Gamera Review: Gamera vs Gyaos (dir by Noriaki Yuasa)

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1967’s Gamera vs Gyaos opens with reports of multiple volcanic eruptions in Japan.

One small village, in particular, has been effected. Tensions are already running high in the village because of a road construction project that some of the more traditional villagers oppose. Making things even more dramatic is that the volcano releases Gyaos, a giant bat that can shoot laser beams from its mouth and which has a habit of eating random people.

Fear not, though! Gamera, everyone’s favorite atomic turtle, is also woken up the volcanoes and the earthquakes! As the villagers watch, Gamera battles Gyaos and …. loses big time! Gyaos manages to injure Gamera’s leg so Gamera spins away and lands in the ocean so that he can heal up. Unfortunately, while Gamera is busy healing, Gyaos is still wrecking havoc.

Gamera vs Gyaos is entertaining as long as it focuses on Gamera and Gyaos. One of the more interesting things about the Gamera films is that even Gamera’s opponents were adorable. On the one hand, Gyaos is a totally destructive killer bat who eats numerous people. On the other hand, Gyaos is actually kind of cute.

And really, Gyaos isn’t trying to be mean. He’s just following his natural instincts. He was hibernating when the volcanic eruptions woke him up. Seeing as how he had been asleep for over a thousand years, it’s understandable that he woke up in a somewhat foul mood. One gets the feeling that if all the tanks and airplanes would stop shooting at him, Gyaos would be more than happy to fly off and find somewhere else to get some rest.

And, then there’s Gamera.

Gamera is a flying turtle who is powered by radioactivity and who, for some reason, has become the defender of humanity. Humanity, it should be noted, never seems to really appreciate everything that Gamera does for them. Gamera is also pretty adorable. Watching Gamera fight Gyaos is like watching two housecats pretend to fight each other. Sure, there’s a lot of yelling, hissing, and eye-poking but, deep-down, you get the feeling that the two of them truly love each other.

This was the third Gamera film. The second Gamera film was considered to be a box office disappointment so, for the third film, the studio insisted that it be kid-friendly. As a result, this film devotes a lot of time to Eiichi (Naoyuki Abe), an annoying little brat who keeps yelling for Gamera to come back and protect his village. Even when Gamera is underwater and trying to heal from his latest battle with Gyaos, he has to deal with little Eiichi yelling, “Hurry up and get better, Gamera!” Like, seriously, kid — SHUT UP! Gamera knows when he’ll be ready to fight again. By the end of the film, even the military is taking advice from Eiichi. No wonder Gamera has to fight all of their battles for them.

Anyway, I enjoyed this movie because of the monsters. Not only were their fight scenes entertaining but the monsters themselves were adorable. That said, Eiichi got on my last nerve. Hopefully, he’ll find a new hero and let Gamera have some peace.

Previous Gamera Reviews:

Guilty Pleasure #85: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (dir by John DeBello)

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1978 film, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, opens with a title card that would make James Nguyen proud. It informs us that people laughed when they first watched a film called The Birds. Then, years later, a flock of birds went mad and started attacking people. No one is laughing now.

As for the rest of the film, it opens with a housewife being menaced by a giant tomato and then it just keeps rolling on from there. Something is causing normal, everyday tomatoes to go on a rampage and no one can figure out what. The government is powerless. (The government’s competence is best exemplified by a scene where a helicopter crashes. Reportedly, the helicopter crash was not scripted but the film’s director decided to keep the scene anyway.) The president puts Mason Dixon (David Miller) in charge of defeating the tomatoes.

The film is one gag and one song after another. Mason has a group of eccentric people working for him, including a superstar gymnast and a man who is always dragging a parachute behind him. The streets are soon running red with tomato juice while clueless teenagers continue to listen to absolutely terrible song called Puberty Love….

In the past, I’ve struggled to define how a pleasure can be guilty but I think Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is actually one of the rare films that truly can live up to the label. It’s a pleasure because it’s just so silly and cheerfully stupid that it’s hard not to smile at it. It’s guilty because, premise aide, the film itself is never really as funny as you want it to be. Comedy — even when its something as silly as this film — is all about timing and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes never nails the timing of its gags. Instead, it plays out like a stoned daydream, amusing to talk about but a bit boring to actually witness.

That said, the film deserves some sort of award for its title and also for going on to inspire not only a few sequels but also a cartoon series. Producer Stephen Peace went on to have a successful career in California politics. Good for him.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

October Positivity: Miles Between Us (dir by Andrew Hunt)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2017’s Miles Between Us is the story of a father and a daughter on a road trip.

Luke Duaer (Dariush Moslemi) is a hotshot Hollywood producer, the type who drives around Los Angeles in a nice car and who puts together the type of deals that lead to Hollywood blockbusters. Luke is really intent on getting film star Chace Creed (Josten Rositas) to agree to being in his next movie but he can’t even get Chace’s people to return his calls. Luke has a lot to deal with but that’s all going to have to be put on hold because his teenage daughter, Gabby (Anna Stranz) is about to start college on the other side of the country.

Luke and Gabby don’t have much of a relationship. Since divorcing her mother, Luke has barely been in Gabby’s life. In fact, Luke’s girlfriend is shocked to discover that Luke even has a daughter. The road trip is a chance for some father-daughter bonding. It starts out uneasily. Luke doesn’t know how to talk to his daughter and finds it strange that she’s enrolled at a small Christian college in North Carolina. When she asks him to stop at a church so she can worship on Sunday, Luke sits outside in the car while she does so. Gabby has a lot of understandable resentment towards Luke. He hasn’t been a great father. That’s not something that’s easy to forgive, as much as one might try and want to do so.

There’s a lot that I could relate to in this film. My Dad and I had our difficulties, especially after he divorced my mom. For years, we barely talked. He didn’t know how to communicate with me and I was so angry that I wasn’t going to open up and give him any help. And yet, though I may not have always realized it, I never stopped loving my father. No matter how many fights we had or how many words were exchanged in anger, I never stopped thinking that, someday, we would work it all out. I’m happy to say that we did. My Dad passed away last year. He was in hospice care and in a coma during the final few days of his life but I believe he could still hear me when I spoke to him and I pray he heard me when I said that I was proud to be his daughter. That said, I will always regret the years that we didn’t speak. That was wasted time that I will never get back.

As you can probably guess, Miles Between Us feels like a film that was specifically engineered to get an emotional response from me and it did. Inevitably, Luke and Gabby end up on the set of Chace Creed’s latest film. (Gabby’s a fan.) Chace asks Gabby for a date and, to the surprise of no one watching, he turns out to be a spoiled jerk. Luke fights for his daughter, as any good father should. It’s a bit melodramatic but I still smiled.

Miles Between Us is a film that got to me. Now, you can probably argue that it got to me because of my own circumstances but that’s true of most films and most people. Miles Between Us made me think about my Dad and how thanksful I am that we finally forgave each other.

Brad reviews SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE (2015)!

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Bradley Crain

The exploitively titled SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE opens up with employees of an “Arkansas Fracking” company causing such a disturbance underground that spiky, ancient sharks wake up and start swimming in our swamps and eating whoever they happen to come across. As a lifelong Arkansan, I’m guessing this would have to be set near the Louisiana line, but I don’t think it’s ever made clear. It doesn’t really matter because the movie is actually shot in the state of Florida. This shark awakening just happens to coincide with a group of hot, womens’ prison inmates, including Christine Nguyen and Cindy Lucas, getting into a van to go clear some stumps in that same shark swamp that’s just outside of the walls of the penitentiary that they’re currently residing in. We also meet Detective Kendra Patterson (Traci Lords) and her partner, who are looking for a group of criminals, led by Honey (Dominique Swain), who may have escaped into that same swamp that now contains our ancient, spiky sharks and our sexy Arkansas inmates! Before you know it, the trials and tribulations of every person involved will be put on the back burner as they try not to become the next victim of the Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre.

SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE is pretty much the exact film that you’d expect it to be. It’s cheap, with terribly cheesy special effects, bad acting and some super-sexy women. It was made for the SyFy channel so it doesn’t really have graphic gore or nudity, which I’m sure is disappointing for those hoping for more bosoms and blood. I did enjoy a scene early in the film when the ladies are extremely warm from a tough day of clearing stumps so they start spilling water on their white T-shirts, while their faces contort in unbridled pleasures. The film is directed by Jim Wynorski who’s known for his low budget exploitation movies such as CHOPPING MALL (1986), BIG BAD MAMA II (1987), NOT OF THIS EARTH (1988), BODY CHEMISTRY 4: FULL EXPOSURE (1995), ALABAMA JONES AND THE BUSTY CRUSADE (2005), and COBRAGATOR (2015). For the director’s fans, this movie has much more in common with his classic PIRANHACONDA (2012) than it does his BUSTY WIVES (2007) series.

The cast of SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE is pretty much top notch for a film like this. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen Traci Lords in one of her porn films, but I’ve always thought she was pretty good looking, and she is here. I did have Cinemax for a number of years as a young man so I’ve definitely seen some of Christine Nguyen’s work. I would come across titles like TARZEENA: JIGGLE OF THE JUNGLE (2008) starring Christine, and the man in me couldn’t help but stop and check out the story. Finally, as a huge fan of director John Woo’s FACE/OFF (1997), I remember liking Dominique Swain as Sean Archer’s rebellious young daughter in the film. In this film, she’s the queen of overacting as a lesbian outlaw who’s out to bust her lover out of jail when she finds herself in a life or death battle with deadly, ancient land sharks. It’s not exactly the performance of a lifetime, but it’s still kind of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind.

At the end of the day, you’re either the kind of person who likes a movie like SHARKANSAS WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE or you’re not. There’s not a lot of in between. It’s personally not my favorite kind of film, but I’ll pretty much watch anything with an Arkansas connection, even though this one is “in title only.” For fans of the director, the film DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR, or some of the beautiful cast members, this film may be just what your looking for this October!

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Maniac (dir by William Lustig)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1980, Maniac stars Joe Spinell as Frank Zito.

Frank lives in a run-down New York apartment. The grimy walls are covered with pictures that appear to have been cut out of magazines. The sheets on the bed look like they haven’t been washed in over a year and, for that matter, the sweaty and greasy Frank Zito looks like he could definitely use a shower as well. Frank lives alone but he has several blood-stained mannequins. He talks to the mannequins, cooing about how he just wants them to be nice to him and to stop abusing him. Just looking at the apartment, one can imagine the nauseating odor of sweet, blood, and who knows what else that seeps out whenever Frank Zito opens his door.

Frank Zito is also a murderer. The majority of the film is taken up with scenes of him stalking his victims. One extended sequences features him stalking a nurse through a subway station. Another scene features a rather nightmarish moment in which Frank, in slow motion, jumps on the hood of a car and shoots a man point blank with a shotgun. (The man is played by Tom Savini, who was also responsible for the film’s gore effects.) An innocent model is killed after Frank breaks into her apartment. “I just want to talk to you,” he says and maybe he actually believes that at first.

Frank has a chance meeting with a glamorous and beautiful photographer named Anna (Caroline Munro, playing a role that was rejected by Daria Nicolodi). Somewhat improbably, Anna is charmed by the socially awkward Frank and even agrees to go out with him. She’s touched when Frank shows up at the funeral of the model that he killed. “She didn’t have many friends,” Anna tells Frank.

Meanwhile, at the cemetery, Frank’s fate awaits….

Maniac is one of the most infamous and controversial grindhouse films ever made. The film’s atmosphere and the bleak visuals are the equivalent of being forced to look at New York while wearing glasses that somebody found floating in the sewer. The deaths are drawn out and Savini’s gore effects are disturbingly convincing. It’s a nearly plotless film about a man who hates women and what makes it scary as opposed to just exploitive is the fact that there are men like Frank Zito out there. Joe Spinell, who was one of the great character actors of the 70s, appeared in everything from The Godfather to Taxi Driver to Rocky but, in the end, it’s his performance as Frank Zito that he seems to be destined to be most-remembered for. Spinell is frightening, convincing, and disturbing as Frank Zito. Spinell was planning on doing a sequel before his untimely death, at the age of 52, in 1989.

(Spinell was a hemophiliac who bled to death after slipping in the shower. According to Maniac director William Lustig, when the police entered Spinell’s apartment, the first thing they saw was a huge amount of blood. The second thing they saw was a life-like replica of Spinell’s head sitting on top of the television. The head was a prop from Maniac and so convincing that the police originally assumed someone had broken into the apartment and decapitated him. Spinell’s death not only prevented him from playing Frank Zito for a second time but also kept him from reprising his role as Willie Cicci in The Godfather Part III.)

Maniac is not an easy film to defend but, if I had to, I would point out that Frank Zito is portrayed as being an unsympathetic loser throughout the entire film. He’s not some evil genius like Hannibal Lecter. He’s not a nonstop quip machine like Freddy Krueger. He’s not even enigmatic or superhuman like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. Instead, he’s a pathetic loser who can’t even win an argument with the voices in his head. Horror films all too often glorify or make excuses for serial killers. (Just look at all of the Ted Bundy films.) Maniac does not present Frank Zito as being anything other than a pathetic and twisted man and, as such, it’s probably one of the most realistic portrayals of a serial killer to be found on film. Frank Zito is not meant to be glorified, though I’m sure that went over the heads of more than a few people who saw this film when it first opened. It’s an ugly film but it’s about an ugly subject. It’s exploitive but ultimately it’s on the side of Zito’s victims.

The film was an early directorial credit of William Lustig, who worked as a production assistant on Dario Argento’s Inferno in order to see how Argento deal with shooting on location in New York. It was while working on Inferno that Lustig met Daria Nicolodi and offered her the part of Anna in Maniac. (Anna’s last name is D’Antoni, a clear nod to Nicolodi’s Italian roots.) Nicolodi was disgusted by the script and turned it down. (Caroline Munro accepted the role and was reunited with her Starcrash co-star, Joe Spinnell. Interestingly enough, even after all of the controversy created by Maniac, Munro and Spinell went on to co-star in The Last Horror Movie.) Lustig based his serial killer on David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz and named him after director Joe Zito, who would go on to direct Friday the 13th — The Final Chapter.

For all the controversy that has dogged Maniac over the years, it’s easy to forget that the film itself is surprisingly well-directed and acted. Caroline Munro bring some much needed class to the proceedings, even if the script requires her character to make some truly dumb decisions. And Joe Spinell was simply horrifying as Frank Zito. It’s not a pleasant film and if you ever find yourself in a home where the owner has a Maniac poster on the wall, I would suggest leaving immediately. It is, however, a landmark of grindhouse filmmaking.

(Be sure to read Arleigh’s thoughts on Maniac here!)

October Hacks: Tourist Trap (dir by David Schmoeller)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1979’s Tourist Trap opens in the same way that many slasher films have opened. A group of friends — young, attractive, and not particularly bright — are driving through a secluded, rural area when they have car trouble.

Now, I have to say that, if I was driving through a rural secluded area or even if I was just a passenger in the vehicle, I would totally freak out if the car broke down. I mean, seriously, you’re in the middle of nowhere. You have no idea who or what might be hiding behind those trees. Even if you don’t get attacked by a bunch of inbred hillbilly cousins, you might get eaten by a bear or, even worse, you might get mauled by a deer and end up with Lyme Disease. Or you might just end up with a bunch of flies buzzing around your face, which is really even worse than getting attacked by a wild animal.

(Pro-tip: One way to deal with flies is to combine the open flame of a lighter with a can of hairspray.)

I’ve seen enough slasher films to know that bad things happen when you get lost in the woods. However, up until everything started getting all self-referential in the 1990s, old school slasher films were infamous for featuring characters who had apparently never seen a slasher film or really any other type of movie before.

Your car broke down in the woods? One member of your party has already disappeared while looking for a gas station? You have no way of letting anyone know where you are? Sure, why not go skinny dipping? For that matter, why not check out Slausen’s Lost Oasis, a run-down shack that is the home of a lot of wax figures and which is owned by the shotgun-toting Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors). Mr. Slausen is pretty bitter about the new freeway. It took away all of his business.

Of course, it turns out that there’s more to this tourist trap than meets the eyes. For one thing, the mannequins often seem to randomly come to life and murder anyone who spends too much time alone with them. Secondly, things in the tourist trap often move on their own, as if someone has psychic powers. And then there the enigmatic man who wears a wax mask and likes to take people hostage before transforming them into wax figures….

Tourist Trap has a totally ludicrous plot but Slausen’s Oasis is such a creepy location and Chuck Connors plays his role with such unnerving intensity that it doesn’t matter that things don’t always make sense. At its best, Tourist Trap plays out like a filmed nightmare, one in which the rules of normal physics often don’t seem to apply. The victims are interchangeable (though I did like Tanya Roberts’s energetic performance as Becky) but the kills are imaginative and memorable gruesome. Researching the film, I was surprised to discover that Tourist Trap was given a PG-rating, despite the skinny dipping and the blood and all of the terrifying wax figures. Don’t let that rating fool you. This is genuinely scary slasher film and one that everyone should see before going on an impulsive road trip to the middle of nowhere.

On-Stage With The Lens: Medea (dir by Mark Cullingham)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 431 BC, the Greek playwright Euripides premiered his latest play, Medea. The story of a woman scorned who deals with her anger by murdering her ex-husband’s soon-to-be wife, future father-in-law, and finally her own children, Medea has lived on as one of Euripides’s most-performed plays. Three actresses have won Tony awards for playing Medea on Broadway, setting the record for the most Tonys won for playing the same role.

Medea is a play that is open to a lot of interpretations. Quite a few stagings of the play present Medea as being a sympathetic character, a victim of a misogynistic culture who was driven to extremes by the men around her. I can see that argument and it is true that the play does emphasize that all the men in Medea’s life treat her terribly. Creon plots to send Medea into exile so that his daughter can marry her husband. Medea’s smarmy husband, Jason, says that he has no choice but to marry a princess because Medea is only a “barbarian,” fit to be his mistress but not his wife. In many ways, Medea is a sympathetic character. But, for me, all of that sympathy goes out the window as soon as she murders her children. The fact that, in most stage versions of the play, the Gods then help her to escape makes her even less sympathetic in my eyes. (Needless to say, it certainly doesn’t do much for the reputation of the Greek Gods. Then again, one gets the feeling that even the ancient Gods didn’t particularly like their Gods.)

In 1983, Zoe Caldwell won a Tony for playing Medea. (Interestingly enough, in this production, the Nurse was played by Judith Anderson, who also won a Tony for playing Medea, in 1947.) A performance at the Kennedy Center was filmed for PBS. The production, with its minimalist sets and atmosphere of growing dread, captures the nightmarish intensity of the story. Zoe Caldwell gives a riveting performance as Medea, alternating between wild-eyed madness and subtle manipulation.

As the most horrific of the Greek plays, Medea is a production that just feels right for the Halloween season. Here is Zoe Caldwell in 1983’s Medea.

The Barbarians (1987, directed by Ruggero Deodato)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

In a magical land of dragons and fierce warriors, the evil sorcerer Kadar (Richard Lynch) attacks a peaceful group of traveling entertainers, slaughtering the majority of them and kidnapping their queen, Canary (Virginia Bryant). Canary has a magical ruby that Kadar hopes will increase his power. Canary also has two sons who are each sold separately into slavery. Years later, these muscle-bound twins, Kutchek (Peter Paul) and Gore (David Paul), will be reunited and will team up to save their mother, fight a dragon, and free the kingdom from Kadar.

An Italian-American co-production that was directed by Ruggero Deodato and distributed by Cannon, The Barbarians was a starring vehicle for the so-called Barbarian Brothers. Peter and David Paul were twin bodybuilders who appeared in a handful of films and who are today best-known for getting cut out of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. (In his director’s commentary, when explaining why their scene didn’t work, Stone said, “It was my fault.”) Peter and David Paul were not natural-born actors. They’re both pretty stiff in The Barbarians but their natural chemistry as brothers made up for a lot. They spend most of their screentime in The Barbarians bickering and yelling at each other and you get the feeling that was something they had a lot of experience with.

The Barbarians starts slow. It takes a while to get going and the plot has the ramshackle feel of many Cannon productions. Richard Lynch, as always, is a great villain and familiar faces like Michael Berryman and George Eastman have small roles. Trying to keep track of who is betraying who can require keeping a scorecard while watching the movie but The Barbarians does a good job of creating its fantasy world (and it looks really good for a film that was probably not made for much money) and once the action finally does get started, there’s enough of it to keep things entertaining. The Barbarians battle not only Kadar’s sorcery but a dragon as well and they do it all while trash talking each other. The film feels like a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and a regional wrestling production. It’s entertainingly dumb.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Dr. Loomis Explains Michael Myers in the original Halloween

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

We’ve talked a bit about Donald Pleasence today. Pleasence is one of my favorite actors, an intense performer with an eccentric screen presence who always gave it his all, even in films that didn’t always seem like they deserved the effort. Pleasence was a character actor at heart and he appeared in a wide variety of films. He’s absolutely heart-breaking in The Great Escape, for instance. However, it seems that Pleasence is destined to be best-remembered for his horror roles. For many, he will always be Dr. Sam Loomis, the oracle of doom from the original Halloween films.

In this scene from the original Halloween, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) attempts, as best he can, to explain the unexplainable. I’ve always felt that Pleasence’s performance in the first film is extremely underrated. People always tend to concentrate on the scenes where he gets angry and yells or the later films where an obviously fragile Pleasence was clearly doing the best he could with poorly written material. But, to me, the heart of Pleasence’s performance (and the film itself) is to be found in this beautifully delivered and haunting monologue.

In this scene, we see that Dr. Loomis is himself a victim of Michael Myers. Spending the last fifteen years with Michael has left Loomis shaken and obviously doubting everything that he once believed. Whenever I watch both Halloween and its sequel, I always feel very bad for Dr. Loomis. Not only did he have to spend 15 years with a soulless psychopath but, once Michael escapes, he has to deal with everyone blaming him for it. Dr. Loomis was literally the only person who saw Michael for what he was.

Incidentally, Donald Pleasence nearly turned down the role of Sam Loomis. He didn’t think there was much to the character. (The role had already been offered to Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, neither of whom were interested.) It was his daughter, Angela Pleasence, who persuaded Donald to take the role. At that year’s Cannes Film Festival, Angela saw John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and she assured her father that Carpenter was a talented filmmaker. Taking his daughter’s advice, Donald Pleasence accepted the role and, by all accounts, was a complete gentleman and a professional on set. After making horror history as Dr. Sam Loomis, Pleasence would go on to appear in two more Carpenter films, Escape from New York and Prince of Darkness.

October True Crime: Dr. Crippen (dir by Robert Lynn)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen

In 1910, a homeopath named Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was executed by hanging in the UK.

An American by birth, Dr. Crippen had come to London in 1897 with his second wife. (His first wife died of a stroke and Crippen sent his only son to live with his grandparents.) Cora Crippen was a former music hall singer who hope to continue her career in London and who did manage to make friends with several prominent members of the city’s theatrical community. Dr. Crippen was widely regarded as a meek man who was dominated by his rage-prone wife. Crippen struggled to hold down a regular job and eventually ended up as a manager at the Druet Institute for the Deaf. By at least 1905, Dr. Crippen was having an affair with a young typist named Ethel Le Neve.

Cora disappeared in early 1910. When her friends stopped by the house to ask for her, Dr. Crippen said that his wife had left him for another man and had returned to America. Later, he claimed that Cora had subsequently died in California. When Ethel was spotted wearing Cora’s jewelry, the London police launched their own investigation into Cora’s disappearance. After Crippen was interviewed by the police, he and Ethel fled to Brussels and then boarded an ocean liner heading for Canada. After Crippen and Ethel disappeared, the police searched Crippen’s home and found a torso buried in the basement. It was assumed that the torso was all that was left of Cora.

(As some have pointed out, it didn’t seem to make much sense for Crippen to dispose of Cora’s head, legs, and arms but to keep her torso. Apparently, at that time, it was common for human torsos to show up in the Thames, the result of people jumping in the river and then having their body split apart by the current. As such, the Thames also became a popular place to dump murder victims. One wonders why Crippen wouldn’t have done the same.)

Meanwhile, on the ocean liner heading to Canada, the captain noticed that one passengers looked like a freshly shaven Dr. Crippen and that the “boy” he was traveling with was obviously a young woman in disguise. The captain sent a wireless telegram to London. Chief Inspector Walter Dew boarded a faster liner and actually managed to reach Canada before Crippen. When Crippen and Ethel arrived in Canada, Walter Dew was waiting for them.

Fate simply wasn’t on Crippen’s side. If Crippen had bought third class tickets instead of sailing first class, it’s probable the captain would have never seen him during the voyage. If Crippen had taken a boat to his native United States instead of Canada (which was then still a British dominion), Dew would not have been able to take him back to the UK without an extradition hearing and it’s entirely possible that the evidence would have been ruled insufficient. Instead, Crippen was promptly returned to London and put on trial for murdering his wife.

During the heavily-covered four-day trial, Crippen’s defense was that Cora had returned to America and that there was no way to prove that the torso was Cora’s. Though the jury found Crippen guilty in just 22 minutes and he was hanged a month later, there were many who felt that Crippen was innocent or, at the very least, that his guilt had not been proven. I imagine that one reason why so many people doubted Dr. Crippen’s guilt was because he just didn’t look or act like a murderer. He wasn’t Jack the Ripper, a shadowy figure moving through the night. Instead, he was a short, balding, and rather owlish looking man who wore glasses and who, in most photographs, has a quizzical expression on his face.

In short, Dr. Crippen seems as if he was literally destined to eventually be played by Donald Pleasence.

The 1963 film, Dr. Crippen, takes a rather straight-forward approach to telling the story of the doctor. It opens with Crippen (Donald Pleasence, naturally) on trial for the murder of his wife and it largely tells the story through flashbacks. Cora (Coral Browne) is portrayed as being a no-talent narcissist who regularly cuckolds her husband while Ethel Le Neve (Samantha Eggar) is portrayed as being a naive young woman who truly loves Dr. Crippen. The film leaves open the question of whether or not Crippen killed his wife, though it seems to strongly suggest that Crippen was innocent of the crime and the only reason he fled London was because he wanted to be with Ethel. Donald Pleasence is excellent as Dr. Crippen, playing him with just enough ambiguity that the viewer is left to wonder whether he did it or not. Pleasence turns Crippen into a sympathetic figure while still holding back just enough to suggest that emotional darkness that could have led even the meek Dr. Crippen to becoming a murderer. Nicolas Roeg’s black-and-white cinematography captures both the harshness of Crippen’s life in prison and the fleeting romance of his brief time with Ethel.

As for the real life Crippen, both his guilt and his subsequent execution continue to be controversial, with some claiming that DNA testing proved that the torso did not belong to Cora. (Other have quite reasonably pointed out that the sample used had degraded quite a bit over a hundred years.) There have been many attempts to win Dr. Crippen a posthumous pardon but all have failed and will probably continue to fail unless Cora’s remains are somehow discovered in a grave somewhere in California.

Shortly before his execution, in his final letter to Ethel Le Neve, Crippen wrote, “Face to face with God, I believe that facts will be forthcoming to prove my innocence.” After Crippen was hung, Ethel spent three years in Canada before returning to London. She changed her name, worked as a typist, and eventually married and had two children. She died in 1967, fifty-seven years after Dr. Crippen.