Zombie Lake (1980), by Jean Rollin

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

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

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Castle Sinister (1948), by Oscar Burn

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

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Oasis of the Zombies (1982), by Jess Franco

Jess Franco's zombie movie, a pseudo-remake that he made twice. "I think I...found myself."

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Night Train to Terror (1985), by John Carr, Philip Marsak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas

With this review, I have now reviewed this movie three times over--and we're not done yet. When I was talking about Gretta and The Nightmare Never Ends, I may have alluded to the fact that the third piece of this anthology was never finished or released. Well, I was wrong. When I made that statement I knew that third movie as Scream Your Head Off, with a 1981 production date. A meager amount of research on my part would have unearthed that Scream Your Head Off was released eleven years after it began production, under the rather odd title of Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars. But that movie is for another day; we're here to talk about Night Train to Terror, the primary reason why any of the three movies it was slashed out from are remembered.

God, Satan, and a mysterious third party who may be Death, are aboard a train. Also aboard is a REALLY shitty '80s pop band, whose lives are on the line: the train is due to crash at midnight, and God and Satan are here to debate the nature of humanity in order to determine whether the band will go to Heaven or Hell when they die. In order to convince God that humanity isn't worth saving, Satan tells God three stories, each of which supposedly prove humanity's evil. In "The Case of Harry Billings" (aka Scream Your Head Off), the titular Harry Billings kills his wife with drunk driving and ends up in a weird mental institution which chains up naked women for the purposes of rape (I think?) and organ harvesting. The main doctor there turns Harry into his drugged/hypnotic agent to abduct women for this purpose. The head nurse is also banging Harry and plans to have him help her lobotomize the head doctor so she can take over the hospital. It's pretty fucking weird.

Next is "The Case of Gretta Connors," aka Gretta. Things are kept pretty much the same, but they try to make Gretta seem more like a victim and George seem more evil; the primary focus is on the Death Wish Club. The main oddity of this segment is that they never explain why Gretta becomes Charlie White--she just suddenly looks like a guy for some reason. While they prominently feature the beetle scene, they also add on new footage of the beetle (rendered with claymation) escaping the room and killing a random makeout couple in a scene that totally doesn't have different video quality. By kill them, I mean it stings them, and this makes their faces explode.

Finally, we have "The Case of Claire Hansen," cleaved from the meat of The Nightmare Never Ends. I saw very few differences here and it actually told the story much more efficiently than the original film did. However, there are some scenes which appear to be of the same type of tacked-on claymation gore as that which appeared in the Gretta segment. I suspect similar sequences were added to the Scream Your Head Off bits, but we'll find out when I finally get around to Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to watch Night Train to Terror without context, aside from the obvious fact that it would be a headrush of unparalleled vertigo. Even with context, Night Train is a heady brew of Doris Wishman-esque cuts, unexplained plot threads, and hidden surprises. Every segment is discombobulated, with traces of subplots floating here and there and yet meaning nothing. This includes the new footage shot for the film. They try to make the pop band on the train into actual characters, despite the fact that all they do is sing the same songs over and over and over again; there's a mention of, "Oh, man, it's too bad our van broke down and we had to take this train!"--as if we could possibly care. How does that even make sense? Trains have to go to very specific places, and even if one was going to where I was headed I'd still worry about leaving my van behind to jump one! To me, that's like saying, "Shit, my motorcycle is out of gas. Might as well charter a cruise ship home then." It's ditching one line of vehicle for another. But I'm getting off-track: again, we're supposed to believe that there's an actual story to this frame story besides the God-Satan thing, and one line is supposed to cover the whole depth of that story. That's a perfect synecdoche for the entire movie. That line is patchwork and so is the rest of the film.

Perhaps I'll have more of a chance in the future to delve into this genre of patchwork remakes, which has existed since forever. For now, both Night Train to Terror and The White Gorilla are fine additions to my A-List, and I'll be returning to their uniquely Burroughsian madness time and time again. In regards to Night Train specifically, I will be returning to it in a stranger sense, when at last the time comes to review the third movie from its twisted catalogue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Man (1933):

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Man Returns (1940):

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Woman (1940):

...honestly, what the fuck?

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

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

Invisible Agent (1942):

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944):

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

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

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

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

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951): 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Club of Desolation #9: Weasels Ripped My Flesh! (2012), by Robert Deis et al.

Even if I was a man, I wouldn't get men. I didn't get men when I did feel like I was a man. That's why I turned out not to be one.

I don't claim to get women, either. I don't claim to get humans. That's why I'm a shitty writer. Well, ordinarily, I would say that. Apparently, there's not great necessity to understand human function to be a good writer. I mean, the business is chiefly based around lying, and I like to think that I'm decent at lying when I do have to say I know people. And that lying, I think, empowers me. And I like the fact that writing gives me infinite power. It gives me the chance to use my imagination and it's meant that exact thing to billions of humans throughout history.

It means that writing has a lot of variety to it. I respect that variety, deeply, and I've tried to read everything. I like a lot of "good" books, and also, as you know, a lot of weird shit. I recently discovered I like some Westerns. I had a chance to read this thing called Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, which appears to be a political brochure talking about anxiety in Argentina in the '70s which turns into Fantomas fanfiction. The Book Club of Desolation has brought me to a lot of these books, and I started to plan out this month's event, to follow up on the conclusion of Spookyween. I propose thus to the reader a BOOKVEMBER, where the Book Club of Desolation will meet weekly for a month to discuss this great variety in literature. We need to get to something that I never would have checked out before now, because I have mixed feelings about it, even after reading a full volume of it. Get your deodorant ready, bros, because we're diving into the Armpit Slicks--Men's Adventure magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the Men's Adventure genre had pulled at me for sometime, because to be frank, I find that shit hilarious. I've had regrets about passing up 100 Mack Bolans for a dollar at a garage sale. Lord knows that would be a fun piece for this site. And I'll probably end up checking out that Donald Westlake pseudo-James Bond novel at some point. But I will say this, and this is the only time I say it: the lure here is purely an ironic one, or, in more/less pretentious terms, an anthropological one. Most of the content on this site that I appreciate I enjoy unironically. If I'm going to be reading Men's Adventure, though, it has to be because I want to poke fun. For some time, I've known about the original "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" story, which I learned about through the film of the same name. It was convenient of Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman, and Wyatt Doyle to entitle this book after that famous story, so that people like me could strike the motherlode with a good intro primer for the Men's Adventure genre. And despite what I may end up saying about this book, I owe all of those fine gentlemen much, because stories like these are valuable and worth preserving. The variety of literature and art is worth preserving if framed in the right context. And yet, also, hanging it out in the air to dry, as it is, for everyone to form their own interpretations--that's important to me too. I guess I should just present this book rather than pass judgment on it--though, incidentally, I will also pass judgment on it.

Usually when I do a short story collection I want to examine each story on its own to the best of my ability. However, there are a lot of stories in this book, and so in general I'll be talking about the book as a whole. There are some common threads between the stories, and the book in turn presents more than just the stories, so it in turn has to be looked at in layers. We'll start with the stories.

I was able to pin down about four basic categories for the stories contained in this book: Killer Creatures, Sociological Studies, Adventure, and Woman-Haters. All of these overlap and interact in some ways, so they're not hard definitions. Killer Creature stories are the namesake of the book and this one has some good ones. It's satisfying to read the original "Weasels" story (which would inspire Zappa who would inspire Schiff), and it's also nice to know that I live in the same universe as a formally published story called "Monkey Madness." These stories probably inspired the wave of animals-gone-berserk movies in the '70s and '80s, like (just off the top of my head) Frogs, Dogs, Strays, Slugs, Grizzly, and Squirm--to say nothing of Jaws. This was seen by some as an opportunity to resurrect the good ol' giant monster flick, leading to movies like Island Claws and Food of the Gods. I'll probably delve into those soon enough with a collection of cryptozoology-themed Men's Adventures put out by the same team. The Killer Creatures are a blast, and it's a good idea to open with one. It drew me even if later elements shoved me back out. Plus, the editors included a master list of all of the animals that have been featured in this kind of story: it included the obvious ones like ants, lions, crocodiles, tigers, sharks...but also anteaters, lemmings, newts, badgers, and iguanas. Excellent.

The Sociological Studies are what they sound like--reports or inside stories about scandalous topics. They vary in quality and, as you may expect have not aged well. Stories about the horrors of Beat culture will be amusing--racism-laden tales bashing Calypso music won't be. I can't properly gauge the lesbian expose stories, of which there are several. These are the literary equivalents of Mondo movies. They are tedious, offensive, and have aged badly, albeit not as badly as some of the other pieces. Have I mentioned this book doesn't support modern values yet...?

The Adventure stories I found to be somewhat boring, though there was a story that was done pretty professionally by Harlan Ellison, shriveled prick through he was. I should say here that if you can imagine the narration from a Something Weird B&W release, you can imagine the prose style of most of the stories in this book. Hardboiled into oblivion. Throw in war stories played straight and you've got me snoozing, and throw in racism and you've got me mad. I don't know what else to say about these ones.

And then we come at last to the Woman Haters. Man, these were a hard sit, but in the trainwreck sort of way. I really had difficulty putting these down even though they were some of the most monstrous stories of the collection--I blame my immunization to such things on having watched so many exploitation movies. Some of these really do give you insight into the sick fucks who were behind a lot of this. I got excited for "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Flesh Stripper" only to be disappointed (when I shouldn't have been) that it was merely an excuse for a nameless, faceless sexy lady to be repeatedly raped and mutilated by a Nazi for x number of pages. While these stories are offensive to basically everyone, sexism is their most prominent issue. And yet there's always something that's compelled me to look into the sick side of our culture, and I know it's not a unique trait. In this case, I don't think I have an explanation for it. I am probably a bad person in my own right.

But, to defend myself somewhat, I do want to step away from the layer of the stories and instead look at the book itself. The editors feature introductions to many of the stories, along with several introductions to the book as a whole--this is also seeded with interviews from some of the guys responsible for the big content of this market, including Mario Puzo. All of this is loaded with a rich history of the genre, showing how fast-moving of a market it was. It's easy for a modern reader to view this material as the Kindle porn market or clickbait "news" sites of the time. And like any sort of "bottom barrel" market, it's an important part of history, because people aren't reading "art," they're reading this stuff. Of course, that won't stop us from writing "art," as well as also writing "this stuff" to pay the bills. Such is the life. Take Mario Puzo for instance: he wrote trash, and yet an adaptation of one of his novels is considered by some to be the best film ever. I'll always walk on the artsy idealistic side of things, but man, do those cynical, realist, "economist-type" writers get the big breaks...

So naturally, the editorial stuff is going to be great for history lovers. The third layer, then, is the art: the team has lovingly reproduced hundreds of vintage covers, pages, and ads from several decades' worth of magazines. This is pure eye candy for fans of the hilarious. Thrill to the things that made your grandparents and great-grandparents hot on the forehead! It's nearly impossible to believe that these images were once printed and sold, and yet more importantly it makes one wonder what will be considered trash-treasure in the future, which we take for granted today?

This is a book where the actual content would fall apart without context. The book itself is so well put together that it's worth getting for the notes and images. It creates a historicity for a genre that we can't take straight anymore--even if the values live on (we need look no further than to our modern politics for that). Deis, Friedman, and Doyle deserve recognition for their work, and to top it all off, Mr. Deis himself signed my copy. If you can survive the horrors of Wanton Witch, you can make it with this one. Try it out if it's your speed. All I can say for now is that I'm hyped for this cryptozoology book.

Bookvember continues next time with a look at English sci-fi...of a very particular brand.

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Image Source: New Texture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SS Girls (1977), by Bruno Mattei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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