By the early 1950’s, the type of Gothic horrors Universal was famous for had become passe. It was The Atomic Age, and science fiction ruled the roost, with invaders from outer space and giant bugs unleashed by radiation were the new norm. But the studio now called Universal-International had one more ace up its collective sleeve: THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, last of the iconic Universal Monsters!
Scientist Dr. Maia, exploring “the upper reaches of the Amazon” with his native guides, discovers a fossilized hand that may be the evolutionary “missing link”. Taking his finding to the Institudo de Biologia Martima, he teams with ichthyologist David Reed, David’s pretty assistant/fiancé Kay Lawrence, institute chief Dr. Mark Williams, and fellow scientist Dr. Thompson to form an expedition. They charter the steamer The Rita, skippered by Captain Lucas, and head down the river into the Black Lagoon. Maia’s Indian guides…
Since I was pretty much indifferent to who won the World Series this year (Congratulations, Boston), I’ve been watching baseball movies instead. I just finished watching The Jackie Robinson Story.
The Jackie Robinson Story was made in 1950, back when Robinson was still playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The movie not only tells the story of how Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play in the major leagues but it also stars Jackie Robinson as himself!
Starting with Jackie’s childhood in Pasadena, the movie follows Jackie as he attends UCLA, serves a brief stint in the Army, and then plays baseball on an all African-American team (Jackie played for the Kansas City Monarchs but, in the movie, the team is renamed the Black Panthers!) before eventually getting signed to join the Dodgers and integrate major league baseball. While the movie skips over a lot of Jackie’s early life, it doesn’t gloss over the prejudice that he encountered at every step of the way. When he wins a scholarship to UCLA, people complain that the college has already recruited too many black athletes. Even when he’s a star player in the Negro Leagues, he still has to ask permission to enter and use the washroom in a diner. And when he joins the Dodgers, riots are threatened if he plays anywhere in the South. During one game, his wife (Ruby Dee) overhears the whites in the stands talking about how “the Lodge” is going to visit Jackie. Through it all, Jackie Robinson keeps his cool and refuses to give the racists the satisfaction of getting to him. Jackie answers every bigoted comment with the crack of his bat, leaving no doubt that he belongs in the major leagues.
Jackie Robinson was a great baseball player and a great man. He wasn’t a great actor and, in this movie, he comes across as being stiff and nervous whenever he has to play any dialogue scenes. But then he swings a bat or catches a ball and it doesn’t matter that he can’t act. Jackie Robinson was an amazing player and it’s still exciting to watch footage of him today.
The Jackie Robinson Story is a rousing, feel-good baseball movie and a condemnation of racism and bigotry, in all of its insidious forms.
In this 1953 satire, a philosophy professor named Kerry West (Hans Conried) buys a television. (Remember, this was a time when televisions were still a relatively new phenomena.) Imagine Kerry’s surprise when he discovers that his television can walk, talk, light his cigarettes, clean the house, and make money materialize out of nowhere!
Sounds great, right?
The only problem is that this TV is not only a bit possessive but it also uses its powers to brainwash people and rob them of their individuality!
Technically, The Twonky is more a comedy than a horror movie. In fact, it’s really not scary at all. But it is a lot of fun and it’s interesting to see how a filmmaker in the 50s dealt with television’s growing role in American society.
Katie (Mary Steenburgen) is a struggling actress with an out-of-work husband (William Russ) and a deadbeat brother (Mark Malone). Desperately in need of money, Kate goes to an open audition and is immediately hired by Mr. Murray (Roddy McDowall), who explains that Katie will have to meet with one of the film’s investors, the wheelchair-bound Dr. Lewis (Jan Rubes). In the middle of a raging snowstorm, they go to Dr. Lewis’s home and, once they’ve arrived, Katie discovers that she is meant to replace an actress who looked exactly like her but who Dr. Lewis claims had a nervous breakdown. She’s told that she must stay the night so she can meet the director in the morning and when she tries to call her husband to let him know where she is, the line is dead. (For those born after 1996, the line being dead was the 80s equivalent of not being able to get a signal.) Dr. Lewis says it must be due to the storm but he promises to have Mr. Murray take her into town in the morning. Of course, the next morning, the car doesn’t start and it becomes clear that Dr. Lewis is not planning on ever letting Katie leave his home.
Dead of Winter is a throw-back to the type of gothic, damsel-in-distress films that actresses like Nina Foch, Ingrid Bergman, and Linda Darnell used to make back in the 1940s and 50s. If you can accept that anyone could ever be as naive as Katie, it’s not that bad of a thriller. Director Arthur Penn fills his movie with homages to Hitchcock and the scene where a drugged Katie wakes up to discover that she’s missing a finger is an effectively nasty shock. By the end of the movie, Mary Steenburgen has played three different characters and she does a good job as all three of them. Jan Rubes makes Dr. Lewis’s too obviously evil but Roddy McDowall is great as the polite but psychotic Mr. Murray. When Mr. Murray sees that Katie has tried to escape by climbing out a window, he yells, “Oh dear!” and only Roddy McDowall could have pulled that off.
Dead of Winter was Arthur Penn’s second-to-last theatrical film. After making films like Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, and Alice’s Restaurant, Penn’s career went into decline as the American film industry became increasingly centered around blockbusters and Penn’s cerebral approach fell out of favor. After Dead of Winter, Penn would direct Penn & Teller Get Killed before returning to his roots as a television director. Penn ended his long and distinguished career as an executive producer on Law & Order.
Rondo Hatton (1894-1946) was dubbed by “The Ugliest Man in Hollywood” by Universal for his repulsive visage. Originally a Tampa-based sportswriter, Hatton began developing the disease acromegaly as a young adult, a form of gigantism which distorts the facial features and bone structure (wrestler Andre the Giant suffered from this). Rondo moved to Hollywood and got work as a film extra and some bit parts (he can be spotted in SAFE IN HELL , IN OLD CHICAGO, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (’39 version), and THE OX BOW INCIDENT, among others).
1944’s “The Pearl of Death”
Hatton played “The Hoxton Creeper” in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes entry THE PEARL OF DEATH (with Universal Scream Queen Evelyn Ankers as a villainess, for a change), then proceeded to scare the daylights out of audiences in JUNGLE CAPTIVE and THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK. While not a trained actor, his unique looks made…
Released in 1958, How To Make A Monster is a clever little horror satire from American International Pictures in which the stars of Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein are hypnotized into believing that they actually are the monsters that they played! The main culprit is a movie makeup artist (Robert H. Harris) who has been deemed obsolete by the new bosses at AIP.
When his parents leave to spend the summer in Europe, Frankie (Trevor Lissauer) has the entire mansion to himself. Frankie wants to spend the time getting closer to his girlfriend, Dee Dee (Daisy Torme), but his best friend Bogie (Danny Hitt) says that it’s time to “party hearty!” (That’s right. Someone in a film made after 1991 says that it’s time to party hearty.) Bogie thinks that the best way to party would be to invite Moondoggie (Johnny Venocur) and his gang (which includes Carmen Elecrta) to hang out at the house. But then it turns out that Moondoggie is a vampire and once he’s invited in, he refuses to leave! Even worse, Dee Dee dumps Frankie for Moondoggie! Luckily, there is one man on the beach who can help Frankie out of his predicament. They call him the Big Kahuna, he wears a Hawaiian shirt and he’s played by Adam West.
This is really, really dumb but at least it’s got Adam West saying lines like, “Stop that sucking!” and “Holy wipe out!” The movie is supposed to be a throwback to the old Frankie and Annette beach party movies from the 60s, just with vampires. (Moondoggie’s real named is Count Erich Von Zipper.) What the movie didn’t take into account is that there was already a perfectly good Beach Party movie with vampires and it was called The Lost Boys. Don’t be fooled by that PG-13 rating or the way that Carmen Electra is posing on the poster. An American Vampire Story is a tame and bloodless vampire story. The cast is game but most of the jokes fail to land like they should and ultimately, only Adam West keeps the anemic tale alive.
Since I’ve already reviewed HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN back in 2015, we now turn our attention to HOUSE OF DRACULA, the last “official” entry in the series (though the Universal Monsters would ‘Meet Abbott & Costello’ three years later). The film tries to put a new slant on things, using science to conquer the supernatural, but winds up being just a hodgepodge of familiar horror tropes without much cohesion. HOUSE OF DRACUA does have its fans, but I’m not one of them.
John Carradine returns as Count Dracula, introducing himself as Baron Latos to Dr. Edlemann (Onslow Stevens ) and seeking a cure for his vampirism. Edlemann discovers a “peculiar parasite” in Dracula’s blood, and believes he can cure him through a series of transfusions. But the Count, that sneaky devil, has his fangs set for Edlemann’s pretty nurse Militza (Martha O’Driscoll), whom he hypnotizes with those hypnotic eyes of his…
This film was produced as a direct result of the box office success of I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Just as in Teenage Werewolf, Whit Bissell plays a mad scientist who makes the mistake of trying to play God. (He also makes the mistake of keeping an alligator in his lap but that’s another story.) The end result …. Teenage Frankenstein!
The makeup on the Teenage Frankenstein is probably the best thing about this film. If nothing else, this film features a monster who actually looks like he was stitched together in a lab.
Count Dracula (played by Udo Kier) has a problem. In order to stay strong and healthy, he needs a constant supply of virgin blood. (Or, as Kier puts in, “weergen blood.”) Unfortunately, he lives in 1920s Romania and apparently, there just aren’t many virgins left in Eastern Europe.
However, Dracula’s assistant, Anton (Arno Juerging) has a solution. Dracula just needs to move to Italy! After all, Italy is the home of the Vatican and it’s just been taken over by Mussolini and the fascists. Surely, no one in Italy is having sex! Dracula should be able to find all the virgins that he needs in Italy!
So, Dracula climbs into his coffin and Anton drives him to Italy. Once they arrive, they meet an Italian land owner, Il Marchese di Fiore (played by Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica). The Marchese is convinced that Dracula is a wealthy nobleman and he says that Dracula can marry any of his four daughters. He assures Dracula that they’re all virgins but Dracula soon discovers that two of them are not. It turns out that, thanks to the estate’s Marxist handyman, Mario (Joe Dallesandro), it’s getting as difficult to find a virgin in Italy as it was in Romania!
After completing work on Flesh For Frankenstein, director Paul Morrissey and actors Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, and Arno Juerging immediately started work on Blood for Dracula. Though Blood for Dracula never quite matches the excesses of Flesh for Frankenstein, it still taps into the same satiric vein that provided the lifeblood that gave life to Flesh for Frankenstein. Once again, the sets and costumes are ornate. Once again, the frequently ludicrous dialogue is delivered with the straightest of faces. Once again, Udo Kier goes over-the-top as a famous monster. And, once again, Joe Dallesandro plays his role with a thick and anachronistic New York accent and he looks damn good doing it.
Ironically, one of the differences between Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula is that there’s quite a bit less blood in the Dracula film. Then again, that’s also kind of the point. Dracula literally can’t find any blood to drink and, as a result, he’s become weak and anemic. Udo Kier is perhaps the sickliest-looking Dracula in the history of Dracula movies. By the time that he meets the Marchese’s four daughters, he’s so sick that he literally seems like he might fade away at any second. As ludicrous as the film sometimes is, you can’t help but sympathize with Dracula. All he wants is some virgin blood and the communists aren’t even willing to let him have that. Blood for Dracula is, in its own twisted way, a much more melancholy film than Flesh For Frankenstein. Or, at least it is until the finale, at which point one character gets violently dismembered but still continues to rant and rave even after losing the majority of their limbs.
When Blood for Dracula was released in 1974, it was originally called Andy Warhol’s Dracula, though Warhol had little to do with the movie beyond allowing his name to be used. As with Flesh for Frankenstein, Antonio Margheriti was credited in some prints as a co-director, largely so the film could receive financial support from the Italian government.
Sadly, there would be no Andy Warhol’s The Mummy or Andy Warhol’s Wolfman. One can only imagine what wonders Kier, Dallesandro, and Morrissey could have worked with those.
Through the Shattered Lens