This October, I’m going to be doing something a little bit different with my contribution to 4 Shots From 4 Films. I’m going to be taking a little chronological tour of the history of horror cinema, moving from decade to decade.
Today, we take a look at the start of the 1930s.
4 Shots From 4 Films
Dracula (1931, dir by Tod Browning)
Frankenstein (1931, dir by James Whale)
Vampyr (1932, dir Carl Theodor Dryer)
White Zombie (1932, dir by Victor Halperin)
X-Isle!?
Is this a book about an island that is populated by the twenty or so people who actually refer to twitter by it’s “new” name of X?
No, actually, it’s not. X-Isle was published in 2002, in the days before social media and ever-present phones. X-Isle is a slasher story, one in which a group of good-looking teens end up hanging out at the exclusive Spinnaker Lodge, a luxury resort on an isolated island. It’s like that island that Kim Kardashian took all of her friends and employees to during the COVID epidemic? Remember that? Everyone else was locked inside or wandering around triple-masked while Kim went to an island and then scolded everyone else for not taking proper precautions.
(Sorry to get off topic there but seriously, the COVID era was messed up in ways that people are still struggling to full comprehend.)
Reading X-Isle, I found myself wandering if you really could write an effective, non-ironic, old school slasher story nowadays. The whole key to the slasher genre is that people have to be isolated and there has to be no way of reaching out for help. Every slasher movie now has to come up with some extended to reason to explain why no one can call the police. Whenever a horror movie starts with someone saying, “Give me your phone, you’ll get it back after the weekend,” I roll my eyes a little just because it’s become such a cliche. At this point, I imagine even Camp Crystal Lake has free wi-fi. It’s easy to imagine a camp counselor tweeting out, “Help! There’s a murderer at Crystal Lake!” and someone replying, “Whatever, Jussie.”
X-Isle gets off to a good start with a collection inner-office dossiers that introduce us to the main characters. What the memo reveals is that the main requirement to work at the resort is a handsome face or a good body. Once the story kicks in, we meet our group of potential victims and, unfortunately, none of them really live up to all the hype in the introduction. We spend a good deal of time with Carter, a womanizer who, at one point, feels the need to tell us that he’s not psychotic despite the fact that his behavior is often manipulative and narcissistic. When you actually have to tell people that you’re not a psycho, you probably are. Of course, in this book, Carter is one of the heroes.
Someone is killing guests and employees. It’s a YA book so we don’t actually see the kills but the aftermath is described in properly grisly fashion. The reveal of who the killer was doesn’t make much sense but, given that the book ends with a cliffhanger, that was perhaps deliberate.
Anyway, I’ve always kind of enjoyed the slasher genre, even with all of its cliches and its issues towards anyone who shows the slightest spark of independence. X-Isle was a fast and entertaining read. None of the characters were particularly likable which made it a lot less stressful to read about them being put in danger. In the end, the main lesson is to stay away from mysterious islands. That’s probably good advice.
In 1944’s Voodoo Man, Michael Ames stars as Ralph, a screenwriter who has been asked to write a treatment based on the real case of several “girl motorists” who have disappeared in the surrounding area. Ralph turns down the assignment because he’s busy planning his wedding to Betty (Wanda McKay). However, when Betty’s maid of honor, Stella (Louise Currie), vanishes, Ralph and Betty set out to investigate. As Ralph puts it, he’s become a part of the story that he earlier rejected.
What has happened to Stella and all of the other women? They’ve been abducted by Toby (John Carradine) and Grego (Pat McKee), two lunkheads who work for Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi). Dr. Marlowe lives in an isolated mansion where he is cared for by his loyal housekeeper (Mici Goty). Twenty-two years ago, Dr. Marlowe’s wife, Evelyn (Ellen Hall), died but Marlowe has been able to keep her body in a sort of suspended animation ever since. Marlowe is kidnapping women because, through the use of voodoo and mad science, he hopes to take their “will to live” and transfers it into Evelyn. Helping Marlowe out is a voodoo priest named Nicholas (George Zucco).
Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco! Obviously, the main appeal of Voodoo Man is that it brings together three great names in horror. Even if the story doesn’t really make much sense (and it doesn’t), the film gets a lot of mileage out of the combination of Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco. While Lugosi does seem to be a bit bored with his role, Carradine and Zucco really throw themselves into their characters. John Carradine, in particular, seems to be having the time of his life as he shuffles around the mansion and replies, “Yes, master,” to every command from Dr. Marlowe. It’s the type of entertaining performance that could only be delivered by a trained Shakespearean slumming in a low-budget, B-grade horror film. As for Zucco, he plays Nicholas with a certain amount of ruthless erudition. Zucco is playing the Boris Karloff role here and he definitely seems to understand what that means.
As for the film itself, it has its moments. Legend has it that director William Beaudine’s nickname was “One Shot” because he was usually only willing to do one take of each scene. As a result, he filmed quickly and he didn’t spend a lot of money and that was probably a good thing for a production like Voodoo Man. It also meant that if someone flubbed a line or bumped into a piece of furniture, that take would still be the one that showed up in the film. My favorite moment of Voodoo Man was when the local sheriff (Henry Hall) referred to Dr. Marlowe as being “Dr. Martin,” and Bela Lugosi, who appeared to be struggling not to laugh, quickly said, “It’s Marlowe.” The sheriff corrected himself. That’s the type of fun you don’t get in movies made by people who do more than one take.
Voodoo Man has a quick 61-minute running time. To enjoy it, it probably helps to already be a fan of low-budget, B-horror films from the 40s. Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco are combination that deserves to be seen.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1973’s Satan’s School For Girls! I picked it so you know it’ll be good.
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube, hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The watch party community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
See you soon!
This is a film that I share every year for Horrorthon and can you blame me? Check out this pitch: Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!
Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is. In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion. This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions. Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way. Thanks to use of what I like to call “slo mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be. And it’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what was going on with that couple at the airport!
Enjoy Baffled! Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?
Unknown Artist
This gamble of a cover comes from 1942.
There are actually two versions of this video. Both of them feature model Rana Kennedy as the mysterious woman looking over Alice Cooper. One version features shots where the woman is meant to be topless. (A body double was used in those shots). The MTV-friendly version excises the toplessness and is less focused on torture than the first version.
Director Nigel Dick was one of the big music video directors of the MTV era. He worked with everyone who was anybody. Alice Cooper definitely was and still is somebody. It’s funny how he went from being the rocker that parents feared to being a beloved cultural institution and he did it while, for the most part, still remaining true to his original act and persona. All the kids who used to get yelled at for listening to Cooper grew up and kept listening to him and Alice turned out to be a pretty smart guy.
Enjoy!
“You’re a monster!” a terrified woman shouts at the hulking, murderous figure who haunts the local abandoned cannery.
“I yam what I yam,” the Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens) replies before presumably killing her in some grotesque way.
The Sailor Man haunts the cannery. Some believe him to be a ghost be actually, he’s just a former sailor who has been mutated after eating too much contaminated spinach. Now, he is freakishly strong and can literally rip people into pieces with his hands. Running into the Sailor Man means that you will soon be seeing disconnected limbs, compound fractures, and split open heads. The Sailor Man’s motives aren’t always easy to figure out but, if you smell the burning of his pipe, you should probably run. With those gigantic arms and his permanent sour expression, the Sailor Man can pretty much do whatever he feels like doing. Shooting him or stabbing him won’t stop him. He’s hooked on the spinach.
Popeye The Slayer Man is one of three Popeye-themed slasher movies to be released in the wake of Popeye moving into the public domain. In this one, Dexter (Sean Michael Conway), a film student, decides that he wants to make a documentary about the Sailor Man legend so he and his friends break into the cannery. Almost everyone is killed in a bloody way and it’s hard not to notice that no one seems to be that upset about it. Dexter comes across the dead body of someone who was previously described as being his best friend since the Second Grade and he barely seems to care. Instead, he just lifts up his camera and films. I’m tempted to think that this was meant to be a satire on the callousness of aspiring documentarians but I might be giving the film too much credit. Who knows?
Obviously, you can’t take a film like this too seriously. In almost every room in the cannery, there’s at least a handful of empty spinach tins. To be honest, I actually think the film didn’t go far enough. Sure, Popeye’s killing people and there’s a character named Olivia (Elena Juliano) but where’s Bluto? Popeye is presented as a largely silent killer which, again, seems like a missed opportunity. Popeye is also presented as being rather random in his kills. He allows one person to survive for reasons that are incredibly unclear, beyond the fact that I guess the filmmakers felt that the character in question was too sympathetic to suffer the same bloody death as nearly everyone else in the film.
Other than the killer being Popeye, this is pretty much a standard low-budget slasher. I will admit that I kind of appreciated that is was pretty straight-forward about its intentions. Unlike a lot of recent slasher films, it never came across as if it was apologizing for being what it was and there’s definitely something to be said for that. The film embraces the philosophy of “I yam what I yam.” The Sailor Man would be proud.
In the fourth episode of Hammer House of Horror, Gary Bond plays a scientist whose son dies after eating some toxic proteins that just happened to be lying around the lab. The scientist’s wife (Barbara Kellerman) goes down to the local orphanage to collect a new son but this new kid turns out to be more than a little creepy.
This bizarre episode originally aired, in the UK, on October 4th, 1980. A quick warning: This episode does feature some dead rabbits. I like rabbits so that bothered me a bit, even though it made sense in the context of the story.
In 1988’s The Undertaker, a small college town is rocked by a serious of viscous, sexually-charged murders. While the professors and the students deal with their own dramas on campus, the bodies are piling up at the local funeral home. Who could the murderer be?
Well, Joe Spinell’s in the film. That really should be the only clue you need.
Spinell plays Roscoe, the town undertaker who has issues with his mother, cries at random, talks to dead bodies, watches movies featuring sacrifices, and occasionally performs what appears to be some sort of a ritual with his victims. This film was Spinell’s final film and he gives a performance that alternates between being perfunctory and being fully committed. On the one hand, there are plenty of scenes where Spinell appears to be making up his lines as he goes along, In the scenes in which he appears in his office, it’s appears that Spinell is literally reading his lines off of the papers on top of his desk. Then there are other scenes where Spinell suddenly seems to wake up and he flashes the unhinged intensity that made him such a fascinating character actor. In the 70s and 80s, there were many actors who frequently played dangerous people. Spinell was the only one who really came across like he might have actually killed someone on the way to the set. Spinell was in poor health for most of his life and he also struggled with drug addiction. In The Undertaker, he doesn’t always look particularly healthy. Even by Joe Spinell standards, he sweats a lot. And yet, in those scenes were actually commits himself to the character, we see the genius that made him so unforgettable.
As for the film itself, it’s basically Maniac but without the New York grit that made that film memorable. Instead, it takes place in a small town and Spinell, with his rough accent and his button man mustache, seems so out-of-place that the film at times starts to feel like an accidental satire. Roscoe is obviously guilty from the first moment that we see him and yet no one else can seem to figure that out. Only his nephew suspect Roscoe but that problem is quickly taken care of. Whenever anyone dies, their body is brought to Rosco’s funeral home. Roscoe puts on his black suit, plasters down his hair, and tries to look somber. Roscoe spends a good deal of the film talking to himself. When a victim runs away from Roscoe, Spinell looks at a nearby dead body and shrugs as if saying, “What can you do, huh?”
If you’re into gore, this film has a lot of it and, for the most part, it’s pretty effective. In the 80s, even the cheapest of productions still found money to splurge on blood and flayed skin effects. If you’re looking for suspense or a coherent story, this film doesn’t really have that to offer. It does, however, offer up Joe Spinell in his final performance, sometimes bored and yet sometimes brilliant.
Through the Shattered Lens 