The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969), by Emilio Vieyra and Jerald Intrator

So, uh, there's no way the director of this film didn't see The Awful Dr. Orlof. Or Atom Age Vampire. Or The Corpse Vanishes. Fuck, there's a lot of goddamn glandsploitation movies! But The Curious Dr. Humpp differs from them in a variety of key ways. Namely, it's one of the more bizarre variants on the glandsploitation genre, throwing a bit of The Brain That Wouldn't Die into the mix--but with an actual brain this time!

Dr. Humpp is a researcher who forces his hideously (and hilariously) disfigured monster-goon assistants to kidnap young people to have a lot of sex. Not to have sex with; it's complicated and I'll get into it. In an astonishingly overlong opening segment, we witness one of the blatant man-in-the-mask mutants kidnap a pair of lesbians, an alcoholic dude, a masturbating hypersexual lady, a hippie foursome, and a stripper. All of them except for Outlier Alcoholic Man are young and attractive and improbably keep their makeup on at times. We know how young and attractive and made-up they are because we watch each of them (except the alcoholic) engage in sexual behavior for prolonged periods of time. The stripper is so sexy she makes a saxophone player cum in his pants! Huh, it's starting to seem like a movie called The Curious Dr. Humpp is a softcore porn or something. It transpires, in the bare excuse for the plot, that Dr. Humpp is making his victims have sex after consuming a smoking, bubbling potion. This somehow produces another smoking, bubbling potion (eww), which Humpp ingests to stave off a mutation such as that which has consumed his assistants. But also, the bad doctor's research is being used to the benefit of a preserved brain in a jar who schemes to conquer the world!

That's a big "but also." The copy I watched was in Spanish with no subs, and so while I could make out enough to tell what was happening, I'm pretty sure the Jar Brain was added in last second. He really doesn't have a bearing on the plot (if they are a he). However, he is much more memorable than our cop protagonists. Considerable time is spent trying to make this one cop into the hero, and it doesn't work, because he's just there to make it feel like a krimi. Speaking of krimis, and, consequently, Edgar Wallace, that's what makes me feel like this could have come from Jesus Franco circa 1962. Cops are just crammed in here because they'd be crammed into an Edgar Wallace adaptation. True, they are cheap protagonists, but I can't help but feel like the creators of this film were going for something particular in terms of style and genre. Interestingly, there were scenes set inside Dr. Humpp's complex which made it feel like a prison movie. It never lingers long enough to count, and the prisoners never interact with each other in a meaningful way, but they could have changed genres and it would have been a natural flow.

Let's talk about Dr. Humpp himself. He looks like Adam West and has a hot wife who's really into masochism. Outside of sex-sauce experiments they also cut open the heads of their mutants and stick hot metal in them to make smoke come out of their eyes. The Humpps have a lot of these mutants! When the cop breaks into the facility he's confronted by a whole army of them. I wish I knew why Humpp was himself turning into a mutant, or what caused the mutant outbreak through the lab. Maybe Humpp worked at the '60s incarnation of the Umbrella Corporation. Or perhaps it was merely fate, for Humpp seems to go out of his way to make his potions foam and sizzle unnecessarily, and he also keeps a skull on his desk. He is clearly evil, or mad, at the very least. On top of this, he gets sex hallucinations when he drinks his splooge-serum, which may or may not be manifestations of his own psyche. That doesn't actually support the idea that he's evil and so evil things happen around him, I just wanted to bring it up because I love me some good ol' psychedelic sex hallucinations. In living black-and-white!

Dr. Humpp is a minor work in the annals of trash, but the title alone is indelible. I've known about this movie for as long as I've been watching exploitation junk, and I'm happy to have actually seen it now. Long stretches of it will put you to sleep (YES WE GET IT THE PEOPLE ONSCREEN ARE FUCKING) but it makes a surprisingly funny double feature with Awful Dr. Orlof. I mean, c'mon, there are Astro-Zombies who look more convincing than this movie's monsters! And seriously--how many movies are there where someone takes someone's glandular fluids and uses them to create a scientist potion?! I just keep finding more! It's really disturbing, especially since few of them have Howard Vernon in them. Much less his dick.

Anyway. Take a look at the poster for this if you aren't swayed into viewing. Yes, the monster does actually look like that. Worse, even. The poster omits the fact that the monster's eyes aren't exactly synced up--he doesn't gaze down on someone like that, and you'll know what I mean when you see it for yourself. Today's a Wednesday, so have a happy Humpp Day.

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Carnival of Blood (1970), by Leonard Kirtman

Let's take a step away from the Great Vorelli's unnecessarily disturbing stage shows, to focus instead on another type of entertainment: the carnival. In the '70s, Coney Island was a gruesome place, where creepy, chipped-paint mannequins laughed at you from the scummy, fingerprint-stained booths. Carnival of Blood is a bit less clean than Devil Doll, but it's also slightly more self-aware in how it portrays its women.

After opening with a song from someone who seems to be trying quite hard to sound like Joni Mitchell, we meet a pair of couples. One of them I'll talk about first simply because they are not long for this movie--or this world. They do not have a good marriage, evidently, and fight bitterly all across the carnival. Eventually, they end up in the tent of the carnival's fortune-teller, who calls Ortega on them I mean foresees something bad for them in her tarot cards. They blow her off, and they next arrive at a dart-and-balloon stall managed by Tom, a mild enough man who nevertheless is willing to give the pair a free prize to make them go away. The dude wants to go home but the girl drags him to the Tunnel of Love, where she is messily parted from her head amidst the Willy Wonka-esque voyage through the dark. Exeunt Couple #1.

Our Main Couple, then, consists of Dan and Laura. The former has made his way to the position of assistant DA, and so he proposes to his longtime girlfriend. Unfortunately, their relationship is fraught with difficulty as Dan relentlessly obsesses over catching the Coney Island killer. When Laura complains about their problems to Tom, he simply tells her that fighting of any kind is awful in a relationship. Note the tone of voice he uses when they discuss this--it will important later.

Before Laura's chat with Tom, however, a drunken sailor and a young woman he's accompanying--presumably a sex worker of some kind--stop by Tom's stand. Tom is accompanied at this locale by his sweeper, "Gimpy," who is mentally disabled and sports a made-up face that looks like it lost a fight with an octopus. (For those of you who care, this is Burt Young's first cinematic appearance.) When the sailor and his girl get too annoying, Tom once more buys them off with a prize. The two wander around the carnival for way too fucking long, a stretch of the film significantly impaired by the sailor actor behaving much more like a man OD'ing on ecstasy and meth than a drunkard. They end up at the fortune-teller's, where she once again sees something awful in the cards and tells them to go home. Instead they choose to keep on wandering pointlessly. The sailor clumsily tries to steal the girl's purse, they start to have makeup sex but then don't for some reason, and the girl is stabbed and relieved of her intestines. We then cut back to Tom, who is wondering where Gimpy went off to. Uh-oh--well, turns out that he went missing because Tom went missing. Gimpy gets upset because Tom isn't supposed to leave him alone, to the mercies of the customers. To make it up to him, Tom asks Gimpy to join him for a beer at his apartment, which is full of creepy googly-eyed teddy bears. Yet despite the eeriness of Tom's accommodations, it's evidence against Gimpy that grows here, because he ends up telling an unnerving tale of how he once had "a good dog" who "went bad, so [he] had to kill him." Gimpy repeatedly crying, "I had to kill him, Tom!" is simultaneously spine-chilling and hilarious.

All this time, our Main Couple is still investigating the park and also fighting each other. We are diverted from them once again by a rando park customer, an extremely rude and noisy middle-aged lady. As with everyone before, she goes to visit the fortune-teller, who again foresees something terrible about to happen via her tarot deck. Then she has a run-in with Tom where she's rude as a Trump supporter to him and Gimpy. Sure enough, further down the boardwalk, the screeching old harpy gets her tongue and eyes torn out, and her head crushed with a brick.

Something finally actually happens with Dan and Laura, which is that Dan decides that it's funny to don a monster mask and rush at a woman who witnessed the aftermath of a gruesome murder. It gets worse. He wants her to go back to the park right away so she can get over her trauma, so that he "doesn't have a hysterical woman on [his] back for the rest of [his] life." Then he calls her self-centered. What a fucking cock. Laura ends up going to cry on Tom's shoulder, but he's aggravated by the unrest in their relationship, and when she says she vandalized the teddy bear Dan won for her, he calls her a slut "like all the rest." No one fucks with teddy bears around Tom. Still, when she runs off, he tracks her down and apologizes. Then, when he has locked in a ride, he starts calling her Mommy, and says he has to kill her. Ohhh, dear...Tom tried to warn Gimpy when he said that his parents used to fight. Now Gimpy is dead, and Laura is about to join him.

And in the end, the villain turns out to be disfigured, too, wearing a somehow-perfect mask. What a trip. Most people cite this movie's value as residing in its vintage footage of a now forever lost Coney Island. However, I found the story and the characters to be pretty damn entertaining too. There's so much unintentional trash humor here that I love returning to this movie whenever I can. And I think it has a message too--one which subverts its surface-level misogyny. In every case save for that of the fortune-teller, misogyny is used to establish the various suspects as possible killers, which extends even to Dan. I can't imagine Dan got better after this movie, even after Laura presumably told him about Tom's backstory as per her ride with him. But ultimately, the same disgust towards women and fear of them having sex proves to be the motivation behind Tom's slayings. There's no doubt that hatred of women is on the side of evil, even though the protagonist also insists on instigating it. There's a lot of sympathy held for Laura in the film, though, and I don't think she's just a piece of meat. Note too that Tom has every reason to want to kill the men in the relationships he targets. The guy from Couple #1 is just as bitchy as his wife, the sailor is literally just babbling drunken nonsense nonstop, and Laura specifically points out that Dan started all the trouble in her relationship. But to Tom that stuff is invisible because he has double standards. A woman abused him as a child, true, but he latched onto the fact that said woman cheated on his father as his motive. It's not the deepest examination of the hypocrisy of patriarchy I've seen, but it's clear that the movie isn't just conforming to tropes either.

Honestly, though, even if you don't care about that thematic stuff, Carnival of Blood is a boatload of fun for people looking for hilariously low-quality films. The gore is some pretty sweet H.G. Lewis-type stuff, and you simply won't believe Burt Young as Gimpy. Give it a shot if you haven't already.

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The Devil-Doll (1936), by Tod Browning

And we're back!

We are switching back to written reviews for 2019, but rest assured there will still be plenty of podcast action at the A-List with a new show, Continuity Cavalcade, where we'll be examining oddities of canon and continuity across a lot of different shows and movies. You'll get to listen to that later this month. For now, however, let's get back on familiarly loopy ground with a return to the world of Tod Browning.

Paul Levond (Lionel Barrymore) is a convict who has been running from prison for weeks in the company of his cellmate Marcel. (Before we go any further, yes, Lionel Barrymore is playing a Frenchman, and no, he does not attempt any sort of accent besides his own.) Levond has been sitting in stir for 17 years now after his cheating bank partners embezzled their institution and framed him for it. While Marcel notes that Levond's heart is full of hate, he insists that he has something worthy to contribute to mankind. The two limp through the feverish swamps to his hidden laboratory, maintained by his disabled wife Malita, who sports a skunk-stripe in her hair and happens to be a mistress of goofy mad-science faces. It turns out she and Marcel had been working on a strange experiment that involves shrinking people's atoms so they become doll-like. Smaller people require less food, and so why not shrink people until there's enough to go around? Certainly beats snapping your fingers to kill half the universe. What's interesting is that the shrinkage's effect on the brain causes them to become even more doll-like, in that they can't move. Can't move, that is, until they are animated by an outside will. Yep--Marcel and his wife have created shrunken telepathy-controlled zombies. That's a pretty convenient thing to have control over when your cellmate dies, and your primary goal in life involves covertly assassinating the jackals who screwed you over. What I'm saying is that Levond and Malita are moving to Paris, where the latter will continue her experiments for the benefit of the former, while giving him a secret weapon to use against the three crooked bankers.

And man oh man do Levond and his newfound assistant show up in style. When we finally see Levond in Paris it's after he's established himself as an elderly, kindly toy shop owner named Madame Mandelip. Yes, it's Lionel Barrymore in drag. This strange angle is an attempt to connect it to the A. Merritt story this is based on, Burn, Witch, Burn, which otherwise has nothing to do with superscientific doll people or even a man escaping from prison and hiding in drag. In the original story, however, there is a menacing old woman, and in order to adapt that part of the tale Browning had to have his criminal lead disguise himself as an aging widow. In any case, Madame Mandelip's toy business is a perfect cover to get the killer "dolls" into the millionaire's houses. Indeed, it's so easy that the movie needs another plot to keep itself as a respectable runtime. Levond also wants to make good for his daughter Lorraine, who hatefully believes him to be a criminal and is trapped in an awful laundry where she earns next to nothing. He is deeply hurt that she hates him so much, and this helps guide him into extracting a confession from the last surviving banker which exonerates his family. He visits her and her grandmother as Madame Mandelip, where we learn the specifics on how deep Lorraine's disgust of her father goes. After obtaining redemption, Levond has one last meeting with his daughter, where he tries to offer her closure. Posing as Marcel, he tells her that her father is dead, but that he loved her very much, and wants her to forget him so she can be happy with her taxi-driver boyfriend. Levond then leaves the Eiffel Tower to step out into an unknown fate.

Tod Browning loved sentimentalism when he wasn't being crass. Much of the emotion is overdone, especially with Barrymore chewing every bit of scenery he can get his jaws around--though nothing quite makes it to Mark of the Vampire's "He used it to--to cup the blood." In any case, the theme here is nakedly meant to be one of love vs. hate. Characters talk about the hate Levond holds in his heart, Lorraine talks about how much she hates her father, and both of them turn out to be wrong. By giving in to their love for each other, they share one last beautiful moment as father and daughter, even though the latter isn't aware of that the man speaking to her is her father. It's compassion rather than pure vengeance or disgust that fixes things. Hey, I'll take it. I love love.

But then you remember that this is welded onto a movie about shrunken people who can be telepathically controlled. And how we're supposed to buy that toy horses and dogs are acceptable stand-ins for such. When the matte effects do show up, they're startlingly effective for the time, but are still a little Bert I. Gordon-ish. What makes the mad science great is Malita. It is clear by film's end that she is totally unhinged, even if her madness is linked to a beneficial goal. Admittedly, however, Levond has a point when he calls her work "monstrous." How much would you want to be shrunken down, in the interest of saving resources? Especially if the process was notably flawed? Good mad science is something helpful gone wrong--because who would genuinely go out of their way to make monsters? I love Malita's character and she helps make everything work.

The skunk-stripe in her hair, though, points out something interesting, which I only just noticed on this watch-through: this movie is totally ripping off the previous year's Bride of Frankenstein. Malita resembles the bride herself. At one point, she makes the shrunken people dance for her, just like Pretorious' dancing homunculi. And part of the climax even involves someone yelling something about "blowing yourself to atoms"! The ripoff is frankly kind of obvious now that I think about it, and I really can't help but wonder if this was meant as Browning's middle finger to Universal. "You want to make a crazy-ass mad science movie that makes you a ton of money? Fine, I'll just go on to the same thing for MGM!" Of course, it could have been a studio mandate, too. But I want to give Browning some credit.

Sakes. This was nuts. But it's so good to be back.

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Top Ten A-List Films of 2018

2018 was a wild ride without these movies. How can I even describe what it was like with them?

A million thanks to all my listeners. You are the stars. <3

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The Abomination (1986), by Bret McCormick

SPOOKYWEEN HAS BEGUN!! I hope you're ready to get messy--with the gross and gory myriad mouths of THE ABOMINATION!

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Tyler's Perry Acrimony (2018), by Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry has made a legitimately great film. But it's great because of its almost obsessive fixation on topping its own oddity.

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House on Haunted Hill (1999), by William Malone

That was fun, let's do it again. But this time, let's see what the '90s have to offer us when we open the doors to the HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL.

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The Man Without a Body (1957), by W. Lee Wilder and Charles Saunders

A billionaire thinks you can cure brain cancer with a brain transplant. So he brings Nostradamus back to life. I was unprepared.

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The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), by Joseph H. Lewis

Lionel Atwill is resurrecting the dead, like a goddamn asshole. Won't you step into his lab on old Market Street?

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Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971), by Thomas Casey

Pride continues by asking the vital question: Stanley, why won't you just get that hair cut? Featuring drag galore!

The Ghastly Ones (1968), by Andy Milligan

LGBT PRIDE IS HERE!!! Get your gay on with Andy Milligan and his island of murder!

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The Age of Insects (1991), by Eric Marciano

Hope you like being rubbed up with bug jelly.

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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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Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), by Massimo Pupillo

Can you survive the chest-greasing horrors of the Crimson Executioner?!?

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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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The Grapes of Death (1978), by Jean Rollin

Our first podcast episode! Pesticide zombies and high art, together at last!

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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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The Zodiac Killer (1971), by Tom Hanson

Most of us at this point are familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer. In the late '60s through the early '70s, an as-yet-unidentified murderer killed at least five people in the San Francisco area, leaving behind mysterious ciphers which remain as unsolved as the case they belong to. Many theories have emerged citing a number of suspects, and similarly quite a few films have been made on the subject of the murders. Like the theories, some of these movies are sound, while others are not. The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer, made by Tom Hanson as part of a harebrained, probably-bogus scheme to catch the Killer in the theater it showed at, is decidedly not one of the sound Zodiac case adaptations, being instead a fascinating portrait of ugly people thrown into a classic exploitation backdrop.

The film is a relatively disconnected series of vignettes. We first follow the Zodiac Killer without knowing who he is, and two suspects emerge for us to consider: the meek, rabbit-keeping vegan mailman Jerry, and the violently misogynistic, drug-addicted, alimony-dodging Grover. The police begin to close in on Grover, seeing as he's the more readily obvious suspect, but he's shot down after trying to kidnap his daughter with a Ultimate Weapon, a handsaw. Jerry is the actual Zodiac, believing that his victims will become his slaves in the afterlife (which the Zodiac Killer claimed to believe), after Atlantis rises from the ocean (which is horseshit concocted by the director). He keeps on killing and, as in real life, he is never caught.

Tom Hanson here takes the Ed Wood route of exploitation and tries to make a movie that teaches us something. At first, the movie is rather cynical--it flat-out calls the audience stupid for not being more paranoid about serial killers, for not suspecting the un-suspicious. This is a rather uncomfortable view to take, especially in an age where kids are now being told that their shy classmates are potential school shooters in the making just because they're quiet. Jerry being the killer fits in with this mentality; he is the very "guy next door" that he warns us about at the beginning. Grover's arc exists to demonstrate that sometimes the most vulgar and openly-violent and Trump-esque of us are just bad people, and despite their loudness and brashness they shouldn't be the only ones we look at when it comes to looking for murderers. Of course, that sort of seems to normalize people like Grover, but the subversion, I think, goes deeper than that.

Grover is violently misogynistic, true, but grotesque sexism is a running theme of the whole movie--almost as if Hanson wanted to demonstrate, at least subliminally, that the Zodiac Killer could not exist without a confining culture that encourages men to be violent. Jerry is not as sexist as Grover, but only barely. He shares a conversation with his hideous pimple of a neighbor Doc, who opines that "once women are over 20, they're no good...Chinese have a term for it, it's called the Year of the Dog. [That's...not what that is, but 'kay.] Or as I like to call it, the Birth of the Bitch!" Following this Doc adds, "if you get any leftovers, though, send 'em my way...remember, I like 'em plump 'n' juicy...and DUMB!" Jerry is generally on Doc's side during this, and the rest of the movie will show him throw sexist remarks out of his own volition. Jerry and many other characters also sling around the word f*ggot, and Jerry himself takes deep offense at being called such. This latter incident takes place in a bar scene where we get glimpses of various relationship dynamics, nearly all of them portrayed negatively. Bad sexual dynamics, negative gender roles, and institutionalized homophobia are all major parts of the world that makes the Zodiac Killer who he is.

Actually, this movie in some ways is all about subversions. After Jerry is shown to us as the Killer, we see him first share some hotdogs with some beachgoers, where he doesn't kill them--then he goes to a park full of vulnerable children, where he doesn't kill anyone. But then we get the biggest and most infamous murder scene of the whole movie, where he first claims to be a crook escaping from a prison in Montana, and that he just needs to steal his victims' keys and money to get to Mexico. But after he ties them up, he chuckles casually, "I'm gonna have to stab you people." This sort of sadistic joking-around follows as he plays games with the police. He takes genuine pleasure in shutting down the power of those who can stop him. At the end, this is played with, where it's briefly put forth that maybe if the police didn't need to get so many fuckin' permits and warrants and whatnot they'd just be able to arrest/kill all those dirty crooks all the time like we want. It's uncomfortable (because time shows that cops perform worse and commit more crimes without those regulations), but it's presented alongside the suggestion (put forth, admittedly, by the Zodiac himself) that the Killer may in fact be a sane person, which means there are other reasons for his killings aside from simple "mental illness." While it is the Zodiac Killer himself putting forth this view, it also obviously stands in for the sentiments of the filmmakers, so this is a point they're interested in exploring. It's interesting. It's almost like unscientific views of mental health and biased explanations/solutions for crime are excuses for the violence of the patriarchy or something. 

Of course, this movie is also ridiculous. Grover is absolutely disgusting inside and out, which becomes kind of comedic after a while. ("Suspect proceeded to urinate in customers' drinks, proclaiming...'The Fountain of Youth lives'?") The Zodiac Killer wears a Paul McCartney wig and a beaglepuss. The police consult a psychic, Mr. Koslow, who has some Mysterious Foreigners in his apartment for no reason. It's a weird movie, and I may have understated that, despite the fact that this is a fictionalization of a series of murders that was released while those murders were still happening. To say nothing of the fact that for all the hard facts about the case Hanson gets right, there are plenty he just makes the fuck up.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's not an easy watch, for quite a few reasons, but every time I pop it into I'm completely engrossed in its world for 87 minutes. Like, I will actually forget about outside reality when I throw it on. That's another way it's weird. Watch it.

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Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (1992), by John Carr

It is finished. What began in 1980 with The Nightmare Never Ends and led into Gretta in 1984 and Night Train to Terror the year after comes to a stunning finale twelve years after it commenced with Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Originally set for production in 1982 under the title Scream Your Head Off, Marilyn was only partially made, and it took ten years for the scrapped footage to be turned around into a full movie. I suspect that the movie we would've gotten with Scream Your Head Off would have been more similar to "The Case of Harry Billings" from Night Train to Terror, but sometime in the decade between its start and finish director John Carr and writer Philip Yordan developed an obsession with actress Marilyn Monroe, and decided to work that angle into the affair. The success of the result means that this whole quartet is amazing all the way through: Marilyn doesn't drop the prestigious ball passed to it by its predecessors.

Harry Billings accidentally kills his wife in a drunken accident on the first day of their marriage, and shortly afterwards, tries to commit suicide. For this, the hospital that retrieves him follows what is clearly real-life procedure and sends him to a mental hospital for indefinite, nonconsensual treatment with no notification to his surviving family. The hospital is run by Dr. Brewer and Dr. Fargo, and they use the hospital to harvest women to sell to Middle Eastern oil sheikhs using hypnotically-controlled patients. Considerably odder than just kidnapping the women for body parts, no? While being used for this purpose Harry also encounters a patient who claims to be Marilyn Monroe, who speaks of a powerful conspiracy to imprison her in this place. Due to the meds they give her she frequently reverts to the mental age of 12, desiring a handsome prince to come save her. Curious to bring up her age, given that Marilyn hasn't, y'know, aged in the last thirty years since her ostensible death. Eventually Dr. Fargo lobotomizes Brewer, but this will bring about her downfall when she seeks to have Harry, the hospital, and all the money to herself.

Not too far a deviation from Night Train, I'd say, but the introduction of the Marilyn plot, and the screentime it consumes, cannot be understated. This is significant for one big reason: this movie is edited drunkenly, trying desperately to stitch on the newer Marilyn bits to the older Scream Your Head Off bits. Making the whole mess hopeless is that the older parts of the movie were shot on film, while the newer Marilyn chunks are very obviously shot on video. This makes the whole affair seem less like A Night to Dismember and more like Run Coyote Run, the pseudo-remake/sequel to Lady Street Fighter. It's a patchwork monster but I always love when one of those makes itself at home in my house.

The film bits feature the same sort of artistic scripting and direction that made Gretta seems so self-contradictory. There's a scene where Dr. Brewer gives someone the "Roman thumb" and it actually feels like something from a real movie. Then the video comes along and it's stiff, hurried, and over-focused on making cheesecake out of Marilyn Monroe. There is no sense of quality in the script. This fits John Carr's filmmaking very well, though; even the good bits that are continuous with one another are still largely suspended in seas of Just Not Getting It. Carr knows how good movies look, but he doesn't know how they work. As ever, this quality works entirely to our benefit.

The mental hospital is still unbelievable medieval, though that might be partially to blame on Fargo and Brewer's crooked natures. However, I don't understand why an ordinary hospital chooses to send someone to a psychiatric facility against their will, rather than, y'know, offering them treatment at the actual hospital and discharging them with recommendations for a therapist. Harry hasn't even regained consciousness when they choose, via shitty dub work, to send him off to Brewer's "care." This must be a weird alternate universe in several ways besides that unusual detail, though, since one of Harry's victims is only mildly put off by a "cab driver" who drives an unmarked cab, is oddly insistent on driving her, waives the fare, and also buys her coffee which he does not allow her to refuse. Sometimes movies just do this. I don't why. They just keep doing it.

I'm running out of things to say, but I'm going to spoil something before I wrap it all up. In the end, the twist seems to be that Harry's friend is actually Marilyn Monroe. That's why I made a note how she hasn't aged since 1962; it's not because she's someone who believes she's Marilyn Monroe, it's because she actually is her. That means the conspiracy against her was real and is probably still out there with no one really investigating it. That's a big slug in the jaw from a movie which already has the audacity to not print a colon in its title. But the movie does have a happy ending, a non-ableist one at that, with the various patients all getting what they want without judgment.

I can't possibly hope to conjure words for my feelings about the journey these four movies have taken me through. So I'll simply end here with the knowledge that these were not the only movies John Carr and Philip Yordan worked on. Those that survive are in my scopes. The party lives on. And if you want to join the party, you should check out Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Just don't take the complimentary coffee.

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The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), by Bert Williams

2010 was probably when I first starting keeping the prototype form of the list that would become the A-List. I could no longer count my favorite trash movies on two hands, much less ten hands, so in order to make sure I didn't forget something in the long course of time, I started writing shit down. There was a secondary list to this, of course, which is the list we all make, the list of movies we want to see when we have a chance. Beneath this second list, though, was yet another list, which not everyone keeps. This was the list of Lost Films for whose return I would wait eternity. This included movies so rare that they might as well be lost.

In eight years, I've found some of those movies: Death Brings Roses is the one that comes to mind the quickest. I'm still looking for The Weird Ones, Sasqua, Amanita Pestilens, and many others. But out of all of them, I never expected The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds to be found. It was lost; as in, all-copies-incinerated lost, London After Midnight lost, not-a-single-frame-remains lost. And yet fate, or something greater, finds a way, and a complete copy of Bert Williams' 1965 exploitation epic was found in an abandoned movie theater just last year and streamed on MUBI. Response has been limited--after all, most people reading this review will have never heard of the film before, and it's just an exploitation movie. But I'm baffled by the few reviews that do exist that say that the film is "nothing special" or "forgettable." On the contrary: I believe that Nest deserves to be enshrined among one of the inner circles of the Trash Pantheon, demonstrating attributes that make it akin to films like Sledgehammer and Manos: The Hands of Fate.

A Liquor Control Department agent named Johnson--no first name--is dispatched to take out a nest of crummy bootleggers, led by the rather unpleasant-looking "Doc." His father was killed by bootleggers, but through sheer dopiness Johnson will prevail. He only regrets having to leave behind Pat, his notably-younger, notably-hotter wife who apparently can't have sex for reasons that are never explained. Eventually Johnson's cover among the bootleggers is blown and he's forced to go on the run into the swamps. Here, he witnesses a strange naked blonde girl who dances around in the swamps wearing a plastic see-through mask very much like the one the killer wears in Sledgehammer. She tries to kill him in a VERY jarring sequence, but he escapes and is taken it by Harold, the groundskeeper of the remote Cuckoo Bird Inn, who honestly does look like Torgo's cousin. The Cuckoo Bird Inn is run by the tyrannical Mrs. Pratt, who, like most people in this movie, CAN ONLY COMMUNICATE WITH YELLING. She also abuses her daughter Lisa in a style much in the same way as Carrie's mom, but Johnson is stuck there until he's done recovering. Oh, but did I mention that Lisa almost perfectly resembles the nude girl who tried to murder Johnson earlier?

The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds makes a lot of wrongheaded decision that lead to it being a very strange watch. I want to start with the fact that our main protagonist is an idiot--but a debonair idiot. Like, his entire character is that he's some kind of ill-mannered bumpkin, but at the same time, he's played up as if this is really charming somehow. He tells Mrs. Pratt, "You're a real attractive woman..." (she isn't) "...just like my sister!" (?!?). Then there's the fact that Pat, his wife, who vanishes without a solitary trace by the film's second half, isn't interested in sex with him, but she takes the blame for this without explanation. There's also a recurring gag of sorts where Johnson keeps crushing Harold's thumb, and it's never really clear if he's deliberately trying to provoke him or if he's just an imbecile.

Johnson also sweats a lot, but so does everyone else. Seriously, there may be more sweat in this than in the Ms. Blandish remake. It is a dour, sour-slick movie, Apocalypse Now-like at times, with lots of high, grungy shadows and claustrophobic grimy indoors. That's before we get to some of the film's more gruesome surprises. The grindhouse has arrived, hallowed be it's name--if this movie came later it would be an appropriate bridge between Manos and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but for now it instead forms a sort of link between Manos and Spider Baby; or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. It's still pretty tame by modern standards, but all these films are cousins to each other--distant echoes probably of the shitty, unnecessarily-praised 1932 Old Dark House (which incidentally starred William "Boris Karloff" Pratt), yet still more powerful in the end than that drab, stupid film could ever be. The initial scenes with Lisa in her plastic mask are legitimately scary, and caught me completely off guard the first time I saw them. They feature plenty of boosted shrieks and sped up footage, which hints at the garbled talent director Williams frequently but inconsistently portrays.

The film starts huffing and puffing when it reaches its final revelations, which include such wonders as Harold's gory secret, the reason why Mrs. Pratt abuses Lisa, and the nature of the "Chapel" the ultra-religious Mrs. Pratt keeps on the Inn property. In all my viewings I've zoned out a lot while watching it. However, the film's multiple climaxes are totally bananas, and frankly, middle chunks aside, so is most of the rest of the film. It's not only scripted off-kilter, making it a strange story no matter how it could end up directed, but it's directed bizarrely as well, with lots of uncomfortable angles and an insistence on having characters face away from each other as they talk. Part art drama, part exploitation gore flick, Nest of the Cuckoo Birds actually is an unsung micro-classic, though it achieves such status entirely in trash terms. Its blend of humorous lapses of judgment and legitimately heart-rending horror sequences makes it something every trash film fan should track down immediately.

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