1960s William Castle Part Three

LET'S KILL UNCLE

(1966)

Overall: MEH

 

William Castle's final film for Universal before switching to Paramount for the remainder of his career, Let's Kill Uncle, (Let's Kill Uncle Before Uncle Kills Us), is an adaptation of Rohan O'Grady's novel of the same name.  Like nearly all of Castle's directorial work, the tongue is firmly in cheek here with a macabre premise of a down on his luck, military veteran Uncle trying to off his nephew that is bound to inherit a vast fortune from his wealthy father, (Castle himself in an opening cameo), who recently died in an automobile accident, all played for black humor chuckles.  English character thespian Nigel Green is clearly enjoying himself in the title role, with a sly, diabolical twinkle in his eye as he divulges his diabolical plan.  That is the problem though in that the plot dictates that he lays out all of his cards to two children as part of a game, but if he just kept his mouth shut like logic would dictate, he probably would have achieved his goal with minimal effort.  It is a stretch for the audience to buy into even under such a knowingly goofy presentation, but the film does not afford enough clever set pieces to make the ordeal worth it, so it in turn stands as one of Castle's more lackluster offerings.

 

THE SPIRIT IS WILLING

(1967)

Overall: MEH

One of a handful of strictly comedic offerings by William Castle, The Spirit Is Willing is largely groan-worthy in its attempts at humor and ranks low on the horror comedy spectrum.  An adaptation of Nathaniel Benchley's novel The Visitors, the gags are routinely predictable and often times annoying as a sixteen year old wise-ass is constantly blamed by his parents for any supernatural activity that transpires.  This grows old quick as everyone on screen, (including top-billed comedian Sid Caesar), make a joke out of constantly yelling at each other while the parents bend over backwards to get who they believe to be their wildly disobedient and destructive son back in their good graces.  Ben Starr's script eventually throws in some homophobic jokes that have obviously not aged well, but they do actually work under such a context where everyone raises eyebrows over Barry Gordon seemingly and inexplicably having an interest in women's undergarments and accessories.  Even for an unabashedly lighthearted comedy, the plot line is loaded with logical holes and character inconsistencies, so this is hardly the most clever genre hybrid of its time.  Some of Castle's campy charm still manages to rub off in fits and starts, but nowhere near enough to recommend it.

 

PROJECT X

(1968)

Overall: MEH

Forgoing his patented huckster charm with stone-faced science fiction, Project X is a noticeable departure for producer/director William Castle that is at least partially askew from his usual, lighthearted camp.  Another adaptation, (this one a conglomerate of L.P. Davies' novels The Artificial Man and Psychogeist), is has tacky production values and skimps on the futuristic setting with a forth of the film taking place at an isolated farm house, presumably to save on budget.  The cheap set design, Hanna-Barbara animation, and silly matching outfits still allow this to be classified as schlock, but Castle permits very little humor and presents more of a topical scenario for the time that mirrors the paranoia of the day.  Fear of overpopulation and a nuclear, Asian threat looms over the scenario where scientists and military personnel use gobbledygook pseudoscience to unlock repressed memories and whatnot, though Henry Jones seems to be the only actor allowed to smirk his way through some of the proceedings.  Elsewhere, it is played straight, yet Castle thankfully had enough chops from behind the lens to keep the viewer interested in a heavily talky plot that still comes awfully close to getting lost in the weeds here or there.

1960s American Horror Part Eighteen

THE DUNGEON OF HARROW

(1962)

Dir - Pat Boyette

Overall: WOOF

Future comic book artist Pat Boyette cranked out three no-budget drive-in cheapies in the 1960s, a sexploitation comedy, a war film, and the pathetically lackluster The Dungeon of Harrow, (Dungeons of Horror), which serves as a regional, D-rent version of Roger Corman's stellar Edgar Allan Poe vehicles from the time period.  The story has a shipwrecked survivor showing up on an island with a weirdo in a castle who keeps his deformed wife locked up in a dungeon for reasons, and it all goes on in endless, snail-paced circles.  For the clearly minimal amount of budget that the crew is working with, Boyette pulls off what should be some halfway decent, Gothic scenery.  Yet the staging is clunky at best, plus he leaves too many lights on for the cinematography to create the desired, creepy mood.  The dialog is endlessly pretentious and the performances are too cumbersome to even be lousy, except for Russ Harvey, (whose only screen credits are this and Boyette's follow-up No Man's Land), who is remarkably dull in the lead and about as charismatic of a leading man as a bag of rice.  A large part of the problem is that producer's allegedly wanted the length to be as close to ninety-minutes as possible, so many of the scenes are either pointless or drag out past the acceptable amount of time that Boyette should have yelled "Cut!" for.

 

MONSTROSITY

(1963)

Dir - Joseph V. Mascelli/Jack Pollexfen

Overall: MEH

 

Shot in 1958 though not theatrically released until five years later, Monstrosity, (The Atomic Brain), is as bad as its reputation dictates.  This was the only directorial effort from cinematographer Joseh V. Mascelli, with producer/co-writer Jack Pollexfen also allegedly having a say from behind the lens and admitting later on that it was a troubled ordeal to finish.  A mad scientist scenario plays out where a disgraced doctor agrees to work for a relentlessly awful, crotchety old woman who wants her brain transplanted into the body of a pretty young lady because that is obviously how science works.  Various failed attempts up until then involving animal-to-human brain switcheroos render two different characters as "zombies", one of whom is an unfortunate new housekeeper that acts like a cat for most of the movie.  Silly stuff which thankfully does not overstay its welcome at a brisk sixty-four minutes, it is surprisingly not as tortuously paced as most D-rent drive-in trash of its kind.  A small handful of absurd plot points make it amusing if one is generous enough to even be paying attention to what is happening, plus the finale is fitting where the two worst characters get their proper comeuppance.

 

THE WITCHMAKER

(1969)

Dir - William O. Brown

Overall: MEH

 

Though obviously far from a masterpiece even of the obscure variety, regional filmmaker William O. Brown's second of only two movies The Witchmaker, (The Witchmaster, Witchkill, The Legend of Witch Hollow), is an interesting, bottom budgeted bit of blasphemy.  Filmed in Louisiana with a cast of actual professional actors, it is typically talky yet sufficiently plotted as to not stagnate in its tracks.  Utilizing the ole cabin in the woods set up mixed with the loose premise from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, it also has the usual occult silliness found in many horror films of the time period where coven leaders give alms to Satan, conduct complicated rituals, and are generally up to no good.  The film would be reedited six years later with comparatively more graphic content and re-released as The Naked Witch, but there is still some almost-nudity here and mild violence to slam home its exploitative nature.  Things fall apart at the ending and it could afford to shave off several minutes of several scenes where Anthony Eisley and Alvy Moore politely discuss the existence of witchcraft, but Brown somehow manages to keep the whole thing on the macabre, atmospheric side with a striking Satanic temple as well as creepy cinematography.

1960s American Horror Part Seventeen

THE CRAWLING HAND

(1963)

Dir - Herbert L. Strock

Overall: MEH

 

B-movie mainstay Herbert L. Strock strikes again with The Crawling Hand; another low-end bit of schlock that was rightly lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000 decades later.  The production aspects are noticeably sub-par right out of the gate with a hokey spaceship set and effects, only for things to go the usual route of fast talking Caucasian actors, (as well as Miss Iceland Sirry Steffen), having conversations in rooms for ninety-five percent of the running time.  One or two death scenes break up the monotony where Peter Breck gets possessed by the severed arm of a astronaut who came in contact with a malevolent extraterrestrial force or whatever.  One of the attacks has a man getting choked against a jukebox which turns on a Little Richard-styled tune for campy giggles.  The makeup effects are laughably primitive and merely involve putting some dark smudges around anyone's eyes who have been bombarded with violent alien mojo, plus the entire concept of a malevolent appendage had been done for decades by this point and with far less ridiculous results.  It certainly would be more endurable with about twenty minutes shaved off of it, but it is at least harmlessly stupid the way that it stands.

 

DAY OF THE NIGHTMARE

(1965)

Dir - John A. Bushelman

Overall: MEH

The only of John A. Bushelman's small handful of directorial works to be in the horror genre, Day of the Nightmare, (Don't Scream, Doris Mays!), is an unabashedly sleazy one that of course equates childhood, sexual trauma with psychopathic transvestism.  A dingy, bottom-barrel, neglected cousin to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, (as many exploitation films in its wake were, to varying degrees), this one features Cliff Fields as the cross-dressing, wackadoo murderer who engages in head-scratching, perverse acts even outside of when he decides to switch to his alter ego in order to murder people.  An artist by trade, he stays away from his wife for endless nights, has women dance as he draws them, and pays other women to make out while topless so that he can relive moments in his past where he walked in on his mom sleeping with a random guy and then got hit on by his father's mistress.  There is plenty of nudity and the film even manages to throw in a completely arbitrary, light orgy scene where characters who are narratively unnecessary play a goofy game of blindfolded fondling.  The whole thing is unapologetic in its bad taste and groan-worthy in its ridiculousness, but fans of low-brow camp will certainly get a kick out of what is on display here.

 

THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES

(1968)

Dir - Ted V. Mikels

Overall: WOOF

 

Another infamous crud rock from schlock peddler Ted V. Mikels, The Astro-Zombies is as stupid as it is wretchedly boring.  Filmed for $37,000, three of those thousand went to what looks like a couple of hours worth of work from John Carradine, all of whose scenes take place on a single set and come off as if the veteran actor only had one crack at all of his pseudoscience, gobbledygook lines.  It is not like Carradine had much to work with anyway, nor do any of the other actors who admittingly do a sufficient job with the moronic material.  What puts this in the "worst movie ever made" discussion besides the embarrassing production aspects is the abominable pacing and surprisingly dull story line, which never takes advantage of what should be fool-proof schlock to work with.  The astro-zombie of the title is just a guy in normal cloths and a plastic, alien Halloween mask, plus he barely gets any screen time anyway.  That is dedicated to CIA agents talking, Carradine talking, and some foreign criminals talking, with minimal action taking place that is all staged in a hilariously awkard fashion which is akin to an elementary school play.  The whole thing is too blandly idiotic and cheap to provide the necessary giggles from an audience ripe to scorn it, so it instead just comes off as a forgettable trainwreck that barely seems to be trying in the first place.

1960s American Horror Part Sixteen

THE DEAD ONE

(1961)
Dir - Barry Mahon
Overall: WOOF
 

One of writer/director Barry Mahon's last movies before predominantly dedicating himself to nudie flicks, The Dead One, (Blood of the Zombie), is significant for a few reasons, not all of which are positive ones.  Long considered a lost film until it resurfaced over four decades after its release, it is one of the first zombie movies to be in color, sharing that distinction with England's Doctor Blood's Coffin from the same year.  It is also notoriously awful, with bottom-barrel attributes from top to bottom. Mahon pads out the first act with three different nightclub sequences one after the other as a newlywed couple gallivants around New Orleans' French Quarter.  Every scene has a stationary camera pointed at the actors with no other coverage or cross-cutting, none of the dialog is properly miked, the performances are hilariously wooden, the sole walking corpse looks like a bargain-bin version of the one that Doug Jones played in Hocus Pocus, its depiction of slave descendants as primitive voodoo practitioners is racially insensitive, and the story line is propelled by moronic behavior from every character on screen.  Even though the running time is mercifully brisk, it is still a hopelessly pathetic and boring mess.

 

VIOLENT MIDNIGHT

(1963)

Dir - Richard Hilliard

Overall: MEH

 

With exploitive murders and mild nudity in tow, Violent Midnight, (Psychomania), is a sufficiently sleazy proto-slasher for its day.  The sophomore effort from director Richard Hilliard, it was one of a small handful of regional, Connecticut drive-in cheapies made by producer Del Tenney, (who worked uncredited on the script as well).  Though the twist reveal as to who the trench coat wearing, knife-wielding maniac is may be predictable in a process of illumination sense, the premise itself has its share of unique details.  Centered around a military vet painter with violent tendencies and daddy issues, certain women in his life are getting picked off, which can either be the work of him or an asshole greaser guy that he has had a few rows with.  Several of the college dorm females present are of the promiscuous variety who are prone to flirtatious behavior and commenting on each other's figures, but the overt sex appeal is limited to their frolicking around in bathing suits, a single sex scene, and some nude modeling.  Tame stuff that goes about as hard as the equally neutered violence, (at least by contemporary standards), but the presentation is less campy than would be expected, for better or worse.

THE BLACK CAT

(1966)

Dir - Harold Hoffman

Overall: WOOF

One of only two films ever made by writer/director Harold Hoffman and one of about seven thousand to use the same Edger Allan Poe title, this contemporary The Black Cat adaptation is a no budget, regional offering that was shot in Dallas, Texas.  Sadly, it is also terrible.  An actor named Robert Frost, (who makes his lone acting appearance of any kind here), plays one of the most obnoxiously unlikable characters that ever had the misfortune to be the sole focus of a movie.  He drinks, ignores his wife, screams at her, beats up people, and tortures various felines for no reason that anyone watching could possibly care about.  Even after spending a month stint in a mental institution and undergoing shock therapy and insulin injections, he emerges "cured" only to go right back to profuse drinking and being an unrepentant asshole the second that he gets bored writing a book that he never finishes.  Hoffman's skills as a filmmaker are crude at best and he does not bother much with establishing any kind of ghoulish atmosphere.  The music is all stock and blares through nearly every scene, (plus we get a handful of sequences with a terrible rock band performing in a bar), the editing is sloppy, and it is nearly as embarrassing from a technical level as it is annoying everywhere else.

1960s American Horror Part Fifteen

HAND OF DEATH

(1962)

Dir - Gene Nelson

Overall: MEH

 

Actor-turned-director Gene Nelson had a hefty career behind the lens in television, but his first theatrically released gig was handling the routine, low-budget Hand of Death, (Five Fingers of Death).  The makeup effects by Bob Mark are a combination of Easter Island statue, sea creature and Ben Grimm, but the charcoal complexion and thick lips also unfortunately and unintentionally give it an aura of exaggerated blackface which is likely to raise some contemporary viewer's eyebrows.  Writer/producer Eugene Ling's script is bare-bones stuff, dedicating the first half to pleasantries between character and some lab coat banter, with the rest of it simply revolving around John Agar in a hat and trench coat stumbling around town and occasionally murdering someone by accident in his now mutated despair.  Keen eyes may recognize The Three Stooges' Joe Besser and a toddler-sized Butch Patrick in cameos, but besides the aforementioned garish monster makeup, the film ultimately ends up being too bland to have enough B-movie goofy charm.  At least is is only an hour long though.

 

THE CURSE OF THE LIVING CORPSE

(1964)

Dir - Del Tenney

Overall: GOOD

 

Filmed in Stamford, Connecticut and marking the film debut of both Roy Scheider and writer/director/producer Del Tenney, The Curse of the Living Corpse is a textbook, old dark house/whodunit that has some admirably macabre details.  Opening of course with a reading of the will, the recently maybe-deceased father suffers from a fear of being buried alive, so he takes the logical precautions in case of his misdiagnosed demise, only for said precautions to be systematically ignored by the greedy inheritors of his fortune.  Tenney's script cherry picks numerous cliches and the equally stock premise plays out with virtually zero surprises, but the angle to announce every character's specific phobia in order to predictably set up how each will meet their end is still a fun detail to play around with.  The kill scenes are brutal enough for the tame time period, plus Scheider's posh accent is a hoot and the future A-lister gets to chew the scenery as is appropriate.  The movie is not as atmospherically spooky or tightly plotted as would be preferred, but it has its tongue in the right cheek and Carnival of Soul's Candace Hilligoss appearing in her second and last leading role is something for genre fans to get a kick out of.

THE EROTIC CIRCUS

(1969)

Dir - Henri Pachard

Overall: WOOF

The third kind of movie from Henri Pachard, (who would go on to have a decades' long career behind the lens in porn), The Erotic Circus, (Orgy in the Psycho House), is a puzzling exploitation relic that nearly gets by on its incompetently embarrassing strangeness.  The "story" begins and ends with "pervert drug dealer goes to visit his pervert sister who sleeps with her pervert son", and it is told over the course of an hour with either incessant sitar or surfer music on the soundtrack.  More of an aggressively incoherent montage than anything else, it seems as if it escaped from someone's dingy basement and was made with zero dollars.  More than half of the seven, highly unphotogenic people on screen would never appear in anything again, nearly all of the dialog is done away with inside of the first twenty-odd minutes, and the entire thing is filmed in bright, garish lighting with the cinematography skills of a chimp with no arms.  It is a stretch to say that Pachard was simply churning out his own no-rent, regional version of a nudie movie since the merger of Psycho, Herschell Gordon Lewis crap, and Easy Rider wields far stranger, borderline concerning results than it even sounds like it would on paper.

1960s British Horror Part Seventeen

THE SNAKE WOMAN

(1961)

Dir - Sidney J. Furie

Overall: MEH

Shot in six days for roughly £17,000 with the sole intention of throwing it on as a double feature with something more sustainably produced, The Snake Woman, (The Terror of the Snake Woman), turned out as cheap as would be expected.  The script by Orville H. Hampton was reworked by director Sidney J. Furie and it is a pathetic attempt at capturing some of Hammer Films' magic, setting it at the turn of the century with a reptilian female serving as its would-be monster.  Unfortunately, nothing interesting or even remotely exciting is done with such an ideal, B-movie premise.  As the title lady, Susan Travers only speaks a couple of sentences and gets maybe four and a half minutes of screen time, plus at no point is it ever explained how no one in her village ever sought to seek her out before when she has apparently been biting people in snake form throughout her roughly twenty living years.  She can also switch from snake to human while keeping her dress on, but to be fair, this makes as much sense as cinematic vampire's ability to shapeshift in a similar fashion.  There is virtually no action during the sixty-eight minute running time, but there are endless scenes of the same characters trying to get to the bottom of a mystery that the viewer already had all of the answers to when the opening credits hit.

 

THE HORROR OF IT ALL

(1964)

Dir - Terence Fisher

Overall: MEH

In between some of his latter Hammer works, director Terence Fisher returned to comedy for the first time in nearly a decade with The Horror of It All, an unassuming old dark house romp written by Ray Russell.  Scoring Pat Boone in the lead, (who even gets to bust out a completely random song forty minutes in), he is joined by familiar genre faces such as Valentine Dyall, Andrée Melly, and Erik Chitty who round out the wacky Marley family, the members of which keep dropping like flies while exhibiting their oddball quirks.  One of them is an inventor who "invents" things that already exist, another has all of the mannerisms of a vampire, another is a mindless brute, and yet another is a invalid grandpa who likes to look at nuddie magazines.  Most of the gags are predictably stupid and the double twist ending is convoluted enough to garnish groans from the audience, which was likely intentional in some respects.  Unfortunately the movie is too lighthearted to deliver much macabre charm and most of its ghoulish set pieces seem tame even for the time period.  Still, it is harmless stuff that is worth eventually checking out for Fisher completests or anyone who wants to see Boone sing about ghosts and goblins.

THE HAND OF NIGHT

(1968)

Dir - Frederic Goode

Overall: MEH

Forgettable genre fodder, The Hand of Night, (Beast of Morocco), has one or two effectively eerie sequences early on, yet it also has an imprecise plot line that stagnates and never recovers.  William Silvester, Diane Clare, (in her final film role), and Terence De Marney should be familiar faces to horror buffs, with the latter spouting cryptic nonsense as a seemingly all knowing guy in a hood and Clare having fun with a French accent.  Opening with a patented nightmare scene, there is another somewhat macabre instance in the first act where Silvester wanders the barren streets of Morocco to creepy stillness, but the story runs in circles once our characters venture out in to the desert which takes up the majority of the running time.  Silvester's recent widower deals with the loss of his family while trying to make merry at the beach with Clare, only to get persistently bothered by a woman, (Miss Israel herself Aliza Gur), who is apparently a vampire even though she does absolutely nothing vampiric besides show up in a coffin at the very end.  There is also some other stuff about a missing archeologist and a magic ring, but the pacing is sluggish and the characterizations weak, all of which just makes for a messy ordeal.

1960s Mexican Horror Part Eight - The Nostradamus Series

THE CURSE OF NOSTRADAMUS

(1961)

Dir - Federico Curiel/Stillman Segar

Overall: MEH

 

The first of four Nostradamus films released in rapid succession over the course of about a year, The Curse of Nostradamus, (La maldición de Nostradamus), is nearly unwatchably repetitive and boring.  Believed to have been edited together from a television serial, it contains one of the most abrupt endings in cinema history and an enormously tedious structure where the title bad guy spends the entire movie asking a professor to speak highly of his infamous ancestor, only for said professor to refuse, only then for Nostradamus Jr. to go on killing more people.  It is no exaggeration to say that this virtually verbatim dialog exchange plays out almost on continuous repeat and it makes for a horrendously dull viewing experience long before the whole thing wraps up as if the film stock simply ran out.  In the diabolical lead, Germán Robles plays another Béla Lugosi stand-in as he also had done in a handful of vampire films released in the late 1950s, but he engages in very little textbook undead activity here besides being afraid of a cross.  One or two of the deaths are gruesome and the cinematography is appropriately macabre, but those are the only positive attributes one can find.

NOSTRADAMUS Y EL DESTROCTOR DE MONSTRUOS

(1962)

Dir - Federico Curiel

Overall: MEH

 

Round two in the Nostradamus series Nostradamus y el destructor de monstruos, (Nostradamus and the Destroyer of Monsters), is an even more dull and actionless one, picking up where the previous installment left off with two kids inadvertently unearthing the buried body of the title vamp who goes right back to his humdrum shtick.  In fact Germán Robles deserves ninth billing at most, disappearing for the entire second act and barely showing up anywhere else except to spout some more general warnings and quickly disappear whenever anyone attempts to cause him physical harm.  There is a detour involving a convicted criminal and two college students who wish to operate on his brain and this actually provides the film with one of its only set pieces that is not just characters sitting in rooms and discussing the existence of vampires.  This introduced Euro-horror mainstay Jack Taylor as the bloodsucker hunter Igor, who would briefly continue his portrayal in the following Nostradamus, The Genie of Darkness.  Similar to Robles though, Taylor only appears near the end, but he does have a smoking cauldron that can apparently show flashbacks detailing the history of the undead, for whatever that is worth.

NOSTRADAMUS, THE GENIE OF DARKNESS

(1962)

Dir - Federico Curiel

Overall: MEH

More of the same with the third Nostradamus film Nostradamus, The Genie of Darkness, (Nostradamus, el Genio de las Tinieblas, Genii of Darkness), which sees most of the same ole characters doing nothing besides talking in rooms about other things that they should be doing to thwart Germán Robles' diabolical, title blood-sucker.  Three movies in and it is alarming at this point what the hold up is on both the good and evil sides, as so little action transpires that is is a huge wonder why neither has claimed victory yet.  Actually defeating each other would clearly take far too much time away from talking about defeating each other instead.  In any event, Jack Taylor is done away with early on, which is a shame since he possessed a mad glare to his eye that made it actually borderline exciting to watch when he finally came face to face with Robles' penetrating stare.  Once he is out of the picture though, it is right back to tortuously dull talking sequences one after the other.  That said, Nostradamus does burn a woman alive after hypnotizing her into laughing through it, but otherwise this is just another boring ordeal whose saga still regrettably had a whole other film left to wrap the whole thing up.

THE BLOOD OF NOSTRADAMUS

(1962)

Dir - Federico Curiel

Overall: MEH

At an hour and forty-three minutes in length, the final installment in the Nostradamus series feels even more like a chore to get through than the previous three which were each nearly a half hour shorter and ergo more forgiving.  The Blood of Nostradamus, (La sangre de Nostradamus), continues the tale of almost nothing happening where Germán Robles's title vampire tries to convince Domingo Soler's insultingly boring professor to take his father's, (or grandfather's?), legacy seriously, lest more victims fall by the wayside.  Viewed as a complete saga, (which is not advisable unless you can play them all at double the speed as to get on with your life), these are some of the most talky and least engaging low-budget horror films that Mexico ever produced during the 1960's, which was the country's most prolific decade in genre cinema up until that point.  Quasi-interesting moments come after tremendous stretches of the exact opposite, (Robles showing off his fangs and actually biting a woman, his dim-witted servant falling to his death from a bell tower, and Soler's electromagnetic contraption causing wild bouts of spastic pain for the undead fiend), but obviously these are hardly redeemable enough to make the entire affair anything less than something that should remain in relative obscurity.