The Long Arm of Coincidence: SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

Bela Lugosi's only color film, and maybe the only horror film period from 1947, surreal poverty row quickie SCARED TO DEATH makes no concessions to atmosphere or tone. Why should it? It has no competition. Instead, along its zippy charge to the finish line, this unique poverty row original rounds an array of weird bases all its own, making it at true deadpan termite wonder, one that doesn't deign to even tag the usual bases as it rounds the diamond lest it lose the go-for-broke fuck-it momentum of someone stealing home on a loping base hit, then running off the field and into the parking lot after a referee in a green mask announces you've been "out" since second.

Director Christy (don't get excited - it's a guy) Cabanne's 162nd feature (it's also writer Walter Abbott's first, and Golden Gate Picture's last), Scared to Death doesn't really give a shit if it makes any sense but we in the Lugosi chat rooms don't care. Plenty of his poverty row films don't make any sense, but more than in some others we forgive the incoherence as it's never dull and--more importantly--it's surreal in that half-intentional (but which half?) zone where Bunuel meets Beaudine. It has the sort of deadpan irreverence we usually see only in international new wave breakthroughs that, if done independently, ala Godard's Alphaville, earn auteur acclaim, and if done for a major studio, like Suzuki's Branded to Kill, get their auteur fired. 

Watched in this light, Scared to Death alchemically transcends its lowly state as a B-mystery Lugosi vehicle, and that's important because, on that level, it fails miserable. Seen the other way though, as a nonsensical exercise in Marx Bros/Beckett noir post-structuralism, it begins to loom wobbly and large 

Set all in and around a single house, one that doubles as a clinic (though there's only one patient), ever-stumbling briskly through an ornate distinctly post-war plot full of gaslighting, shady pasts (what went on in Europe doesn't stay in Europe, even though you thought you left it to die in a concentration camp), lame comedy, exits and entrances, and signification-free fury, Scared to Death might seem incomprehensible the first dozen times you doze through it, but--and this is how you know it's a masterpiece-- the more times you see it, the weirder and more incomprehensible it gets, and the more you start to love it for resisting all analysis so vigorously. As Michael Weldon lovingly wondered in his Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: "Were the people who made this on some strange, mind-bending drug?" [1] 

Maybe we'll never know, but one thing we do, and that's that you should be on some strange, mind-bending drug when watching. It won't help, but then again, it can't hurt. Then again, the film itself might be enough. Maybe it's already bent your mind, made you strange. Maybe it made you afraid so your mind started to crack.

Set in a former (that was 'before the war') mental institution, now the office and home, of Dr. Van Ee (George Zucco), the film seems haunted by the WW2 in much the same way The Black Cat (1934) was haunted by WWI. Van Ee harbors strange secrets about his past, i.e. during or before the war, secrets the film never does deign delve into. We never learn why, for example, he needs a private duty policeman around (Nat Pendleton). As with the hiring of the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla (1939), the answer may lie not in that Van Ee hired a private detective but whom he chose. Someone is going to murdered? But whom? Surely not the wife of Van Ee's son Ward (Roland Varno), the paranoid Laura (Molly Lamont), who claims she's being kept a virtual prisoner in her room, though Dr. van Ee and Ward both wish she'd leave (or so they see). Why, is she so anxious to stay in this gloom-less house if she knows whomever is after her has arrived and is somewhere in its walls right now? The  suspicious way Van Ee acts, the weird double meanings and cryptic assurances in the initial scene where he's examining Laura (why would her fear of blindfolds even come up during a routine examination) do nothing to clarify anything. One could almost think one was in that post-structuralist Blow-Up blast radius, next to Elio Petri's A Quiet Day in the Country. 

Though Zucco probably gets more screen time, Lugosi gets top-billing as 'wanted' magician-hypnotist Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) who shows up at the door with his mute assistant Ingo (Angelo Rossitto), "one of the little men." They invite themselves to stay a few days (Van Ee says "I can't very well refuse." "How true, cousin Joseph. How... true"). Leonide and Ingo spend most of the film creeping in and out of secret panels in search of some other unseen person or gesticulating at the moon. At one point Leonide watches Laura depart his presence, snarling a weird poetry chant: "Laurette... Laurette, I'll make a bet, the green masked man will get you yet."  

Meanwhile, a scowling green mask regularly looks in from outside the window, but no one sees it. (Though Laura, from beyond the grave, somehow knows it was there in her narration). Bodies appear in one room and wind up downstairs, covered in a sheet on the doctor's examination table, as if by magic. Heads--delivered in boxes left at the door--doth literally roll. 

Its blithe inconsistency of tone might all be a passive-aggressive attempt by Cabanne and Abbott to do as bad a job as possible to get out of a contract with Golden Gate, but I like to think they knew they had to get it done quick and cheap, and so just 'went for it,' throwing continuity to the wind and writing the whole script over one long whiskey and benzadrine bender. Sometimes a kind of loose deadpan Mad magazine irreverence takes over when freedom and speed make 'art' almost by the not wanting of it.  This is why Plan Nine from Outer Space is endlessly rewatchable, while 'better' films appall with their mediocre consistency. This being decades before Antonioni let us see through the cracks of cinema's symbolic code, we have to find these Brechtian post-modern 'see around the sets'-y kernels where we may, and--all through the 40s--poverty row Lugosi films were giving us instances thereto. One could view them as an expression of the producer's contempt for the subject matter, or as harbingers for the post-structuralist landscape to come:

 From top: The Voodoo Man's script is written after the 'real' events happen, the writer/hero even
suggests Bela Lugosi to star; The Ape Man's author peers through windows all through the film,
a kind of 'WTF' through-thread. As a kid, seeing these films on afternoonTV a lot, these kinds of moments
were like insider winks. We didn't understand 90% of the dialogue, but these moments let us know we really
weren't naive. We got post-modernism (We read Mad). That same kind of enshrined ambiguity of inference
would become key European art cinema language, but until we learned it, only children and audiences
seeing movies in languages they don't understand, in un-subtitled prints, could share our sweet mise-en-scene
theory forming aesthetic arrest.  

And I make an Ed Wood association not lightly, and not just because there's a cross dressing surprise (SPOILER!) at the end. Lugosi's long downward slide really begins here, his leanest year. All he'd done in the last three years before Scared were some small roles in RKO B-movies, and one lead villain role, in the Val Lewton spoof-- Zombies on Broadway (1945). [2] Aside from Abbot and Costello Meets Frankenstein the year after Scared, times were only going to get leaner until Ed Wood came calling, like Bela's personal morphine-hallucinated cross-dressing angel of death. And though this isn't really a Lugosi showcase he does get star billing and it holds up today as a great example of how one might handle being handed a question mark of a role, with murky ambiguous motivations not even known to the writer, and turn it into a plum.

The unique things about Scared would go on to pepper later films, like Billy Wilder's 1950 show biz horror-drama, Sunset Boulevard -right), which is narrated, not from a face-up lady in the morgue but a face-down a man in a pool. Other than that, the same, though if you had to guess which film was set in an old dark house holding an ape funeral, how could you ever guess it wouldn't be the poverty row 40s Lugosi chiller, but an A-list Billy Wilder classic? This Lugosi chiller doesn't even have a single dark corner, or ominous statue: it's all light and normal decor, peppered with some heads and masks. But it doesn't matter. Sunset is brilliant even as it veers ever towards a kind of razzing ageist misogyny, while Scared to Death is brilliant because doesn't have enough of anything to be anti-something else. It stays constantly fluid, as if Holden, Von Stroheim, and Swanson, and Wilder couldn't decide if they were making Salome, a making-of documentary playing themselves playing roles, or the roles of Norma, Max and Joe amidst the haunted waxworks and--being clever--decided to keep events, dialogue and performance cryptic enough each line could serve all three or four different readings.

The dialing back and forth to Laurette on the slab, for example, becomes almost comically nonsensical and redundant, as if the editor is venting some irritation with having to spread the length to over an hour. Even with the all-knowing perspective of the unmoored soul, she couldn't possibly know a lot of the details she shows us. Not only that, her comments are often unrelated to the scenes we see. "I became afraid and my mind started to crack" for example, dials back out to Bill the cop (Pendleton) hang-doggedly hitting on the brassy maid Lilybeth (Gladys Blake), calling her his "melancholy baby," his "wild Irish rose." Then we dial back to Laurette on the slab: "Then came a sinister pair!" We see Indigo and Leonide enter through the front door, like a pair of trick-or-treating funeral attendants. 

"then came a sinister pair' (centered)

The paradoxical conundrums and obvious discrepancies continue to accrue. Regularly using big words and then wondering what they mean, Pendleton starts hamming it up to an WB cartoon-level height, even to the extent of saying "which way did they go? Which way did they go?" while waving his fists around. Dr. Van Ee calls the operator and asks for  police but then is conked on the head before he can talk to them; the cops don't come but but reporter Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley - the guy who "likes 'em stupid" in Cat Women of the Moon) shows up anyway, and brings his fiancee, the operator who clued him in on the phone call, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton). What clue he has that something newsworthy is going on seems vague, but he remembers all the headlines about the weird marriage between Laura and Van Ee's son (she got him drunk and married him on dare) and maybe more besides. Meanwhile a green death mask keeps 'looking' through the window (it has no eye holes), causing girls who see it to faint. And yet - if no one sees it but us, and it cannot see--for it has no eyeholes--how can a dead woman know it was there? Is this mask the embodiment of Laura's post-death all-seeing eye that allows her to comment on action she was upstairs for?  

Maybe not, but this sort of thing, and fine paradoxical examples of Ed Woodian ouroboros dialogue, go looping around in lopsided orbit: Van Ee assures a mysterious lady in green that there are no abnormal things going on in his house, "nor will there ever be." She replies "Nevertheless, the way you were described to me, and the way your place was described to me, I am certain that I am in the right place!" Bull says to Laura he was hoping she'd get murdered so he could solve it and redeem himself with the homicide bureau ("who paid you to say these things to me?" she asks). He vows to cook and slave and buy Lilybeth furs and jewels, which leaves her cold ("I'd hate to hang by my neck until you got me those things...") Professor Leonide refuses to announce himself before coming in since "if I allowed myself to be announced I doubt I would be received anywhere" Van Ee lets us know Leonide (his cousin) helped pepper the house with secret panels when he was a "patient" there before the war. It was ostensibly so the guards could spy on the inmates, yet Leonide used one of the panels to escape! Who'd have thought!? Lilybeth drops dead after trying to blindfold Laura (her big phobia!) while in a hypnotic trance. She is then is revived by Leonide only because he can see that Bull "truly loves... this girl." Which is itself hilarious, and Lugosi knows it. Throughout his observations re: the women in the scene are bronzed in iron: he wryly calls Jane "delightful" and advises Lee "take good care... of her" and when Van Ee tells him Leonide he'll be staying in the room right next to Laura's, Van Ee adds, "I know you'll like that." Why or how is never elaborated. Alas!

And what does Lilybeth know, that she taunts Laura about the man in the green mask ("I let him in! Maybe he's here right now, Miss Lavalle!")

These crazy quotes are just off the top of my head, but I could write you out the whole script and get the same surreal buzz transcribing Joyce, Beckett, or Nat Perrin. That's why my heart always sinks when I hear strange canned/echo-drenched French accented voice for the first time that announces Renee is ready to perform the magic act that acts as the film's climax. Hidden in some secret passage while speaking to the gathered players, he sounds not unlike Mel Welles' crab consciousness in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). There's no real build-up for this 'climax' and Laurette's past betrayal, odious thought it may be. In that weird sense, it's hard to find something genuinely scary or punishable. Past crimes don't resonate as well as seeing her kill someone new. Had post-war audiences seen enough murder?

No. Film noir was fading out, 50s drive in sci-fi was about to fade in. In between there was only Scared to Death, the missing link in a chain that connects Arsenic and Old Lace-inspired wartime 'horror-comedy' (ala the underrated Boogeyman will Get You) with the psychosexual Freud/Kinsey flood of the late 50s-60s ala Suddenly Last Summer, Lilith, Three Faces of Eve, Psycho, Repulsion and Robert Bloch's semi-remake of Cabinet of Caligari (1962) starring Glynnis Johns (below).

Actually Scared and the 1962 Caligari would make a fine double bill, allowing us to consider the 15 year gap between them just how readily the population flux in the wake of the Second World War led to the frustrations of the 50s housewife, forced to give up her riveting job and stay home with the kids. If unable to find recourse in satisfying sex lives or a posse of hyper-active children, she turned to murder and madness. Electro-shock and lobotomies, hysterectomies and, if all else failed, they may well escape, to a place where birth control and liberation from the confines of male 'protection' might be feasible, i.e. Maine.

This is all just beginning to happen in 1947, where we find Laura in Scared to Death. Her Paris-under-occupation hypnotist act is in the past and now she has no role other than scheming bitch wife. So she hides in hr room, freaks out over branches at the window, stands up to cryptic threats from her father-in-law, and harasses the household staff. AND YET! Laurette/Laura is, a trailblazer -- her paranoia and madness, like a slowly gathering storm, will move across the warm ocean to the Freudian 50s, the bra-burning 60s, and finally blossom into a full on 70s women's lib typhoon!

++

HOLD ONTO THE PAST BEFORE THE PRESENT BECOMES IT.

What makes Scared resonate as indoor-child beloved art is its ability to be seen again and again, each new viewing doing little to shed light on the cryptic allusions to war crimes never fully elaborated on. I recently saw Dinner at Eight (1933) for the zillionth time and this time what I noticed was how the good old days before the Crash are recalled so glowingly it illuminates the desperate straits of the present, of aging and death in general --as if remembering bright lights helping ease the descent into darkness. Scared to Death could almost be Dinner's deadpan satirical inverse. For Scared to Death  it's the reverse, focusing on the bright present to avoid the murky past, trying not to look back to the darkness of the Second World War, to--at least between Leonide and cousin Joseph--let bygones be bygones, and trade the self-destructive intellectual gamesmanship of old Europe for the mire of grinning middle class American New World idiocy. But, they spend their time itching for something to happen, trying to generate tension with screams and faints, almost grateful that Rene with his green mask and back from Europe for revenge motif has come to leaven the small town sameness. Instead of Dinner at Eight-style monologues about the good old days, everyone plays their pasts as cards close to the vest and then, the big reveal as collaborators are ferreted out by presumed-dead concentration camp escapees, i.e. dinner is cancelled. But Desert is served.

RECOMMENDATIONS: 

If yer scared of a little Caligari semi-remake, you should also see on a double bill with The Awful Truth (with which it shares two actresses- above - each playing a Cary Grant rebound (hint: Joyce Compton sings "Gone with the Wind"). Like Scared to Death, Awful Truth gets better and better as the layers of cool little termite moments are shuckered loose from their deceptively shallow shells. As I point in my award-skipping 2003 film The Lacan Hour there are so many "Momento Mori" skulls, masks, and head effigies in Scared one can't help but read the obvious meaning behind them, and the meaning is that obvious meaning itself has no meaning. The quick dick pic sketched and pocketed by Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski is the ultimate in phallic signifiers when using this yardstick to measure. 

Of course in order to 'get' this truth, you need to have seen Scared to Death so many times it ceases to make sense at all. Is staying indoors, strung out on allergy medicine, watching this film obsessively, over and over, a kind of secret pathway to post-structuralist enlightenment? Or is it  a living death which, nonetheless, like the lowering of the shroud, may bring air conditioned peace? (3) See it on a triple bill with the 1962 Caligari and Antonioi's Red Desert  -in that order, while comfortable and, ideally, alone and strung out... See if I'm wrong! 

I know I'm not alone in loving this cockeyed caravan of a film: shout outs to renowned raconteur d'horreur classique David Del Valle (though even he admits it's "not Voodo Man") and a thanks and RIP to my old Scarlet Street mentor, Ken Hanke, who steered me to the best available transfer of this often-crappy PD title back in 2000 (PS, it's the 1999 Sling Shot DVD w/ Devil Bat "The Bela Lugosi Collection - Vol. 1" - worth getting, as the colors are upgraded and the detail is sharp. I think you can get it for $8 on Amazon -- yer welcome. )

SEE ALSO: 

VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!  

RETURN OF THE APE MAN: Revisiting the Savage, from a Wartime Perspective 

and many the Woodisan gems from:

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #8: 

The BRECHT, GODARD WOOD Issue

NOTES:
1. Weldon, Michael Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983)
2. See: At Long Last Lost Lewtons
3. Allergy sufferers know that 'air conditioning season' usually signals the end of allergy trouble. What pollen remains is filtered out of the air during the AC process and for those of us with Nordic blood and allergies who hate humidity and heat, air conditioning + Bela Lugosi = nirvana.  

You're Eatin' Hearts: Universal Cult Horror (TCM DVD Set review)

THE MAD GHOUL

1943 - **1/2

"With me it's ghoul trouble, baby," laments Carl Denham, i.e. Robert Armstrong, to a little honey of a fellow reporter who appears and exeunts with little fuss in one of the few horror movies made in 1943, THE MAD GHOUL. Excuse its impoverished gloss as half the studio workforce was busy fighting in WWII, back when we weren't yet sure we'd win. Universal, in its lack of wisdom, didn't believe horror movies were what the wartime public wanted (they thought they wanted wartime jingoism, and/or bourgeois fluff operetta). Son of Frankenstein proved 'em wrong. But by '43 they were issuing half-awake surplus like this.

Censors are flighty folks. Despite the horror overseas, they won't allow us to learn what the "Mad Ghoul" (David Bruce) does with dead bodies he exhumes. We guess he eats the hearts, since the hearts are missing from the coffins and dug up graves. But then the cops change the subject, perhaps realizing some half-dead sod rifling through the contents of dead men's chests for food is pretty low to nil, all things considered. Rather than evil, he's like a poor hippie, funeral home dumpster diving while following his former true love on tour (instead of Phish or the Dead) doing (what else?), bourgeois fluff operetta, lip-synced by Evelyn Ankers and conducted by urbane composer-pianist Turhan Bey. With his Egyptian charm he easily sweeps Evelyn off of her feet while Bruce is out eating people's hearts. How symbolic! Turned ghoulish via an ancient zombie gas formula created by yet another romantic rival (his chemistry thesis advisor George Zucco), Bruce is outclassed from the get-go. 

But again, the threat angle is dubious. The worst the cops and press can do is concern themselves with his effect on the bereaved ("He always chooses a new corpse"). Though the ghoul doesn't kill, merely raids the funeral home larder like an unscrupulous med student or mad wax museum sculptor, he's still a menace... for some reason! Catching him "may be the means of saving the deceased from a horrible mutilation!" (I'm sure the deceased would be grateful). It all seems especially gross, since the censor won't let us learn \ why Bruce would need to eat hearts in the first place, as opposed to normal meals (is he getting high on embalming fluid?), or why we should care if an already dead person is used for something other than feeding worms or crematory ovens. Is it really so important these recently deceased hearts stay un-pilfered? Corpse eating shouldn't be further demonized, considering civilians were probably doing the same thing in besieged Leningrad the same year this came out, just to survive the winter. Calling it monstrous is shaming to our temporary allies!

Zucco has fun with all this grisly business, as much as he can, but the plot is the same as all the Universal monster B-pics of the time: an exploited killer and his evil mastermind handler take their frustrations out bitchy critics and romantic rivals while a snappy reporter goes undercover to catch them. In this case, it's Armstrong posing as a funeral home cadaver to catch his "man." "Whatever you do, don't mar this coffin!" exclaims the undertaker. 

Anyway, the make-up is interesting, the shambling effective, the suspense music fine, the heart-eating uncanny chiefly for its glaring elephant-in-the-room vagueness. The lighting is competent but needs more shadows and darkness. Hasn't anyone ever heard of expressionism? Where are all the German immigrants? A dark set could save on electricity! I guess the censors wanted to make sure no phantoms were having sex in the corners or eating things they shouldn't.

I''ll say it again: THE MAD GHOUL is the best PRC horror movie that Universal ever made. It's every bit as strange and oddly engaging as any Poverty Row monster movie of the 1940s that you can name, but it's got all the brand-name (B-unit) trappings of Universal Studios to give it that little bit extra and deliver a lasting, satisfying, and fun film. Although it was probably pretty forgettable as the second-banana feature in the cinemas in 1943 to SON OF DRACULA --- Shock Cinema

Rose Hobart is in it, somewhere. I didn't see her though. There's not even eight people in the whole cast, aside from some disheartened gravediggers. Hang in there, boys!

MURDERS IN THE ZOO

1933 - ***1/2

Somehow this Paramount film wound up in the Universal Cult Horror collection, to all our benefit. The beautiful Kathleen Burke (the Panther Woman from Paramount's same year ISLAND OF LOST SOULS) is to kill for, especially. when her hair and make-up are reigned in. It's the old familiar tale of maniacal jealousy between an older, domineering man and his younger, lothario-magnet wife but with one welcome addition: this is pre-code so the animal-related murders and lurid come-ons of cuckolded husband Eric (Lionel Atwill)--the big game hunter / zoo owner-- are truly perverse. "Yes, Eric, I know," Burke says, voice trilling with anticipatory sexual panic, after he kills her latest lover with a mamba bite, "now you're going to make love to me." Cutaways from the human actors to pent-up animals in cages, all the better to symbolize a panorama of human emotions. Atwill sits with a chimp in his lap and looks quite comfortable and is clearly the sort who wants to be master of the flora and fauna. I've been the delusional boyfriend of the hot girl every man in town feels obliged to hit on, and it's very nerve-wracking. It's not like you can do much about it without making the situation worse, and you know you do the same thing all the time--beauty like Burke's enchants men to the point they don't even know where or who they are. That West Side Story 'love at first sight at the dance' effect where all the rest of the world blurs/fades away.

Unfortunately, there's too much comic relief in Charlie Ruggles as the zoo's dipsomaniac PR agent. He hems and haws for whole bathroom break-long stretches at the thought of l-l-lions and t-t-t-igers! and there's boring straight man stuff from Randolph Scott as a straight arrow herpetologist so smart he accuses the killer to his face, while they're alone in a room filled with venomous snakes, and then turns his back on him, and all before bothering to phone the cops or tell anyone else of his suspicions! Hahaha! Eric is not one to squander such an opportunity. 

Luckily Scott's toxicologically-savvy assistant (Gail Patrick) isn't as much of an idiot, and saves the day. Her black oil slick hair doesn't make a good contrast with her pale face. Other bummers are the subtextual animal cruelty, such as turning a lot of big cats loose in a cramped room or keeping them in their tiny cells is heart-wrenching. reminding me of bummer Philly zoo trips in the 70s. But hey, Burke is so lovely, alien-looking and haunted that her terror leaves a queasier taste than it might otherwise. Her misery being married to Eric has put her in a state of somnambulistic terror so irresistible you may want to risk having your mouth sewn shut in Malaysia just to 'save' her. Don't do it! Even if you succeed, some other banal handsome white cipher will be waiting to turn you into just another jealous Eric.

HOUSE OF HORRORS

1944 - ***

Two disparate artists - one of murder, one of sculpture -- are brought together by fate to rage against the bile of snooty art critics determined to rob them of revenue in this unofficial BRUTE MAN sequel. Real-life German political refugee Martin Kolseck plays a poverty-stricken mad sculptor and his model, the (real life) acromelagy-ridden Creeper, Rondo Hatton is his muse and friend. Rondo was in a string of Bs (including the Sherlock Holmes film PEARL OF DEATH). He died and his career is very sad, but his name lives on in the Rondo awards. I was once nominated for one once! I didin't win but I'm still feeling honored about it. Your image will outlive us all, fair and lovely Rondo.

Kolseck's tortured, shadow-dwelling expressionist sculptor--a genius but unknown and scorned by the critics--has an interesting shadow in an All-American bland boy hack photographer (he takes pretty girl's pictures for ads). There's a great dissolve between the hero's subject--a hot vacant bikini model-- and Kolseck's subject--the magnificently disfigured Rondo.  Beautiful and complicated Rondo vs. bland blonde!  

"Now I have a feeling of power!" Kolseck rants, inspired. "Limitless power!"

As someone who labors greatly for this little site, I'm always having mental dialogues where my innate grandiosity is tempered with rage at a relative lack of public recognition compared with some of my mainstream hack fellows. These thoughts fuel a whole cycle of dejection, bitterness, anger, humility, redemption, and finally artistic inspiration fueled by grace, which quickly becomes overstuffed with grandiosity, followed by bitterness my magnificence isn't more fully appreciated, and the cycle clicks a spoke anew. Sometimes I take this journey in a single breath! Limitless power and unbridled creative flow, and its twin flip-side, blocked insecurity. Thus I appreciate the frustrations of Martin Kosleck as the moody sculptor. An anti-Nazi German who fled his homeland one jump ahead of the Gestapo, Martin would, ironically, spend most of his years in Hollywood playing the very Nazis he fled from. Here he's clearly relishing a chance to embody a more tragic, three-dimensional figure (ala Conrad Veidt in A WOMAN'S FACE -my 2008 Bright Lights appreciation here)

The Rondo award prototype is complete!

I like this from Memphis gadabout John Beifuss: "Those who do not appreciate true art will probably call it ugly," rationalizes the film's mad sculptor about his work -- a useful comment that could function as an inadvertent slogan for all the undervalued directors laboring in the sometimes disreputable horror genre." I like that Burns and Allen's regular third wheel and announcer, Bill Goodwin is cast as a cop, for no earthly reason. And there's a great existential sadness that hangs over it all, which Beifuss again nails:

"House of Horrors" is little more than efficient in terms of its staging and camerawork. But it's utterly absorbing in its alternately dismissive and sympathetic attitudes toward art and abnormality; as the story volleys between the healthy Steven and the weird Marcel, between the vibrant Joan and the grotesque Creeper, it functions almost as a dialogue. On the surface, Yarbrough seems to encourage the conflicted viewer to embrace the film's rote 1940s endorsement of wholesomeness; yet it's the almost Steinbeckian duo of Marcel and the Creeper that engages our identification.

The clarity of the DVD image bears this out, exposing the relative poverty of the bland 'good guy' sets vs. the attention to moody shadows and alive flickering in Marcel's studio. Rondo's reputation as the Creeper is well established by his supernatural ability to slip silently around brightly-lit empty corridors; and sneak up right behind people before strangling them and breaking their spines, with only his tall twisted shadow to give him away. Rondo's earlier Creeper engry, THE BRUTE MAN ends (I dimly remember) with the Creeper, shot and falling into the East River, which is where our sculptor finds him and fishes him out and brings him home to his studio like a lost puppy. It's touching, not unlike a similar scene early on in 1941 Peter Lorre classic FACE BEHIND THE MASK. The film eventually ends on a note of unsatisfying predictability, but for awhile it really soars in satisfying directions with a great moral: if you want to kill a bunch of your enemies, just be kind to a half-drowned hulking monster! The war was in fullest flower in 1944, and it's to the film's credit that it understands the need for being kind to that which horrifies us for ultimately higher ends, i.e. allying with the thuggish Stalin against a certain Austrian hack painter. 

STRANGE CASE OF DR. Rx

1942 - *

This is the one where the guy kills all the people who were exonerated for crimes with which they were clearly guilty. I say, good work, Dr. Rx! Mantan Moreland is of course the best part as a a lazy butler, jiving with delivery folks and generally deserving to be fired despite being the best thing about the movie. My favorite moment is when he's supposed to pick up his blandsome hero boss from the airport in the morning, but sleeps through his alarm instead. Finally in the afternoon, Mantan wakes up to find his boss--having had to come home in a cab--now at his bedside, strangling him: "Why didn't we meet me at the airport?" the hero snaps.

"Boss!" blurts startled Manton, "I'm on my way right now!"

That's the only good line. Similarly there's only one tiny little dark patch of horror in the film (pictured above), a kind of a cheat (like using an arresting image from a dream sequence montage for your movie poster) wherein we see Dr. Rx pulling a MAGIC CHRISTIAN-esque freak-out on the captured hero with the help of a gorilla suit, but it's just one small heavy metal oasis in a desert of tedious lite muzak. Things only gets worse with the arrival of a feminism-sabotaging, first amendment-violating hack reporter who tries to gaslight her detective husband out of the crime-solving racket. Yecchh. 

MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET

1942 - *

I started watching this in good faith but its tale of a mad scientist working on early forms of cryogenics-- leaving a trail of bodies wherever he goes--is so dull and flat it only made me mad I'd ever even bought this set. I began to long for the comparatively ingenious touch of PRC or Monogram. This one stars Lionel Atwill as the titular doctor, marooned with some dislikable specimens on a tropical island. One night he saves the chief's wife with an adrenalin shot (not into the heart, I guess to not shock those heart-phobic censors) and from then on he's got the tribe's witch doctor gig, which means experimenting on the natives and then, when he wants to work on 'higher' forms of life, the white castaways. Now he's gone too far!  They'd have probably loved this film in Germany or the Jim Crow south. 

The Mad Doctor of Market Street presents us with such lousy specimens of the human animal I am tempted to think that Martin's script was trying to sneak in an existentialist subtext. Certainly, life couldn't seem more absurd or meaningless than it does at the end of The Mad Doctor of Market Street. Only Martin's colossal incompetence at every other facet of screenwriting keep me from taking such an idea seriously. - Horror Inc.

I actually stopped watching about halfway through in disgust. I paid real money for this set, after eyeing it for years on TCM's site, thinking the price would go down or I could get them to send me a review copy. For $44 or whatever the list is they should endeavor to give us at least four decent films instead of only three. These last two 'doctor' films are appallingly bad. We all know 1942 was a grim period for the horror film thanks to evil censors (in both senses of the term) but Jeeze! I don't mind ineptitude but I hate anemic triteness and soul-killing racist boredom.

Maybe it was the war. Nothing could compare with the Nazis and Japanese as far as horrors. (By 1944 it was okay since we realized we would probably win, eventually). At any rate it does make one wonder if anyone at TCM even saw these films, or were just scrolling the available titles in the Universal roster and picked anything with 'Mad', 'Strange' or 'Horror' in the title. A pox on them (but not too bad a one, don't want to spook the censor), when there are so many other worthy titles they could have included whose names may not have stuck out. In closing, if you're wondering whether this set is worth the money, here's my breakdown:

Mad Doctor of Market Street - value - $0.00
Strange Case of Dr. Rx - value $0.00
The Mad Ghoul - value: $3.50
House of Horrors - value: $15.00
Murders at the Zoo - value: $19.99

Maybe you can find the last two separately? (POST-SCRIPT: Now you can!)

In the future, TCM, here's my recommendation for a great five film horror set, PRE-CODE JUNGLE HORRORS:

KONGO - 1932
EAST OF BORNEO - 1933
WHITE WOMAN - 1933
BLACK MOON - 1934
THE INTRUDER - 1933

Yr welcome! 

Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Secret panels, stormy nights, dying heirs, hairy hands, Karloff, candles, lawyers; priceless mcguffins stolen from a dead man's watch pocket; maybe a coroner, woken up at this ungodly hour of the night; guys in ape suits for the medium shots, stock footage of a monkey for the close-ups; Bela Lugosi stuck playing a butler with barely any lines because the producers are worried about his morphine addiction; shrieking maids; bats; black cats; skulls on desks; conniving trophy wives everyone wants dead. What could be more Halloween-ish? It's the Old Dark House genre, basically forgotten today because there are no more old dark houses. Now they're either 'haunted' or long-since converted to apartments.

But if you've ever spent a weekend at a rich friend's mansion then you know how weird it can get: a late night trip to the bathroom after everyone else has gone to bed can be a terrifying, surreal nocturnal journey ala THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER river trip. The walls are so thick that if someone were screaming for help downstairs in the study you'd never even hear them, or be able to find them.

And no longer can eccentric millionaire uncles just caper down to Egypt and help themselves to whatever cursed, ancient artifacts they care to dig for. The colonialist yard sale is closed! But the films, thank Ra, remain open! Here's five I know like the back of m'hand, and the catacombs of m'mind: 

 THE GHOUL

(1933) Dir. T. Hayes Hunter
***

British studio Gaumont's attempt to make a 1930s Universal horror reveals just how great Universal horrors were by contrast, especially when made with Karl Freund and James Whale nearby. At any rate, GHOUL used to exist only in fuzzy dupes (in this country at least) so it's nice there are finally coherent transfers/prints around, for the film is lovely and foggy and cozy as a cup of Earl Grey at a midnight foggy moor picnic which, as a few of the other entries here make clear, is not as easy to pull off as it seems. The all-star cast includes Ralph Richardson as a noisy parson (there must be a running joke in English dog-and-pony circles about nosy local vicars cycling from house to house to mooch drinks). Karloff stars and gets almost no lines as an eccentric, dying Egyptologist who spends 75,000 pounds on an emerald he thinks will bring him back from the dead. He's soon entombed to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Sigfried's Funeral March" but naturally the gem winds up bounced around the rest of the skulking cast, starting with Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorious!) as a worried Christian butler, and Cedrick Hardwicke as a grumpy Dickensian lawyer who employs rather elaborate strings of words like "I intend to grant myself the pleasure of calling on her this evening." They're all either looking for the emerald, stealing it from someone else, writing notes, stealing said notes in the fog, making peace with angry cousins, being strangled by Karloff (back from the dead and in search of his expensive emerald) or having sadomasochistic fantasies (how very British!)

The grand guignol moment is when Boris carves a bloody ankh symbol on his bony chest, cut from many prints, and skulks around nearly harming the ladies (he's really just after the gem and immortality) and the comic relief comes in the form of Katherine Harrison as the daft best friend of plucky heroine (Dorothy Hyson). Believe it or not, Anthony Bushell and Harold Huth steal the show as a bemused Arab and a square-jawed nephew, respectively, THE GHOUL would make a fine, weird double bill with the original MUMMY (1932), and possibly even stole its props. Alas, like so many British-Egyptian Museum horrors of the era all the supernatural elements must be conveniently explained away by film's end. One mustn't leave the queen's subjects thinking such things are true, you know... a gullible lot they are, I'm afraid, sir. That's not to say this jewel still isn't a little loose in its setting, sir! Pure 30s horror mood it is, with enough Worcester fog to carry it through if you lose track of who has the jewel, or where it's hid, or where everyone else is relative to everyone else on the grounds.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY

(1939) Dir. Elliot Nugent
 ****

My favorite Bob Hope movie! I've seen it 1,000 times! Dragging my canoe behind me! I taped it off 'Spotlight' in 1980 and, in some ways, I'm still watching it. It only came onto DVD recently, was never on VHS and hasn't been on TV ever, so if you don't remember it, there's a reason. The silent version is in public domain but who needs it when this one has Bob Hope in the perfect mix of romantic hero and scared goofball quipper as Wally Campbell. It was his first big role and his comedic timing is so sharp he actually heightens the suspense with his whistling in the dark style asides, double takes, and feints back and forth between courageous pose and truthful reveal of (understandable) fear; he puts all the other variations of this character to shame (and I mean you, Wallace Ford). He's also drawn a great leading lady in Paulette Godard, though it's clear that in the original she's a bit more frail and old-school kindness-of-strangers-dependent. Goddard seems way too modern to faint or drop a gun, and way too sane to believably be even remotely as out of her mind as her greedy relatives would like to believe. That's because the she's the sole heiress to her eccentric Uncle Cyrus Norman's bayou mansion, where an escaped maniac who calls himself 'The Cat' is prowling for victims, and where the disparate relatives are gathered for the midnight will reading, a cliche which really got its start with the play version of this, which underwrites not just this film but the entirety of the genre.

So much that could go so very wrong goes just as right instead in the hands of director Elliot Nugent. He keeps the shadows alive and makes sure a creepy wind sound accompanies the fine Enrst Toch score (which never gets cutesy, just creepy). The outdoors around the house is a big swampy fog-bound soundstage rather than drab outdoor footage, which earns it a high mark; the secret panel-to-the-small-garden-hut climax conjures the expressionist shadows of Cabinet of Caligari, replete with the maniac's dramatic posturing - very high mark. What a cast! George Zucco reads the will and is the first to get murdered; Gale Sondergaard is the Creole housekeeper in tune with the mysterious chimes and 'murmurs' of the old house; and nobody sings or titters like an imbecile, not even cousin Cecily and she has to hold her finger under her nose to keep from screaming. Top marks. It was such a perfect lightning bolt synergy of style, substance, and cast chemistry that Hope reunited with Sondergaard and Zucco when they played his Nazi pursuers three years later in My Favorite Blonde and he reunited one year later with Goddard in The Ghost Breakers which has more supernatural elements than Cat and is generally considered the better film, but man, I'll take them both. It's still early in his career enough that Hope doesn't know yet just how great he is, but Nugent does, and the atmosphere is electric. Dragging my canoe behind me!

THE MONSTER WALKS
(1932) Dir. Frank Strayer
 **

This creaky Frank Strayer riff seems recorded on the kind of early sound equipment that was outmoded by 1930. The air is thick with burbling hiss like everyone is underwater (which I like). It's got most of the boxes filled:  big old dark house with a rich dead patriarch? Check.  The will read and an absentee girl heir (the compact Vera Reynolds) breezes in to collect the millions? Check. Ape in a cage in the basement? Check. Willie Best as a frightened chauffeur? Check. But we also get Mischa Auer as the illegitimate son of the old creep in the wheelchair and the maid, angry he's denied any of the family fortune after all the hours he's slaved for that old man. Not even hairy hands coming out of the wall can remedy the social injustice and animal cruelty (the ape, named Yogi, is a real ape instead of a guy in gorilla suit) that lingers in the air while the typical Cat and Canary will-reading resentment simmers and the camera keeps its static distance.

I know the Leonard Maltin review by heart: "Willie bests Mischa for laughs, but it's a close race." Lenny, you're my wheelchair-bound true father who taught me to write like a subliminal weisenheimer. Despite the unpleasant angles, the unconvincing stormy night-rattling-sheet metal makes it nice to fall asleep to as the sun comes up on another frosty November 1st, your blood levels of alcohol, ecstasy, nicotine, and sugar now dwindled to an early morning frost on the window shudder no amount of hot coffee can allay. Take it from me. "I have a premonition something's going to happen! Something horrible!" Vera says while the painting behind her slowly turns crooked so someone can spy on her. Her dumb boyfriend doctor (Rex Lease) tells her she needs something for her nerves, but then just kisses her. Dude! You should have got the tranquilizer! Then the old creep in the wheelchair tells her she should take one, too. And then the doctor goes to get her one after the ape hand incident and she still won't take it ("perhaps I won't need it"). Ugh.

Still in a movie this slow and strange it's the little things. "Nobody's going to steal their money," snarls bitter Mischa after his mom tells him to bolt the doors and windows. "It's not here." Best gets the last laugh: when he's on the floor panicking because the mouth on the polar bear rug has caught his slipper (he thinks it's "Mr. Yogurt") he seems about as afraid and engaged as if he's reading the script to himself while falling asleep. Vera is such an idiot she won't believe who the killer is, even when he's openly trying to kill her.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE

(1932) Dir. James Whale
****

The great 'lost' Universal horror of 1932. I longed to see it ever since I was a kid reading about it in my Creature Features guide, but it was all but lost thanks to the habit of destroying older versions when remakes came out (not that the remake resembled the original in anything but name/s). Then Kino came to the rescue via a restored, lone surviving print (discovered through the perseverance of Curtis Harrington), and co-star Gloria Stuart even did an audio commentary for the laserdisc.

I never had a laserdisc player, but James Cameron did, loved the commentary, and that's how she came to narrate Titanic! True story!

Not an old dark house movie, Old Dark House is not even really a horror movie or a comedy, but a James Whale movie. As such, it's a combination of many atmospheric, very British elements that don't come together until numerous viewings over decades help the various medicines buried in its flavor tapestry kick in. Getting older, we come to understand the 'that's fine stuff' rant by Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) to Gloria Stuart, and how it leads to her reflection like that of a skull in the mirror; or the resemblance Rebecca has to a photo of Queen Victoria by her mirror; the general nicety and British crust of Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) who "likes gin" (and would still be drinking it a few years later in Whale's Bride of Frankenstein), the way the alcohol passed around by the roaring hearth gives you a feel of being there and feeling the warmth of the cinematic image like that same fire; the honest romance between lost generation lad Melvyn Dougas and Bill's (Charles Laughton) traveling companion Perkins (Lillian Bond); their arrival like a daft breath of fresh working class air in the middle of a stiff dinner, lightening the rich yobbo dryness against which the merry Melvyn Douglas hurls himself like a kid fighting waves on the beach. Karloff as the mute butler portrays the end point of madness and the beginning point of savagery; Laughton becomes the backbone of Britain; the late inning introduction of Roderick Femm--played by the elderly real life old lady of the stage Elspeth Dudgeon --provides a welcome bit of contextualization, change of scene and foreshadowing. And then, in a rage Morgan releases Saul (Brember Willis- the hermit from Bride) who is hopelessly, violently insane... See it 30 times, 300, it's still not enough... my friend.

 THE BLACK RAVEN 

(1943) Dir. Sam Newfield
****

When I'm having a travel-induced panic attack, THE BLACK RAVEN is my go-to source of solace. I really respond to the cozy fireplaces, howling wind, torrential rain, muffled dialogue, and the sense of conspiratorial cool amongst the more criminal guests (they all sign the register as 'John Smith'). It all takes place--like the best old dark house films--over one 'dark and stormy' night, beginning as guests learn the bridge is washed out in their rain slashed cars and ending when the rain stops at dawn. Padding around the waterlogged cardboard sets in his robe and slippers, Zucco's great as the enigmatic retired criminal who now runs a small inn (named the Black Raven) just this side of the Canadian border. No actual ravens or border-crossings appear in this film--too rainy--but Glenn Strange is the idiot manservant and the wondrously dour Charles "Ming" Middleton is the clueless sheriff. A suitcase of embezzled cash results in murder; a corrupt politico tries to break up his daughter's newlywed marriage; and an escaped crook is out to settle an old score with Zucco. An eloping young couple try and stay out of the way. Make sure to get the best available edition as there's lots of crappy public domain editions wherein everything is too dark and muffled. (Roan Group's 'Black and Blue' set that includes Ulmer's Bluebeard and Bela's great, incoherent Black Dragons is the best so far, and highly recommended). Your mileage may vary, but for my dark and stormy night PRC 40s money, it's Black Raven all the way.

Special shout-out to Verdoux! - it seems to contain the same eerie alchemical magick as celluloid itself!

VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!

Notoriously absent from the world of DVD for the longest time (it's somehow not as much in the PD as the rest of the Lugosi Monograms? What else explains it?): VOODOO MAN (1944) completes the holy "Lugosi Nine." The missing link in the chain of strange, boring, inept but irresistibly Brechtian and unintentionally hilarious horror films from poverty row studio Monogram starring Bela Lugosi. Marked by a cheap crackerjack style that made sister fleapit PRC seem an MGM by contrast, what saved Monogram movies from dullness was a savvy they needed to keep kids from getting bored and tearing up the theater seats with their switchblades and--in the Lugosi nine--an ability to create the space for the great one to display the full breadth of his talent, from heartbreaking pathos to seething megalomaniacal menace.

Especially during the war years (when the bulk of "the nine" came out) Lugosi's complex persona found a niche freezing the new brides of overseas fighting men, as if preserving them for their soldier boys' return (in danger only of having their hair combed and petted by Carradine like he's Lenny with a rabbit.)

VOODOO MAN's release year, 1944--the last full year of all-out war, was an otherwise lean one for horror films. Aside from the work of Val Lewton over at RKO,  poverty row studios like Monogram ruled over the empty kingdom of wartime horror like blind kings. A lack of budget led to lack of meddling producers noticing or caring about the product as long as it was finished at or under budget and on time, and in the process nocturnal dream poem auteurs like Lewton and Jacques Tourneur could weave future classics like I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE out of gossamer cobwebs, while half-asleep directors like William "One Shot" Beaudine could follow their lead like a dollar brick road, straight into the undernourished collective unconscious of the home front audience.

In the case of VOODOO MAN (or similar CORPSE VANISHES), the plot involves Lugosi abducting women for scientific experiments and keeping them in suspended animation via hypnosis and/or narcotics. The subtextual translation to home front psychology isn't hard to discern: Unable to see what their men were doing overseas except through alchemical means (and letters that might arrive after the sender had already been killed in action), the brides and sweethearts left at home created a distorted magnification of sexual paranoia that found a nice screen in the suave, European dark and handsome devil Lugosi even as the repression of being faithful to a ghost husband driving themselves into cold storage storage fugues.

But me, I was a kid when I first encountered VOODOO MAN as a bored child in the 1970s. It was on UHF TV almost all the time, along with other Monogram Lugosi 'classics': THE APE MAN, GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE, THE CORPSE VANISHES, BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT and THE INVISIBLE GHOST... all could barely register against the constant attacks of static and "ghosting" on UHF channels, and in retrospect, that made the threadbare films seem better - like maybe we missed something, like there was something to miss. We kids watched these titles over and over again --every time they were on TV--in our forlorn pre-VHS hope of catching a view of a real frickin' monster --they were rare. Maybe it was edited out and we'd see it next time? The "Voodoo" title of this one made us think that, maybe, there'd be, I don't know, a zombie? Anything? But Noooo! Just hypnotized chicks in robes, and Bela Lugosi and George Zucco in a crazy headdress, all seeming to have been filmed on a single dirty staircase with a ratty old camera, and as full of dull adult talk as any crappy film parents watched.

But still... when Bela was on, we were transported!

To really appreciate VOODOO MAN as a key 20th century work of art, you need to vibe with the lonesome beauty of Edward Hopper's paintings, as in the gas station scene above. It's hard to tell if the VOODOO MAN gas station is indoors on a set or outside at a real gas station, I'd assume the latter. But the resemblance is uncanny for other reasons then the style of the pumps; the same lonesome quality of Hopper's gas station, the same eerie forlorn dusk approaching, darkening the forest down the road so it seems like a black devouring sadness is creeping towards the man working outside. Similarly, the drivers who pass by George Zucco's gas station don't realize this is the station where Zucco signals the arrival of desired vicitms by radioing on ahead for the trap to be laid. In bigger budgeted films you might see a long shot of the gas station along the road, but Monogram's aesthetic afforded no non-stock footage exteriors. So the Zucco station demands close framing all the time, giving the film a cramped feeling as if the road is only around a mile total in length, and then the world just ends in a black gulch abyss. 

World War Two saw, among other things, men going off to fight battles who, before they left for Europe, got married so they could at least have some sanctioned sex, i,e, not die a virgin, and maybe even leave a kid behind as a legacy. For a nation of these young women and young men, the sexual relation was hot and short, leaving them with a whetted appetite and little else. Their erotic awakening froze in early bloom. The soldier’s bride surely felt as if she was married to a nonexistent entity (perhaps she even sets the table in case he comes home, in shades of Lugosi’s first Monogram pic, THE LIVING GHOST). Not only is her man not around, but his next letter may arrive weeks after he is already dead. These sorts of things were probably swilling around the collective unconscious like a plague of ghost G.I.s and seductive traveling salesman Hitlers. Like the Voodoo Man, in fact. 

And of course, through it all, that horrendous ache, the lonesome sadness, the same sadness a boy in the early 1970s like myself was feeling from staying indoors on a sunny day, unable to leave Bela's side in his hour of woe, sighing over his Charlie's Angels bubblegum cards in prepubescent longing all the more tortuous for the fact that Kate Jackson was so out of reach, yet right there - in ephemeral mirage form. Life.... to death. Image... to life, and each side greener than the other, blacker too. 

Thus to appreciate the beauty of VOODOO MAN without the background of having seen it many times as a child in the 1970s, or as a wartime lover, you must first understand true suffering: romantic longing, unfair parents, stupid little brothers, annoying teachers. You should be a mad genius trapped in the mundane reality of normal suburbia. For like such a mad genius, VOODOO MAN suffers from disrespect and the hostile derision of lesser mortals. For indeed, the poverty row horrors of the 1940s were dissed by everyone, even their own makers; a sad state of affairs when the director and writer admit throughout the film that they don't give a damn about what they're doing and you shouldn't either. But we were used to being told stuff we liked was crap. And we raged against boredom and against every bedtime; and in this refusal to kowtow to life's petty rules we really found a kinsman in Lugosi. It didn't matter how bad everyone else was in front of and behind the camera, Bela was a star and he gave it his all, like it was his last picture ever, and like his character had nothing left to lose, was not about to postpone joy just because the cops and/or mom was closing in. 

So yeah, the director William "One Shot" Beaudine shot the film with his usual adherence to the lazy tenets of his nickname, though like the lazy he occasionally lurches into inspired brilliance. "Romantic" lead Tod Andrews plays Ralph, the most unimaginative and dull screenwriter in Hollywood, though his existential suggestion that Bela Lugosi star in the film he has just written and/or lived, does in fact come true, Moebius strip style. Still, in Ralph's own words, "Zombies are a scenario writers worst nightmare. I should know, I wrote one once.” 

Hmm, so zombie and horror films are for morons, and Monogram's writers should know, because they write them? Such self-defeating and dubious logic abounds all through the film, as as when the sheriff refuses the hero's help in finding the ever increasing roster of missing women: "Me and Elmer've done all right looking for them ourselves, I guess we can look for one more." Not that they've found any clues, or leads, or women, but they're doing "all right by themselves." That's something a child says when they're too shy to ask for help. Such blatant contempt for the intellect of an audience borders on the pathological, even further, until it loops back around to crest the pinnacle of high art. 

This meta-logic ties into the practice of voodoo itself, in both in the contempt it inspires in the western "white man," and the way trances actually can be induced to universal benefit and cosmic aura enhancement. The voodoo spells performed are just contemptuous mumbo jumbo but the actors are game and Lugosi and Zucco both intone like skilled hypnotists or bass players, their robes are badass, and Ramboona clouds the minds of all who would try and stop them. Free to treat the landscape of the film as his own tyrant sandbox, Lugosi outwits the sluggish sheriff, berates his cringing dingbat servant/drummer Toby (John Carradine) and leaves hypnotized women shambling around his whole world backyard. It fits the mindset of any frustrated kid who (often rightly) feels the adults in charge are raving idiots and/or cocktail-dazed bullies; and who recruits the dumb little brothers and their friends into his mad schemes to transform the den into a magical alternate realm. The only other 'real' person he knows- - his wife--is dead, or in kid terms, his best friend moved away, or Kate Jackson exists only on the cover of Bananas, in WW2 terms it's that girl back home re-reading the letters written by her MIA husband until they're sogged, until she turns to killing sailors as a sacrifice to get her man back from hell.  

In case you don't have a drunken father or son or me to make snide comments as you watch the film, the VOODOO MAN DVD comes with the comic stylings of Rifftrax, hence the cover that makes this look like some frat boy Tiki party video: Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, ala Mystery Science Theater, are the comics and rather than robot silhouettes there's thankfully just a hilarious audio commentary option. I'm certainly grateful to them for getting the film out on DVD, in a nice transfer, and for keeping their comments on a separate track so I can enjoy the purity of the original and refer to their company only when I want to make sure they caught some ridiculous moment, and they do catch them all. Keep 'em coming, buckos! 

So now that I've trashed the film and everyone, let's concentrate on the brilliance beneath: Lugosi, naturally. His restrained, melancholic performance reflects, as I've said, that he always brought his "A" game (check his "handy" robe above), no matter how contemptuously the actors around him treated the story. As grieving husbands trying to resurrect their lost Lenores he could pull you right into the screen by the throat just by welling up his eyes with tears and spacing out his words in the right way... "Life... to... death!" His sense of despair and dejected madness is again totally metatextual, for he was a classically trained toast of Romanian theater who had come to Hollywood and rose to iconic fame and just as quickly fell off big studio favor and now here he was at Monogram studio, with William "One Shot" Beaudine, kind of like Klaus Kinski in AGUIRRE: WRATH OF GOD, ending up the king of a gaggle of unimpressed monkeys. And Zucco of course, his perfect wingman. 

Bela's megalomania and devotion to the eternal "play" of acting, then, earns our love despite and because of the dregs surrounding him. Children still at that pre-compassion stage could easily identify with that kind of protective madness, the insanity that prevents true genius from succumbing to despair at the mundanity all around.” 

I also like how the film adheres to the spirit of a child’s sense of play, where no one really dies or escapes fake death. In all these Monograms there was seldom any actual harm done to these young frozen brides. They usually snapped out of whatever trance they happened to by the picture’s end (presumably unmolested -- coded into the 'child-like' nature of her keepers), while Bela inevitably died in his burning lab, usually with his hands happily locked around the neck of a gorilla. Every kid knows that in war games the only true winner is the one who dies last. Even the last man standing knows that, to truly win, you don't stay standing--you're always shot by the second-to-last man as he dies, as a kind of final exhale of life and bullets: in death there are no losers, everyone gets their own death scene, to make of what they will. After all, what is the difference between a living soldier and an emotionless zombie if not that one of them is seen but not heard from, the other heard from but never seen again? The pain of absence underlies both, and is the one true enduring badge of courage. Come home, soldier. Andy, come home, whatever you are.