Saturday, June 27, 1970: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

Synopsis: Retired archeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) is regaling his son John (John Hubbard) and John’s fiancée Isobel Evans (Elyse Knox) with the story of his strange expedition to Egypt thirty years earlier: how he and the members of his expedition found the tomb of the mummy Kharis and, breaking the seal, unleashed a horrible curse that brought the mummy back to life. In a series of flashbacks, we are told how various members of the expedition were killed by Kharis, who was being controlled by the high priest Andoheb (George Zucco). In the end the mummy was destroyed and Steve and the surviving members of his party returned home.

John and Isobel find the story so fantastic that it isn’t clear if they completely believe it, but Banning claims every word of it is true.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, an elderly Andoheb is handing off his mummy-protecting duties to young Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey). He tells the young man that the defilers of Kharis’ tomb still live; they must be tracked down and killed, and their line must be extinguished. Bey immediately makes plans to sail to Massachusetts, where the Banning family lives.

Once in America, Bey takes a job as caretaker in a cemetery, and from the caretaker’s cottage sets his plan in motion. Each night he gives the mummy the potion derived from nine tana leaves, which brings it to life. He orders the creature to kill Steve Banning. It shambles out to the Banning house and does so. The next night Bey orders it to dispense with Babe Hanson, another survivor of the expedition. This too the mummy accomplishes.

But a mummy's work is never done, and we learn that young John Banning is on the schedule for the next night. Surprisingly, the ultra-disciplined Bey hesitates. He finds himself captivated by the beautiful Isobel, and disobeys his orders from Andoheb by sending the mummy not to kill John but to capture Isobel, and bring her to him. What he does not know is that the townspeople are becoming suspicious of him, and that Kharis is close to rebelling against his sacrilege….

Comments: Let me confess right away: I’m a sucker for a good mummy movie.

My wife claims that the phrase "good mummy movie" is an oxymoron, but she is wrong. Mummies are thrilling creatures. They only do one thing (stumble around and kill people) but they do it really well. They are relentless, and of all the classic monsters in the Universal stable, they are the only ones focused exclusively on revenge.

Remember that Banning and his merry crew of grave robbers were explicitly warned not to break the seal of Kharis' tomb, but they dismissed the warning as superstitious nonsense and did it anyway. For this reason they richly deserve what's coming to them; and I find it hard not to root for Kharis in these films. I've been waiting for Horror Incorporated to bring us some mummy-related mayhem.

And mummy-related mayhem is what we get, in spite of a somewhat uneven script.

The Mummy's Tomb starts out quite shakily, dressing Dick Foran in some unconvincing old-age makeup and having him frame a flashback sequence from 1940's The Mummy's Hand. The use of scenes taken from this earlier movie is quite extensive, running more than ten minutes, or nearly a sixth of the entire movie's running time. This tells the viewer two things right away:

1. Enjoy these scenes set in Egypt, because you won't see any more of them for the rest of the film.
2. Wasn't The Mummy's Hand an exciting film? We think so too. Wish we could just show you that one again.

But once we're done with this clumsy bit of exposition, the movie starts running on its own power. Transplanting the action to Massachusetts is a bit problematic (how a shambling mummy is able to navigate the streets of Mapleton without being observed is never addressed) and the action is rather slow out of the gate, but it pays off in the end. We get a good, torch-wielding mob in the finest Universal tradition, and the movie finishes in the Banning house, now burning to the ground with a presumably stressed-out mummy wandering around inside it.

You would expect a film like this to be building an atmosphere of suspense and foreboding, as the smug members of the Banning party come to realize that 30 year's distance from Kharis has not nearly enough to make them safe. But that never happens. Instead we're treated to an atmosphere of rather dreary cheapness, a problem that plagues many of the Universal horror entries from this time.

Director Harold Young likes to use newspaper headlines for exposition, a common practice for films of this era, but he hilariously overuses the tactic here; every headline employs gigantic JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR font:

There are always, of course, moments of unintentional hilarity in movies like this, but I will refrain from pointing any more of them out to you. It isn't a good idea to mock Kharis. If he could show up in 1942 after a sleep of 3,000 years, he could terrorize us all in 2011. He would kill me first, obviously, since I wrote this blog entry. But he wouldn't stop there: he'd track the IP addresses of all visitors to the Horror Incorporated Project and wipe them out, one by one. You might think that you could outrun him, but you would be wrong. Through the magic of tricky editing, he'd get you.

So let's just move along, shall we?

THE MUMMY'S TOMB can be found on the DVD set The Mummy: The Legacy Collection, which contains all five of the original films. It's widely available, but you might want to check Alibris first -- there are lots of used copies out there.

Saturday, June 20, 1970: The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)

Synopsis: Nathanial Billings (Boris Karloff) is a wigged-out professor who owns a dilapidated colonial inn. Billings carries out unorthodox experiments in the basement of the house, much to the consternation of the town mayor / sheriff / banker / justice of the peace Dr. Lorencz (Peter Lorre). Billings is paying a usurious interest rate on the mortgage and for this reason is eager to sell. The only hitch is that nobody would want the place -- it is in desperate need of maintenance and is quite off the beaten track.

His prayers are answered when young divorcee Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell) shows up at the inn with the determination to buy it and restore it to its former approximation of glory. Billings gets her to agree to let him stay on for a time and work on his experiments in the basement.

The nature of his experiments quickly becomes clear to us. Billings is a patriotic fellow, and he wants to do his part for the war effort. He believes he is closing in on a method of making ordinary men into super-soldiers. Alas, none of the door-to-door salesmen he's used as guinea pigs have become super-soldiers. In fact, none of them have survived the treatment. So there is a growing stack of dead salesmen in the basement, which he is desperately trying to hide.

Soon Winnie's ex-husband (Larry Park) shows up and immediately becomes suspicious of the goings-on around the house, Dr. Lorencz becomes an unlikely backer in Dr. Billing's experiments, and a new dopey door-to-door salesman ( "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom) becomes the latest chump hoping to be converted to a superman.

Comments: This is the first madcap comedy we've seen on Horror Incorporated, and it's a movie so tethered to one locale that it looks as though it was originally written for the stage -- even though the credits indicate that it's an original screenplay.

And while I knew I'd never seen it before, why did The Boogie Man Will Get You seem so familiar to me?

I finally figured it out, and no doubt you have already done so as well: The Boogie Man Will Get You is a pretty blatant knockoff of Arsenic and Old Lace, which was a popular Broadway show at the time. Karloff himself had originated the role of Jonathan Brewster on stage the previous year. Instead of two dotty but lovable aunts collecting dead bodies in the cellar of their boarding house, we have a dotty but lovable scientist storing dead bodies in the cellar of his inn.

As you've probably already guessed, this is about as much a horror movie as Arsenic and Old Lace was. It seems to have slipped into the Son of Shock! package more or less by accident (perhaps the title and the presence of Karloff and Peter Lorre convinced someone at Screen Gems that it was a horror flick).

So we must shrug for the moment and go along with it.

As a horror movie, it's obviously a non-starter. As a comedy -- well, it certainly makes you appreciate Arsenic and Old Lace, in much the same way that watching Starcrash improves your opinion of George Lucas' talent as a filmmaker:

Karloff is perfectly serviceable in the absent-minded professor role, and Peter Lorre in particular seems to be enjoying himself as the kooky and amoral Dr. Lorencz. Retired boxer "Slapsy" Maxie Rosenbloom gets in some laughs as an unsuccessful cosmetics salesman.

And Jeff Donnell (here credited as "Miss Jeff Donnell") shines in her too-brief screen appearance. Considered too plain-looking to be a romantic lead (at least by Hollywood standards), her career sputtered out too quickly.... though I suspect any agent who let her use the stage name "Jeff" might not have been acting in her best interests.

But beyond that?

Hmm....well...

Nah. Sorry, I got nothin'.

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THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU is available on the 2-DVD set Icons of Horror Collection: Boris Karloff

Look, what do I know? Maybe you'll like it. Proceed with caution.

Saturday, June 13, 1970: The Black Room (1935)

Synopsis: In a Tyrolean fiefdom, a baron anxiously awaits the birth of an heir. But he is greatly distressed to learn that his wife has given birth to twins. An old family prophecy holds that one day twins will be born to the family, and that the younger twin will murder the older in the onyx-lined "black room" of the castle. Fearful of the prophecy, the baron orders that the entrance to the room be bricked up.

Some forty years later, we find the older twin Gregor ruling as baron. He is a cruel and dissolute tyrant, hated by his subjects, and he is suspected in the disappearances of several young women. But the local authorities turn a blind eye to his activities.

The younger twin Anton (Boris Karloff) is a nice but somewhat ineffectual fellow, and has been away since his brother's rule began. At Gregor's invitation, Anton returns home.

At first Anton refuses to believe the rumors about Gregor, but it soon becomes clear to him that his older brother is every bit as cruel and despotic as the locals allege.

When Gregor is implicated in the disappearance of Mashka, a gypsy serving girl, the townspeople rise up. They storm the castle and demand Gregor be handed over to them.

To everyone's surprise, Gregor tells the townspeople that he will relinquish his authority immediately and turn it over to his younger brother Anton. This mollifies the crowd and Anton becomes the new baron.

While acquainting Anton with his new duties, Gregor shows him an interesting trick: inside the huge fireplace in the main hall there is a secret passage that leads into the Black Room. Gregor reveals that he has been there many times, and that there is a pit beneath the room. When Anton looks down into the pit, he sees a number of bodies that have been thrown down there -- including the body of the missing girl Mashka. Gregor strikes Anton and tosses him down into the pit as well.

As Anton dies, Gregor taunts him. He reminds him that, according to the prophecy, Anton was supposed to kill Gregor in that room. "The prophesy will be fulfilled!" Anton insists. "From the grave?" Gregor asks sarcastically. "Yes," Anton says as he dies. "From the grave!"

Emerging from the Black Room, Gregor now assumes the identity of Anton, able to rule again while being absolved of all his past crimes. Yet Anton's dying words keep coming back to him...

Comments: Whenever you are introduced to a pair of twins in the movies, you can be sure that one twin will turn out to be good and the other evil. This is such a persistent cinematic trope that if I didn't know better, I'd assume that this was simply an accepted fact of real life.

Well, what do I know? Maybe it is; my experience with twins is quite limited. I seem to remember a pair of twins in my kindergarten class; neither seemed noticeably good or evil, but perhaps their true natures hadn't yet emerged.

Many years later I spent a summer working in a factory with a pair of stunningly beautiful twin gymnasts. For most of the summer I simply assumed I was dreaming and that they weren't really there. I remember being rather sweet on one of them (probably because she laughed at my jokes), but neither seemed the least bit evil. Of course, the evil twin might have been pretending to be good, for her own nefarious purposes. That is exactly the sort of thing I would expect.

Passing yourself off as your good twin is a deliciously evil thing to do, and it's an absolute requirement in your standard good twin / evil twin movie.

And of course it happens in tonight's feature, The Black Room. The insidious Gregor kills brother Anton and takes his place. This is bad luck for for Anton but a good thing for us, because good twins are always boring and we're much better with him out of the way.

Prophesies, of course, always come true in the movies as well. That's just a fact. So we know going in that even in death, Anton will somehow manage to kill Gregor in the Black Room. And we're not disappointed.

This is the second Columbia feature to be broadcast on Horror Incorporated, and already we're seeing a pattern: Columbia horror films are a bit stingy on the horror. Not a great concern -- this movie is pretty lively -- but Universal would have at least thrown in a torture chamber or a vampire or something to keep it interesting.

Another difference is that angry villagers in a Universal film always carry torches and pitchforks. They get liquored up and act crazy. But disappointingly, the villagers aren't really angry here; they are stone cold sober and they arrive at the castle empty-handed. And when Gregor renounces his title, they all melt away.

The citizens of Vasaria would never have stood for it. They'd have burned down the castle just for the trouble Gregor had put them all to.

Karloff does a good job playing the dandified Anton, but the real fun is clearly playing Gregor, and later, playing Gregor playing Anton. Unlike some actors who have done double duty on-screen, Karloff is perfectly capable of playing two entirely different characters. As always Karloff is wonderful to watch and I'm happy that the fame he found in Frankenstein made it possible for him to break into more lead roles. He's really marvelous here.

THE BLACK ROOM is available on the 2-DVD set Icons of Horror Collection: Boris Karloff

It's widely available, and if your local video store doesn't have it, Amazon.com will.

Saturday, June 6, 1970: Behind the Mask (1932)

Synopsis: A Sing Sing inmate named Quinn (Jack Holt) is plotting an escape. His cellmate Henderson (Boris Karloff) advises against it, claiming that powerful friends will spring both of them soon if they are patient. But seeing that Quinn will not be deterred, Henderson tells him how to get in touch with his associate on the outside, a man named Arnold (Claude King).

Quinn’s escape is successful and he travels to Arnold’s mansion in the country. Arnold seems afraid to assist Quinn, but is too frightened of his employer, the mysterious drug kingpin Mr. X, to refuse. He employs Quinn as his chauffer, and Quinn becomes enamored of Arnold’s beautiful daughter Julie (Constance Cummings).

Soon enough Henderson is released and makes contact with Dr. August Steiner (Edward Van Sloan), who runs the Eastland Hospital. We learn that Steiner is also an agent of Mr. X , and he tells Henderson that Mr. X arranged for him to be incarcerated so long because he was displeased with him.

Henderson suggests Quinn as the perfect man to deliver the next drug shipment for the organization. But as soon as Steiner sees Quinn he knows the man is an undercover federal agent. Henderson is shocked and angered by this revelation.

But the plan to have Quinn to pick up the shipment via seaplane goes forward. After Quinn delivers the drugs to a ship at sea, Henderson instructs Quinn to take off and then bail out – the boat, he says, will come to his location and pick him up. Quinn, sensing that this is an attempt to dupe him, quickly “rigs a dummy”*, attaches it to the parachute and tosses it overboard so that Henderson will think it’s him.

But before long Steiner captures Quinn himself. He plans on disposing of the federal agent in his usual manner – by getting him admitted to his hospital and subjecting him to an unnecessary – and fatal – operation….

Comments: Okay, let's see what we've got here. A sinister mastermind known only as“Mr. X”. A wire recorder that captures phone dispatches from criminal agents. Hospitals where snoopy undercover cops are dispatched with unnecessary surgeries. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, sure it does. And the truth is, director John Francis Dillon could have made a good movie from the raw material that went into Behind the Mask. Instead, every time he got close to doing something interesting, he chickened out.

It's difficult to understand how you could blow so many opportunities in a mere 70 minutes. Everything in this movie is bungled – Agent Burke’s murder at the hands of the drug gang establishes an entirely different m.o. than is used later in the film. Quinn’s romance with Julie seems exhausted and perfunctory. Henderson’s attempt to kill Quinn when he discovers his identity is exceedingly clumsy (why doesn’t Henderson just shoot him?). Mr. X himself, whose identity is supposed to be the Big Fat Secret Key To Everything, isn’t even mentioned until 24 minutes into the picture. You can get away with pacing like that if you’re Tarkovsky or maybe Hitchcock, and then just barely.

This is a movie that perfectly demonstrates the kind of bread-and-butter character parts Boris Karloff won before he became a household name in his mid-40s. Karloff worked on this movie after Frankenstein was filmed, but before it was released. After his smash success playing Colin Clive's tormented science fair project, he was able to quit playing common thugs and graduated to mad scientists and brilliant lunatics.

Perhaps because success came relatively late in his career, he never seemed to take it for granted, saying "You could heave a brick out of the window and hit ten actors who could play my parts. I just happened to be on the right corner at the right time." It's a statement that I guarantee you'll never hear from Tom Cruise.

Karloff is lucky, too, that he gets to work again with Edward Van Sloan, who gives a remarkably wacky and over-the-top performance here as Dr. Steiner.

Better-known today as the father of actor Tim (The Magnificent Ambersons) Holt, Jack Holt was once famous in his own right. He appeared in nearly a hundred silent features, and he carried on as a brusque leading-man type well into the sound era. I always associate him with Robert Armstrong for some reason, perhaps because they worked in the same era and used the same theatrical rat-a-tat delivery.

BEHIND THE MASK never had a proper DVD release, but you can purchase a copy from Loving the Classics, a great site for public-domain movies.

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*How? There was only room for one dummy on that plane.

Saturday, May 30, 1970: Before I Hang (1940)

Synopsis: Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff) did the best he could for the elderly patient in his care, even giving the man injections of his test serum to reverse the effects of aging. But the serum was a failure. Finally, Garth helped his agonized patient achieve a peaceful death.

Now convicted of a mercy killing, the judge sentences Garth to death by hanging -- a sentence to be carried out in one month's time.

At the state penitentiary, prison doctor Ralph Howard (Edward Van Sloan) becomes intrigued with Garth's line of research, and he convinces the warden to allow him to work with Dr. Garth in a makeshift lab on the prison grounds. Working quickly, knowing that Garth's execution date is fast approaching, the two are elated when they are able to create a promising test serum.

But fresh blood is needed for further tests, and Dr. Garth asks Dr. Howard to secure blood from a prisoner due to be executed that night. Howard sees no reason why this shouldn't be allowed, and he takes the prisoner's blood after the execution.

The new batch of serum is finished just minutes before Dr. Garth is taken away to be hanged. Garth injects himself with the new serum, reasoning that the autopsy will allow Howard to examine the effects the serum had on the body.

But moments before the execution, Garth's sentence is commuted to life in prison.

Within 24 hours, Garth's body has undergone a remarkable change. His heart is stronger, his hair is turning dark -- he seems in every 20 years younger.

Dr. Howard decides that he will be the next one to try the serum. But as Garth prepares to inject him, he begins to feel strange. Dr. Howard, seeing his face, realizes in an instant what has happened: they used the blood of a three-time murderer to make the serum, and now Garth has absorbed the killer's nature into his bloodstream....

Comments: Drumroll, please: tonight we have the first Horror Incorporated feature that doesn't come from Universal Studios.

Before I Hang was part of the Son of Shock! package, which we discussed here; of the 74 movies included in Shock! and Son of Shock! 62 were from Universal. The remaining 12 were from Columbia.

Why Columbia? It's because TV distributor Screen Gems was owned by Columbia studios, which could toss in titles from its own vaults.

But it couldn't toss in many. Columbia had only dabbled in the horror genre, and it certainly hadn't developed the familiar faces and the durable franchises that Universal had. So these are relatively small and forgotten movies, somewhat on a par with the lesser-known Universal efforts of the time.

Before I Hang is certainly minor, but it does have its charms. It has an admirably goofy premise, equal parts Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Hands of Orlac.

The whole movie turns on the idea that the recipient of a blood transfusion might absorb the personal characteristics of the donor. Transfusions weren't new in 1940; in the 19th century it was found that a human-to-human transfusion would save one patient, but kill the next, and no one knew why. It wasn't until the advent of blood typing at the dawn of the 20th century that the procedure moved past the experimental stage. Vaccines against a host of diseases were perfected in the first decades of the 20th century, and such things as injections and inoculations and blood draws were becoming increasingly common.

Misperception and misinformation persisted, of course, as they always do in the wake of new discoveries. As late as the 1920s, Russian serologist Alexander Bogdanov believed that taking regular transfusions of whole blood was a potential fountain of youth. And it's easy to imagine why one would think such a thing. Blood has always represented life and vitality in the human mind, and the great new strides in medicine seemed to offer unlimited promise.

Which brings us to the rejuvenated Dr. Garth meeting with his elderly friends in his drawing room, offering them each the chance to be young again. Rather than jumping to their feet, rolling up their sleeves and shouting "Me first!", as one might expect, they each shrug and say, in effect, no thanks, I've lived a rich and full life, it's gone on long enough. This comes across as fairly improbable (I'm guessing that the screenwriter was very young), and the movie would have been better served if the men were greatly tempted to be young again but were held back by the nagging sense that somehow it was all too easy, that there was a catch they hadn't been able to figure out yet.

This, of course, is where horror films always diverge from science fiction films. In horror there is always a catch, and the cost of getting what you want inevitably proves to be ruinous.

But Before I Hang never pushes that sensibility very hard, and comes across a bit muddled as a result. Garth is depicted in the movie's first act as a kindly old scientist, guilty only of acceding to his dying patient's request for an end to his suffering, interested only in the good of humanity. He is no Faust, willing to trade away eternity for fleeting success. The movie works so hard to put us on Garth's side that we cannot hold him accountable for what happens next.

So we wind up with a fairly anemic villain, as Garth is repeatedly -- and predictably -- possessed with the soul of a serial killer.

And as Garth comes under suspicion almost immediately for his crimes, there's very little suspense to be had as the film totters on to its conclusion.

But as a showcase for Boris Karloff's talent, Before I Hang excels. It struck me once again how physical an actor Karloff was. His body language for the elderly Dr. Garth is spot on. A big, ungainly-looking man, Karloff isn't able to mimic the frailness of a septuagenerian, but his whole physical demeanor is brilliant -- the stoop-shouldered gait, the slowness in reaction time, the slight fogginess in his general demeanor. The old-age makeup in this film isn't bad, but Karloff has do most of the work himself (unlike Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, whose state-of-the-art age makeup didn't hide the fact that he walked and talked like, well, Tom Cruise).

And what a joy it is to see Karloff working with Edward Van Sloan again! The two are delightful to watch. Interestingly, Van Sloan looks younger than the characters he played a decade earlier in Frankenstein and Dracula, making me wonder if he took a bit of Dr. Garth's serum himself.

Interlude: Mant! (1962)

Gentle reader, I apologize for the delay in bringing the latest Horror Incorporated feature to you. I'll have a summary of our next feature up shortly.

In the meantime, please enjoy the trailer for Lawrence Woolsey's 1962 chiller Mant!

They sure don't make pictures like that anymore.

Saturday, May 23, 1970: The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946)

Synopsis: Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce) arrives in the small town of Domingo. She's been hired as a nurse / companion to a reclusive blind woman, Zenovia Dollard. Moments after the bus has dropped Jean off in town she bumps into Hal Wentley, an old school friend who has long carried a torch for her. Jean seems uncomfortable seeing him again, and Hal is disappointed that she isn't in town to visit him. But when the expected car from the Dollard mansion doesn't arrive to pick her up, Jean accepts a ride out to the place from Hal.

Dollard's place is far out of town, a creepy house complete with a creepy mute servant named Mario (Rondo Hatton). It seems Miss Dollard has trouble keeping assistants on staff, which might seem surprising given the light duties involved, but might not when you consider there's a freakish-looking manservant skulking around in the shadows. Miss Dollard is troubled to hear that Jean knows someone in town, and expresses the hope that Jean will stay for a long while. She certainly doesn't want Jean to run off and get married, as her last assistant did.

Meanwhile, the local farmers are upset at a wave of cattle deaths that have been occurring throughout the area, deaths that have been left the local soil expert (Milburn Stone) baffled; the cattle deaths indicate that poison plants are growing in the area, yet there are no such plants to be found anywhere. One by one, the farmers conclude that they must sell out before they're ruined.

Back at the mansion, Jean settles into her new duties, which prove to be less than taxing. But she is alarmed by the baleful stares and the unwelcome attention from the grotesque Mario, and puzzled that she sleeps so soundly during the night, almost as if she were drugged.

What she does not suspect is that she is being drugged, every night; what's more, the sinister Miss Dollard is draining her blood each night in order to feed a brood of carnivorous plants in the basement, and that she is using the plants to make a deadly poison....

Comments: Remember Gale Sondergaard? She played the conniving Irene Herrick in The Invisible Man's Revenge, which we saw on April 11. The Minnesota native must have made an impression at Universal when she appeared in a 1944 Sherlock Holmes movie called The Spider Woman. Because the studio decided to use the same character again in a different setting.

Not exactly the same character, mind you; instead of Adrea Spedding of London, Sondergaard was now playing the allegedly blind Zenovia Dollard of Domingo, a wealthy small-town recluse with evil on her mind.

She's trading in poisonous orchids rather than poisonous arachnids this time, but never mind -- Sondergaard was quite good at projecting an outwardly friendly demeanor while suggesting something sinister lurking just beneath the surface.

And she projects just the right sort of menace for this creepy little mystery story, which cleverly uses Jean's vulnerability to ratchet up the suspense. Both Miss Dollard and Mario are interested in Jean for different reasons, neither of which can be described as wholesome.

And the small town of Domingo is shown to add to Jean's sense of isolation and paranoia: when she wants to quietly mail a letter to her predecessor, who left a forwarding address in New York, she is thwarted by the nosy denizens of small-town America, ca. 1946. The Domingo postmaster is suspicious even of her request for an air-mail stamp ("Air mail? Goodness! What's your hurry, miss?").

If I have any complaint about the character of Dollard, it's that she's a little too evil. Don't get me wrong, I love evil women*, but she seems to be trying too hard. Zenovia, honey, isn't it evil enough to drug your hired help so that you can drain her blood in order to breed carnivorous plants so that you can poison the local cattle population? Must you pretend to be blind as well? That's just showing off, darling.

But she is by far the most interesting character in the movie, even more intriguing than Rondo Hatton's glowering Mario. We must fill in a lot of the blanks in Mario's background, and this ambiguity serves the plot well. The movie suggests that he had an overweening interest in some of Miss Dollard's past caretakers; but beyond that we have little to go on. Hatton's performance here is somewhat better than that in House of Horrors; he makes the most of a non-speaking part, conveying a wide range of emotion with some very subtle body language.

Brenda Joyce is best-known as the second actress to play Jane in the Tarzan movies. About her performance in The Spider Woman Strikes Back, I can only say that she is best-known as the second actress to play Jane in the Tarzan movies.

Interestingly, there were originally twelve speaking roles in Spider Woman Strikes Back; five of them were cut out prior to release, and the film was trimmed down to less than an hour. I can't say the brief running time hobbles the narrative. The movie moves along at a good clip, and none of the scenes appear to be superfluous.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back was never released on home video, but there are businesses that will burn DVDs for you from old 16mm prints. The quality isn't stellar, but most of these movies can be had if you are persistent and willing to pay.

The truth is, there is very little you can't find online. One thing I'll say about the internet -- for better or worse, it's good at bringing obsessive people together.

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*I even married one! Ha ha! Thank you, folks, thank you, I'll be here all week.

(Actually, at the rate I'm going, I'll be here until the spring of 2020.)