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

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

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

Frankenstein (1931):

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bride of Frankenstein (1935):

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

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

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

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

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

Son of Frankenstein (1939):

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

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

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

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

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942):

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Dracula (1931):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dracula's Daughter (1936):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Son of Dracula (1943):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Glen or Glenda (1953), by Ed Wood

I think it's safe to say that by merit of the Internet alone, Edward D. Wood Jr. will never, ever be forgotten from the annals of humanity. In a hundred years time he will be remembered just as surely as Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, or Martin Scorsese. What I've been able to conclude from my short years on this Earth is that oftentimes it is the volume of one's reputation that counts, not the purity of it. We have reached a moment in history where bad is worth the same as good as long as it's in equal proportions--this has demonstrated itself in ways both good and bad. On one hand, humanity continues to prove to me on a regular basis that it is easily blindsided by cheap celebrity to the point where it is willing to encourage an avatar of the frothy, screamy discord of reality TV to attempt to fuse its ugly mass with the terminal controlling a significant number of the world's nukes. But on the other hand, there still is something special about praising and embracing the awfulness and mediocrity of our collective failures. I'm sure it's a matter of scale--Ed Wood never became President of the United States nor pioneered a depressingly hideous orange wig (even if wig-wearing is the theme for today). But there's something else going on, too. While most people are quick to call Ed Wood "the Worst Director of All Time," they seem to lump in the notion that he was an idiot.

Wood was most definitely not stupid. He worked within the confines of poverty, true, but his movies feel more like studio films than many of the flicks highlighted on this site. Perhaps he couldn't stretch his funds as far as an H.G. Lewis or a Roger Corman, but he wasn't as amateurish as many make him out to be--and arguably, the entertainment factor of his films exceeds that of Lewis' or Corman's. In addition, his legendary guile in obtaining the money he used to produce his pictures rivals that of Corman at his most infamous. He was a storied man, willing to suffer for his art. What was more confining for him was media. Studying Wood's writing, through his pulp prose and his scripting, we see ideas that exceed his budgets, yes, but which also exceed the conventions of what he's working with. He's trying to build a time machine with nothing but a screwdriver. If at some point in the future we can make movies that are telepathic and send emotions to the viewer, we should bring Ed Wood back from the grave in a computer or something so that all his films can be remade. Then we will finally glimpse the ecstasies and tortures of the soul within.

I say this because Glen or Glenda is perhaps the trippiest movie Wood ever made, barring perhaps the later Orgy of the Dead. It is also Wood's drive-in expose of transvestism and "pseudo-hermaphroditism," a bizarrely prescient docu-drama on transgender politics, decades before it was considered anywhere close to acceptable to be openly trans in the U.S.

Describing Glen or Glenda as a narrative is a little tough because of said trippiness. We open, naturally, with a dark parlor where Bela Lugosi is sitting, and where he will sit for the rest of the movie when he isn't mixing chemicals or superimposing himself over stock footage. Already I have to say that you have to watch this opening sequence for yourself to understand the full scope of it: in case you haven't seen Plan 9 from Outer Space or Bride of the Monster, Ed Wood is largely famous for the fact that his dialogue makes absolutely no fucking sense. Quoth the famous Criswell: "Future events such as these will affect us in the future!" (Plan 9 12:1). With that sort of garbage coming out of Bela Lugosi's mouth it is absolute pure entertainment. Lugosi will appear throughout the movie to do things like show us a buffalo stampede or mock us with nursery rhymes. We see the police find a dead man who is dressed as a woman--in hir suicide note ze mentions how many times ze's gone to jail for transvestism, and how ze wants to die as ze wanted to look. One of the policeman begins talking this over with a psychiatrist, who tells us two stories (one of which contains a story within the story), concerning Glen/Glenda and Alan/Anne. Glen(da) strives to hide his transvestism from his fiancee Barbara, especially when she expresses her disgust over the idea of sex changes when she reads a newspaper article about them. We learn about how Glen's transvestism comes about and what it all means: he was encouraged to wear his sister's dresses because she felt he looked better as a girl (and she only wanted daughters); and he seems to only be interested in wearing the clothing of women, insisting that he is heterosexual and does not desire a sex change. Here's where I should point out that this is a pretty strong parallel to Wood's own life as a heterosexual cis transvestite who began cross-dressing in youth (Wood also plays Glen/da in what is a legitimately good performance). He decides not to tell Barbara his secret until after the wedding, leading to a sequence where a legitimately-creepy Satan presides over the wedding and chants "Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails" in tandem with an increasingly-spooky Bela. Along the way we learn about how Alan/Anne is a transvestite who becomes excited and enticed by the prospect of a sex change, especially after ze finds out ze's intersex, possessing female organs as well as male ones. Ze eventually undergoes gender reassignment, and we learn about hormone therapy as well as top and bottom surgery in as much detail as the '50s could allow--a surprising amount, as it happens. Both Anne and Glen get their happy endings, as Anne is able to pass and live as a cis woman to all appearances as she wanted, and Glen is accepted by his wife, who wants to let him have the things that make him happy.

As a queer person in the 21st Century you may imagine that I don't regard the 20th Century with much fondness. All the same, I am finding out that, just as there have always been people like me, there have always been cracks for us to find our homes in. There was an LGBT+ community in the 1950s, even if it wasn't something that could be out in the open. For all my research shows, Wood presents an honest view of the decade that cracks not only stereotypes about that point in history, but it also chips the very real heteronormative suppression of queer folk and experiences of the era: when he says that there are many men who aren't men or who don't shy away from "female" clothing among the American public he is not lying. As this movie was being shot and screened there were thousands of queer folk and transvestites doing their thing behind locked doors and closed curtains. That's not even getting into the fact that this a pro-intersex movie in 1953 when there is virtually no representation of intersex folk (much less positive ones) sixty-four goddamn years later. In any case: whether they were persons queer in body, sexuality, or gender, or if they were people with differing ideas on the concept of fashion, people like me existed even when we weren't "supposed" to. And that gives me hope, in the same way the final scene of Some Like It Hot does; it shows that there were spots where we weren't funny, or freakish, or mentally ill. We were people that our straight cis loved ones could accept--there was always a small chance that we could be the people we wanted to be, get the bodies we were supposed to have. In addition to embracing these images, Glen or Glenda refuses to shy away from the harsh reality that a lot of us die, and when we do, the world still insists on dragging us through the mud. Throughout the movie, the characters are haunted by that front page headline decrying sex changes, attacking dead people who underwent them. Even our criminals, many of them, get better treatment when they shuffle off the mortal coil.

I'm sorry: it's impossible for me to communicate my feelings about this movie without being political. As an apology I should also show the movie's imperfections, of which there are many. There is a weird contrasting sense throughout the film that transvestism, and possibly the state of being transgender as well, should be "cured"; at times the movie refers to both transvestites and trans folk as "mistakes of nature" and "Frankenstein's monsters." There is also a condescending tone towards women, and notably there are no trans men, nor are there women who dress or try to pass as men. Similarly there is some implicit homophobia in Glen's insistence on being straight--and nope, no gay characters appear, as Anne is apparently attracted to men. On top of this is some mercifully brief but still marring racism, wherein it straight up compares "natives" (cue dancing Africans in tribal gear) to animals in order to make some nonfunctional parallel between gendered crests and mating rituals among birds and the plumage-like masks worn among the dancing men. It could be cut from the movie and nothing of value would be lost (although these moments do serve as an unpleasant reminder that yes, even those lacking privilege in society can be bigoted towards another underprivileged group). These are the inevitable bumps of this being commissioned explicitly as an exploitation flick; Wood's insistence on a message of love and acceptance shows that he at least had his heart in the right place, and I really can't help but wonder if these more exclusive elements were additions or mandates by the studio. After all, love and acceptance do not good exploitation make, even if it involves topics taboo at the time.

Glen or Glenda does a great job of capturing its creator's eccentric mind on film, which is what trash is: a record of a mind which could never be put at the reins of a mainstream production. We can see more of Ed Wood as a person just by watching this, even if--especially if--that includes dubbing in female voices by shifting the pitch of the dub on a clumsy tape recorder. Wood's obsessive earnestness combined with shockingly empathetic material makes me seriously question anyone who would call this one of the worst films of all time. It is cheap, yes, but it is not bad. You certainly can't call terrible a movie that ends with, of all things, Bela Lugosi sighing and chuckling over the silliness of the gender binary. By the way: this is Bela's best performance ever, and that is (probably) my final answer.

Sh! The Octopus (1937), by William McGann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), by Al Adamson

I don't know if I've ever seen a bad review of Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Those that I have seen have usually been by people who watch--ugh--good movies and can't stand anything that suggests that there is a cinematic economic class below that to which they are accustomed; or by folks who have confused it with the 1970s Dracula vs. Frankenstein made by Jess Franco, which is a life-draining experience. Adamson's film is the jewel in a crown which also contains wonders like Brain of Blood--it makes him a fond memory in the mind of trashsters the world over, and indeed, Dracula vs. Frankenstein has a strange archetypical quality about it that really does make it feel like a foundational pillar for trash cinema. As Top Hat is to musical films, Dracula vs. Frankenstein is to movies made by wide-eyed movie nerds with loads of ambition but not a penny to their name. Indeed, estimates suggest it took Adamson five years to make this film due to continuous budgetary issues. Which makes the final flick fascinating indeed--why, it almost feels like a real movie!

Dr. Durea runs a museum of wonders in a tacky seaside carnival. With the assistance of Grazbo, his Little Person carny barker who eats money and Grodim, his brain-damaged bruiser of a lab partner, he ekes out a cheap living privately trying to bring the dead back to life until he runs into Count Dracula. Dracula reveals that Durea is a descendant of the Frankensteins, and that he can help him get revenge on all the scientists who have snubbed him--after all, he has the original Frankenstein's Monster, and he will help Durea bring it back to life. Durea can hardly refuse, but the awful activities of the two will hardly go unnoticed. Friends of some of Grodim's victims begin closing in on Durea, until inevitably all falls apart, and the Monster of Frankenstein turns on the King of Vampires...

With a premise like that--dishonored son of House Frankenstein wants revenge, leading to teamup with and battle against Dracula--does really help sell the idea that this movie belongs somehow, doesn't it? Isn't that the exact plot of one of the later Universal movies? I can never keep them straight, and that's because this film is better than all of them combined. To me, Dracula vs. Frankenstein ends up becoming a paradox: it embodies the exact model of a series of movies that I hate (and I will make it no secret on these pages that I'm not fond of actually watching the Universal monster movies), and yet is one of my favorite movies of all time. I can't ignore the fact that it is bettered by arriving about thirty years too late, and by being an outsider to the studio system, for all its faults and glories. By using the Universal formula in 1971 (or earlier, depending on when Adamson commenced filming), the movie has a touching self-awareness about it that never makes it drop down from celebration to parody. It is indeed a celebration; Adamson, I think, presents himself as a '30s and '40s horror nerd by sheer merit of the film's plot. But in case you don't believe me, then examine this movie's casting decisions. Dr. Durea (pronounced Durray, Duhr-ee-AY, Drury, or Dray variously throughout the film) is J. Carroll Naish, of such Golden Age creepers as Dr. Renault's Secret, The Monster Maker, and House of Frankenstein. Grazbo is Angelo Rossitto, from Freaks and The Corpse Vanishes. And as you may already know, Grodim (or Groton, or Grahtim, or Groban) is the last appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. We also get Forrest J Ackerman, comic book writer/editor/superfan, as a character named Dr. Beaumont (which may be a reference to Edmund Gwenn's character from the 1936 horror film The Walking Dead--IMDB flat out claims they're the same character).

That someone as cheap as Adamson ended up with a cast like this definitely contributes to the memorability of the film. I have my own thoughts on each of them. Naish generally brings in the best performance in the whole damn thing, even when he's clearly reading cue cards, in a way that strangely precedes Marlon Brando's shockingly good work for Island of Dr. Moreau. (I'll get to that film soon enough.) He gives Dr. Durea both serious gravity and a hammy accent that suggests he's having the time of his life with the part. Rossitto has some of the strangest dialogue in the movie and for that I enjoyed his appearance greatly. He also plays a more sadistic "Evil Little Person" stock type in Brain of Blood who also gets some truly excellent stuff to say. That he flat out fucking eats a dollar bill not five minutes into the movie shows that we're in good hands. As for poor Lon Chaney, then: I can't be the first person to comment on how it is sad that the very last thing we see of the star of The Wolf Man in movies, forever...is him falling off a roof like a bag of mashed potatoes. Prior to this all he gets to do is mug and strike an Of Mice and Men impression. After watching this movie for this review, I continue my winter study of Bela Lugosi's career by watching The Black Sleep, an aptly-titled snoozer which features the admittedly impressive teamup of Lugosi with Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Tor Johnson, and yes, Lon Chaney Jr. And sure enough: Chaney basically plays Grodim in that movie, too. It's really odd that in the early parts of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, which were presumably shot first, Chaney looks no older than he did when Black Sleep came out in 1956, fifteen years prior to this film--and in that movie, he looked roughly the same as he did in The Wolf Man, released fifteen years before that! For someone who hit the booze and cigarettes as hard as Chaney famously did, he was well-preserved, or at least, well-made-up. In the later scenes, Chaney looks a much older and harder man, but that works to his advantage as the film implies and later forgets that he is a werewolf. Constant sweating, grunting, and panting definitely benefits the strain of trying to hold back such a transformation. And finally there is Ackerman; almost a nonentity in the film, he's a fun addition simply because I can thus pretend that this movie takes place in the same universe as Philip Jose Farmer's duology Image of the Beast and Blown, where Uncle Forry is kidnapped by sex aliens.

Whew! I could go on about this movie, but suffice it to say that I can hardly describe the pseudo-grandeur the casting obtains without offering the counterweight of the movie's trashiness. It still looks like a Nathan Schiff movie, and definitely feels like one too (perhaps by way of Waldemar Daninsky). Adamson's scripts feel unfinished, or more properly, nonexistent. We get odd moments where a man says to his girlfriend: "I wish I could hold you in my arms right now." Except...he does so while holding her in his arms, right then. Add that to the fact that none of Dr. Durea's technobabble makes sense from a grammatical or scientific standpoint. There are also several key points which ground this movie firmly in the '70s: namely, there are bikers, and at one point, the bikers try to rape someone. There are also hippies, who get dialogue like, "His body was chopped up all into little pieces! Man, it's a real bummer!" Perhaps it's these elements which further spare the '40s callbacks--they add to the fact that what we're looking at is a living comic book, replete with monsters, mad scientists, and awful haircuts. The dips through trashy weirdness make the film immune to the torrents of boredom, overhype, and insipid Abbot-and-Costello non-jokes of the Universal films it's based on.

Welcome to the A-List in 2017. If this is what my year looks like...I'm glad to be back.