Forbidden Jungle (1950), by Robert Tansey

The worst jungle adventure movie of all time, and therefore the only one worth watching.

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Serpent Island (1954), by Tom Gries

I'm going to level with you: outside of Daughter of Horror and a few others, there aren't many 1950s horror movies appropriate for the site that I enjoy. That's why I'm sort of cheating with this one--finding material for both the '20s and this decade will be a challenge next year, assuming I pursue the same format for our Spookyween celebrations. My one justification for including Serpent Island on the itinerary is that it features a voodoo subplot, plus a killer creature sequence at the end. Other than that, this movie is a sailing drama about adventure on the high seas, featuring a scurvy underdog hero who gets the girl at the end. Call me a sucker for voodoo, no matter how mild it is, but there's something about this one that feels like October to me.

Peter Mason is an old marine engineer working dockrat shifts out in San Pedro, CA. One day a woman named Rikki Andre comes up to him asking use of his sailing services; you see, her ancestor was Michel Andre, a gold fence who hid a million dollars in treasure out near Haiti. Using the ship called the Constellation, belonging another sailor she's hired, a rival of Mason's by the name of Kirk Ellis (Captain Kirk, huh?), they set off, traveling to the Seas of Padding. This includes things like gut-punch brawls, shark attacks, and the lamest stock footage hurricane ever. When they land, Mason and Rikki consummate their romantic tension in a surprisingly explicit scene for 1954, but of course, there's voodoo afoot. Pete is captured by the voodoo cult where he learns that their leader is an old flame of his, a woman named Ann Christoff, and she's bound to protect the gold--after all, it constitutes the mass of their sacred idol. Rikki is allowed to see the idol, but is attacked by a boa constrictor; Pete saves her, Kirk is killed by the snake, and the two lovebirds escape the island safely.

Serpent Island is largely notable because it's the first movie that Bert I. Gordon had a hand in producing. As is easy enough to point out there are no giant monsters in this one, even if that boa is pretty big. In a sense, this is one of the most successful monster movies Gordon made--not in terms of monster content, of course--because I actually found some horror in the scene where Rikki is attacked by the snake. They managed to make the actress being choked to death look strangely real. I found it grotesque, but maybe I'm a big sissy--or maybe a crusty print does things to me.

I was pulled into this movie because it has a strange self-awareness about itself that makes it and its characters charming. Pete is well-acted as an aging former sailor with extreme cynicism about life at sea. Rikki is strikingly convincing as a young woman who is figuring herself out. And Kirk is a true bastard like any evil ship captain in a sailing adventure film worth his salt should be. We get this sense of winking from the oddities the script insists on indulging in. For example, after Pete stops a thief from stealing the letter that will lead Rikki to the treasure, he says, "We never did find out who the uncommon thief was; I still have my own ideas on the subject." Yet we never learn those ideas; moving on. How about his later zinger: "My dad always said to never fight a man in his own territory. I never listened to him and that's how I became a success in life." Pete has a sentimental sort of narration over the whole of the film, with pseudo-poetic reflections on all they come across, which seems to be a fixture of sailing segment in these types of adventure flicks. Some of these bits of narration reminded me of Infrasexum in their own way. He also makes jokes which appear to be at the expense of the Republican Party, which earns him a thumbs up in my book.

One last note on the dialogue before I move on. Kirk comes up behind Rikki one night and looks her up and down like a creep. She knows he's there without looking and he asks how she knows. She says, cheerily, "You're real quiet, and so when it gets real quiet I know you're around. If that sounds confused, that's because I'm confused. About a lot of things." Wow! You know you're a master scribe if you've got that in your screenplay, folks.

There's a lot to riff here, because it's a '50s exploitation movie. For example, we see what might have been some of the film's raison d'etre during a scene where Rikki runs out on deck in her nightie, and gives us a big face full of hot lingerie'd booty. There's something for the androsexual, as well, as there's no shortage of Pete's weirdly-shaped shirtless torso. I never really thought I'd get a chance to see Rob Liefeld's interpretation of Captain America extrapolated into real life, but I was not disappointed. Finally, we have Jacques, Ann Christoff's voodoo enforcer, who I like to headcanon is a zombie, just 'cause then I can claim this is a zombie voodoo movie. Every time he makes his sudden appearance I remark on his stunning resemblance to a shaved Mr. T. Because it's a '50s voodoo movie, there is trace racism, including white people being afraid of burly black dudes just 'cause they're burly black dudes. Fortunately, it's not even in the same galaxy as West of Zanzibar.

Serpent Island may be one of those movies which can only be appreciated so idiosyncratically that it's almost not worth it. It may also be a movie I enjoy exclusively because I had to go to surprising lengths to find a copy. If you like sailing dramas with a touch of killer creatures and the threat of human sacrifice, this one's for you. Give it a try.

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Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976), by Jack Weis

This is another one which sometimes seems to have a life of its own. Whenever I watch Crypt of Dark Secrets, I always feel like it's the right time; whenever I try to watch this movie when the day doesn't make time for it, it feels flat and empty. But when it's my time to watch it--when the movie lets me watch it--then suddenly every frame seems to gain its own weird inner light. I feel like this sensation goes well in hand with this movie's occult themes, which somehow always scratch my Magic Itch. There's a certain way that I like seeing magic done in movies, and this movie has got it. however that happens to be. Keep in mind that this movie does not contain a crypt.

There are legends of old Haunted Island out in the bayous near New Orleans--with a name like Haunted Island, that's basically a guarantee, ain't it? It's the supposed home of a woman named Damballa, an "Aztec" girl whose alternate form is a rainbow snake that is the bridge between life and death. Vietnam veteran Ted Watkins lives out in a small house on Haunted Island with an extensive fortune, and when he is visited by two cops who are curious about the legends of Damballa, they accidentally spread word of his money to a trio of crooks named Earl, Max, and Louise. The three are surprisingly eager to murder Ted and take his money, so they drown him and take all they can carry. But Ted isn't dead, at least not the way we know it--a beautiful naked woman appears and restores his spirit, explaining that she is Damballa, and that their souls must fuse together to fulfill their respective destinies. Ted is pretty cool with this idea (Ted's cool with basically everything), but he needs to avenge his death before he can move on. But temptation alone will bring fate to its conclusion: for there's a voodoo witch in the swamp who is willing to give the murderous trio the treasure of Jean LaFitte. They should have figured that there are no promises when voodoo dolls are involved.

Returning to the beginning of this review for a bit--almost more than any other movie, save for perhaps The Witches' Mountain, is this film like a dream. Everyone in it acts as if they aren't real, or like they're stoned. Every time I show this movie to someone (because sometimes this film wants me to bring it an audience), they say of Ted, "Is he high?" When I watch this alone, my question is, "Is everyone high?" People are in a strange headspace in this one. It goes beyond Ted's dull, blank stare, and his denim short-shorts. It's not just bad acting. But it's not anything deliberate, either. It's almost like they just aren't aware of what they're doing, like it doesn't matter. I wish I could put my finger on it but I can't.

Because this film takes it easy, generally speaking, it's a relaxing watch. And it manages to have a plot without the conflict being overly stressful. I'm someone who can get stressed out by movies. Even movies that I like can raise my cortisol levels if they contain too much conflict. On my thin-skinned days, this movie can pass over me with no trouble. Like, Ted dies, but he's revived immediately after--he needs to take revenge, but the voodoo cult does it for him, because they want him to succeed--and in the end he and Damballa are united to love each forever in the spirit world. Sure, there's the small detail that they hardly know each other, but there's a dreamy romance to Damballa, and not merely because she's hot. I watched this movie on the same day I did my Divine Emanuelle review and Maureen Ridley, who plays Damballa, is an eerie doppelganger for Laura Gemser. She reappears in Jack Weis' Death Brings Roses, one of the few known films that Weis directed. He also made Quadroon, which I watched for the first time before rewatching this. I don't know if I'll ever review it, but let me say for now that it's as essential as this one...

And Crypt of Dark Secrets is essential. It has a scene where a stack of dollar bills start bleeding ketchup. I was worried that the shortness of this review would detract from my implicit recommendation, but then I remembered that that was one of the details I wanted to mention. There are more, but Dark Secrets are best learned firsthand. Find the time for this film to find you.

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Murders in the Zoo (1933), by A. Edward Sutherland

It's hard not to sympathize with certain early movies. When I was a kid, I had this belief that anything from the past, especially from the 1950s backward, was considered art by the world at large and was therefore universally preserved. I've since been proven quite wrong. In my line of work I come across dozens of films and books that sound like they were absolutely wonderful, but which have been neglected by the ages, doomed to ever-increasing obscurity. Sometimes you'll be lucky and you'll just have to settle for something expensive, but much of the time you'll be lucky if you find any of these things at all. All the same, I like the thrill of hunting for something: I managed to find a copy of the '70s TV paranormal-kids thriller The Wednesday Children, which was believed lost. That was pretty neat, even if the movie was boring. In any case: it can be interesting to see what history has preserved and what it hasn't. A lot of these movies, especially the cheapies, have become tediously repetitious staples of public domain multi-packs, like The Ape, The Devil Bat, and The Corpse Vanishes. But others--including films made by bigger companies than Monogram, PRC, or other Poverty Row studios--have been harder to track down, with some of them still claiming Laserdisc as their most up-to-date release medium. It's weird to think of how many of the films of the '20s and '30s we fetishize simply because they were products of those eras, including ones which legitimately suck, and how many other, better-made films from those times have only found homes on rough VHS tapes, or DVD-Rs cloned from such. Sometimes, it's the pirates to the rescue: some films have only survived because of gray market labels or torrent sites. You never know how intense the battle for film restoration is until you're in it.

I say this because it sounds like it was very difficult to obtain Murders in the Zoo until about ten years ago, when Turner Classic Movies released a DVD of it. I find this odd because Murders in the Zoo is a Paramount film; on top of that, it is very good. Now, I realize it may not have been released because not many people have heard of it, but I've met a lot of people who will obsessively monitor every pre-'50s horror film, claiming each is some kind of classic. I heard people praise this film before the DVD came out, mostly hardcore Lionel Atwill fans, and that impression of theirs must have arisen from watching one of the low-quality VHS editions. But for once, those obsessive folk were right. Murders in the Zoo deserved a better touch-up, because thanks to it, I am now in that eccentric, minuscule camp of hardcore Atwill fans.

Lionel Atwill (praise him!) plays Eric Gorman, one of the most valuable employees of the Municipal Zoo. This movie wastes no time in telling us exactly who Gorman is, as the first scene is him stitching a man's mouth shut! He's out in Asia with his wife, Evelyn, looking for new specimens for the zoo, and it was Eric himself who found this man, Taylor, enjoying some smooches with Mrs. Gorman. Evelyn is immediately suspicious, as Taylor probably wasn't the first man to suffer an awful fate at the hands of her husband, and she grows more so when Taylor is eaten by a tiger. Fortunately, Taylor wasn't Evelyn's only lover: her heart truly belonged to Roger Hewitt, whom she is reunited with on the trip back with the captured animals. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, the alcoholic coward reporter Peter Yates, whose comic relief is extremely dull and should be skipped. He creates massive tone problems in this movie about a man who will stitch your mouth shut if you mess around with his wife. He is the unwitting agent of much of the film's conflict, however, when he mentions that Roger was staying in Evelyn's room. Later, at a dinner put on at the zoo to raise its public standing, Gorman murders Roger with what turns out to be the severed head of the venomous green mamba. When Evelyn finds the evidence (in a tense chase scene which is easily one of the movie's best sequences), she ends up as her husband's next victim. Of course, Gorman can't hide from his crimes forever, and if you use nature for your ends, nature will exact its price...

It can be a letdown sometimes when a movie lets us know upfront who our killer is, but if the killer is a character worth following, then it can be a great thing. Eric Gorman is indeed such a character. Gorman is a bastard; he knows and has known for a long time that his wife hates him, and rightfully so. One can infer that the zoologist's murderous trends only intensified Evelyn's desire to fool around with as many men as possible after she found about said trends. If this movie had been made in the '70s, we probably would have seen a much bitterer Evelyn, one who usually has a glass of scotch in her hand.  

There's just one issue that bugged me about this: our main conflict is Gorman's obsession with Evelyn and the desire to "protect" her against other admirers in a perverse attempt to keep her love. While the movie doesn't lose traction or tension with the rest of the plot it plays, it's odd to have Gorman kill Evelyn so early in the runtime. We are then left with Gorman wanting to defame his coworker Jack Woodford, whom he faux-blames for Evelyn's death (playing the grieving husband to a T), which he uses as an opening to get the zoo closed down. But I don't know why he chooses to do that: if he does, where's he, y'know, gonna get his money from? He works for the zoo, after all, and does seem to take genuine pride in the animals he's brought into the zoo's keeping. I get that he's unhinged for having been the one to cut Evelyn off from himself forever, but it's strange to me that his way of working through that would be to destroy his own career.

I should also say, while commenting on the film's faults, that Peter Yates is an extremely annoying character. He really does seem to be an import from the hallowed halls of The Invisible Woman. Wait...he is an import from The Invisible Woman! His actor, Charlie Ruggles, played..."George," whoever that was. Unlike The Invisible Woman, however, he does get at least one joke that lands. After getting locked in a cage within arm's reach of a tiger, he discovers that his cage has a mamba in it, leaving him caught between a rock and a hard place. When the mamba is taken away, he gasps out, "Does this town have a good laundry?"

I laughed because this is proof that they had piss and shit jokes in films as early as the 1930s, not because it was actually funny. I shouldn't be surprised, since even the most prudish of historical eras have had cracks in their conservatism. I popped in another Lionel Atwill thriller after I got done with this one, which was the original Mystery of the Wax Museum, made in the same year. In that one, reporter actually gets to ask someone, "How's your sex life?" Mr. Hays--you know where you can shove that Code of yours.

I have now seen several thrillers with Lionel Atwill as the villain or a suspect for such, to say nothing of his myriad Universal appearances. Mystery of the Wax Museum wasn't as fun, but for awhile now I've been a fan of 1932's Doctor X and that one will probably turn up here at some point. Atwill has a wonderfully rich charm about him, and he does justice to almost every role I've seen him in. My unfortunate habit of comparing actors I like to Doctor Who persists, and I see a trace of William Hartnell, the First Doctor, in Atwill. They have a prideful composure even when they don't really have much to be proud about. If that makes any sense.

Anyway. I am pleased to say that Murders in the Zoo keeps such a nice, tight system of works that you will find yourself forgetting the comic relief as soon as we return to the real action. It is a well-devised thriller, a relaxing and engaging mystery, and a piece of Paramount history generally deserving a wider release. Bravo to TCM for taking on official duties with it--may many of its lost kin find similar fates.