In the 1942 film, The Mad Monster, the great George Zucco plays Dr. Cameron. Dr. Cameron is a mad scientist who has a few issues with his colleagues and who makes the decision to deal with those issues by transforming his simple-minded handyman (Glenn Strange, who played Frankenstein’s Monster in a number of Universal films) into a wolfman.
The Mad Monster is one of the many horror films that were produced by Producers Releasing Corporation, which was one of the most poverty-stricken of the poverty row production companies. To me, the interesting thing about the film is that Cameron initially wants to use his werewolf formula to help in the war effort. He wants to help the United States win the war by turning soldiers into wolfmen. It’s only after his plans are dismissed as being ludicrous that he starts using his wolfman to get revenge. Unfortunately, the wolfman itself turns more savage and bloodthirsty with each act of revenge so I guess it’s a good thing that it wasn’t deployed on the battlefield because who knows what type of state the soldiers would have been in when they finally came home.
Just try to get that chorus out of your head after listening to Nemesis. Everybody happy as the dead come home!
Director Tony can den Ende has also done music videos for The Proclaimers, Meat Loaf, Melissa Etheridge, Joe Cocker, Thomas Dolby, Manic Street Preachers, and Guns N’ Roses.
Tonight’s episode of The Hitchhiker is a stylish homage to noir, starring Meg Foster as a femme fatale who is not quite as blind as she pretends to be. This episode was directed by Phillip Noyce, who was also responsible for a film about an actual blind person, Blind Fury. Interestingly enough, that film also featured Meg Foster, though in a very different role than the one that she plays here.
This episode originally aired on April 22nd, 1989.
1976’s Dr. Black, My Hyde tells the story of Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey).
Dr. Pride is a respected doctor, the head of a free clinic in the Watts district of Los Angeles. He has a big house. He has a fancy car. With Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash), he is researching a serum that will help people with cirrhosis to regenerate the tissue of their liver. Of course, Dr. Pride wasn’t always rich. In his own words, he and his mother grew up in the guest house of a brothel. But now that he is rich and successful, some people claim that he’s lost touch with his community. As a prostitute named Linda (Marie O’Henry) tells him, “You talk white, you think white, you probably drive a white car.”
In a scene that is designed to bring to mind the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Dr. Pride considers the ethics of injecting his serum into his patients without warning them that there might be consequences. Billie warns him that what he’s thinking about doing would be not only unethical but illegal. Dr. Pride questions whether ethics matter when dealing with something that could potentially save lives in the future. After Dr. Pride injects an elderly black woman with the serum, she turns into a white-skinned monster who attempts to strangle a nurse before promptly dying. Despite this, Dr. Pride continues to develop the serum and eventually, he tries it on himself.
Under the effects of the serum, Dr. Pride becomes a white-skinned madman. (Bernie Casey wears a white makeup whenever he plays this film’s version of Mr. Hyde.) Under the influence of the serum, Pride rampages through Watts, killing prostitutes and pimps before transforming back into the Dr. Pride. The police are investigating the murders but they’re searching for a white man. Meanwhile, Dr. Pride continues to obsess on trying to work out the kinks of her serum. He wants Linda to be his latest test subject.
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a blaxploitation take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, as with many blaxploitation films, the subtext is frequently more interesting than what actually happens on screen. Dr. Pride, after continually being accused of acting white, takes his serum and soon literally becomes white and sets out to kill the prostitutes and the pimps who remind him of his life before he became a doctor. And while it’s easy to see this as an example of the serum turning a good man into an evil monster (the classic Jekyll and Hyde formula), it’s also true that, even before his transformation, Dr. Pride views his patients as being potential test subjects. For all of his talk about helping people, Dr. Pride maintains his distance from the members of his own community. Is the serum turning Dr. Pride into a monster or is it just revealing who Dr. Pride truly wishes to be? Given the film was directed by William Crain, who also did Blacula and who, unlike a lot of Blaxploitation directors, actually was black, it’s easy to believe that the subtext was intentional.
Of course, subtext aside, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a cheap-looking and haphazardly edited film. Much of the acting is amateurish but Bernie Casey gives a strong performance as both the repressed black doctor and his violent, white alter ego. Cheapness aside, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a frequently intriguing film.
A found footage film, The McPherson Tape (which is also known as UFO Abduction) opens with a title crawl that tells the viewer that what they are about to see is both and also the most compelling evidence to date that aliens are visiting Earth.
On October 8th, the Van Heese family gathers to celebrate the fifth birthday of Michelle. Michael, the youngest of the Van Heese brothers, is home from college and he’s brought his new video camera with him, which he uses to film the party. At first, his brothers give him a hard time about both his new beard and his camera but soon, everyone has bigger things to worry about. When the power suddenly goes out, Michael and his brothers go outside to investigate. While doing so, they stumble across what appears to be a spaceship and three humanoid aliens standing outside of it. The brothers run back to the house and, eventually, the aliens follow.
The McPherson Tape was one of the first found footage films and it stays true to the rules of the genre to an extent that more recent examples have not. That means that the 66-minute film plays out in real time. There’s no background music. The sound quality is poor. The footage is grainy and sometimes out of focus. This is one found footage film that actually looks like found footage, with the only thing giving the game away being the rubber alien masks worn by the actors playing the invaders. Just as in real life, it’s not always exciting. There are moments of dead space where both the audience and the McPhersons are waiting to see what happens next. But because the film feels authentic and it features a cast of unknowns who do a good job of acting scared and confused, it’s much more effective than some of the slicker examples of the genre that have come out in recent years.
Director Dean Alioto later remade The McPherson Tape with a bigger budget professional actors. In 1998, the remake aired on the UPN under the title Alien Abduction: Incident In Lake County and supposedly caused a panic when some viewers though it was an actual documentary. For my money, though, the original is still the best.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1971’s Five Desperate Women! It can be viewed on YouTube!
Five women, who all went to college together, reunite for the first time in five years. They’re planning on spending a weekend at a cabin on a private island. Lucy (Anjanette Comer) is the alcoholic who talks too much. Dorian (Joan Hackett) is the pill popper who lies about having a handsome husband and two beautiful children. Joy (Denise Nicholas) is the former activist turned trashy model. Gloria (Stefanie Powers) is bitchy and self-centered. And Mary Grace (Julie Sommars) is the one with the mentally ill mother who refuses to speak to her. Upon reuniting on the dock, the five women all immediately gather in a circle sing an old sorority song. It’s going to be one of those weekends!
The private island is lovely and the women believe that they have it to themselves, with the exception of the two men who are also on the island. Wylie (Robert Conrad) is the caretaker and he seems to be a trustworthy gentleman and exactly the type of guy who you would want to be stranded on an island with. And then there’s Meeker (Bradford Dillman), who drove the boat to the island and who is the type of overbearing jerk who has to be specifically told not to bother the women. While the women stay in the main house, the men stay in the nearby caretaker’s cottage.
From the start, it proves to be a stressful weekend. All of the women have secrets and long-buried resentments that come out at the slightest provocation. Not helping the fact is that there’s a murderer on the island, one that goes from killing a dog to strangling Dorian while the rest of the women are at the beach. The woman, figuring that the murderer has to be either Meeker or Wylie, lock themselves into their house for the night but it turns out that it’s going to take more than a locked door to defeat a killer.
Five Desperate Women has an intriguing premise but it also has an extremely short running time. With only 70 minutes to tell its story and 7 major characters to deal with, the film doesn’t leave much room for character development and, as a result, each woman is only given one personality trait and each actress ends up portraying that trait as broadly as possible. As a result, it doesn’t take long for the movie to go from being Five Desperate Women to Five Annoying Women. As for Robert Conrad and Bradford Dillman, the two of them give effective performances but anyone with a hint of genre savvy will be able to guess who the killer is going to turn out to be. There is one unintentionally funny moment where the desperate women attempt to fight off the killer by throwing rocks at him and none of the rocks come close to reaching their target but otherwise, Five Desperate Women is not particularly memorable.
Peter Cushing was a horror mainstay who played both heroes and villains, often appearing opposite Christopher Lee. By most accounts, Cushing was a kind and old-fashioned British gentleman, one who was beloved by both his colleagues and his fans. Christopher Lee described him as being his best friend and reportedly, never fully recovered from his sadness over Cushing’s death in 1994.
(Cushing’s long screen collaboration actually first started in 1948’s Hamlet, in which Cushing played Osric and Christopher Lee had an uncredited role as a spear carrier.)
Though Hammer Films often cast Cushing as the mad Baron Van Frankenstein, I preferred his work as the stern but kindly Dr. Van Helsing. This scene from 1958’s Horror of Dracula, in which Van Helsing drives a stake through Lucy and ends her eternal suffering, features Cushing at his best. In this scene, we see both Van Helsing’s determination and also some hints of the kindness that Cushing brought to the role.
The 1985 film, Confessions of a Serial Killer, is based on the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas was a one-eyed Michigan-born drifter who was arrested for murder in Texas in 1983. Once in custody, Lucas started confessing to murder after murder. At one point, it was estimated that Lucas had claimed to have killed around 600 people, sometimes by himself and other times with the help of his friend and sometimes lover, Ottis Toole. (Lucas “married” Toole’s 12 year-old niece, Becky, and then later chopped her up in a field.)
Of course, eventually, someone actually looked at Lucas’s confessions and came to realize that they didn’t really add up. Lucas had confessed to so many murders that, in order to believe him, you would have to be willing to accept that he could commit a murder in Florida in the afternoon and then somehow commit a second murder in upstate New York that night. (And that’s not even getting into the fact that Lucas confessed to killing Jimmy Hoffa and claimed that the CIA sent him to Cuba to take out Fidel Castro.) In the end, it was determined that Lucas was simply telling the police what they wanted to hear and that, sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally, the police were feeding him information about unsolved crimes in order to make his confessions more credible. Today, it’s generally agreed that Lucas may have killed 11 people. It’s also possible that he only killed two. (On the other hand, Ottis Toole really was the degenerate serial killer that Lucas claimed her was.)
Still, the national coverage of Lucas’s confessions inspired two independent films that were made in the mid-80s. One of those two films (and the better known of the two) was John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, in which Lucas was played by Michael Rooker and most of the action took place in Chicago. The other film was Confessions of a Serial Killer, which was filmed in Texas.
In Confessions of a Serial Killer, Henry Lee Lucas is re-imagined as Daniel Ray Hawkins (Robert A. Burns), a polite and mild-mannered redneck whose short stature, glasses, and somewhat quizzical expression all hide the fact that he is actually a vicious serial killer. Having recently been arrested, Hawkins nonchalantly confesses his crimes to Sheriff Will Gaines (Berkeley Garrett). Hawkins obviously enjoys telling his stories and he also appreciates that, whenever he and the sheriff go out to a crime scene together, he gets a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake. (“If these policemen weren’t here,” Hawkins tells one waitress, “you’d be mine.”) Hawkins talks about his childhood, growing up as the son of the town prostitute and a shellshocked father. He claims that his first victim was a sex worker in Scranton. Though flashbacks, we see Hawkins’s friendship with the moronic and equally bloodthirsty Moon Lewton (Dennis Hill). Hawkins eventually marries Moon’s sister, Molly (Sidney Brammer), who turns out to be just as sociopathic as her brother and her new husband.
Though it never escapes from Henry’s shadow, Confessions of a Serial Killer is an effective and disquieting film. The low budget works to the film’s advantage, especially in the scenes in which Hawkins wanders across the Texas countryside. Watching these grainy, documentary-style scenes, the viewer can literally feel the humidity and see the bugs buzzing around the tall grass. Though the cast is made up of unknowns, they all bring an authenticity to their roles. Anyone who has ever spent any time in small town Texas will automatically recognize the stoic but fair-minded sheriff played by Berkeley Garrett and the humble and religious doctor played by Ollie Handley. That said, the film is dominated by Robert A. Burns and his effectively low-key performance as Daniel Ray Hawkins. Burns himself was a set designer who got his start designing the house of horrors from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Burns plays Hawkins as being someone who has figured out how to come across as harmless but who also can’t help but seem off-center. His flat delivery of Hawkins’s lines captures the fact that, on the inside, Hawkins is empty. Even when he kills someone to whom he was close, he can only blandly say, “I was sorry about that.” True feelings are unknown to him.
Confessions of a Serial Killer is a film that stick with you. It’s a film that reminds you that you never know who might be watching you. Is that polite man just looking to be helpful or is he another Daniel Ray Hawkins?
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
Today’s director is Tod Browning, who started his career during the silent era, ended it in the sound era, and was responsible for some of the most important horror and suspense films of both eras!
4 Shots From 4 Tod Browning Films
West of Zanzibar (1928, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Percy Hilburn)
Dracula (1931, dir by Tod Browning. DP: Karl Freund)
Freaks (1932, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Merritt Gerstad)
The Devil-Doll (1936, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Leonard Smith)
Through the Shattered Lens 