1980s American Horror Part One-Hundred and Nine

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND

(1981)

Dir - Jerry Warren

Overall: WOOF

If you think that a schlubby asshole with an eye-patch who never, ever stops laughing, random women in jungle bikinis running around, John Carradine providing a talking head cameo from the comfort of his own home, and Cameron Mitchell quoiting Edgar Allan Poe and chewing the scenery in a jail cell all sounds great, then Jerry Warren's final film and first in ten years Frankenstein Island has you covered.  Wildly out of touch for the early 1980s, Warren was allegedly talked back out of retirement by someone who reminded him that low-budget horror still returned a profit, which he foolishly though stopped being a thing throughout the entire decade of the 1970s, apparently.  His work here has all of his clueless hallmarks, (namely zero sense of pacing, a moronic story that haphazardly tosses in macabre cliches, and pathetic production values that are Manos: the Hands of Fate worthy), as well as some past-their-prime actors who make it feel even more dated.  The movie would be unacceptable even for the 1950s, but it has an extra level of embarrassment having emerged the same year that the slasher boom was underway and after so many independent filmmakers had made actual real movies within similarly meager means.

JAWS OF SATAN

(1982)

Dir - Bob Claver

Overall: MEH

The only theatrically released film from television director Bob Claver, Jaws of Satan, (King Cobra), is unique amongst animal horror movies in that it somehow manages to shoehorn a demonic angle into its tale about killer serpents.  Shot on location in Alabama with a couple of familiar television and character actors on board, (as well as a ten year-old Christina Applegate), it is a humdrum watch.  The set pieces are consistently dopey, (a guy awkwardly falling out of a moving train, two priests running away from a serpent in a cemetery until one of them scares it away with a crucifix, a woman frozen in fear while waiting for a big strong man to show up and remove the snake in her bed, a random motorcycle rapist, etc), and as the title would suggest, Stephen Spielberg's Jaws is once again mined for plot points as local officials refuse to take the alarming number of snake bites seriously because they are hellbent on opening a dog track.  Claver keeps up a TV movie pace and even though the premise is ridiculous on paper, the presentation never leans into either its goofiness or exploitation value.  Instead, it takes itself too seriously, plods along, and ends with a whimper.

 

NIGHTWISH

(1989)

Dir - Bruce R. Cook
Overall: MEH

One of only two directorial efforts from Bruce R. Cook, Nightwish combines mad scientists, haunted houses, Indian burial grounds, nightmare hallucinations, UFO shenanigans, bug parasites, Satanism, and Brian Thompson running over animals on the highway.  Even amongst other "stupid people in horror movies" behavior, the personnel here exhibit some embarrassing laps in judgement, allowing themselves to go along with the blatantly shady experiments of Jack Starrett's clearly unhinged parapsychologist who at one point manages to handcuff them all together while raising an ectoplasm demon, even though one of the students is fully aware of the doctor's past indiscretions that got him kicked out of two universities.  After this incident and further torture and murder, everyone continues to work with Starrett because this movie assumes that anyone watching it is as dumb as the characters are.  Despite its inconsistent tonal shifts plus how insulting the "everything but the kitchen sink" script is, it has enough desperately silly ideas to keep one invested.  Also, Sean McLin's cinematography has some flare to it and the production design makes solid use out of gooey practical effects, green backlighting, and severed body parts.

1960s 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, respectively.  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.

1950s Foreign Horror Part Four

ALRAUNE
(1952)
Dir - Arthur Maria Rabenalt
Overall: MEH

More of a missed opportunity snooze than a gripping melodrama, Arthur Maria Rabenalt's Alraune, (Unnatural: The Fruit of Evil), is the to-date last full cinematic adaptation of Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel of the same name.  It is notable for Erich von Stroheim's involvement, who speaks in his native tongue while making his first acting appearance after appearing in Billy Wilder's seminal Sunset Boulevard two years earlier.  Karlheinz Böhm is also on board, though his role is less showy than Stroheim's disgraced doctor who medically inseminates Hildegard Knef with the DNA of a murderer, apparently for funsies.  None of the three leads are likeable and the inherent evil of Knef's title character is never properly conveyed.  Instead, everyone seems uptight about a humdrum situation that pushes Knef to flirt with men as well as being in the vicinity of when things go wrong with people, all because Stroheim scares Böhm away from having the hots for his artificially created cousin.  On the plus side, Friedl Behn-Grund's cinematography is sufficient, yet even though it is a slick production, it fails to cast the appropriate spell.

 

EL FANTASMA DE LE OPERETA
(1955)
Dir - Enrique Carreras
Overall: MEH

Not to be confused with the 1960, Germán "Tin-Tan" Valdés-starred movie of the same name, El fantasma de le opereta, (The Phantom of the Operetta), is a horror/comedy mishmash stemming from Argentina that manages to be stupid without being insulting.  The story plays out in an opera house where a wacky group of actors convince the owner to let them rehearse there, one guy really wants to open a pizzeria, and a mad scientist keeps a slew of Universal monsters in the basement because this movie likes drugs.  In addition to said mad scientist, genre fans will appreciate the appearance of an invisible man, Dracula, two different phantoms, a wolf man, and Frankenstein's monster who eventually all run amok while a performance is unfolding on stage. People fall down, people act scared, people are smitten with pretty ladies, people chase each other around, and then the whole thing is revealed to be a dream which actually gives all of the nonsensical tomfoolery some "logical" footing to stand on.  The cast of characters are interchangeable, but the tone and plot are equally ridiculous and easy to not have to pay attention to.  Forgettable and monotonous, (as well as padded with musical numbers that are at least brief if still frequent), some of the fourth wall-breaking humor actually lands.

 

INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE

(1959)

Dir - Virgil W. Vogel

Overall: MEH

One of the few theatrically released films from director Virgil W. Vogel who worked almost entirely in television throughout his career, Invasion of the Animal People, (Rymdinvasion i Lappland, Space Invasion of Lapland, Terror in the Midnight Sun), is a rare Swedish/American co-production that was re-edited with added and removed footage three different times over the years.  First, crap peddler Jerry Warren did his usual job of cutting the original running time down while adding newly shot scenes, including opening and closing prologues by John Carradine.  Then once that version was deemed too short for television broadcast, even more different scenes were filmed to pad it back out.  The OG Swedish cut opens with a flying orb from outer space crashing into the snowy mountains, but we do not get back to it until thirty-three minutes in.  This gives us way too much time to meet a crop of vanilla-flavored characters, some with accents and some without.  Vogel actually stages a couple of scenes with the appropriate level of menace and eventually there is a giant abominable monster and some weird aliens in robes who omit a weird piercing sound, but the trek to get there is arduous.

1950s American Horror Part Thirty - (Jerry Warren Edition)

MAN BEAST
(1956)
Overall: WOOF
 
When Fred Olen Ray allegedly goes on record in stating that your film is "incredibly boring", you know that you got something that is the antithesis of special on your hands.  Man Beast is the debut from director Jerry Warren that was made with no money and much footage from other films thrown in for padding and it fails as an engaging viewing experience in every possible way.   Though it is only sixty-seven minutes long, fifty of them is spent with characters talking to each other about missing brothers and treacherous mountains, while another sixteen and a half minutes is made up of expedition scenes from Allied Artists and Monogram movies, plus some that was allegedly taken from an unreleased Mexican one.  If you are doing the math, that leaves thirty seconds for having any yeti on screen whatsoever and considering that the entire affair is marketed as an abdominal snowman movie, that is a big fat swing and a miss.  To be fair, the reworked ape costume from the 1945 film White Pongo looks fine during the "blink and you'll miss them" moments that it shows up and the plot twist of a native guide who is actually a silver-haired/eyebrowed decedent of the yeti whose master-plan is to kidnap women in order to mate with them is sufficiently exploitative.  Too bad they just forgot to do anything else correctly.

THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD

(1959)

Overall: WOOF

 

Shot in 1957 yet not released until two years later on a double bill with Teenage Zombies, Jerry Warren's The Incredible Petrified World is anything but "incredible".  Well, unless you consider it incredible that it is so lackluster.  While technically an under sea romp where ocean explorers get trapped in a volcanic cave after their diving bell breaks, the two women/two man crew of bland Caucasians sit around talking, exploring, arguing, and eventually coming in contact with a bearded man who has been inexplicably living down there for over a decade.  Meanwhile, John Carradine tries to rescue his crew and eventually does so in one of the most anti-climaxes that you are likely to find, even in D-grade crap like this.  There are no monsters, no dangerous sea critters, of course some stock footage, and the only alarming thing that happens besides everyone spending the movie slowly losing hope of being saved is when the aforementioned bearded guy grabs one of the women before some rocks fall on him.  Warren occasionally has his cinematographer move the camera around this time and the sets are more impressive than just a mid-sized room getting redecorated, but it is still a waste of time from front to back.

TEENAGE ZOMBIES

(1959)

Overall: WOOF

Shot with his usual "bah, who cares?" level of production values, Teenage Zombies is Jerry Warren doing what he does "best".  Infamous and rightfully so, Warren threw this lazy drive-in effort together in what looks like about two days and for twenty cents, putting a bunch of poor no-name actors in front of the screen who never get a break from saying embarrassing dribble.  The performances are uniformly bad since how could they not be, with Jacques Lecoutier's script serving as a series of lazy "mad scientists dominating the world" tropes and jolly-wiz youngsters who have to make the most out of the fact that Warren seems allergic to yelling the word "cut" until the scene is over.  This is to say that his direction deserves the brunt of the scorn since the man has the pacing sense of a sloth reading War and Peace.  The music never stops playing and was likely taken from whatever library cues were the easiest to obtain, plus besides some repetitive transition scenes on a speeder boat, it may as well have been filmed in a single room since the camera never cuts away from an unending stream of wide-shots, with just enough decor to signify what is supposed to be a laboratory or a diner.  One guy stumbles around doing a Frankenstein monster impression as a zombie and another guy wears an appropriately cheap gorilla costume since what no-budget horror movie is complete without one of those?  The point is, stay away; stay far away.