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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The Devil-Doll (1936), by Tod Browning

And we're back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Zombie Lake (1980), by Jean Rollin

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

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

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Oasis of the Zombies (1982), by Jess Franco

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

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The Grapes of Death (1978), by Jean Rollin

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

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Orgy of the Dead (1965), by Stephen C. Apostolof and Ed Wood

Does it really need saying that it wouldn't be a proper Spookyween without Ed Wood? No one quite handled the horror genre in the way Ed did. Though he presented his scary stuff in a fashion implying he was being cynical and ironic, Wood actually threw himself into his work and believed himself to be the scribe of hair-raising nightmares--or at least, the custodian of hair-rising nightmares past. His obsession with Bela Lugosi and the Universal Horror movies led him to create films which ended up perpetuating the exaggerated campiness that folks today think all old horror films, Universal included, happened to contain. Once more this is that strange idea of horror as fun--horror as a Halloween children's game. There's virtually nothing actually scary about Orgy of the Dead--in fact it's probably not really about being scary--but it's still a fun watch if you've got both an adult mind and a remnant ribbon of that old Halloween children's spirit.

Orgy of the Dead doesn't burden itself with needy troubles like plot, but since you asked, there are a few incidents here and there. Bob and Shirley are a couple driving through an unfamiliar area. Bob is a famous writer, who is apparently out on the road in search of inspiration. "Most of my books are based off of fact or legend," he says. "That's why they sell in the top spots!" Anyway, Bob's a dumbass, so he ends up driving too fast and goes off the road, ending up in an old cemetery. It is this cemetery which is ruled by "the Emperor," played by Criswell. The Emperor orders numerous dead folk to rise from the grave and dance for him, erotically, if possible. This includes "the woman who died by fire" and "she who loved gold." Then, without warning, a woman in cat footy-pajamas comes out, with holes cut in the pajamas for her tits and booty. We follow a parade of ethnic stereotype dancers, who are commented on by a werewolf and American-accented mummy. This long string of ostensibly erotic dances continues until at long last it comes time for the two intruders to be sacrificed. But then day comes, turning the Emperor and his minions to skeletons, leaving our heroes believing it was naught but a dream.

So yes, this movie is largely about well-proportioned ladies jiggling. Ed Wood presents us this sea of T&A using the only platform he knows--remember, the dude couldn't make a movie about trans rights without putting Bela Lugosi in the vicinity of smoky test tubes and creepy shadows. So of course this movie is "actually" about the secrets of the world of the dead, and their bizarre ceremonies under the full moon when they walk the Earth. Obviously. The thing is, I think old Eddie forgot that he was hired to write sexploitation first and horror second. For while Wood was a master of sleaze, he was primarily a master of dialogue that no one but he found intimidating. That's why we keep cutting from the naked woman on screen to a mummy who says bullshit like: "Back in my days of ancient Egypt, snakes were the stuff of nightmares!" Uh, in contrast to today's harmless snakes, which no one is afraid of?

You watch Ed Wood-penned movies for the writing. Because Lord did that man suck at dialogue. Somehow, however, he is still better at it than Harry Stephen Keeler, and, depending on the day, George Lucas. I've provided a few snippets here and there, but honestly, every single fucking line is pure fucking gold. Somehow, even the most relevant speeches collapse into untamed non sequitur. We critics sometimes complain about having too little material--and sometimes, there are those moments where we're forced to complain about having too much material. I swear to God, Wood's writing is like its own dialect of English or something. Someday we'll find an island of pudgy white guys dressed in angora sweaters, and that's all they'll speak in. Let's try to tackle the line, "She was a zombie in life...so too must she walk as a zombie in death!" What?! A zombie in life?! I mean, technically, voodoo zombies are drugged, hypnotized living people, but still, even those kinds of zombies have been referred to commonly as "the living dead" since the '30s. As far as I'm concerned, most folks in 1965 would have thought you had to die to become a zombie. No, I suspect this is some of Wood's patented social soapboxing. Wood is criticizing this lady's social behavior--she was a social zombie. At least, that's how I read it, and having now read a couple books of Wood's prose on top of seeing most of his movies, I feel I have solid insight. But it's Ed Wood. There is no fucking canon.

Criswell makes this movie lovely. Seeing him in color is a trip and a half. I don't know if he looked  this out of it in Plan 9 from Outer Space, but he's trying pretty hard to hide his age at this point. He has what I call Trump Bags--gross little white rings around his eyes where his obvious fake tan halts its orangeness. His performance varies. Sometimes he's having the time of his life, others he's clearly baffled by the syntax of what he's been asked to say, and a lot of the time he just wishes he was doing bullshit mentalism on TV again. I wonder how much the nudity he was actually present for. I can see someone with a career like his trying to stay away from that. He's joined by a woman who is not Vampira, but is made up to look like her. (No, she isn't Elvira, either.) She does a very good job, a better job than Vampira probably could have done. It is a misplaced acting extravaganza.

So much of Orgy of the Dead is dedicated to tedious and occasionally offensive stripteases that it may drive the ordinary viewer mad. I can't even argue that it's the best Ed Wood movie, as I am much more impressed with Glen or Glenda. But it is an amusing and baffling entry into the Wood corpus, and even if horror wasn't the point of emphasis, it's suitably "spooky" enough for us to celebrate with it this month.

If you want to see more Spookyween madness, there's always Patreon. Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to keep up to date on what's goin' on!

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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Valley of the Zombies (1946), by Philip Ford

Doctor X is relatively clunky, because horror in the early '30s was slow. As time went on, however, a more frantic pace could be found as B-movies needed to get their deal over with sooner, as writers took less time in writing, and as studios cut more and more money from these lesser programmers, ultimately reducing features like Valley of the Zombies to the sort of fodder which would play in the ultra-neutered market of TV movies. Fortunately, the existence (and hasty creation) of these B-features means I have lots of short, quick-paced material which is usually primed with the best sort of trashy hilarity. Valley of the Zombies is our shortest stop this Spookyween, at a whopping 55 minutes, but there's worlds to find in it that makes it worthy of looking over during this joyous month.

Terry Evans and Susan Drake are a doctor and nurse who are dating while working their way through their studies. Evans is mentored under Dr. Rufus Maynard, who informs the pair that a large amount of blood has recently gone missing from his supply under mysterious circumstances. After Evans and Drake leave, however, Maynard is visited by a man by the name of Ormand Murks, who appears to have time-traveled a year into the future to get fashion advice from Bela Lugosi in Scared to Death. There's a problem with Murks being here, though--he's supposed to be dead. A former undertaker, Murks was once placed in Maynard's mental hospital for his weird fixation with blood transfusions. As it happens, Murks needs blood because he has learned the secrets of the Valley of the Zombies--he has become the living dead. The vampiric blood-thief decides to take some fresh blood from Maynard himself. Terry and Susan return and stumble upon the crime scene, which implicates them in front of the police. Like you do, the pair decide to exonerate themselves by catching the crook themselves--admittedly, the police aren't much help, as they spend a few hours basically verbally torturing Susan in order to extract a confession, which was a process still pretty legal at the time. They have a clue: Dr. Maynard's body, alongside the body of Murks' other victim (in the form of his brother Fred, who was helping Murks steal the blood vials), has been embalmed. They finally head down to the old Murks Mansion to commence their investigation further, little aware that the last scion of House Murks is waiting for them.

Once more we have the premise not only of a particularly unusual killer abetted by super-scientific principles, but also a film where the primary heroes are also our comic relief. Perhaps taking some backwards inspiration from Nick and Nora Charles, our plucky investigators engage in quite a bit of banter, albeit banter far less sophisticated than the I-Am-Not-Shazam'd Thin Man and his wife ever exchanged. Unfortunately, a lot of this takes the rather sexist form of Susan being scared of everything. Admittedly, if I had spent most of my life training to be a nurse, I'd focus on steeling my nerves against mortal perils like disease and bloodshed, not vampire serial killers hiding in decrepit mansions, so I totally understand where she's coming from. Doesn't mean that Terry has to be a condescending prick as well (though I get the impression maybe we're supposed to find him a bit of an idiot).

What intrigues me the most about Valley of the Zombies is that it is essentially a cinematic form of a Villain Pulp. I'm sure there are plenty of movies out there similar to this (Ogroff possibly counts as one), but let me explain: back in ye olde days of pulp magazines, there were stories which centered around the villain as a protagonist of sorts. Pulp characters were always outlandish, the villains especially so, and with names like Dr. Satan and Dr. Death it was hard to go wrong. So Valley of the Zombies is a Villain Pulp starring Ormand Murks. And he is indeed a pretty neat villain--possibly cinema's only voodoo vampire, Murks is played by Ian Keith, one of the contenders to play Dracula in the Universal film. I think he probably would have done better than Lugosi, but then we'd never have everything Lugosi made after '31. While far from perfect, and hammy to the point where we can't quite take him seriously, Murks has some wonderful moments, including a creepy moment where he gives his best Evil Mastermind face while threaten-asking his brother, "You're going to put me in my grave?" He also embalms his victims for no fucking reason outside of the fact that it abets our protagonists, and because, well...that's what Super Villains do! I love it.

Everything about this movie is lensed in a strange comic melodrama that makes it all feel something akin to a dream. A dull dream at times, unfortunately, but that's a matter of age more than anything. Still, if you want to flash back to the days of nickolodeon B-features and get a whirlwind tour of the weird world of the undead, you can do no better. Valley of the Zombies is the perfect balance of spooky and campy for your cozy Spookyween night.

P.S. I hadn't mentioned its occurrence in the Doctor X review, but that's two for three on films featuring comic relief shenanigans involving pretending to be a morgue corpse. I guess people couldn't get enough of that one in the '40s. Come to think of it, I think I've seen the same gimmick in movies from the '80s as well. I guess some shit never dies...it only waits...to be re-born...

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The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), by Ray Dennis Steckler

Before we begin this review of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, I want to say that this review will refer to the movie in question, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, by its full title on a consistent basis. Why should I dishonor the movie's writer, director, and star, Ray Dennis Steckler, by abbreviating the title when he put so much hard work into it? And indeed, he put as much work as he could muster into producing The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, another movie which I spent years hating until I was traumatized into liking it.

We open with a scene in the tent of the fortune teller Madame Estrella. She decides to come on to her--customer? boyfriend?--who rejects her in favor of alcohol. She calls him a "dahrty, feelthy peeg" and summons her enforcer, Ortega. Estrella and Ortega then disfigure him with acid and lock him in a closet. We then cut to our main plot, involving Jerry, his girlfriend, his friend(s?), and a few other nondescript individuals as their visit to Estrella's carnival results in Jerry being snared by Estrella's sexy sister Carmelita and her hypnotic dance routine. The process begins for Jerry to become a Mixed-Up Zombie--I don't know why Estrella is converting Jerry into such a thing, but maybe he turned down fucking her as well. Jerry begins a career as a murderer under Estrella's control, until he is put to a sorry end.

I have seen other Ray Dennis Steckler movies, particular The Thrill Killers, and I'd say I'm a fan of his--he's considered one of the quintessential trash directors, and while I never found as compelling as James Bryan or Nick Millard, I like popping in a Steckler when the mood strikes me. I think my issue was that I, like many, watched The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? exclusively in its MST3K format. The beaten-up toilet-paper print that appears in the MST3K version has been replaced by a cleaner edition on new releases, which still leaves the film looking like the gasoline-soaked asshole of every after-the-end movie ever, but which at points makes the film a pop-art masterpiece. That's a good thing, given how psychedelically surreal this movie is.

The process of turning an Incredibly Strange Creature into a Mixed-Up Zombie involving a lot of colored lights and turning wheels. It gets a little nauseating after a while, making it perhaps one of the most authentic psychedelic movies out there. Nausea is the name of the game as far as aesthetics go, and this movie takes that idea farther than any movie I've seen before. The carnival is seemingly located in a barren desert. The roller coasters, tents, advertisements, and employees all look fifty years too old, except for the "old hag" Estrella, who looks about thirty. We never get enough significant shots to establish that anyone is having any fun here. The opening scenes, where Ortega bursts out and manhandles Estrella's victim, are so disgusting to look at that they become genuinely terrifying. No one has any sort of fun in this movie, except for, on occasion, the audience. It is like Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty in action, but there is no point or cause for the Cruelty to lead to us to. And this bounces off the bright colors we can see in newer prints to leave the whole thing feeling like the most feverish of fever dreams.

Jerry relays to us some philosophical gibberish, which I can never remember the content of. I just remember it's depressing and nihilistic. Look at that excuse for a title card--did you really expect anything that wasn't bleak and dull? Yet, as befits Steckler, the movie is also weirdly comical, beginning with that lovably goofy title. There's a slant to this that suggests its entertaining qualities are intentional. I don't know how Steckler wanted us to react to Ortega, for example. His oft-remarked-on resemblance to Torgo is very striking, and it's amusing to imagine Ortega as Torgo's awkward cousin--someone who always somehow ends up on the far side of the table from Torgo at Thanksgiving. I always cheer when Ortega bursts through his curtain, ready to fuck shit up (even as I cringe). I wish I knew why, aside from the fact that I have become so drastically mutated by these films that a crusty chain-smoking freak with a propensity towards acid attacks named Ortega of all things is just a perfect fit for my sensibilities. Ortega, you and your cigar are why I wrote this review. He is a strange paradox, this man, a thing of mirth and nightmares alike.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? is legendarily dull as fuck, and I can confirm this. You will probably end up ditching long chunks of it, and that will make the experience more upsetting because you will understand less of the plot. To be honest, I think I understand this movie less the more I watch it. Which means I recommend it. It is another unforgettable experience in the radical deconstruction of a movie, and in extreme experimental sleaze beyond the limits of general sanity. To witness it at least once is a must. Three cheers for Madame Estrella! Five cheers for Ortega!

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The Phantom of the Convent (1934), by Fernando de Fuentes

I'm going to tell you all something depressing: I have almost exhausted my supply of horror movies from the '30s and '40s. It's not depressing because I'm going to be running out of these kinds of movies, it's depressing because I've watched so many of them. The ones that have appeared recently on the site are only the tip of the iceberg...remember, I tend to review stuff on this site that I like. Well, fortunately, I've not quite done mining out these decades, as it turns out I've been blinded by American-centrism, and forgotten that other countries made low-budget horror films in the '30s and '40s. I've tried to get into some of the British scare films from this time, particularly those featuring camp legend Tod Slaughter, but this is one time where British sensibilities are too overwhelmingly mild for me. I need something that has teeth in its mouth and meat on its bones. Well, as it happens, there was a short string of horror movies made in Mexico in the 1930s that erupted in seeming response to the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein. (After all, Spanish-speaking Mexicans would have had access to a Dracula all their own, due to Universal's shot-by-night alternate Spanish version of Dracula.) Recently I've worked through as many of these '30s Mexican fright films as I can get my hands on, which is tough given that, surprise, many of them have been lost. Unfortunately, for me at least, fewer still among them have ever been given English subtitles. I've been able to decipher some of them thanks to some of the English and French cognates I can pick up now and again, but otherwise I'm reliant on physical presentation and online plot synopses. One of the ones that has gotten an English translation, however, is 1934's The Phantom of the Convent. Even if this movie wasn't available with subs, it would still stand out among its brethren, but I am infinitely grateful for whoever subbed this film. Phantom of the Convent is a fascinating, eerie, legitimately good horror movie with some complicated psychology, which I'm perpetually stunned has not left grander scars on the face of cinema.

Alfonso, Eduardo, and Cristina are a trio traveling in the mountains somewhere. The wimpy Eduardo is married to Cristina and is uncomfortably aware of the attraction she shares with Alfonso, who is his best friend. This sort of tangled red string is not the sort of thing you want to have when you end up stranded on the mountain in the middle of the night, nor when a mysterious stranger and his spooky dog show up to offer you shelter at the monastery that's supposed to be abandoned. This is the very fate that befalls the three, and it turns out that that reports of the abandonment of the ominously-named Monastery of Silence are indeed exaggerated. However--as if the imposing black-clad stranger or the too-huge eyes peering through the door weren't enough tip-off--it becomes clear that something is amiss in the Silent Convent. The three find a cabinet that is partially tipped over; they fix it, but as they leave the room Eduardo glances back and sees it's been restored to its initial position. They also come across a monk who is flagellating himself, which we only see in shadow. Eeriest of all is the monk's cell which is blocked off with an enormous cross, which is either covered in scratches or what seem to be strips of flesh...that we can't tell makes it worse. Above the cell is an enigmatic Latin message about the damnation of those who succumb to carnal sin, and before our heroes are properly prepared, they begin hearing agonized moans from within...

It is here that the monks properly welcome the three with an enormous banquet, wherein they all but reveal they are the living dead. Strangely, the three don't seem to care, as they are all beginning to undergo certain changes...Eduardo is becoming more cowardly, while Alfonso and Cristina grow even bolder about their extramarital lust. Still, what questions they do have for the monks are met only with standoffishness, at least until a wind begins to blow through the Monastery. The monks then go on about having to stop "him" and embark on a complex prayer ritual. Now they are willing to explain what has happened to their monastery. Long ago, there was a brother among them named Fray Rodrigo. Rodrigo coveted his best friend's wife, and despite knowing the evils of such, he made a pact with Satan to kill his friend and make his wife fall in love with him. For this, he was haunted by guilt, and eventually the Dark One came for him. The monks tried to bury his body, but every time they did, it would return to its cell, to the place its owner had been killed in.

The monks then received a curse from God, that they must pray until Rodrigo's soul was cleansed, no matter how long it took. During this time "the Evil" would raid the monastery at night and make the weird psychological hell it is today. Despite all of this knowledge, however, it becomes clear that Alfonso cannot escape the archetypical mold left for him by the wife-loving Rodrigo. And that brings him to a desperate, terrifying encounter with the awful things that lurk in Rodrigo's locked-up cell...

Most of the '30s Mexican horror movies I watched before this lacked the sheer distinctiveness that this movie possessed. Much like their northern counterparts, many of them were made to make a buck, and that was all. Of the selection I watched, I only found interest in the sci-fi thriller The Dead Speak, about a "mad" scientist's quest to prove the reality of forensic optography, and The Macabre Trunk, which may be the first horror movie to feature a scientist who harvests "glands" to keep his female relative living/young--it precedes the extremely similar Bela Lugosi flick The Corpse Vanishes by six years. What I think helps The Phantom of the Convent stand out is its uniquely Mexican identity--more properly defined as a Hispanic Catholic identity. One German review I read (one of the few available online of the film) made the same comparison I did, that the sinister monks and the monastery that is their tomb are highly reminiscent of Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series. And with that connection in mind, you begin to see a critique of Catholic strictness arise in Phantom that director Fuentes shares with Ossorio's zombie Templars. Fuentes gives us a universe where God curses a large group of his most devout followers for the trespass of one of them, forcing them to beg him for this fallen man's forgiveness long past the point where any of them would have wanted to die. What's more, God then allows his greatest adversary to add to their misery relatively unchecked, held back only by constant prayer. As for the sinner himself, who died guilty for what he did? He is denied eternal rest within the grave, constantly reanimated to return to his place of penance. And that's before the Devil starts latching onto your soul and bringing out your absolute worst attributes!

Regarding those attributes, there is some implicit and unfortunate misogyny in this movie--at least, I see it as such. The person who becomes most obviously affected by the monastery's corrupting influence is Cristina--and specifically, the monastery makes her more lustful. Alfonso lusts for her too, but he also has his own "No, Johnny's my best friend" moments of resistance. Making the film's sole female character a symbol of lust is bad enough; that she is more strongly affected also suggests she has less internal resistance to the supernatural forces. This was sort of a thorn to me, as was the movie's tendency to repeat conversation points unnecessarily. Otherwise, the whole film was tightly scripted, filled with mystery and some spectacularly horrific imagery.

The ending made me realize I'd heard a variant of this story before; and that story, in turn, claimed to be based on a common folk tale. That is one thing I've noticed about these Mexican horror films--even the less-interesting ones have a much more clear-cut tie to folklore than their counterparts from the States. The Dead Speak's story of "the dead man's eyes" is older than Frankenstein and many of its inherent ideas, while two of the more famous entries in this era of Mexican horror include adaptations of the La Llorona story. Such is also the case with Phantom of the Convent's delving into Catholic lore to build its world. American movies surely conformed to the same type of archetypes as the mythos the Mexican filmmakers were drawing from, but it also seems like American movies had several extra layers of bullshit. The Macabre Trunk, with its parallels to the pretty-darn-batshit Corpse Vanishes, is one of the crazier ones, as is, seemingly, The Mystery of the Ghastly Face, which I found incomprehensible due to a lack of subtitles and plot synopses. (It may be the Mexican Face of Marble, but don't quote me on that.) It seems that Mexican filmmakers particularly enjoyed tapping into their roots in the Spanish-speaking world, probably because that's what their audiences wanted, whereas our American films can't be linked to one culture in particular.

Catholic unease aside, Phantom of the Convent has enough raw atmosphere and psychosis to make it a worthy equal to any of the great horror films that modern audiences love. Actually, this may be one of my new favorite horror films of all time in a way that almost makes me feel guilty reviewing it on a site dedicated to garbage. But the A-List is also about celebrating the obscure, and Phantom is a film that is undeserving of the obscurity it has today. I say that often, but it takes a movie like this to remind me of when it really counts.

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Plaga Zombie (1997), by Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez

A young man is wandering through Bubble-Lens Alley after midnight. He is jumped by a gang of skunk-striped punks with incredibly bizarre facepaint--thankfully, he is saved at the last minute by a mysterious beer-drinking interloper. It turns out, however, that said interloper is a zombie! Cut to the apartment of Mike Taylor and his roommate, former doctor Bill Johnson. Johnson is depressed after losing his license to practice following "the accident," and spends most of his day clipping the leaves off of ferns. As we meet Mike and Bill, we also learn the story of John West and Willie Boxer, two ex-wrestlers--the former wants to get back in the ring with his old partner, while the other just wants to sit in bed and smoke. Eventually Mike is abducted by aliens, who cut him open and rub bubble gum on the back of his neck. Okay, that stuff on his back isn't actually bubble gum--it's more that the skin on the back of his neck (and his whole back) is beginning to rot off. And the same thing is happening to Willie, which is the source of his lethargy, in fact. Bill and John join forces, along with Bill's geek neighbor Max, in a desperate struggle against the extraterrestrially-powered living dead. It is this struggle which will consume the rest of the movie until the inevitable downbeat ending.

Plaga Zombie may be Argentina's first zombie film, and if the efforts that follow this one are anything like it, my world just got a little bigger and brighter. It can be tough to watch a lot of horror comedies, especially from the '90s...and especially if zombies are involved. That even the analysis of the idiocy of the scores of thousands of bad zombie movies made over the years is now exhausted is a sign that unless someone does have that startlingly-good fresh idea, the genre is beyond dead, and indeed beyond any sort of topical joke about undeath as well. The one mercy of being bludgeoned with so many of these awful movies is that I've gotten used to knowing when exactly to turn something off. Plaga Zombie, however, looked like a positive outing at first glance, and I'm glad to say it lived up to my initial optimism.

The first realization I came to after watching the movie was how exactly it accomplished its blend of horror and comedy so nicely--besides being just an hour long, that is. Unlike the makers of a lot of horror comedies, directors Parés and Sáez are aware that the best horror comedies are ones where the comedy breaks the tension, and logically plays off of the story the horror parts set up. Rarely are there asides in Plaga Zombie--compare it to Poultrygeist, which will gleefully interrupt its own non-narrative just to bring us a close-up shot of a greasy butthole shitting on the camera. The goofiness comes out in the form of slapstick during the fight scenes, or the actors mugging; sometimes we do cut to something else, but it's always brief, like the cutaway to the zombie giggling stupidly as it tazes itself in the face with a defibrillator. As a result, the movie is actually funny. It doesn't explain its jokes; it doesn't repeat them until they lose all coherence; it doesn't dwell on any one bit for an uncomfortably long time. If you laugh, you laugh. If you don't, you wait for the next part. It's plain and simple.

While the movie never succeeds in being actually creepy, it is still an extremely professional effort. Plaga Zombie was made for a shocking $120, and it contains more actors and extras than movies I've seen made for a thousand times as much. If Parés and Sáez were not film students, they were auto-didacts from having watched a tremendous deal of movies, one of which was almost certainly Evil Dead. The cinematography is almost always appropriate in framing and mobility, and it's one of the few movies I've seen that uses a bubble-lens in a way that works. And the effects are suitably grotesque, as well. Partly-melted Neopolitan ice cream makes surprisingly impressive zombie vomit, while a lot of filmmakers could learn from how cake frosting can be used to make undead face-paint. There wasn't a single moment where I wasn't entertained by the movie, and that's not even getting into the weird shit.

There's one "weird shit" scene in particular I want to highlight, which is Max's introduction. Let's just that as much as this movie threw me, I wasn't expecting to hear Leonard Nimoy rasp out the "Final Frontier" speech as presented in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What's confusing about this scene is that Max is in a chatroom on his computer, talking to someone named "Kirk"! These circumstances don't really justify themselves outside of establishing that Max, a mathematician, is nerdy, which is funny because Max has a relatively small role in the film.

But of course I'm ignoring the main thing I liked about Plaga Zombie: more than any other Kids Goofing Off movie I've seen so far, it reminded me of the movies I used to make with my friends. All those silly half-comedies about ninjas and bigfoot and Sausage Kings...those were the days. We knew what sort of movies we wanted to make ours like, but it was impossible to ignore putting in our own idiosyncracies as well. And in the case of the movies of my past, this meant a lot of dumb inside jokes which were nonetheless pretty hilarious at the time. But the makers of Plaga Zombie, as I've said, took a very professional approach to their work, and consequently their output is more soberingly fluid than anything I put together.

The production company responsible for Plaga Zombie, Farsa Producciones, has been generous enough to put the movie and its two sequels up on YouTube, so you have no excuse to miss this. I will probably never recommend a zombie comedy ever again, so this is a pretty big deal!

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The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

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Frozen Scream (1981), by Frank Roach

Renee Harmon returns again! I'm not reviewing her films in a very good order--really, I should have given her time to shine in Lady Street Fighter first. But Escape from the Insane Asylum was not a terrible place to start, and Frozen Scream is an excellent way to continue. After all, Escape from the Insane Asylum used stock footage from Frozen Scream! There are a surprising amount of things that use stock footage from Frozen Scream, as bits of it show up in Bryan's Run Coyote Run as well. Add in the fact that Frozen Scream shares that awesome soundtrack with Don't Go in the Woods and you begin to see the amazing James Bryan-Renee Harmon-Frank Roach web that extends through the '80s. Frozen Scream is yet another Trash Cornerstone, a film without which a proper definition of These Sorts of Movies is not possible. This one's been long overdue, so let's take a look!

We open with Renee Harmon, German accent thicker than ever, narrating over footage of the ocean, which we'll return to several times: "Ever since the creation of man, man has dreamed of immortality. But his pursuit of eternal life is always devoured by death itself." Yeah, that's usually a true statement. Following this we go to the home of Tom Girard, who appears to be under duress as he calls his wife Ann. It turns out his stress has reason; there are black-hooded men trying to break into his house. Eventually they catch him and inject him with something, and next we know Ann is the hospital, having broken down over Tom's mysterious death. The doctors say it was a heart attack but Ann knows better, and with the aid of her cop ex-boyfriend Kevin she intends to get to the bottom of things. She and Tom used to be part of a study led by Renee Harmon, a study concerned with turning its participants into immortals. It seems it all began with mind-expansion experiments involving meditation, but eventually led up to surgeries that turned the participants into the dark-robed creatures we saw at the beginning. It seems immortality comes at a price, and Ann and Kevin will soon learn how cold and lonely Hell is.

Frozen Scream is over before you know it, and its relatively bare-bones plot had continued to elude a lot of the people I've shown the movie to. The movie approaches the plot strangely, placing events out of order and being too vague in some places. It's never made entirely clear how the scientific processes used to make the zombies overlap with the immortality group's philosophical musings about "love and immortality." It appears very dream-like, but it's not clear if this is deliberate. It's surreal in the same way that Don't Go in the Woods is, but I know that that movie's quirks were intentional. Frank Roach and James Bryan are very similar filmmakers--I know from Roach's other effort, Nomad Riders, which I always confuse with Bryan's lesser Hell Riders, also featuring Harmon. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some tongue-in-cheekness to Frozen Scream's creation, much as there was with Don't Go in the Woods. It seems like there's a method to the madness.

Of course, it may also be simple cheapness. This movie is edited like if it runs over 85 minutes, everyone involved with it will die. That leads to scenes like Kevin giving one of his oddly-omnipresent voiceovers during a surreal sequence where Renee Harmon slits her wrists and drinks her own blood. It comes across as goofy, and forced, as if we're supposed to know that Kevin's interruptions are basically for the purpose of throwing in tawdry exposition. The movie can't decide if Kevin or Ann is the protagonist...we have more of a stake in Ann than Kevin, but Kevin gets the voiceovers and the ending. It's an uncanny mix, but a captivating one. As a side-note: I'm absolutely positive, from analyzing these voiceovers countless times over the years, that Kevin's actor, Thomas McGowan, is the uncredited man who played Detective Tim O'Malley in Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember--another movie I need to get to soon.

If nothing else, Frozen Scream is a fun revivification of the sci-fi zombie movies of the past. It reminds me of a more mature and more risk-taking Teenage Zombies, but with boobs and bizarre dream sequences. If you haven't seen Frozen Scream, it really is one of those Bucket List films. Make your cinematic experience a bit more complete and give it a shot.

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The Face of Marble (1946), by William Beaudine

I have come to a horrifying discovery: for the last seven months, there has not been a single week gone by where I have not seen a film featuring John Carradine in some capacity. From Vampire Hookers to The Bees to Voodoo Man and Universal Horror and beyond, the one-time Grapes of Wrath star won't leave me alone, which is no surprise: the dude was in a whopping 351 fucking movies!! That I would cross his timeline not once but dozens of times in my quest to consume mid- and low-budget/quality movies of every stripe is not inconceivable, as Carradine, while appearing in high-classic movies like The Grapes of Wrath, was also an actor of the Nick Cage school in that he refused to decline work under any circumstance. One that I saw awhile back was The Face of Marble, another Monogram film, apparently the last of their 1940s horror run. My eagerness for the movie swelled when I saw it was a good ol' John Carradine mad scientist film--not as unrestrained as the unrelenting hamminess of House of Frankenstein, but an example of the man at work. Face presents Carradine in one of his more intriguing roles of a mad scientist who is not mad, or even angry.

Dr. Charles Randolph and his assistant David are hard at work at the age-old scientific dream of bringing the dead back to life. This is all without the knowledge of Randolph's notably younger wife Elaine, though she nearly discovers the nature of her husband's experiments late one night when he and David are trying to resurrect a dead sailor fished out of a storm from the water body the Randolphs ostensibly live next to. They are, incidentally, nearly successful, though the appearance of the "patient" is changed. Specifically, the color drains from his face, which becomes seemingly immobile, granting him a "face of marble." Unfortunately the resurrected man deresurrects not long after his restoration to the land of the living, which is disheartening for the simple fact that Randolph and David are always under threat of intervention from the authorities. In fact many of Randolph's colleagues eagerly tell him they will call the cops on him whenever they feel he steps too far, a fact which he accepts genially. While Randolph is kind, and his work is entirely for the betterment of humanity, he is still desperate to conclude what that one promising night offered him, so he makes the hasty decision to kill and attempt to revive Elaine's dog Brutus. The process fails again, at least at first--but after a few long moments, Brutus comes back again, not only feral but with the ability to phase through solid matter. Who must drink blood in order to sustain his existence. I haven't even mentioned how Elaine's housekeeper Maria is a voodoo priestess who puts a curse on David after he burns one of her fetishes! (And that's fetish as a "magical object"; this movie kinkshames not.) This particular subplot is the one which brings us to our climax, when the voodoo curse backfires and kills Elaine instead of David. And so Charles and David must again turn to their experiments in hopes of undoing what has been wrought...

As you might expect, this movie is a little confused about what it wants to do, though I should say it is rarely confusing. Events transpire frankly, with no illusions about what's going on but without serious elaboration on some of the zaniness. While we occasionally get typical Hollywood pseudoscience like "Electrolysis of the blood cells is occurring more rapidly than I dared hope!", this movie recognizes that it is first and foremost a fantasy horror film. Consider: it has not only voodoo, but a ghost, in the form of Brutus the Intangible Vampire Dog. It tries to appeal to the rising culture emphasis on science fiction at the time while still invoking the supernatural eeriness that dominated the horror films of years past. But no matter what genre it adopts, there are still two questions that arise from the matrix of interlocking ideas that builds The Face of Marble: what were they smoking when they came up with this shit, and how did the pitch for this film sound?

It was Monogram, so I doubt there was too much forethought, but what's intriguing about The Face of Marble is that it's not that bad of a horror movie. I doubt it will really scare anyone, but it functions rather elegantly as a character-driven mystery. It's yet another of those "what will happen next" sort of outings, and everyone puts a reasonable performance in, John Carradine especially. The horror in the movie arises less from Charles Randolph's controversial actions than the consequences that befall him for the hubris inherent in those actions; he is a good man who loses everything, making this a tragedy. And in many great tragedies, the punishment of hubris is a theme. All of the weird events that affect the Randolph house--the voodoo and the strange fate of Brutus--could be manifestations of some form of cosmic justice against Dr. Randolph's transgressions. At least that's my way of trying to tie together the various disparate elements of this story.

Plot-wise the film is still a mess, if nothing else for the above-mentioned fact that the least-fleshed-out subplot of this sea of subplots is the one responsible for the climax. You would think that the movie would reach its peak with the authorities busting in on Randolph at the peak of his success, given that everything, including Brutus' bloodthirstiness and ability to walk through walls, keeps leading the police closer and closer to the doctor's secrets. Instead, Maria, a character who has no real motivation to speak outside of vague allegiances to evil voodoo gods, is the one who thrusts the burden of perfecting the revivification process on the protagonists. If there was a bridge between ghost-Brutus and the voodoo then mayyybe I could buy that Maria's story is in any way relevant, but this film needed an antagonist, and if the mad scientists couldn't be evil and the Hays Code stopped the writers from pitting their heroes against cops, then apparently a two-dimensional voodoo witch was sufficient.

As you expect, this movie has some unfortunate racial issues which shouldn't be overlooked. Not only do we have our villain's evil arise from her foreignness and the religion she brings with her, but there's also a butler named Shadrach who is a stereotypical Cowardly Negro. He's not in this movie much and the filmmakers seem aware of the delicacy of overusing comedy (especially shitty racist comedy) in what is supposed to be a supernatural/mad science spectacle. Shadrach's relative absence from the film prevents it from becoming a Mantan Moreland slaughterhouse, but I'm still a little surprised to be seeing this type of shtick in a horror film from '46--it seems late, well beyond the nightmares of King of the Zombies and the like. But the past is always destined to let me down, it seems.

Generally, however, The Face of Marble is not a letdown. It was probably viewed as garbage when it came out, and it's definitely garbage now, but it's still a fun ride. I can only wonder what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think when they come across their own grimy bootlegs of our era's unfettered polyheaded weirdness like Ghost Shark.

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Ax 'Em (1992), by Michael Mfume

Y'know, it's been awhile since I've reviewed a movie which has...floored me. Sure, there was Glen or Glenda, but that was a long while ago. I need some flesh back on my bones! Some blood back in my veins! I need something overwhelming, something which leaves me struggling for comprehension and comprehensibility. Oh, yes, I know what I want. I know what I need. Yes, it's time...time for AX 'EM!!

Ax 'Em is generally regarded as one of the worst movies ever released on home video, and it is admittedly tough to contend with as far as sheer production values. I have seen few movies, in all those which I've seen, with poorer visuals, cinematography, and sound mixing. And it is tough to watch a singular movie which features extensive scenes of people telling jokes, bickering, and urinating, especially if it also contains those aforementioned technical failings. But there is something charming about Ax 'Em--there has to be, as I returned (eagerly) after an abortive and hate-filled first viewing. Ax 'Em is, as they say, like a fine pair of shoes. It will be angular and cramped at first, but you eventually find that it will carry you well over the marshy terrain of the Scottish highlands, should you ever be presented with a situation wherein that would be a good thing. That is to say it's pretty awesome.

The movie's sole authentic DVD release (which only happened nine years after the movie was made), drops us immediately, sans menu, into the movie's opening title cards, which explain that years ago a man went berserk and killed his family and himself. We will see this incident much, much later in the film in a pretty hilarious dramatization. Anyway, one of the kids, Harry, was "not ever found," and we meet someone whom we can presume to be Harry as an adult. The kid has made some of himself, namely by becoming a booger-faced machete-wielding zombie. (He's never explicitly referred to as a zombie, but most reviews I've seen seem to think he's one, to explain not only the booger-face but his immortality. C'mon, he could just be a leper afflicted with the Curse of Thorn!) Harry kills an old man, and we swiftly learn that said old man's grandson and his college friends plan on going down to visit the old man and spend some time at his house to relax in the woods. Another flashback tells us that some of these kids were childhood friends of Harry's, and that he, being "mentally Ill" blamed them for the murders. Why he didn't kill them then and there when confronting them about it, and why they apparently never passed this incident on to the authorities, must remain a mystery.

Anyway, shortly after arriving, the kids hardly notice the old man's conspicuous absence as they drink beer, play Game Boy, and cheat on their partners with each other. Much of this is filler and, aside from some non-linear flashbacks edited in to tell us the backstory in a surprisingly patient way, we don't really get to the horror aspects of the film until about 40 minutes in (of 70). From there it's just a matter of Harry hunting down the impressively large cast and killing all but three or four them. That's it! Director Mfume--known to his friends as "Mfumay" by the way--thanks his grandma, and the credits roll.

Most of what makes Ax 'Em memorable is the now-oft-aforementioned fact that it looks and sounds like shit. The acting is solid--I can tell that at least a few of the cast have gotten some kind of acting training, and everyone has enough energy that even those without talent still have something to bring to the table. The music, while usually ripped from public domain sources, is bearable, albeit weirdly placed. Ax 'Em is genuinely a shoddily put-together film: most of the dialogue can only be picked out with repeat viewings, which will make the plot borderline incomprehensible. Not only that, but it is pretty hard to see what's going on. But unlike a lot of films with these problems, Ax 'Em gains strength from them, becoming something of an experience in visual poetry, with some lines or images snapping out suddenly from a void of random nonsense. Lines like "You better lay off my beer, you big six-foot-nine motherfucker!" Images like one of the characters bobbing his glasses up and down.

Okay, I have to open that last one up. This scene has haunted me since I first saw this film, nearly ten years ago. There's a scene where three of the characters are bickering and two of them break off to leave the third, a dude with glasses, behind. At this point the killer catches up with him, and music starts playing that sounds like it belongs at a funeral. The bespectacled guy screams and we get a close-up shot of him wiggling his glasses up and down, before jumping to a shot of his dead body. I have never been able to determine why they decided to have this guy bob his glasses up and down. I assume it's supposed to be like Laurel and Hardy's hats jumping off their heads, or someone's monocle popping out--a slapsticky representation of the surprise of confronting something scary. Then why the fuck are they playing funeral music? These murders can't be simultaneous whacky and tragic!

Unless you want to get a dark humor effect, which is what they totally ended up with. This scene is hilarious: not merely because of the contrasting tone, but because I'm still not entirely sure that they were going for slapstick. Maybe the actor just felt like hyperactively adjusting his glasses, which I'm told is common behavior in those about to be killed by zombies.

I hope you can tell I'm in a good mood. This movie has brought me to it. Everything is wrong. Everything is awful. The title is awful. Only one person is killed with an ax; everyone else dies by machete, gunfire, or rotary telephone. Also, the film was originally called The Weekend It Lives, which adds to the notion that Harry is a zombie (hence "It") while also being more grammatically and contextually confusing. I cannot, for the life of me, determine why this was released, much less made, but I want more of it and any film distributor who wouldn't release this film is naught but a craven coward. I've praised the decision to make and release these films in the past, but for someone outside of the director's friend group to release this shows not only insanity but courage. It was a risk to try to find an audience for this film, but a risk well-played, because they found me. Except York Entertainment, which is responsible for the Ax 'Em DVD, no longer exists. Sorry, York--I should've gotten into the game before it was too late. Now the world will never again enjoy your releases of such films as An American Vampire Story or Laserhawk.




To wrap things up, then: sometimes I can't help but wonder if we trash-lovers are really just creeps who like watching people's home videos. Hell, I've bought tapes that really have been just people's home movies before, from the antique shops and garage sales who choose to sell such things, but I do so for a very specific: I watch these movies with the hope that they will turn out to be horror films. (And hey, if I find a snuff film or two in the mix, I get to be part of Internet history! Because that's what one should value in such a case.) This is simply because I'm sure movies like Ax 'Em, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and The Tony Blair Witch Project began their lives as home movies before plot suddenly intervened. A shitty excuse for a plot usually, but something in there that separates it from what would otherwise merely be clips of families seeing what the new camera can do. These films are separate from movies like Bad Magic or Weasels Rip My Flesh, which are made with the quality of home videos, but clearly had scripts of some kind. This is a weird sort of candidness crossed with the provision of genre tropes in a way that's uniquely magical; movie, but not movie. Home video, but not home video. These movies are trapped in a bizarre sort of quantum lock that returns to the old trash adage, that movies which reveal the hearts of their creator at their embarrassing worst are worth treasuring. To be honest, I don't know if Ax 'Em really says anything about Michael Mfume, but it said something for him. There was a reason why this movie was made--it surely couldn't have been for money. I guess I don't really care about that purpose. Everyone who made it looks like they had a great time, and I'm grateful they decided to let us in on that.

Sugar Hill (1974), by Paul Maslansky

I think I've said it before, but I am grateful to my fellow critics. Obviously, I would have never seen these films if someone in the world hadn't recommended them to me, however indirectly they did so. If your main hobbies are like mine and include watching movie reviews to cover up for the pain and horror of being utterly insignificant, you'll begin to recognize cinematic trends, sub-trends, and sub-sub-trends within the big chunky genres you previously took for granted. Studying blaxploitation for example will lead one to the genre's outset as the "race pictures" made between the 1910s and the 1950s, starring all black casts and marketed to all black audiences--films that reinforced segregation but nonetheless encouraged and enabled black creators and black representation in the media. Race pictures became blaxploitation in the early '70s, arguably beginning with the mandatory Black Panthers initiation watch subject Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. Blaxploitation has continued long since the death of '70s funk, or at least, genre films made by and starring black people have continued. Some that come to mind are Black Devil Doll from Hell, Tales from the Quadead Zone, Devil Snow, Ax 'Em, and Don't Play With Me. Because these are movies that I like they are probably not the most flattering examples of this, but I considered them all to be truly wonderful films. You can even see movies today that get theater showings which arguably carry on the blaxploitation spirit, in the form of the films of Tyler Perry, which, despite being shredded by critics, do get high audience scores and even get the dubious distinction of top billing at my workplace's Redbox.

And of course there were and are blaxploitation horror films. That is one of those sub-trends I mentioned above: in 1972, of course, we had Blacula, which heralded such films as Blackenstein, Ganja and Hess, and Abby. There had been earlier black-produced horror films, such as the ever-elusive Drums o' Voodoo from 1934, but this new vein was often crossed with the badass protagonists and dicey gang politics of the crime-oriented blaxploitation movies. This is the ground from which Sugar Hill grows, and admittedly I have not seen any of the other famous '70s Blaxploitation movies, by the simple merit of Sugar Hill ranking higher on my priority lists. The reviews always made it sound like a blast, and a blast it is. If Blacula and the others are as good as this, then I have a lot to look forward to.

The plot is pretty straightforward, especially by blaxploitation standards, save for the zombies. Black people own a club, white people wanna steal it. In this case, it's Diana "Sugar" Hill and her boyfriend Langston who own Club Voodoo, subject of intended theft by white crime lord Morgan. When Langston refuses to give in, Morgan kills him, prompting Sugar's quest for vengeance. Fortunately, the voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse can help her. Sugar makes a pact with the witch and Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of the dead, to receive an army of turkey-killing zombies. Soon everyone in town is paying for the price for offing Sugar's man. Will Sugar manage to find her special brand of justice?

By the end of the thing you'll be hoping she does. The film casts its leads well. While the entire cast puts on a good performance, the black actors shine the brightest, especially Marki Bey as Sugar Hill, who presents a genuinely sympathetic, attractive, and badass voodoo queen, and Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi, who is one of the hammiest hams to ever beautifully ham. Those two are charming and you get attached to them. Baron Samedi in particular is a very strange and intriguing character. He is in some ways a continuation of the character of the same name from Live and Let Die, and that version of Baron Samedi was the only reason why most of us watched that movie to begin with. Sometimes he goofs off; sometimes he's menacing; sometimes he's mocking, especially when he's talking to white people. When white people think they can boss him around, he starts talking like, well...let's just say it's sort of like a banned Warner Brothers cartoon. It's kind of jarring to hear, but the movie makes it clear that all parties know that he's doing it to piss these people off. Because what are they going to do? This isn't a guy calling himself Baron Samedi--he is a legitimate voodoo loa. Weapons are not going to work on him. He calls them out on their racism, and when they try to shove him and Sugar down for that (instead of, y'know, stopping the whole being racist thing), they are killed by zombies. Baron Samedi's got a system, and the system works.

Helping you root for the heroes is the fact that the white people in this movie are bastards. Sure, sometimes they have a glimmer of respectability, but basically all of them spout the n-word whenever they get a chance, and pull all sorts of bullshit about "betters" and the like. Worst of them all is Celeste, Morgan's girlfriend, who is so racist that even he shrugs her off like a rotten corpse. She drops the n-bomb more than anyone in the film, and takes a personal jealousy in Morgan's wandering eyes when Sugar's around. Naturally, she is saved for last, and her implied fate is so dark that I laughed at it out of astonishment. But you really can't feel bad for her.

That her death is memorable is impressive, given that whenever someone dies in this movie it's pretty great. That's because the zombies in this movie are great. They have these weird silver cups over their eyes, and they also have cobwebs all over them, even though they all seem to have been buried sans coffins in earthen graves. (Are underground spiders a thing? Should we fear them?) I swear to God that the first scene of the zombies rising from their graves goes on for ten minutes. For however long it is, it's not long enough. Intercut with scenes of these zombies crawling from the earth are shots of Mama Maitresse and Sugar Hill getting really excited over the prospect of having an army of zombies, along with Baron Samedi's sweet, sweet mugging. Whenever these zombies kill someone, it's usually done in a way that resists repetition, making each individual kill scene satisfying. The quirkiness of some of these deaths, along with their roots in vengeance, reminded me in a lot of fun ways of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Which is funny because I also realized that this movie almost shares a plot with Bad Magic. I guess a lot of revenge horror films have similarities.

If you want to get a good taste of archetypical '70s exploitation, Sugar Hill is a great start. If I have somehow failed to convince you, I should say that this movie's is a Motown funk piece called "Supernatural Voodoo Woman." The movie also contains a large, large building called "the Voodoo Museum and Research Library."

P.S. Originally this review was meant for January until I had to do some schedule rearranging for the site. In the course of it I forgot that February was Black History Month. I find it to be a happy coincidence that I post this now. I'd say that a movie where a bunch of black people avenge themselves on some racist white gangsters with zombies is a good anti-racist text.