Pilot X (1936), by Elmer Clifton

A mysterious air-fighter named Pilot X is gunning down planes manufactured by the Goering Air Company. (That "Gore-ing," not "Gaer-ing.") Mr. Goering works with a scientist named Dr. Norris to divine that the maniac is probably a World War I pilot who desires to continue his killing spree even after the Armistice. To this effect, Goering gathers some of the best air pilots in the world to his mansion so that Norris can spy on and study them. One of these includes Jerry Blackwood, who is dating Goering's ward Helen. Slowly but surely, Pilot X turns his sights on his fellow pilots, keeping his identity a secret, until the '30s Post-Code Ending comes and all is happy and good.

I never know what I'm going to get when I throw on a B-programmer from the '30s, and so I'm always glad when they end up on my to-watch list from some recommendation or another. Initially, Pilot X started out pretty slow and dull, an almost Westernish thriller with wrecked planes swapping out for stolen cattle. But the presence of Dr. Norris changes that dynamic. His immediate theory--that Pilot X is an ordinary citizen with an evil split personality eager to relive Great War glory--is taken for granted and indeed, without any sort of fault, turns out to be absolutely correct. This exposes one of the things that brought me great joy in this film: indeed, Pilot X is nothing less than a weird alternate version of the noir Old Dark House flick Doctor X, from four years earlier. Both films concern scientists using modern equipment (and good old-fashioned bullshit) to interrogate a group of murder suspects in a creaky mansion. Just throw in tons of airplane stock footage and a more convincing romance angle and it's all complete. The idea of trying to combine an airplane thriller with an ODH movie, with peepholes and secret rooms and the like, is kind of brilliant and I wish there had been more experiments with ODH like this. Maybe there were, and they're still waiting out there.

There's tons of fun stuff in this movie, even outside of the general premise. For one thing, Helen insist on wearing what is probably the ugliest dress I've ever seen...and if you knew anything about my high school life you may know that's saying something. The only way I can describe it is that is vaguely reminiscent of the ridiculous high-collared Time Lord robes from Doctor Who. Except the front is clasped by buttons, and these buttons are made of googly eyes. I haven't anything like it before in any other '30s media I've consumed. I'm aghast to think of what that thing looked like in color.

Plus, we get a scene which is so unexpectedly dramatic and loud that it made my dog bark from the other side of the house. You'll know it when you'll see it. There are lots of good moments of characters screaming or otherwise spouting Mattei-esque dialogue. Take, for example, the scene where they find a survivor from one of Pilot X's downed aircraft, where we get this: "His plane was dark...dark...like it's getting for me now...ungh!" And he dies. They don't write 'em like that anymore, folks.

Yet another '30s short film--not as brief as the B-Westerns but pretty close. You've got nothing to lose! It's always wonderful to dig out old sci-fi pulp garbage like this and hold it up to the light. We even get the requisite "let's Red Herring the fuck out of the German guy" angle! Rack up a double feature with Doctor X and have yourself a blast. Science vs. Murderers is a tale as old as time--but putting it both in an Old Dark House and high in the skies makes it all roughly a thousand times better.

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Lady Street Fighter (1985), by James Bryan

I could hardly help myself. After writing up my review for Frozen Scream, I decided to go straight into Lady Street Fighter, the next of the great Renee Harmon films. I hope your ears are prepared for even more of that luscious German accent, because this is one great movie.

We open with a scene of a woman being gruesomely tortured by men who want to know the location of a certain dog. Rather than talk the woman dies under torture. It turns out the dog in question is a stuffed one presently in the possession of Linda Allen (Renee Harmon). The dead woman, Billy, was Linda's sister--after learning of her sister's death, she decides to use what leads she has to break into the organization that killed Billy. The dog contains a microfilm with a master file detailing all the tiers of operations in this gang. Once this premise is established in the first ten minutes, all that's left is to follow Linda as she eludes government agents and criminals alike through authentically tacky stripper acts at the "Goo-Goo Club" (note that everyone but Renee says it as "Go-Go Club"). Up until the first half-hour, the movie behaves like a run-of-the-mill sleazy crime film, albeit a quirky one with some odd choices in editing and sound mixing. But eventually Linda arrives at a party hosted by Max Diamond, one of the members of the crime organization, and all Hell breaks loose. There is too much for to describe happening at this party, which every overly-decadent eccentric movie gangster party ever; one of the least remarkable things, to give context, is Renee Harmon sucking on a stalk of celery like it's a dick. Not only is a tremendous amount of insanity set up at one time, with very little warning, but it's shot professionally, with fascinating set-ups, acting, and framing. Everything from there on out is cooldown, until the literally explosive climax.

On the surface, Lady Street Fighter appears to make sense, but the mark of Bryan is high on it. Either I have worse attention problems than I thought, or nothing in this film leads to anything in particular. I never want to overuse the description that something "looks like a dream" but there's always something mystifyingly elusive about the sequence of cause and effect in how this movie turns out. I have so much difficulty following the dialogue sometimes because, like in Don't Go in the Woods, there are some lines which are written like they're bad translations, even though this was an American project made generally by English-speaking Americans. Some of Renee Harmon's lines are hard to make out because of her accent, but even when you can understand her, there's a seeming gap between content and context.

There's still a shape to the movie, though, even if it sometimes does screwball things like having cops who show up at murder scenes seconds after the murder is first discovered, or giving us a heroine who crushes and burns her enemies in car crashes. This movie is all about Renee Harmon kicking ass. Gas fires aside, Linda Allen's quest for sororal vengeance is pretty cool, and she has a lot of great fighting moments. She's also pretty good-looking for her age, and many of the characters in the film seem to think so too...though this isn't always a service to the audience.

The soundtrack also makes the movie. Sure, it's a ripoff of Ennio Morricone, but what isn't? In all seriousness, this movie has its own unique version of the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, plus a weird Don't Go in the Woods-style Casio ditty that plays near the beginning which will be in your head for years to come. The music from this movie overlaps with those of Don't Go in the Woods or Frozen Scream to form a master soundtrack that I would pay good money to hear on CD.

Fun fact: this movie was followed up with a remake called Run Coyote Run, made available only recently. Run Coyote Run is sometimes noted as being a sequel to Lady Street Fighter as well as a remake, but I don't see it. I'm not overly psyched about Run Coyote Run because it's largely the same movie as Lady Street Fighter, being entire scenes pasted over from the latter film and strung together with '87-era video segments. But if I ever feel like getting really meta, maybe someday I'll take a look at that one too.

If you're a fan of the other movies James Bryan and Renee Harmon made, and you want to see them take a crack at a crime film, you are well-covered. Hell, this is one to try even if you like your crime films, y'know, good. It will probably just be a little surreal in places, but if you like crime films and you're not used to a little surrealism, you can just get out of my face.

Book Club of Desolation #16: Gretta (1955), by Erskine Caldwell

I loved Gretta the Movie so much that I had to check out Gretta the Book. And to speak very succinctly, it is beyond my wildest dreams, for the simple reason that it enhances the experience of watching Gretta the Movie exponentially. The movie has nothing to do with this book. There's a Gretta, sure. Both stories have a Glen. But otherwise, they are completely different beasts. For Gretta the Movie to audaciously stamp writer Caldwell's name on the title card is probably the most hilarious thing I've seen in a while, because after getting through Gretta's 144 pages I found not one plot point, not one in the whole book, that it shared with the movie, aside from the fact that people have a lot of sex.

Gretta is a young woman who seems eager to meet as many men as possible. She wants love, but she knows that sex is a very quick path to love for some men. We follow her through her erotic adventures until she meets Dr. Glen Kenworthy, with whom she strikes up what is a nearly perfect relationship. Then one of the men from her past comes back, Dr. Royd Fillmore, who engages in lengthy creepy near-rape scenes with her throughout the book's middle. When she rejects him totally, he kills himself, and this brings scandal to the Kenworthys' marriage. The hospital director calls Glen into his office to basically call his wife a whore to his face; consequentially, Glen finds himself liking Gretta less and less. This is even after he finds out that Gretta's lustful ways and desire to find true love are an attempt to patch a hole in her heart after a molestation incident at the age of ten.

I would have never heard of Erskine Caldwell if it wasn't for Gretta the Movie, but my copy of Gretta the Book says the Faulkner himself included Caldwell in his top five writer's list. I laugh at that because this book has more sex in it than some of the smut paperbacks I've done in the past for the Book Club of Desolation...and it's a good deal sexier than those, too. The book is actually pretty well written, being above the usual romance paperback fare. Sure, there are people blushing and gushing and fainting, but we're a long way from Danielle Steele, especially since as far as I know Danielle Steele doesn't really put pedophilia flashbacks into her works. The prose never gets tiresome and for a relatively soapy Valley of the Dolls-style potboiler it held my attention surprisingly well. In fact, I'd be interested in checking out some of Caldwell's other works, as I feel like there are some writing tricks I could pick up from him.

It was really fun, until I reached about the halfway mark, to try to see if the book was going to diverge into a narrative about people with past experiences with death who give themselves near-death experiences on purpose out of nostalgia. Or when Gretta was going to become a transgender piano player named Charlie White. As I said above, none of this happens, and indeed, it's baffling at times to consider where John Carr could have gotten even the faintest inkling for what would become Gretta the Movie from this novel. The two Grettas are similar to a point, though Film!Gretta gets paid for her sex work while Novel!Gretta considers that to be whoring; the two Glens are not similar at all, because Novel!Glen lacks Film!Glen's dedication to Gretta. Royd Fillmore is kind of like George Youngmeyer, in that he's kind of an evil bastard, but again, once you progress past the most basic of details the two become distinct and separate. Gretta the Movie is really just a fucked-up, all-original gem, and in its own way, so is this book--albeit to a lesser extent in my mind. But that's just because Gretta the Movie is tough to top.

Things get even more complicated when you recall that Gretta the Movie was cut into one of several incoherent short pieces in the utterly batshit anthology film Night Train to Terror, which I will definitely have to talk about at some point. When I rewatch that flick for my inevitable review, I'll have to see if they credit Erskine Caldwell as a writer. That would be astonishing indeed. I wonder if Caldwell ever saw either film based off of his work.

If you like realistic paperbacks or romance novels, I think you'll find Gretta to be one of the better examples of a literary-inclined drama. If you want some great amusement, though, read the book in conjunction with watching the film. The stark contrast is a comedic marvel in and of itself.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), by Gilberto Solares, Rafael Portillo, and Jerry Warren

I must be at the absolute end of my rope if I'm starting to actually enjoy Jerry Warren movies. There are Ed Wood fans, of course, and Jess Franco fans...even James Bryan and Jean Rollin fans. But in all my years I've met few people who have told me they appreciated the films of Jerry Warren. Warren's fame these days comes from the many films he "made" from films originally shot in Mexico, to which he added his own scenes and dubbing. He and K. Gordon Murray were the kings of this Mexican import racket, though Warren also made films of his own, including the legitimately atrocious Wild World of Batwoman. Despite my completely rational hatred for Batwoman, I found that Teenage Zombies, of all things, was not a horrible experience, and I intend to check out Frankenstein Island at some point. But my introduction last year to today's film, an example of Warren's Mexican hybridizing called Face of the Screaming Werewolf, was a revelation in trash filmmaking. In fact, I considered it to be the best movie I saw in 2016. Now, to most that's probably just a sign of how utterly trashy 2016 was, but all the same, I think Face of the Screaming Werewolf is a movie that deserves another look, if anything because it was as baffling as the year I saw it in.

We open in media res with a bunch of scientists hypnotizing a lady. This hypnosis scene goes on for way, way too long, like most scenes in Face's 59-minute runtime. But we learn that in a past life, this lady was an Aztec priestess of some kind who may be connected to a mummy who I guess these scientists are looking for. They go to this pyramid and find not one but two mummies. One of them is a legitimate Aztec mummy (composed of stock footage of one of this movie's halves, 1957's La Momia Azteca), the other is apparently a much more recent addition to the pyramid. According to a news report, this other mummy--played by Lon Chaney, Jr.--was given "an exchange of fluids" from the mummy to "achieve an apparent sense of death." Note that this intriguing plot thread is never followed up on; but it was probably added in to explain why the Chaney!mummy later appears wearing Larry Talbot's plaid shirt and slacks. This mummy is freed of his wrappings by a rival gang of scientists who steal the mummy from an exhibition and attempt to bring it back to life in their laboratory/wax museum for reasons that are never explained. With me yet? Well, get ready for the shock of your life, when the Talbot!mummy does come back to life, only for the revivificated Chaney to transform into a werewolf under the full moon! This movie ain't called Face of the Screaming Mummy, after all. The Chaney scenes come from La Casa del terror, which from what I know originally played the Chaney role for laughs, a parody of his Universal work. So now there is a killer mummy running around but also a werewolf. Will our heroes prevail? Are there heroes? Will any of these plot threads come to a head in some way?

I've learned I simultaneously enjoy and despise writing reviews about movies which I consider to be the favorites of my favorites. Usually, they're movies where the synopsis should be able to stand for itself, but every time I review one of them I feel like I've done an inadequate job. C'est la vie pour une ecrivaine...but I still want to make people watch these things. I like to imagine, however, that my summary of Face of the Screaming Werewolf is probably sufficient to convey the flavor of this film to you. It is a mess, possibly one of the messiest films I've ever seen. Its continuity is like confetti; it's like Harry Stephen Keeler's web philosophy given Frankensteinian life, with a million tangents that exist solely because life is nothing but millions of tangents. Never mind the fact that few among us (read: me) actually enjoy consuming media that applies that weird maximalist slice-of-life madness to genre fiction like mysteries or horror. Face is not born of deliberate action, instead being a product of the strange energies that arise from the Burroughsian cutup method. Warren has taken two serviceable movies and made a nonsense film so artless that it's become artsy again.

I love movies that make you constantly ask "why?" and "what?" This is a feature of great good movies as well as great trash movies. When you watch The Wicker Man, for instance, you constantly ask, "Why is everyone is this village acting so strangely?" and "What happened to Rowan?" But in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, you will just keep asking "why...?" and "what...?" with no continuation past that initial word. Constantly. Why do the scientists need to use the girl's past life memories to guide their way to an above-ground tomb? Why would someone "exchange fluids" with a mummy or force someone through the process--when a mummy should be desiccated and therefore have no fluids to speak of? Why do the other scientists steal the mummy? Why do they try to bring it back to life, and where did they learn the methods of doing so? Why do filmmakers keep thinking the Aztecs had the same assignations to their mummies and pyramids as did the Egyptians?

What sort of body would provide funding for a research team interested in bringing back the dead, especially the very old, very organ-deprived dead? What sort of equipment requires hooking up cables to a stone sarcophagus and filling it with dry ice fog while annoying sirens go off? What sort of scientists run a horror wax museum on the side? What are the other two tubes on the three-chambered person-sized centrifuge they put Lon Chaney into for? What kind of werewolf can be killed by being clubbed in the head with a torch?! I could go on.

If you want to go into how the two movies clash, you need look no further than tone. Really, we're looking at three different movies here. There are the Jerry Warren scenes in the minority, which have drastically different film quality, which largely consist of various characters providing stapling exposition. Then there are the Lon Chaney scenes, which are pretty spot-on imitations of the Universal Wolf Man movies--pretty standard fare. But we also have the scenes clipped from La Momia Azteca, which are impressively chilling, making stunning use of shadow and lighting to make their admittedly disturbing mummy makeup even spookier. If I thought I could bear the rigors of old Popoca again, I'd actually be willing to give the source material of this film a try. The only thing ruining the creeps are the inserts of Warren's actors mugging into the camera.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf is truly one of the most inept and cheap films of all time, but that makes it special in my mind. I think it will always be one of my absolute favorites, even if I fly solo in that regard. But as always, I encourage people to let the under-an-hour-runtime magic light their way.

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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Blue Summer (1973), by Chuck Vincent

I don't know why this movie the impact on me that it did--which is kind of my way of saying I don't know why this movie left any impact on me at all. It's kind of like The Witches' Mountain, another movie I love which, frankly, has so little going for it that it's remarkable that it even still finds release. Really, there's little to separate Blue Summer from other softcore porn exercises of the early '70s, and I can think of little that makes it stand out against other "teen road trip" movies I've seen, to say nothing of the fact that it's not even that distinct from other non-teen road trip movies I've seen. But the High Concept premise sold me quick: "Two teens load up a car with beer and go on the road in search of sexual adventures." I think what made Blue Summer hook into my heart is it's cheap attempts to milk my nostalgia for the road trips of my youth. Sure, I never went on these trips in search of beer or sex--I went looking for ghosts, because I had this weird Gravity Falls-style youth--but the thrill of being young on the open road is something that fades away over time. Maybe it never goes away, but it's never quite the same again. So this crude little porno managed to stir up some strange emotions in me, managing to overcome another fault I had with The Witches' Mountain: I hated it the first few times I saw it.

Gene and Tracy have just finished high school, and soon, horror of horrors, it'll be off to college for the both of 'em. Thus they decide to spend the summer making the trip out to Gene's uncle's cottage, with plenty of stops along the way. The primary mission, of course, is girls, as many as they can bed. Once this premise is established and we've gotten our first few twangs of '70s guitar out of the way, our string of ostensibly erotic vignettes can begin. First our boys run into two girl hitchhikers of around the same age who turn out to be quite permissive. Of course, this is because they expect the boys to be permissive with their valuables. It's implied these two have been running this thumb 'em, bang 'em, and rob 'em for some time. Next, they run into a Manson-esque hippie leader and his two free-loving girlfriends, and that doesn't end well either. At last, they end up in some crap shanty town, where they're offered drunken sex with the village bicycle, Regina. Eventually, however, some thugs show up and butt ahead of the two on the train to Reginasville, and when they decide to fight for their rights to sex it looks like they're going to get their asses kicked. But back near the start of the movie, they ran into the world's most apathetic biker, whom they helped out when his bike wouldn't start. Ever since he's been stalking them with unclear intentions. Turns out he's just been looking to repay the favor, as he fights off the toughs so the boys can get away. When they reach the cottage, Tracy is reunited with an older woman whom he shared an attraction with earlier in the movie, and the two have sex, before realizing they probably shouldn't see each other again when Tracy meets a man older than him who turns out to be the woman's son. Finally, they pack it in, reflecting fondly on the new memories, but also lamenting what comes next.

Because Blue Summer is a porn first and foremost, it spends most of its runtime showing people rolling around and utterly failing at making out. This stuff is easy to fastforward through, unless you want to hear some purebred '70s guitar indulgence, including the occasional not-Beatles. The musical interludes are on par with An American Hippie in Israel for sheer ridiculousness. They highlight the fact that everything about this movie is pure '70s...it's just conspicuously free of drugs, even in the presence of hippies. I think I appreciated it initially by merit of its being a time-capsule film. It is a living memory of something that is, like the road trips of our youth, forever inaccessible. Hell, most of the buildings, forests, and mountains shown in this thing have probably been bulldozed by this point. One needs reminders that the world is always changing, and coming head-to-head with the past is one way of going about that.

There's some actual...heart...in this movie? Like, again, T&A, and tongue-on-tongue, those are the goals, but I get the impression Chuck Vincent, director of such films as Sex Crimes 2084 and Sexpot, actually had something of a personal stake in this film's story. Weird, innit? Any of us who graduated from high school knew it was a bigger step than anything we'd previously known, and that feeling is adequately communicated here. Growing up is scary. It does mean the end of a lot of freedoms that you may go on missing for the rest of your life. But it's also liberating. You get to have your own pets, you can feel the weight of your accomplishments, you can eat whatever garbage you fucking want. And you find that, after a time, you can even still find days to just sit around watching and writing about awesome movies. I can't help but wonder if there is a deliberate irony in that final sadness Tracy and Gene leave us on. One life's ending, but another is just beginning. I mean, if anything, I guess I don't get why they think there's not going to be booze, sex, and road trips in college.

And I think that theme--the fear of growing up--comes back in what is probably the most memorable thread in the film, the affair between Tracy and the older woman. I don't remember if the movie really explains why she ends up going for him; specifically, I don't know if she's meant to be predatory or not. But perhaps this woman fears the future as much as Tracy does, and therefore looks to younger men to help her feel youthful again. There's enough ambiguity that it gives the film depth it didn't have up until everything spills out about her twenty-something son.

I really don't think I can encourage you to watch Blue Summer. It's a relatively tedious run-of-the-mill skin flick, but with a few patches here and there that break up the ennui in ways that I at least found interesting. Let me know if it sticks in your head as well.

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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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