Saturday, November 20, 1971 (Midnight): The Ape (1940) / The Brighton Strangler (1945)

Synopsis: Dr. Bernard Adrian (Boris Karloff)  is widely disliked by his small town neighbors. The locals have few rational reasons for their dislike. Dr. Adrian keeps to himself, but he is civil enough.  Nevertheless there is a general feeling that doesn't belong, and the distinctly vague complaint that he "experiments too much".

The one person in town who adores Dr. Adrian is Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon), a young woman stricken with polio.  Dr. Adrian dotes on her like his own daughter, and this causes resentment from Frances' jealous jerk of a boyfriend Danny (Gene O'Donnell).

Dr. Adrian has been experimenting with the spinal fluid of animals, and he believes he is getting closer to perfecting a serum that will cure those who've been stricken with polio.  At about the same time, a circus comes to town, and Dr. Adrian encourages Danny to take Frances to see it.  Late the same night, an ape badly injures its trainer and escapes from the circus.  The trainer is brought to Dr. Adrian's surgery, but it is clear that the man has little chance of survival.

Soon Dr. Adrian has created a human serum and he begins to treat Frances with it.  The serum causes great pain to her legs, which alarms Danny, but Dr. Adrian sees this as an encouraging sign, since the paralysis had left her without any feeling in her legs whatsoever.  Meanwhile, the ape, which is still on the loose, kills another man, and Dr. Adrian must sign the death certificate.

Frances' reaction to the spinal fluid treatment is encouraging.  While the pain in her legs is growing worse, she is able to move her foot a little -- a clear sign that Dr. Adrian's treatment is working.

Late one night the ape breaks into Dr. Adrian's lab.  Dr. Adrian is able to kill it but not before it smashes his vials of serum. He decides to keep the ape's death a secret.

Soon the county coroner comes to visit Adrian.  It seems the two victims of the ape were both found to have puncture wounds in the spine -- as though Dr. Adrian had injected something into the men -- or extracted something.

Before long, Dr. Adrian is topping up his spinal fluid supply by wearing the ape's skin and murdering those who mocked his work....

Comments: Small-town people do not come off well in Hollywood movies of this era.  Like other horror films from the 1940s -- The Spider Woman Strikes Back, The Man Who Returned To Life and The Devil Commands among them -- small-town folk are depicted in The Ape as a bunch of peevish, paranoid busybodies. There is no reason, really, that anyone should dislike the kindly Dr. Adrian. But of course it's convenient to the plot that they do, because it gives Dr. Adrian an excuse to turn against them and....um....wear an ape's skin around town and.... brutally kill people so.... um....so that he can draw spinal fluid from their corpses....

Aw, I give up. You just can't talk about this movie without banging your shins against its absurd plot points. In the end you just shrug and mumble to yourself, "It's Monogram, Jake. Forget it". Like our last Monogram entry, Return of the Ape Man, this one casually tells an increasingly idiotic story, almost daring you to give up on it.

Working in the film's favor is Boris Karloff,  much more adept at carrying a bad movie than Lugosi  (Karloff is better at carrying good movies too). It's pretty much a standard Karloff mad-scientist picture of the era, albeit somewhat dumber (and a lot chintzier) than the Columbia pictures he'd only recently starred in. 

The screenplay was co-written Curt Siodmak, very loosely based on a 1927 stage play.  Siodmak was already nursing his pet obsession with swapping out brains and brain fluid and so forth. In spite of his one-track mind Siodmak was a decent screenwriter, workmanlike if nothing else, but he doesn't come across very well here.  Monogram wasn't the sort of studio where much care was taken with any aspect of the production, least of all the script; and we have to presume that the first draft of this clunker was good enough for producer Scott Dunlop.

The Brighton Strangler

Synopsis: Celebrated actor Reginald Parker (John Loder) has just completed a successful run on the London stage with the hit play The Brighton Strangler.  The theater manager ruefully notes that he could easily run the show for another year, and he's sorry that Parker has decided to hang up the role.  So arresting is Parker's performance that there's no thought of bringing in another actor to play author-turned-murderer Edward Grey.  For audiences Parker is the Strangler.

It is December 23rd, and after wishing the cast and crew a happy Christmas, Parker prepares to leave the theater and rejoin his wife, who is also the author of the play.  But German bombers are making a nighttime raid on London.  Numerous bombs hit the neighborhood and the theater is destroyed.  Parker staggers away from the ruined building.  He's gotten a nasty knock on the head and he is in a daze.  Has he forgotten who he is?  Not exactly; he remembers that he's Edward Grey, and he heads to Victoria Station and buys a ticket to Brighton.

At the station he meets beautiful young April Manby (June Duprez), a WAAF heading home for Christmas.  Seeing that Parker -- or rather, Grey -- is injured, she helps daub a bit of blood off his forehead.  On the trip to Brighton she confides in him that she has secretly married her sweetheart, an American soldier named Bob Carson (Michael St. Angel).  Upon arriving, April is met by her parents, respected physician Dr. Manby (Gilbert Emery) and his wife (Lydia Bilbrook). They invite Grey to come over and celebrate Christmas Eve at their house the following evening.

The next night, Grey leaves his hotel room and walks to the Manby house.  Along the way he encounters the mayor of Brighton, Herman Brand (Ian Wolfe).  Grey accuses the kindly mayor of being the barrister who had betrayed him -- a charge which puzzles Brand but which we know is taken from the play The Brighton Strangler.  Reaching into his pocket, Grey produces a silk cord, which he'd kept in his pocket after the show closed. He uses the silk cord to strangle Brand, and then proceeds to the Christmas party as though nothing has happened.

Late that evening, Chief Inspector Allison (Miles Mander) arrives at the Manby house.  Everyone is shocked to hear of the murder of the mayor. The following day, the police interview all new arrivals in town, including Grey.  Like the character in the play, Grey is outwardly pleasant and charming.  He says that he is staying in town to write a book, and that he is a friend of the Manby family.  Soon he is crossed off the list of suspects.

April is surprised to learn that Bob is able to join her in Brighton for a few days.  But because of the mayor's funeral, she isn't able to meet him at the station, and she asks Grey to meet him for her.  Grey meets Bob, and takes him over to the hotel.  But as Bob checks into his room, Grey goes to his own room and falls asleep.    He dreams that he is confronting Inspector Allison, who is now another of his persecutors from the play. 

As Bob goes over to his new friends's room to knock, he overhears Grey talking angrily in his sleep -- vowing revenge, and threatening to kill an unseen someone....

Comments: There's something inherently nutty about actors. They tend to be rootless types who spend their days crying and emoting and otherwise pretending to be people they aren't. And while Reginald Parker isn't a Method actor, he is so wrapped up in his fake life that he's only one knock on the head away from trading it in for his real life.

This is the sort of premise that could easily descend into self-parody, and as a result the screenwriters are careful not to portray Parker as a guy obsessed with the role he plays.  As the movie opens we're told that Parker has chosen to stop playing the Strangler on stage, even though the show is a hit.  Acting might be his profession, but he isn't a weirdo about it -- he has a real life offstage.  He is a loving and attentive husband, and he looks forward to collaborating on other projects with his playwright wife.  He is unfailingly kind and courteous to everyone on the cast and crew, and we accept that his success hasn't turned him into a boor or a megalomaniac.

Once his credentials as a nice, well-adjusted person are established (see, he's not like an actor at all!) we get to the bombing raid that drops part of the roof onto his head.  The is actually a great device, much more dramatic than if he had fallen off his bicycle or walked into a lamppost, but the wartime setting also presents a risk: wartime pictures look dated just as soon as the war in question is over.  I imagine the producers were sweating bullets about that, wondering if the war would end before their movie was released.  In fact The Brighton Strangler was released before the end of the war, but just barely,  in April of 1945.

 As unlikely a premise as this is, The Brighton Strangler is a pretty good little thriller, helped enormously by the presence of John Loder as Reginald Parker / Edward Grey.  Loder has an easygoing charm that puts us on his side, and although he doesn't quite pull off the deranged serial killer bit (he was a bit too wholesome-looking to come across as dangerous) he's still required to carry a lot of the film himself, and he does.

The lovely June Duprez brings us a very self-assured April Manby, and Miles Mander is quite likable as the ill-fated Inspector Allison. Ian Wolfe shows up -- he seems to have been born elderly -- as the town mayor, and Michael St. Angel has some funny scenes as the all-too-American Bob, who keeps his British hosts baffled by a never-ending stream of American slang -- "skip it", "juke joint","on the nose", "don't snap your cap," etc. But amusingly St. Angel is evidently British -- at one point he tells Parker / Grey "I'll ring you up", a Britishism that no American could have delivered with a straight face. Who's the phony now?

Saturday, November 13, 1971 (Midnight): Svengali (1931) / The Devil Bat's Daughter (1946)

Synopsis: The eccentric musician Svengali (John Barrymore) ekes out a living as a music tutor in Paris. He lives a decidedly bohemian lifestyle: he rarely bathes, his clothes are worn and unkempt, and he owes money to just about everyone he knows.

Svengali is acquainted with a group of English expat artists who live nearby, and it is through them that he first sees the lovely young model  Trilby (Marian Marsh).  Like most men he is thoroughly taken with her, drawn to her beauty, innocence and playfulness, but she is in love with an Englishman named Billee (Bramwell Fletcher).

Among Svengali's talents is a knack for hypnotism, and he offers to help Trilby with her persistent headaches by putting her under his spell and eliminating the pain through the power of suggestion. Before long, the amoral mentalist decides that he can do more than this, and under his power Trilby sends a note to Billee rejecting him, and leading him to believe she has committed suicide.  But in fact she has fled Paris with Svengali, starting a new life not only as his musical protege but as his bride.

Under Svengali's tutelage, Trilby becomes a famous singer, performing across Europe as Mdme. Svengali.  Svengali himself becomes wealthy and powerful, with the most important figures in the music world begging for a moment of his time.  Yet Svengali is not happy.  In spite of his control over Trilby, he knows that she doesn't really love him.

Soon enough, Svengali makes a triumphant return to Paris. Billee is astonished to see that Trillby is not only alive, but is Svengali's wife.  When Trilby sees Billee, she is momentarily ecstatic to see him, and Svengali must struggle to bring her back under his control....

Comments: In spite of its theme of hypnotic control, Svengali isn't so much a horror film as it is a romantic tragedy. Billee is made to believe the woman he loves has killed herself, thanks to the work of an unprincipled cad, and we sympathize with him. Trilby is victim to a much crueler form of manipulation, and she evokes our pity as well. But curiously, the one we really wind up feeling sorry for is Svengali himself.   He is a monster in his way, but like King Kong or the Creature From the Black Lagoon he is a tragic one.  He only wants the love of one woman, and he seems to know he is fated never to have it.

Like all fools for love, he keeps on trying even when he knows how things are going to end. His method of controlling Trilby may be exotic, but it's not so different than those used by jealous lovers down through the ages: separate her from friends and family, keep her close at hand, and force her to regard him as the center of her universe.

What's tragic about the character of Svengali is that for all his power, he can't control the one thing he wants. Everything he does in the movie -- making her a famous singer, touring Europe with her in tow, becoming rich and famous and respected -- was all in hopes of winning her love. 

John Barrymore's performance does a lot to sell the character as a human being rather than merely a villain (a stereotypically Jewish one, it should be noted).  It's a hammy performance, of course (Barrymore was a ham of the first magnitude) but he is able to add touches of humor and tragedy to the role that make the character memorable. This was a high note in a film career that had enjoyed many high notes, but it also meant Barrymore had a long way to fall. By 1940 the studios would be trading on his famous name while casting him in increasingly meager and humiliating parts. It can't be said that his talent was being wasted, though, since his long years of heavy drinking had rendered him incapable of memorizing dialogue anyway.

The beautiful Marian Marsh, still a teenager when she starred in this film, is the perfect Trilby.  She so perfectly conveys Trilby's innocence and playfulness that it's easy to imagine anyone -- even the creepy Svengali -- falling head over heels for her.  She effortlessly conveys both the woman who loves Billee and the one who stares at him coldly when Svengali works his hypnotic hoodoo on her.

Devil Bat's Daughter (1946)

Synopsis: A young woman (Rosemary LaPlanche) is found lying facedown on the highway late at night, and a passing good Samaritan stops and takes her to the Sheriff's office.  She is conscious but in a catatonic state. A local cabbie identifies her as the fare he picked up earlier that evening.  She'd wanted to go to the "old Carruthers place".  When the cabbie told her the place has  been deserted for years, she reacted with a shocked expression.  Nevertheless it is at the Carruthers place that the cabbie leaves her.

Surmising that the woman's missing bag must still be at the house, the county Sheriff (Ed Cassidy) and local physician Dr. Eliot (Nolan Leary) go there in hopes of finding a clue to the woman's identity.  In the woman's bag they discover papers that identify her as Nina MacCarron, the daughter of the late mad scientist Paul Carruthers, who had terrorized many people with his giant mutated bats some years earlier.

Believing that Nina is suffering from some sort of psychological shock, Dr. Eliot places Nina under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale). Over a number of weeks, Dr. Morris helps Nina reconstruct her broken memory: she had been living in England for most of her life. Dr. Carruthers had left her family when Nina was only four years old.  Traumatized by the recent death of her mother and by the stress of the London blitz, she travels to America to find her father, only to find that he had died under the accusation of terrible crimes.

During this intensive therapy Nina stays at the Morris household, and we get a view of the respected psychiatrist's home. There is growing friction between Morris and his wife, the wealthy Ellen Masters Morris. Ellen has a weak heart, and a son from a previous marriage, who is expected home soon from the war.  For his part, Morris is keeping a mistress on the side named Myra (Monica Mars), who wants a commitment.  Even though Morris explains that he would lose out financially if he divorced Ellen, Myra won't relent.  Don't call me, Myra warns Morris, until you're ready to get Ellen out of your life.

Soon Ted Masters arrives home from the war; he and Nina quickly fall in love.  But Nina is troubled by strange dreams -- of giant bats that are trying to control her. One night Nina awakens from one such dream to discover that she has killed the Morris family dog with a pair of scissors. Dr. Morris suggests she be moved to a sanitarium for the family's safety, but the kind-hearted Ellen disagrees, and Nina stays.
 
But a few nights later, after another disturbing dream, Nina awakens to find herself standing in the hallway holding a pair of bloody scissors.  And nearby lies the body of Ellen Masters Morris....

 Comments: This meager PRC offering was ostensibly a sequel to the 1940 Bela Lugosi vehicle The Devil Bat. That film was an archetypal Lugosi mad scientist picture, featuring a method of execution that has a zany greatness about it: the victim receives the gift of a special shaving lotion; when applied to the neck, the lotion attracts giant mutated bats that -- quite literally -- go for the jugular.

The Devil Bat was silly and lurid, but it made money, so it was only natural for PRC to greenlight a sequel.  But it turned out to be a sequel in name only. What they really did was to make a low-budget knockoff of two popular films of the era, Cat People (1942) and Gaslight (1944). From Cat People comes the family curse and the conniving psychiatrist; from Gaslight comes the device of a powerful man convincing a vulnerable young woman that she's going mad.

As we previously noted, Cat People and Gaslight also clearly inspired She Wolf of London, a Universal thriller also released in 1946 -- and a movie with a very similar plot to this one.

 So was Devil Bat's Daughter a rip-off of She-Wolf of London, which was a rip-off of Cat People and Gaslight?   Or was She-Wolf of London a rip-off of Devil Bat's daughter, which was a rip-off of Cat People and Gaslight?

Well, we don't know.  Devil Bat's Daughter and She-Wolf of London were released within a month of each other.  It's possible that one was influenced by the other, perhaps by news that appeared in the trades.  On the other hand, they both might independent rip-offs of other movies.

Oddly enough, the screenwriters felt it necessary to rehabilitate Dr. Carruthers' reputation at the end of this movie.  We're told in the final minutes that Carruthers was actually a wonderful man whose important experiments with giant bats were misunderstood by a fearful and superstitious public.  This seems extremely unlikely, since we all remember Lugosi chuckling with glee as he sent his devil bats off to rip innocent people's throats out in the first movie.  Audiences had no doubt forgotten some of the plot points from The Devil Bat by the time the sequel arrived.   But the presence of a  homicidal bat-obsessed maniac probably wasn't one of them.

Saturday, November 13, 1971 (Noon): Gog (1954)

Synopsis: In a top-secret laboratory complex, researchers are working to make practical the age-old dream of manned spaceflight.  In one experiment, a monkey is given an injection and then placed in a cold chamber.  The temperature drops to over 100 degrees below zero; the monkey is quickly frozen solid but when it is thawed out it's as good as new. In a similar manner, we are told, astronauts will one day hibernate during long space journeys.

Later Dr. Huburtus (Michael Fox) is working inside the chamber alone when the door slams shut behind him.  The controls begin to turn on by themselves, plunging the temperature inside the chamber to -100 degrees.  Huburtus freezes to death, as does his assistant (Marian Richman)  when she tries to go inside the chamber to rescue him.

The two mysterious deaths cause station director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) to call in the Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI), a sort of brainy FBI.  Soon Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) arrives at the facility, which is located in the desert southwest. Sheppard is brought in via helicopter, as the base is inaccessible by road.  As the helicopter approaches the base, the controls begin to move by themselves,  and the pilot lets go of them. He explains to Sheppard that the last part of the voyage is controlled by the installation's computer, NOVAC.  This, he says, is in order to keep the exact location of the base a secret.

Dr. Sheppard is introduced to Joanna Merritt (Constance Dowling), who is tasked with giving Sheppard a tour of the facility.  However, we soon find that Joanna and Sheppard have been lovers, a fact they keep hidden from the rest of the personnel at the base.

Sheppard is shown the various experiments going on in the lab.  We see a chamber where gravity can be artificially reduced, and a man and a woman do acrobatic feats in a near-weightless environment.  In another part of the facility, a centrifuge whirls prospective astronauts around at dangerous speeds.

Dr. Van Ness shows Sheppard a scale model of a planned orbital satellite.  America, Van Ness says, must be the first to launch such a satellite.  If the enemy gets into space first, it could be the end of the United States.  To prove this dubious claim, he shows Sheppard a parabolic mirror that will be mounted on the satellite.  The mirror is designed to focus sunlight into a mercury-filled chamber, creating steam and powering the space station.  However, he warns, such a mirror could be used for more sinister purposes.  He uses the same kind of focusing mirror to direct sunlight on a scale model of a "an industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie".  The model city bursts into flames as soon as the focused sunlight touches it.

Later, Sheppard meets Dr. Zeitman, a suspicous German expatriate who designed NOVAC and spent five years assembling it in Switzerland. Zeitman is clearly a genius, and he demonstrates two innovations he believes are even greater than NOVAC itself: the robot Gog, and its twin Magog....

Comments:  Gog was the third and last of Ivan Tors' series of films about a near-future government body, the "Office of Scientific Investigation", that solves mysteries of a scientific nature. The first of these, The Magnetic Monster (1953) , is a clever little film in which a misguided scientist exposes a chunk of "serrenium" to some exotic radiation. The element becomes strongly magnetic and starts growing exponentially. The scientists discover that jolts of electricity stop the element's growth, but only temporarily; and each time an exponentially larger charge of electricity is needed. The OSI must find a way to destroy it before it destroys the world. The Magnetic Monster is mostly remembered today for its clever use of cyclotron footage from an expensive German film called Gold (1934). While a bit corny and melodramatic, The Magnetic Monster was still a  lively and well-paced movie.

The same cannot be said for the second OSI film, Riders To the Stars,  the first of the series to be shot in color.  In this film, rockets launched beyond Earth's atmosphere rapidly disintegrate, due to the bombardment of cosmic rays. The OSI scientists must find a way to get rockets safely into space before the Soviets do, because (as in Gog) the first nation to reach orbit will dominate the world. Knowing that meteors fly through space without disintegrating, the scientists hatch a plan to launch three men in separate rockets to try to catch a small meteor sample and return it to Earth, in hopes of finding alloys that can survive the dangerous conditions of outer space.

The problems with Riders to the Stars are numerous, and expose Tors' weaknesses as a storyteller.  The script is talky, Richard Carlson's direction is leaden, and plot holes abound. It doesn't make sense, for instance, that the meteors must be retrieved from space, since meteors routinely fall to earth. The men chosen for the mission are required to be single, for no adequately explained reason. And none of the recruits are called upon to use any of the science and engineering backgrounds that were deemed so important to their selection in the first place.   In the end, they're chosen to fly the rockets based on physical endurance, steely nerves and raw courage, which makes you wonder why they didn't just recruit test pilots to begin with.

Gog was the only one of the three to be shot in 3D (though for some reason it wasn't released in that format) and apparently the only one to be shot in widescreen.  Only one partially intact 3D print has been discovered, and there don't appear to be any widescreen prints extant at all.

I wouldn't call Gog a good movie, but it's interesting.  The production values are surprisingly robust for an indie production, somewhat reminiscent of Jack Harris' work with Valley Forge Studios in the late 50's and early 60's.  And whether intended at the time or not, the whole concept of the underground  lab and the work it's engaged in provides an aura of menace and paranoia. 

Early in the film we learn that the base is so super-secret that it was built underground, an no trace of it can be seen from above.  The helicopter that brings Sheppard to the lab flies that last part of the route on autopilot, to prevent anyone from knowing its exact location -- even the people who work there.  But this seems like an absurd level of security. After all, the Soviets didn't seem to have any trouble finding it.

While not every plot point makes sense, some of the ideas expressed in the film are surprisingly prescient.  Gog and Magog (and in fact all the electronic controls on the base) are operated through the mainframe computer NOVAC via its centralized transmitter. The Soviets* gain access to base controls by means of a secret transceiver that was placed inside the mainframe during the unit's assembly in Switzerland. 

So in modern parlance, the Soviets manage to hack into the computer and its wireless network, allowing them to monitor all actions taken by NOVAC and to take control of it -- like a modern remote desktop -- when it suits them. These ideas expressed in a rather clumsy fashion throughout the movie, but the fact that they're expressed at all is actually pretty impressive for a movie made in 1954.  I don't think Gog has ever gotten credit for this, but perhaps it ought to.

The screenwriters assume that the hack into  NOVAC must be via  direct line-of-sight transmission -- more like a microwave link than a conventional radio transmission.  In order to establish the line of sight to NOVAC,  the Soviets build a high-altitude aircraft which, because it has a fiberglass hull, is undetectable by radar; what we would describe today as a stealth aircraft.

As the title suggests, it's Gog and Magog who are the real stars, and they are pretty convincing robots for this era. Rather than a mechanical man that stumps around on two legs, these robots run on tractor treads and carry a nasty collection of pincers and flamethrowers.  They don't get a great deal to do, but they sure do look imposing.  Left unsaid is why these robots are equipped with heavy weapons in the first place; nor do we ever find out why they are named after the biblical minions of Satan.  Kind of an unfortunate choice on the part of the good guys -- unless we are supposed to walk away wondering if we really are the good guys. Given that this is 1954, though, I'm guessing that wasn't the filmmakers' intent.

Gog runs a brisk 85 minutes but its pace is painfully slow, and like all of Ivan Tors' OSI movies there are a lot of long scenes of someone explaining the workings of this or that scientific apparatus.  The action scenes are jealously measured out, with Sheppard's big fight with the robots saved for the climax. Even that scene is pretty tame by today's standards.  But that's okay. Ivan Tors was never known for staging action sequences -- as he would prove the following year when he produced the dull-as-dishwater Science Fiction Theater.





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*In a peculiar -- but quite durable -- convention in Cold War films, the Soviets are never referenced directly. They are always referred to obliquely  as "the Other Side", etc.  Early in the film Dr. Van Ness tells Sheppard that the base is being sabotaged by "an enemy power".  "But we're not at war," Sheppard replies.  "We weren't at war the night before Pearl Harbor either," Van Ness says darkly, evincing a level of paranoia that makes me wonder how we survived that era at all.

Saturday, November 6, 1971 (Midnight): The Brute Man (1946)

Synopsis: The city is being terrorized by a spine-snapping brute called The Creeper (Rondo Hatton), a grotesque character who prowls the streets at night and seemingly kills at random. The police are under enormous pressure to capture him, but so far they don't have a name, or even a clear description.

One night the killer strikes again, and this time his victims are a professor at Hampton college and a woman named Joan Bemis, whom the Creeper seems to know.

The police manage to corner their suspect in an apartment house; in order to escape, the Creeper enters the apartment of a young woman named Helen (Jane Adams). Because Helen is blind, she isn't repelled by his appearance. He asks for her help, and she agrees, saying that she has a gift of sensing a person's true nature.  When the police knock on her door, she tells them that she hasn't seen anyone suspicious in the area.

Helen knows only that she's met a man who is in some sort of trouble, and she is certain that he is innocent of whatever he's been accused of.  For his part the Creeper is glad to know someone who doesn't scream and run away when he enters the room, and a rather unlikely friendship ensues.

Soon enough the Creeper has murdered a delivery boy who brought groceries to the waterfront storage shed he's been living in.  Here the police discover an old newspaper clipping of three college chums, circa 1930: Clifford Scott, Virginia Rogers and Hal Moffat. 

When the police look for Clifford Scott and Virginia Rogers they discover the two are now married; and that the third person in the photo, Hal Moffat, was Clifford's college roommate as well as a rival for Virginia's affections. The late Joan Bemis was also a close friend of the trio. A star athlete, Hal's face was hideously disfigured in a lab accident.  The accident seems also to have affected his "glands and nerves", not to mention his mind; because all these years later Hal has decided to get revenge on all those who spurned him in college.

Meanwhile, learning that Helen needs $3,000 to pay for an operation to cure her blindness, Hal decides to get her the money -- even though he knows that she will be repelled by him if she's able to see him.  Nevertheless, he goes to Clifford and Virginia and demands money.  Clifford gives him a box of expensive jewelry, but manages to put a couple of .38 slugs into him before he's murdered himself.

Wounded, Hal delivers the jewelry to Helen, determined that she go ahead with the operation. But when the police find her and tell her who she's befriended, she agrees to help them find their quarry. Angered at her public betrayal, he decides that Helen too must die....

Comments: The Brute Man was produced by Ben Pivar, the same man responsible for Universal's previous Rondo Hatton vehicle  House of Horrors.  From that film Pivar brought back the writing / directing team of Dwight Babcock and Jean Yarborough, but this is somewhat less successful outing than House of Horrors was.

There are several reasons for this.  First, while the character of The Creeper is intriguing, Rondo Hatton simply isn't strong enough an actor to carry a lot of screen time on his own, and his menacing presence gets diluted if we see too much of him.  This problem was elegantly side-stepped in House of Horrors, which had as its primary antihero Martin Kosleck's tormented artist; Hatton's Creeper served both as the artist's muse and as his means of retribution. Most importantly, the Creeper was the catalyst for everything that happened in the movie, giving the artist a reason to believe that vengeance, of which he had dreamed for so long, might actually be possible.

Here, instead of an artist, the Creeper befriends a beautiful, pure-hearted blind girl who conveniently focuses on the inner beauty of those around her.  This plot device was already an old chestnut in 1946, and was clearly a bid to make the Creeper sympathetic, like the monster in Bride of Frankenstein or Peter Lorre's disfigured watchmaker in The Face Behind the Mask.  But no matter how you slice it, a man who snaps people's spines whenever he gets annoyed isn't going to generate a lot of sympathy from the audience. Helen's statement that she can sense that Hal is good at heart is laughable, considering just what the Creeper has been up to; it seems to be a case of the screenwriters wanting to have it both ways -- a remorseless killer who is -- somehow or other -- simply misunderstood.

Another problematic departure from House of Horrors is the insertion of an origin story.  This is a bad idea to start with, because the Creeper is an intriguing character partly because he is so enigmatic. We don't know where he comes from, why he looks the way he does or why he kills so indiscriminately -- and no explanation is going to be as good as what we dream up on our own. To make matters worse, the story presented  isn't remotely plausible, and isn't even interesting except that it parallels in some ways Rondo Hatton's own story.  The character of Hal Moffat is shown to be a handsome college football star who is Clifford Scott's romantic rival.  Clifford foils Hal's scheduled date with Virginia, forcing Hal to stay late after chemistry class, mixing various corrosive acids in glass beakers.  In a flash of temper, Hal smashes one of the beakers on the lab bench, causing him to be permanently disfigured.

In real life, Rondo Hatton was a popular and handsome college athlete; it is often claimed (though I can't confirm) that he was voted "Most Handsome" by his high school peers. Like Hal, his grotesque appearance came relatively late in life, though not as the result of a lab accident but by a glandular disorder called acromegaly. Over a number of years Hatton's features became increasingly coarse and grotesque, until his face and body became a carnival-sideshow grade of ugly.

There's no denying that this movie is itself a carnival sideshow of sorts, as the audience is invited to pay money to gawk at Hatton's misfortune. It's been claimed over the years that this apparent attempt to cash in was exploitative and unsavory.  And that's true so far as it goes. But it's important to remember that exploitation of this kind wasn't seen as a big problem in the 1940s.  Nor was it considered wrong to deny employment to someone with a physical deformity like the one Hatton endured.  For some people in those days,  taking money to be stared at was the only living they could make, poor as it often was.  So in that context Hatton probably had a  better time of it than others with his affliction. He was, after all, in the movie business, and many people have done far more humiliating things for a chance to be in pictures.

The Brute Man would prove to be Hatton's final screen role; he died after shooting completed but before the film was released.  Universal, which was in the midst of a merger with International Pictures, had resolved that these sort of B-pictures were better suited for the Poverty Row studios, and The Brute Man was sold off to PRC for distribution.

The sale of The Brute Man basically marked the end of Universal's dominance of the horror genre. It's unfortunate that the studio had let its horror entries become so threadbare.  But it's just as well that the studio stopped making more films of this kind -- films that were little better than the dreck PRC and Monogram were grinding out.  And Universal would rise to prominence again a decade later with the William Alland-produced science fiction films, many of which had elements of horror about them.  Those films still lay in the future for viewers of Horror Incorporated.

Saturday, November 6, 1971 (Noon): The Phantom of Crestwood (1932)

Synopsis: Jenny Wren is a professional gold-digger who has grown tired of her racket and has decided to retire.  Her disillusionment stems from the recent death of Tom Herrick (Tom Douglas) a penniless young man whose marriage proposal Jenny turned down. Despondent, Tom threw himself off a cliff and Jenny has been haunted by his death ever since.

She plans to leave her lavish Los Angeles apartment behind and sail away to Europe. A prospective buyer for the apartment appears unannounced, a man who goes by the name of Farnsbarnes (Ricardo Cortez).  In fact, the man is a career criminal named Curtis who is looking for incriminating letters in Jenny Wren's possession. 

Jenny needs a retirement nest egg, so she visits bank manager Priam Andes (H.B. Warner) and instructs him to throw her a farewell party at Crestwood, the Andes family retreat, and to bring along three of his business associates --Eddie Mack (Richard "Skeets" Gallagher), William Jones (Gavin Gordon) and Senator Herbert Walcott (Robert McWade) -- each of whom is on the list of her wealthiest clients.



When the men arrive -- not suspecting a shakedown -- Jenny demands that they pay her a total of $750,000 as a farewell gift.  The men balk, insisting that they are unable to raise that kind of money. But Jenny is undeterred.  They will find a way, she says -- because if they don't, she will release enough evidence of their indiscretions to ruin them all.

Curtis arrives at Crestwood with a few of his henchmen. At just about the same time a ghost appears  -- the ghost of poor Tom Herrick. And Jenny ends up dead, the back of her neck punctured by one of the hefty steel darts used in the game room. 

Now Curtis and Jenny's sister Esther (Anita Louise) must team up to find out who killed Jenny Wren, and unmask the Phantom of Crestwood....




Comments: Today's movie has a fairly unusual provenance. Before it was released in theaters, a version of  The Phantom of Crestwood was broadcast as a radio drama on NBC, as part of the Hollywood On the Air anthology series.  By design, the show ended before the Big Question -- who killed Jenny Wren? -- was answered. Listeners were invited to submit their own ideas for how the mystery should be resolved.  Once the movie came out, fans of the radio show would (theoretically) flock to the theaters to see if their ending was picked!

Since listeners were cautioned that the final ending might not be one submitted by fans, we can assume that this was nothing more than a marketing ploy (a successful one, it should be noted  -- The Phantom of Crestwood was a solid moneymaker for RKO).  To carry the marketing tie-in further, the movie actually opens with the radio show's announcer, Graham McNamee, wearing a tuxedo and standing at an NBC microphone, a radio orchestra playing behind him. McNamee reminds us of the radio drama and tries to wring as much excitement out of the "Who Killed Jenny Wren?" question as possible. At this point, the opening credits start and the movie proceeds like any other.

 I wasn't expecting much from The Phantom of Crestwood, but to my surprise we have a pretty good movie on our hands, once the clumsy marketing gimmick is dispensed with. It's a well-paced combination of the murder mystery and old dark house genres; and in an unusual turn, Jenny Wren herself isn't done away with until about halfway through the film.  This gives us time to get to know her, and like a number of women in pre-code Hollywood films, we grow to like her as well.

Heretofore Jenny has traded on her body to secure the lifestyle she enjoys.  Now she has turned to extortion for one last score, plotting to brazenly take her four benefactors for nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. This is presented in such a way that we are cheering for her to succeed. After all, a young woman has few options in 1932 -- even women as strong and intelligent as Jenny. We see her not as a strumpet but as someone using every advantage she has in order to get what she wants.  By contrast, the four older, married businessmen who have been renting her services are seen as the villains - they are cads and hyprocites, men who are unjustly lauded as paragons of earthly virtue.


Like many films of the early Depression era, The Phantom of Crestwood focuses on the world of the upper class, allowing moviegoers an escape into a world of wealth and glamour. Appropriately, the only people who weren't born into this world are Jenny, her sister Esther and Curtis, and they are depicted as "real"  people navigating a world of phonies. This immediately puts the audience on their side. Karen Morley carries the first third of the movie herself, and she a delightfully strong and self-assured woman in an era when female leads were usually trembling flowers of the Gloria Stuart variety. 

Ricardo Cortez is also quite effective in this movie, transitioning smoothly from thuggish pennyboy to heroic leading man as the circumstances at Casa del Andes change. And Anita Louise gives a winning performance as kid sister Esther, as pure and innocent as Jenny is world-weary and corrupt.  Jenny wants Esther to have the life she couldn't -- to be able to say yes to the boy who loves her in the way Jenny herself wishes she could have done.  It's a relationship between sisters that actually comes across as believable.  That was a hard trick to pull off in 1932 -- it still is today.

Saturday, October 30, 1971 (Midnight): Chamber of Horrors aka Die Tur Mit Den 7 Schlossern (1962) / Doctor X (1932)

Synopsis: In London, a priest is poisoned while drinking a soda at a concession stand.  That same day, another man in the city is murdered, also under mysterious circumstances.  Each of the men carried an unusual looking key on a long gold chain. Later, police inspector Richard Martin (Heinz Drache) is visited by talkative safecracker Pheeny (Klaus Kinski) who tells him that someone tried to hire him to open a mysterious door with seven locks.  Pheeny, sensing that this is the sort of job that doesn't end with a paycheck but with a bullet in the back of the head, backs out of the deal and tells the whole story, asking for Martin's protection.  Pheeny, however, soon ends up dead.

Martin's only clue comes in the form of a piece of paper that bears a coat of arms.  He visits a library; the librarian frostily informs him that it might take months or years to track down a particular coat of arms.  However, when the woman sees it, she instantly knows to whose family the coat of arms belongs. By an astounding coincidence it is the coat of arms of the librarian's own family, the Selfords; and in fact the young woman, Sybil (Sabina Sesselmann), is herself one of the heirs of the Selford estate.  This turns out to be quite useful, as it soon becomes clear that each of the Selford heirs is being systematically targeted for murder.

It happens that the dispostion of the Selford estate is a hot topic at this particular moment.  The primary heir to the Selford fortune is soon to reach the age of majority, and all other heirs to the estate will receive their share of the fortune at the same time.  No one seems to have seen the heir lately, but the family's attorney Mr. Haveloc (Hans Nielsen) says that he is abroad and that he himself has had to send frequent letters of credit to cover the heir's gambling debts and hotel-trashing bills.

Martin, assisted by the comical police detective Holms, proceeds to the Selford mansion, where he must contend with the mysterious Dr. Antonio Stiletti (Pinkas Braun), a scientist in the Bela Lugosi vein, who keeps an ape in a cage down in the basement, and whose sinister experiments have yielded a monstrous assistant named Jacko, who is ready to kill at Dr. Selford's command....

Comments: For our first feature tonight we get a rare treat: a krimi film from the early 1960s.  Krimis were West German crime films produced by the Danish studio Rialto, and based on the novels of Edgar Wallace.  Rialto made an impressive number of these films through the 1960s. They tended to have the same actors pop up again and again (Klaus Kinski played low-life criminals in many of them, including this one) They are mostly forgotten now, though they do enjoy something of a cult following. They sport their own unique look and sensibility; and The Door With Seven Locks (released stateside as Chamber of Horrors) is a good introduction to this subgenre.

Krimi films are fast-paced and pleasant enough to watch, but you shouldn't spend a lot of time trying to make sense of them; it just spoils the fun (it might occur to you, for example, that a door with seven locks can be defeated by any punk with a set of lock picks; it would just take him seven times as long -- but never mind that).

 The novel's already overloaded plot is burdened with even more improbable twists and turns and red herrings. These films have an odd sense of humor, too --  as though you're watching The Usual Suspects as directed by Richard Lester. Inspector Martin is an engaging, light-hearted fellow who is constantly doing magic tricks.  His assistant, detective Holms, is always providing unnecessary information (one murder victim's name is Livingstone; Holms feels duty-bound to report that it isn't the famous African explorer).  And Dr. Stiletti is a Bela Lugosi-esque nut who is interested in building a race of supermen; his first attempt yields a Tor Johnson-esque brute who lumbers around, carrying out his sinister instructions. Stiletti's plan to place the head of a man on an ape's body speaks to the same eclectic portfolio of a Lugosi villain, as well.

There is an agreeable wackiness to the proceedings, and as a mystery-horror hybrid this ones works pretty well.  Chamber of Horrors is also, at nine years old, the "newest" film we've seen on the show thus far.

Doctor X

Synopsis: A vicious serial killer is on the loose in New York, a cannibal who only strikes when the Moon is full. The police realize that all of the murders are centered around the medical academy run by Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill), and the cops recruit Dr. Xavier to help find which of the four eccentric surgeons in his employ might be the murderer.

As it turns out, all four of the doctors make pretty good suspects.  We have the sour Dr. Wells, who has studied the practices of cannibals; Dr Duke, whom we may or may not rule out because he is in a wheelchair but who is kind of a jerk anyway; Dr. Rowitz, a researcher of a more lyrical bent (he writes poetry); and Dr. Haines, who seems to be hiding a number of secrets, including a penchant for lad magazines.  Oh, and he might have taken a nibble or two of human flesh in his day.

Meanwhile, newspaper reporter Lee Taylor  (Lee Tracy) is trying to scoop the competition in getting the facts of the case, and he isn't above posing as a corpse in the city morgue to get access.  Along the way he falls for Dr. Xavier's daughter Joanne (Fay Wray).  But as Dr. Xavier hatches a plan to catch the man dubbed the "Moon Killer" by the papers, Lee also has to face the possibility that the killer may be none other than Dr. Xavier himself...

Comments: This Michael Curtiz thriller was shot not long after Universal hit box office gold with "Dracula" and "Frankenstein".  As popular as these two films were with the public, they were regarded with great suspicion by the various self-appointed guardians of public morals, which saw them both -- particularly the latter  -- as unnecessarily ghoulish (Hollywood would soon create its own guardian of public morals in the form of the Hayes Office). Perhaps because of this, Doctor X  is surprisingly light-hearted in tone, considering the subject matter; and the male lead is even more of a goofball than the reporter Wallace Ford played in Night of Terror.

Doctor X was one of a number of early sound-era films shot in two-strip Technicolor, which theoretically makes this the first color film to be shown on Horror Incorporated. However, I am dead certain that the print shown on Channel 5 the night of October 30, 1971 would have been black-and-white.  To my knowledge no color 16mm prints were ever struck for this feature; in fact, most of the 35mm prints made after the original release of Doctor X were in black-and-white.  Luckily, the current DVD version is taken from UCLA's restored archival print, so we can see what audiences in 1932 saw.

Color does wonders for this film. It brings life to the lavish art-deco sets and seems to deepen the overall depth of field. The two-strip process also lends an unusual, desaturated color palate to the film, with very strong greens and browns but the vibrant "hot"  colors we associate with the later Technicolor -- reds, oranges and yellows -- quite muted by comparison.

It's great to see Lionel Atwill working on a good film while his career was still on the upswing.  Doctor X was released about a year before Secret of the Blue Room, another of his good early roles. But he's better served in this film because his daughter is not played by the simpering Gloria Stuart, but the radiant Fay Wray, one of the greatest film talents of the early 1930s. It's unfortunate that Wray's career faded so quickly -- but she gives a luminous and memorable performance here.

Saturday (Noon), October 30, 1971: The Black Sleep (1956)

Synopsis: Dr. Gordon Angus Ramsey (Herbert Rusley) has been convicted of murder. On the eve of his hanging, he is visited by one of his old medical school professors, Sir Joel Cadman.  Ramsey swears to Cadman that he didn't commit the crime, and Cadman seems sympathetic. He gives Ramsey a vial of powder and instructs him to mix the powder with water and drink before dawn on the morning of his hanging.  This, Cadman promises, will put him in a such a state of torpor that he will not be aware of the hanging at all. He also assures Ramsey that his body won't be turned over to the medical college for dissection, as is normally done with convicts' bodies; instead, the body will be turned over to Dr. Cadman himself.

When the guards come for Ramsey the next morning they find his dead body lying in the cell.  The body is transferred to Dr. Cadman, who once back at his lab gives it an injection.  At once the body goes into convulsions; minutes later, Dr. Ramsey has come back to life.

This, Dr. Cadman tells an astonished Ramsey, is the work of an ancient drug known as the Black Sleep; it perfectly simulates death; and as long as the antidote is given within 24 hours, the patient can be revived. A grateful Ramsey agrees to assist Dr. Cadman with his brain research.

While at the Cadman estate, Ramsey witnesses young Laurie (Patricia Blair) being attacked by a wild-eyed patient, Mungo (Lon Chaney, Jr). Mungo seems deranged and is apparently carries a visceral hatred for Laurie.  Ramsey tells Cadman that Mungo reminds him of someone he once knew, Professor Monroe, who was one of his instructors in college.  Cadman tells him that Mungo is indeed Professor Monroe; moreover, Laurie is his daughter.

Dr. Ramsey assists in experimenting with the brain of a cadaver when he notices cerebral fluid running down the surface of the brain.  How can this happen on a cadaver? he asks Cadman.  It isn't a cadaver, Dr. Cadman replies.  The man they are experimenting on is alive, kept in a state of suspended animation by the Black Sleep.

When Dr Ramsey protests, Cadman tells him that this is the only way to conduct the research that will benefit all mankind.  He reminds him that Dr. Monroe will benefit when he is able to unlock the mysteries of the human brain; so will Dr. Cadman's wife, who has been in a trance-like state since a brain injury.

But little does Dr. Ramsey know that Cadman was the one who arranged for him to be tried and convicted of murder, in order to recruit him as an assistant in his ghoulish experiments....

Comments: The Black Sleep is often called a throwback to an earlier era of horror, for two reasons.  First, it is the sort of gothic mad scientist picture that was popular in the 1930s, but decidedly unfashonable when it premiered in 1956; and second, it boasts an impressive number of washed-up horror stars in its cast, giving the strong impression of an homage to the glory days of Universal horror.

Unfortunately, while the actor's names might have been useful in generating box office, the actors themselves don't fare well. Bela Lugosi walks through his mute servant role with a pained expression and a palpable sense of physical frailty; the good humor that he displayed in such unfortunate productions as Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire has utterly evaporated here. He's reached the end of the line and seems to know it -- and in fact, this would prove to be the last time he worked on a movie set. (Plan 9 From Outer Space is technically his final screen credit, but that hardly counts -- Lugosi died after shooting less than a minute's worth of home-movie-quality footage).

Lon Chaney, Jr's drinking problem had more than caught up with him by this time and he looks sallow and unhealthy, no longer able to memorize dialogue and therefore appearing here - as he did in most of his late film roles -- as a rampaging brute. John Carradine, who always seemed quite comfortable in the most dismal settings, seems no less comfortable here; and Tor Johnson, the new kid on the block, upstages the old guys somewhat with his trademark blank-eyes-and-gaping-mouth performance.

While he wasn't a horror star per se, Basil Rathbone had played the title role in Universal's Son of Frankenstein nearly 20 years earlier.  He had moved on to bigger and better things in the meantime, and appearing in this film must have felt like a big step down for him.

But throwback that this is, The Black Sleep is also something of a missing link.  While aping Universal's golden age of horror, the  movie anticipates the Hammer cycle of horror films that defined the genre for the following decade.  The old Universal films almost entirely implied their ghoulishness and anything grotesque occured offscreen*.  In this film, we see a patient laid upon an operating table, a flap of skin folded back and his brain exposed, and we're treated to a close-up of cerebral fluid dribbling down the brain's convoluted surface. 

This icky detail must have been quite lurid for its time, and it is treated with the solemnity of acolytes wishing to impress the master.  Hammer, by contrast, used blood and gore with the barely-concealed glee of prankish schoolboys. The Black Sleep was made in a time when Universal's golden age was remembered fondly, even though its characteristic restraint was seen as a bit old-fashioned. By the time Hammer studios got into the business, Universal's horror films seemed much creakier, and movies like The Black Sleep, which wanted to be seen as  daring and innovative, were quickly forgotten.

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* In fact, James P. Hogan's The Mad Ghoul we never see a single drop of blood -- even though it's a movie about a man turned into a zombie, who can only return to normal by digging up freshly-buried bodies and eating their hearts.