Zombie Lake (1980), by Jean Rollin

Yes, even Jess Franco had his limits on cheapness. But when Franco steps out you call in Jean Rollin to bring you the zombie goods.

The show will be going on a brief hiatus as we get ready for the 200th review!

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Castle Sinister (1948), by Oscar Burn

A short, punchy film noir about fast-talking Nazis. Oh, and a man in a triple-nostriled skeleton morph suit.

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Ace of Aces (1933), by J. Walter Ruben

By coincidence, this film was the next entry on my to-watch list following The Man from Colorado, a 1948 Western about a former Union officer driven mad by the Civil War. While those movies contrast wildly as far as budget and artistry are concerned, the two films are similar in many ways. Both of them are about good men who War makes into monsters; consequently both films deal thematically with the dark side of humanity that lurks inside everyone, the side that causes Wars to begin with. As such they can both be interpreted as anti-war films, but Ace of Aces is much more directly about protesting conflict. That directness certainly makes it a bit dumber than The Man from Colorado, but that doesn't mean the film's wiping its drool off the floor. What makes Ace of Aces so enjoyable and indeed compelling is its emotional intensity and earnestness about its message.

Rocky Thorne is a sculptor engaged to Nancy, a fellow intellectual. They share rambling, pretentious conversations with each other but generally seem to be good kids. Then America enters World War I, and there's a need for fighter pilots. Nancy turns on Rocky when he dismisses the value of the War, and that's enough to make him enlist. Despite his early hesitance, Rocky faces his duty with honor, and a terrible change begins to occur. It turns out Rocky really likes killing...and he's willing to sacrifice whatever parts of himself don't apply to that. What's more, he becomes secluded, refusing to let anyone else service his plane or guns. Not even Nancy can turn him back, even though her own job as a nurse has taught her how foolish it was to support this war. Is it too late for Rocky, or can some new horror yet reach and change his heart?

Many of the old cliches are rolled out for this one. Before his enlistment, Rocky compares the marching troops outside his soldier to lemmings--at great length. At such great length, in fact, that I couldn't help but envision an enormous red alarm flashing over the whole screen, shouting "SYMBOLISM" the whole time. Adding to the SYMBOLISM is the fact that Rocky's unit is singing a song to the tune of a funeral march when he enters the bunk. It's moments like this which couple with the occasionally over-flowery dialogue to make the whole thing seem heavy-handed. But I think this hamfistedness comes from a place of caring.

There are a plenty of strange details about this film which make it a joy to watch from the perspective of one who like eccentric movies, while also showing, as those eccentricities often do, a precision and care that went into this movie's forging. When Rocky is meeting his squadron for the first time, each of them have a witty or "witty" introduction/sobriquet. The best being "Tombstone Terry the Tennessee Terror, aka Dracula." I could read 80 years of comics centered on a WWI ace with that name. There's also the fact that each of the pilots has an animal mascot--a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a goat, and Rocky's own lion cub. These animals aren't just for cheap gags--they, too, bring symbolism, because they start fighting around the time that Rocky's violent obsessions start ripping the unit apart.

The film's heart serves it well, as those trips into eccentricity also lead to genuine darkness. Witness Rocky whipping a man with an ammo belt after he failed to load it properly, sending gouts of blood gushing from his crushed skull. Witness Rocky turning Nancy's pro-war arguments on her to convince her to have drunken, sweaty beer sex with him (which is truly skin-crawling by the way). And finally witness Rocky turning straight again after being forced to spend the night with a German teenager he shot down, whom he eventually helps commit suicide when it becomes clear he's got nothing but a slow death ahead of him. War. Is. Hell. It's tough to watch the early scenes where Nancy is trying to justify to Rocky what seems to him to be coldhearted murder, and remember that that was the common attitude of the day. Of course Rocky's arguments, that war is pointless and without true glory in the end, make sense, but when this War broke out people put so much of their pride and fear into their nationalism that relationships really were destroyed over "dishonor," for whatever meaning honor has when you're up against lung-dissolving gas.

Here the movie shines the brightest, because it's ultimately a film concerned with how war happens. The answer I feel it gives to this question is "peer pressure." Rocky is a gentle man largely ruled by his love for Nancy, but Nancy is able to use that to lever him into doing something he's afraid of, by forcing him to face what seems an even greater fear. Once this layer kicks in and pushes him out to the barracks, the encouragement becomes positive: he's rewarded by the comradery and praise of his fellow pilots, who all treat each other like brothers. It's notable that even when his squadron turns on him for his change in behavior, it's not enough to turn him back to good--but he does change his behavior when they turn on him once more after he announces he's leaving to take on a prosperous teaching job instead. In this case, this later scene, where Rocky loses all his friends in the squad for accepting his CO's offer, shows that the positive reinforcement of the squad's brotherhood was really enforced by implicit violence this whole time. The friendship of the armed forces, the film seems to say, only goes as far as one friend is useful to another. That's pretty cold, given that in my experience the military does create sincere friendships as well, but these pilots stand in for the war they fight and the horror it in turn represented, and how entirely without honor and compassion that conflict was. I know this probably makes me seem dumb, but it was really nice to see a movie that flat-out condemned World War I with such vitriol, especially one made in such a precarious era as the inter-war period. All wars are fucking horrible, but that so many of us still rank World War I as one of the top worst points in all of human history shows that it in particular was especially fucking horrible. It deserves to be condemned in big bold letters.

This film was something of a marvel for me; an airplane thriller with some serious war drama. And trauma. Watch it as I did, with The Man from Colorado, or maybe with another airplane thriller, and you've got a good day carved out for yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Book Club of Desolation #19: Left Behind (1995), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.

And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.

Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.

Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.

The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.

To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.

Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?

I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.

Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!

Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?

Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.

Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.

Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Book Club of Desolation #14: The Ant with the Human Soul (1932)/Night of the Trolls (1963), by Bob Olsen and Keith Laumer

There was no way I was passing up a book with a cover like that.

I don't read as much straight sci-fi as I should outside of comic books, and I've meant to change that all my life. Fortunately, the Book Club of Desolation may be my chance to get on the right track. I recognized in my childhood that I always leaned towards the softer side of the Sci-Fi Hardness Scale, and a lot of the big names in classic sci-fi--Asimov, Anderson, Heinlein, Hubbard He Who Shall Not Be Named--had the bulk of their work on the harder side of things. Because they seemed to comprise so much of the iceberg, I dodged the genre except when it was scientifically "easy." I have other reasons for not enjoying these authors, which I won't bother to go into here, but I'm an older person and frankly, I'm becoming bored with the limits of my comfort zone. So maybe it's time to delve back into the things I didn't like as a kid and see what surprises await me.

But this really is all just incidental. I really did buy The Ant with the Human Soul exclusively for that cover.

Bob Olsen's '30s pulp adventure tells the story of Kenneth Williams, who is suicidal after his college experiences have made him doubt his Christianity. He is rescued from a drowning attempt by the sinister-seeming scientist Dr. De Villa, who suggests that perhaps an uncommon experience will help remind Williams of the beauty of life. And by "uncommon experience," he means "having his brain transferred into the body of an ant." How, you ask? Why, for that matter? Well, De Villa has perfected a ray which can cause ants to grow to the size of people. From there, it's simplicity itself to splice Kenneth's "memory center" into the ant's brain, while Kenneth's body is kept in suspended animation. The ant containing his brain-chunk will then be shrunk back down and returned to its colony, and Kenneth will record all of the ant's experiences as his own, all for the purpose of solving the secrets of ant colony behavior.

Kenneth ends up undertaking more than one lesson in ant-hropology, though one has to wonder how many times a single person can have their brain chopped up and transplanted in a week. In his first expedition, he is sent to a colony of common garden ants, where he sees that ant society is uncannily similar to that of humans, albeit with ant-like twists. Sure, it's a rigid caste society where automaton-like drones constantly search for and carry food to and around the colony, there are also bars, dances, and funerals. Next, he is sent to a more violent type of ant, one which spends a lot of its time drinking liquor and holding wrestling matches. Finally, he is sent to a colony of farmer ants, where he learns the joys and hardships of raising bug "cattle." And, following this adventure, the book decides to stop, so he gets a happy ending with his girlfriend.

The Ant with the Human Soul starts really strong and slowly declines. As the frontispiece for the book states, Bob Olsen was noted in his prime for his lighthearted approach to sci-fi prose. That shows itself quickly, because even in the face of depression and suicide, there's a pluckiness to the book, where everyone, even the mad scientist, behaves in a sort of golly-gee-gosh manner. This helps the audience forgive the stunning weakness of the book's attempts at hard science explanations, which admittedly may have been something Olsen intended. Olsen is skilled enough at using this tone that when the book's theme starts emerging it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere. Unfortunately, the themes of Ant are where the book kinda shits the bed. After the second ant encounter, it becomes clear that the different species of ants are supposed to represent different social circles of humans. The first ants represent an example of the middle class's conception of a stable society, while the second represents the criminal element. But then, when Dr. De Villa starts describing the farmer ants in the setup for the third incident, Olsen makes it overwhelmingly clear that it's not morality he's meaning to examine, it's race. He says that the criminal ants of the second incident are basically ant black people, while presumably the first group of well-behaved ants are the white ones. Meanwhile, this third group represents the "semi-primitive nomadic races." Bleccchhhh. The fact that the ending tries to claim this whole thing was about the evils of atheism makes it even lamer. While there's plenty of great stuff in the beginning with the improbable science, and the suggestion that Dr. De Villa is, y'know, Satan, it's all discarded in the end in favor of something that makes it all feel like a waste of time.

There's also something that really started bugging me, but in that way that makes me laugh. Dr. De Villa puts a lot of stock into how his exposure of ant behavior will secure him his place in history, but the man already has inter-species brain transplants and a growth and shrink ray. How, in any way, could discovering the secrets of ant social structures add to the scale and possibility implied by inventing things like those? The neurological medicine that could be derived from De Villa's understanding of the brain, to say nothing of how space-altering rays would affect the struggle for resources, is way, way more important than figuring out if ants put their dead in caskets or not. Again, this annoyed me, but the more I thought about it, the more hilarious it became. I guess I don't get it because I'm not a scientist. Anyway: this probably won't be the last ant-related book I feature on here, because I also own a copy of Spiridon, a French philosophical novel about a human-intelligence'd ant, and something called The Ants of Timothy Thummel, which appears to be the Bible, but with ants. Huh.

Armchair Fiction was also kind enough to include a second story in their publication of The Ant with the Human Soul. Keith Laumer's Night of the Trolls is the first novella of his Bolo series, which centered around a series of super-scientific tanks. An astronaut named Jackson awakes from suspended animation to find the world destroyed in a holocaust. He learns of his wife's death, and believes that his son and astronaut unit have also perished. He learns that some of those folk are still alive: one of his fellow astronauts, Toby Mallon, has set himself up as "the Baron," the mysterious dictator of the land that was once Jackson's home city. Mallon has ruled the land so ruthlessly that people have fallen back into superstitions, believing the colossal Bolo tanks he controls are Trolls. (This also lands Mallon the title of "the Trollmaster," which is pretty fucking cool.) It will take all of Jackson's wit to get his hands on one of the Bolos and stop the Baron before he can conquer what's left of civilization.

This was a good one, and not simply good for trash purposes. Night of the Trolls has a punchy and quick pace that's so efficient and effective that it makes one realize how stodgy Ant with the Human Soul really was. In about 70 pages, Laumer is able to bringing an engaging and straightforward plot that actually has some good character scenes. The Bolos themselves, and how they fit into the world Jackson left behind, are interesting enough to merit the sequels the story got. I don't know if I'd feature any other Bolo books on the site, but I will almost certainly be reading them.

Hey, look, you can tell it's good because the review is short and relatively free of spoilers. A lot of the trash material I talk about I talk about rather freely because, well, if this blog is meant to chronicle the unique feelings that stuff gives me, skimping on details is counter-productive. I give spoilers because I'm a bad person. The only out I've given myself on that is that a lot of these are absurdly hard to track down, and so if people want to know what actually fucking happens in them, they can know for themselves. While I'm fine with spoiling some details of The Ant with the Human Soul because I don't really if it's worth your time, I will leave the read of Night of the Trolls to your own discretion. It's not a deep or complex work of fiction, but...check it out. Tackle Ant if you consider yourself a trash-lit master.

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Image Source: Armchair Fiction

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 4 (The Invisible Man)

The Invisible Man, like Dracula and Frankenstein, is based off a novel, this time by H.G. Wells. That novel is not a horror novel per se but as we'll get to, the common assignment of The Invisible Man and its sequels to the horror genre is somewhat erroneous.

It's worth noting that the Invisible Man and Mummy franchises are only connected by the Abbott and Costello movies, which is a bit of cheating on my behalf as clearly Abbott and Costello do not play the same characters between films. Arguably, one could say that the Invisible Man's appearance at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein counts, but I'll get to that.

(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three)

The Invisible Man (1933):

Watching the first entry of a Universal series is always interesting because so often are one's expectations subverted. It's baffling to think about Dracula creating a franchise. Frankenstein is more believable in that regard, and that The Wolf Man received no sequels besides Larry Talbot's appearances in the monster rallies is flat out depressing. The Invisible Man and its sequels are movies which I've never been involved with, or even really that interested in, despite my enjoyment of the H.G. Wells novel which this movie is based on, but I have always heard that compared to flicks like The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Man is quite good and deserves its place in the "canon." My feelings are mixed, as I find it difficult to either praise or drag the film in the end.

We open in the middle of a snow-storm as a man covered head to toe in coats and bandages barges into the Lion's Head Inn. He quickly proves himself to be a generally rude bloke, violently demanding a room and total privacy. Once he is decently settled we come to a scene introducing Dr. Cranley and his daughter Flora, who is engaged to one of the doctor's students, Jack Griffin. Flora and Griffin's friend Dr. Kemp are concerned about Griffin, who has been missing for some time. Back at the inn, the verbal viciousness of the stranger--Griffin, of course--becomes physical and in a pique of frenzy Griffin reveals that a drug of his creation has made him invisible. When the townsfolk confront Griffin, exposing his invisibility, he loses all of his control, and tracks down and forces Kemp to become his assistant in an attempt to do nothing short of taking over the British Empire, if not the whole world! Griffin commits crimes both serious and silly for the rest of the movie's runtime until at last he is caught up with and slain.

This movie gets off on the wrong foot, even if it jumps back briefly now and again to the right one. Maybe it's because I've been essentially binging these films, but I am getting a little sick of the obsession with obnoxious and/or superstitious peasants. The fact that they are Silly Dickensian Brits in this venture doesn't help matters (though Racial Stereotype Romani Folk are not much better), nor does the fact that Screamy Lady from Bride of Frankenstein is among them, once again screaming in a way that not even the shallowest of shallow preteens would find amusing. So much of this interrupts the genuinely well-made moments; the shots of the tavern patrons laughing and talking with one another, playing darts, and drinking help us forget that there's a weirdo out in the snow, which helps us feel the shock the crowd does when said weirdo bursts in all dramatic-like. And while we are dazzled by the special effects--and we will be throughout the entirety of the film, because Jesus these are amazing--it's sad to see that they're put to use to Griffin playing ring around the rosy with the villagers while laughing like the Joker, which is hardly the peak of Mind-Warping Horror. It could be argued that since this is still early in the film this is meant to build up Griffin's descent into madness and true evil--but that brings to my main criticism, which is the movie's sometimes ludicrous tone problem.

Because later in the movie, Griffin is still being silly! Yes, he kills people, and there's even a reference to an offscreen "train incident" (Griffin talks early on about wrecking a train). But the murders pass so quickly, and the "train incident"'s offscreen nature make them seem almost insultingly hollow, moreso than even a lot of slasher films. It's impossible not to laugh at Griffin skipping down the street wearing naught but a pair of pants, terrorizing some old farm lady, because this is supposed to be happening in close sequence with the train incident, which, if it was the wrecking of a passenger train (this is why we should see it), probably killed dozens and injured hundreds in a best case scenario. If they couldn't present such horrible incidents in full onscreen because of censors or a limitation of budget, they should have cut them from the script.

That having been said, this movie is not a trainwreck. (Ha.) Despite my frustrations I tried watching it as a horror film, and when I found myself unable to solve the problem that I just don't find someone being invisible scary in and of itself, I tried to look for other ways the horror shines through. And I realized ultimately that despite the general glossing-over of the domestics about Griffin, like his relationship with Flora, we are meant to identify with Flora, her father, and Kemp. Griffin was important to them, and to see his decline from their eyes would be genuinely horrifying. The film spends precious little time with this angle, but it is deepened slightly by the fact that Dr. Cranley and Kemp determine that one of the key ingredients in Griffin's invisibility formula is monocaine, an extremely unstable drug pulled off the market years ago. In a sense, then, it's almost like watching a family grieve someone succumbing to meth addiction, except it's just one hit that's needed to start the irreversible descent into decay. Suggesting that Griffin was a relatively reasonable bloke before he became gripped by his experiments helps give him a tragic element--a victim of his own arrogance, definitely, if he was willing to use a drug that he seemingly knew might fuck him up, but a victim all the same.

That in and of itself should be enough to save the film from my hate, but as it's worth repeating, the special effects used in The Invisible Man should be mandatory studying at any film school for people thinking of working in the SFX field. If you can't do chroma keying or double exposure at least as good as these people got it in 1933, maybe think of doing something else. Adding to the awesome visual effects is Claude Rains' acting. He was superb as Sir John Talbot in The Wolf Man, but The Invisible Man is his movie. Not only does he physically act well in the scenes he appears but his voice is marvelous and sells the character perfectly. Some have said Rains should have done radio dramas, and what leads me to agree is the shocking closeness between his voice and that of Geoffrey Beevers, who played one of the versions of the Master on the original Doctor Who series, who reprises the role in some of Doctor Who's Big Finish audio dramas. Beevers' performance for Big Finish has made him one of my favorite actors ever, and so Rains' similarity to Beevers greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the film. While I can't love it wholeheartedly, this movie is good if nothing else for the Invisible Man himself. And given that he's, y'know, the title figure, that means the movie generally succeeds at what it was created to do.

The Invisible Man Returns (1940):

Like its predecessor, The Invisible Man Returns is also a mixed bag--a film full of moments both good and bad. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the good and bad elements are subdued, making the good moments no longer "great," and the bad elements no longer "really bad." This leaves us with a serviceable sci-fi thriller that will leave a lot of people asleep.

Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (played by Vincent Price) is sentenced to hang for the death of his brother Michael. However, he's not lost quite yet--a secret injection of invisibility serum by Dr. Frank Griffin, Jack Griffin's younger brother, allows Geoffrey to sneak out of his cell, with the intent being to administer the cure before he goes permanently insane as Frank's brother did. The problem is: Frank hasn't invented the cure yet. Aiding them is Geoffrey's fiancee Helen, who is disgusted by Geoffrey's invisibility, which doesn't put her in good hands when the formula starts making him distrust those around him. Complicating matters further is the fact that Geoffrey soon forgets about the cure and becomes dangerously obsessed with using his newfound power to exact revenge for his sentence...as well as possibly take over the world. 

First the good: I jumped on how the real horror of The Invisible Man was not his unnatural appearance, or even his ability to get away with any crime, but his decline into madness. Rather than poke at such a theme, The Invisible Man Returns makes it the central conflict, and to good effect. It allows the film to do what any sequel should: expand on its predecessor. Speaking of things being used to good effect, the movie also toys around with the invisibility effects, which vary in degree of impressiveness. Like all Universal sequels, there's a lot of recycled material, but because even Universal wouldn't stoop so low as to steal scenes from a seven-year-old film, most of what we see is fresh. There's a great shot where a cop literally smokes Geoffrey out with his cigar, with the smoke pooling around the outline of his invisible body. Similarly, the lengthy sequence where Geoffrey bedevils a thug to extract the identity of the real murderer does make the film at least somewhat worth it. Plus, they even get around the inevitable nudity jokes about an Invisible Man (who obviously can't wear clothes if he wants to be invisible), which are pretty bold for what I've seen from '40s films. That's not to say that they're really that controversial or funny.

What's interesting to me about The Invisible Man Returns is that it shows to me why the Invisible Man, despite having five films to his credit by the time of the making of House of Frankenstein, never showed up in any of the monster rallies. While the original film was played for horror, this one works much better as a revenge thriller. I suspect we'll see the full blossoming of this assertion in Invisible Agent, which as far as I know makes no effort to work as a horror film at all.

Obligatory title nitpick: the Invisible Man does not Return in this film, the original one, anyway. He is still dead, and will be for the remainder of the films. Meaning it will presumably be difficult for him to get Revenge in four years too!

Obligatory continuity nitpick: who is the Invisible Man at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? The fact that he is voiced by Vincent Price seems to suggest that he is Geoffrey Radcliffe, but--spoiler alert--Geoffrey is cured of his invisibility at the end of this film so he can have a happy ending, and one would presume the pain invisibility inflicted on him would make him unwilling to become invisible again just to torment two bunglers! Ignoring a silly Real World explanation like, "Vincent Price was probably the most convenient ex-Invisible Man to put in the cameo and they were also probably not worried about continuity in a comedy film," we can either presume that Geoffrey had a relapse and went crazy again, choosing to fuck with two people he never met, or this is the Invisible Man of The Invisible Man's Revenge impersonating the voice of his predecessor.

The Invisible Woman (1940):

...honestly, what the fuck?

If The Invisible Man started on the wrong foot, then The Invisible Woman had the proper foot amputated. We open with an atrociously stupid sequence of stiff slapstick hijinks with a butler which you'll swiftly notice become extremely awkward if you cover your ears to drown out the ostensibly whacky music. This long-suffering butler (whose actor cannot joke to save his life), works for Dick Russell, playboy extraordinaire. Russell has wasted his fortune on girls and booze, but also on bankrolling/investing in a scientist named Professor Gibbs, who believes he has discovered the secret of invisibility. (There's no mention of the Griffins, meaning this movie shares continuity merely by the title.) After introducing Russell to be our main character we ditch him almost entirely to follow Gibbs as he recruits a model named Kitty Carroll to be our titular Invisible Woman. Both Kitty and Gibbs use her invisibility for a variety of ends, including taking revenge on "Growly Growley," Kitty's abusive boss, and thwarting a mobster plot to steal and sell the invisibility formula. During this time we get supposedly funny invisibility gags that we've seen before, always crowned with repetitious and dull jokes that boil down to "oh my god she is invisible." These are broken up by a new type of invisibility scene--the sexy invisibility scene! Yeah, you never got to see Claude Rains or Vincent Price try on pantyhose while invisible. This sort of sleaziness is the kind I'd expect from a Doris Wishman film, not a fucking 1940s Invisible Man movie. Dick Russell comes back to the movie so that we can shove a romance plot into this and Jesus Christ just let it end. I can't even get into this movie's climax, which involves a callback to a scene which reveals the invisibility formula has a negative reaction with alcohol. Somehow this leads to--I think--a twist where Kitty can become invisible whenever she gets drunk, which helps her regain invisibility after being caught by the mobsters. And this leads into an even dumber ending involving an invisible baby and OH MY GOD

Bereft of nearly any redeeming quality (containing not a single joke that did anything more that slightly alter my breathing rhythm), The Invisible Woman is hopefully the worst Invisible Man movie of the bunch, and easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. I'm not kidding here, folks--this movie was torture. For comparison, two of my other least favorite movies are Night of Horror, a movie in which virtually nothing happens, and Humongous, a movie which spends 90% of the visual space of its runtime in total pitch blackness. Both of those movies, however, are merely boring, whereas this one is offensive. Though it contains significantly less sexism than I was expected, and never gets racist, ableist, homophobic, or generally hateful or meanspirited, it is so unspeakably dumb and lazy that it shames even Dracula. And at times, it contains the boredom of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Don't get a movie that can do both. Boredom plus lazy, stupid comedy is a death sentence for a film in my judgment. There's no use telling me "it was another time" as far as the comedy is concerned: I've seen enough movies to know that this sort of shit would be dated and flat even when it was released. Universal spent nearly $300,000 on this in 1940, which comes out to about $5,000,000 today. Not a single fucking penny of that was justified. I apologize for being brief with the review for The Invisible Woman, but my desire to never remember this film's existence leads me to such brevity; I would say that one would have to watch it for oneself to understand just how bad this movie's plot, acting, and comedy are, but no. Never, ever watch this lousy excuse for a movie.

Invisible Agent (1942):

I was sweating when I started Invisible Agent, fearing a repeat of its predecessor. I couldn't imagine them trying to do something that stupid twice, but mercifully, Invisible Agent is only a comedy in that it is a World War II propaganda film, which has obligatory funny bits leveled against Nazis. While it generally stays within the propaganda mold, being flat but occasionally entertaining, and only sometimes annoying, it doubles in its own way as a superhero film, making it at the very least a fun way to spend eighty minutes.

We open to an American city, in the print shop of Frank Raymond, ne Griffin--nephew, son, or grandson of "Frank Griffin Sr." (The movie itself expresses ambiguity in this relationship, as if unsure how much time has passed since The Invisible Man Returns.) A group of Nazis, led by Peter Lorre (who seems to be intended to be Japanese, reflecting his playing of detective Mr. Moto), confront Griffin Jr. and demand the location of the invisibility formula. He manages to overcome them and escape, and the incident causes the U.S. government to urge Frank to give them the formula, in case they need it for an emergency. "There's no emergency that could necessitate such a thing," Frank assures them, but then, without warning--Pearl Harbor! Suddenly Frank is the first man to sign up for the invisibility program, and he becomes the Invisible Agent. From there we see him fight and sneak his way into Germany, where he befriends Maria Sorenson, wife of a Nazi officer, who is nonetheless opposed to the Nazis. Maria is having several key Nazi officers over for dinner, and Frank takes this as an opportunity to spy on them, and stop some of their schemes.

Really, it was cathartic to get a film of this quality after one as awful as The Invisible Woman. While it's not great--it's a propaganda film, after all--it still manages to hold one's attention. Jon Hall does a good job as Frank Raymond/Griffin, so it will be fun for him to come back, albeit as a different character, in The Invisible Man's Revenge. Peter Lorre holds up his reputation--this is my first movie with him and it was a good show of his talents. He manages to give a relatively dignified white-guy-as-Asian-guy performance by 1940s standards--his natural features made it unnecessary to put him in the usual yellowface makeup of the time, and he doesn't speak with an affected accent, nor does he speak in broken English. The only thing that happens that's stereotypical is when he commits seppuku, but even then, Japanese soldiers and agents did commit seppuku during World War II. The performance he gives, especially in the opening scene, comes across sometimes as something akin to if Marlon Brando showed up in a Bert I. Gordon film. Kinda nice when it's not just stiff guys in suits reciting lines at each other, isn't it? The pants of nearly everyone within five hundred miles of Lorre come off, because he acts them off of those people. I should actually see one of his good movies, I suppose.

Rest assured, the bulk of Invisible Agent is mostly stiff people in various tight clothes reciting lines at each other. It doesn't matter--there's not poorly framed butler slapstick! Joking aside, there are some interesting thematic things of note here. Namely, the only people who end up viewing invisibility as a bad, scary thing as the bad guys. When Frank meets Germans who aren't sympathetic to the Nazis, they call his invisibility wonderful. What's more is that Frank Griffin Jr. was able to work out the old insanity-causing kinks in his forefathers' formulae. This really cements my suspicion that the Invisible Man films are only horror films by distorted reputation only--they are sci-fi thrillers, when they aren't diving into the horrific deeps of humor. Invisible Agent is especially interesting because it shows a Griffin taking back the evil of his predecessors and making it into a force of good. Invisible Men before him wanted to become dictators, but he uses their means to crush dictators. Despite its overall ordinariness, Invisible Agent may resonate with modern viewers most strongly, least of all because of the ongoing popularity of superhero films. After all, would a great deal of us not use the power of invisibility, if we had it, to deck Nazis in the face? Now more than ever do we need the work of Dr. Griffin...

The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944):

We have one more look back at a serious entry in the Invisible Man series before returning to comic relief. I have hopes that Abbott and Costello will be at least a little better than Kitty Carroll and Professor Gibbs, even if I still proceed with trepidation.

On a chilly night, a rude, disturbed man comes into an old tailor shop to buy a suit and hat. He seems paranoid, claiming he doesn't want to be spied on--though he regains control of himself. When he leaves, the tailor goes through his pockets, finding a newspaper article identifying his customer as Robert Griffin, an escaped mental patient! However, Griffin doesn't appear overly crazy, or at least, he has good reasons for his madness: he is a victim of his old friends, Jasper and Irene, who screwed him out of a fortune in diamonds in Africa a few years ago, by knocking him over the head sending him to the mental institution. In doing so, they also cut him off from his girlfriend, their daughter Julie. After nearly drowning and being saved by an annoying comic relief hobo named Herbert, Griffin finds himself in the strange company of Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine) who wants to turn a man invisible to become famous--he's already succeeded with a parrot and a dog. Griffin agrees, and when the formula succeeds, he forces Jasper to sign over all of his property to him, and tries to interfere in Julie's new relationship with reporter Mark Foster. When it transpires that the only way to become visible again is with a full-body blood transfusion, he drains Drury's blood, despite the doctor's warning that he will lose his visibility again after a short while. When Herbert learns that Griffin has regained visibility he demands money, but Griffin abuses him before finally paying him off. This turns out to be a eucatastrophe of Tolkienesque proportions when Herbert (the beaten, discarded Gollum of this story, allowed to live against his would-be killer's better judgment) helps stop Griffin from stealing Mark's blood when his invisibility fails again. Griffin can't be allowed to live for his hubris and thus Drury's dog tears his throat out. The moral seems to be that this was the intervention of God himself...oh, we are so far from Claude Rains.

The Invisible Man's Revenge is...disappointing. By now the wonder of invisibility effects have worn off and they are used so sparingly and weakly here that they fail to hold our attention. The movie drags, and it doesn't help that one of the things it borrows from its progenitor is the breaking of tone. Both The Invisible Man and its fourth sequel will show us (or more usually tell us about) the power of invisibility used for mayhem and murder, and then show us (more usually than telling us about) the power of invisibility used for practical jokes and other such flimsy forms of comic relief. There's very little gravity in the film to begin with due to its plodding pace, and when these whiplash moments break it up it derails the movie more and more, until the "he tampered in God's domain" ending feels like a slap in the face. If it had been twenty minutes shorter and faster, we would have something on par at least with The Invisible Man Returns. I can say at least that I didn't hate the film, but it was a mediocre effort at best, a sign that Universal was stuck in the rut. It's too bad that they couldn't inject it with some of the spare craziness from House of Frankenstein two doors over.

I don't know what else to say. A member of the Griffin family becomes invisible and takes revenge on those who wronged him. There is nothing to add to that, save for the odd fact that Robert is not overtly connected to the Griffin family we've been generally following so far. In fact, it's specified that he has no family, which I presume means that if he is a relative, Frank Raymond was killed by the Nazis or something. So another Griffin from a good movie bites the dust. C'est la vie...speaking of Frank Raymond, I guess I could also add that Jon Hall does a decent job in this one. He is much better in Invisible Agent as a cocky, invincible Invisible Man--vengeful, sinister Robert Griffin is a bit beyond his acting range. Perhaps if they had ever decided to try for something like House of the Invisible Man or The Invisible Man's Ghost or whatever, we could have seen him try again.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951): 

And so the largely unpredictable Invisible Man series draws to a close with its obligatory comedy nightcap. My fears were unjustified--this is by far no repeat of The Invisible Woman. While Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man will slip out of my memory in a matter of days, if not hours, it still has a few moments that make it salvageable.

Bud and Lou's characters, this time, are named Bud and Lou. They are recent graduates of a prestigious detective agency and soon open their own practice--their first client is escaped boxer Tommy Nelson, accused of murdering his manager. With the help of the detectives Tommy reunites with his fiancee Helen (the second love interest named Helen featured in the series now) and her uncle, Dr. Gray; the doctor has recreated Jack Griffin's invisibility serum, insanity side effects and all, and Tommy intends to use it to find the real murder. Though they're initially interested in the reward offered for Tommy's capture, they soon side with the Invisible Man, leading inevitably to Lou's own career as a boxer, and a match with the presciently-named champion Rocky. Of course, all is mended--the real killer is caught, and Tommy is made visible again via blood transplant from Lou, who gains some of the invisibility serum in term. Except the serum wears on and off again at random, and also apparently turns his legs around backwards, condemning him to a long life of great pain and inconvenience. Finis.

Pffft...a better title would be Abbott and Costello Meet an Invisible Man. What a ripoff--no Claude Rains, no Vincent Price, not even Jon Hall! And for what lousy excuse, that they actually had careers that were leading them places in a way totally unlike Abbott and Costello? I kid. While it's definitely a step down from Meet Frankenstein, this movie still has a few laughs, even if it's clear that Bud and Lou are sort of going through the motions at this point. Plus the two apparently lack some of their former mobility--shots of Lou crawling under things are sped up, and it's hard to tell if they're trying to play the effect for laughs or if Lou Costello legitimately couldn't crawl at a reasonable speed at his age. I can't be too harsh, though. We'll see where I stand when I see the pair again in four years' time...

Most of what I laughed at was Abbott and Costello's mimery when it to interacting with the invisibility man. All the effect bits with floating books and cigarettes and whatnot is hat eighteen years old by this point, but once again, the professionalism of the pair sells a lot of gags that The Invisible Woman absolutely couldn't. Similarly--and tellingly--the puns and one-liners based around eyes and seeing and not seeing and how weird and shocking invisibility is and all that brainless, skim-at-the-top horseshit that Invisible Woman tried to foist on us is kept to a distinct minimum. Though they pushed their way through a lot of awful scripts in their time, it seems as if Costello and Abbott had at least some standards.

It's also interesting to me that this movie maintains actual continuity. Not only do they mention Jack Griffin by name, but they show a picture of Claude Rains to back this up! This is actually meant to be a sequel to the 1933 film, while Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein seemed to operate in its own universe, barely mentioning any plot details from the original Dracula and Frankenstein (certainly nothing of the sequels) and restoring Larry Talbot's lycanthropy after it was removed in the film that came before. I suppose, though, that fewer people would have seen The Invisible Man, while Frankenstein and Dracula were beloved and memorized the world over. There would be greater need to establish the concept before getting on with the whackiness.

Again, I will not remember this movie or any of its scenes or lines in just a little while, and it's not a worthy end to the series, but it is relatively inoffensive and it did not overly bore me (even if I have to dock points for all the time we have to spend looking at 45-year-old Lou Costello's nearly nude body). Once more I will settle for pale mediocrity to escape the sad depths that this series fell to.

Next time, we wrap things up once and for all with a look back at the Mummy!

---

Image Sources: Wikipedia, Classic Movie Posters, Universal Horror Wiki

Book Club of Desolation #6: The Fangs of Suet Pudding (1944), by "Adams Farr"

The deeper I've dug, the more I've found that there are a few author that are (in)famous for being particularly odd. Obviously this includes Harry Stephen Keeler and Lionel Fanthorpe. But the name Adams Farr was a moniker I kept coming upon over and over; it seemed to represent a semi-renowned, semi-respected literary anomaly. Though Farr's name is probably false, Farr was the writer of The Fangs of Suet Pudding, a book seen as something of a hidden classic--the title and general premise have bewildered writers ranging from Russell Ash and Brian Lake in Bizarre Books to Chris Mikul in Biblio Curiosa. I had to check it out for myself, and I've found that the legends are true: The Fangs of Suet Pudding is legitimately good while also being intensely idiosyncratic. It's an artifact from a world that couldn't be replicated, for reasons regarding the time in which it was written, and regarding the presumed facts about "Adams Farr."

Fangs centers around Loreley Vance, a young English girl living with her aunt in France during the German invasion. Her life is changed forever when a burglar named Pugg breaks into her house, an act which naturally leads to their friendship. He takes her to a dance and introduces her to another boy, wealthy aristocrat Bobby Treslin, and the three of them, along with an exile from "Troubania" called The Dictator, get caught up in the machinations of the Nazi officer Carl Vipoering, aka Suet Pudding, whose head resembles the beefy dish for which Loreley names him. While France falls apart around them, they stop each of Vipoering's schemes, while he seems to toy with them, insisting on playing snakes and ladders with Loreley and somehow escaping their every attempt to kill him. Did I mention he also smells like "crushed violets"? The good guys win in the end, but not before enduring some...legitimate trauma. For indeed, this is a book about war written during the war it describes. Adams Farr saw some shit. Whoever they were.

The intro and back cover of the Ramble House edition speculate that Loreley Vance is a self-insert character, and that "Adams Farr" was an English teenage girl. This ties in handily with the realism of how the character of Loreley is depicted, and with the weird prose eddies that marble the book. In the case of the latter, there's an odd blend of eternal Britishisms, inside-jokes, and words used incorrectly but with meaning. Consider the following: "Aunt Sophie sniffed. It was the kind of sniff that said: I TOLD YOU SO, DEAR BOY! in Hindustani." Or how about the fact that Loreley says she was introduced to Bobby's "blond size," or her reference to someone possessing "that pre-Boer-War spirit"? These are signs of an overly-cryptic and inexperienced but otherwise talented writer. While I never could and never will be able to write something nearly as charming as Fangs, I see the same mistakes I made when I was a teenager. It's youthful ambition, raw experimentation, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Assuming this theory was true, I wish Adams Farr, whoever she was, wrote more. It's entirely possible she did--we would never know.

My mind flooded with comparisons as I read this book. In terms of literature, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson (extraordinarily charismatic prose) and R.L. Stein's Goosebumps (bizarre/hilarious chapter cliffhangers). Jackson and Stein's vastly different works show worlds where the supernatural exists, and this other world is sometimes a benefit, answer, or sublime experience for the protagonists. Oftentimes they learn that the weird powers they've encountered are evil. It's a simple story of the innocence of youth being taken away by a brush with something beyond comprehension, or explanation: the mirror that makes you invisible also replaces you with an evil mirror double, or the trip to the beautiful old house, escaping your mother at last, ends with suicide at the base of a tree. In this case, the supernatural is replaced by the circumstances of War. Loreley is at first excited to live in France, thrilled by the notion of war, and charmed by the Chateau her friend Bobby lives in. Slowly, the War becomes both terrible and omnipresent, and takes away whatever enthusiasm she has. Over time, we learn that Pugg's family was killed, and we see civilians run in fear as the Nazis overrun Paris, bombs erupting around them. For all the whimsy, there's a chilling seriousness beneath.

I came up with movie comparisons too. The honest innocence of the work and its infringement by maturity made me think of an entertaining version of Valerie's Weekend of Wonders. It shares its "extreme European-ness" attribute as well. Of course, in terms of style and prose, this is like Nathan Schiff's Super 8 movies. Again, youthful experimentation. Kids Goofing Off. In terms of Nathan Schiff, I primarily mean Weasels Rip My Flesh and Long Island Cannibal Massacre--nowhere does this film get as dark as Vermilion Eyes. Once again: dark but whimsical, not graphic and stomach-churning.

Ultimately, this is a legitimately good book, even outside of trash terms. The writing is good, the plot is fun, and the characters are wonderfully memorable. Not just Suet Pudding, he-of getting Aunt Sophie drunk on cognac as part of his master plan to conquer Europe--but everyone. The Dictator, who learns the meaning of freedom in the course of fighting an evil bigger than himself. Bobby and Pugg, who form a charmingly clumsy attraction-triangle with Loreley. Aunt Sophie, who gets a piece of the action with a few chances to clobber some Nazis. And Loreley herself, who is self-aware, witty, and mature but with youthful imagination and inexperience. If you can stand having your brain twisted around now and then, this is a classic. Check it out.

SS Girls (1977), by Bruno Mattei

Recently, as Adam Mudman's A-List has come up on around thirty posts, I've gone back and reflected on what I've presented these last few months, and in doing so, I've tried to think of ways to make this blog relatable while also fulfilling my eternal mission of relaying the alien qualities of the movies I tend to highlight. After all, weirdness obtains greatness primarily in the context of normalcy, as insufferable as that context can be. In essence, I need to compare more of these movies to movies you're likely to have ever seen, like The Great Escape and Salon Kitty. Okay, there's a smaller chance you've seen Salon Kitty, which is unfortunate given that SS Girls (or Private House of the SS, I guess) is basically a remake of that. Except it's made by Bruno Mattei, he of Women's Prison Massacre and Hell of the Living Dead, and so this is like The Great Escape if there were prostitutes, blood-drinking, and Gabriele Carrara.

Brilliant and shining Gabriele Carrara! He is the star of this film, as he plays enthusiastic Nazi fanatic Hans Schellenberg. The line in the sand is drawn at him--there's no point in making comparisons from here on it. By merit of its star, SS Girls transcends any sort of expectations one can have for a World War II film.

It's 1945, and the Wehrmacht has been invaded by a buncha lousy Hitler-haters. The SS employs Hans Schellenberg to rip the truth out of five officers suspected of a plot to betray the Fuhrer, and so with the aid of Frau Inge and Professor Jurgen, Schellenberg acquires a group of prostitutes who are swiftly conditioned for any sort of sex, unnatural or otherwise, and likewise honed to physical perfection. Schellenberg then invites the officers to a proper Third Reich orgy, where people do all sorts of things that I'm sure the Nazis really did at their orgies, like lick wine off of people. As this occurs, Herr Schellenberg climaxes while playing the organ, and caresses nipples creepily but never does the deed himself. The plot succeeds and the officers, in throes of passion, confess to hating Hitler. They are put on trial by Schellenberg dressed in a Nazi Pope uniform, and promptly disposed of. Movies over, right? Of course not! We haven't yet gotten to see the next batch of officers Schellenberg and his girls are given to work on, including a blood-drinking guy and a Japanese Nazi with a Swastika drawn in permanent marker on his dishcloth headband. So it goes.

Claudio Fragasso wrote this, and so basically it's the same type of dialogue you'll see in Troll 2. Despite the subject matter, it surprisingly doesn't have someone exclaim, "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me!" But instead, we do get gems like a quip by General von Kluger, the eyepatch-Nazi: "I may only have one eye but I've seen the orders and it's a fact...we're abouta get more pussy than we can handle." If you've seen any Italian movie from the '70s or '80s you will hear the same voice cast/accents, and it will be like coming home. No one is a European, and no one is as excited as Gabriele Carrara's dub actor, who, judging from the flawlessness of the performance, may well have been Carrara himself.

It truly is Carrara who makes the entire thing dodge any description but "operatic." I'm sorry, I know that's a pretentious thing to say, but this is the kind of acting I feel I need fancy glasses to watch. Perhaps Schellenberg himself says it best when he says, "It's almost like a play...that's it...a play." This line is followed immediately by his snarfing down a mouthful of roast chicken, clearly representative of the scenery. Either Carrara was a secret acting genius whose great talent allowed him to produce such a confusing performance (he only appeared elsewhere in Mattei's Women's Camp 119 and a Mondo flick called Mutant Sexual Behaviour), or he believed this was how Nazis really acted, and he believed in realism so much he was willing to die for it. The man does basically kill himself throwing his body and voice into the level of camp to which he stoops. I've never seen anything even fucking close to it.

Fortunately, it is generally comparable to other Nazisploitation movies, at least on the surface. There's the sex aspect, and gross sex at that. Schellenberg's girls learn to screw German shepherds and circus freaks in scenes that will make you cringe, then laugh your heart out. It's not Joe D'Amato at the wheel, so everything's softcore and none of the ghastly stuff is real. But at the edges of this seemingly normal abnormal sexuality is something greater. A normal Nazisploitation film wouldn't include a scene of a Little Person SS Officer lip-syncing to the Headless Horseman's laugh in the 1949 Disney Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nor would it feature a scene in which a Nazi Pope shrieks "Am I funny, huh? Am I funny, huh?!" at a crowd of confused onlookers. So even if you have entered the deep levels of Nazisploitation and that has become your norm, this is even farther away. Farewell, Great Escape, I guess.

SS Girls is marred by one of the traditional faults of Nazisploitation, which is tedium. After the first and second batches of traitorous Third Reich Benedict Arnolds are done away with, we're left with a long half-hour in which the brothel reacts to news of Hitler's death. Not much of interest happens here, but that's okay. As long as we have that first hour, all will be well. The world will keep being a better place.

I was introduced to this movie about six months ago, but it feels like I've known it for lifetimes. The images strung together that make this movie are so random and wild that they always come out of nowhere, even when I know they're on their way. It's so relieving that this is emblematic of most of Mattei's movies, even some of his crasser and grosser ones.

And here, I started by saying that I wanted to take about being relatable. I chose a poor movie for the job, given that it's best measured in degrees of inverse relatability. Basically: take everything you know about a World War II movie. Then, translate your understanding of those movies into an equivalent amount of confusion and unfamiliarity. From there do everything you can to accept that anti-comprehension. Once you do accept it--you'll be free to laugh endlessly.

I can't say I'll be able to promise grounding and stability the next time around. My tastes have become too distorted for that. But again, if you can turn yourself inside out, you will find a great bliss. Bruno Mattei will guide you down this Stygian river more smoothly than anyone else, so if you can stand a lot of boobs, a lot of dubs, and a lot of tasteless exploitation, spend an evening with this one.