House on Haunted Hill (1959), by William Castle

Considered by many to be Vincent Price's best film, and with good reason. Would you spend the night in the HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL?

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Oriental Evil (1951), by George Breakston and C. Ray Stahl

Despite the bad title, Oriental Evil is actually something of a lost film noir classic. Strange and touching.

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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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Bewitched (1945), by Arch Oboler

Aka: We Don't Understand Mental Illness: The Movie. This is a weird one and a bad one. Let's just dive in.

Joan Ellis is a young woman who should to all rights be happy. She has loving and doting parents, and an equally loving and doting boyfriend, Bob, who wants to marry her someday. Her family seems well-liked and affluent. However, she has the rather serious problem of someone else living in her head. This other voice, which sounds like a crabby 40-year-old waitress with emphysema, is Karen, and she actively tries to ruin Joan's life--in essence, her plot is to weaken Joan enough where she can rule over their shared body, thus enabling her life of evil. Eventually, Joan gets the help she needs, but not before Karen forces her to murder Bob after he tracks her down when she runs away from home. But can the doctors save her before she's due to be executed for Bob's slaying?

I shouldn't be quite as hard on this movie as the opening implies. While its views and explanations on dissociative identity disorder are primitive to the point of ableism, and there is virtually no effort put forth to understand the illness at work, the victim of the illness is definitively portrayed as a victim, and consequently there's an effort to sympathize (but not empathize) with her. Perhaps most significantly, it shows the effects of social stigma against mental illness and people who have it, because Joan never feels safe talking to Bob or her family about her problems for fear of them isolating her. In a time where you could be sent to a mental institution for teen rebellion and get a lobotomy for autism, there's a notable chance that her fears would be valid, especially when you consider the Ellises' wealth and social position. Crazy folk in a rich household are Just Not Done. While there is no attempt made to address or correct this possibility that maybe stigma against mental illness just makes the suffering worse, it still presents enough of a threat where audiences at the time could have left the theater thinking. Unfortunately, so much else is done wrong--and the movie itself is so cookie-cutter--that the whole affair barely registers on the synapses at all.

The plot is very stereotypical: an ordinary girl is suddenly confronted with the horror of an insidious illness, which leads her to make a fatal mistake, though she is redeemed and cured in the end. She is nearly rescued by one man and fully saved by another. I didn't mention Eric in the synopsis--he's the lawyer who falls in love with Joan when she becomes a cigar stop clerk after running away. He's also kind of creepy, because while it does turn out that Joan's reluctance to go out with him is due to her own anxiety rather than a lack of attraction, he doesn't exactly turn away when she turns him down day after day after day. He also proposes to her on their first date, which is strange even by '40s standards. It's not like Bob is much better though. I was a little glad when Bob died, to be honest. He's one of those dudes who think that lines like "I love you and I don't know why" are romantic. He also introduces Joan to a little girl as his grandmother? "She's very weak, but if you help her along she can come with us to the zoo." It's really not charming, and I don't exactly trust his eagerness to take a strange little girl to the zoo without her parents.

What is interesting about Eric is that his marriage proposal triggers the first instance in which Karen is able to fully use Joan's body, implying her problem is rooted in intimacy. She then proceeds to grope and mack on him pretty hard, suggesting that Karen's primary evil...is that she's a sexually interested woman. This is a problem in itself but a bigger issue is that what Karen does to Joan is strange and not well connected. Her primary form of harassment seems to be mocking Joan about her mere existence, insisting that she run away before her loved ones lock her up. Next, she expresses strong lust for Eric, but this is followed by her killing Bob. She seemingly kills Bob for reasons related to the first bombardment of taunts--she wants to keep Joan isolated from people who will think she's crazy. The lust for Eric comes back but it's not strongly tied to the murder plot. We can only assume that Karen sees Eric as a more ideal partner than the admittedly dreary Bob, though she also uses him as an anchor to carve out the independent life she desires. While Karen seeks to achieve her goals through violence, she desires a sort of independence and sexuality which Joan denies herself in her ordinary life, and which she permanently refuses at the end by accepting a chaste upper-class existence with Eric. No reason is ever given for Karen's existence. The movie seems to legitimately believe that multiple personalities are the product of two minds born in one brain by a fluke of hormones, like some failed conjoined twin where only their immaterial consciousness formed. Joan is never shown to have suffered any sort of trauma in the past that facilitated Karen's manifestation--we're to believe she literally popped in existence one day after years of sleeping. But because Karen appears as Joan's sexuality and desire for life outside her family, maybe that's a sign of how Joan's problem came to be. Maybe she legitimately feels trapped by her upper-class existence, and its curtailment on sexual experimentation. If so, the fact that she goes back to that at the end makes the film's conclusion actually really sad--to say nothing of the fact that she's still hanging under threat of execution as the last title card comes onscreen! 'Cause yeah, even if it was proven that Joan wasn't at fault, and that her alternate personality killed Bob, she's still been convicted. This is kind of a strange thing to consider because admittedly, the movie does suck you into the feeling of Karen's otherness. Whatever Karen represents within or without my interpretation of her, she's still a threat to at least one innocent person, and that's enough for the viewer to coherently separate her from Joan.

The thing is, though, I feel this movie is a cash-in on MGM's behalf more than anything. (Yes, despite having the plot of a Monogram movie, this was put out by MGM.) People say that this movie almost works as an early exorcism movie, because of the final scene with Edmund Gwenn as Joan's psychologist, wherein he employs good ol' fashioned Hollywood Hypnotism. Replace the Jesus stuff with psychiatry and it's beat for beat almost the same. The Good Man talks the Demon to death. However, Karen's frequent reference to "freedom" made me think of Fredrich March's Hyde in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That movie was remade with Spencer Tracy in 1941, a whole four years before Bewitched...by MGM. Yep, they were ripping off themselves. This isn't anything big, because the big studios did and do that all the fucking time, but the recognition of Bewitched as a de-glorified Jekyll and Hyde clone simultaneously kills and boosts the movie for me. On one hand, it helps explain why it was such a deflated experience, empty of life somehow. On the other, it adds another twist to it that keeps it wedged in my head.

Bewitched is not what I would call a fun film to watch, but it's a fun film to remember. I talk about movies on this site that I love because they're legitimately good, or they're so ridiculous that I can't help but love them. There's also of course the odd movie that I love because they're extremely banal, but their banality makes them exceptional in some way. Bewitched is a movie, though, where it's more a mess to figure out, a puzzle, and while it yields almost nothing in the end, it at least gave me something to say, if I could be said to have said anything. I always relish a chance to talk about mental illness, and how on occasion the great studios of Hollywood's golden years were a bunch of shameless hacks. Watch Bewitched for laughs and a fun Edmund Gwenn performance, but don't expect much else.

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Pillow of Death (1945), by Wallace Fox

The history of this movie starts with Simon and Schuster, who, starting in the 1930s, began publishing a series of mystery titles under the name "Inner Sanctum." The Inner Sanctum series was the inspiration for a popular radio series that ran from 1941 to 1956. If you've ever heard the old horror host clip, "Pleasant dreams, hmmmm?", that's from Inner Sanctum. Actually, Inner Sanctum was a huge influence on the concept of horror hosts in general, alongside other Old Time Radio champ The Whistler, so I owe much to this series due to the eventual creation of the DC characters Cain and Abel (heads of the delightful House of Mystery and House of Secrets series and main characters in Neil Gaiman's Sandman). It wasn't long before Universal capitalized on the success of the radio show and began making a series of Inner Sanctum films, all of them starring Lon Chaney Jr. in a series of increasingly implausible roles. Pillow of Death was the last of them, and thus the most bizarre. It is also, besides the moderately-okay Weird Woman, the only one of the series which doesn't suck total shit--quite the opposite, in fact. It has swiftly become one of my favorite '40s horror films of all time, because the content is nothing short of utterly ludicrous.

Wayne Fletcher (Lon Chaney Jr.) is a lawyer married to Vivian, whom he is having problems with. At the center of these problems is the affair Wayne is having with his secretary Donna Kincaid, niece of the wealthy heiress Belle Kincaid. In a strange subversion of 1940s norms, Belle's brother, comic-relief big-eater Sam, supports the affair. However, as suspicion mounts over the late-night interactions of the pair, Vivian is murdered. Wayne, obviously, is the chief suspect. Belle calls in her psychic friend, Julian Julian (presumably the father of the live-action incarnation of the Mario Brothers), to prove Wayne's guilt. Indeed, it seems that Vivian's spirit names Wayne as the murderer--Julian is also an impersonator and ventriloquist, however. This isn't admissible in court, of course, but Donna has a second admirer, a local boy named Bruce who has stalked her since they were kids. Bruce will stop at literally nothing to win Donna from Wayne, but as both Sam and Belle join the corpse pile, one has to wonder--who is the real killer in all this mess?

As in Phantom Ship, I'm going to reveal who the killer is, because that's an essential part to how the charm of this movie works, but let's build to that. This is an Old Dark House movie, and the Kincaid house is ostensibly haunted, which is why they work in the spiritualism angle. Spiritualism usually gets pretty silly in these movies but here it's taken to a new level. Both Belle and her sister Amelia are deep believers in mediumship--they supported Vivian because she was Julian's medium. There's a point where it looks like Julian is the murderer, and as such Amelia starts believing he's going to get the death penalty. Reasoning that he'll die in the gas chamber, she lures Wayne and Donna into a broom closet, locks them in, and gets ready to fucking gas them to death. Only Julian's timely arrival stops her from doing so, and the incident is laughed off. Seriously, Julian's response is to chuckle out, "Misguided loyalty is a dangerous thing." This is probably meant to be a red herring and we're still supposed to believe that Julian is the killer, but that I'm only realizing this now is a sign of how clumsily assembled this movie is. But that's not the most ludicrous thing.

I mentioned Bruce, Donna's stalker. Well, he found out as a kid that a cave near his house has a secret passage in it that leads into her house. When she tells him she's going to wall it off (because fucking duh) he begs her not to in the whiniest white boy way imaginable. Aside from her plans to seal the passage, though, she takes the whole his being able to break into her home at any time thing pretty well. This secret passage comes up again when we find out why Wayne discovered Vivian's body missing from her tomb earlier: Bruce dug up her corpse and planted it in Donna's house to scare Wayne into confessing. Bruce gets Donna in the end. Bruce gets Donna in the end. He desecrates a goddamn corpse and he gets the girl. And no one goes back for the body!!!!!

But that's not the most ludicrous thing.

One slightly less ludicrous thing, just a bit I liked. When Wayne is looking into Vivian's tomb, he is confronted by the graveyard watchman. "Hey! Do you want me to call the police?" the watchman barks. Chaney looks him in the eye and murmurs blandly, with no effort supplied whatsoever: "Oh no. Don't call the police." He leaves. The guard shouts, "Hey!" And...scene. Perfect. That's how you make movies.

The most ludicrous thing is that Wayne is the killer. Shoulda seen it coming, but literally the only reason why anyone trusts Wayne is because he's the protagonist. There's no motive for his killings either, he's just a lunatic. For no reason at all, in the last five minutes, he becomes a stereotypical child-like crazy person, and tries to kill Donna with a pillow...supplying the movie's title. Imagine if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre came out and was called Girl Laughs in Truck. Not quite the same, is it? (I mean, Texas Chain Saw is such a good movie that that title would actually have some resonance to it, so bad example.) It would be like if a slasher movie with only one axe murder was called Ax 'Em...oh, wait.

Pillow of Death ends up being a more advanced version of the "one-joke" movies archetyped by Ghost of Rashmon Hall, where you watch the whole setup for the enjoyment of being screwed at the end. Fuck You Endings often seem less insulting in older films, because budgetary and conventional restrictions made the Fuck You of the Ending especially loopy. I'm reminded of the ending of Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man where Costello regains visibility but his legs are on backwards, and he runs away from the camera in sped-up footage. That has absolutely nothing to do with what we just saw and it's confusing in and of itself. But somehow--because of rather than despite the loopiness--it ends up really entertaining, and that's exactly what Pillow of Death is.

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Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), by Albert Zugsmith

Just as Fanny Hill was an adaptation of a classic book that echoed and cashed in on the Sexual Revolution, this movie's timing was similarly perfect--and it's probably no coincidence that today's movie's director produced Fanny Hill. While this "adaptation" of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater preceded much of the heavy drug use that was to come in the West, it doubtlessly had an influence on such as well. If it was possible to screen reels of this you'd better believe hippies were doing that in their basements when they had a chance--hell, it has Vincent Price in it, and hippies loved them some Vincent Price. (Who doesn't?) Promising trippy visuals clipped onto the action scenes that would define the Bond films yet to come, Confessions of an Opium Eater can be viewed as a prototype for many of the trends of the nascent decade it inhabited, a creepy drug-echo of times yet to come mirroring Price's character's own time-warping experiences in the story.

Price plays Gilbert de Quincey, a thug-for-hire and descendant of Thomas de Quincey. Gilbert finds himself caught up in the San Francisco Tong Wars of 1902, specifically a showdown between anti-human trafficking editor George Wah and the ancient, never-seen slaver of women Ling Tang. Ling Tang, through his officer Ruby Lo, hires Gilbert to bring back a prize slave girl who originally wanted to come to America to marry George Wah. Gilbert decides to rescue the girl from Ling Tang, bringing the full force of the Tong down on him. At some point in the chase, in order to hide out, Gilbert must smoke opium. Much of the film's reality has been dubious so far--but now Gilbert can't trust his senses, and consequently, neither can we.

This film is well-made, but it's not really until the end that everything "clicked" for me. It's lit by plenty of fun moments but only when viewed holistically does it become truly wonderful. Let's focus on the little details first. First of all Angelo Rossito shows up and he and Vincent Price are onscreen together, though they share no lines. Rossito is probably foreshadowing for another little person who shows up, the unnamed Chinese little person who helps Price in his quest, and whose death possibly foreshadows Price's own. Then, there's something I caught at the beginning, where one of the slave-girls aboard the ship tries to appeal to the ship's captain, who silently rolls his eyes and gestures her away. To me that hinted at something bigger. Was there a relationship between this girl and the captain, an attempt by the former to save her life? Is this all that tryst led to? I don't know if that was intentional but in the heat of the moment I read it that way, and it was heartbreaking.

Even as early as these opening sequences on the slave-ships, there are psychedelic hints which help suggest that Gilbert's trip travels back from the future to touch on all of his experiences. When the captured women are transported from ship to ship, their bodies falling to the deck are rendered in claymation, which looks out of place in the rest of the shots. Similarly, when one of the slave-ships is destroyed the explosion is a cartoon. This ends up leading into a scene where Gilbert, ostensibly sober at this point, hallucinates that a dragon-kite is a real dragon. Add in some weird geography/architecture (why does George Wah's office have an elevator into the sewers?) and you've got a world which is weird to start with. One which probably doesn't need opium's touch.

The actual psychedelics of the film are rather disappointing, but this was in an age where filmmakers rarely ever had even secondhand experiences with these substances. We get plenty of distorted shots of faces, skulls, and Chinese masks, however, which make up for things. There's also a spooky sequence where everything is silent and in slow-mo--a more realistic psychedelic terror. Zugsmith understands at least in some capacity that psychedelia and the horror therein thrives on altered sensation and a feeling of dissociation from time and other aspects of reality we take for granted--this slow-mo sequence captures that feeling nicely.

Then there's the dialogue. The runtime is populated with stretches of Price (supposedly) quoting de Quincey, Confucius, or the Bible...I couldn't be bothered to check all the quotes. But in between this pretentious quoting, Price also gets lines like, "I'm not a side'a beef in a butcher shop" which help bring you back to reality. Similarly, the aforementioned Chinese little person is a delight, as she often finds herself married to husbands she doesn't like--but only because they bore her. She often runs away or dissolves the marriage herself just so she can move onto a new experience. She actually probably has the best-defined character in the movie.

Despite the pretension of the dialogue, the ending does feel emotionally resonant--the movie does feel like the end of a journey, like a trip winding down. At the last, Gilbert has embraced the distorted reality opium has given him, and I will say that there is no more appropriate Vincent Price ending than this. As he is carried to his presumed death by the grungy waters of a dank sewer, he asks the audience: "Were these the whitening waters of death...or the gates of Paradise?" You gotta wonder, but the visuals don't let you wonder far...

Confessions of an Opium Eater is probably a love-it or hate-it, or rather a like-it or meh-it. It never dares too much, but it is pretty great for what it sets out to do. I felt like Vincent Price was slumming it a bit with these Zugsmithian conditions, but Price is never wasted--with him, you're in good hands.

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The Monster and the Girl (1941), by Stuart Heisler

Okay, I've been mean to you guys. I can't say I'm gonna look at some old-school gorilla movies and then exclusively show you the ones that don't actually have gorillas in them. Of the gorilla movies I watched last year, The Monster and the Girl is probably the best of them in terms of sheer entertainment--it's a double feature all in itself, being punchy noir in its first half, and a sci-fi horror thriller in the second. That makes it pretty bizarre and thus a good fit for the A-List. After this, we'll get back to some of the more usual stuff we do around here, but not before I draw attention to what is surely the most valuable derivation of this exercise in gorilla films: of the four we've looked over, three of them all use the same "hairy" font that this movie does. Interesting...

Young Scot Webster is on trial for the murder of a man named Wade Stanton. We learn from Scot's testimony that he was framed--he was trying to track down a man named Larry Reed, and the trail brought him to an apartment where someone shot Stanton and forced the gun into Scot's hands. Scot's sister Susan gives the full story. She came to the city to "be somebody" and met Larry Reed, whom she quickly fell in love with and married. Except it turns out her beau wasn't planning on footing the bill for their wedding, and indeed there are now several men in Susan's life trying to convince her Reed never existed, who similarly want to be paid for their wedding accommodations. These men are gangsters under the employ of W.S. Bruhl, and it's apparently a recurring scheme of theirs to have "Larry" marry women, rack up high bills in their names, and then vanish, leaving them with a sizable debt, which can only be worked off in one way... (This being a Paramount movie from 1941 they never call it prostitution but you figure out how to read these things at some point.) Scot of course wanted revenge, but the case against him is too stacked, and he's sentenced to death. In jail he's approached by the mysterious Dr. Parry (George Zucco) who wants to extract Scot's brain after his execution. Scot consents to the strange request, having nothing to lose. But then, at exactly the halfway mark, we are in Parry's operating room. A sheet is pulled back. There is a gorilla underneath. Zucco looks down at his brain-in-a-jar and gets ready for the operation...

Ahh. It's sweet, isn't it? This one of those movies that Gets Me. There are quite a few ways in which I use that phrase, when I do use it: sometimes it means a horror film actually scared me, or a shock film actually shocked me. Other times I mean it in a less traumatic sense--it Gets my funny bone, is what I mean. This movie is halfway between. The sudden revelation of the gorilla, and the implicit future which lies in wait for Scot, which swiftly becomes explicit over the next half-hour, is one of the great movie moments of all time for me. After all, it makes sense for the noir film that this movie is to be called The Monster and the Girl for the first half-hour. There is obviously a girl surrounded by several individuals who could easily be called monsters, with either Larry or Bruhl being the biggest contenders for carrying the title's definite article. George Zucco's appearance early on in Scot's trial could potentially help foreshadow the movie's next direction, but one has to think about context. Zucco's primary appearances as a mad scientist--The Mad Monster, Dr. Renault's Secret, The Mad Ghoul, and The Flying Serpent--all postdate The Monster and the Girl. The only prior role which would have contextualized Zucco's appearance for audiences would have been as Andoheb in The Mummy's Hand a year prior. So this would have been a nowhere-twist for its native audience just as it is for those who watch it today.

I realized, while rewatching the film for this review, that the reason why I like these movies is that they are actually extremely pure jokes. Humor arises from a mental gap in expectation, with the expectations in question often relating to learned logic or social norms. That's why comedy is so fucking hard--if you abuse those gaps, it just pisses people off, and you have to avoid abusing those gaps over and over. But in trash movies, people manipulate expectation by accident, and it reveals what I think is a sympathetic sort of worldview. We all have our eccentricities, and in American society at least, we are told to restrain those eccentricities because taking the time to address them stands in the way of makin' money, y'see. (Also a continuously-embarrassed population is easier to manipulate but that's another story.) In trash, people expose those eccentricities--those weird, sideways beliefs about details of life (sometimes mundane, sometimes grandiose) that make them who they are. For better or worse. Trash speaks to a sensibility of individuality, and to a subversion of social norms that is as revolutionary and serious as it is funny. If nothing else, movies like these free up one's imagination. Someone got away with turning this into a gorilla movie halfway through--so why shouldn't your half-baked idea see the light of day? As long as it entertains people?

(I mean it's more complicated than that, but it always is.)

Anyway. I like this movie not only because it suddenly turns into a weirdo sci-fi horror movie (Death Wish with a gorilla is maybe a way of putting it), but because the noir elements on display throughout are actually really well done. It's hard not to love a movie where a gangster tells a lady about to fall out a window: "Watch that first step. It could spoil your makeup." The noir stuff keeps on until the end, including some psychological scenes with the gangsters as they slowly come undone when they realize a huge, strong guy is running around killing their gang in particular, but it's a little hard to take it seriously when there's a man in a gorilla suit lurking around.

The thing is, though, it's not a bad gorilla suit. A lot of other reviews noticed this too: the mask they have for it is strangely emotive, and it helps us hang onto the idea that this is a man in a gorilla's body. Plus the man in the suit is really good at acting like a real gorilla--isn't it nice when you can presume someone watched nature reels at some point to prep up for one of these? Because it's difficult for me to be serious about a man in a gorilla suit, however, I do have to say that watching a gorilla drop down on a man from a tree in a suburban neighborhood is a truly magical sight to behold. It's awesome that the gorilla of this movie is both "good" and hilarious. To have a funny-awful gorilla movie is one thing; to have one that's good but too serious is another; and now I just feel like a glutton.

The Monster and the Girl is a Janus of a movie but at least both faces are nice. I've seen some weird noir fusions now at this point and this is one of the weirdest and best of all of them. If you have a chance to give it a watch, don't miss it.

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Human Gorilla (1948), by Budd Boetticher

You may be noticing around now that I am a bit of a sucker for gorilla movies. There's something fascinating to me, in ways both good and bad, about the obsession movies had with gorillas over the first half of the 20th Century, in a way which I feel is unequaled today. Gorillas were an easy symbol of the exotic and the unknown, and for a while it seemed like it was almost a goddamn requirement to have a gorilla in your movie if it fit anywhere within the horror and mystery genres. People just couldn't get enough fucking gorillas.

Now, there are some relatively clear issues in this: using the gorilla as a shortcut for "the exotic" usually brings up complicated racial issues. In this case "the exotic" usually refers to Africa (though as we'll see in the decidedly odd House of Mystery Southern Asia was not immune), and there's a long history of black people being associated with apes and other subhuman hominids. Consider the fact that King Kong, the most famous "gorilla picture" of all time, wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for the release of Ingagi two years prior in 1931. Ingagi, as I've said often on this site, is a "documentary" about the mating habits of gorillas and...Africans. Yeppp, I still have...issues with that. Of course, King Kong isn't immune to racial criticism either--Kong kidnapping and sexually threatening a beautiful white woman, anyone? (To say nothing of the trampled villagers.) You'd better believe that some hideous thoughts were had in the heads of moviegoers when they saw these gorilla movies.

But by the early 1940s, it had gotten to the point where, as we've seen in The Gorilla Man, movies that didn't even have gorillas in them were trying to get in on the gig--mercifully freeing them from the uncomfortable racial elements in the process while also creating hilarious surprises for the unaware viewer. That failed setup is what makes this second category of "gorilla pictures" fun for me, just as the increasingly bizarre dalliances into Shitty Science in the actual gorilla pictures brings me to laughter. Human Gorilla was originally released under the title Behind Locked Doors, but the title card above indicates it must have seen release under the better title pretty early on. The film is not about any sort of actual gorilla, instead being a film noir about corruption in a local mental hospital.

Reporter Kathy Lawrence seeks out PI Ross Stewart to help her claim a $10,000 bounty put out on crooked Judge Finlay Drake. The caveat is that Drake is presently hiding out at a medical facility run by his friend Dr. Clifford Porter: La Siesta Mental Hospital. Stewart will have to disguise him as manic-depressive ex-salesman Harry Horton to get in, with Kathy playing his wife. It isn't long before he finds out that La Siesta is more like a prison, and a bad one at that--one with torture and abusive staff. Of course, when it's time for patients to disappear permanently, they're taken to the "Human Gorilla," a man named Champ--a crazed ex-prizefighter played by none other than a weirdly-young Tor Johnson! It isn't long before it's Stewart's time to face the Champ. With our plucky investigator escape the madhouse, or will he be caught in Tor's wheels of progress...?

One thing that I'm noticing fast in these film noir PI things is that a lot of them feature similar central leads--I've not read or watched my Hammett or Chandler, so I don't know the proper archetypes here, but I've seen quite a few movies where the PI is a happy-go-lucky obscure first-timer who has a lot of comic relief before he gets real serious on the case. And, of course, he usually ends up dating his female client at the end. This is the sort of stuff that the noir parodies I watched in my childhood took on. It's quite ripe for ripping apart.

I know I still haven't gotten around to Find the Blackmailer, but Ross Stewart is no D.L. Trees. When he's in "comic" "relief" mode, he's really, really creepy. Not even the fact that he's a pretty solid detective can make up for the fact that he is basically a step away from being a rapist. When Kathy proposes (no pun intended) to pose as husband and wife, after telling Ross about what the plan is, he backs her up against the wall and says, "Yes, and I'm always kissing you...publicly, privately, just all over the place." Seeing that written out gives it a double meaning that I really don't like. Then he goes on to add, "You could say I'm manic-depressive--beating you one minute and kissing you madly the next." They've known each other for less than thirty minutes. Add on the fact that Ross is so green that Kathy watches his name get painted on his office door, and there's no reason why she shouldn't just seek out some other detective. One thing that does bug me about these private eye movies is that they always say that they can't hire a detective whose face is known, but surely an experienced detective would a) know how to disguise themselves, and b) keep their identity on the down-low on a consistent basis to avoid this exact situation. I realize that's not perfect logic on my behalf, but I feel bad for these ladies who have to keep shelling out good money for idiots just because Dick Tracy keeps plastering his face everywhere.

Anyway. This movie has a lot of creepiness besides Ross Stewart, as manifested in Larson, Dr. Porter's abusive assistant. Larson takes care of most of the physical punishment around La Siesta, even though Porter gives him a limp admonishment not to harass the patients. Larson beats a man for screaming from nightmares, subjects the patients to long hours of hard unpaid labor, and make loud noises outside Tor Johnson's cell to make him have PTSD episodes. Worse, there's a third man around the hospital, Fred Hopps, who meekly accepts his place under Larson and Porter because his son is a patient at the institute, and Larson abuses the kid when Hopps misbehaves.

There are a lot of intriguing parallels and deviations between this movie and The Gorilla Man. In The Gorilla Man, suspense arises because we the audience know what Craig Killian is in for before he does; in Human Gorilla, we get our suspense from the fact that Stewart knows he should brace for the worst but we the audience don't know what's in that hospital. Both movies feature a bespectacled, psychopathically violent second banana to the main villain; both movies feature another servant of the main villain who is only working for them because they're holding their children hostage, who ends up helping the hero in the end. Both movies also feature the threat of gristly punishment for the imprisoned protagonist--in Human Gorilla transgressions are dealt with by Tor Johnson, while in Gorilla Man the threat is ending up in the operating theatre of Dr. Ferris.

In sum, Human Gorilla is a surprisingly wild ride in its 61-minute runtime, even if its "hero" is a despicable scumbag. It's great to see an early "performance" by Tor Johnson, and what's more is that it has a pretty good double feature to go with it if you can get your hands on a copy of Gorilla Man. It's a piece of solid noir, with a lot of fun twists along the way. Try it!

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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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The Amazing Mr. X (1948), by Bernard Vorhaus

For a while, I began to notice a pattern in movies that featured the word "Amazing" in their title. Namely, these movies would be about as far from Amazing as one could get. The Amazing Transparent Man, for instance, is one of the most forgettable cash-ins of The Invisible Man out there. The Amazing Colossal Man is Bert I. Gordon's best movie, but it's still not Amazing. And I'll never forget the time, in the process of tracking down obscure James Bond parodies, that I found an Italian film called The Amazing Dr. G, aka Goldginger (yes, you read that right), which ended with a blackface gag. Decidedly not Amazing. And yet, there are doubtlessly hundreds of films that had chosen that adjective for themselves, and as such I just happen to have really bad luck. Until today. The Amazing Mr. X is legitimately amazing, a compact and punchy little film noir that once more scratches my Nightmare Alley itch for phony psychics and carnival magic.

Christine is a wealthy woman who misses her two-years-dead husband Paul. She sometimes envisions his voice coming out of the sea when she walks the beaches near her house. Her younger sister, Janet, encourages her to marry Martin, the awkward nerd whom she's been dating recently. While headed out on a date with Martin, Christine is caught up in her Paul hallucinations and runs into a mysterious man named Alexis. Alexis reveals himself to be a psychic, and he tells Chris things about herself and Paul which he would have no way of knowing. Captivated, Christine enjoys her date with Paul, but has a nightmare about the pressures of a new marriage. She vows to see Alexis again, and when she does, she's hooked. Janet and Martin, of course, suspect that Alexis is a swindler, but when Janet goes to investigate, he sweeps her off her feet as well. And in a rather more literal sense, too, as Janet falls in love with the medium. Naturally, Alexis is a trickster, as we the audience see in great detail--he's a very good one, though, lacking the weaknesses that stopped that the Great Stanton from making it to the big time. He even manages to make a good show out of making Paul's apparition appear, while seemingly tied up in another room.

There's just one hitch. Paul is still alive. And he wants Chris's fortune.

So how's that? I'm really starting to find I love film noir. So akin to psychological horror--and such a variable style. If you keep shoveling me spooky movies about wicked showpeople that love will only deepen. Of course, like B-Westerns, or '30s plane thrillers, or '50s sailing movies, one must pan through much shit to get the gold. In turn, there is salvation, as hipsters looove them some noir, and as such, there's a lot of light shined into where some of the gems may lie. I can't watch too many of these things, because they look to all end mighty unhappily, but I think I finally understand that which I was looking for when I first saw Daughter of Horror.

Film noir is all about the writing--well, the actors need to carry it, too, but there are types I'm starting to see which could be played well by someone who's just seen enough of the right movies. But the writing in these films is tremendous. Set the right combination of believable circumstances, and make them exploitative. Lock the characters in something that'll make 'em sweat. I know those things can be said about any sort of narrative, but noir is written in a way that makes you feel the keys of the keyboard. It's sort of meta, in a way--because it uses quick-cut conventions and language, with its believable circumstances, it can tell a lot of story in a hurry with using speech. That's why you need a "tight" script, and "tight" directing. It uses horror logic--visceral sign language--to help pile on the exploitation elements to its greasy, gritty characters. Flawed protagonists are scattered out here lie autumn leaves, never fully good, rarely fully bad. Am I getting it yet? Am I cool?

But seriously, there are a lot of tips here and there that make this a really good script, and it's so relieving to see Turhan Bey come up after being kicked around in the Mummy movies. He's amazingly suave here and I want to see him in other things. He portrays Alexis beautifully as a convincing criminal genius, but also as a romantic who is willing to recognize true evil in the world, who probably also regrets his past time in prison. He leaks a little bit of cynicism here and there, as in one of the film's best moments, where Janet is cuddled up to him. Once Janet gets on the psychic train she goes full Fluffy Bunny Pagan. "Do you think I would make a good Celestial Companion, Alexis? Would you travel with me and love me for all eternity?" Alexis blinks and replies, "Oh...even longer, my dear." And the efficiency of that script carries into the revelation of how Alexis pulls his stunts--all of it seems plausible for a man of means given the technological limitations of the era. It doesn't have to delve into sci-fi (which would require some explanation) to show us what all this gadgetry is, and therefore the film's momentum is maintained. Comedy props to the moment when Alexis shows how he Batmans up behind people, all mysterious-like...he just walks very quickly, and very quietly.

From the opening fakeout scare to the twisty ending, The Amazing Mr. X is a vast smorgasbord of rich, full characters, knockout performances, genuine creeps, and marvelous dialogue. It's nice when the adjectives of a title aren't used meaninglessly, eh?

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Nightmare Alley (1947), by Edmund Goulding

This is yet another movie which is probably too good and too well-received for me to be talking about here, but which I knew immediately I had to review after watching. Nightmare Alley has such a wonderful tone to it, by which I mean it has an utterly ghastly tone to it, making it yet another movie adding to the trend of this site being largely a journal of my night-terrors. I've gotten PTSD from movies before, but some films will leave stains on my psyche in a way that keeps me warm from the cold, fed in the face of hunger. Stop by the box office to get your ticket of admission into Nightmare Alley's carnival of souls.

Stanton "Stan" Carlisle is a barker at a low-rent carnival, which offers many of the usual acts, including a geek and a medium. Stan is fascinated by the geek, at first buying the mythos that they are the Missing Link, but he slowly learns that they are actually alcoholics who are forced to do what they do--i.e. bite the heads off of chickens--by the managers controlling their booze access. Stan strikes up a friendship--and more--with Mademoiselle Zeena, the medium. Years ago, Zeena and her ex-lover Pete were a top-tier magic act in vaudeville, drawing in crowds of thousands. However, due to circumstances Zeena blames herself for, Pete became an alcoholic, and now is reduced to her assistant in her psychic act. Stan at once desires to obtain the secret code Zeena and Pete used in their act, but it's not until he accidentally poisons Pete with wood alcohol that he gets a chance. Stan proves to be a fine mentalist, even waylaying a sheriff who wants to shut down the show for exploiting the geek. This act in particular proves to be so impressive he finally breaks the sexual tension with his long-time crush Molly the Electric Girl--an act witnessed by her boyfriend, Bruno the strongman. When Bruno reveals this to Zeena, the carnival immediately turns on the pair, forcing them into a shotgun marriage just at the dawn of their romance.

Thus begins the next stage of Stan's life. He and Molly have the code, so they swiftly become wealthy top-billers as Zeena and Pete once were. But the ambition of "the Great Stanton," as Stan now calls himself, doesn't stop there. At one of his shows he runs into a psychiatrist named Lilith Ritter, who has a particularly aristocratic patient by the totally-not-miserly name of Mr. Grindle. Stan is interested by the fact that she records all of her therapy sessions on vinyl, and believes he could use those records to learn everything about his clients. Then, he could break into the spiritualism business, where he can start breaking bread with the top 1%. But there's another dimension to this as well--Stan legitimately starts believing he's doing God's work. He's able to convince Molly to help Mr. Grindle make the final crossing into religion by appearing as the ghost of his dead lady-love, but she has a pang of conscience and blows the gig. Stan still has some of his money, though, and tries to skip town with Molly. Except, Lilith has cheated him--she gives him a paltry $150, takes the rest for herself, and makes it clear to Stan that if he tries to stop her or implicate her in the crime, she has a vinyl record explaining he once had something to do with the death of a certain alcoholic former mentalist. Stan is left wandering around, reduced to drinking, until at last he finds a chance to fit back in with carny life. "Of course, it's only temporary," says the man hiring him. "Till we can get a real geek..."

This has been a good year for carnival movies, I feel. This is the same year I revisited The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, and when I first witnessed the relentless brutality of The Unknown. I'm starting to sense a thing here--it's like creators enjoy telling stories about the dark secrets of sources of mirth and wonder or something. This continues today, with the tradition of celebrity gossip mags and Disneyworld creepypastas--if something makes us happy, there must be something wrong with it. And this is not oversaturated at all, no sir, nor is it simply done occasionally just for the sake of pure cynicism. But sarcasm aside, there is something thrilling about looking into a point of entertainment and seeing it goes colossally wrong. And when that sort of logic is applied to something as seedy as a carnival, it produces results like Nightmare Alley. The movie and the book it was based on don't shy away from the problems of carny life, like addiction and forced labor. It doesn't quite step into the plight of the freaks, but the plight of the geek is highlighted as I've never seen it before. As far as I know, this is historically accurate; shows would take in bums and ply them with booze to do crap shows, in some sense relying on the embarrassment of geekdom to ensure that they never escaped their addiction. It's hard to avoid a cynical, nihilistic message when faced with the reality of that.

So, the primary theme of Nightmare Alley is, "Don't tamper in God's domain." This is hammered in a little roughly but it certainly takes. The movie allows its two-hour runtime to really dig into Stan's journey from barker to showman to wannabe messiah, to chicken-biting lunatic, so we walk through his journey to touch the hand of God with him in great detail. This is film noir, in case I didn't say so, and as such it's really, really good at telling its story through implication and conversation. We learn briefly that Stan grew up an orphan, where he took in "the scripture they fed us Sunday, after beating us black and blue all week." He tried to escape the orphanage but they sent him to reform school, where he faked spirituality to get parole. This is a great way of explaining Stan's wanderings into Christianity as well as his sociopathic tendencies. Interesting that this film, while attempting to be sincere about religion, also portrays it cynically, just as it does the carnival. Perhaps it's that the movie believes that God is good, but religion can be abused by "ministers" like Stan. It's tough to tell, what with the conformist '50s on the way. If this movie was made six years later, it may not have been so quick to condemn Stan's corporal punishment at the hands of the nuns at the orphanage.

Returning, then, to the telling of character by implication: this movie's structure roughly follows Stan's life as a traditional tragedy, detailing how he obtains glory and loses it. But the simple fact of it is that Stan had prosperity before his journey began. He specifies to Zeena at the film's beginning that he quite enjoys being a barker, finding it the first job he ever truly enjoyed. It wasn't great, but it was a steady paycheck and a roof, and maybe he could have worked his way up to a management position at some point (hey, it was the '40s--I'm told the American Dream actually sorta worked then, least as long as you were white, straight, cis, abled, and a man). And yet, whether it was by his upbringing or something else, he couldn't get enough. See, I can say this with honesty! This is a tampered-in-God's-domain story that actually works!

Of course, there's a lot going for it stylistically--I can't describe it all fully but there are tons of neat noir tricks, and if you are a diehard noir junkie, yes, there are plenty of shadows and cig-smoke clouds to go around. One thing I really liked is how, as Stan runs into his obstacles one by one, we begin to hear a faint sound behind the music. When this sound appears near the end of the movie, we can tell it's the screams of the geek that Stan heard at the beginning--the screams which will soon become his own. And yet, there is an ending added to the movie which is not present in the novel, which makes things happier...while also making the parallel structures between Pete and Stan, and Zeena and Molly, all the more terrifyingly adamant. This movie has one of the best uses of this cruel irony that I love seeing in films so much. And while this isn't a stylistic comment, I do have to say something how much this film benefits from casting Coleen Gray as Molly. Gray is one of the most attractive actresses I've seen in a while, and I don't know why. She hasn't been in too much else that I recognize, but my crush on her is rather an irony in itself, due to the fact that the other big I do recognize her for is the titular character of The Leech Woman! So I have found myself attracted to a woman whose other big role for me is "vampiric hag." C'est la vie...

There are some things I could criticize, such as the fact that Stan and Zeena's code is perhaps a bit too complicated for me to believe, and that Lilith's turn from horror at Stan's idea of using her records to swindle her patients to being totally onboard with the idea is never explained. But almost every other frame of the movie is pure gold, and I challenge you to lose yourself in the tangled knots of this one. It's a real treat.

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