Universal Monsters and Other Classic Horrors

[almuric]

Any idea why Bride of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein and most of the monster rallies were held back from Shock Theatre and ended up in Son of Shock instead?

[johnnypt]

Oct 7, 2023 10:45:21 GMT -5 almuric said:

Any idea why Bride of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein and most of the monster rallies were held back from Shock Theatre and ended up in Son of Shock instead?

Looking at the listings for Shock and Son of Shock…nope, doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. Shock had more variety but it seems to randomly left titles out.

[almuric]

The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) - After the colossal success of Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein, a sequel was inevitable. Frankenstein (Cushing once again) narrowly escapes death by the guillotine and sets himself up in a new city under the impenetrable alias of Dr. Stein. A young doctor (Francis Matthews) recognizes him and uses his knowledge to get himself a position assisting Frankenstein on his new project. Frankenstein is working on a new monster, physically perfect this time, planning to transfer the brain of his crippled assistant Karl (Oscar Quitak) into it to vindicate his work. But things go wrong. Karl in his new body (Michael Gwynne) is the most sympathetic Monster since Karloff. Also, look out for Eunice Gayson, a few years before she became the first Bond Girl.

Cushing almost makes the audience want to root for him to succeed, in spite of everything. And in the wild, audacious twist ending, he kind of does.

Next time: Addressing the elephant in the room

[almuric]

So, anybody who has been reading this might wonder, "Why haven't you reviewed any of Val Lewton's films?" Well, there's a reason.

I wanted to like them, I really did. Whenever I watch one, I'm very impressed with the direction, the acting, the music, and yet . . . I'm left cold each time. It's not for a lack of good material. Karloff gets something other than mad scientist roles. The scene with the blood coming under the door in The Leopard Man is a great moment. Lots of great moments, yes, but not one single movie I really want to watch a second time. There's an emphasis on Freudianism that's extremely dated now and reminds me a little too much of L Sprague De Camp and his reductive psychoanalysis. That's not to say that Horror can't be subtle or ambiguous, but with each of the films he produced and co-wrote, it feels like there's a gaping hole where the movie's heart should be. They always feel a little too clinical, too distant, to really stick with the audience. I get to the end of Cat People and the audience is supposed to be left wondering if Irena ever really did turn into a panther, and I found that I didn't really care.

It's ironic that the original concept for The Wolf Man would have been almost as ambiguous as Cat People, with the audience left unsure if Talbot really was a werewolf or not. There's even a bit of dialogue in the finished movie left over from that phase. I'm sure Universal would have gotten a lot of praise and the film might still be remembered, but would be it beloved? You wouldn't still see people wearing Wolf Man T-shirts because we wouldn't even have an actual Wolf Man. Lewton's stuff feels too aloof. As goofy as they sometimes got, the Universals have a charm that transcends their limitations. They might have been made in the '30s and '40s, yet they feel timeless. The movies of Val Lewton are firmly rooted in that mid-century era when Freudianism was going to explain and solve everything. His movies are just too rational to connect with our irrational fears.

[johnnypt]

I’ll take the hit for the team and upload my Val Lawton reviews thru the weekend. Some of the them definitely aren’t what you think they’re going to be.

[johnnypt]

Part 1

Lewton’s hand as producer on nine RKO mid 40s horror films left a mark on each of them, much like the way his former boss David O. Selznick left his mark on the films he produced, even more than the directors (though of course, their contributions were certainly not insignificant). Working with directors Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson and Robert Wise, he created a catalog of what could be considered psychological horror films. There aren’t monsters like in the Universal films of the time, the terror comes mostly from the minds of the characters.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)-Probably the most famous of Lewton’s films, owing some of that familiarity to the early 80s remake by Paul Schrader. Simone Simon is a young artist who marries a man she meets at the zoo, but she’s afraid she’s been cursed to turn into a cat. Everyone thinks she’s crazy…until a giant cat does begin showing up and going after the women who surround her husband. This film is the closest to the Universal model, with Irena being a sort of Wolf Man type, but it’s not even really clear that she actually DOES turn into a cat. Then again, I might be giving her the benefit of the doubt in those scenes where one minute she’s there, the next a panther is there. Thing is, we don’t really ever see that cat much. Mostly we see the shadows and hear the roar, director Tourneur keeps the cat hidden, probably to keep costs down! It’s nowhere near as out there as the later Schrader version and the whole incest subplot of that film is nowhere to be found in the original. But there is a surprising amount of sexuality and frankness for a 40s film.

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)-Lewton and Tourneur follow up their last film with this one, set in the Caribbean Islands and deals with voodoo. Nurse Frances Dee arrives to take care of the semi-comatose wife of a plantation owner, but there’s something going on beneath the surface. Is it an illicit affair, or is it voodoo? Another atmospheric film where you think you get a reasonable explanation towards the end of the film, but when the finale happens, you’re not quite sure if the supernatural wasn’t involved. It’s up to the viewer to decide if it was a case of jungle sickness or something beyond the ordinary. Supposedly there was a remake of this about 15-20 years ago, can’t say I ever heard of it.

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)-The third film in the Tourneur trio sounds like it should be a follow-up to Cat People, but really has nothing to do with that. A leopard escapes after a botched publicity stunt and then terrorizes the countryside killing young girls…that is until the leopard turns up dead, but the killing continues. While not a bad film by any means, it certainly wasn’t up to the level of the other two. This was far more of a traditional type B movie pot boiler murder mystery that I figured out about 40 minutes into the 66 minute running time (In fact, it probably would’ve made a pretty good MST3K feature). But it’s relatively effective and moves briskly. There’s one really weird scene towards the end where a procession is about to take place and the men are dressed in pointed hoods!...but they’re in black, or some kind of dark material. Still very odd looking and spooky, though it’s not meant to be.

Tourneur went on to do the noir classic Out Of The Past, the horror classic Curse of the Demon, Giant of Marathon with Steve Reeves and a lot of TV work.

[johnnypt]

Part 2

Next up in the Val Lewton series are the first two films directed by Mark Robson. He was the editor on the three previous films and ended up directing such diverse pictures as Champion with Kirk Douglas, the grand soap opera Peyton Place, WWII programmer Von Ryan’s Express and Valley of the Dolls (the one without Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert). He started cheap though, Val kept him on a tight budget, so Mark did the best with what he had.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1944)-Robson’s directorial debut is a sequel to Cat People…or is it? This time the focus is on Dr. Lewis Judd, played by Tom Conway, really looking a lot like his more famous brother (no, not Tim, but the ever suave and sometimes caddish and always great George Sanders). Didn’t he die towards the end of Cat People? He certainly wasn’t moving much. To make it more confusing, he refers to a woman who went crazy that sounds suspiciously like Irena, but who also seems to be very much alive. Also making a debut here is Zira Kowalski herself, Kim Hunter. She plays a school girl whose sister is missing in New York so she tries to find here. She ends up getting involved with Village Satanists (guess the Castavets hadn’t moved to the Dakota yet), the aforementioned Dr. Judd who talks like he’s been out of it for a while, and Hugh Beaumont as a character named, I kid you not, Mr. Ward. No, I could not stop laughing the whole film every time it came up, but can’t blame for the producers for that bit of future history. Apart from that this is a pretty effective thriller that does stumble a little at the end because, like some of the earlier pictures, you think you know what happens but it’s not made 100% clear. The trademark Lewton atmosphere is here in spades, the subject matter is surprising for 1944 and a couple of great set piece scenes (one on a subway, the other in a shower-paging Mr. Hitchcock) rise this one above the level above the average thriller. Definitely worth a look.

THE GHOST SHIP (1944)-Old film star Richard Dix is the “star” here. He plays a captain of an old steamer who gets a new third mate. There have been a bunch of unexplained deaths on the ship, and the third mate begins to think the captain is behind them. Dix’s performance is interesting, he plays the captain as paranoid and demands everyone around him be loyal…sound familiar? The main difference between him and Captain Queeg is Bogie didn’t turn into a homicidal maniac. The film is more mystery than horror until the last 15 minutes when things go really haywire. Blood is spilled, knives are flash and the weird silent Gollum looking sailor ends up playing a similar role in this story. Certainly an interesting film, especially in light of the Caine Mutiny comparison that invariably come up now.


[johnnypt]

Part 3

The next person who got a directorial start under Lewton was Robert Wise. He’d been an editor at RKO, working on some big pictures including one named Citizen Kane. His first uncredited work as director came on the studio-mandated mess that became Welles’ follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons. Around the same time he was working on another non-horror film for Lewton when he got called in to replace a short subject director who fell WAY behind…

CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)-The film that actually is a sequel to “Cat People”…or is it? It famously has the reputation as being “the non-horror horror film”. I think this is a completely accurate description! Can you imagine going to the movies back in 1944, knowing Cat People was a pretty big hit, going to see this…and seeing a movie about a lonely little girl? I’m sure there must have been some pretty ticked people. But it seems many of them gave the film a shot anyway, and it’s worth it. Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph are all back, but it’s a very different mood this time. Amy is the daughter of Irena’s husband and his second wife, and she’s got an active imagination. In other words, she doesn’t have many real friends, only imaginary ones. She strikes up an odd relationship with an old woman in an old house with kind of an old daughter, who doesn’t have a good relationship with her and gets jealous of the kid. When she’s given a “magic ring”, she wishes for a true friend and one shows up, in the form of Irena, who really did die in the last picture. Her father is annoyed at her imaginary friends, but can’t believe it when she picks out her “friend” in her father’s old wedding photo. I think it’s better going into the film knowing you’re not going to get a bunch people running around turning into cats. Instead it’s actually, dare I say it, kind of sweet. It reminded a lot of Home Alone, of all things.

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)-Wise’s second horror film for Lewton is an adaptation of a Robert Louise Stevenson short story and is the last time horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi appeared on screen together. The story’s a little familiar, if only because it’s been copied quite a bit: a doctor needs corpses for his students to work with, so he makes a deal with Boris the cab driver. At first he digs them up, then he gets them in one step so to speak. One of the doctor’s students is getting cold feet with it all, while the doctor’s servant Bela wants in on the action and ends up a subject. There’s a little of Frankenstein in it with the getting of the bodies and all, but it’s really more Stevenson’s version of the Burke & Hare story (why they didn’t just do the story of the famous graverobbers, you got me). Another one that’s more drama than out and out horror, but there are several instances of the Lewton staple “incident in a dark alley”. There’s also the moral underpinnings of the whole “corpse gathering” thing, but it’s not a message picture. Not all that many bodies get snatched considering, but it’s a solid effort.

Wise of course went on to have a long and distinguished career with The Day The Earth Stood Still, Oscar winners West Side Story and The Sound of Music and of course Star Trek: The Motion Picture…well, give him points for trying on that one.
For the final two of the nine films, Mark Robson returns as director and Boris Karloff continues as the star. Both are period pieces (though one is only set some 30 years earlier) and like most of the Lewton films, they aren’t really horror so much as thrillers with some very disturbing aspects.

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)-Now this sounds like an “Island of Lost Souls” type of thing, with mad doctor Karloff doing all sorts of crazy experiments. Well throw out all those pre-conceptions, it couldn’t be further from them. Karloff is a Greek army officer on an island off the coast where he’s holed up with his men and the locals when a plague breaks out. The sickness makes everyone act bizarrely before causing death. The isolation begins to eat at him and he begins to think a local girl is an ancient Greek demon. I have to admit, I watched it twice and still wasn’t 100% sure what happened over the 70 minutes it was on. There’s some cool touches here and there like every one of the Lewton films. I think they were trying to be understated, but left things a little too confusing unnecessarily.

BEDLAM (1946)-Set in the mid 1700s in England, Karloff is the head of a notorious insane asylum. When a reformer comes to try and clean the place up, Karloff uses a foolish incident on her part to get her institutionalized, so he can keep his control over the place. Both here and in the earlier film, Robson relies his experience as an editor to utilize montages to connect scenes. It’s especially effective here, mixing in pictures of the time to set the mood and throw things off a bit. The ending’s pretty nifty, reminding me a lot of M, and Boris’s final fate is cool too.

The final piece in the collection is an hour long documentary on Lewton (I got the version without Scorsese), describing his early days as a novelist, how he hooked up with David O. Selznick, cutting his teeth on epics like Gone With The Wind and how all this experience got him his break at RKO to make the films in this collection. He comes off an early version of Roger Corman: making his films quick and cheap, but with an eye on consistent quality that is lacking in many of the AIP films (to be VERY charitable!)

The Lewton films provided a kind of counterpoint to the Universal pictures, showing a different side to the horror film. While I would qualify many of them more in the “thriller/suspense” category, they did open up the language of film for directors and writers in the future making horror films. The “girl walking alone when she realizes she’s being followed” scene is a cliché now, but someone had to come up with it first. That’s where these films came in. According to a lot of reviews online, my old employer Channel 9 played these films all the time when they were owned by RKO (RKO movies on an RKO station, makes perfect sense to me). I don’t remember them much myself, and once the station was sold, TCM became the home for these films and there’s at least 25 years separation there, so they weren’t in as heavy rotation as the main Universals. But with DVD, they’re on when you want them. Definitely worth watching for fans of the genre.

[Jason Aiken]

Joe Rogan and Rob Zombie discuss their love of classic horror films. I enjoyed the conversation.

[almuric]

The Haunted Palace (1963) - When is a Poe not a Poe? When it's a Lovecraft. After a couple of Poe adaptations, Roger Corman wanted to try something different, and who better than the work of an author who admired Poe? But AIP insisted on shoehorning this into the Poe series so they changed the title and Vincent Price intones a few lines of the titular poem to sort of, kind of, make this a Poe movie. Price plays the double role of Joseph Curwen, an 18th century warlock and his 19th century descendant Charles Dexter Ward. Lon Chaney Jr is on hand as the sort of sinister servant he played so often in his later career.

For what is the first time (as far as I know), the names of the Necronomicon, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Arkham are spoken on the big screen and that's a major moment for Lovecraft in the media. However, this movie stumbles where so many Lovecraft adaptations stumble, because how can you possibly depict the indescribable, especially on an AIP budget? One scene, where Ward is confronted by the local mutants on the streets of Arkham is effective and Lovecraftian. But the finale is a letdown. An immobile, four-armed monster statue with colored lights shining on it at the bottom of a pit just doesn't cut the mustard and ultimately, the audience is left haunted by what might have been. But it's worth watching just for Price and Chaney, so it's not a complete loss.

Next time: To the Doctor, a daughter

[efb]

O those Roger Corman movies! Dan O'Bannon's THE RESURRECTED (1991) also draws from Lovecraft's CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD, with Chris Sarandon as Ward/Curwen. Co-starring John Terry, relatively fresh off his one-shot as Felix Leiter in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. If memory serves, it was more faithful to Lovecraft's story than THE HAUNTED PALACE.

[johnnypt]

Oct 16, 2023 11:18:16 GMT -5 efb said:

O those Roger Corman movies! Dan O'Bannon's THE RESURRECTED (1991) also draws from Lovecraft's CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD, with Chris Sarandon as Ward/Curwen. Co-starring John Terry, relatively fresh off his one-shot as Felix Leiter in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. If memory serves, it was more faithful to Lovecraft's story than THE HAUNTED PALACE.

I think I remember Joe Bob Briggs did that one at one point.

[Lonewolf]

Oct 16, 2023 11:18:16 GMT -5 efb said:

O those Roger Corman movies! Dan O'Bannon's THE RESURRECTED (1991) also draws from Lovecraft's CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD, with Chris Sarandon as Ward/Curwen. Co-starring John Terry, relatively fresh off his one-shot as Felix Leiter in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. If memory serves, it was more faithful to Lovecraft's story than THE HAUNTED PALACE.

This seen from The Resurrected creeped me out......


  

[almuric]

The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) - Sometimes it's all in the execution. Despite a script which conflates Hyde with a "human werewolf" (werewolves are already half-human, aren't they?) and a vampire, despite a scene with 1950s cars driving past a window in a movie set on the 1910s, despite a British setting where almost no character has any kind of British accent, despite an over-familiar plot which reminds the audience not only of She Wolf of London and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (dairy is still not scary), this ends up being not that bad.

That this movie is halfway decent at all is largely up to Edgar G Ulmer. He's a long way from The Black Cat here, in his Poverty Row days that followed him stealing the mistress of a studio executive. Much as he does in The Man From Planet X, Ulmer conceals the shortcomings of his sets with lots of atmospheric fog. Gloria Talbot's nighttime visions are staged with some flare and in spite of the gaslighting plot, there actually is a monster in the end, so there's that. But what's with all the werewolf/vampire stuff? Was this originally a script featuring the daughter of a werewolf which got changed for name recognition? It's a mystery. In the end, this is not strictly essential viewing except for Jekyll and Hyde completists, but if you get a chance, there's worse ways to spend 71 minutes.

So many worse.

Next time: Mesa of lost sanity

[johnnypt]

I remember WOR playing this in a double feature with Son of Dr, Jekyll. They never did that with Frankenstein or Dracula that I remember even though I saw all the Son/Daughter pictures on that station.