Secrets of the French Police (1932), by A. Edward Sutherland

H. Ashton Wolfe was a strange writer. I can find virtually no biographical details of the man online, but he is known to me as an author of 1920s true crime lit which was probably only somewhat true. For example, in Wolfe's book Warped in the Making: Crimes of Love and Hate (1928), he tells two stories about the Parisian police's clashes with a larger than life Chinese criminal named Hanoi Shan. The story features Shan unleashing killer spiders and deadly poisons on the citizens of Paris--in a manner not dissimilar from Sax Rohmer's Yellow Peril racist stereotype Fu Manchu, whose stories were popular at the time. Indeed, comparing Wolfe's work to the pulp fiction of the era yields many more similarities that a comparison to late '20s true crime tales. This movie is ostensibly based on a series of stories by Wolfe which he claimed to be from the archives of the French Surete. I don't know if the French police ever had to deal with a cackling maniac armed with a basement Tesla coil who wanted to subvert the Communist regime of Russia with a royal pretender posing as Princess Anastasia Romanov. It's possible. I guess.

Meanwhile, we last saw director A. Edward Sutherland in command of a film which opens with Lionel Atwill sewing someone's mouth shut. He also committed a dark sin with the creation of The Invisible Woman, but we can let bygones be bygones. Because Secrets of the French Police is a sharp and fascinating film indeed.

We open at the funeral of the mysteriously-killed Brigadier Georges Danton, attended by his colleagues among the gendarmes of Paris. In case we missed the title card, his widow is told that he served the Secret police Secretly, and therefore is being buried in Secret. Using forensics they begin to look for the smokers of a special type of cigarette whose ash was found on Danton's corpse. They track it to a cigarette shop where we get an exceptionally bizarre vignette of a man who appears to be fucked up on meth getting mad over the cigarettes burning his mouth. He's supposed to be drunk, but his repeat exclamations of "FIRECRACKERS!!!!!" gets more and more surreal as time goes on. What makes this scene even stranger is the fact that it has no bearing on what follows.

Our real plot, when we do return to it, concerns a young pickpocket named Leon Renault, who is in love with a flower girl named Eugenie Dorain. Eugenie's father Anton despises that his future son-in-law is a criminal, but as we will learn, Monsieur Dorain has perversely good reasons for wanting his daughter to avoid the world of crime. You see, Anton used to be a criminal himself, as revealed by the mysterious man who comes to his apartment that night. Indeed, Eugenie isn't even his biological daughter, and it is entirely possible that Anton's "adoption" of her was a shady affair--the old man claims she was a war orphan in Russia (which raises some interesting questions as I'll explore below). But Anton does sincerely care about his adopted child and if he can spare her the horrors of his history he will. Unfortunately for him, he was friends with Brigadier Danton, and for that he must die.

The killer, whose belt buckle is actually a sheath for a knife, is a Russian General named Moroff. When we first meet Moroff he's saying something over the phone about Princess Anastasia, and how she will soon return. I started getting really excited for this movie when he mentioned the name, because whenever I hear a phrase from the conspiracy theory buzzword checklist that I totally have, my heart starts racing. "Illuminati," "Die Glocke," "the pyramids," "Kennedy"--now I'm lucky to have found a film which ticks off "surviving Romanovs." In case, Moroff's master plan, if you haven't guessed it, is tracking down a girl with a "Slavic" jaw who could be passed off as the supposedly-living Princess Anastasia, who was in our reality killed along with her family during the Russian Revolution. However, in case the girl is a poor actress or doesn't want to pose as fraudulent royalty, Moroff has trained himself in the arts of hypnotism, and trust me, it's way more hilariously pulpy than it sounds. It's really tempting to speculate that Moroff is meant to be a surviving Grigori Rasputin, just as it's tempting to consider Anton's story of Eugenie's origins meaning that she genuinely is Princess Anastasia (never mind that Anastasia was actually a Grand Duchess). I realize that latter point is more to explain the "Slavic jaw," but come on, do all Russians really look that similar? Do better, 1930s! What the emphasis on facial features also leads to is a face matching board used by the cops to come up with pictures of their suspects--pretty ordinary police work, a bit revolutionary in the 1930s, but for this movie they use a board which is ridiculously gigantic. The poor interns look so stupid looking for puzzle pieces to match to this thing as a guy called out a string of numbers and letters. This is the problem with making a police procedural: eventually, times will change so that your methods eventually look kinda silly. At least this wasn't made thirty years later, when they were showing us "the brand new computing machines" at their disposal. Even Batman knew it was hard to look cool using a '60s computer to solve crimes.

Moroff invites over the brother of the late Czar Nicholas II, the totally-not-fictitious Maxim Romanov. While initially Eugenie's act is decently convincing at first (if you get past the fact that she looks and acts about as lively as a zombie) but the sight of flowers is enough to break the hypnosis and drag her back to her old life. A slip in the act convinces Maxim that he's dealing with "a mental case," and ducks out on Moroff--but not before the General slips a note into his pocket claiming to be written by the Czar's brother, saying he believed Eugenie was Anastasia. Shortly thereafter Maxim and his chauffeur are driven off the road by an ingenious (but also ridiculously pulpy) movie screen projector, which simulates a car rushing towards oncoming traffic, and the plot against the Soviets goes on.

As an aside though, I do have to wonder--does Moroff legitimately think that Joseph fucking Stalin was going to hand over leadership of Russia to his cabal if somehow he did convince Maxim he had the real Grand Duchess on his hands? Really? More like Moronoff, dorogoy.

Eventually Leon, working with the police in exchange for a period where none of this thefts are stopped, breaks into Castle Moroff and nearly frees Eugenia when they are caught and brought down to the General's requisite torture-lab. Here, Moroff starts draining the girl of her blood, while he threatens Leon with a Tesla coil. I don't know what he intends to do with the Tesla coil, but it sure has Leon worried. But the police are right behind Leon, and their entrance is delayed only by the length of time it takes for an acetylene torch to get through a steel door.

Yeah, do you believe that happened in real life? You can say no, it's fine. If you do say no, you won't be alone. This movie is about as much of a true story as the Amityville sequels. I'm sure that it's possible to argue creative liberties, such as the fact that Leon has a well-developed personality that's too movie-perfect to be true--he never steals from Frenchmen, as he is a patriot who lost his entire family in World War I. But the difference between imagination and exaggeration can be a thin one when dealing with the tempestuous nebulousness that is "true crime." There's a strange blend of humor, horror, and stark, dour seriousness as we bounce from plucky Leon to Moroff's Gothic castle to the stiff procedural sequences. Ultimately this adds to a fun Pre-Code sum which is officially in my list of favorite unusual '30s movies. It's legitimately good, and where it isn't, it's at least captivating for other reasons. Give it a shot!

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The Oracle (1985), by Roberta Finlay

Roberta and Michael Findlay were trash legends, it's fair to say. They made The Touch of Her Flesh and its two sequels, a film series in which someone is vaginally assaulted with a lobster claw. (Not in all of the movies, just one. I think.) It's hard to imagine a married couple being inspired by the goddamn Olga films, and then going on to make classics like Snuff and Shriek of the Mutilated. Michael met a grisly end, being chopped to pieces by a helicopter in 1977, but Roberta kept on making horror into the late '80s. The Oracle is the first of these later outings that I've seen, but what I saw not only impressed me cinematically, but it worked as great trash too. This movie's pretty intense.

We open with some good ol' automatic writing being down by downtown medium Mrs. Malatesta. (Huh, wonder if her husband runs a Carnival of Blood--no, not that Carnival of Blood, I mean this one.) She has a ghost-planchette which is about to summon the spirits responsible for her demise; the planchette's new owner comes along shortly. Her name is Jennifer, and she's a friendly, ordinary woman who is married to world's biggest jerk. Men, if you constantly call your wife hysterical and embarrassing except for when you want sex, you're a stupid motherfucker and you should put your testicles under a jackhammer. Anyway, once the landlord, Mr. Pappas--who has a Greek name but acts like a Mexican stereotype--hands off the planchette, then Jennifer starts running into trouble. And not just because her dumb houseguests make the hand spell out "I am horny." Jennifer makes contact with the ghost of a murdered businessman named William Graham, who helps her uncover a conspiracy of murderers involving an evil factory manager and a trans male assassin named Farkas. And of course, no one believes her, or believes that she's sane.

This movie actually works really well as a commentary on how women are treated and gaslit in our society. At almost no point in time do any of Jennifer's friends or loved ones consider that she could be, y'know, telling the truth. They don't even consider that her paranormal experiences could be based on completely ordinary phenomena! Maybe it's bad writing--trust me, the dialogue is pretty goddamn bad, even if it's frequently hilarious--but the world is set against this poor lady as it is for many women in real life. It's a pretty crude form of dealing with a real issue, but crudeness is perhaps what's needed. Sometimes a sword will do, but other times a club just hits a little better. Apply a little reason, chaps! If your ladyfriend goes crazy on you there's probably a cause, and not just a tilting of the womb or whatever.

The theme is so blatant that I'm not really gonna spend that much time on it. IT'S TIME FOR TRASH INSTEAD.

Alright, so this movie really acts like it's two movies sewn together, Godfrey Ho-style. There's the occult stuff and there's the murders with Farkas. They come together at the end but it's funny how far apart they are. And how awkwardly they're cut together. In between scenes of Jennifer's Christmas Eve party are snippets from Farkas' murders. He hires a prostitute who he kills after she finds out about his genitals. He goes to a diner with the world's bitchiest waitress and takes an angry phone call from the diner's phone. ("Oh my God! He even ate the bones!") He also pops a Happy Hanukkah balloon--Nazi fuck. Maybe there's meant to be an intentional play between the fun of the party and stark '80s New York apathy of these other scenes. It's not played up that way, though. It feels more like someone just had an accident with the editing machine.

Incidentally. With that facial structure, that voice, that weight, the AFABness and the antisemitism--my God, Farkas is actually Crazy Fat Ethel, isn't he? He found his true self in that stock footage mental hospital from the end of Criminally Insane 2! I knew the story continued! Now we just need a movie explaining the Janowski family tensions between Ethel/Farkas and his sister, Edith Mortley RN.

Then there's the supernatural stuff. Pappas ends up with the planchette at one point, but he tries to use it to figure out the next day's lottery numbers. Because that's what communing with the dead is for. He is attacked by slimy rubber kids' toys, who start drinking his blood; when he tries to cut them off with a knife he just ends up mutilating himself instead. Then there's Jennifer's visions. She sees a shitty-looking corpse on TV, a clawed boogeyman at the window, and finally the zombie of her landlord. At the end there's another bad-looking rubber corpse who we get to see in even more detail. All they could afford was rubber and slime. Frankly though, that's all you need to make a great horror film.

There's just one more thing I want to comment on. When Jennifer says she has a surprise, her husband rolls his eyes and murmurs, "Antique pistols." What?! Why would he think that's what she had? Did he think she was challenging him to a duel? Is showing off one's antique pistols a common occurrence in this couple's social circle? I don't know why this baffles me so much. I can understand this from a first draft perspective--lord knows how many jokes or bit of dialogue I've written that have made sense in the moment but have proven baffling on the return run. (That's right, you guys get my good material. Crumble in despair as you consider how dire my bad shit must be.) But this was just odd. Odd in a way that I love, naturally, but odd all the same.

If you like slime and communicating with the dead, then this is the movie for you. It actually feels like a "real" thriller at times, before someone opens their mouth and says something. Professionalism is on display. But not everywhere. It's that precise and unique dichotomy that really matters.

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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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Devil Doll (1964), by Lindsey Shonteff

There may have been a few of you last week who read my review for The Devil-Doll and thought to yourselves--"Hmm, that doesn't sound like the movie I watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000." Wrong Devil Doll! This is, like a few other inhabitants of the A-List, one of the movies that Joel/Mike/Jonah and the Bots introduced me to. This indie British chiller is nothing special, but it has enough trashy weirdness that it makes for a pretty entertaining watch even outside the riffs of the Satellite of Love.

The Great Vorelli is a stage hypnotist who works with a ventriloquist dummy named Hugo. There are many early intimations that Vorelli's shows are more than a little upsetting. First, he hypnotizes a dude into mentally taking the place of a Chinese person who the man saw executed. The trauma isn't permanent--the man forgets everything once Vorelli snaps his fingers--but it's hard to imagine any audience that would want to watch something like this. Then, when Hugo comes out, he and Vorelli prove to have a mutually abusive relationship. Admittedly, the audience still applauds wildly in the wake of his "comedy" routine that's about as funny as a math test. What is truly impressive about Vorelli's act is that he can ventriloquize (sure, we'll call it that) through Hugo without even having to touch him. It's like the doll is really alive.

But our story doesn't truly begin until Vorelli has met Marianne Horne, a wealthy girl who he hypnotizes into an expert dancer. It's clear that Vorelli has some sort of perverse lust for her, and when we meet Vorelli's other assistant, a 30ish woman who only covers half her ass onstage, we start to understand what sort of man Vorelli really is. It's clear that his current assistant has been drained of all hope and life by Vorelli's cruelty, and Marianne is about to be put on the same path. Marianne is scared of Vorelli--she says that much to her reporter boyfriend, an American named Mark English (an American named English...was that someone's idea of a joke?). But he telepathically compels her to come visit him, so she can invite him to her aunt's charity ball. During this time he shows as a wine called "Blood of the Virgin," and he begins to hypnotize her he repeats that the wine is "deep...rich...red...warm..." Ughhh. Nothing happens yet, but after a once-again depressing excuse for a show at the charity ball, where Hugo actually threatens Vorelli with a knife, Vorelli drags Marianne further under his spell and rapes her. Hugo, whatever he is, has had enough. He goes to find Mark, and tells him to look up what he was doing in 1948 Berlin. Mark sends a reporter friend to Berlin to investigate. Meanwhile, Vorelli ends up in some rather confusing soup when Hugo kills his washed-up cheeky assistant, to frame him for murder. Not only is this point basically forgotten, but it paints Hugo, a sympathetic character, as a murderer. It contributes to a surreal noir-like griminess that haunts the movie even outside of Vorelli's shows.

It becomes clear that Hugo was not always a dummy--in the late '40s, in Germany, he was Vorelli's assistant, after the man spent a prolonged period of time studying both medicine and mystical techniques in soul-transference. Eventually, during a show, Vorelli killed Hugo in a way that trapped his soul in the dummy. Now Vorelli intends to do the same to Marianne, apparently so he can get her family's money. What?! I would assume he would want his "bride-to-be" to keep her human body for as long as possible, given what he's done to it so far--and what he has a habit of doing to his female assistants. For a movie with this much sexual grime oozing up from beneath, it's a little jarring for the film to claim that the primary interest of this villain is money.

But anyway, this is all leading up to one of the best fight scenes of all time, pitting man vs. dummy. I can't possibly describe how ludicrously awful this fight is, so I will encourage you only to seek the film out for yourselves. It's a sight to see.

Devil Doll is an ever-welcome combination of cheap sleaze and effective atmosphere. Vorelli's show at the beginning is murky, smoky, and sweaty--there is no music, save for the ominous thumping beat we the audience get to hear. It would be an astonishingly eerie experience to watch a man force another man to believe he's going to be shot in the head in silence, in the dark. This movie seems like the sort of thing that would be decently shocking in early-'60s Britain, if anyone actually saw it. Plus, Hugo is a scary motherfucker--when Vorelli calls him ugly, he unfortunately does have something of a point. I'm not saying that this is horror gold, but the mixture of the sleaze with the oily, claustrophobic atmosphere is interesting to watch. Especially when it all falls out and becomes funny again. Invite Tod Browning over and you'll have yourself a zany double feature.

Oh, and I'll quote it before you know it: "Ham! I love it."

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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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Disturbia (2007), by D.J. Caruso

2007 logic: if you are an utterly disrespectful creep, you will get the girl. I had fun ripping into this one.

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Secrets of Chinatown (1935), by Fred C. Newmeyer

A pulp novel come to life, Secrets of Chinatown is simultaneously amusingly bizarre and depressingly racist.

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The Legend of Spider Forest (1971), by Peter Sykes

How can you resist a title like THE LEGEND OF SPIDER FOREST? Fortunately the movie is every bit as unhinged as its title.

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Macumba Sexual (1983), by Jess Franco

Our Pride Twentygayteen reviews come to a close with Macumba Sexual, Jess Franco's even trippier remake of his early Vampyros Lesbos.

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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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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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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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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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Fog Island (1945), by Terry O. Morse

In my review for The Black Raven I mentioned the brief period of joy in my life where I would settle in after a late night shift to watch an hour-long George Zucco thriller. Now that I'm back to reviewing, I've been finding enough Crazy Shit to make me see the weaknesses of these clunky old mysteries, but I didn't want to leave such a significant portion of my life without paying it proper due--though I know there's at least one other piece of Zuccoana I want to get into. The Black Raven and Fog Island are rather similar, in that they feature George Zucco as a noble criminal who ends up both outplaying and being outplayed by the various other criminals who wash up at his mysterious isolated house. The Black Raven didn't have Lionel Atwill or Ian Keith, however, and that makes worlds of difference.

Leo Grainger (Zucco) is an ex-convict whose wife Karma was murdered by one of his former business confederates. In addition to killing Karma they also swindled him out of his money and got him thrown in prison. However, they know they didn't get the whole of the sum they helped him embezzle, and now, on remote Fog Island, where he lives with his stepdaughter Gayle, Leo is in the prime position to use that remaining money as a lure to get revenge on his wife's killer. The assembled goons are Alec Ritchfield (Atwill), John Kavanaugh, phony medium Emiline Bronson, Sylvia, who turned on Leo when he married Karma and not her, and Jeff Kingsley, whose father, the subject of Leo's invitation, has passed away. Also joining them is a prison buddy of Leo's named Lake, who is posing as a doctor to subvert the guests. Then it's on to some pure shenanigans, Old Dark House style.

The acting is great in this. Zucco is wonderful as a calm, sophisticated man nonetheless driven singularly by revenge. His final breakdown before his death, the splintering of his serenity, is hammy but convincing. He also spends most of his time passive-aggressively mocking his guests about their coming demises. Edward G. Robinson he ain't, but he's never as bad as everyone says he is. Then there's Lionel Atwill--sadly close to his premature death, he nonetheless fulfills his usual quota of stuffiness, now accomplished fittingly by the flabby chins which protrude over his collar. He makes lovely faces in this and shows no signs of slowing down even thirteen years after Doctor X. He can say "Tut, tut," to someone and make it seem natural. I love him. Finally, there is Ian "Ormond Murks" Keith--slimy as always, he gets a chance to murder someone (resolving a pointless red herring about Leo's butler being an ex-con in the process), and it's pretty great. I want to see all of Ian Keith's movies. Damn.

The rest of this review will consist of me simply naming the things I liked. There are definitely some oddities here that put flesh on the film's bones.

I have to talk about the character of Jeff. Jeff, like Creepy Guy from Pillow of Death, is a Creepy Guy. He used to date Gayle in college, which is kind of a huge coincidence if you think about it. He's one of those '40s movie "heroes" who continually steps on his "love" interest's toes, ignores her wishes, and then does something unspeakable to her at the end. In this case, he covers up that Gayle's stepfather has been murdered, with the implication being that he will never tell her. Presumably that means they'll share a lifetime of her yearning to return to the man who helped raise her, only for her husband to block her at every turn, until she's forced to conclude that he's died of old age. I extrapolate based on the weird humor that Jeff displays while performing the cover-up.

Then there's the fact that Emiline, who is played as a phony psychic all throughout the movie, accurately predicts her own death. Maybe that wasn't a coincidence that joined Gayle and Jeff--if psychic powers really exist in this universe, then maybe black magic does too, and Jeff cursed Gayle to link her to him. It all makes sense!

I have to comment also on the scene where Emiline and Alec are speaking, and she asks him to get her a book to help her sleep. Kavanaugh recommends "something light" and he picks out Crime and Punishment. Like, I get the joke, but when I think "light reading" Dostoyevsky is not the first guy to come to mind. Just an observation.

Finally, there is an odd scene between Gayle and Sylvia, which I read as being hella gay. Let's just say that when an older woman starts talking to a younger one about the quality of her skin and how she should take care of it, there's some coding involved...even though this certainly isn't positive representation. Fortunately it's not like "lesbians are predatory" is a theme or anything but it's a testament to the lowness the times these movies were made in stooped to at times.

All in all, however, Fog Island is probably the '40s mystery for me--nothing extraordinary by any means, but still a fun, cozy movie to curl up with. Long live Zucco.

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Phantom Ship (1935), by Denison Clift

First of all, I want to apologize for the plethora of clipped title cards I've been using for page images this year. I assure you that when the card appears clipped, I check other versions of the movie (when possible) to see if I can find a better screencap. If a card shows up with bits missing it's because I failed. Film preservation is pretty great, huh?

Benjamin Briggs and Toby Bilson are, respectively, the captain and first mate of the infamous Mary Celeste. We from the future know that in 1872, the Mary Celeste's crew mysteriously disappeared without a trace, but of course these men can't guess that. Briggs is having difficulty finding a crew due to the Celeste's bad name, but he's not averse to shangaiing sailors, despite the fact that he claims to be opposed to such--this will be one of many blatant lies Briggs tells throughout the movie. Word of this reaches a sailor named Anton Lorenzen (Bela Lugosi) who was once shanghaied himself--he practically begs to be let aboard the Mary Celeste for reasons that are assuredly not good. Meanwhile, Captain Briggs is about to marry his sweetheart Sarah, despite the fact that his friend Jim Morehead proposed to Sarah earlier in the day. Despite the fissure this creates between the men Briggs still has the gall to ask Jim to borrow one of his sailors. With this plot thread aboard alongside a seemingly vengeful Lorenzen, the fate of the crew, which now includes Briggs' wife Sarah, seems sealed for sure.

As it turns out--spoiler alert--Lorenzen is the killer. The ship he was shanghaiied aboard six years was the Mary Celeste (despite the fact that, in our world at least, the ship was called the Amazon in 1866 and had a completely different crew), and during that voyage he fell overboard and lost his arm to a shark. As such he wants to avenge himself on Bilson and everyone else aboard the Celeste. This "twist" is "preserved" by the fact that Lorenzen, as we see him throughout the rest of the movie, is a pious and sorrowful man, who weeps in remorse when he has to kill a crewman who tries to rape Sarah. The sincerity of this side to Lorenzen is one thing that makes the characters of this film surprisingly complicated.

I am of the opinion that Lorenzen's piety and empathy are an act, given how intense his hatred is towards Bilson in the end. (I'll touch on that more below because I have to analyze the acting in this, especially Bela's.) However, that doesn't meant that Lorenzen may have once been that sort of man, before his traumatizing, inhumane experiences, and he's drawing on his old character to disguise himself. Bela's best acting is when he tries to put pathos in the character--yes, it's cheesy, but it's leagues better than a lot of his costars. It doesn't really make sense, though, why Lorenzen would find seemingly sincere friendship with Sarah Briggs, only to delight in her murder later.

Then there's Captain Briggs. Briggs ought to be the movie's protagonist. He's dashing, and has a beautiful love interest to protect. However, all his supposed virtue is a lie. He forbids Bilson from kidnapping men to work for him, but immediately turns the other way when Bilson disobeys him in this. He serves maggoty bread to his crew and gets irate when someone questions the quality of such. It's unclear how much wool Bilson, the much more obviously corrupt figure, has pulled over Briggs' eyes, but Briggs deliberately censors information about the murders not only to his crew but to his wife, putting their lives in further danger and squaring him firmly in villain territory for me. Maybe not a willing villain per se, but action is more important than intent. This leaves us rooting for Lorenzen and his quest for vengeance, wherein he kills people who were friendly towards him. This movie has no heroes.

I am impressed with how grungy this is for a '30s horror movie, but it's made by Hammer who would go on to make the particularly gross Frankenstein series. It's relieving, despite the general cheapness of the production, to see a horror movie interested in capturing horror--not just scares but the atmosphere around such. They succeed by capturing the sense of hopelessness that only a grungy 19th Century trading vessel could supply.

I mean, there's also the acting. This is one of the hammiest '30s movies I've seen in a while, coming close to having a full cast of Ptomaine Petes. It's great when a movie opens with a man angrily yelling, in the full presence of a variety of dockhands, "Looks like we're gonna have ta shanghai this scum!!" Said man (Bilson) later gets a moment where he's picking out an alias for himself, and he makes a big deal about calling himself "Captain Abercrombie." But in both quality and lack thereof, Lugosi outperforms them all. His pathos, as I said, is actually very good, but at the end, when he and Bilson are the only survivors and the cards are all on the table, he, uh...well, there's a reason I love ol' Bela. "I didn't forget you...I didn't forget this ship...I HATE IT! And IIII...hate youuu..."

Don't get me wrong--it may sound like this movie is a lot better than it really is. It's still bargain basement, with the most pristine surviving prints looking rather like they were used for toilet paper. Ham does not equal good acting inherently, and there are enough failed premises and bad story notes to make us feel the production's cheapness. However, for purposes of trash-viewing, Phantom Ship is pretty damn great, especially with Lugosi in tow.

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The Nightmare Never Ends (1980), by Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Greg Tallas

Ah, yes. With this, we move one step closer to getting to review Night Train to Terror, the greatest anthology film of all time and "sequel" to Gretta. You know how much I love Gretta and this one is a worthy prequel to this little fucked-up series that Night Train of Terror forces them all into.

James and Claire Hansen have only a small shortage of troubles in their life. James has fallen under criticism for the publication of his anti-religion book, God is Dead, and Claire has begun having strange nightmares of "devils and demons." When she goes to see a stage psychic in Vegas, he unlocks visions of Nazi Germany. Around this time, police lieutenant Sterne (Cameron Mitchell) begins having trouble with an elderly Holocaust survivor named Abraham Weiss, who is insistent that a 20-something rich socialite named Olivier is one of the Nazis who killed his family during the War, despite the fact that he's decades too young. Soon Claire and Sterne meet in the middle and begin to find out that they are wrestling with Satan himself. And Satan has his eyes on James Hansen, whom he believes is the perfect vessel for killing God once and for all.

I wrote that introduction based entirely off my memories for this movie, hopeful that it would live up to my expectations. Sure enough, the mental note I tagged to this film--"As weird as if not weirder than Gretta"--turned out to be accurate. The two films are similar but I don't yet know if there was ever any connection between them. Both of them have the same brand of horrible editing and odd cardboard acting that only '80s can provide. Claire in particular is horrible and as such she makes a very strange choice for a protagonist. But then, I've followed movies that featured Chesty Morgan as a protagonist and they turned out okay. The woman playing Claire isn't nearly as bad an actress as Chesty Morgan, but she comes close at times.

The Nazi angle is really jarring in this. To put things in perspective, we have no hints of Nazism until the psychic tells Claire to flash back to her dreams. Then suddenly: "SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!" and we're in the middle of SS Girls all of a sudden! Okay, I should specify that we aren't literally transported to the footage of SS Girls, but it's a party straight out of that film, sans the loads of nudity. The movie manages to handle the Nazi material well, clearly borrowing from Boys from Brazil and Marathon Man in places as far as the Nazi-hunting goes, but once we learn demons are involved, the Nazis are reduced to just being a cog in the wheel. The paranormal elements are also jarring but not quite as much--but still, you wouldn't expect a movie about Nazis and psychic dreams to suddenly feature a fucking xenomorph, would you?

I think this movie may be an anti-atheist film but I'm not sure. We're probably meant to be on Claire the Catholic's side as she spars with her husband over his rejection of religion. However, James' atheism is so ridiculous that it almost seems to be a parody. No serious atheist would use the disproof of Jesus as a historical figure as their sole evidence that all world religions are objectively bullshit--especially when said "disproof" is shockingly lazy! However, his atheism is still used for an intriguing purpose. After all, Olivier and his demons recruit James on the premise that his atheism is a pretense for Satanism. But James doesn't believe in the devil any more than he believes in God, leading to a scene where Olivier becomes something of an Inquisitor in the Christian sense, ordering James to repent his disbelief in Satan! In the end his refusal doesn't save him, however.

It's strange, too, because in this universe belief in God won't save you either. I was left with the impression at the end that this is a godless universe, or has become one, meaning the bad guys win. That's '80s horror for yuh.

The Nightmare Never Ends labors under the prospect that it really means something, or at least it gives the impression of such labor. For that reason, I think it's worthy of multiple viewings, and I know I'll return to it again and again over my life, if nothing else because the rubber monsters in it are amazing. And now that this is taken care of, we can move on to the series finale, with Night Train to Terror. This movie is already pretty weird, but imagine it now with most of its insides cut out!

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House of Mystery (1934), by William Nigh

That the Old Dark House film and the gorilla picture were wedded early on stands to reason. All the time today do we see popular trends welded anxiously onto each other in an attempt to double-dip on certain media markets. I doubt this was the first ODH gorilla movie, but it was far from the last. Indeed, depending on where you look, it seemed almost mandatory for a gorilla to at least be teased as playing a part in the events to come once all the characters were settled in the house. House of Mystery is not a great A-Lister...it's one of the dumb ones. I don't like it for any good reason, and it's perhaps arguable whether I like it at all. This is a rare film where most of my amusement comes from pure gawking, and that probably means it's no good at all.

In one of the weirdest openings I've seen in these films, we start in "Asia, 1913." Archaeologist John Prendergast likes two things here in "Asia": drinking, and dancing girls. When he's cut off from one he turns to the other, in this case seeking out the dancers at the Temple of Kali--pronounced "Kay-LIE" here because white people in the '30s were not great at paying attention to these things. (So we're in India, then, and not just "Asia.") Conspicuously the Temple of Kali features a pair of guys in gorilla suits--they aren't there for nothing, coming to life when Prendergast is brought there after drunkenly killing one of the Temple's sacred monkeys, invoking the curse of Kali when he calls the priests "dogs" and starts whipping them (!!!). Prendergast escapes, taking not only one of the dancing girls with him but also a fortune in jewels. He and the girl seemingly get married, in an amazingly casual subversion of 1910s race relations, and we fast forward to twenty years later. A man named Professor Potter and his wife are looking for Prendergast and believe that he is now living under the name Mr. Pren in a large mansion, having been confined to a wheelchair or pretending such. Alongside an insurance salesman and several other annoying individuals, the Potters go to Pren's house to talk over the terms of finally doling out payments to those who invested in the Prendergast Expedition all those years ago. Unfortunately, it is Pren/Prendergast's belief that the Curse of Kali extends to those who inherit the wealth of the treasure. Thus, all the heirs must stay in his Old Dark House to see the horror of Kali before they can be allowed in on their share. Before long they're all sat down at the seance table, and a gorilla lunges out of the darkness at Mrs. Carfax...

So, I can imagine the first thing you're thinking: are gorillas an actual part of Hinduism? I tried to look into this to see if any sort of research was done on behalf of the screenwriters, and the closest I could come is this: there is a character in a Ramayana named Hanuman who is a monkey-like being in the service of Rama. However, this movie is about the cult of Kali, who, as far as I know, isn't even another avatar of Vishnu, as Rama is. Hindu belief has a less strict sense of orthodoxy than Christianity but as far as I know there has never been an ape cult of Kali in Indian history. This is just the beginning of the movie's many problems.

There's the weird bit where the medium lady's spirit guide is named "Pocahontas," and I'm not sure if she's supposed to be the historical Pocahontas or just a ghost who goes by that name. This is used for a couple of cheap shots equating Indians with American Indians, which is made worse by the fact that the drums that accompany the gorilla attacks are called tom-toms. I found out actually that "tom-tom" comes from Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants to England, where it was adopted by white people as the name for a toy drum and later for part of modern drum kits--so actually this is more accurate than the word's use in the Westerns it's likely to remind audiences of. In the '30s, however, one has to wonder if this is a furtherance of the "Pocahontas" Indian/Indian cross-up.

Regarding the film's racism, then: poor Chanda, Pren's wife, gets treated like shit in this. There's this lovely exchange about her between the girl and the insurance salesman douchebag guy, who--argh--end up together.

Girl: "I don't like the looks of that person."
Asshole: "Person? She looks more like Gandhi's ghost!" (??????)

As far as I know, yes, he is questioning that she's a person. (Also, I'm sure a reference to Gandhi's death won't have a harsh edge to it in fourteen years or so. Asshole.) Now, Chanda came back with Prendergast to become his wife, right? Like...they're married, right? 'Cause we saw them kissing back in India, right? Nooope. It turns out that Lead Gal is the one Prendergast wants, and Chanda is, in the ex-archaeologist's own words, "just [his] housekeeper." JESUS. You can presume from those kissing scenes that he fucked her as soon as he got her back to the homeland, and then proceeded to fuck her in another way by ditching her for other (white) girls. When it turns out that Chanda is the killer, having worked with Prendergast to use trained gorillas to scare off those who are after "his" investment money, you really don't feel bad at all that her last victim is Prendergast himself. When the two of them left India, she was probably about twenty, and so she's in her early forties now, but there's a certain age to her face that would make the film loads better if they decided to do anything with it. Maybe that's why in the end Chanda gets away, with the only assertion that she's caught being a "don't worry about her" from the local cop. Since everyone in this movie is an idiot I'm assuming said cop has no way of catching her and is just trying to cover his ass. Dick.

One has to ask what the makers of this movie thought its appeal was. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what the movie sets out to do. Well, because it's an Old Dark House film, it's basically out to make money off of cheap scares and cheaper laughs. (Seriously, the "comedy" in this is so bad that it nearly becomes good through sheer surrealism.) The slackness of its research suggests that any sort of subtext, including the movie's imperialism (or possible subversion thereof), are probably accidental. Ever since the miracle stories of the days of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the bizarre descriptions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the West has had an obsession with weird tales, and has primordially linked those tales with the foreign. Whether they be from the forest beyond or the next continent over, people from other lands have been associated with the mystical and monstrous. The trend has only been challenged comparatively recently and it will be a long time yet before the racist aspects of tropes such as it die out completely. Even last year's The Mummy showed that studios at least are still interested in marketing the "exotic" as a source of horror, mystery, and unknown evil. However, to go back and try to answer my own question, I can't imagine a group of filmmakers setting out to make a movie which attempts to make funny the misadventures of abusive, idiotic assholes who--at least in the case of Lead Girl--are punished if they have any trace of redeemability. Oh, wait, never mind, I can imagine such people, because that sort of formula has always been used by movie comedies and is still being used today. Arrrrrggghhhh.

Just gawk, folks. Just gawk at how fucking stupid this movie is, and give it no quarter. You will only find entertainment if you expect nothing and give no fucks about your own well-being.

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Giant from the Unknown (1958), by Richard E. Cunha

Ahh. I found myself craving some '50s sci-fi cheese, but not necessarily of the giant monster variety--if anything because I've seen almost all of the giant monster flicks of that decade and the one after. In some of my research the name Richard E. Cunha kept coming up, and for good reason: his short filmography includes some rather promising titles like Frankenstein's Daughter and She Demons, but he also made the infamous Missile to the Moon and was the cinematographer on my favorite shitty adaptation of "The Hounds of Zaroff," 1961's Bloodlust! Giant from the Unknown, with its premise of an inhumanly strong and brutal Conquistador restored from suspended animation, seemed to offer much. It did not, but the way in which it failed to deliver is fun to look at. For better or worse, I actually enjoyed Giant from the Unknown, even though it sucks in a way I wasn't previously sure the '50s could deliver.

Strange murders have been plaguing the small town of (snicker) Devil's Crag. Some speculate it is part of the curse which is said to afflict the area (and it's called Devil Crag? Really now!). A young geologist named Wayne Brooks is in the area and hears about the murders--around the same time he also reunites with an old professor of his, Dr. Cleveland, and his daughter Janet, who we'll get to in a bit. Both Brooks and the Clevelands decide to ignore the advice of the Sheriff (played by our old pal Bob Steele from Big Calibre and probably other movies I've reviewed on this site) to go in search of signs that the old stories that Spanish Conquistadors made it out to this area are true. Ostensibly one of these Conquistadors was an unnaturally tall and strong man named Vargas, whom they called "the Diablo Giant." He will turn out to be our "Giant from the Unknown." As it turns out, the soil of this area is great for preserving life--Brooks has previously found a living specimen of a previously thought extinct lizard out in the area. It is of little shock to those of us who are even faintly trope-savvy that this soil has managed to preserve Vargas, whose legendary size and brutality are both matters of fact. Vargas kills some of Brooks' friends from town which of course leads to his being blamed for the murders. Will Brooks and his comrades be able to defeat the Diablo Giant before the savagery of the 16th Century becomes the new norm of the 20th?

When I've previously delved into the true schlock of the 1950s--the actual bargain-basement stuff, not the giant monsters, for the most part--it's never gone this low before. I'm about to embark on a study of the movies of W. Lee Wilder, Billy Wilder's significantly less-talented brother, as a personal dare to myself, and I'm told not even Richard Cunha delves as low as he, but this was something special. That is to say it's been a while since I've run into a '50s sci-fi movie that has been cardboard due to unprofessionalism before. Many of the bad '50s sci-fi flicks I see are bad because they're overly stuffy or overly padded. Not so here--this movie is just boring because there are long stretches where nothing of interest is happening. But the same demented slant brings the laxness to life here as the same touch of madness brought an entertainment quality to the oddly-similar Phantom Cowboy. Maybe it's just my expectations projecting a meta-quality onto it. Yet there is a quaint charm to the proceedings because as dully and stupidly as the movie was made, it was made with some degree of heart.

After all, there has to be some reason why so much dramatic tension is given to Brooks and Cleveland's research. I know that in archaeological and geological careers one has to move fast to keep getting sources of income or gateways into such, and as such they have to devote a tremendous passion and rigor to their work, but sometimes this movie feels like the Earth will explode if the three explorers don't find proof of those fucking Conquistadors. There's a hilarious scene based on the weird idea that metal detectors have time delays on them for some reason, and there is even a dramatic metal-detection montage. Bet no one was allowed to be seated during that. There's an even better montage right near it, a "dig up the artifacts" montage, which is so pathetically '50s that I loved it.

This movie has two massive problems with it. First, Janet Cleveland may be one of the sexist portrayals of women in a '50s sci-fi movie, ever. She is not only ignorant of science but proud of it; by her own admission she prefers being called pretty to book-learnin'. She is also tasked with all the "household" chores of the science-camp, like cooking and cleaning, and this is played for laughs at her expense. There is the interesting subversion that she's ultimately successful for the men's accomplishments, in that she's the one to discover Vargas' armor (albeit by accident), but is this really a blessing given that Vargas' awakening led to the horrible deaths of several people? As a woman I was so offended by how badly written Janet was that I just assumed she was a parody and laughed the whole thing off. But Jesus do I have to wonder how Cunha treats ladies in his other works--damn.

There is also, uh, Indian Joe, the man who warns the town of the curse. Okay, I get that the reservation system in the United States has always, in one form or another, been nakedly abusive to the Native American populations of this country whom it is supposed to benefit, but in 1958, Native folk were not wandering around talking like Tonto. It is so goddamn weird to have a contemporary Native American of the 1950s speak in this horrible broken English, but I also have to remember that in the early days of the Adam West Batman show I grew up loving, there were the same sort of tropes at play, and that was as late as 1967. Now, there is a truly weird scene involving Joe which is never properly addressed, where he shoots at Brooks, and then claims he was aiming at a rabbit. Despite the fact that he then says he never misses, he doesn't retrieve a rabbit carcass of any kind. I just have to ask why he was so obviously aiming at Joe. And why did he take the chance to do some weird inside-joke quip about not missing when he missed Joe while trying to shoot him? Joe never threatens anyone again for the rest of his appearance in the movie, nor does he seem to hold any sincere ill will towards Brooks--in fact, he calls him his friend, and trusts his word when Brooks says he and the others won't violate the Indian graves! Maybe I'm missing something here but this is a strange scene. What makes it odder is that there is the rather obvious plot hole of what exactly was killing people at the start of the movie when Vargas was only resurrected later, as a result of being struck by lightning. Was--was Joe killing those people? Is that really what they meant to imply there? What the fuck would his motive be for doing that?!

Then there's the ending. Spoilers abound but I have to dissect this bad boy. Vargas is ultimately taken down by one of Brooks' townie friends, who knocks him over a waterfall after beating him repeatedly with a stick, in a "fight" scene which is truly great to behold. When the Conquistador topples over the falls it is represented by--and I am not kidding here--the worst greenscreen effect I have ever seen in my entire life. This is worse than the combined filmography of Bert I. Gordon. This may actually be even worse than every single shot in The Amazing Bulk.

Somehow following this is a scene where Cleveland's desperation for research suddenly returns in force and he requests the Sheriff's help in recovering Vargas' body for study. The Sheriff's reply: "Unfortunately that river opens up into an underwater volcanic crater. No one has ever found the bottom of it." Ah, how convenient. Then, all tension immediately evaporates, and Cleveland is left to recover from his crippling scientific defeat by the happiness that comes with the knowledge that his former student is now banging his daughter.

As a final middle-finger to the audience, the tagline on the original poster read: "It came from another world!" No it fucking didn't. I mean, yes, another world in time, another world in civilization and perspective thereof, but "it" still came from Earth, and it was 1958 and thus there is literally no way that audiences didn't walk out of this at the end cheesed off by the lack of aliens. Though I suspect that was the least of their concerns with how everything in Giant from the Unknown all turned out.

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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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