Dir - Victor Halperin
Overall: MEH
Victor Halperin's follow-up to the better known White Zombie is an interesting yet ultimately lackadaisical, em, supernatural outing from Paramount. Supernatural has screwball comedy vixen Carole Lombard in an against-type role where she spends nearly the entire film looking sad and saying practically nothing. Some of the ideas surrounding a person's evil consciousness being able to go on possessing people is adequate footing as far as a premise goes, but any otherworldly elements are haphazardly portrayed. It is a problem that the script does not seem to have any idea what to do with any of its parts. Most of the would-be spooky bits are revealed to be part of faux seances from the get-go, so there is no mileage gotten out of eerie voices from beyond the grave or a dead guy's face appearing in a dark room when we know from the outset that it is all staged. When legit curious things do transpire like the wind blowing papers around, faces being shown either as a visual call-back for the audience to something that happened earlier, or Lombard actually getting possessed, it just comes off as sloppy and rushed.
(1934)
Dir - Dwain Esper
Overall: WOOF
Exploitation hack Dwain Esper's Maniac, (or Sex Maniac as it has also been known), has a solid anti-classic reputation for reasons that immediately become apparent when viewing it. While the Z-grade crud rock inevitably drags at times since such overall incompetence naturally bleeds into its pacing, for the most part it is a ridiculously bizarre hoot. Well, it is a hoot if you are in the mood for cluelessly over the top performances, an incoherent structure and "plot", characters giving exaggerated speeches when no one is within earshot to hear them, (often while looking exactly at the camera), a completely gratuitous scene of obnoxious women hanging out in their underwear, another one of two women beating the shit out of each other for no reason, stock footage of Häxan superimposed in there, and pretentious psychiatric text interrupting most scenes in a pathetic attempt to legitimize the entire movie as having some sort of educational merit. For further cinematic torture, Esper would also make the hilariously titled Marihuana: The Devil's Weed two years later, proving that his remarkably awful filmmaking abilities were no fluke.
(1935)
Dir - John H. Auer
Overall: MEH
Both Eric von Stroheim and Dwight Frye appearing together in a horror film is something to take note of, but unfortunately, the resulting The Crime of Dr. Crespi is an uninspired bore. A noticeably cheap production from Poverty Row studio Liberty Pictures, the problem largely lies at the hands of Hungarian-born director John H. Auer. As his first American work from behind the lens, Auer's sense of pacing is unacceptable as he and cinematographer Larry Williams appear to have no rhyme or reason to any of their staging. Sans a few exceptions, they usually just point the camera at things without bothering to create any sense of suspense or atmosphere, which leaves the actors to carry all the weight of an already lackluster screenplay that is loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Premature Burial. Thankfully, Frye gets the chance to play someone who is not a simple-minded stooge or a madman, instead squaring-off against the appropriately scenery-chewing and loathsome title character of von Stroheim's who drugs his love interests husband in a state of near-death in order to put him underground while presumably planning to cackle wildly at his rival's misfortune. Due parties get their comeuppance in a macabre yet lackluster finale, but at least it wraps up in under an hour which was nice of them.
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