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THE BLACK CAT. (1934) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE BLACK CAT. (1934) FROM THE STORY BY EDGAR ALLAN POE. DIRECTED BY EDGAR G. ULMER. PRODUCED BY CARL LAEMMLE, JR. DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

STARRING BELA LUGOSI, BORIS KARLOFF, DAVID MANNERS, JULIE BISHOP, LUCILLE LUND, EGON BRECHER AND HARRY CORDING.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This excellent old vintage horror classic has the distinction of being the first film ever to pair Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff together, so it’s a real case of Dracula versus the Mummy, isn’t? My money’s on the Fanged One rather than Mr. Bandages over there, but you never quite know how these things will pan out, do you?

The story begins on a train. American newly-weds Peter (a mystery writer, ironically enough) and Joan Allison are honeymooning in Hungary when they are asked to share their train compartment with a stranger, a handsome and charming Hungarian psychiatrist with an exotic accent by the name of Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi). They’re put out, naturally, as they wanted to be alone, but graciously invite Dr. Werdegast to sit with them nonetheless.

Dr. Werdegast is not just a stranger, but also a strangely intense man with a dark past. He reveals some of it to Peter while Peter’s wife Joan is asleep. She’s every inch the early ‘Thirties starlet, by the way, this one, and she spends most of the film screeching in fear at everything she sees and swooning elegantly into the arms of the nearest man.

Peter is obviously the love of her life and he shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever controlling this docile, biddable little woman. I imagine he’d only slap her as a result of extreme provocation and not as a matter of course, which is always nice to know.

Anyway, I digressed there, lol. Vitus, who’s en route to visit a friend, as yet un-named, reveals to Peter that he has spent the best years of his life rotting away in a horrible prison in Siberia.

He was captured as a POW during the Great War of 1914-1918 and incarcerated for nearly two whole decades, thanks to the betrayal of a friend. His physical body may have survived the ordeal but his soul is in pieces, such was the horror of the place. His eyes are haunted with the memory of it all, and maybe other memories too that we don’t yet know about.

The young couple and Vitus and his wordless servant Thamal seem to be travelling in the same direction, so they all opt to share a carriage. In the lashing rain, however, the carriage overturns in a mudslide.

The driver is killed and Mrs. Allison, the frail little flower-petal, is injured a tiny bit. Vitus says, well, the friend’s house that I’m going to visit is just up the road a piece, come with me and my friend will fix us all up. So that’s what they do…

The ‘friend’ isn’t really a friend at all but Vitus’s worst enemy, the man whose terrible betrayal led to Vitus’s imprisonment for so long. Boris Karloff plays Hjalmar Poelzig, or ‘Pigslowe,’ if you prefer. Just ask Mrs. Allison. She knows what I mean!

Anyway, Poelzig is an architect who has built a very strange, rather futuristic-looking house in a mountainy region on top of Fort Marmarus, which he commanded during the war. Dr. Werdegast was one of his men.

The odd-looking house is surrounded by the graves of hundreds of soldiers who died in the war. It’s a weird, mysterious and atmospheric place, and the perfect location for the dark events that are about to play out there.

Causing Vitus to be imprisoned for so long is only half of what this sinister Poelzig fella has done to poor Vitus. There’s at least one woman in Poelzig’s household who can testify to just what wrongs have been done to her and Vitus and one other party, who shall remain nameless. Vitus is here to revenge himself on Poelzig, but not until the very end of the film does he know to what extent Poelzig has wronged him.

There’s a supernatural element to the film, of course, as Poelzig is involved in some very dodgy practices with their basis in the occult. Mrs. Allison is in grave danger, as Poelzig has decided he likes the look of her and wants to use her in an upcoming ritual. Well, if he needs a bird who can do little else but squawk and swoon into the arms of the nearest bloke, she’ll do just fine.

There is a black cat in the film but he seems to be there only to give Boris the chance to remark sarcastically to a bemused Peter Allison that Bela has a terrible fear of cats. It’s not really integral to the plot.

However, a lot of these old movies liked to be able to say at the beginning of the credits that the movie was inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, whereas in reality the connecting link was often quite tenuous, as it is here. Still, Poe was a popular fellow and, if his name got butts-on-seats, the producers were prepared to use it, see?

The handsome, suave and still young Bela isn’t the villain as such in this one, oddly enough. He wants to avenge himself against the evil Poelzig who is the real villain but, not only that, he’s taken a liking to the pleasant young couple who invited him to share their train compartment and they like him well enough too. (Even though the husband caught Bela stroking the wife’s hair while she was asleep, lol!)

He’s damned if he’s going to let the dastardly Poelzig and his queer V-shaped futuristic hairstyle ruin the young couples’ lives by taking the wife to use as a pawn in his deadly Satanic ritual. The stage is set for a terrific battle of wits between Bela and Boris which might just end in a big bang for someone, but we won’t of course say who. Or is it whom?

Either way, this film is a marvellous watch, with up-tempo classical music playing throughout just as if this were a silent film. Bela is wearing dark lippy and Boris is fully made-up in the style of the stars of silent cinema.

We’re only four years into the talkies by this stage, remember, so the film still retains the look and feel of a silent movie. Luckily for us, though, it’s a talkie and so we get to hear Boris’s charming lithp and Bela talking in his wonderful Dracula voice, which was actually his real accent.

Pre-Code but not, I believe, by much, the film features Satanism, the occult and the skinning alive of a human being and it also hints at abduction, necrophilia, rape and domestic abuse. For a film from the ‘Thirties that’s so old as to be almost a silent movie, it really kicks some serious ass.

What a delicious treat this old black-and-white movie is. It’s only one of a handful of films that were all released with the same title, lol, which must have been terribly confusing for the poor flummoxed viewer. Just how many movies called ‘The Black Cat’ were filmed, anyway? Never mind, dear reader. We don’t need to know. Maybe, as Bela himself remarks in the film, there are more things in heaven and earth…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

You can contact Sandra at:

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VAMPYR. (1932) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CARL THEODOR DREYER’S ‘VAMPYR.’ (1932) BASED ON JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU’S WRITINGS, ‘IN A GLASS DARKLY.’ DIRECTED BY CARL THEODOR DREYER.

STARRING JULIAN WEST (BARON NICOLAS DE GUNZBURG), MAURICE SCHUTZ, RENA MANDEL, SYBILLE SCHMITZ, JAN HIERONIMKO, HENRIETTE GERARD AND ALBERT BRAS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘This is the phantasy-experience of young Allan Gray, who engulfed himself in studies of demonology and vampire-lore. Preoccupation with the crazed ideas of past centuries turned him into a dreamer and a fantasist, lost at the border between fantasy and the supernatural.’

This surreal, fog-wreathed German-French early talkie, with so few words of dialogue that it could nearly pass for a silent movie, is the most gorgeous, ethereal and dream-like old vampire film I think I’ve ever seen.

It doesn’t have a linear storyline, in which, say, a Jonathan Harker is ordered by his employer to travel to Transylvania, there to meet with a Count Dracula to discuss a property the Count is desirous of purchasing in England, and then everything that happens after that follows a straight enough course to the climax.

Rather, it’s non-linear and dreamlike, and the lines between fantasy and reality are very much blurred. Also, some of it makes little or no sense but it looks so good ‘n’ spooky that it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

It has a sub-title of THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF ALLAN GRAY, Allan Gray being played by the handsome young aristocrat, Baron Nicolas De Gunzburg, who put up the money for the production in return for being allowed to play the lead role. Well, if it’s your money, then I guess you can ask for that privilege…!

Allan Gray is first seen travelling to an inn close to the village of Courtempierre with his fishing tackle slung over his shoulder. He locks his bedroom door at night because of very uneasy feelings he has about the place, but the sanctity and safety of his chamber is nonetheless breached later that night by a terrified old man.

‘She mustn’t die, do you hear?’ he says cryptically before depositing a wrapped parcel on Allan’s nightstand. ‘TO BE OPENED UPON MY DEATH,’ the old man has written rather ominously on it. It is an ancient book on vampire lore, and the man is the owner of the local chateau, who is at his wits’ end because he and his two adult daughters are under siege by vampires.

Next day, Allan finds this fabulous, rather run-down old chateau, but the master, his nocturnal visitor from last night, has just died in mysterious circumstances. Was he already dead when he came to Allan in the night, begging Allan’s aid for his two daughters? According to the book of ancient vampire lore, much, much stranger things have happened. Allan is involved now, and the fate of the chateau-dwellers is now to be his fate too.

The master’s daughter Leone is confined to bed, her life-blood being drained away from her bit by bit by the local vampire. Two marks like the bite of a rat can be seen on her neck. The scariest sequence in the whole film is when she rises from her sickbed and her eyes follow the progress of an unseen entity around her sickroom, even on the ceiling, while a manic, evil grin adorns her face. Her horrified sister Gisele, played by a beautiful young woman who worked as a Paris photographer’s nude model in real life, looks on helplessly.

Gisele is glad to have Allan’s help with her dreadful problem. The local doctor, played by a Polish poet who’s a dead ringer for Nobel prize-winning scientist Albert Einstein, is in league with the vampire so he’s deliberately not being much help at this terrible time.

The old servant at the chateau is really the hero of the hour. He reads the old book of vampire facts and thus learns what must be done if the chateau, and even the village, is to be saved from this demonic plague of creatures of the night.

He spearheads the operation of tracking the vampire down to an old grave in the churchyard and staking it through the heart with the help of Allan in a scene that bothered the censors greatly back in 1932. He even has a nasty surprise in store for the evil doctor in another scene that drew the censors’ wrath down on the film back in the day.

While Allan is sitting on a bench in the cemetery waiting for the trusty family retainer to bring the staking instruments, he drifts off into two Allans and has an horrific nightmare. He is in his coffin now, not dead but merely paralysed by nefarious means, and he is fully conscious while watching a man above him apply the turnscrew to the coffin nails and lock him away inside his forever-box.

The vampire also looks triumphantly down on him as his coffin screws are nailed down. Then the paralysed Allan sees the sky and the trees above him for the last time as his coffin is carried in a solemn procession to the cemetery. It’s a terrifying scene and one that could easily have inspired film legend Roger Corman when he made THE PREMATURE BURIAL for American International Pictures a few short decades later.

A few random facts about the film now, if you will. No sets were used, the whole thing was shot on location in a real inn, a real but marvellously derelict chateau, a real disused ice-factory (there’s nothing spookier than an abandoned factory, unless it’s an abandoned hospital or mental asylum) and a fully-operational plaster works for the grand finale.

The chateau looks truly magnificent in the film. I especially love the room randomly discovered by Allan in his wanderings (it’s not in the chateau, I think) which contains the old dusty books, the skull and what looks like a child’s skeleton standing intact upon a window-sill. If that’s not a room where you can practise your black magic or study the occult and the dark arts, then I don’t know what is. The whole film is stunning to look at. Catch it if you can at all, that’s my advice to you.

‘Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because WE have changed and the objects ARE as we conceive them. That is the effect I want to get in my film.’

Carl Theodor Dreyer on describing to his crew the kind of film he wanted to make.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

You can contact Sandra at:

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FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN. (1943) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Frankenstein-Meets-the-Wolf-Man_01

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN. (1943) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY. DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES. DIRECTED BY ROY WILLIAM NEILL. WRITTEN BY CURT SIODMAK.

STARRING LON CHANEY, BELA LUGOSI, LIONEL ATWILL, DENNIS HOEY, MARIA OUSPENSKAYA, REX EVANS, DWIGHT FRYE, ILONA MASSEY AND PATRIC KNOWLES.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

“Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.”

This sounds like another hilarious horror movie monster crossover but it’s actually very dark, with the very real anguish of Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman running the whole way through it, like the line of writing down the middle of a stick of seaside rock. He’s never played the Wolfman as a comedic character, but rather as a terrible curse forced upon him by the bite of a werewolf.

It happens on the moors one night while Lon Chaney Jr.’s human character, rich boy Lawrence Talbot, is back staying in his ancestral home with his father, played by Claude Rains, after an absence of some years. He’s a tragic character from the start, unable to live with this fiendish curse that causes him to turn into a wolf and kill people every time there’s a full moon. Howwwwwwwwwwwl…!

The film opens very atmospherically in a dark windswept graveyard by night in the little Welsh village of Llanwelly. A couple of grave-robbers are breaking into the tomb of Lawrence Talbot, who’s been dead for four years now, hoping to pinch any jewels or money that might have been buried with him.

Lawrence Talbot isn’t really dead however, and is thrilled of the opportunity to abscond from his crypt as his alter-ego the Wolfman. He ends up injured on a Cardiff street without any knowledge of how he got there.

He’s immediately deposited in the local hospital, where he gives Dr. Mannering and local copper Inspector Owen a cock-and-bull story about turning into a wolf when the moon is full. In march the orderlies with the strait-jacket for the nice crazy man…

Inspector Owen is played by Dennis Hoey, who brings the exact same detective’s outfit and brusque bedside manner to Inspector Owen as he does to Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies (1939-1945).

He doesn’t believe Larry’s mad story for a minute but, when Larry escapes from the hospital to go in search of the gypsy woman Maleva, whom he thinks can help to lift the curse from him, both he and Dr. Mannering are forced to take Larry’s wild claims seriously.

When Maleva tells a distraught Larry that she can’t take the curse away from him, Larry decides that, in that case, he wants to just die instead and have the whole thing over and done with. The two of them travel together to the little village of Vasaria somewhere in Europe in search of Dr. Frankenstein, whom Maleva has heard is a brilliant doctor who can cure the ailments other doctors can’t.

But Dr. Frankenstein is dead, and so is his creature, the Monster who wreaked such havoc in the town and caused such distress and horror to the townspeople. Would he have left a diary by any chance, some written records that might have the secret of life and death in them? Maybe the Baroness Elsa, the late Dr. Frankenstein’s attractive grown-up daughter, will know if such records exist and, if so, where to find them?

Elsa is only too happy to assist the handsome and tortured (a winning combination with the broads, lol) Larry Talbot, who by the way has come across an astounding discovery in the ruins of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle in the form of… well, I can’t tell you that, lol, but maybe you can guess?

Can Larry and Dr. Mannering- who’s caught up with them by now- recreate the conditions under which the original Dr. Frankenstein created life from the body parts of corpses and, if they can do that, can they reverse the process to end poor Larry’s tormented existence?

Oh, and, while they’re at it, can they manage to rid Vasaria of the mad Dr. Frankenstein’s evil creation once and for all? They can if the power of being able to play God doesn’t go right to Dr. Mannering’s head…

Dwight Frye is on the ‘right’ side of the law for once here, as a mouthy villager with a sharp haircut who calls for the destruction of Castle Frankenstein and all its warped inhabitants. Screen villain Lionel Atwill in a twirly moustache plays the Mayor of Vasaria and Bela Lugosi is brilliant- if voiceless- as Frankenstein’s Monster. Frankie’s head is flatter than ever, God bless his little electrodes…!

Check out the fabulous bling on the Baroness Elsa too, the pearls and the furs which I’m prepared to bet my bottom dollar are all real. This rather stunning Hungarian actress looks like a Viking Queen in her long blonde bedtime plaits. She really brings a touch of cool blonde glamour to the proceedings in Vasaria.

She’s clearly attracted to Larry but she’d be better off setting her sights elsewhere, like on Dr. Mannering, for instance. Larry is doomed, there’s no point at all in her hitching her wagon to his star. It’s a dead horse, a non-runner, a foregone conclusion. Dr. Mannering is smitten by the Baroness. If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, that’s what I say.

The showdown between the Monster and the Wolfman doesn’t take up too much time but it’s massively endearing. I love them both so much I don’t want them to hurt each other but they don’t really.

It’s the external forces that will bring about their inevitable destruction, not a bit of petty in-house squabbling between the two monsters, lol. Who’d your money be on though, if they really did have a big pay-per-view showdown on d’telly? I’m undecided…!

It’s a visually beautiful film to look at, deliciously atmospheric and wreathed in swirling mist. There’s a very catchy song in it too, a song sung with gusto by all the villagers to celebrate the season of the new wine. Wine, in my humble opinion, is always worth celebrating. Will you join me in a rousing chorus or two? All together now: ‘Faro-la, faro-li…!’

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

You can contact Sandra at:

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. (1939) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

son of frankie

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. (1939) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY. PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY ROWLAND V. LEE. PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

STARRING BASIL RATHBONE, BELA LUGOSI, BORIS KARLOFF AND LIONEL ATWILL.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This vintage black-and-white horror film is an absolute cracker, containing four of the biggest name stars of the day, namely Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lionel Atwill.

It’s a sequel to FRANKENSTEIN and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN that sees Basil Rathbone arriving in his father’s home town of Frankenstein as his father’s son, Wolf Von Frankenstein. That’s an awful lot of FRANKENSTEINS, as I think you’ll agree.

The setting is somewhere in that sort of ambiguous ‘mitt-Europe’ favoured by Hammer Horror films as well as UNIVERSAL ones. It’s that sort of blurry Germany/Austria area that has men wearing Tyrolean hats and lederhosen while they’re dancing gaily to old folk songs from their native soil or downing the kind of massive tankards of ale that normally come with bratwurst on Oktoberfest. Well, that’s an awful lot of racial stereotyping to begin with, let’s quickly move on to the plot…!

The opening scenes are tremendously atmospheric. Wolf von Frankenstein arrives in Frankenstein by train, via London and Paris, with his attractive wife Elsa and adorable curly-headed young son Peter. It’s dark and lashing rain when they disembark from the train, facing straightaway into a sea of umbrellas owned by the waiting villagers, the welcome committee, as it were.

Except that it’s not very welcoming, lol. They’ve only come along to express their deep dissatisfaction, not to mention disgruntlement, that yet another member of the accursed Frankenstein family is moving into the village to bring more trouble down on their heads. At least, this is what they think.

If they only had the least idea of what was going to happen, they’d have run the little family of Frankensteins outta town on a rail, ‘the same way we got ridda Laura Ingalls Wilder,’ heh-heh-heh. (SIMPSONS reference there!)

Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes films with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson) is marvellous as the handome and aristocratic- and neatly moustached- Dr. Wolf Von Frankenstein, who initially has no intention in the world of following in his father’s ultimately murderous footsteps.

His father was, of course, the fantastic Colin Clive’s character in FRANKENSTEIN and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the ‘mad scientist’ who created life, ie, the Monster, out of the dead body parts of cadavers which his mad assistant Ygor dug up for him from local cemeteries. What a wholesome thought.

His triumph ended in catastrophe for the locals, however, who don’t even want to hear the word of ‘Frankenstein’ mentioned in their hearing ever again, never mind nestling and nurturing a further generation of mad Monster-creators in its collective bosom.

They don’t even like the idea that the mad scientist’s old laboratory is still there, glowering down at the town from its lofty position on the top of a mountain just across from the Frankenstein’s family domicile, the fabulous old castle. I bet they’d just as soon see it burned down in one big inferno and be done with it.

But when Bela Lugosi (DRACULA, 1931) as the still-living Ygor takes Wolf to view the still-intact but comatose remains of the Monster in the Frankenstein family crypt, Wolf can’t resist Ygor’s suggestion that he use his father’s old notes and records to… You’ve guessed it. Revive the Monster…

Of course, when he inevitably succeeds in bringing Boris Karloff’s superb Frankenstein’s Monster back to grisly life, the Monster predictably runs amok in the town, just like the cookie foretold. (Another SIMPSONS reference there, heh-heh-heh.)

He’s particularly gunning for Ygor’s enemies, the last of the eight men who sentenced Ygor to hang for his part in Colin Clive’s character’s crimes. They did hang him, in fact, but it didn’t fully take and so now Ygor feels invincible, untouchable, like he’s unkillable or something.

Certainly he can’t be sentenced to death again, as he’s already been declared legally dead by the town council, headed by the Burgomaster, without which no self-respecting town in a UNIVERSAL FRANKENSTEIN movie would be complete. No wonder Ygor feels that he can safely send Frankie out into the streets of the darkened village to kill the last two still-living members of the posse of eight that initially sentenced him to death.

Screen villain Lionel Atwill (SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON, THE VAMPIRE BAT) is brilliant as Inspector Krogh, the local copper who knows full well that there’s skullduggery afoot in Castle Frankenstein but he and Wolf have to play this elaborate game of cat-and-mouse with each other first before he can get to the real truth of the matter.

Inspector Krogh has first-hand experience of the horror of the Monster. When he was a child, presumably during the initial period when Frankie was brought to life by Colin Clive’s character, he bumped into the Monster during one of his rampages. He had his little right arm ripped out by the roots for his trouble. Now he wears a fake arm, and he’s understandably wary when he hears rumours from the worried townspeeps about the possibly monstrous goings-on up at the old castle.

Little curly-headed Peter is the one who gives the game away to Krogh when he talks about a friendly ‘giant,’ wearing a big furry jacket, who comes to visit him in his bedroom at night through a hole in the wall… Sounds well dodgy to me, does that…!

By the way, the chap who plays Peter- Donnie Dunagan- is still alive at the ripe old age of eighty-four. Furthermore, it may interest you film buffs to know that in 1942, this child star was the voice of Bambi in the famous DISNEY film that’s been tugging at heartstrings everywhere for nearly eighty years now, which is no mean feat.

THE SON OF FRANKENSTEIN is so atmospheric, and it brings out a wonderful nostalgia as well in the viewer for the original Frankie films. Basil Rathbone hams it up marvellously as the slightly manic Dr. Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi is deliciously evil as Ygor. And with those fake teeth he’s wearing, he looks like the cartoon character Muttley from the pairing of Dastardly And Muttley, remember, the doggie who was always sniggering? Aw. Such a sweet film. You’ll love it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

You can contact Sandra at:

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. (1943) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. (1943)

BASED ON A STORY BY INEZ WALLACE. DIRECTED BY JACQUES TOURNEUR. PRODUCED BY VAL LEWTON. STARRING FRANCES DEE, TOM CONWAY, JAMES ELLISON, EDITH BARRETT, CHRISTINE GORDON, JAMES BELL, THERESA HARRIS, DARBY JONES AND CALYPSO SINGER SIR LANCELOT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a strange, eerie and mysterious little classic horror film that’s positively oozing with atmosphere. It’s the story of a young attractive nurse called Betsy Connell (by whom the story is being told), who is brought from the cold and snow of a wintry Canada to the island of San Sebastian in the West Indies to take up a new job.

She is to look after the invalid wife of posh Britisher Paul Holland, who assures her on the boat over that San Sebastian is a place of misery and decay, and not at all the lovely island paradise it appears to be. What a downer! Anyone would think he was trying to put her off.

The boat on which they travel to the island is worthy of mention because it’s a proper old-fashioned sailing ship complete with the big sails and everything, just like on MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY and in all the old swashbuckling pirate movies. It makes the film seem even older and more atmospheric than it already is.

When Betsy gets to the island, she discovers first of all that it is populated by black people who were brought to the island as slaves by the Holland family. Even now, now that slavery has been abolished, they still work as servants or other employees to the Hollands.

We can infer from that, I think, that the island has been a silent witness to many years of suffering and bondage on the part of the slaves and former slaves. The history here is bound to have left its mark on the island, in the same way that pain and misery suffered within its walls can leave its mark on a bricks-and-mortar building. Can leave it haunted, even, at times, with the restless spirits who once lived there and the unhappy souls who now consider that they have unfinished business here on Earth.

Betsy is introduced to the handsome Wesley Rand, the half-brother of Paul Holland. Wesley is an American guy who was born to their mother and her second husband, while Paul was the progeny of Mrs. Rand and her first husband, who is now deceased.

Betsy, by the way, is immediately attracted to her employer, Paul Holland, even though he’s the stiff-upper-lip type, he’s married and he’s much less approachable than his boozy brother Wesley. Let’s see if her inappropriate attachment gets her anywhere, eh?

Paul and Wesley don’t like each other much. That much is clear. There’s a bad history there, some bad mojo as they say. Mrs. Rand, the boys’ mother, is a kindly doctor who tries to bring good medical practices and standards to the islanders, but this is difficult enough to achieve as the islanders are steeped in superstition and the centuries-old practice of voodoo.

Speaking of which, Betsy is shocked to discover that her patient is in fact what she terms a ‘mental case.’ The scene in which she encounters the beautiful catatonic Jessica Holland, a tall elegant blonde in a white flowing gown, wandering around silently like a ghost in the Tower is one of the two best- and spookiest- scenes in the film.

Can Jessica be cured of her trance-like state, brought on by a fever that destroyed part of her spinal cord and left her unable to speak, hear or feel? She can still walk, though, funnily enough. Mrs. Rand and Paul Holland are both adamant that she’s incurable. She’s a zombie for life, one of the living dead.

But not according to Alma, a maid in the Holland-Rand household. Alma, a native islander, tells Betsy that there are voodoo priests on the island who can cure Jessica of her terrible affliction. Betsy now loves Paul Holland so much that she wants to give his wife back to him, cured. That’s some funny kind of love, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure that I’d never be able to love that unselfishly myself.

Betsy, however, is well up for it. She’s obviously made of sterner stuff than me. She and an insensible Jessica make their way to the place known as the houmfort by night, where the voodoo priests meet and the magic happens.

The scene where they have to pass through the silent fields guarded by the zombie Carre-Four in the dead of night, with the tall grasses blowing in the breeze and the sky filled with frightening shadows, is the second of the two best and most memorable scenes in the film. Such haunting images! I know I won’t forget them.

So, does voodoo cure Mrs. Holland or has Betsy just twisted the lid off of a big old can of worms? You know perfectly well that she has, lol. But if you want to find out what happens next, you’ll have to watch this fabulous old film, which incidentally celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. It shouldn’t be any hardship. It’s a genuine old masterpiece.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

You can contact Sandra at:

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When he’s not playing his most famous role of Dracula, Bela Lugosi is at his absolute spine-tingling best when he’s playing a mad scientist or doctor who’s hell-bent on either getting revenge on the world for some real or imagined slight, or on gaining world domination just for the hell of it. Because he can, in other words, lol.

In THE DEVIL BAT, a genuine little gem from 1940, he plays Dr. Carruthers, a well-respected and well-loved scientist living in a small American village. The village’s biggest employer seems to be the Heath and Morton Cosmetics Company, for whom Dr. Carruthers also works, developing new formulae for successful perfumes, aftershave lotions and other lotions and creams that you slap on your skin so that you smell real nice like to the opposite sex.

In fact, it was Dr. Carruthers’s excellent work that’s made the Heath and Morton Cosmetics Company the multi-million-selling business it is today. Old Doc Carruthers has no shares in the company. All he got for his trouble was a lousy bonus cheque. The rage and resentment he’s been feeling against the two Heath and Morton families know no bounds.

When we meet the embittered old Doc first, he’s perfecting a sort of deadly monster killer bat who can be trained, in the same way that a dog can be trained, to murder anyone who smells of a certain scent. Like, say, aftershave? Like, say, aftershave indeed, heh-heh-heh.

He gives different male members of the two families his new patented aftershave to ‘try out,’ knowing full well that when he releases the hounds or, in this case, the killer bats, the mens’ lives aren’t worth tuppence any more. They’re toast, in other words. Dead men walking on the Green Mile, so to speak.

While the bodies pile up, an ace reporter by the name of Johnny Layton is called in to get a story for his paper about the murders. His sidekick, a photographer with the dubious nickname of ‘One Shot Maguire,’ provides the comic relief and Mary, the beautiful daughter of one of the families, the love interest for the dynamic newshound Layton.

Bela and his killer bats are the undisputed stars of the show, however. The gleeful grins on Dr. Carruthers’s face when he realises that his fiendish plans are working is just joyous to behold. Bela in general is just a sheer joy to watch.

His face definitely lends itself to an array of marvellously devious expressions. Just look at him cackling his ass off through the laboratory door at the sight of his super-bats becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. It’d warm the cockles of the coldest heart.

THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933) has pretty much everything you could possibly want in an old horror movie: a Burgomeister, a dark little village somewhere in Europe, worried townspeople, a concerned little town council, an angry mob, complete WITH torches, lol, and Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas and Dwight Frye as the stars. What else could you really ask for?

Certain selected villagers in the little hamlet of Kleinschloss (the little castle?) are being found dead in their beds of a dreadful blood loss. Drained of their precious life’s haemoglobin, all that’s left behind is a sack of skin and bones that’s truly horrible to behold.

The villagers, naturally, are up in arms about the murders and talk of vampires is rearing its ugly head no matter how superstitious and backwards it makes the villagers look. They don’t care a flying fig about how they appear, all they care about- quite rightly, too- is not being murdered in their beds by some unknown gruesome entity.

Screen villain Lionel Atwill (he plays Moriarty to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON) here portrays Dr. von Niemann, the town’s one medic and well-respected scientist who’s as baffled about the murders as anyone else. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, lol.

Screen royalty Fay Wray, whom you might be more used to seeing in her scandalous scanties being carried up the Empire State Building by a big hairy ape (KING KONG, 1933) is Dr. von Niemann’s attractive young assistant, Ruth, whose scientific knowledge you could probably write on the back of a stamp, but she shore is mighty purdy…!

Melvyn Douglas (James Whale’s THE OLD DARK HOUSE, 1932) plays Fay Wray’s boyfriend and the detective assigned to the murders. He has a logical scientific approach to the hideous blood-lettings and he thinks that all this talk of vampires is a load of superstitious old twaddle and old wives’ tales, more suited to the Dark Ages than these modern times. Will he have cause to eat his words? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets…

The star of the show here is Dwight Frye, best known for playing Renfield in the Bela Lugosi DRACULA (1931) and Dr. Frankenstein’s humpbacked servant Igor in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931). Like Bela with his mad scientists, Dwight Frye seems to have been typecast as insane loners and outcasts, but he does it so wonderfully!

Here, as Herman Gleib, the local misfit and pariah who’s not the full shilling- an Irishism for someone who’s not playing with a full deck- he cackles just like Renfield and scares the horrified locals, amongst whom he’s totally persona non grata.

His penchant for befriending bats and acting weird and secretive in general causes him to be blamed for the murders by the locals. He’s just a handy and natural scapegoat. Poor Herman, with his manic grins and his criminally bad haircut. He just can’t catch a break. There’ll be tears before bedtime. You mark my words…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

You can contact Sandra at:

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bela lugosi headshot

I love everything that the mysterious Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi ever did. If he’d advertised cat food, I would have loved those adverts as much as anything else he ever made. He and Boris Karloff, the two Lon Chaneys (father and son), Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing are the Kings, the undisputed Kings, of the horror movie genre.

Everything that Bela does, every movement he makes, every word out of his mouth, is fascinating to me. I love the way he’s nearly always playing a mad scientist or a mad doctor who’s trying to take over the world with his eye power or clawed hand power, or maybe by building a monster or some kind of unholy army of the night, and it’s up to a feisty newspaper reporter and his best gal to stop him from attaining the world domination he always seems to crave, lol.

In BLACK DRAGONS (1942), he’s a mad medic once more, a Dr. Melcher, who pulls off possibly the most amazing feat of plastic surgery since, well, since I don’t know when. He travels to Japan to turn six members of the fiendish Black Dragon Society, all Japanese, all in cahoots with the Nazis, into six upstanding American industrialists, all through the magic of plastic surgery.

The real American industrialists will, of course, be killed, leaving the six Japanese impostors to step neatly into their lives in America. It’s the most improbable scheme ever devised and no foolin.’ Dr. Melcher, meanwhile, has to remain imprisoned in Japan so that he doesn’t give the game away.

But, in America, someone is killing off the fake industrialists one-by-one. Who could it possibly be? Nobody knows their true identities, except for Dr. Melcher and the lads back in Japan who commissioned the life-swapping plastic surgeries.

Each of the murder victims is found clutching an exquisite and obviously expensive-looking Japanese dagger, so I say look for the man who owns a Japanese dagger shop or who otherwise has access to an unlimited supply of Japanese daggers somehow.

Good thing there’s a reporter on the trail, and a young lady whom he likes called Alice, whose Uncle Bill is at the centre of the murders. The film contains the most blatant sexism I’ve ever seen in a ‘Forties movie, and ‘Forties movies are already pretty damned sexist. But just wait till you hear this little lot. It’ll make your jaw drop.

The reporter wants to keep Alice safe and away from all the commotion occasioned by the murders. He says something at one point along the lines of: ‘I wish we were married, so I could beat you up and then you’d have to stay home and you’d be nice and safe.’

There’s a lot I could say to that right now that I’m not gonna say. Just keep telling yourself, ‘that’s the way it was back then, it was the style of the times, all relationships were like that back then, fuhgeddaboutit, things have changed since then…’

BLACK FRIDAY (1940) sees Boris FRANKENSTEIN Karloff performing the almost obligatory surgery as a Dr. Ernst Sovac. This time, he’s transplanting part of the brain of a criminal called Red Cannon into the brain of his friend, Professor George Kingsley, who’s been badly injured in a car accident caused by the criminal. Fair enough, I suppose, lol. And it’s very FRANKENSTEIN-y too, isn’t it?

Anyway, though, the criminal part of his friend’s brain keeps asserting itself over the nice scholarly part of the friend’s brain. It’s like when Homer Simpson from THE SIMPSONS finally gets his longed-for hair transplant, but the thick luxurious quiff of hair has come from the show’s resident criminal and petty thug, Snake, who’s just been killed in the electric chair.

Every now and then, Snake’s thuggish personality comes out in Homer, much to the alarm of Homer’s son Bart, who’s unfortunately on Snake’s to-kill list. In BLACK FRIDAY, Red Cannon’s evil brain vies for supremacy over George Kingsley’s much more moderate one.

Dr. Sovac observes these transitions back-and-forth from evil to good and back again with interest. Red Cannon apparently stashed away a half a million bucks before he died and Dr. Sovac allows greed to get the better of him.

He wants to find that money for himself and use it to further his scientific research, no matter what the consequences for poor old George Kingsley, who’s supposed to be his oldest and closest friend. For shame, Dr. Sovac, for shame…

Bela plays a criminal called Eric Marnay in this film. He’s one of Red Cannon’s gang, even though you might have expected him to play the lead role, that of the mad scientist-doctor. He often was made to play second fiddle billing-wise to Boris Karloff, with whom he doesn’t play any scenes here.

He was included in films frequently just so that the film-makers could say, hey, lookee-here, Bela Lugosi’s in this flick! Sometimes, the roles were actually quite small and didn’t reflect his status as the man who’d played the most famous role of all time, Universal Studios’ DRACULA in 1931.

Anyway, Marnay’s desperate to get his hands on Red’s cash, and when members of Red’s gang start being mysteriously bumped off one-by-one, just like the fake Japanese industrialists in BLACK DRAGONS, Marnay is initially complacent. More dosh for me, is what he’s obviously thinking. But his time will come too, and maybe sooner than he thinks…

SCARED TO DEATH (1947) is the strangest little film I’ve ever seen. It looks a great deal older than it is and it’s filmed in something called ‘natural colour,’ so it has the distinction of being Bela’s one-and-only colour film.

It’s based on a play called MURDER ON THE OPERATING TABLE by Frank Orsino, and at times the film actually looks like a play, but a kind of scrappy one where everyone keeps chiming up at the wrong time and nothing makes a lick of sense.

George Zucco, who’s played Moriarty twice in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce SHERLOCK HOLMES movies, portrays a Dr. Van Ee, whose daughter-in-law Laura has somehow died of fright and the flashbacks are going to try to explain how.

Dr. Van Ee’s son Ward has been trying to get an unwilling Laura to divorce him and Dr. Van Ee has been treating Laura for mental illness. As she’s a reluctant patient, you can see that a lot of suspicion should really attach to both Van Ees for her sudden death-by-fright. They both want her out of the picture, after all.

Bela plays a visiting cousin of Dr. Van Ee’s called Professor Leonide. Resplendant in a red-lined black cloak (just like Dracula’s!) and wide-brimmed black hat, he apparently used to be a stage magician in Europe. He’s accompanied by a little malignant dwarf called Indigo and, together, they present a source of terror for Laura, the wife of Ward Van Ee. What’s the deal with that, we wonder?

A floating green mask appears to be the main source of horror for the beleaguered Laura, however. Who’s behind these ghostly apparitions, and what does it mean for the three Van Ees, locked together in a ghastly dance of death and mutual dislike?

The plot is further complicated by the intrusion of a nasty newspaperman, desperate for a story, who is absolutely horrible to his ditzy blonde girlfriend. From what I’ve seen of these ‘Forties relationships, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the ditziness turned out to be caused by repeated blows to the head from her tyrannical newspaperman boyfriend…!

Anyway, Bela is marvellous in all three films, no matter how small or bizarre the roles he plays. I love him in anything he does. He was the best Dracula ever filmed- as well as one of the first- and he’s credited with turning Bram Stoker’s creation into the handsome, suave, sexy, domineering lust-object later perfected by Christopher Lee in the HAMMER HORROR films. Good old Bela. May he never be forgotten.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

You can contact Sandra at:

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com