Paul Verhoeven's Black Book - Monday, July 20

This is just a reminder that on Monday, July 20, Only The Cinema will be hosting the latest discussion for The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club (TOERIFC). The discussion will be about Paul Verhoeven's 2006 film Black Book. Here's how it works: at 10 AM EST, I'll put up a post about the film and open up the comment thread; all you have to do is stop by any time after that and join the conversation. Respond to my review, or reply with your own thoughts about the film, the director, or anything else. Let the conversation go where it will. Past TOERIFC discussions have always been really lively and active, with plenty of back-and-forth and debates. There's no official membership in this club, so EVERYONE is free to participate. Please do. Watch (or rewatch) the film, then stop by to chat about it here. See you then! Franken is eagerly expecting you...

Films I Love #37: Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

Alan Arkin's adaptation of the Jules Feiffer play Little Murders is a harsh, acerbic masterwork, an unflinching satire of a society spiraling out of control. The film's main character, Alfred (Elliott Gould), is a spineless, neurotic photographer whose work consists almost entirely of photographs of dog shit: he walks around the city with his eyes continually pointed down, focusing his perspective on the sidewalk and the waste that stains it. This is, to him, the only rational reaction to a rotten world, at least until he meets the relentlessly cheery Patsy (Marcia Rodd), who rescues him from attackers in the opening scene and then becomes enraged when he simply wanders away, disinterested, leaving her to get assaulted herself. Naturally, it's the blossoming of a romance, mainly because Patsy just cannot countenance someone as bland and cynical as Alfred, so she makes him her latest "project," a hopeless guy who she can rehabilitate into enjoying life.

The film is structured like the theater piece it's based on, with little attempt to get beyond the stagebound nature of the play. Fortunately, this is some of Feiffer's strongest, angriest writing, and his set pieces and monologues are never less than stunning. An encounter with Patsy's family is especially hilarious, as Alfred is forced to cope with her leering, authoritarian father (Vincent Gardenia), her stereotypical unflappable 50s housewife mother (Elizabeth Wilson), and her creepy brother (Jon Korkes), with whom she shares a borderline incestual camaraderie. What's brilliant about these scenes is that Alfred's nihilism is presented as a fairly logical reaction to the insanity of this society, certainly more than the almost pathological optimism of Patsy, who reacts to even the complete trashing of her apartment with a kind of teeth-gritted determination to make the best of things. The film really soars, however, in a pair of lengthy monologues that take up a large portion of the middle section. The first of these is delivered by the pompous Judge Stern (Lou Jacobi), who harangues Patsy and Alfred with a rambling discourse on his hard life as the son of working class parents, and the importance of God in his life. When Jacobi's bellowing, hilarious oration proves too big for the small room where he's met the couple, he simply walks away to find a courtroom where, backed by a tremendous American flag, his rhetoric more comfortably fills the space. This scene is quickly followed by Patsy and Alfred's wedding, performed by an unconventional hippie reverend (Donald Sutherland), whose speech is inflected with a shrugging, anything-goes indifference to marriage, fidelity, divorce and drug use: this wedding ceremony acknowledges right up front the likelihood that it will all end in divorce. Later, Arkin himself appears in a cameo turn as a jittery, flinching police detective, while Patsy's family hunkers down behind steel shutters, driven mad, fending off society's collapse with a sniper rifle. This bleak — and bleakly funny — film is Feiffer's most uncompromising statement on societal disintegration, and Arkin's adaptation memorably translates this satire for the cinema.

The Monolith Monsters

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

They're coming. Slowly, insistently, they're creeping closer, leaving a wake of destruction in their path, an unstoppable force inching towards a desert town, killing and destroying anything that gets in their way. They came from outer space, and once on Earth they're deadly and terrifying. Worse still, they're multiplying at a fantastic rate. They're... a whole bunch of rocks. From outer space. They're made of silicates and they're angry. Okay, not exactly angry, because they have no emotions at all: they're just rocks, after all. That's right, the "monster" in The Monolith Monsters is a rock, a black silicate that landed in the California desert in a meteor. It takes a special kind of sci-fi thriller to eke out all its scares and drama from chemical reactions involving a strange mineral deposit, but despite its inert villain — and the unfulfilled promise of monsters hinted at by the title — The Monolith Monsters manages to provide a few thrills before descending into a deadly dull waiting game.

The rocks in the desert start spreading their destruction whenever they come in contact with water. This kicks off a chemical reaction that causes the rocks to begin expanding and multiplying, sucking off needed chemicals from whatever they come in contact with, whether it's the desert sand, a wooden structure, or living creatures. Director John Sherwood gets as much tension as he can from this set-up, particularly during the early stretches of the film, when it's not quite clear yet what's going on, only that the rocks are reacting to water and that afterward everything is destroyed and people are virtually turned to stone, their bodies petrified and hardened by whatever the rocks are doing to them. It's a creepy premise, and Sherwood gets a lot of mileage out of eerie shots of the rocks sitting in the desert, strewn across the landscape, black and shiny, looking very much out of place in these ordinary settings.

But the film is sabotaged by its own title to some degree. The Monolith Monsters conjures up images of lumbering rock creatures in the classic mold of the Hollywood B-movie creature feature — alien rock monsters unleashed from a meteor to destroy everything they touch. The film's set-up only prolongs this impression, utilizing the usual tropes of the monster movie, with creepy suspense set pieces in which the actual attack happens offscreen, and only the dead bodies and destruction left behind suggest something terrible happening. One suspects, watching this, that Sherwood is doing what these films always did, keeping the monster offscreen for as long as possible, building up to its revelation. But no, the "monster" is just a rock, and the suspense in the film centers around the rocks' inexorable progress towards a tiny desert town after a rainstorm sets off a chain reaction.


Sherwood milks this premise (partially supplied by a story from sci-fi great Jack Arnold) for as much as it's worth, but he can't manage to overcome the fact that his "monster" is a mineral made active by chemical reactions. These rocks aren't a good sci-fi threat for the same reason that a really big avalanche wouldn't be a good one — it's hard to make compelling drama out of the geological research and chemical experimentation that the film's characters engage in to stop the rocks' growth. The resulting film is more of a disaster movie than a sci-fi thriller, and a rather dull disaster movie at that. The bulk of the action centers around geologist Dave Miller (Grant Williams) and his schoolteacher girlfriend Cathy (Lola Albright) as they try to figure out what's going on and how to stop the rocks from multiplying and overtaking the town. They enlist a string of doctors, journalists, police and professors in the task, but nobody in the cast has much more personality or verve than the rocks themselves, and the script is so generic that the characters are barely differentiated from one another.

All in all, The Monolith Monsters is just a big disappointment, a film that offers up little to even talk about, good or bad. There are a few compelling suspense sequences before the nature of the threat is revealed, and then the film becomes a static, anti-dramatic snoozefest. It's faintly hilarious to see Sherwood desperately trying to wring some tension out of the progress of the rocks, but they move so slowly that everyone in town finally has time to pack up all their things and leave before the rocks get even remotely close. Movie monsters are often notoriously slow and ungainly, lumbering after victims who can only be caught by falling multiple times, but this film manages to go even further by positing a sci-fi threat that creeps along so slowly that its potential victims are in the next state before it's even advanced a few feet.

Karloff/Lugosi Double Feature: The Raven/The Invisible Ray

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

The Raven is a perfect example of a classic Hollywood horror film where virtually the entire pleasure of the film rests on its central actors, two icons of horror cinema: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. This duo, together and separately, were responsible for much of the appeal of so many of the era's low-budget throwaways. They infused these otherwise disposable films with the timeless quality of their performances. Sometimes, these two — particularly Karloff, who was far more versatile an actor than he has ever gotten credit for — could elevate a film by locating unexpected drama, pathos and depth in their mad scientists, monsters and killers. Perhaps more often, their broad, campy performances could bring a spirited energy and intensity to films that would otherwise have been merely flimsy, poorly constructed B-movies.

The Raven certainly doesn't have much to recommend it beyond the appeal of its dueling central performances; as was so often the case when Lugosi and Karloff met onscreen, they are pitted against one another, Lugosi's smiling courtliness set off against Karloff's blunt, Frankensteinian strength. Lugosi plays Dr. Vollin, a brilliant physician who has now retired to conduct private research — and also to dedicate himself to his obsession with Edgar Allen Poe, constructing elaborate replicas of the death traps from Poe's stories in a hidden basement room. Karloff is the killer Edmond Bateman, escaped from prison and showing up on Vollin's doorstep, begging the doctor to perform plastic surgery on him, to transform his face. Vollin agrees, but instead he deforms Bateman beyond recognition, giving him a half-formed face with one staring, non-functioning eye and a melted texture to his skin. He needs Bateman's sinister services, and in order to ensure the escaped criminal's cooperation, he promises that he will restore his face only if Bateman helps him with his evil plot.

Vollin desires revenge for being denied the great love of his life. He had saved the life of the pretty young dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), but she was already engaged to another doctor (Lester Matthews) and her father Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) urged Vollin to back off. Vollin's not exactly a stable guy, and this is enough to drive him over the edge: he invites Thatcher and his family to his home for the weekend, plotting to use Bateman to exact his revenge. The plot is, obviously, beyond silly, really little more than a flimsy excuse to trot out some of Poe's elaborate torture devices, as well as providing a framework for Karloff and Lugosi's sparring. The film is strangely a bit like a Marx brothers movie, formally speaking, in that everybody else in the cast is playing it straight while the main characters are on an entirely different level. While Karloff and Lugosi are wildly gesticulating and enjoyably hamming it up, everyone else seems to be on the verge of falling asleep, and not just when they're exaggeratedly yawning to convey their sleepiness. It's like there are two different movies here, and nobody else seems to realize that there's a Gothic chamber horror story playing out in the basement, while up above the Thatcher family and Vollin's assorted other guests amiably sleepwalk through some melodrama and light comedy.

Needless to say, whenever the focus is off Karloff and Lugosi, the film is simply dreadful, featuring some of the most stilted, painfully horrible line readings imaginable. The supporting cast is composed entirely of forgettable non-entities, including even Ware as the love interest; it's hard to imagine this drone, pretty as she is, driving anyone truly mad. The cast alternates between melodramatic overacting and barely acting at all, rendering the already minimal plot even more irrelevant. No, this is strictly a two-man show, and thankfully both Lugosi and Karloff rise to the occasion. The former is especially good here, playing Vollin with a smarmy self-righteousness and sense of entitlement, always tinged with a note of madness even before he really goes mad. He's a smiling sadist, fascinated with pain and torture: "toooortuuure," he drawls the word out in his signature Hungarian accent, savoring its every syllable, rolling it around on his tongue as though tasting it. There's a chilling scene where he clumsily tries to seduce Jean after her surgery, running his hand along her neck to examine her wounds. "Does it still hurt?" he asks her with a gleeful smile on his face, eying a surgical scar with the pleasure of a small child playing with a puppy. His broad smile is creepy; he takes such obvious pleasure in doling out pain.

Karloff is equally good, playing a character with more dramatic and emotional shadings. His character is haunted by the things he's done, and obsessed by the idea that his crimes were a reflection of his ugly, brutish face: if only he could have a different face, he could be good. Instead, Vollin makes him even uglier, suited only to revenge and cruelty, using him as an instrument in his evil plans. Bateman is a poignant character, and Karloff conveys his despair with the use of only one eye and half his face, the other half frozen beneath thick makeup, an obviously fake eye staring dead ahead at all times. The makeup isn't necessarily convincing, but it's creepy enough to do its job, and the strength of Karloff's performance is such that after a while one forgets the makeup is even there. This is what Karloff unfailingly brought to these low-budget ventures, infusing his characters with depth and resonance far beyond what was called for, getting across his inner state even through the most formidable of barriers. His one good eye, casting desperately about as he tries to avoid further corruption, is all he needs to craft a powerful performance.

The interaction of these two greats is all the film has to offer, but it's more than enough. It's a flimsy, utterly ridiculous story, flatly directed (by journeyman Lew Landers, on his first film) and hampered by the overall low quality of its acting. Even so, Karloff and Lugosi manage to craft an entertaining and even dramatically satisfying opposition between mad cruelty and a crooked man who desperately wants to change.


Unlike its predecessor The Raven, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi's next film together, The Invisible Ray, was one even these legends couldn't quite redeem. The film has a convoluted plot and some absurdly funny science fiction contrivances, as well as special effects that pretty much guarantee its status as a camp classic of a certain kind. But in between scattered scenes of over-the-top silliness, it's surprisingly dull and monotonous, allowing much of its action to occur offscreen while focusing at interminable length on the least interesting aspects of the story.

Karloff is the star of the show here, playing the brilliant but isolated scientist Janos Rukh, who has studied by himself for years, mocked and ostracized by the scientific community for his unconventional theories. Frankly, I'm still not sure what those theories are, though he goes to great lengths to explain them during the unintentionally hilarious opening scenes, when he presents a demonstration of his ideas along with some proof that he'd been right all along. Basically, he gathers together a group of scientists for a big planetarium show, projecting rays into space and somehow getting an image of Earth from the distant past, just in time to watch a big glowing meteor crash into the planet and land in Africa — just as Rukh had predicted, how convenient! The scientists, led by Rukh's rival Dr. Benet (Lugosi), then head off with Rukh into the interior of Africa in search of the mysterious meteor that crashed there so long ago. They drag along Rukh's wife Diane (Frances Drake), who married the much older Rukh out of respect for his intellect rather than genuine love — which doesn't exactly explain why her eye wanders, once in Africa, to the fey, annoying Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton, who can't quite suppress a silly grin throughout the film, as though bemused by his own career choices).

Anyway, things quickly begin going wrong for Rukh. He discovers his meteor, but finds that it turns him radioactive and deadly, so that anything he touches will die. He also glows in the dark, a neat party trick rendered here with some of the laziest special effects ever trotted out for a Hollywood production. Benet is able to cure Rukh's radioactivity, but it's not permanent; Rukh has to continually take shots to counteract the effects of the meteor, or else he'll return to his lethal state before dying himself. Not long after, while Rukh is once again absorbed in his research, he finds that not only have Benet and the other scientists taken it upon themselves to report the discovery of the meteor, but Diane has left Africa, leaving him a note that she's in love with Drake. Rukh returns to Paris broken and enraged. He gets credit for the discovery of the miraculous "Radium X," which can cure all sorts of diseases when harnessed, but Benet and the other scientists wind up getting more attention for actually putting the substance to practical use. And in any event no amount of accolades are a consolation for seeing his wife with another man. So Rukh fakes his own death and begins stalking the other members of his expedition, killing them off one by one.

Despite the needless twists and turns of the plot, at this point the film's horror premise should kick into high gear, as Rukh tracks down his victims, merely touching them in order to infect them with his murderous radioactive emanations. This should make for a supremely creepy, horrifying movie. But director Lambert Hillyer, perhaps constrained by a limited effects budget, keeps the action almost entirely offscreen. Rukh's activities appear in newspaper headlines, but none of his murders are actually shown, nor are the incidents when he uses his invisible ray gun to symbolically destroys a set of church statues that represent, for him, his victims. This makes for a rather dull, plodding film, with a whole lot of exposition and irrelevant melodrama and build-up for suspense sequences that never actually come.

Karloff delivers a fine performance as the slowly unraveling scientist, and in a more straightforward and secondary role Lugosi does his best, exuding a cool reserve as Rukh's rival colleague. He also presides over a great scene in which he reveals for some police inspectors the irradiated handprints on a murder victim's throat, one of the most memorable images (besides the glowing Karloff) from this mostly visually undistinguished film. This is a minor sci-fi/horror offering from Universal, and a minor pairing for Karloff and Lugosi, who despite their best efforts can't manage to inject any real vitality into this lackluster project.

Sci-Fi Double Feature: The Deadly Mantis/The Leech Woman

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

One of the marks of the 50s sci-fi cinema was how seriously these films often took themselves. In spite of the crude effects, grisly monsters and ridiculous plots, these films were totally committed to their central ideas and themes. Just because a film's central character is a giant praying mantis left over from the prehistoric era, resurrected from a block of ice by volcanic disturbances, doesn't mean that the film can't incorporate an utterly straight-faced infomercial for America's Cold War defense systems. That's how The Deadly Mantis begins, with an incongruous semi-documentary segment that aims to educate viewers about the fascinating new technology of radar and how it's being used to protect America against an evil Commie invasion. Well, OK, the deadpan announcer doesn't actually say that, but that's the unspoken meaning of these scenes, which establish the 1957 film as a true product of the Cold War era.

The film is all about protecting America from threats that buzz in from outside the border. The threat in this case happens to be a massive carnivorous insect, but it could just as easily be enemy bombing planes or missiles. The film is a rallying cry for solidarity, uniting against the common enemy, and ultimately the big bug is defeated because common Americans — a ground force of dedicated ordinary citizens who volunteer to watch out for enemy activity — band together to help out, because civilian professionals leap to the government's aid at a moment's notice, and because the journalists trust the government's word implicitly enough to report only what they're told and no more.

That's the subtext, and the film's serious message. Even so, at its heart The Deadly Mantis is still just a film about a really big, really hungry bug, and as such it succeeds only to the extent that its voracious monster is creepy and frightening enough. Certainly, the mantis is about as good as one expects for this kind of creature, a giant puppet with an appealingly textured surface and an especially expressive face: oftentimes, the creature seems to be smiling as it plods towards its victims, a bit of anthropomorphism that somehow only makes it even creepier. Of course, pedestrian director Nathan Juran does the creature no favors by inserting long shots in which the camera pans across the length of the insect's body, shots that only call attention to the artificiality of the threat and the basic inertness of the puppet. Much better are the dead-on shots of the creature's face and threatening forelimbs, emphasizing the terror of facing this monstrosity.

Unfortunately, for much of the film's length the creature is offscreen altogether, as paleontologist Ned Jackson (William Hopper) investigates the mysterious deaths of several soldiers at a remote radar station near the Arctic Circle. Jackson heads to the area along with his inquisitive assistant and photographer, Marge (Alix Talton), and the duo join up there with Colonel Parkman (Craig Stevens). The script makes a few lame attempts to generate some sparks between Parkman and Marge, but the acting here is all so limp that such efforts are doomed. The mantis has more charisma than any of his prey; the filmmakers had a bigger chance of getting some romantic chemistry going with the insect. Of course, the lack of any human interest here doesn't stop the film from spending much of its time with the non-insect characters as they try to figure out what's killing people up at the North Pole. Hey, B-movie makers, I have a tip for you: if you want us to wonder what mysterious thing is causing so much damage for the first half-hour of your movie, don't name the film The Deadly Mantis. The result is that nearly half the movie is spent yelling at the screen: it's a really big mantis, you idiots, figure it out already so we can finally see the damn thing.

Still, at its best the film does generate some compelling suspense from its central premise. The insect soon enough escapes from the Arctic Circle, heading south into the mainland USA, where it terrorizes Washington, D.C., even climbing to the top of the Washington Monument like an exoskeletal King Kong. The film's best sequence is a long, eerily quiet segment when a thick, dense fog settles over the area. Marge and Parkman are driving near D.C., listening to reports coming in over the radio of the terrible "accidents" happening in the area. The monster creeps through this dark, foggy soup, occasionally looming up to attack a bus or derail a train. The fog helps obscure the ungainly nature of the creature, increasing its effectiveness — when only its blank, empty eyes are visible, glowing faintly through the fog, it's much more frightening when the thing is out in the light of day, revealed as a typical Hollywood construction. This is essentially a generic giant monster film, delivering a few effective scares but little else.


Edward Dein's The Leech Woman is startlingly rich and complex for a B-grade horror flick with such a sensationalistic title — it calls to mind the films of producer Val Lewton, who, given a pulpy title, would often mine unexpected depths while playing down the horror premise. Dein's film hardly reaches the visual beauty or sophistication of Lewton's best work, but his serious approach to the material recalls Lewton. What could have been a typical B-movie shocker is instead a poignant, insightful examination of aging, beauty and the differential treatment of men and women in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.

It's apparent from the film's very first scene that this is going to be something different than the usual B-movie fare. The scientist Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) and his wife June (Coleen Gray) are arguing at his office, as June drinks and grows progressively more distraught. Paul is a distant, heartless man, openly disdainful towards his wife and turned off because she's middle-aged, no longer a youthful beauty. For her part, she is slightly worn, disheveled, her eyes ringed with black — she is aging and depressed and fading away, and the loss of her husband's love and affection have made her bitter, driven her to drink. It is a heartbreaking scene, one that makes the parameters of the couple's relationship apparent in the subtexts of their conversation, a tortured back and forth of insults and passive-aggressive retorts that ends with the ultimatum of divorce. Nevertheless, Paul hastens to make up with June after the shriveled old African woman Malla (Estelle Hemsley) visits him in his office, offering him the secret of reversing the aging process. Paul makes up with June and heads to Africa with her, pursuing the secret that rests with a mysterious African tribe.

They discover the secret, but they also find that it involves killing a man — the drug from an orchid is activated by plunging a hooked ring deep into the brain of a hapless victim, who dies for a woman's youth. June gets her youth restored to her, and she also gets her revenge on her despicable husband, who loved her only as long as she was young and beautiful, before growing distant from her as she aged, casting her aside. But when she returns to society, she finds that her newfound beauty is shortlived, and will only last as long as she continually replenishes her intake of the African tribe's drug. After going without it for too long, she shrivels up, aging far beyond her slightly worn middle age into a wrinkled old hag. So June becomes a parasite, living off the lives of men in order to retain her beauty, posing as her own niece in order to seduce the young lawyer Neil (Grant Williams).

Gray's performance is fantastic, covering a very wide range, from the despairing alcoholic of the film's first half, to a grieving old widow, to the predatory young girl she is when supplied with the drug. She plays her younger self with a peculiar urgency, as though eager for sensual experiences. In one particularly memorable scene, she blocks a doorway as Neil tries to leave, thrusting her body at him, smiling seductively, her body suggestively sprawled against the door as though offering herself to him. There's a desperate sexiness in her portrayal of the younger June, as well as an unearthly confidence: she's not just playing a young girl, she's playing a young girl with the mind of an experienced older woman.

The fascinating depth and complexity of Gray's performance is matched by the film's treatment of its themes. One early scene begins with a tight closeup of Paul talking to another man, planning their course of activity. Then Dein's camera tracks backward, expanding the shot until June appears in the corner of the frame, away from the men, away from the action, without a voice in their plans. This simple camera move subtly underlines the conventions of Hollywood films, where the woman disappears as soon as some action is called for. The men are the ones who are supposed to make the plans, but soon June will be acting for herself. Not longer after, Malla, describing her people's customs about old women, delivers a scathing indictment of the way society casts aside older women, treating them with pity, while older men are treated as wise, worthy of respect. During this insightful monologue, the camera cuts away to June's face, capturing her look of recognition, her wounded sidelong glance at her disinterested husband, her resentment and hurt. It's a moving shot, and one that helps set up her transformation into the needy leech woman of the film's title.

June may eventually become the villain here, but she's a sympathetic character anyway. The men are the film's real villains: fickle, transitory with their love, capable of immediate betrayal, only interested so long as a woman is beautiful. Even Neil, June's object of affection, cavalierly casts aside his own fiancée (Gloria Talbott) for the rejuvenated June. June doesn't see it, but this only demonstrates that he's just like the other men she's known, just as inconstant and easily distracted, just as careless about love and women.

This subversive subtext — questioning the values of a society that allows men to age gracefully while women are cast aside past a certain age — hovers just below the surface of a film that purports to be a simple shocker. As a horror film, it's effective enough, with some suitably creepy makeup effects for June's transformations (all of which occur conveniently offscreen or behind a curtain of fog). The African scenes are rather lackluster and clichéd, and the plotting is a bit light on suspense or thrills, perhaps, but despite its sensationalist surface, The Leech Woman isn't really that kind of movie. At its heart it's a character study of June, a woman driven to horrible deeds by her desire to once more be loved and accepted, to once more earn some actual attention rather than just suffering pitiably. It's a moving, harrowing tale, and a fascinating film.

Tod Browning Double Feature: Mark of the Vampire/The Devil-Doll

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Tod Browning's bizarre, elliptical Mark of the Vampire must surely rank among the strangest of the early Hollywood horror films — not an insignificant title considering the sheer variety of lunacy on display in the countless low-budget shock-fests churned out during this era. This outrageous film runs barely an hour long, and the evidence of the significant cuts it suffered at the hands of meddling producers — over twenty minutes worth of footage are reportedly missing — is apparent at every point. Who knows what Browning's original film was like, but the film as it exists now has a stuttery tempo that actually lends an air of accidental surrealism to the whole affair. Characters abruptly show up without introduction, times and locations collide awkwardly into one another, scenes end suddenly without resolving their action, only for a new scene to begin, without explanation, in the middle of something else altogether. Incidents happen and then seem to be forgotten just as quickly, as the timeline leaps forward and the same characters reappear in a totally new scenario. One tries desperately to follow the plot by reading between the lines of the fragmentary dialogue, trying to guess what could possibly be going on.

The film is a complete mess, but a delightfully entertaining one. Its schizophrenic editing never settles down, never stops frenetically jumping around from place to place without providing any sense of context. From what I can gather, one night the nobleman Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is killed; he's found drained of all his blood and the local populace is terrified by the idea that a vampire did the deed. They pin the blame on the creepy Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and his pasty-faced daughter Luna (Carroll Borland), who live in the town's requisite abandoned castle. Then for some reason Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore) shows up suddenly, talking about killing vampires and stuff like that, and the Count and his daughter are prowling through the nights, preying on Borotyn's daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) and her fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth). This is when things get really baffling. Mora and Luna keep showing up, turning into patently fake puppet bats or slooooooooowly wandering through the halls of their castle, which is also populated by both real animals (notably, a grinning opossum) and some more puppet creatures, like a spider so laughably fake it practically has a pair of googly eyes glued to its head. Meanwhile, Zelen is frenziedly preparing to defend against the vampires, despite the initial skepticism of local police inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and Irena's guardian, Baron Von Zinden (Jean Hersholt).

The film is a mad jumble of isolated scenes, each of them bizarre non sequiturs in relation to one another. The film's structure, already loose, pretty much falls apart at this point, opting for a disconnected stream of consciousness, like a distilled vision of the vampire myth, a fractured story with all the connective tissue crudely chopped away. It's the absolute essence of the vampire story: the creepy, silent vampires, their faces pale and severe, their eyes wildly staring as they hypnotize their victims; the foggy moors through which the creatures stalk; the castle strewn with spider webs and infested with vermin; the crypt from which the vampires arise at night; the dazed victims who remember little of the vampire's bite.

The film is itself a hallucination, a fevered dream experienced while in the vampire's irresistible sway. Lugosi and Borland, as the vampires, get barely a word of dialogue in the entire film but they're both electric presences. Lugosi is of course the archetypal vampire, but here he sheds Dracula's courtly charm for the eerie blankness of the grave, and a sinister, leering smile that perhaps provided the inspiration for Robert Blake's monstrously cheerful demon in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Borland, heavily made up to give her a corpse-like pallor and gauntness, seems to glide through the film in her long flowing gowns, another creepy incarnation of the undead.

Adding to the film's lunacy is the utterly ridiculous denouement, which twists things around in a way that explains at least some of the odd inconsistencies and gaps in the story, but at the same time creates a whole new set of problems, shattering much of the sense that could be garnered from the rest of the film. Still, it hardly matters. The film is a shambles, but its mad illogic is part of its appeal, as is its hammy overacting (Barrymore in particular is full of portentous orations, and his "good guy" character winds up being even creepier than the vampires at some points). There's always someone screaming, sending everyone rushing around from one room to the next, chasing after the source of all this commotion. And one can be sure that as soon as any given scene starts to make some sense, it will suddenly fade out to be replaced by something that throws everything into confusion again. It's a mess of a film, and though it's easy to blame studio interference, it's hard to imagine even an additional twenty minutes of footage could make sense of all this chaos.

Not that I'd ever want this film to be tamed. It's delightful because of its freedom from logic, its true commitment to taking things moment by moment, scene by scene, without worrying if the film as a whole fits together or tells a coherent story (it doesn't!). In this respect, Mark of the Vampire is best appreciated as a true surrealist film, a film in which meaning and narrative are at most secondary to the pleasures of sensation, of visceral thrills, of the textures of the image.


The Devil-Doll is an unsettling, complex horror film from director Tod Browning, a film that often hardly even seems like a horror film at all — it's also a story of revenge, and a family drama, and in a weird and unexpected way, also a story of redemption. The story opens with former bank president Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore, much less hammy than in Mark of the Vampire) escaping from prison after seventeen years behind bars. He'd been framed by his three former business partners, who had taken over his bank and his fortune while he languished in jail. He escapes with his aging cellmate Marcel (Henry Walthall) and the duo manage to make their way to an out-of-the-way cabin where Marcel's wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano) is hiding away. It seems that Marcel and Malita are mad scientists, and Malita's been continuing her husband's work in his absence, shrinking down dogs to miniaturized size. It's another of those wacky mad scientist plots that are meant to save the world, though really it's just loony — that's what makes it mad science, I guess. Anyway, Marcel soon dies of a heart attack, and Lavond sees a perfect opportunity to use his friend's experiments as an instrument of revenge against his former associates.

Along with Malita, Lavond moves back to Paris, where he disguises himself as an elderly, hunched-over old woman in a gray wig, earrings and a dress. So even with all of Paris searching for him, he hides in plain sight, setting up a doll shop and plotting his revenge. Using the shrunken figures of people, which he can control with his mind, Lavond begins methodically, one by one, enacting his vengeance on his enemies, the bankers Radin (Arthur Hohl), Coulvet (Robert Greig) and Matin (Pedro de Cordoba). The mechanics of Lavond's vengeance are simple, but Browning crafts these scenes into well-made suspense sequences. What's interesting about these scenes, and the movie as a whole, is that it's not clear who the audience is meant to be rooting for — there's no sympathy for the corrupt bankers, who certainly deserve their comeuppance, but Lavond's thirst for revenge makes him mad and sinister himself, cruel and cold.

Nevertheless, Browning never allows Lavond to become fully the villain of the piece. More than anything, Lavond is motivated by his love for his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O'Sullivan), who hated him because she believed him to be guilty and blamed him for her mother's suicide. Lavond is deeply hurt by his own daughter's contempt for him, and yet he is unable to reveal himself to her, speaking to her only in disguise as an old woman. In the film's second half, Lavond's cruelty and madness are redeemed when his true purpose is revealed — not just revenge, but the possibility of happiness for his daughter, the redemption of his own image not for his sake but for hers. In a clever paradox, he makes himself a criminal, makes himself guilty of murder and worse, in order to prove himself innocent of other long-ago crimes. Despite his brutality — and despite his pre-Norman Bates cross-dressing — Lavond is basically a decent guy, even if he is rather terrifying whenever he's controlling his dolls, directing his thoughts to animate them with an intense stare.

The film as a whole interestingly incorporates its sci-fi/horror premise into a melodramatic structure, creating these weird tonal ambiguities in Lavond's character. At some points, he's required to be the horror movie mad scientist, driven and frightening and capable of startling cruelty. But at other times he is sympathetic and complex; he loves his daughter and genuinely regrets that he hadn't been able to raise her. This complexity extends as well to Malita, who's more of a typical mad scientist — she even has a Bride of Frankenstein-esque band of gray hair running through the front of her frizzy, mangy hair — but who is driven by her overpowering love for her husband and her desire to fulfill his wishes now that he's gone. The film as a whole is an appealingly rough, emotionally nuanced thriller. Its effects are crude but effective, especially since Browning combines trick photography and multiple exposures with the use of oversized sets, as in a sequence when one of Lavond's tiny "dolls" scurries across a dressing table in order to steal some jewels. Browning takes a potentially silly premise and turns it into an odd, memorable little B-movie classic.

Cult of the Cobra

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Cult of the Cobra is a great movie on paper, if only on paper. It's a lurid, potentially chilling story, a truly inventive premise for a B horror flick. While waiting out the last few days of their tour of duty, a group of American GIs stationed "somewhere in Asia" get a chance to witness a strange ritual never seen by Western eyes: the ceremony of a snake-worshipping cult whose members believe that humans can transform into snakes. They're discovered at the temple, however, and barely make their escape, as the cult's priest screams a curse after them, promising them that they will die. The soldiers head back to America, but they're then stalked by the snake goddess herself, a slinky, seductive woman who slithers into their lives and kills them one by one. It sounds great, right? Sounds campy and fun? You want to see it already, don't you? Don't bother; like so many of the low-budget, indifferently made sci-fi and horror flicks pouring out of Hollywood's underbelly throughout its Golden Age, Cult of the Cobra is far more interesting in theory than in execution. Its plot would suggest a sexy, creepy thriller, but in actuality it's simply plodding and predictable, methodically draining all the fun out of its campy central idea.

Well, not quite all the fun, maybe. There's still fun to be had here, though much of it rests with Faith Domergue, who plays the cobra woman Lisa. Domergue, a Howard Hughes discovery who smoldered her way through some great low-budget genre fare in the 50s, is the perfect choice for the sinister, chilly Lisa. Her big black eyes, with their heavy lids, always seem guarded, distant, and her distinctive mouth is a twisted scrawl best suited to a sneer or a frown. She gets the big moments here, the dramatic, ambiguous closeups, her face bathed in light, accentuating the pools of shadows that formed at her cheekbones. She's creepy and mysterious, even if there's no real mystery about her; it's obvious from the moment she appears who she is and why she's around.

Upon Lisa's first appearance, she immediately attracts the attention of Tom (Marshall Thompson), one of the servicemen. He's nursing a broken heart, since the girl he loved, Julia (Kathleen Hughes) had decided to marry Tom's service buddy Paul (Richard Long). Tom tries to be happy for the couple, but can't get over the loss until he stumbles into Lisa's arms. As Tom falls in love with Lisa, she's stalking around the city at night, visiting his friends and killing them one by one, just like the priest's curse had promised. All of this makes Paul, somewhat improbably, suspicious of Lisa — not that he has any reason to be, just that she seems "strange" to him. Ultimately, the film is about the tension between its pair of female archetypes: the chirpy, sweet blonde and the dark, troubled, seductive brunette. Julia and Lisa make an interesting pair of opposites, particularly in the memorable scene where they finally meet, Julia's wide-eyed innocence and earnestness contrasting against Lisa's barely contained turmoil.


The film develops Lisa as a figure of danger and destruction. Like the noir femme fatale — a role Domergue excelled at as well — Lisa is a corrupting force, using her sexual energy as a weapon, a shield, a tool to turn against the men who want her. The other men sense that she's dangerous, but Tom just knows he loves her. Paul says that he thinks she's "bad for him," but one wonders why — he certainly doesn't know she's a killer cobra in disguise, doesn't know anything about her other than what he sees on the surface. It's just obvious, because she's dark and "different" from other girls. She doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't giggle and throw herself at men the way a perpetually smiling party girl does at one of the friends' parties. Julia, in contrast, is sweet and warm and unguarded, as Hughes does her best Marilyn Monroe impersonation (not that her best is very good: she mostly just purses her lips a lot and arches her eyebrows so high they look like they're about to fly off the top of her head). She's the girl you're supposed to want to marry; Lisa is the dangerous yet appealing girl you're too afraid to ask. These clichés are at the center of the film's depiction of these two women, and the tension between them is fascinating even though they only come face to face once.

There's certainly not much else that's fascinating about this film. Lisa's transformations between snake and woman all happen offscreen, for the obvious reason that it would doubtless look silly if they'd tried to show it onscreen. (And when they finally do, during the finale, it's so laughable it winds up being one of the film's most enjoyable moments.) Even her attacks are mostly unseen; at most, a shadow of a cobra's profile appears as the snake creeps closer to its victim. Director Francis D. Lyon doesn't have much of a sense of pacing. The scenes leading up to each attack are interminable and slack, with tension building only to be tossed away. At one point, one of the men is about to be attacked at the bowling alley where he works. Lyon shows Lisa in the area, shows the open window leading inside, shows the mysterious stirring in the back that knocks over a bowling pin. But then nothing happens, the man walks outside, is interrupted and has a conversation, walks back inside, comes out again, gets in his car — and is then finally attacked as expected. The timing is all off, the tension fizzles out as Lyon spends too long simply watching this guy going about his business, doing mundane tasks. So much of the film is like this, just slightly off in its timing and pacing, expending long stretches of time on prosaic moments while rushing through the encounters with the actual supernatural horror elements.

The film's main problem (besides the unfortunate shift in Lisa's character to make her declare her scaly love for Tom) is that it's just one big tease. There's nothing there: the "mystery" is so obvious it barely deserves to be called one, and the killings are sloppily executed and obviously hamstrung by the lack of an effects budget. The absence of any real shots of the snake shouldn't be a problem if the director had been capable of creating suspense and terror in other ways — one imagines what 40s horror producer Val Lewton would have done with the pungent psychosexual subtexts of this material, or with the potential for creating horror in the shadows, in what isn't seen rather than what is. Instead, this is a missed opportunity, an inventive premise squandered in a lame, dull film.

Jack Arnold Double Feature: Tarantula/Monster on the Campus

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Oh those crazy Hollywood scientists. They always mean well. They want to save the world, to end world hunger, to improve the human condition, imagining a future where everyone is healthy and well-fed. To do this, of course, their research requires that they create tremendous tarantulas, grown to massive size with a radioactive nutrient formula. It's only logical, right? Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) is the mad scientist of Jack Arnold's sci-fi classic Tarantula. Deemer's a well-meaning soul, with a real vision for the future. But the problem of his escaped giant tarantula, which menaces a small desert community, sort of overshadows his plans for ending world hunger. It hurts his Nobel Prize chances, too, I'd imagine. Deemer's research suffers its setback when two of his colleagues, impatient with the slow progress of their work, decide to overlook the side effects of their nutrient and inject themselves with the formula as the first human test subjects. One of these men goes dramatically stumbling through the desert in the film's stark, powerful pre-credits sequence — a deformed and twisted man, his body contorted and bulging out as though subjected to tremendous internal pressures, staggering as the vast white sand of the desert and the big open expanse of the sky stretch off for miles all around him. Not long after, Deemer's other colleague, driven mad by the injection, assaults Deemer, injects him as well, and destroys their lab before dying. In the commotion, the spider, then "only" the size of a small dog, makes its creeping, crawling getaway.

Although this opening sets up the tarantula's triumphant return, the bulk of the film keeps the focus off of the titular arachnid. Instead, the story turns to the local doctor, Matt Hastings (John Agar), who is investigating the death of Deemer's colleague along with local sheriff Andrews (Nestor Paiva). Hastings is suspicious about what's going on out at the professor's lab, and when Deemer gets a pretty research assistant with the un-feminine nickname of Steve (Mara Corday), Hastings takes a renewed interest in the professor's mysterious research. Throughout all this, the tarantula is lurking in the background, just off-screen, a conceit that grows more and more comical and ridiculous the bigger the spider gets. I suppose it's possible that a giant tarantula could hide in the desert for a while, but once it gets to be the size where it dwarfs a large mansion, it's hard to figure out exactly why nobody ever sees the thing. At one point, it actually hides behind a big rock formation, playfully sticking up one of its hairy legs so we know it's there, even as the protagonists manage to miss it. One wonders what would happen if someone looked at the mountain from the other side: would they see the spider ducking down there, playing hide and seek? Or would it scurry quickly around to the other side of the rock pile?

At times, Arnold seems to be getting a kick out of this game of hide the spider as well, and there's something amusing about the way the tarantula's appearances become ever more outrageous as the film goes on. The thing is apparently skulking around in the night, killing cattle, picking them to their bare bones with its venom and powerful jaws. But no one sees it as it prowls the flat, open land, except a few unfortunate victims who get devoured as well. Perhaps the funniest moment is when Hastings and Andrews come across a car that was turned upside down off the road, with a pile of bones from the two passengers strewn around at the scene. "So do you think it was an accident?" Hastings deadpans, and the funny thing is that they seem to consider it a possibility.

Through optical printing, Arnold gets fairly realistic effects from the juxtaposition of a real spider, greatly enlarged, onto various landscapes. The spider's distinctive scrambling, eight-legged walk is eerie at such a scale, as it lumbers over the top of a hill or creeps up next to a country house. Arnold's style is blunt and efficient, and he interweaves the tarantula's increasing destructiveness with the story of Hastings and Deemer, as the former slowly uncovers the truth behind the latter's reclusive experiments. The pace is slow and deliberate, with much time given over to the development of a relationship between Hastings and Steve — not that either progresses beyond the level of the typical B-movie cardboard cutouts, but their relationship nevertheless has a cheery and natural camaraderie that lends some heft to the human element in this story of science gone awry.

Arnold also inserts some appealingly low-key character humor in the form of the hotel manager Josh (Hank Patterson), who noses his way into the town's business any chance he gets, listening in on Hastings' calls and asking prying questions of everyone he meets. His counterpart is the reporter Burch (Ross Elliott), another comic figure who does much the same things as Josh, except in a more official capacity. These touches of character humor — along with the rapport between Agar and Paiva's grizzled sheriff — help invest the film with some life and emotion, raising the stakes as the tarantula slowly grows and becomes more active, more deadly, its rampage developing mostly off-screen, waiting patiently for its eventual final showdown. The film is sometimes crude in its effects, particularly during the conclusion, when the tarantula is often transparent, as though already a ghost, anticipating its imminent demise. But on the whole the film is a raw, compelling piece of science-gone-mad sci-fi, as tough and direct as its central monster.


Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus is a weird, unintentionally goofy bit of horror/sci-fi camp, saddled with one of the most inane, scientifically implausible, outright ludicrous plots in a genre not exactly renowned for its level-headedness or scientific acuity. College professor Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) is a scientist fascinated with the study of the primeval roots of things, with those creatures who have resisted the progress of evolution. So he acquires for his university the remains of a coelacanth, the prehistoric fish originally believed to be long extinct until living specimens were unexpectedly discovered in 1938. What he doesn't realize is that this fish had been treated with gamma rays during shipment — of course! — and so contact with the fish's corpse has the unfortunate and unlikely effect of reverting other creatures back to a primitive state. The fish's blood transforms a tranquil, friendly dog into a vicious wolf-like creature, attacking everyone he sees. When a dragonfly alights on the fish and bites it, it returns as a two-foot-long insect, buzzing with a sound like an airplane. Most notably, the fish regresses Blake himself, turning him into a Neanderthal monster, a hairy ape-like creature with a murderous temper.

What's interesting about the film isn't its premise, but what's left unsaid in between the lines. There's a sense in which the film isn't really about what it seems to be about on the surface — or maybe that's just what I'm hoping, since what is there on the surface is frankly pretty lousy. But there's something appealingly seedy about the way the film sets up Blake's regression as a descent into an alternative lifestyle. When he first transforms, he's in the company of the young research assistant Molly (Helen Westcott), and despite the fact that he's happily engaged to the equally pretty Madeline (Joanna Moore), his interactions with Molly are flirtatious and sexually charged. This is the beginning of his downfall, his illicit thoughts about another woman, who obviously stirs him up; she "scares" him, he says, but it's obviously more than that. Things really get bad when Blake, woozy and destabilized — by Molly or the poisoning of the coelacanth? — has her drive him home. Hours later, he wakes up in his backyard. His house has been destroyed (and his photo of his fiancée notably torn in two), his clothes are tattered, and in a grotesque, startling image, Molly is hanging by her hair from a tree in the backyard, her eyes glazed.

So begins Blake's regression to the form of an inhuman monster, a transformation characterized not just by his ape-like appearance, but by the increasing strangeness and distance of his behavior in his ordinary life. He is cool with Madeline, ignoring and neglecting her, even as he draws further and further into his obsessions with the coelacanth. He's convinced that something about this fish is causing regression and creating an ape-like murderer on the campus — he just doesn't realize that he's the killer. The film is strikingly similar in its themes to Paul Landres' The Vampire from the year before, another film that used such violent regression as a metaphor for the degradation of a good man's lifestyle. Blake is just a decent guy, an eager scientist, seemingly very much in love with the perky Madeline, but his one little moment of innocent flirtation ends horribly: he takes a female student home with him and she winds up dead, hanging from a tree, while he remembers nothing. Later, Blake's increasing exposure to the coelacanth's blood plasma begins to resemble a drug addict's desire for a fix. He prepares a syringe of the stuff, injecting himself in the name of science, rationalizing his behavior as a desire to learn if the blood is really making him a killer or not.

The undercurrents of sexuality and drug abuse buried within the film are undoubtedly interesting, but such threads can hardly distract from the basic clumsiness and silliness of the film. The makeup that transforms Blake into a monster is laughable, a cheap rubber monkey mask that is way funnier than it is scary. The film's one real creepy shot is, notably, one achieved entirely through shadows, a shot of the monster's shadow stretching across the pavement as it shuffles threateningly towards a man at a phone box. Whenever the monster must emerge into the light, the film's cruddy effects can't bear the weight of the horror premise. Landres' The Vampire survived a similarly silly monster with the strength of its lead performance, by John Beal, but Arnold's film has only bland, occasionally awkward acting to distract from its low-budget effects. It's a strange film, interesting for its confrontation with the darkness within ordinary men, but only fitfully translating this theme into actual compelling cinema.