The Devil Bat (1940), by Jean Yarbrough

I technically talked about this before back in The Monogram Monograph, but it's more that I used imagery from it and that's about it. I wanted to keep elements of The Devil Bat loose in The Monogram Monograph because The Devil Bat is a Producers' Releasing Corporation movie rather than a Monogram one. The one commonality between this and the Monogram movies I've covered on the site is that this is a Bela Lugosi Poverty Row flick. It's a classic of the genre, and while there are plenty of reviews of this elsewhere online, I still wanted to talk about it here because there's a lot to love.

Bela Lugosi is Dr. Carruthers, the "kindly village doctor" of Heathville. At once we see that he is performing good old electrical stimulation experiments on bats, causing them to grow to the size of comically fake bat puppets. While stimulating his bats, he clenches his fist and makes a pouty face, like every scientist does in the midst of an experiment. He receives a phone call from his former coworkers at the local chemical factory, who are inviting him to a party where they intend to give him a $5,000 check as compensation for the success his formulas have bestowed on the company. Carruthers views this gift as an insult--apparently, they began using work of his they previously rejected after he left the company, and consequently made a mint. Carruthers' excuse for missing the party, that he is working on a new shaving lotion, is not a lie. However, he does not share with anyone the fact that he has trained his Devil Bat to kill people who wear this aftershave. "You will stuhrrrike!" he tells his Bat. "Yes...you will stuhrrrike." One by one, Carruthers picks off the members of the cosmetics science team, all while being pursued by a reporter named Johnny Layton, played by Ralph from Reefer Madness, and his comic relief sidekick "One-Shot" McGuire. Will they crack the case before it's too late?

The appeal of this movie to me appears almost instantly, being built into the premise. Only in the 1940s could a theatrically released movie get away with featuring a mad scientist who takes revenge on his coworkers with perfume-powered giant bats. Stack that up with the fact that it's Bela Lugosi as the mad scientist, and of course bad movie fans are going to rave about it--it's one of Lugosi's best performances, too. The only other person who I can think of who'd do just as good of a job as Lugosi would be John Carradine. Lugosi is strangely gleeful in this role, being indeed rather kindly at first, before revealing himself to be a relentless and obsessive maniac. Of course, all of his rage is as campy as Bela ever made it. This is probably his second best role, with the first being, of course, his part in Glen or Glenda. After that it would be Dr. von Housen from Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Lugosi's performance is perfectly suited for a movie about incredibly fake looking killer bats who sometimes turn into stock footage of bats when they're up close.

To examine it in detail: Carruthers is indeed kindly to the very last, almost never revealing his true nature to others. He even puts his life on the line to continue to prove his innocence, accompanying Johnny out into his garden to wait for the Devil Bat to arrive, unaware that Johnny intends to throw the lotion on him. Carruthers is an intelligent supervillain. He knows you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. Unlike an uncomfortable percentage of the American public, he is able to keep his vast and confounding rage under control long enough to complete his goals, or come very near to such. He vents by giving little ironic nods that we the audience will pick up on; there's a running gag of sorts where his victims, unaware of what they've just rubbed on their necks, wish the doctor good night. And he always responds with a resonant, "Goodbye," that only Lugosi could purr out. He also tells one of his victims, of the aftershave, "I don't think you'll ever use anything else." Bela clearly had the time of his life in this role, and it's good to see the old bastard happy after everything he went through in life.

Other than that, a lot of this stuff is par for the course as far as Poverty Row horror goes. It has the same stock library cues as many of the Monogram movies, and the screenwriter and cast never have any idea on how to end a scene. To be honest, my watch-through for this review made me think of one Monogram movie in particular, Lugosi's Black Dragons, which also features Lugosi running around killing people out of revenge. But unfortunately his performance in that is pretty terrible, even if I love the movie for its bizarro Monogram twists. I'm glad I've now seen so much of this guy's wartime output--even at its worst it's given me something to work with.

There's one other moment I wanted to mention before we wrap up...the moment where a scientist proclaims the Devil Bat to be the last survivor of a prehistoric species. Okay...how did he come to that conclusion? Surely there was some sign that these were just electrically-engorged bats? I'm no scientist myself, so I don't know. I just know that this zany pseudoscientific bit reminded me of the conference rooms full of scientists spewing bullshit in the early Godzilla movies. It definitely improved the experience.

The Devil Bat is something like Bad Movie Elementary School, but truth be told I only found it last year. This is a Gateway Drug much like Plan 9 from Outer Space or I Eat Your Skin. Touch it, and it ignites like fire. Hold it in your palm. 

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The Bye Bye Man (2017), by Stacy Title

This was a treasure.

Unlike The Book of Henry, I missed this one in theaters, and subsequently caught up to it on a rental. And oh my God, it is really fucking bad. There are several reasons why it is bad and there are several reasons why I chose to review it for the site, which I will greatly enjoy delving into because it means I get to rip this movie a new asshole. I will say initially that I liked this for the same reason why I liked Book of Henry: what the hell are our kids gonna think about us for having taken this crap?

We open in 1969, with a man named Larry running around his neighborhood killing his friends and family, all the while chanting, "Don't think it, don't say it." He wants to know who's told who about "the name," warning that "he's coming." We then cut to a shot a train, and go on to the present day. Three college students, Elliot, Sasha, and John. Elliot and Sasha are dating, but there's an unspoken, Phantom of the Convent-esque attraction between Sasha and John. After getting some strange vibes in the house Elliot finds a drawer left behind by the old owner, which has Larry's motto inscribed on it, accompanied by the words "The Bye Bye Man." Later, Sasha invites over her friend Kim, who is a medium. They hold a seance wherein Elliot reveals he's an Amazing Atheist fanboy, but Kim nonetheless leads the group in a good ol' Hollywood Seance Seizure.

Sasha begins to develop a bad cough, and all three of them begin to hallucinate. These hallucinations all tend to put them in embarrassing or harmful circumstances. They also begin to become aware of the Bye Bye Man, and how he becomes more real to them the more they think about him, and the more scared of him they get. Elliot's research, facilitated by the world's best librarian, brings him to a redacted newspaper article written by Larry, who we learn killed himself with what looks to be the world's tastiest swig of Drain-O after slaughtering the last of the folk contaminated by the Bye Bye Man's influence. He tries to destroy the article, but the Bye Bye Man strikes quickly and makes Kim step out in front of a train; then, he basically makes Elliot seem like a crazy person, leading to him getting arrested. In a hilarious scene, Elliot talks his way out of prison with the most bullshit logic ever, even though his detainer is a hardass high-rank cop played by Carrie-Anne Moss. I cannot describe the conversation they have--it must be seen to be believed. Anyway, in the end, the Bye Bye Man comes for the trio with his N64-graphics CGI dog, and murder and mayhem ensues. Elliot seemingly seals away the evil...or does he?

So this wasn't as bad as the reviews led me to believe. However, it was still an unforgettable experience in vast and dramatic incompetence. I think the best place to start is the first thing I noticed about this film, which is what this film rips off. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the people who made this saw Marble Hornets, the first big Slenderman YouTube show, because the two stories share a lot of commonalities. Both are about young people who come in contact with a curse of sorts wherein an inhuman monstrosity begins terrorizing them after they learn about it and how it gains strength by people learning about and becoming afraid of it. Those who are particularly sensitive to the presence of the entity begin violently coughing, and the entity sends its victims into fugue states where they experience lost time, mood swings, and hallucinations. I do firmly believe that they were trying to cash in on Slenderman here due to the big faceless guy's recent transition to the sellout world of Hot Topic merch, despite the fact that stories of demons conjured up by sheer belief go back for millennia, and they scare the fuck out of me. In case you cannot tell, this movie did not scare me in the least.

This was put out by Universal, by the way. Hey, the Bye Bye Man should be part of the Dark Universe!

Actually, this movie has an uncanny number of production companies. Six or seven by my count. Interesting.

Anyway; this movie also rips off The Babadook, again, by being about a demon which is summoned up by people coming in contact with a record of it. The Bye Bye Man is similarly akin to the Babadook in that he cannot be gotten rid of once he begins haunting people. (For those of you who followed that Gay Babadook meme, I present to you thus the concept of the Bi Bi Man.) His implacability also echoes the entity from It Follows. All of these recent, more successful ideas have been Frankenstein'd together to make something that is nearly hilarious in its plagiarism. You feel the age in the movie, even though it only came out less than a year ago. I know I said that tulpa and other such creatures are among my worst fears, and that's true, but movies like this are helping me break through the fear. I mean, come on. R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour had an episode on fear-conjured demons that was more involving than this, and that came out nearly seven years before this did.

Now, onto the good stuff. At the start of this film, we have some of the same douchey movie college dudebro stuff that makes me come out of the woodworks for the Ouija Experiment movies. It is very much like a semi-white version of Ax 'Em. There is wallpaper of a fish graphically sucking a man's cock. Then, at the housewarming party for the trio, people play baseball with a Nerf football, like it's the tuxedo football game in The Room, or the "one-on-one" scene in Catwoman. There's also weird symbolism involving trains (?) which involves trains running over the three while they stand on the tracks showing us their nude asses. Okay. I think it's supposed to be that the Bye Bye Man is coming for them like a train about to crush them, but it's still pretty stupid. What's not stupid is how a dog which is part of the wallpaper turns into CGI so it can turn to the audience and snarl. Its head even transforms into a skull. This is meant to foreshadow the Awful CGI Dog, which...oh dear God.

This thing is fucking awful. It looks like something out of Where the Dead Go to Die, and if there is any way that that can be a good thing, I don't mean it as a good thing. It's a glossy, overly-smooth mess straight out of one of the Godzilla PS1 games. What makes it even worse is that it's never explained what it is, why it's working with the Bye Bye Man, or hell, what the Bye Bye Man himself fucking is. I'm sure this, too, is part of the Slenderman plagiarism, and they're trying to be all, "It's unexplained which makes it creepier!" But not in something like this. I laughed every time that dog was onscreen for all the dumb issues it brought to the movie's forefront.

(It has also occurred to me that perhaps the Bye Bye Dog is a ripoff of Smiledog, another demon that haunts those who know about it from Internet meme culture. God, I knew there was a reason I dreaded the day Hollywood started stealing from creepypastas.)

Anyway, I have run out of things to say about The Bye Bye Man, at least until the direct-to-video sequel rears its head. Here's the usual point where I recommend the movie, and sing its praises, but here, I'm going to confess that you have to be a straight-up fucking maniac to squeeze any sort of enjoyment out of this. I loved the hell out of it, but again, only because I love watching utter disasters, and because it was better than I anticipated. See it at your own peril--and I mean that gravely.

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The Instructor (1981), by Don Bendell

Some movies start out letting you know they're gonna be awesome. The Instructor opens with two men jogging, but loses focus on them after mere seconds to instead show a street fight between a bearded punk and a punk woman named "Cookie." She almost cuts his dick off with an axe. Castration is usually a good sign for a movie, and I'm glad this one decided to put such a thing--or nearness to it--at the beginning. It was like being greeted with a hug rather than a handshake. The encounter that ensued proved to be a fulfilling one. Let it be known that The Instructor is something special, even if it's not always entertaining.

Our joggers from the beginning are the titular Instructor and his pupil, Thumper Rhodes. The Instructor, as you might expect, teaches at a local karate school. They exposit for us that long ago, the Instructor's wife was raped and murdered by Bud Hart, who runs a rival martial arts academy. Hart's goons are the punks we saw at the beginning of the movie. We follow the Instructor and Thumper as they increasingly come to blows with Hart and his mob, while they are stalked by a ninja who turns out to in truth be a mentally handicapped man who wants to become a karate tournament champion. At one point this man clubs a fellow martial artist to death with his trophy, in a plot I don't remember going anywhere. In any case, this character exists to provide "comic relief" and to be beaten up by children. In the end, the Instructor probably defeats Bud Hart, and gets the girl I didn't know he was after.

The Instructor is, um. Puzzling. On one hand, it hits all the buttons I want to have hit whilst watching a martial arts movie. It features rugged dudes with mustaches and the whole Godfrey Ho-esque feel (while admittedly still being too American to be as crazy as something like Ninja the Protector). Yet I couldn't keep my focus on it for some reason. Even as I was being charmed by things like people catching ninja stars with their shoes and kicking people off motorcycles, I felt a weird fuzziness over the whole thing that left me feeling disinterested. I watched this movie three times for this review, and I still can't entirely remember if Bud Hart died, and if so, how he did. I don't remember when exactly the Instructor's new girlfriend enters the plot. I do remember being confused when we got a flashback to the Instructor finding his wife's corpse. That happened much later than I feel it should have. This is another movie where I feel like it was edited out of order, while knowing fully that that was not the case. Ordinarily I would find this sort of feeling pleasurable, but something is holding me back in this case.

It may be that there's something off about the fight scenes. They don't grip me as much as the material around them--I wouldn't call them lethargic, or lazy, but those two words nag at my mind for some reason. I just remember zoning out during the fight scenes in particular. I think I was bored by them, only really recalling one segment where an Asian martial artist showed up to very poorly use nunchuks and make stereotypical "Hwah!" noises. I probably remember that because it was rather offensive. I also remember the "ninja" getting his ass kicked by children, because I don't easily forget scenes of people being kicked around by kids. These fight scenes are often set to music, but I'm spoiled on the soundtracks from movies like Miami Connection, so these songs didn't hook my attention either, instead feeling as intrusive as the songs in bad musicals.

But there was still a lot I liked about this. Bud Hart is a particularly interesting villain, being not only an evil martial arts instructor as per action movie tropes, but also functioning as a mafia villain, and blaxploitation villain a little bit as well. There's a scene of him having a fancy restaurant dinner with an Italian dude, where they have one of those hush-hush Godfather-style conversations. He's also racist, calling some of the black characters slurs--one almost suspects that he's trying to buy out Sugar Hill's club on the side. He even dips into sci-fi villain territory, beating Khan Noonien Singh to the punch by a whole year in forcing his enemy to shout his name dramatically. Shatner would be proud.

Overall, I liked The Instructor, but this is definitely one that's not for everyone. Pop in Furious or Games of Survival first to get a feel on what you're stepping into. It may shake your focus a little bit, especially when we get to the kickboxing tournament. Actually, maybe slap some Mexican wrestling movies into the mix while you're at it. You're going to need to pick up a taste for endless spectator fights to make it through this one.

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The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

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Satan's Black Wedding (1975), by Nick Millard

Nick Millard returns again! This is probably his best film. It feels the most like an actual movie, even moreso than the already-impressive Criminally Insane. From here, Millard's cinematic output becomes no less amazing, but decidedly cheaper--and while Satan's Black Wedding does run into cheap territory at times, it is a wonderfully atmospheric vampire film that rivets you down for a vastly entertaining 60 minutes.

Hollywood actor Mark Gray has been called back to his hometown of Monterey after the untimely death of his sister Nina. The circumstances of her death are rather mysterious--she apparently committed suicide, but all the blood was removed from her body post-mortem, and her finger was cut off. Interrogating his sick aunt, Mark learns that Nina started going back to the abandoned church that they both feared as children, to ostensibly research a book she was writing on "High Satanic Rites." Similarly, the local police detective says that her death was one of many such brutal fatalities afflicting the town--one of these victims had swatches of 200-year-old cloth gripped between their fingers, their face frozen in horror. We the audience already know by now that the local priest, Father Dakin, is a vampire...and so is Nina. Mark will have to fight hard to escape the bloody grip of Satan.

There's a lot that I can praise about Satan's Black Wedding. I haven't watched it as much as Criminally Insane, but I have probably seen it about two dozen times, so it's still up there in turns of ranked rewatches. First of all, let's talk about how it works as a horror film. There's plenty of creepy stuff here. The opening scenes set in the tomb definitely stand out, with Father Dakin whispering "Sanctus diabolis" from the darkness as Nina mutilates herself with a razor. The entire movie is wracked with an audio hiss that highlights "s"-sounds, which actually heightens the spookiness of these Latin whispers; cheapness comes to the rescue. This follows our opening credits, which feature not only a freaky painting but some nicely atmospheric freaky music as well. Most of the movie's first twenty minutes, which set up the various facts of the world these vampires live in, are effectively mysterious, leaving us wanting to know more even though it's not really a mystery what's going on. And the scene where vampire!Nina slowly creeps into her aunt's bedroom is notable to me as well.

The acting, also, is generally pretty good. Nick Millard got someone to competently and convincingly cry on camera! That makes him better than a whole fucking lot of big-name Hollywood directors. I can't think of anyone who does a shit job per se, aside from maybe Mark's aunt's housekeeper, who has to give an extremely phony/racist Latina accent. It may not be great, but there is one performer in particular who I have to give a shout-out to: Ray Myles, who plays Father Dakin. Maybe someday I'll do a Ray Myles appreciation essay. He shows up in a lot of Millard's other movies, and has some bit parts in movies like The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (two titles which just roll off your tongue). I want to know what acting school he went to, because his English accent is one of the most refined I've ever heard. He's a wonderful man to listen to, and an astoundingly controlled actor. Listening to him recite "Dies Irae" at the end sends shivers down my spine. He is too good, and more people should know about him.

Not everything is perfect, but what movie is? The vampires' teeth look incredibly silly, mostly because they also include bottom teeth, giving the impression that they have tusks, or perhaps hillbilly teeth, rather than fangs. Plus, Mark is a moron for not immediately realizing that Dakin is a Satanic vampire--clergymen typically don't get happily excited when recounting the victories of the Devil. So there's a little bit of Idiot Ball play at work here in the script, which is never good. And finally, there's a scene with a policeman who was clearly spliced into the action much later, at a different shooting location. You'll know it when you see it--it's flagged by the fact that it will make you laugh your ass off. There's a very similar scene in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge, featuring the policeman "Kline" who makes a bizarrely pointless appearance via extra-locational splicing, which is a great moment in the MST3K episode for such. Was Millard homaging Wood? The world will never know!!!! (He wasn't.)

But the faults blend in well with the rest of this movie. Everything feels coherent and complete. This is a must-see for the Millard initiate, and indeed for Millard fans as well. It never hurts to burn an hour!

P.S. HAPPY 100 REVIEWS! (Not counting Retrospectives, otherwise we would have passed this 57 movies ago.) I don't think I coulda picked a better director to commemorate a hundred reviews with than Nick Millard. Plus, it bodes well that this was also the week I got to see Jungle Trap. Here's to a hundred more!

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Jungle Trap (1990/2016), by James Bryan

Do NOT read this review if you do not want this freshly-released film spoiled. Thou hast been warned!

We've all been waiting a long time for this one. James Bryan's final horror hurrah--finally sewn together from its 26-year-old principle photography by the pioneers at Bleeding Skull Video, this is the culmination of the work Bryan and Renee Harmon collaborated on. While strangely resembling more Harmon's Escape from the Insane Asylum than Bryan's Don't Go in the Woods, Jungle Trap is an astonishing and refreshing glimpse into something that is familiar but new--so distinct from its makers' other pieces, and yet unmistakably created by the loving hands of the very same duo.

Renee Harmon plays Chris Carpenter, a journalist whose career has been scrambled somewhat by her bungling of an expedition into the Amazon territory of the Mali tribe. A girl, Jean, ended up getting killed in an apparent accident. All the same, Chris intends to go back to the Amazon to retrieve the Mali Idol; it's just that this return expedition is being led by Josh, her immoral anthropologist ex-husband. Chris recounts how the Malis were swept off their land by greedy government officials who wanted to steal their land and build a resort on it. The subsequently-built Palace Hotel was abandoned to the jungle shortly after its opening. Trouble strikes the expedition early when their guide is suddenly murdered by a mysterious cultist who seems intent on avenging the Malis. After a ride on the world's most unconvincing train, wherein we learn the Malis had something to do with the sudden closing of the Palace (involving a lot of employee heads being lopped off), the group is prepared to fly into the rainforest interior, courtesy of alcoholic pilot John. And wouldn't you know it, they pick up a new guide, too--friendly Mr. Ortega, who is our cultist friend from earlier. They are able to find the Palace Hotel, and learn that tales of its destruction were greatly exaggerated. One of the girls of the expedition, however, is sure that the supposed staff of the hotel are ghosts. That doesn't bode well, given that the Malis are said to control the spirits of their victims--and given that the Malis will be going on the warpath soon.

It is tough for me to analyze Jungle Trap without first giving full credit to and explanation of its origin. James Bryan nearly completed Jungle Trap in 1990 when the VHS horror market fell out from under him. He and Harmon had found some success by rebranding a new version of Lady Street Fighter as Run Coyote Run in 1987, but there were suddenly no distributors available for Jungle Trap; the tapes sat unused for years. But with the help of Bleeding Skull, a new soundtrack was recorded, and the footage was cut into what is a ultimately a very smooth and professional-looking movie. There's some jaggedness here and there--contrast between film footage, video footage, and what may be new footage edited to resemble video (?)--but overall it looks amazing. And it sounds amazing, too. The fresh synth soundtrack is made to deliberately resemble the sort of music you'd hear on SOV movies at the time, and it is exactly on point. H. Kingsley Thurber would be proud.

With that out of the way, let me just say: I will always trust a movie that brings me evil cackling cultists and quick-zooms of shrunken heads. I will also always trust a movie which brings me that really shabby-looking train like the one I mentioned above. It helps that aboard said train are some hippies which basically Crazy Ralph the expedition about the horrors of the Palace Hotel, and their delivery is great. The "foreshadowing" in this movie is clumsy as hell--you can guess what's going to happen at the Hotel, especially if you've seen Bloody Wednesday--but still the movie pulls off occasional chills. The soundtrack, as I can praise it enough, really helps in that regard. There's still a shadow of the creepiness from Don't Go in the Woods. There are many moods within it, and that keeps it all fun and engaging.

It's so fun to see Renee Harmon and the others give one last go at it, like the future was never coming. Frank Neuhaus, from Hell Riders, Run Coyote Run, and Escape from the Insane Asylum is here. Rhonda Collier, who plays one of the expedition members, was in Escape from the Insane Asylum too (I think most of everyone here was in that one). It's too bad that Dick and Cherry and Dale couldn't come back to say goodbye. But this feels conclusive--I feel like that pack of movies I started watching when I was a kid have their ending now. The missing piece has been put in place. I wish there was more, but this is still quite satisfactory. The last shot of the film shows Renee and John the drunk pilot laughing with each other, arms around one another, happy to be alive. James Bryan doesn't play John but they're both white-bearded old men, and it's easy to see him as a stand-in for Harmon's old friend. It's one last laugh together, as a team. And then the book closes.

This was worth the wait. This is Bryan and Harmon's Phantom of the Convent. Their The Shining. Their Cabin in the Woods. Their Cannibal Ferox. I will spoil no more about it, and instead leave you to pick it up yourself. Now, we've spoken of endings, but I'm not sure if I've properly gotten to the beginning yet. Escape to Passion, I'll speak of you before the year is out. That's a promise!

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The Ghost (1963), by Riccardo Freda

It's weird for me to come back to The Ghost after some of the madness we've been touching on lately. After Gretta and The Telephone Book and all the rest, a middling Euro-Gothic memorable to me chiefly because I enjoyed it as a kid is hardly going to be a good link in our combo chain, to use a fighting game metaphor. Whatever--this is film criticism, and the only rule is that there are no rules. (That and that you must hate every remake without watching it.) The Ghost may be one of the most painfully non-crazy films I happen to like, but I know not everything needs to be the most extravagantly nutty thing on the block. Let's get stuffy.

Dr. John Hichcock has been paralyzed, but he and his friend Dr. Charles Livingstone are trying to use poison to cure that. The idea is that they'll expose him to an almost-lethal dose of curare, and then give him the antidote at the last second, so that, ideally, the shock will bring vitality back to his legs. On the side, Hichcock also indulges in seances and other spiritualist fancies with his medium housemaid Catherine. Most people, including Hichcock's wife Margaret, are opposed to such dangerous extravagances. But she loves him all the same...or so it seems. It's still several years before the good doctor would have the chance to read Lady Chatterley's Lover, but let's just say being the man around the house who can't use the lower half of his body is not a good thing when one is a fictional character. Margaret is a good actress, and not just because she's played by horror empress Barbara Steele; she and Charles are having an affair, and she hates John entirely, wanting only his money. You can imagine what happens next--it's just a matter of a little too much curare, or the cure delivered a little too late. Soon the treacherous couple are free, but in truth their troubles are just beginning. After all, this movie ain't called The Ghost for nuthin'. But what's really going on here?

I think what I like the most about The Ghost is that it's one of the most generic movies I can think of. What? No, I'm normal, I swear. I am captivated by The Ghost because it does the exact minimum an atmospheric Gothic spooker about adultery has to do to be a movie, while still being entertaining. Provided, as a kid, I was very much fascinated with horror that I wasn't scared by. I would try to find what people found creepy in horror stories I thought were mundane so as to better understand what scared people. For the benefit of my writing, of course--like I said, I'm absolutely normal. The Ghost touches on the usual Gothic fears: ghosts, obviously, as well as crypts and untrustworthy house staff. And deception, of course. I seem to remember this movie's twist actually getting me as a kid, though I also remember being pissed about the movie's final stance on paranormal activity. As an adult you will probably guess what's up before the finale, especially since there are a few other movies that have very similar premises.

One of them is 1965's Nightmare Castle, a movie which also tends to garnish the public domain collections that The Ghost has a tendency to appear on (and which also stars Barbara Steele). I only saw that recently, under the best possible conditions: a remastered HD print, in its uncut 100+ minute form. And I fell asleep three times. Maybe it was the absence of the nostalgia hook, but there was also the lurking sense that Castle director Mario Caiano was ripping off Riccardo Freda...especially since Nightmare Castle also rips off Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock! (It's okay, they all rip off Les Diaboliques.) Incidentally, The Ghost is often listed as a sequel to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, even though the Dr. Hichcock in that movie is named Bernard, not John. I assume that Bernard and John are brothers and probably blood kin of The Awful Dr. Orlof, which, fittingly, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock shared a double bill with back in the '60s. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is pretty good as well, definitely more of a B-feature, but it features yet another amazing performance from Barbara Steele so it's worth tracking down.

How does this movie hold up as a trash film, then? Well, it's definitely more to the side of commercial products like Horror Safari than the material I usually like to cover, but there are still some classic bad movie moments. The movie opens strangely, in media res at the end of one of Hichcock's seances, as Charles says, "That's enough for tonight." Operatic music swells and the opening credits play as everyone files away. For years I assumed the public domain DVD I had was cut, but nope, the movie's supposed to play like that. I have no idea why they did this, aside from just having no clue on how to start the movie. But surely you could have had a creepy establishing shot of the house or something...?

This movie is also really melodramatic, sometimes beyond the call of duty required of a Gothic horror movie. Hichcock seeming never notices that his supposedly-doting wife wants to kill him, even when she freezes and stares murderously into the distance for several seconds while holding a straight razor up to his throat during a shaving session. People gasp at the movement of curtains or shadows, and someone actually says, "I had to do it. There will be no witnesses." And of course, everything boils down to a hammy cackling exposition dump at the end. I guess if you want to see Dungeon of Harrow made by Europeans, or a Jess Franco movie without even a hint of ass or pubes, this is the way to go. The Ghost is like a hard pair of shoes, and takes a good breaking in, but once you get it to fit it will bring you some good walking.

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