course, they stop him--an open-and-shut slice of life, in sixty minutes.

This is already a pretty solid pulp concept, and it's pure fun to see it put into action, but there are some interesting twists and turns along the way--almost all of which spawned through sheer brainlessness. Like some of the other Monogram flicks, this one used its poverty to subvert censorship standards at the time: there's the scene where one of the female leads get kidnapped by John Carradine when her car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That he licks his lips and says, "Yer pertty" is one thing; the later suggestion that he feels up the comatose ladies his Master keeps in the cellar is another. (Of course, there was implied necrophilia in The Corpse Vanishes, too.) Here, the grime of Poverty Row makes the subject matter even seedier--it's jarring if you're used to older horror films being "clean." But the cheapness detracts, too, or at least makes things absurd. Take for example the fact that John Carradine bangs on a drum as part of the voodoo ritual, but we can only hear the drum when the camera cuts over to him. Or the fact that the Sheriff, upon visiting kindly Dr. Marlowe, comments on how gloomy his house is. Except the house isn't gloomy, it's as well-lit as a movie set! (Presumably to accommodate a camera that would be unable to record in actual darkness.) Which gets taken even further by Lugosi's response: "We use very little light in the house, my eyes are not in the best of shape." There is some attempt to use creepy lighting in the film but it's given maybe 2% of the film's total devotion. You can feel the lamp next to you, set down on the floor where there was room and vaguely aimed at the actors. Fortunately, Lugosi and Carradine can sustain tension, mystery, and atmosphere where the rest of the cast cannot.

I should still define myself when I say that Lugosi's acting is "fine" here. There are four moods that Dr. Marlowe displays depending on the scene: the first is the angry, violent person who lashes out at his servants. Physical violence is not becoming to the former Count Dracula, which is probably why most of the scenes of Lugosi actually hitting people happen between cuts. The second is the contrasting public personality, where he is almost childlike in his politeness, to deflect suspicion--he also does this in Black Dragons and to a hilariously passive-aggressive extent in The Devil Bat. Then there is creepy Bela, where he speaks precisely and moves slowly--the sort of thing he got famous for, him at his best, when the morphine wasn't throwing off his focus. Finally there's sad Bela. You can already envision it if you've seen Bride of the Monster. He's this close to belting out "'Ome? I have no 'ome." It's very clear that Lugosi had a style, and it was a style much more complex than most people think, even if there were many patches where he was essentially playing Dracula all over again. I think it's fascinating that in many of his movies you can find this same pattern of four: the misplaced violence, the courteous passive-aggression, the spookiness, and the hammy grieving. He had his limitations, so he's hardly a god, but he's far from the plank of cardboard a lot of people peg him as.

Speaking of vampires (or the people who played them): this and Corpse Vanishes are essentially vampire films, though they present the interesting twist of being vampirism by proxy, and with gland-juice and souls instead of blood. I feel like the theme of this one is how horrifying it is for the old to burn the young to sustain their lives. It's safe to say that's where a lot of the horror of vampirism ultimately comes from--something ancient denying the turn of progress by constantly feeding on the agents of progress. If you want to be pretentious about it, it's the horror behind the Biblical Moloch: throw the babies into the burning idol, so that the devil-god doesn't kill the non-babies. Or it's like Cronus, devouring his children to sustain his power. What's dead is dead, and passed is passed; don't chain up a bunch of ladies in white nightgowns in your basement to steal life-force from. Because eventually, the monster of the past has to be staked through the heart, or castrated by the children. Or, hell, maybe it's all just supposed to be a don't-tamper-in-Baron-Samedi's-domain sorta thing. The writers may not have given it much thought, but any writers, cheap or otherwise, is going to channel the conventions and tropes of the culture they live in, and those tropes are worth examining.

And of course there has to be a twist at the end. The main character turns out to be a Hollywood screenwriter who presents his write-up of his adventure to his boss under the title Voodoo Man, to star Bela Lugosi. Ha, ha. Earlier there's a bit too where he and another character discuss the possibility of zombies, but he rules them out: "They're just a scene writer's nightmare!" It's weird, though, because Robert Charles, the screenwriter of Voodoo Man, only wrote this plus Return of the Ape Man from later that year. The name could have been a pseudonym, of course, but to me it's funny that he'd be complaining about zombie movies he never made. I mostly wish I knew which zombie movies in particular he meant, 'cause if he wrote this, I'd love to see what he could've done with the walking dead.

I Eat Your Skin (1964), by Del Tenney

Voodoo charts a perfect timeline of my life. If you want a voodoo movie that shows me at the ecstatic, youthful, hectic middle of my relationship with these sorts of movies, check out Trash Canon gem Crypt of Dark Secrets. If you want to see me at the far limits I've found now, where I'm largely just reflective and need something really tremendous to whet my appetite, managing a blog of memories more than having true, exciting adventures, check out Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. This is the voodoo movie--and indeed, the movie, period--that started it all. I Eat Your Skin is the first trash movie I ever saw. I watched it when I was ten, with my eight-year-old brother and my aunt and uncle. My aunt got the 50 Chilling Classics collection of public domain horror movies from another of my aunts. The four of us went in blind and it was up, up, and away from there.

I had never before imagined that acting, as a thing, could be bad, before laying my eyes on this. It was a goddamn blast. We didn't really riff it--it riffed itself. We laughed a lot and even got a few chills here and there. Well, my brother and I did at least, probably. After that, we tracked down Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space and all that. We'd been watching '50s monster movies for years, like Them! and The Giant Gila Monster, but we began to learn there was something new. Something alien. We met a lot of strange movies when we finally bought 50 Chilling Classics for ourselves. I Eat Your Skin came back time and time again, to be joined by Medusa, Cathy's Curse, Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, The Alpha Incident, Demons of Ludlow, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Horrors of Spider Island, Driller Killer, Oasis of the Zombies, Revenge of Dr. X, The Witches' Mountain, and probably everything else in that damn box and all the other collections like it. A veritable smorgasbord of weird, shitty horror. I needed more--I found MST3K and it still wasn't enough. (Even as Laserblast, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Deadly Bees, Boggy Creek II, and Space Mutiny flooded into my awareness, and my heart.) Fortunately, I Eat Your Skin was historically double-billed with I Drink Your Blood. Figuring I'd be running into another black and white zombie movie, I was stunned by the display of rabies, gore, and hippies that unleashed itself into my eyeballs. I began to comprehend these "exploitation movies," and as teenhood dawned, I came across the annals of I-Mockery, the Cinema Snob, and Bleeding Skull. My formative years were shaped and stirred as I witnessed a bottomless sea of gore, nudity, and monstrosities beyond imagination.

I shared my movies, with some hits (Troll 2 nearly killed everyone) and some misses (King of the Zombies does not a good sleepover make). I even got the high school to have a One Night Only event for some of these movies, which is where Troll 2 knocked 'em dead, along with Don't Go in the Woods. I am proud to say that for two years, I was the Captain of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, or BMC for short. If there are any veterans of it out there, you know we saw both glory...and horror. It was our war, our private little war, and there were heroes as there were sacrifices. But what I mean to say is: it all started here. Some of the best days of my life started with I Eat Your Skin. So what better place to carry on the SPOOKYWEEN horror extravaganza from here?

Writer Tom Harris is in the soup with his editor, Duncan Fairchild. "Harry" Harris has been spending too much time helping lonely young housewives cheat on their husbands and not enough on composing his next Haydock-'n'-Harmon style potboiler. Duncan is forcing Tom and his own wife, Coral (which everyone always pronounces as "Carl"), to go to a Pacific island so that Tom can get some inspiration and make them more money. The island in question? Voodoo Island, home of snakes, zombies, and beautiful women. After an attack by one of the zombified locals, featuring the most hilarious decapitation set to film, Tom learns of the voodoo sacrifices of the island, and the mystery only deepens from there. As he falls in love with Jeanine, daughter of the local scientist, he'll need to solve it before their island Heaven becomes a Hell.

Does I Eat Your Skin hold up after all this time? Or have I grown too cynical with age to enjoy its cheesy, clumsy charms? I can say that fortunately I continue to enjoy the experience. I have perhaps moved on in some regards--for example, the mere presence of voodoo doesn't bring chills to me simply by merit of being some mysterious foreign religion. Now I know more about voodoo and I understand that there's not really such a thing as a "weird" religion (well, I mean, besides Scientology--excuse me, Sci***ology). There's almost certainly something racist in I Eat Your Skin, with the black pagan islanders trying to sacrifice a Blonde Caucasian Virgin™ and everything, something which I didn't pay attention to as a kid. It kills the mood a little bit, but of course the true evil behind the voodoo cult turns out to be a white man. His alias's name, though, is Papa Negro. That brings it back to uncomfortable a little bit.

But the movie is groovy, the shadows and zombies are creepy, and the dialogue is amazing. Any movie that uses the word "praytell" as part of its snark is going to be top of the charts for me. The acting, especially from the lady playing Coral, almost reaches self-parody at times. Did I mention, too, that this was the first movie I saw to have a sex scene in it? It was the early '60s, though, so nothing gets shown, and I wouldn't realize what it was until years later, when the sheer comedy of the scene wore off. There's also a wonderful zombie transformation sequence when some poor asshole is injected with the zombie drug and starts becoming one of the flesh-eating fiends with some Larry Talbot-style dissolve cuts. 

On top of all this, the movie doesn't drag, unlike most of the movies which I adored in my childhood that I've tried to rediscover over the years. That, more than anything else in my life right now, is important. I run a magazine, I write books, I work a day job. I have finally reached the stage of maturity where I cannot afford to watch movies without merit. Thankfully I have some solid luck these days, in these matters. And I have a great and bountiful past behind me to examine anew. Every scene in I Eat Your Skin flows well into one another, and while there is some dwelling (especially on the voodoo dancing), usually forward kinetic motion is a thing. There was some degree of care behind this, from the man who also brought us The Horror of Party Beach. There was enough to hook me. Just as easily, I could've slipped away from this path forever in the moment of watching this. Imagine if I had watched fucking Cathy's Curse instead of this. I would probably end up just watching Casablanca for a living. Assuming such a thing is tenable. (You'd think people would stop paying for reviews of Casablanca after awhile.)

Whatever. Be cautious but know that I Eat Your Skin is a party in your living room. Beget a trash legacy of your own with what you find in it.