60's American Horror Part Twenty-Five - (Jerry Warren Edition)

TERROR OF THE BLOOD HUNTERS

(1962)

Overall: WOOF

 

As one could suspect, writer/director/producer/editor/hack Jerry Warren's take on jungle adventure is a snore-inducing one.  Shot at Griffith Park, Los Angeles which stands in for the Devil's Island in French Guiana adequately enough, Terror of the Blood Hunters features a small handful of people trying to escape the deadly location, except that we only occasionally get the sense that it is dangerous.  Prison guards sometimes are shown tracking them down or at least talking about tracking them down, stock footaged wild animals run about, and Warren filmed some scenes of scantily clad ladies gyrating to jungle drums to convey that there is a deadly tribe of locals who also pose a threat.  The incessant library-cued musical score is even more arbitrarily used and off-putting than usual, incorrectly signifying menace when there is nothing of the sort transpiring on screen.  Warren's regular leading man Robert Clarke and the rest of the poor cast try to save face with what was hopefully a quick shooting schedule and an agreeable paycheck, but there is no style or even unintentional humor to be found here.

CURSE OF THE STONE HAND

(1965)

Dir -  Carlos Schlieper/Carlos Hugo Christensen/Jerry Warren

Overall: WOOF

 

Another slap-dash re-edit from Jerry Warren, Curse of the Stone Hand takes footage from two 1940's, non-horror Chilean films, Carlos Schlieper's La casa está vacía and Carlos Hugo Christensen's La dama de la muerte, respectfully.  Always one to give John Carradine some work, Warren shoehorns him into the newly-shot segments and then has Bruno Ve Sota narrate a plot that becomes increasingly impossible to follow.  This is understandable since taking two unrelated movies that were decades old and then adding even more unrelated stuff to them while dubbing everyone's dialog when their faces are not on the screen is bound to not hold up under a microscope.  On the plus side since Warren only shot a small percentage of the footage himself, it at least looks like a real movie as both Christensen and Schlieper were actually competent filmmakers who knew how cinematography, scenery, and mood works.  Still, it is always embarrassing when the best thing that you can say about somebody's movie is that the only acceptable parts are the ones that they had nothing to do with.

HOUSE OF BLACK DEATH
(1965)
Dir - Harold Daniels/Jerry Warren/Reginald LeBorg
Overall: MEH
 
A slapdash mess comprised of footage shot by three different directors, House of Black Death, (Blood of the Man Devil), is only a minor curiosity for Golden Era horror fans who wish to see an aged Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine playing rival Satanic cult leaders who never share any scenes together.  Harold Daniels and Reginald LeBorg in a minimal capacity initially shot the movie before producers hired Jerry Warren to throw some more talky nonsense into the proceedings, which mucks things up as much as would be expected.  Warren brought in his frequent on-screen collaborator Katherine Victor, though her role is no more prominent than any of the other forgettable faces who are merely collecting a paycheck.  While Chaney dons small devil horns underneath his robe and grins in a drunken stupor as glamour model Sabrina belly dances many times over, Carradine is largely absent or bedridden until he finally gets to spout some unholy gibberish at the end.  A guy does turn into a werewolf kind of while rolling around on the floor which is minimally hilarious, but as far as everything else that happens, it is not worth paying attention to and rendered nearly incomprehensible by the sloppy and low-budget production.

60's American Horror Part Twenty-Four

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN
(1960)
Dir - Edgar G. Ulmer
Overall: MEH
 
Shot back-to-back with Beyond the Time Barrier in less than two weeks, (allegedly), The Amazing Transparent Man is a dopey knock-off of Universal's The Invisible Man's Revenge.  Director Edgar G. Ulmer was well-versed in such quickly and cheaply made B-movies, this being one of his last theatrically-released films; a film that clocks in at under an hour, has mediocre-at-best special effects, a laughably stupid script, and wears its twenty dollar budget on its sleeve.  Most of the plot unfolds in a single household where a dopey and miscast James Griffith has three unwilling participants at his beck and call by the flimsiest means possible, pointing a gun at them, locking one of their daughters in an easily escapable room, and just lying to a guy about his son still being alive.  Griffith's plan is to develop an army of invisible soldiers for no reason that any viewer will either care about or buy into and for the most part, things unfold with people being hit on the head, locked up, and easily believing anything that anyone says.  It is more dull than unintentionally hilarious, with a cast and crew merely going through the motions to collect what must have been just a meager paycheck.

 

DESTINATION INNER SPACE

(1966)

Dir - Francis D. Lyon

Overall: MEH

Though it cannot escape the low-budget B-level tyranny of interchangeable white people standing in rooms while talking, Destination Inner Space gives its silly, amphibious extraterrestrial plenty of screen time and manages to build some character moments along the way.  Shot back-to-back with Castle of Evil over the course of two weeks, it comes off as the rushed production job that it is.  Besides some underwater shots, it takes place entirely within a small handful of sparsely decorated sets and the miniature work is some of the least convincing that you can find, basically coming off as toy submarines and flying saucers skimming the floor of a shallow beach.  The rubber suit monster looks ridiculous and there is zero attempt made to shoot it in anything remotely atmospheric, but this gives it a laughable charm since said creature is viscous enough to continuously attack our crop of forgettable character actors, some of whom fall in love and some of whom have a previous beef with each other that must get sorted out before they can all get on the same page against their predicament.  Paul Dunlap's music is typically bombastic and some idiot forgot to shut it off during the more intimate dramatic bits as it distractingly plays over even inconsequential transition scenes still at full-tilt.

 

SCARE THEIR PANTS OFF!
(1968)
Dir - John Maddox
Overall: WOOF

A Z-rent grindhouse exploitation "roughie" from one-time director John Maddox, (unless this was an alias used for someone who made several of these non-movies and did not want to be associated with more than one of them), Scare Their Pants Off! has a brainless premise of two guys kidnapping women and engaging in convoluted bad acting in front of them.  The first vignette has a guy in a medieval mask and a black cloak talking in a strained voice as he convinces a woman to have sex with him before he kills himself, the next has a guy in brown face conducting a sacrificial ritual involving wide-eyed mugging and zoom-ins on a demon statue, and the third is a Nazi-styled interrogation played for "laughs".  A failure on every front, it has a minimal amount of nudity and cuts away from any graphic sex or violence, leaving nothing but a pair of assholes awkwardly performing experimental stage plays in front of poor women who have the thespian chops of a wooden plank.  It is too pathetic and clumsy to land its intended Manhattan seediness and instead seems like something that should have been lost decades ago, but on the plus side, it is only an hour long so at least the suffering is over with quickly.

60's American Horror Part Twenty-Three

BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER
(1960)
Dir - Edgar G. Ulmer
Overall: MEH
 
Thematically different and unrecognizable production wise from its counterpart The Amazing Transparent Man, (which was shot in Dallas, Texas at the same time and within a two week period), Beyond the Time Barrier blows a promising first act that eventually settles into sluggish dialog sequences done ad nauseam.  Written by frequent sci-fi peddler Arthur C. Pierce and distributed by drive-in experts American International Pictures, whatever budget was available for both movies was clearly prioritized here, with expansive/Expressionistic/triangular sets, several extras, matte paintings, and goofy costumes to play with.  Also because B-movies, bookending stock footage of military jets is thrown in there, though the crossing of the titular "time barrier" looks as low-rent as you would imagine.  Director Edgar G. Ulmer's daughter Arianne Arden plays a lady from the future who because of a virus, is part of a mute society, (except for others in that society who are not mute, but whatever), yet the story here spins in circles when Robert Clarke's military pilot first tries to figure out where the hell he is even though the audience has already pieced it together, then spending a lot of time in denial, and then having silly makeup on his face.

 

CASTLE OF EVIL

(1966)

Dir - Francis D. Lyon

Overall: WOOF

 

An old dark house melodrama already seems dated for 1966, but all parties involved figured that they could just throw a robot version of a recently departed, physically deformed mad scientist into the mix to make the resulting Castle of Evil stand out from the mountains of other "reading of the will" horror movies that had been made at that point.  The film was shot back-to-back with the conceptually different Destination Inner Space, with the same crew and "star" Scott Brady returning in the lead, but it is a similarly problematic offering.  Once again, it seems as if somebody just hit "play" on a record of Paul Dunlap's music and let it run both continuously and randomly throughout scenes, plus the plot affords for little else than bland actors delivering a series of redundant monologues.  Everyone stays in a house because dead guy's money, no one trusts the housekeeper until she also turns up dead, and people repeatedly check to make sure that characters are dead, only for them to disappear from the room that they died in.  The android monster's make-up is fun, but this is otherwise a hopelessly dully and poorly executed rush job.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

(1968)
Dir - Charles Jarrott
Overall: MEH

Hardly necessary yet professionally done, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the first of several tradition horror adaptations from producer Dan Curtis for ABC.  Filmed in Toronto, Canada, the project was originally set to be shot in England with a script by none other than Rod Serling and Jason Robards in the lead.  Such a proposed production fell through and Jack Palance came on board, who would also play the title monster in Curtis' Dracula interpretation six years later.  Here, Palance is his usual intense, smirking self, handing the duel role as well as should be expected by capturing Jekyll's initial scientific determination as well as Hyde's increasingly ruthless hedonism.  Denholm Elliott and Billie Whitelaw get some adequate scenery-chewing as well, but the presentation belongs to a towering Palance and his garish Hyde make-up, as well as the impressive period set design which brings the late 19th century London to the small screen on a hefty sound stage.  Director Charles Jarrot can only do so much with the SOV aesthetic though and Ian McLellan Hunter does not offer up a fresh angle to tackle material that had already been cinematically done nearly two dozen times, plus the two hour length fails to clip along as steadily as one would hope.

60's American Horror Part Twenty-Two

BLOODLUST!

(1961)
Dir - Ralph Brooke
Overall: MEH

Over a dozen screen adaptations of Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game" had been produced by the time that the lackluster indie drive-in cheapie Bloodlust! was made.  Shot in 1959 though not released until two years later, this would be the only directorial effort from actor Ralph Brooke and he does a merely competent job of pointing the camera at his actors until they finish saying all of their lines.  Wilton Graff turns in a by-numbers performance as the deranged, human-hunting eccentric who has set up shop on an island, remaining calm with his silky robe, waxing poetically about the glory of the kill, and eventually getting a grisly comeuppance via impaling.  Otherwise though, the only other character who stands out is a guy with glasses on since this has the usual crop of bland Causation actors delivering B-level performances in a film that calls for nothing more.  One can be generous and merely label this "pointless" since the material itself was already so over-done and the production design is likewise interchangeable with earlier versions, but the results are more likely to lull you to sleep than engage you with a white-knuckled tale of man vs man.

SATAN'S BED
(1965)
Dir - Michael Findlay/Marshall Smith/Tamijian
Overall: WOOF

An inane, D-rent exploitation "film" that is only of interest for featuring a pre-John Lennon-wed Yoko Ono, Satan's Bed is one of many such junk heaps from the husband/wife duo of Michael and Roberta Findlay.  It also splices together a presumed unreleased movie called Judas City from someone named Tamijian and good luck trying to gather any information online as to whoever that is.  Basically a, (very), poor man's French New Wave knock-off shot with handheld cameras and zero dollars, it can be described as a precursor to the rape and revenge genre except that it forgets to put in the "revenge" part.  Instead, we just have several women getting brutalized by criminals, including Yoko Ono who barely says anything but at least manages to keep her clothes on.  Technically there is a plot, but the bulk of the dialog was ADRed over the existing footage to desperately try and cobble the Ono rape sequences in with the other rape sequences featuring a gang that is presumably led by a woman.  The whole thing does not so much as end as it does just run out of scenes and it is sadly less weird and a whole lot more terrible than one would hope for.

 

WAIT UNTIL DARK

(1967)

Dir - Terence Young

Overall: GOOD

 

Terence Young's tightly-wound adaptation of Frederick Knott's novel Wait Until Dark is a convoluted crime thriller with some top-notch performances from all involved.  Though Richard Crenna and Jack Weston get adequate screen time as a pair of con-men who get unexpectedly caught up in Alan Arkin's elaborate scheme to retrieve some drugs that are hidden inside of a doll, it is Arkin who steels the show as a slimy villain that dons a few disguises yet remains unsettling and sinister as he pulls the strings on all parties involved.  Audrey Hepburn is ideally cast as the hapless victim, an efficient though recently-inflicted blind woman whose due-diligence to survive ultimately usurps the morally corrupt criminals that are giving her one helluva crappy day.  Besides a brief prologue and one or two shots outside, the entire film takes place in a basement apartment, giving it a claustrophobic feel that intensifies by the extended life-or-death finale full of grave threats, gasoline, knife-stabs, and faulty electricity.  Young's suspense-building chops may not be as showy as Alfred Hitchcock's who such a project easily could have also been brought to the screen by, but he still maintains a taut grip over the material that never looses its footing with the increasing amount of details being thrown in.

60's American Horror Part Twenty-One

EEGAH
(1962)
Dir - Arch Hall Sr.
Overall: WOOF

Truly deserving its place in the annals of wretched celluloid, Eegah, (Eegah!, Eegah: The Name Written in Blood), is a bafflingly inept Z-grade bit of lunacy that can only be seen to be believed for the rarest of bad movie fans with the will power to sustain it.  Part vanity project, part nepotism hack-job, part zero effort/drive-in cash-grab, this would mercifully be the only directorial work from actor-turned producer Arch Hall Sr, who designed it as a starring vehicle for his embarrassingly untalented son Arch Hall Jr..  The story is too asinine to mention, but it is loaded with nonsensical editing, ADRed dialog that does not come within light years of any of the actor's mouth movements, aggressively bad cinematography, musical numbers that will make you hate all music, a head-scratching scene where Richard Kiel's title caveman laps up shaving cream, and all of the comatose-inducing pacing that clueless filmmaking has to offer.  To be fair, there are a handful of "What the hell am I watching?" nonsense to warrant this as a curiosity for the cinephile who is also a glutton for punishment, but it is also unacceptable trash that will never give you such an unforgiving ninety-two minutes of your life back.

 

THE POWER

(1968)

Dir - Byron Haskin

Overall: MEH

The final directorial effort from Byron Haskin, The Power takes a tension-mounting approach to its psychological sci-fi ideas, yet it fails as a mystery due to the fact that said mystery never becomes engaging.  An adaptation of Frank M. Robinson's 1956 novel of the same name that adheres to the basic plot while changing most of the character's names and several inconsequential details, it fits snugly in with other "man on the run" thrillers and the preposterously-tanned George Hamilton, (though stiff at times), still has enough movie star charisma to be such a running man.  For genre fans, Michael Rennie, Richard Carlson, and Yvonne De Carlo are the most recognizable bit players here, but the only thing of interest are some flashy hallucination sequences that give it a quasi-psychedelic and therefor dated charm.  Unfortunately, these moments are scattered throughout a pedestrian series of events as Hamilton tries to uncover whoever "the Power" is, meaning someone with telekinetic abilities who is able to hide their identity until the very last moments.  The twist on top of a twist is predictable for anyone that is paying attention, but the film is colorful and flashy enough in fits and starts to have some merit.

 

THE MAD ROOM

(1969)
Dir - Bernard Girard
Overall: MEH

An adaptation of the play Ladies in Retirement, (which had also been cinematically made in 1941 under the same title), The Mad Room is significant for kick-starting a run of horror thrillers to star Shelley Winters, though this does not specifically qualify as one of the actor's psycho-biddy offerings.  Instead, it concerns a set of siblings who have spent the better part of their later childhood in a mental institution after being accused of murdering their parents, even if the specific culprit between the two has never been discovered.  Enter Stella Stevens as the older sister to both of them who takes on the legal guardian role once the children have reached their late teens.  Simultaneously melodramatic and dull, the contemporary reworking of the material manages to shoehorn in a mild interracial romance and an African American doctor to break up the exclusively Caucasian cast, but the story itself meanders with little agency.  While the murder that kicks in the final act is both abrupt and the first exciting thing to happen, the later twist and closing set piece is far from riveting and delivered with more of a "Sure, I guess we'll just go with that" type of energy.  Also, they kill a dog so fuck this movie.

60's American Horror Part Twenty - (David L. Hewitt edition)

THE WIZARD OF MARS

(1965)

Overall: MEH

 

The same year that he made the doofy comedy horror short Monster Crash the Pajama Party, director David L. Hewitt also delivered his full-length debut The Wizard of Mars, (Horror of the Red Planet, Alien Massacre).  Ed Wood Jr.-worthy production values are front in center, which provide some unintended hysterics when the plot is not hopelessly stuck in the muck.  The small handful of non-charasmatic characters spend untold minutes of screen time walking around the barren planet of the title, (actually the Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, Nevada and the surrounding desert), staring at embarrassing special effects with no face shields on their helmets because those things cost money.  As the title would suggest, it is supposed to be narratively stylized after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but besides a half-second mention of a golden path and the lone female character being named Dorothy and having three astronaut companions with her, any similarities between this and L. Frank Baum's famed source novel are non-existent.  There are occasional shots where Hewitt manages to make the setting look otherworldly and the last twenty-odd minutes features a model sand castle, a weird whispering alien thing, and John Carradine delivering expository dialog as a disembodied head.

 

DR. TERROR'S GALLERY OF HORRORS
(1967)
Overall: WOOF

A D-rent anthology offering from hack director David L. Hewitt, Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors, (Return from the Past, The Blood Suckers, Alien Massacre, Gallery of Horror, Gallery of Horrors, The Witch's Clock), is mostly famous for Amicus Productions going after it to change its title, the participation of both John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr., and for recycling footage from Roger Corman's seminal Edgar Allan Poe films.  Though it has the same structure as other omnibus cinematic collections, (Carradine is the Crypt Keeper host, introducing several segments that all share macabre themes), it has the wretched distinction of looking as if it was made for pocket change.  Every vignette takes place almost entirely on a single sound stage with different decor, giving it a high school play vibe except with worse screenwriting.  Allegedly based off of Creepy stories from Russ Jones, only the most lazy and cliched of ingredients come through with a tale about a condemned witch, a vampire, a dead guy back for revenge, a modern day Frankenstein, and then another vampire with the most brisk and pathetic Dracula reworking ever filmed, (saying something).  The conclusion of each entry is more embarrassing than the last and Carradine's long-winded introductions only make one feel bad for the fact that he needed the money this badly.

 

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME

(1967)

Overall: MEH

A redundant remake to the 1964 film The Time Travelers that also inspired the 1966 television series The Time Tunnel, Journey to the Center of Time, (Time Warp), finds writer/director/producer David L. Hewitt calling all of the shots, having previously only been credited with the story concept along with Ib Melchior on The Time Travelers film.  Why anyone thought that it was necessary to green-lit a forgettable B-movie redo a mere three years after the fact, (and one year after the TV show version), is a question best left unanswered, but why they also did so in an even more cheap and lame manner is that much more confusing.  Granted, Hewitt changes some of the specifics to the plot of three male scientists and a female one getting stranded in the future due to their well-intended space-time continuum experiments, sending them into the past as well so that they can encounter volcanic stock footage and stop-motion dinosaur animation from One Million B.C..  Some of the sets are fun in their tackiness, (that is when they do not rely on mere black backgrounds to save money), plus the future human encounter has all of the actors in ridiculous costumes while bathed in blue light.

THE MIGHTY GORGA

(1969)

Overall: WOOF

Seven years before Dino De Laurentiis produced a King Kong remake that nobody liked, D-rent genre director David L. Hewitt took an unofficial crack at it with The Mighty Gorga; an enormously bigger embarrassment that has gone down in the annals of horrendous, no budget hack-jobs.  The plot line devised by and unfortunately credited to Hewitt, Jean Hewitt, and producer Robert Vincent O'Neill follows the RKO classic close enough to be an Italian mockbuster, with boring white people venturing into the jungle in order to capture the giant and elusive ape that is worshiped by the locals, (who are just other white people in brown face).  This is all because a circus is close to going out of business, so the Mighty Kong Gorga would be an ideal attraction if only the production had the means to get it back to the main land.  Instead, we spend almost the entire movie in its African landscape, (which was probably just somebody's backyard in California), and boy is this a poster boy for the worst "special effects" in cinema history.  The title primate was allegedly played by Hewitt himself in a cheap monkey costume and in one hilariously Z-grade scene, he battles a rubber dinosaur hand puppet to the death.  Besides a couple of moments of such abysmally-realized mayhem, the film is predominantly just made up of our personality-vacant characters running around and talking to each other.

60's American Horror Part Nineteen

THE TIME MACHINE

(1960)

Dir - George Pal
Overall: GOOD

MGM's big budget adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine boasts an impressive and memorable production design that forgives some of its plot inconsistencies and a dopey romance that seems shoehorned in for mere commercial pandering.  Stop-motion animator George Pal was an ideal choice to bring the source material to life, staging some wonderful sequences where the decades fly by as Rod Taylor sits in the title contraption's seat and watches the world morph beyond recognizability.  These moments, grandiose matte paintings, a lavish set design, an oatmeal lava destruction scene, and the freakish look of the mutated Morlocks make up a plethora of eye candy that are as iconic as any from the best of the era's science fiction movies.  Taylor, (in his first top-billed role), makes for a dashing, Hollywood-tailored inventor who becomes hellbent on teaching mankind's distant descendants from tens of thousands of centuries in the future how to regain their humanity, but there is not much for the rest of the cast to do besides looking bewildered in front of him.  Overlong in some places and hardly scientifically accurate for a 19th century man to be able to breathe, eat, and communicate in English with people so ridiculously far ahead in the future, it keeps up a solid pace and manages to convey the class system themes of Wells' initial novel along with all of the visual pizazz.

THE DEVIL'S HAND

(1961)

Dir - William J. Hole Jr.

Overall: MEH

 

Batman fans may get a kick out of watching Commissioner Gordon Neil Hamilton run an evil devil god cult in The Devil's Hand, (Witchcraft, The Naked Goddess, Devil's Doll, Live to Love), but this dud is otherwise instantly forgettable.  Shot in both Los Angeles and Mexico with an international cast, it concerns an underwritten Robert Alda who becomes spellbound by the glamorous Linda Christian and her wicked cohorts who put on robes, utilize voodoo dolls, make grandiose speeches about rejecting goodness, and sacrifice their members with a bunch of knives hung from a wheel.  The story becomes increasingly lazy as it goes on, with Alda bouncing between being hopelessly sucked into his new Satanic friends and playing a long-winded con on them at the same time, giving the plot an aura of convenience over logic.  Director William J. Hole Jr. never comes up with anything clever to do with Joyce Heims' lackluster screenplay, allowing the pacing to regularly stall and for everyone to play things too serious to invite any much-needed camp appeal into the proceedings.  Monotonously structured and asleep at the wheel, it misses whatever diabolical goal it was aiming for.

THE GHASTLY ONES
(1968)
Dir - Andy Milligan
Overall: WOOF
 
The first color movie The Ghastly Ones, (Blood Rites), from Andy Milligan is typical of the director's uniformly terrible work.  Shot on faulty 16 mm film, featuring piss-pour actors with zero charisma, laughably crude gore effects with animal entrails, a nonsensical story, abysmal cinematography, non-stop stock music playing in every scene, and poorly recorded dialog that is embarrassing to begin with, it is all here to bore the living shit out of trash movie buffs.  Milligan deservedly belongs in the conversation of the worst filmmakers who ever lived, having churned out a couple dozen Z-rent regional exploitation movies until his untimely death in 1991, but only the most forgiving of viewers can tolerate the wretched results of even his "best" movies.  This one was remade by Milligan himself in 1978 as Legacy of Blood, pointlessly so as it was just as unwatchable and suffered identical setbacks.  On the one hand, you can feel sorry for a guy like Milligan in that he was never granted anything close to a reasonable budget to work with, yet judging by the results of what he was able to pull-off within perpetually limited means, why would anyone take a chance on giving this guy any more dimes to see if he could do any better?

60's Herschell Gordon Lewis Part Two

BLOOD FEAST

(1963)

Overall: MEH

 

While not his first film, Blood Feast marks ground zero for Herschell Gordon Lewis' legacy as a splatter pioneer.  The former teacher-turned-no-budget-filmmaker had already made a good handful of exploitative nudie flicks, but like many lesser talented people have, he took inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and wondered what it would be like if the murders did not shy away from excessive gore.  This is as fine of a jumping-off point as any and considering that the 1960s were a transgressive decade that marked a turning point for various artistic mediums, somebody had to come along and up the crimson blood splatter and tastelessness in order to push cinema further away from its more censored form.  This is all that a movie like Blood Feast deserves, which in every technical aspect is a moronic and dull bit of celluloid that resembles countless other Z-grade cheapies from its era.  Still, there is a tacky sleaze-ball charm to all of the dreadful cinematography, acting, set design, music, and the story itself which features an eccentric caterer who is obsessed with murder and cannibalism in the name of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.

 

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!

(1964)

Overall: MEH

 

Easily the least egregious entry in Herschell Gordon Lewis' wretched filmography, Two Thousand Maniacs! boasts a larger enough budget to afford some semblance of professionalism, be it of the low-grade drive-in variety of course.  An early example of hicksploitation that sensationalizes redneck stereotypes, the fear of backwoods communities, and the cultural divide that still exists somewhat between the North and the South even a century after the end of the Civil War, it has a bizarre and darkly comedic tone.  Incessant and boisterous cackling on the part of the hillbilly bumpkin characters grows insufferably annoying, but it is also in place to exaggerate what is a nightmarish story on paper; namely a disturbing centennial celebration where the South rises up for revenge and lays on the charm while manipulating some Yankees who cross their paths.  The set pieces are nasty enough to appease gore fans and Lewis makes sure to show some severed limbs and unrealistic bloodshed whenever appropriate.  The movie is still too amateurish to be properly unsettling, but the balancing of goofiness, sleaze, and sadism occasionally works to its advantage and this would spearhead a slew of similar exploitation films over the decades, for better and worse.

THE GRUESOME TWOSOME

(1967)

Overall: WOOF

A rambling, amateur-hour piece of shit, The Gruesome Twosome finds craptacular filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis in his usual form.  As unwatchably nonsensical and boring as it is, credit must be given to the opening scene which finds two crude dummy heads engaging in mindless, southern-accented chit-chat with each other, before one of them gets stabbed and starts oozing blood.  Whether this intro was meant to set a comedic tone or was just the result of Lewis' cinematic ineptitude, (or drug use?), is inconsequential since the rest of the movie needs to be avoided at all costs.  It concerns an old lady and her dim-witted son who run a wig shop that specializes in human hair.  One can guess what that means and yes, women get murdered by the mommy/son duo in order to get scalped, but moments of such nasty bloodshed are alarmingly sparse.  Do not worry though, Lewis makes sure to pad out the run time with college girls in their underwear making endless small talk, a couple of boys also talking, various other characters talking, and a few excruciating musical numbers just to make sure that the whole thing reaches an acceptable full-length running time.  Easily the worst movie with a horror angle in Lewis' heyday unless one counts Monster a Go-Go, (which nobody should ever count), this is just garbage, pure and simple.

60's Hammer Horror Part Eight

THE FULL TREATMENT

(1960)

Dir - Val Guest

Overall: MEH

 

One of the more talky psychological thrillers in Hammer's cannon, The Full Treatment, (Stop Me Before I Kill!, The Treatment), was a passion project for one of the studio's busiest directors Val Guest.  After purchasing the film rights to Ronald Scott Thorn's novel of the same name, Guest produced and co-wrote the screenplay with the author and maybe because of this, it is loaded with busy dialog involving Ronald Lewis' troubled race car driver who suffers bouts of severe mood swings and violence towards his wife after both were involved in an automobile crash.  While the cast turns in fittingly melodramatic performances and Guest utilizes some Hitchcockian style from behind the lens, the plot is monotonous and mostly revolves around waiting for Lewis to act like an asshole out of nowhere, which he does.  This is intentional to showcase the frustration suffered by he and the characters around him, but the very concept of a pushy psychiatrist using such aggressive methods to crack his patient's mental affliction are more annoying than compelling.

 

MANIAC

(1963)

Dir - Michael Carreras

Overall: MEH

 

A bit of film noir by way of psychological thriller, Maniac, (The Maniac), was also one of several such Hammer movies to be scripted and produced by Jimmy Sangster at the time, who was briefly stepping away from the studio's Gothic horror vehicles.  Set and particularly filmed in the South of France, it concerns a dupe played by Kerwin Mathews who has an affair with a married woman while also falling for her adopted adult daughter, getting played by the former in a convoluted ploy involving her husband who was committed to an asylum after murdering his daughter's rapist with a blowtorch.  The wacky details sound more interesting on paper than they come across on screen unfortunately, with Hammer founder James Carreras' son, (producer-turned-director Michael Carreras), failing to keep up the momentum throughout the sluggish first half.  Manipulative plot points eventually start kicking into gear, but it is too easy to tune out before that happens and there is not enough gusto to the presentation or the performances to elevate it.

THE NANNY

(1965)

Dir - Seth Holt

Overall: MEH

Hammer's psycho-biddy entry The Nanny features a wonderfully low-key performance from Bette Davis, but its focus on a completely unlikable family makes it a tiring watch.  Oddly enough, mainstay screenwriter Jimmy Sangster allegedly wanted Greer Garson in the title role and had to settle for Davis who was still hot off of her Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? success.  Though she is not ranting and raving to her heart's content, Davis is still ideally suited as a traumatized woman who takes a curiously passive stance amongst the dysfunctional behavior of her employers.  Young William Dix has the thankless responsibility of playing a mercilessly obnoxious brat, while James Villiers is his ice cold father and Wendy Craig his enabling, bed-ridden mother.  Sangster's script does gradually shift where the audience's sympathies lie so that we feel more sorry for everyone as opposed to hating them, but the structure is clearly leading to a twist from the onset so it never ends up anywhere surprising.  In other words, the kid that Dix plays cannot be THAT awful can he?  Still, director Seth Hold handles everything with a sturdy hand and does not let the pace lull once everything settles into a routine second act.

60's Spanish Horror Part Three

FACE OF TERROR
(1962)
Dir - Isidoro M. Ferry/William J. Hole Jr.
Overall: MEH

A Spanish, "plastic surgery gone amok" horror film done on the cheap, Face of Terror, (La cara del terror), is unique among such movies in that the crop of not-American actors largely dub their own dialog with accents in tow, but it is otherwise a derivative and sluggish bore.  TV director William J. Hole Jr. added some extra scenes for the US release depending on which version you come across, but either one boasts the same lackluster results.  It plays the trope that all women with mental illness must be raving lunatics, but the annoyance of Lisa Gaye's antagonist over people gawking at her or trying to send her back to a crazy house comes off as reasonable.  That is because her extreme level of depression stems from her face being deformed, something which would make anyone unhappy to say the least.  The film detours with musical numbers, police trying to track Gaye down, and the attempts of Fernando Rey's doctor to recover from Gaye's earlier attack on him after he "cures" her unfortunate facial features.  It makes for a boring and talky watch that only mildly springs to life with clumsy set pieces, plus the cinematography is barely competent and the finale is clearly broadcast from the onset.

 

STRANGE VOYAGE

(1964)
Dir - Fernando Fernán Gómez
Overall: MEH

Splashing together some old dark house and hagsploitation motifs under what is primarily a lighthearted black comedy, Strange Voyage, (El extraño viaje), comes from director Fernando Fernán Gómez, who was a beloved Spanish renaissance man in various fields throughout his career.  While the story meanders with several side characters and never lands anywhere interesting, it does provide a melodramatic look into unassuming Spanish life during an era that was undergoing cultural change.  Most of the film focuses on the generational differences emerging during Francoist Spain, where the older townspeople are depicted as suspicious curmudgeons and the younger adults try to find their way out of their small, judgemental village while dancing and falling in love.  It also just so happens to throw in an accidental murder where an old spinster gets bludgeoned by her dim-witted siblings, one of whom is portrayed with schlubby charm by the world's lousiest/most prolific filmmaker Jess Franco.  We eventually get a convoluted explanation that ties some otherwise unrelated arcs together, but the road to get there is poorly paced and lacking in any convincing humor.  It is a shame though that Gómez never embarked on anything in the horror genre proper, since he stages some early scenes in a spacious house at night with suspenseful and spooky confidence.

 

THE MARK OF THE WOLFMAN
(1968)
Dir - Enrique López Eguiluz
Overall: GOOD

While the debut of Paul Nashcy's Waldemar Daninsky's character has some of the usual drawbacks for Euro-horror of the era, (namely sluggish pacing, laughable dubbing, and a hare-brained script), The Mark of the Wolfman is benefited by stylish visuals and of course Nashy's ferocious performance.  This was the actor's first starring role, which he allegedly debating in offering to a far past his prime Lon Chaney Jr before Naschy somewhat reluctantly took it on himself.  Considering that this launched his career as the Spanish Wolfman and easily the country's most stubborn-in-a-good-way proponent of throwback horror cinema, it is crazy to see anyone else in the part.  Director Enrique López Eguiluz helps to create a colorful, Bava-esque tone with vibrant lighting, Gothic locations, fog, and occasionally eerie music which accompanies the transformation scenes wonderfully.  Of course no European genre film would be complete without having been released under a plethora of alternate titles and this one is near the top of such a list with La Marca del Hombre Lobo, Hell Creature, Les Fantomes de Dracula en de Weerwolf, Le Notti di Satana, Hexen des Grauens, Die Vampire des Dr. Dracula, and of course the most misleading, Americanized title of all time in Frankenstein's Bloody Terror.

60's Spanish Horror Part Two

HYPNOSIS

(1962)

Dir - Eugenio Martín

Overall: MEH

 

An early effort from director Eugenio Martín, Hypnosis, (Ipnosi, Nur Tote Zeugen Schweigen, Dummy of Death), is a European co-production between West German, Spain, Italy, and France that adheres to the formulaic trappings of Edgar Wallace krimi films.  Though a ventriloquist dummy is introduced in the opening scene and is even more garishly unsettling looking than most, this proves to be a misleading motif as the story instead concerns Jean Sorel trying to cover his tracks while making things much worse after a hypnotist is murdered in his dressing room.  The plotting is cumbersome and mostly hinders around Heinz Drache's police inspector interviewing and tailing to the same woman several times, all in an attempt to catch up to the suspect who doubles as someone that the audience knows is innocent.  This is because we are aware of who the murder is from the get go, rendering this as a police procedural without a mystery.  Martín hardly has the production backing to make anything stylistically noteworthy, but ghostly wailings of a dummy's cackle are inherently creepy and though we are fully aware that no otherworldly or even psychological trick is being played on us, there are still a few shadowy and suspensefully curious moments to break up the monotony.

FATA MORGANA

(1965)

Dir - Vicente Aranda

Overall: MEH

An incoherent art film with a murder mystery disguised underneath it, Fata Morgana, (Left-Handed Fate), was the second effort from Spanish director Vincente Aranda.  Model-turned-actor Teresa Gimpera runs around a deserted Barcelona as everyone that she meets becomes different levels of infatuated with her, all while her death seems to be preordained and a police detective, (who is the only frustrated one in the movie), tries to find her before it is too late.  Or something along those lines.  Antonio Pérez Olea's up-temp jazz score occasionally breaks the long moments of silence, a woman kills two guys with a fish knife, one character keeps taking off disguises, sometimes people talk directly into the camera, hoodlums cut out and steal a billboard with Gimpera's photo on it, and the whole film has meta references to further confuse things.  Our main heroine all but disappears for the final act as we switch to the detective before things end in a frustratingly abrupt manner, which all things considered, is in keeping with the nebulous giallo by way of Alain Robbe-Grillet/Jean-Luc Godard approach that Aranda takes here.

 

MACABRE

(1969)

Dir - Javier Setó

Overall: WOOF

The penultimate film Macabre, (Shadow of Death, Viaje al vacío), from Spanish director Javier Setó is unfortunately a lifeless, giallo-adjacent snooze-fest.  A co-production between Spain and Italy as many identically structured cheapies were, familiar genre faces Larry Ward, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, and Teresa Gimpera are all present, with Ward playing a set of identical twin brothers convincingly enough.  The ole "let's kill him by making him go crazy and take all of his money" scheme is utilized here, as well as a blackmail one involving Stuart who takes on the appearance of a typical, black trench coat and gloves giallo killer even if he does not play one.  Setó's presentation of the already stock material is lifeless, with hardly any murders taking place and any sleazy elements left alone.  Granted, the plot line revolves around a woman's infidelity with her husband's brother which is seedy enough on paper, but with hardly any set pieces besides Ward boringly getting treated for epileptic seizures, a woman getting killed so boringly that you hardly notice, and then Stuart getting thrown off out of a train, (also boringly), there is nothing here to captivate trash enthusiasts who expect a lot more, (or for that matter ANY), silliness, Euro-style, or camped-up melodrama.

60's Spanish Horror Part One

PYRO...THE THING WITHOUT A FACE

(1964)
Dir - Julio Coll
Overall: MEH

The extramarital thriller Pyro...the Thing Without a Face, (Fuego, Wheel of Fire), was one of a handful of tacky B-movies from producer Sydney W. Pink, several of which were shot in Spain.  This one is no different in that regard, though the two top-billed actors were Americans Barry Sullivan and Martha Hyler.  The first half is an insufferable bore, revolving around Sullivan's guilt over his on-going affair with Hyler.  This is because none of the characters are interesting or sympathetic and they prattle on with each other to such a degree that viewers will long check out before anything promised in the movie's title takes place.  Eventually, the revenge plot takes over, first with Hyler torching her lover's home after he dumps her and then with Sullivan's now burned-up frame getting back at her. Julio Coll's direction is meandering and dull, but Pink's script deserves the brunt of the blame as it fails to properly exploit the plight of its adulteress pyromaniac or its architect-turned-ferris-wheel-repair-man, (?!?).  How three different women become hopelessly in love with Sullivan's moody character is both ridiculous and insulting, but at least the couple of seconds that we get of his melted, fleshy burn make-up at the very end looks nice and ghastly.

LA LLAMADA
(1965)
Dir - Javier Setó
Overall: GOOD

An obscure, supernatural romance that ends up growing increasingly chilling as things progress, La Llamada, (The Sweet Sound of Death), benefits from its minimalist production.  The script by John Davis Hart, Paulino Rodrigo Díaz, and director Javier Setó takes some liberties as far as logic is concerned in order to keep the plot moving, but it also fuses familiar motifs with genuine surprises.  A Spanish answer to Herk Harvey's American independent masterpiece Carnival of Souls, it covers some of the same ground of people questioning their existence from beyond the grave and it even borrows said film's gag of dropping out all of the noise on the soundtrack for a particular scene.  Though it is set in contemporary times, (possibly for budgetary reasons), Setó still manages to make atmospheric use out of cemeteries and a crumbling mansion which recall some of the period Gothic aesthetic that European horror was already indulging in by the mid 1960s.  The movie still cannot avoid some pacing lulls as Emilio Gutiérrez Caba and scream queen Dyanik Zurakowska's destined lovers exchange the same flowery dialog with each other throughout the first act, but the finale delivers the appropriate level of spookiness as well as a fitting plot twist that teases at a psychological undercurrent.

 

SOUND OF HORROR

(1966)

Dir - José Antonio Nieves Conde

Overall: MEH

As the title would dictate, Sound of Horror, (El sonido de la muerte), does in fact contain an impressively sinister sound design.  It arrives whenever an unearthed, invisible dinosaur monster whatever thing attacks a bunch of archeologists who were careless enough to blow up dynamite and not heed a superstitious lady's warnings about fucking around in a cave in order to find some treasure.  A typical tale of people doomed by their own greed then, it features a small crop of bland characters whose names are not even worth remembering, even if scream queens Ingrid Pitt and Soledad Miranda play two of them.  Director José Antonio Nieves Conde was not one to bother with the horror genre and there is little for him to do with it under the confines of Sam X. Abarbanel's stuck-in-the-muck script, which just has everyone boringly talking, getting picked off, and running from a house to the cave until the ninety minute mark.  While it is clearly a detrimental byproduct of the inadequate budget that the deadly creature is left unseen, the film deserves some credit for the howling wind/human screaming noise that it utilizes at regular intervals, which serves as an unnerving substitute for a guy in a rubber suite or some bad puppetry.

60's Mexican Horror Part Twelve

HOUSE OF TERROR
(1960)
Dir - Gilberto Martínez Solares
Overall: MEH

 

Allegedly hard up for cash enough to make a south of the border trip for a pay day, Lon Chaney Jr. puts on the werewolf makeup for one of the last times in co-writer/director Gilberto Martínez Solares' House of Terror, (La Casa del Terror).  Joining forces with Germán "Tin-Tan" Valdés, it is about as lackluster and not-humorous as any other Mexican horror comedy from the era, with plenty of goofy mugging, cartoon sound effects, an arbitrary musical number, and Valdés jumping at his own shadow like a buffoon.  Watching Chaney pathetically howl, slowly prance around a busy highway, awkwardly remove a lock from a prison cell door, and stand unflatteringly in full mummy garb for closeups while a mannequin that is noticeably half his size is used in the wide shots all amounts to an embarrassing ordeal for the man who was delegated to such lowly parts at this point in his career.  Solares and his cinematographer brother Raúl Martínez pull-off some atmospheric shots here or there when the movie is not exclusively concerned with an aggressively juvenile sense of humor, but it is also too dull and sluggish as a genre hodgepodge to recommend.

LA MARCA DEL MUERTO
(1961)
Dir - Fernando Cortés
Overall: MEH
 
Later reworked for American audiences by Jerry Warren as Creature of the Walking Dead, La marca del muerto, (Mark of the Dead Man), is one of countless movies where a lunatic scientist justifies killing young woman in a ridiculous, pseudo-science scheme of attaining immortality.  Fernando Casanova stars in a dual role, both said mad doctor and also his descendant who of course looks exactly like him to the point where the villainous version easily dupes people into thinking that he is the good one.  Also because of course, the eternal youth blood transfusions only work for a limited amount of time, forcing more victims to pile up while simultaneously allowing for bad "monster" makeup when Casanova's Dr. Malthus needs his fix.  There are a handful of talky set pieces that slow things down to a standstill with characters regurgitated redundant dialog, though this is still a quicker paced affair than would be expected.  Director/co-writer Fernando Cortés builds suspense with some sinister stalking and lab experiment scenes, plus the set design and location work is not without its macabre charm.  The story is cliche-ridden, cockamamie nonsense that even a three year old would find illogical, but it at least not insulting in its presentation.

 

EL MONSTRUO DE LOS VOLCANES
(1963)
Dir - Jaime Salvador
Overall: WOOF

 

More of a yawn-inducing, contemporary, Western-adjacent crime movie than a Mexican yeti one, El monstruo de los volcanes, (The Monster of the Volcano), comes from prolific director Jaime Salvador who is unfortunately powerless to elevate the material towards anything close to watchable.  Federico Curiel and Alfredo Ruanova's script deserves points for effort at least in trying to sandwich two clashing ideas together as we have a band of henchman or something trying to get a medallion, an ancient monster who is guarding a treasure in a volcanic region, and a love interest who gets caught up between everything.  Said abominable not-snowman looks like a cross between an albino version of Billy Bob from the Rockafire Explosion and a Teletubby, which is to say a tall actor wearing a fluffy rug that comes off about as menacing as it sounds.  Not that we see much of him anyway since this is another clear example of a rushed B-movie that can only afford to have a series of actors standing in rooms while talking to each other.  At one point, several of them are having an aggressively uninteresting conversation in one room, only for one of them to proclaim that they should continue their conversation in the next room, which they then promptly do.  Such edge-of-your-seat set pieces are all that we get here and still at only seventy-six minutes, it cannot end fast enough.

60's Mexican Horror Part Eleven - (Benito Alazraki Edition)

THE CURSE OF THE DOLL PEOPLE
(1961)
Overall: MEH
 
A dopey and heavily talky witchcraft export from director Benito Alazraki, The Curse of the Doll People, (Muñecos infernales, Infernal Dolls, The Devil Doll Men), tosses together its horror cliches in a silly manner.  Seeing dwarf-sized actors in dead-eyed rubber masks stumbling around dark rooms with pointy needles is both viscerally unsettling and weirdly humorous, plus there are thankfully several such moments scattered about as a vengeful witch doctor gets his revenge against scientists who disrespect his particular brand of voodoo.  This inadvertently leads to a monotonous structure where everyone gets picked off one by one and each character keeps having the same conversation throughout the whole movie as to whether or not supernatural activity is afoot.  Everyone on screen is a cardboard cutout with zero personality, save for Quintin Bulnes who spouts hilariously arrogant dialog while raising his eyebrows in a cartoon bad guy manner.  The finale is both abrupt and ridiculous where he easily hypnotizes his pursuers, only to allow them to show a cross at him in his hubris.  This forces him to cower so that his puppet minions can stab him, naturally leaving him no alternative than to torch his own hideout while his would-be victims easily get away.  In other words, this is nothing to take seriously, but it is worth a few chuckles for those that can endure its tedious nature.

 

FRANKESTEIN EL VAMPIRO Y COMPAÑÍA
(1962)
Overall: WOOF

 

The Mexican Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Frankestein el vampiro y compañía, (Frankenstein, Vampire & Co.), sees Manuel "Loco" Valdés and José "El Ojón" Jasso standing in for the famed American comedy duo and they do a particularly not funny job with the also particularly not funny material.  Granted, Alfredo Salazar's plagiarizing script follows the plot of the Abbot and Costello classic almost to a tee and therefor should have some inherent humor to it, but with gags like a mustached man fooling everyone as a belly dancer, the "least conscious of what time of night that the full moon rises" werewolf in cinema history, Valdés bizarre penchant for hopping up and down and making seal noises for no reason, and much more stupidity all sink the ship.  Director Benito Alazraki keeps the tone juvenile throughout and he does his best within the meager production values to make an underground laboratory give off a nostalgic Universal monsters vibe, but the constant mugging and "dumb dumb fall down" high jinks become grating right from the onset.  Also, the wolfman makeup is atrocious, the Frankenstein monster does absolutely nothing until he gets Valdés' brain in the finale and busts out the whole obnoxious jumping seal thing, plus Quintín Bulnes hardly makes for a menacing Count Dracula when he can be thwarted by such bumbling antics.

 

ESPIRITISMO
(1962)
Overall: MEH

 

Director Benito Alazraki's Espiritismo, (Spiritism), bears as little resemblance as possible to his dreadful Frankestein el vampiro y compañía from the same year.  A somber cautionary tale of evil forces being utilized in dire situations when conventional Christian faith fails to do the trick, Alazraki lets zero humor into the proceedings, instead creating a heavy melodrama where a family loses everything and it all ultimately points the way of religious redemption.  Arriving in the early 1960s before George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead helped usher in more nihilistic outcomes for horror movies, this one bypasses a fully miserable conclusion, but it comes awfully close by slamming home a level of despair that low-budget Mexican genre exports were less often to get away with.  A tragedy then first and foremost, it is unfortunately burdened by a repetitive plot and padded dialog that crawls to a foreseeable conclusion that introduces the age old "Monkey's Paw" concept in its final act.  When the film is not stuck in the muck with characters repeating mere variations of the same information over and over again with its cumbersome process to get all of everyone on board with the fact that in this universe, spiritualism is all too legit, there are intense performances and some spooky set pieces to appreciate.