Book Club of Desolation #18: Benighted (1927), by J.B. Priestley

Spookyween has come and gone, but Bookvember rises anew! We've gone fairly light on books this year, but this month we'll be making four stops to the Book Club of Desolation. Starting off our celebration of bizarre literature is Benighted. It was from Benighted that we got the 1932 film The Old Dark House, which everyone likes for reasons I'll never understand. The Old Dark House is, despite being the Trope Namer, a late addition to the Old Dark House subgenre; though the form would persist into and through the 1940s, the ODH film's peak was really in the late '20s. This year has seen me take a liking to these creaky old mysteries, and as such, I wanted to dip into the literary origins of this cinematic cluster; Benighted was one of those which was still available and which was actually readable. Mary Roberts Rinehart, I'm sure I will get to you at some point--but for now, let's just get the crap out of the way.

Indeed, Benighted is very crappy. That may be due to the fact that it bears a very close resemblance to The Old Dark House, only it manages to be less funny, more boring, and most damningly, it lacks Boris Karloff. But it was, however, readable, in a way that the original 1925 stage play of The Gorilla (for example) simply wasn't.* Our principle characters are Philip and Margaret Waverton, two travelers who are joined in their voyage through rural Wales by young Roger Penderel. The trio end up going through a heavy rainstorm, finding the sole shelter for miles in the form of mysterious old Femm Manor, ruled over by the bombastic, unbalanced Horace Femm and his religious fanatic sister Rebecca. The travelers are eventually joined by two other travelers whose names I can't remember. I do know that one of them is named Gladys, and she ends up as Penderel's love interest for all the jack diddly it ends up meaning in the end. For the rest of the book, the travelers endure the strangeness of the Femms and their disfigured alcoholic butler Morgan until events reach their violent pitch.

The primary issue which readers may run into concerning Benighted thankfully manifests itself right at the start. Simply put, the book is dull, with the opening driving scene which takes our three heroes to Femm Manor reaching Manos levels of absurd length.** Trust me, it makes you wonder about the literary audience of the late '20s when the first chunk of the book is just Priestley finding new ways of saying "It's raining." And this sets the pattern for the rest of the book in another way: too much of the material printed is wasted on re-summarizing what a ghastly storm this is. I would argue that most of the book is spent describing the weather or having characters talk about the weather. And when they talk--dear God.

This is yet another book which I have spent my precious reading time on this year which features a Party of Roving Twits. You probably know the kind, even if you haven't read any of the abominable thrillers of the '20s and '30s which feature the archetype (and which I keep reading because I'm an idiot with high hopes). Everyone who isn't a pretentious asshat is foppish and disengaged to the point of inducing aneurysm. I tried to find conversations between the protagonists that were both interesting and relevant, and was completely without luck. I hate books where all the women do is scream and all the men do is make faux-Wilde pithy observations on everything. Especially when both insist on using such unbearably Caucasian similes as "strange as a mandarin."

Which is sad, because there is at least some good stuff here. Our ostensible villains, the Femms plus Morgan the butler, are the ancestors of the Sawyers of Texas, the Merryes from Spider Baby, and all the other degenerate families living in isolation spread out over 90 years of horror fiction. There's a great part where we learn that Rebecca's religious obsessions may stem from the fact that when she was young she would witness her father and brother bring women home to conduct orgies! I guess I can hardly blame her after that. But too little time is spent with these folk, and this creates a sizable schism in the text. Really, it's almost like Priestley wrote two books--one, a spooky Gothic horror-thriller, and the other, a soppy romantic drama about idiots--and fused them together in layers like an Oreo mishap. Characters will engage in pointless dialogue...then be trapped in a flooding room...then, more pointless foppishness...then, Morgan attacks somebody...like I said above, I shouldn't have hoped for much when The Old Dark House was such a fitfully boring film.

If you distrust my opinion and want to read overlong accounts of people drinking gin, Benighted may be for you. But honestly you really should run away from it fast. I haven't entirely given up on the books and plays which inspired the ODH thrillers, but damn if this doesn't make me want to.

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* For those of you who mourn the loss of the first two adaptations of The Gorilla which predated the 1939 Bela Lugosi/Ritz Brothers travesty, don't. The original play's primary form of humor outside of the usual "cowardice is funny" shtick is making fun of black people. It was a repugnant read and I'm sure both the 1927 and 1930 versions preserved this rubbish, if I know anything about the films of the late '20s/early '30s.

** Quick! Someone remake Manos: The Hands of Fate as an old-time Old Dark House movie! You can add the gorilla from House of Mystery! It'll be great!

Image Source: Valancourt Books 

"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 5 (The Mummy)

The Mummy series is last not only on our list, but the last chronologically speaking as well; its final film, released in 1955, was the last breath of Universal's first wave of horror films. From here Universal would explore other options (they'd already started by the time of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948), and now The Mummy is to be remade as part of the new Universal Horror Shared Universe that is ostensibly in production.

On a more personal note, the Mummy series was the one I was looking forward to the most, simply because it was the one I knew the least about! Let's see if the wait was worth it...

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

The Mummy (1932):

"Boo! Hiss!" some of you may say. "The Mummy isn't really part of the Universal canon! The Mummy series is about Kharis, while The Mummy tells the story of the mummy Imhotep!" Well, as I said in the last entry, technically none of the Mummy films are expressly canon to the Universal horror-verse, being only linked by the tenuous thread of Abbott and Costello. At the same time, I feel like it would not only be pedantic to avoid watching The Mummy before checking out The Mummy's Hand, but it would take away the chance to have some fun, too.

We open in the desert near Cairo in 1921. Three men, Sir Joseph Whemple, Dr. Muller, and Ralph Norton are excavating the tomb of the Egyptian high priest Imhotep, who was apparently buried alive for sacrilege. Dr. Muller appears to be a student of the occult (sharing actor Edward Van Sloan with Dr. van Helsing, and basically doing it exactly the same), warning the two not to open the box they discovered near Imhotep's sarcophagus. Not only does Ralph do exactly that when the other two step away, but he reads off the ancient scroll, the Scroll of Thoth, that he finds within, with the expected consequence of awakening Imhotep. Ralph is driven mad and Sir Joseph abandons the site. But twelve years later, Sir Whemple's son Frank has come back to the camp to continue his father's studies. He is abetted in this by an Egyptian scholar named Ardath Bey, whom the audience is supposed to notice bears a striking resemblance to Imhotep after a shower and makeover--he leads Frank to the tomb of the ancient princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. When she is excavated and carted off to the British Museum, Ardath Bey ingratiates himself with Sir Whemple so that he may stay in the museum overnight, allowing him to perform a ritual of some kind to the mummy of Ankh-es-en-Amon. This begins to stir feelings in one of Dr. Muller's patients, a woman named Helen, with whom Frank begins to fall in love--Helen is the reincarnation of Ankh-es-en-Amon, and she is drawn to Ardath Bey. It was a forbidden relationship with Ankh-es-en-Amon that resulted in Imhotep's premature mummification--or at least, he was sad when she died and tried to use the Scroll of Thoth to bring her corpse back to life. (It's not really specified if she returned this sentiment in life.) By the time we've learned this, we already know that his power is no joke, apparently crushing Sir Joseph's heart. Next he has his eyes set on Frank, so that no man can interfere with his relationship with his resurrected bride...

I've sort of always thought that mummies were cool, and I think I have to conclude that the only reason why I feel that way is because I saw this when I was a kid. Sure, I clearly remember falling asleep, but watching it as an adult, it's not that boring. It has a slow pace, but I've been watching these movies for awhile and I'm used to it by now. The mystery of who the Mummy is and what he wants unfolds at a comfortable and rational pace, and we are kept in some classic suspense that Hitchcock himself would be proud of: I've already mentioned the fact that only we, the viewers, can know that the man who meets Frank to lead him to the Princess' tomb is probably Imhotep in disguise, so we feel horror upon making that recognition since we already know from that haunting opening scene that Imhotep is supposed to scare us shitless. Leading on from that, there's the bit where Ardath Bey dismisses himself from Sir Joseph's office when he realizes the two are not alone--since we know he's Imhotep and Imhotep is scary, we can assume that Ardath Bey's sudden resentment of company is due to the fact that he was going to kill Sir Joseph. But since this movie is good--and good movies make us care about them--why should we care if Imhotep does kill these people?

That leads us to a question you may be asking: how does this movie treat the archaeologist characters? The excavations of real-life mummy sites were oftentimes more disrespectful than the grave-robbers who cracked some of those tombs over the centuries before Westerners started poking their noses in the cemetery-spaces of brown people. One man's scientific preservation is another's theft, and I've read enough to be wary of how exactly certain museums acquired their artifacts. (Never trust an institution that has bought and will buy stolen art off the Nazis, that's what I always say.) Well, surprisingly, the movie is relatively sensitive to such things. They may not care enough to have the Egyptian nobles be played by, y'know, actual Africans, but Helen is notably offended by Frank's glee in his ghoulish description of plundering the tomb. Indeed, his talk of the act doesn't paint him in a heroic light, as he focuses on her treasure above all her other possessions, and it doesn't sound anything but profane when he talks about removing her bandages. Intriguingly, removing Frank as the hero (as the movie would lead us to believe he is, as he is the designated Young White Male Love Interest) shifts protagonist status to Helen instead, which is apt, as she is ultimately the one responsible for stopping Imhotep. Her disgust over Frank's assault on a sacred place reinforces to us modern viewers that she's the hero, and if her being the one to destroy the Mummy was meant to be a sign on behalf of the filmmakers that she is the hero, then that means they take a stance against grave-robbing as well. Hell, this even fits into early Universal's anti-science motif, as Frank and others justify their taking of tomb artifacts back to Britain as being FOR SCIENCE!!!!

Overall, The Mummy is an impressively good horror film, being the most successful at actually scaring me of the five series-openers. I can see where my fascination came from.

The Mummy's Hand (1940):

The Mummy's Hand is a pseudo-remake of The Mummy, and while the debate over the quality of remakes over originals has found compelling arguments on both sides that have left me a cold centrist, I can easily say that if you wanted to rule that movies should never be remade, even partially, this film is solid proof that remakes are shitshows, pure and simple. 

We open with a man named Andoheb meeting with his father, the High Priest of Karnak, who seeks to pass on his ancient knowledge. He tells him the story of Kharis, a priest of ancient Egypt, and the movie almost immediately derails itself by telling Kharis' story almost entirely through stock footage stolen from The Mummy. Yes, Kharis' story is basically the same, with Ankh-es-en-Amon replaced with a princess named Ananka, and the Scroll of Thoth replaced with the sacred tana leaves, but that's no excuse--Kharis actor Tom Tyler looks nothing like Boris Karloff, and though they strain to hide his face, it's easy to see that that's Boris Karloff. Anyway, it is the sacred tana leaves, brewed into a juice, that have carried out what appears to be the central goal of the Karnak cult, which is to keep Kharis' mummy alive. Three leaves brewed will sustain his life, but nine leaves will give him the power of movement. After introducing this, we meet our heroes for this movie, a loose cannon archeologist named Steve Banning and his comedy relief Brooklyn sidekick Babe. They are unbearable pricks and spend most of their introduction showing this, with Babe in particular demonstrating that some actors really are completely blind and deaf to the barest concept of humor. They, along with a scientist named Dr. Petrie and a woman of some occupation named Marta (who naturally becomes the Necessary Heterosexual Female Love Interest, so people are not suspicious of two men who keep close company with one calling the other "babe"), travel to the tomb of Ananka, where Andoheb awakens Kharis. Ultimately he wants the Mummy to capture Marta because he has fallen in love with her, and plans to make she and himself immortal, Kharis' own destiny of destroying the profaners of Ananka's tomb be damned. Unfortunately none of this comes to pass, and all of the designated protagonists live when Babe guns down Andoheb and Banning burns Kharis to a true death.

The lack of effort put into this movie, I think, can be placed on an obvious detail I noticed while watching. Universal evidently felt like they had mined the Mummy concept clean in their 1932 effort, and nonetheless sallied forth by making the opening few minutes of the film out of stock footage from The Mummy and fusing in elements from Dracula. Think about it: Kharis is a vampire. The tana tea is a parallel to blood; he can only operate under the light of a full moon (thus ruling out walking in daylight for him); and he begins the film as a relatively inert creature in a creaking tomb who must be fed. His presence is even highlighted by wolves, described as nothing less than "the children of the night"! Even if you believe that the Cult of Karnak and Dr. Andoheb are original additions, they essentially represent Dracula's Romani servants from Bram Stoker's original novel of Dracula. Throw in a heaping dash of the tonal problems from the Invisible Man series with some horrible comic relief, and you've got something nearly as bad as The Invisible Woman. Because there are still some interesting makeup effects, good performances, and well-used atmospheric shading, it's not irredeemable, but I would never watch it again. I can't believe they took a monster as neat as a Mummy and reduced it to a cheap sideways clone of one of their most poorly-executed monsters. I can only hope for improvement.

The Mummy's Tomb (1942):

If it was ludicrous for The Mummy's Hand to open with stock footage of The Mummy, then surely it's just straight-up moronic for The Mummy's Tomb to open with stock footage from The Mummy's Hand! No joke, the first twelve minutes of The Mummy's Tomb's 59 minute runtime is comprised of little but opening credits and stock footage. An older Steve Banning--probably about thirty years older if the appearance of his son, John, is any indication--tells his family the story of Kharis, which seemingly justifies this borrowing. After this we see an elderly Andoheb, evidently more bullet-proof than the previous film let on, mirroring the ritual he had with father in the prior film as he passes on control of the Cult of Karnak to a younger man named Mehemet Bey (played at least by a Turkish actor this time, Turhan Bey). It's not long before Mehemet Bey revives Kharis--who survived that all-consuming fire just fine, wrappings and all--to destroy those who profaned the tomb of Ananka. This means that Kharis not only kills Steve Banning, but his friend Babe as well! And Babe's death is long and drawn out. Unfortunately the filmmakers decided that doing something like showing the progression of generations in a franchise was too interesting, so we have Mehemet Bey fall in love with John Banning's fiancee Isobel and kidnap her to make the two of them immortal, in defiance of Kharis' wishes. (It's not like this repetition of history goes without comment--Kharis is clearly taken aback by the prospect of his present master following the fate of his first.) Somehow this all leads to the formation of an angry mob--did I mention this movie is set in Massachusetts?--with literal pitchforks and torches, which go on a hunt to burn the Mummy. Mehemet Bey is shot and killed by a minor character who had like maybe two scenes beforehand, and John Banning kills Kharis with fire. Then John and Isobel are married, as if we cared, represented in the film by a newspaper showing a photo of the two characters standing next to each other.

Everything about The Mummy's Tomb is completely pointless, beginning with the title. Only in flashbacks to The Mummy's Hand do we see Kharis' Tomb in any way. There is no genuine conflict because the characters spend most of their time trying to find out who's been killing people, but we already know who is it because they just fucking show us Kharis killing these people right away. Similarly, the film, which again is shockingly brief, jumps between story threads so frantically that there's no character development whatsover; the only reason why we care about anyone in the film is that they are opposed to Kharis and Mehemet Bey, and because they are related to characters from The Mummy's Hand, who I hated anyway. Piling on even more shit are scenes which appear to have been left in the film by accident. How do you explain the scene where Kharis rustles some bushes near a couple making out in a parked car (see how goddamn old this trope is?) only for said couple to drive off without incident, never to be seen again? At least I think we never see them again, and I'm pretty sure they aren't John and Isobel. Even if they are, I've already explained why I don't care. 

And whereas The Mummy's Hand was willing to make Kharis a metaphorical tana-leaf vampire out of a lack of creativity as far as escaping the Dracula mold went, The Mummy's Tomb's use of an angry mob shows that Universal was desperate to hang onto audiences by reminding them of Frankenstein. It's the same sort of obvious commercialism that afflicts so many of these films--I know I shouldn't be surprised, because these are sequels to movies that generally weren't very good anyway, but for The Mummy's Tomb to be even cheaper and lazier than The Mummy's Hand still feels like a harsh blow. I'm willing to give this movie credit because it was okay with killing off the meatheaded prick of an Indiana Jones wannabe and his mutant Lou Costello clone foisted on us in Hand, as old men no less, and in pretty drawn-out and horrible ways. Normally I find that killing the protagonists of a previous film in a series is done for crappy shock value, and that's probably why it was done here, but it was still pretty dang satisfying.

The Mummy's Ghost (1944):

We begin once again with an elderly Andoheb passing on the duties of Karnak (now called Arkam in a Vasaria/Frankenstein sort of thing) to a man named Yousef Bey, played by John Carradine. This time there is no stock footage but we need the story of Kharis and Ananka and their cursed love again. I'm surprised the filmmakers managed to remember that story accurately, when they couldn't recall that Andoheb is supposed to be pretty conclusively dead twice over now. Yousef Bey vows to fulfill the will of Kharis and of the gods of Egypt and all that stuff. We then go to a class taught by Professor Norman, a character from The Mummy's Tomb who I didn't bother mentioning because I didn't remember him. He is apparently teaching archeology and history when he explains what happened to him in the last film, and how he found out that the living dead are real--when he ends the class, he says, "Next time we'll be covering something more scholarly and curricular than living mummies." Can you imagine attending a class that reveals that there is/was a force on this Earth that could bring people back from the dead and keep them alive for centuries and then having to go back to memorizing dates and writing essays on the patterns on bits of pottery? Anyway...Kharis and Yousef Bey go to steal Ananka's mummy, but it collapses to dust, which I guess means that her soul has moved on to a new body. Hm...perhaps it's that Egyptian girl Amina, who keeps having fainting spells near the scene of Kharis' murders? She's really important, after all! She's the possible love interest of Tom, one of Professor Norman's students. Yeah, that's real important, especially now that the professor is dead. (His murder lacks even the dull amusement of his being an annoying character who deserved death.) Now, once Yousef Bey has Kharis kidnap Amina, would you believe that he falls in love with her and seeks to make she and himself immortal so they can live in eternal marriage? I guess now that Ananka's reincarnation is the girl on the line, and Ananka was Kharis' girlfriend, Kharis is willing to be the one to kill his own disciple. And because each of the Mummy films must rip off another Universal film (with this one already having taken the reincarnation plot from The Mummy), we have a sad twist ending, where the Generic White Male is left sans girlfriend, just like in Son of Dracula. Aw.

Okay, backing things up a bit on that ending: it is actually a little shocking that they'd be willing to condemn the female lead of the film to such a horrible death (which now that I realize it is the same fate as the Monster and Dr. Niemann in House of Frankenstein). But it's not that Amina drowns in quicksand with Kharis, but that she apparently ages rapidly at his touch, so Ananka's lost time can catch up with her. So by the time she and her past-life lover descend into their boggy new tomb (meaning that in a way this means that Kharis wins, since re-entombing himself and Ananka was his goal), she has aged to a mummy herself. It's a remarkably savage image for such an otherwise blunted movie, but what follows wrenches it a little bit: there's a voiceover line that warns that those who invoke the wrath of the gods must suffer a cruel and horrible death. At what point did Amina do anything to invoke the wraths of the gods?! As far as I saw, she was the victim here. I have no idea how to read this, beyond the obvious fact that They Just Didn't Care. Hell, even John Carradine is flat in this, and John Carradine has saved and/or benefited basically every movie I've seen him in. Where it not for the distance they were willing to go for one last shock with Amina's death, and for the fact that it doesn't waste an egregious amount of its runtime being stock footage (actually the movie appears to be stock footage-free, meaning that maybe they finally learned something), I would be willing to condemn this movie just as I did its two predecessors. We must be grateful for small mercies.

The Mummy's Curse (1944):

The Mummy's Curse is cursed to yet another rocky start, though it is mercifully not the same rocky start as the other Mummy films. We begin in a swampy area populated by Cajuns and Creoles, who oppose a corporate plan to drain the swamp containing the bodies of Kharis and Ananka. Wait, we're in Louisiana? Weren't the previous movies set in Massachusetts? And wait, now they're saying that the two Egyptians were entombed in the swamp twenty-five years ago, meaning that The Mummy's Ghost is set in 1919...and The Mummy's Hand is set in the early 1890s?!? Bullshit! But at least it isn't opening with stock footage or a training session for the next Priest of Arkam. That comes later, after we're introduced to our two archeologists, James Halsey and Ilzor Zandaab, who have come looking for the Mummy and put more stock in the local superstitions about the Curse of Kharis than the company operators. Of course, because Dr. Zandaab is Egyptian, we learn he is really the High Priest of Arkam, and as soon as he is introduced he wanders off to the conveniently-nearly abandoned monastery...where his student Ragheb has brought the Mummy of Kharis. Now we come to the reciting of the duties of Arkam (borrowed nearly line-for-line from the other movies), complete with stock footage pried from The Mummy, now looking more aged than ever. (It's almost like you shouldn't reuse footage from twelve-year-old films or something.) Kharis, renewed by tana brew, goes on a killing spree in an attempt to retrieve Ananka, whose Mummy also wandered from the swamps. Exposure to sunlight, however, has turned Ananka back to a living girl, though she seems to have the mind of Ananka and not poor Amina, whose body she's hijacking. So surprise, Ananka actually gets a little agency in this film, as she's decided upon gaining new life that she's not terribly interested in letting Kharis manhandle her body anymore. Swimming in all this is another subplot where Ragheb falls in love with Betty, one of the workers on the swamp-draining project, but Dr. Zandaab wisely reminds his pupil that selfish sexual interest and having Kharis as a coworker rarely mix (even though Kharis isn't interested in the girl the Priest is after this time!). So Ragheb kills Zandaab, and Kharis, in trying to kill Ragheb, kills himself along with his intended victim by breaking down the monastery and burying them alive. This causes Ananka to turn back into a Mummy--so much for agency--and Dr. Halsey, who has basically not been a character at all in this film getting banging rights to Betty over some of the most brainlessly sexist ending dialogue I've ever heard.

You may notice that I seem hopeful at the start of that synopsis, suggesting that this movie only has a bad start by its decision to mutilate the timeline of its series. Indeed, I was praying that the divergence from the ordinary formula, beginning with the passing on of the Priesthood of Karnak/Arkam, leading into Mummy murders for the sake of Ananka, leading into the Priest fucking things up and being killed by the heroes/Kharis, would be a consistent one. While the movie does break away from that formula, it embellishes it only slightly, moving some incidents around in the film and making it two Priests of Karnak instead of one. It doesn't matter--it's too brief to establish characters, and absolutely no effort is put into making it scary. I'm no longer counting novelty as a valid excuse for sparing a movie.

As this series has gone on, I've desperately scrambled to come up for any sort of justification of the existence of Kharis, beyond an interest in Egyptology when the Mummy films were made. Again, he is basically a slow-moving Egyptian Dracula, and even that defining feature gets sanded down as time goes on. He then starts to embody what the Frankenstein's Monster became, the supernatural hitman. Interestingly, Kharis is a hitman in his own quest--he's controlled by a higher power, but the Priests of Karnak use their control over him to attain what are ultimately his goals. Because the Priests of Karnak are apparent servants of Ananka, there must be a revenge angle against Kharis in using Kharis to retrieve and re-entomb Ananka, as Kharis was turned into a Mummy for trying to bring Ananka back to life, which was viewed as a heinous crime. So the Priests and Kharis are naturally going to have an antagonistic relationship--they need each other so they can find spiritual peace, but one is surely aware that he is just a glorified thug, and the other views said thug as a trespasser on what he holds sacred. But the fact that I've had to mull this in my mind for four movies now when this should be more clearly explored in the movies themselves shows that the sequels to The Mummy's Hand were generally flukes, born out of a desire to make money for than anything else, and I won't even start on the notion of people actually being fans of these movies. In my mind, I can't understand in any way why these movies are remembered with the same fondness and prominence as the Frankenstein or Invisible Man series. 

What I'm forced to conclude is that Universal was desperate to replicate the success of The Mummy but never applied logic to the process of making a new Mummy character. After all, what are Kharis and his Priests of Karnak if not Imhotep split into two characters? You have the slow murderous Mummy and the mysterious well-spoken sorcerer. Together, there is effective menace--a physical presence in the conflict and a mystical one as well. But none of the Priests we see have any character traits aside from "evil, Egyptian, and horny," and Kharis, having had his tongue cut out when he was mummified, never gets any character development, instead just being a foot-dragging strangle-murderer. There are many more better movies featuring evil horny people and strangle-murderers than this. By basing the series on a Mummy that exudes no threat or interest, it's no wonder Universal shit the bed so hard with these four. I've worried about the coming of Abbott and Costello--because I'm not sure there's anything at all for them to parody.

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955):

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is the last official Universal Horror film related to the original five franchises, and the second-to-last movie that Abbott and Costello made together. One can't expect the dignity of what we started with--long absent is The Mummy, along with Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. But fortunately, the movie is at least a little funny, and it is significantly superior to all the Mummy films bar the 1932 original, so it's not an awful end by any means.

Bud and Lou are in Egypt attending some weird, horrible dinner theatre when they overhear that the famous Dr. Zoomer is looking for two men to join him on an expedition to the Tomb of Princess Ara, which he has discovered by examining the Mummy of Klaris. (Yes, that's Klaris, not Kharis, and he seems to be a distinct Mummy.) Also overhearing this are the Followers of Klaris, who seek to regain their Mummy master's stolen body and stop people from reaching the Tomb of Ara. They retrieve Klaris, but fail to obtain the medallion that could leading clever explorers to the Tomb. Our explorers aren't terribly clever, but after some run-ins with the vicious treasure-hunter Madame Rontru they find their way to the Tomb as Rontru's prisoners. The leader of the Followers of Klaris, Semu, continues to hunt Bud and Lou to get the medallion, while Rontru's men decide to overthrow the cult by disguising one of their number as Klaris and placing him in Klaris' sarcophagus. But Bud and Lou get the same idea, knocking out and replacing the replacement. So there are three mummies together at the end when Madame Rontru's dynamite, wielded by an unknowing Klaris, blows up the Tomb and reveals the treasure of Princess Ara. Using this treasure Bud and Lou turn what's left of the Tomb into a nightclub, somehow receiving no complaints from academic and governmental boards for this desecration of a significant historical site.

I'd like this examination by reaffirming what I said at the beginning: this is better than all of the previous Mummy movies that came before (except the original), possibly combined. It has a much larger budget and is shot and acted better. It has momentum, action, characters with traits, purpose, and multiple sets and settings, which is more than I can say of The Mummy's Hand and all the films that followed it. What is more--and this hurts the film a little bit--the Mummy is actually an effective monster. Klaris is much more mobile than Kharis, and his makeup is vastly superior; in a true horror film, the distorted moan-screams he keeps making could actually be scary. Making Kharis mute was a terrible decision. Yes, silent monsters can definitely be terrifying. But a Mummy seems proper when it's gibbering horribly as it lurches towards you, assuming you want to take the lurching approach. Klaris also has a genuine cult at his fingertips, one which reveres him rather than treats him like a hitman, and which consists of much more than two members at a time. (Seriously, are the Priests of Karnak Sith Lords or something? You can hire more guys, you know!) Because this is a good comedy, not everything is played for laughs, so we get to see the cult's rituals, and it's a nicely atmospheric scene. Never mind the fact that the ritual sequence betrays that the filmmakers don't know the difference between Egypt and India--not only is there a gag with an Indian rope trick before the ritual scene, but during it the Followers of Klaris dance in a distinctly Hindu-like fashion, even doing the multi-armed Kali dance that shows up in so many Western films. Unlike The Mummy's Hand, however, humor concerning "Eastern" cultures is not unleashed with the intent of degrading and belittling those cultures. It's just nice to see effort put into the mythology of the Mummy, when the last time that was actually bothered with was 23 years ago. 

And again, it is pretty funny. Sure, even I can tell that Abbott and Costello are recycling old material, but I've never heard it before and I liked it. Since 1951, Abbott has become a better actor overall, putting more energy into his performance (which helps his humor), but Costello has lost some of that energy. He doesn't get to shine as much as he does in the previous films, but that's simply because he doesn't get as much limelight time as the other plot threads. You can't go in expecting top shelf comedy, but if it made me laugh, it can't be too bad. It still feels like a longer movie than it is, but there are enough hits for it to justify its own existence.

So that's the Universal horror series! Do I have any lasting regrets? Honestly, not really. If you don't like something, it's best to make sure you experience it first, and I'm glad I broadened my horizons. For the most part, I can understand why these movies are beloved. Some of them are decently successful at what they do, whether it's making us scared, thrilled, or amused. And their monsters are enduring, and not just for visual reasons. Dracula, Imhotep, and Kharis represent the prospect of an ancient, dead evil coming back to menace a world that has forgotten it; Frankenstein's Monster reflects the horrors of man, as he is a victim of cruelty who learns to be cruel and to victimize people; the Wolf Man is the fragility of life, the horror of what it would be like to be cursed; and the Invisible Man shows us where blind arrogance and hunger for power will lead us. Surround that with the usually-impressive imagery and you've got something to fuel the imagination with.

And before you ask, I did consider taking on some of the other monsters associated with Universal. There was also Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but none of the famous Jekyll and Hyde adaptations of the 20th Century--the 1920 version with John Barrymore, the 1931 version with Fredric March, and the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy--were Universal productions, contrary to popular belief (and my own!). I also mulled over examining The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels, but those movies aren't set in the same universe as the others. All the same, I do have one more thing to offer. It's time for a bonus review!

Bonus:

House of the Wolf Man (2009):

House of the Wolf Man was made to star Ron Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr.'s grandson, in an unofficial continuation of the Universal Horror series. In 2009, when I was more closely affiliated with the sort of horror community that fetishized the Universal films, this was a pretty big deal. It toured for one night only at Monster Bash, the annual movie monster festival that I never attended but kept hearing about. However, shortly after its release on DVD, it became sort of a rare item, as it went out of print and used copies became pretty expensive, even now being outside my comfortable price range. It's taken me eight years now to find a bootleg that won't put a virus on my computer (hardly abetted by the fact that I forgot about it till I started working on this retrospective). I'm sure that there are plenty of Universal fan films meant to continue the series, possibly including some featuring relatives of original cast members, but this one always stood out to me as the worthiest contestant for the title of "truly" continuing what Universal laid down. Is it worth it? We'll just have to see!

On a dark and stormy night, several people come to Reinhardt Castle under a notice that they are to inherit the Castle. The present owner is Dr. Bela Reinhardt, and his guests are siblings Reed and Mary Chapel; foxy Elmira Cray; obnoxious nerd Conrad Sullivan; and machismo-sick racist Archibald Whitlock and his squad of African manservants. (Sigh...) It isn't long before the guests realize they are being spied on--also, it can't bode well that the good doctor owns a book by Abdul Alhazred. (Universal Lovecraft, huh? Wonder how they would have handled that...) Dr. Reinhardt then reveals over dinner that his heir will be chosen by process of elimination; thereafter, Whitlock and his servants discover mysterious wolf tracks outside. Hm...

Things grow more complicated when Elmira meets a witch who lives in the Castle, Dr. Reinhardt's mother and her grandmother. Her brother was Bela the werewolf from The Wolf Man (she owns the wolf's-head cane from that film), and with the aid of a wealthy German Baroness she came to America, where she married the Baroness' cousin Peter--not Peter Reinhardt, but Peter Frankenstein. (Peter was last seen as a child in Son of Frankenstein.) But Reinhardt is not merely a Frankenstein--he is a werewolf, and the reason why all the guests' mothers are dead is because he killed them, and he was able to kill them because they were his wives. Yep--all the guests are half-siblings, and Frankenstein has brought them here because he wants to see if his offspring will be werewolves through genetics. If they are not, it apparently means that werewolves are the product of magic, not science. As he chases his spawn through the castle, killing them one by one, Elmira uses a key she received early to free the Frankenstein's Monster (with the help of a rhyming lunatic). The Monster holds the Wolf Man at bay, in a real physical brawl, but Conrad, one of the two survivors with Elmira, is dying. It seems there's one way he can survive, and perhaps it has to do with the mysterious fellow in the cape with the sharp teeth in the doorway...

One thing that I will give House of the Wolf Man is that it is unrelenting in trying to copy the Universal films as closely as possible. On one hand, it gives the movie the refined touch that ought to come with a fan production of this caliber. On the other, it means the movie not only replicates the groaning boredom that comes with a Universal production, but the racism as well. They try to veer off from the racist portrayal of the African characters by having Whitlock seem genuinely sad when they die, but it's still pretty painful to watch. If you really wanted to humanize them, you would have had at least one black guy who speaks non-fragmented English in the main cast. But I suppose anyone who proposed that was shouted down with cries of that breaking the mold they tried to copy.

Complicating things further is the fact that while the movie is overall a well-scripted effort, with lots of good character moments alongside the twists and turns, the acting is...well. Let's just say that if you ever had to do a video project in high school, picture that. They were lucky to get some real theatre kids in on this one, but even Ron Chaney, the ostensible star of the piece, is pretty bad, resembling something somewhat akin to Goldman from House of the Dead 2 (which admittedly works for the role). And the ladies were clearly hired more for their physical attributes than their acting talents, because this is a low-budget horror movie made by men (why, even the predictability is predictable!). Yet I get the impression that everyone on the cast tried their best, and I found it charming in its own way, with the characters having enough individual personality that even stilted acting could sustain them. I should say that the guy who plays Dracula, the late Michael R. Thomas, does a great Bela Lugosi impression--his voice is pretty spot on. The worst I could say about the acting is that I have seen worse. What is odd to me about the script is that it's set about two generations after the events of The Wolf Man, if not later, so it's probably taking place sometime around the early '80s at least. So why are people dressing and speaking as if it were the early '40s? Maybe they're doing it ironically and all desperately trying to out-hipster each other. Who knows.

And yes, I will say it: the monster fights are very, very cool. (Apparently people didn't like the out-of-nowhereness of Dracula, but the rhyming madman in the cellar is the key, I think. You see I think this person is supposed to be Peter Frankenstein, the guests' grandfather--a brief, anomalous piece of rhyming voiceover says that wherever Elmira's great-great-grandfather's creation appears, Dracula will "await invitation" to combat the Monster. Elmira freed the Monster, and thus, Dracula has come to destroy it.) It's a hard movie to accept 100% and there were some choices made that should not have been made in 2009. But I liked it well enough. I mean, hey! It's in an actual House owned by an actual Wolf Man!

Notably, there is also a licensed Universal Horror novel written by Jeff Rovins called Return of the Wolf Man, which serves as a sequel not only to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but also White Zombie, The Monolith Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, and others. I'm sure I'll read it someday, if anything because I've heard it's not very good.

And while I normally don't rank the movies I watch, I decided to do so this time around. Behold, the final statistics:

Awesome/Trashtastic: Dracula's Daughter, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy
Good (But Not Awesome): Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns, Invisible Agent, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, House of the Wolf Man
Not Horrible: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, The Mummy's Ghost
What is This Rubbish: Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The Invisible Woman, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Curse

Six of 24 are great, and only four of those are included because I consider them to be great horror movies (Bride of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein I only appreciate as bad movies). To be honest, that's better than I was expecting. It's only too bad that seven of them are some of the worst films I've ever laid eyes on, with special shoutouts to The Invisible Woman and The Mummy's Tomb. May I never see anything like them ever again.

Thanks for reading! Next time I'll be back again with something a bit more germane to my usual interests.

---

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

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

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

Even a man who is pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a werewolf when the wolfsbane blooms

And the moon shines full and bright

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

(Part One of this Retrospective, and Part Two)

The Wolf Man (1941):

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

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

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

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

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943):

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

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

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

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

House of Frankenstein (1944):

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

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

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

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

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

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

House of Dracula (1945):

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

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

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

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

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

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948): 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"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.

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