Tag Archives: Peggy Stewart

Horror Film Review: The Vampire’s Ghost (dir by Lesley Selander)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1945’s The Vampire’s Ghost takes place in the African port of Bakunda.  It’s the colonial period and the port is full of not just adventurers and local plantation owners but also all sorts of disreputable people who are looking to disappear from civilization for a while.  A series of murders have recently rocked the port.  Victims, almost all of them women, have been discovered drained of blood.  The natives claim that it is the work of vampire but the colonialists dismiss that as superstition.  Plantation owner Thomas Vance (Emmett Vogan) says that there is no such things are vampires.  Thomas’s daughter, Julie (Peggy Stewart), says that there is no such things as vampires.  Julie’s boyfriend, Roy (Charles Gordon), says that there is no such thing as vampires.  Mysterious casino owner Webb Fallon (John Abbott) says that …. well, actually, Webb’s thoughts on the subject are a bit less certain.

Webb Fallon is known to be an expert on the occult and voodoo.  The natives consider him to be a vampire and it turns out that they’re right!  After he is wounded in an assassination attempt, Fallon is forced to reveal the truth of his existence to Roy.  He also puts Roy under his psychic command, forcing him to serve as Fallon’s servant while Fallon proceeds to kill several people.  Can Father Gilchrest (Grant Withers) save Roy from Fallon’s control and also prevent Fallon from turning Julie into his eternal vampire bride?  And why exactly did Thomas think it was a good idea to buy a plantation next to the infamous Temple of Death in the first place?

It may not sound like it from the plot description but The Vampire’s Ghost is actually a fairly interesting take on the traditional vampire story.  The film was made by Republic Studios and, as was so often the case with Republic, the budget was noticeably low and the film’s African locations were obviously just sets on a Hollywood soundstage.  The film was apparently shot in ten days, which was considered to be a long shoot by Republic standards.  And yet, despite the low budget, director Lesley Selander does a good job of creating a properly eerie atmosphere, opening with a POV shot of the vampire stalking a native woman and filling the soundtrack with the sound of beating drums in the distance.  The beautiful Adela Mara appears as a dancer in Abbott’s casino and her dance scene is definitely one of the film’s highlights, a sudden burst of energy that fills the screen with life.  With his somewhat wan appearance, John Abbott may not immediately strike most viewers as the most intimidating of vampires but, as the film progresses, Abbott’s performance win us over.  He plays Webb Fallon as being a calculating villain who suffers from just a touch of ennui.  He’s grown weary of his existence but he’s still driven by his vampiric urges.

This film was an early credit for screenwriter Leigh Brackett.  Apparently, Howard Hawks hired her to adapt The Big Sleep after seeing this film.  Brackett would go on to work on the scripts for Rio Lobo, El Dorado, The Long Goodbye, and The Empire Strikes Back.  And it all started with a vampire named Webb.

Dead Man’s Gold (1948, directed by Ray Taylor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Jim Thornton (Britt Wood) has discovered a gold mine so he writes to his old friends, Lash LaRue (Lash La Rue) and Fuzzy (Al St. John), asking them to come help him guard it.  When Lash and Fuzzy arrive, Jim is nowhere to be found.  With the help of Jim’s niece (Peggy Stewart), they discover that Jim’s been murdered.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the murder was carried out by Conway (Jason Cason) and his men and that’s a good thing because a genius is something you will never find in a Lash La Rue western.  However, Lash suspects that Conway was following someone else’s orders.  He and Fuzzy set up a trap to reveal the true identity of the mastermind.

Lash dresses in all black and often uses a whip instead of a gun but this is still a standard B-western.  Historically, it’s important because it was the first movie that La Rue made with producer Ron Ormond.  Ormond later went from producing Lash La Rue films to directing them and Lash’s career never really recovered.  (Ormond, whose non-Lash LaRue films included Mesa of Lost Women and If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, was never much of a director.)  Fortunately, Dead Man’s Gold was directed by the dependable Ray Taylor, who keeps the action moving and crafts an adequate if not exactly memorable western.

There is one cool scene in Dead Man’s Gold, in which Lash uses his whip to knock a shot glass out of a bad guy’s hand.  Let’s see The Lone Ranger do that!

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 2.15 “MAIT Team”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!

This episode was a tough one.

Episode 2.5 “MAIT Team”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on January 13th, 1979)

On a desolate stretch of highway, several cars sit totaled.  At least two are in flames.  A truck sits stalled in the middle of the road, the bloody body of the driver still behind the steering wheels.  A woman screams that her father is having a heart attack.  Sitting off the road, in a ditch, is an overturned police car.  Officer Sindy Cahill is unconscious in the wreckage.

This hardly a typical episode of CHiPs.  This show has featured many spectacular crashes but this episode is the first to feature fatalities.  And its not just one person who dies in the crash.  Eleven people die, including the driver of the truck and the man having a heart attack.  The sight of Ponch looking at the dead bodies is jarring because it’s not what we expect from a show like CHiPs.

And, I have to admit, it was jarring for me on a personal level.  In May, my Dad was in a serious car accident, one that ultimately involved four vehicles.  He broke his shoulder and, afterwards, had to learn how to walk again.  He spent a week in a hospital.  (That was the week that we didn’t have any power due to the storms so I couldn’t even call to get an update on his condition.)  He spent a month in a rehab facility, staying there until his insurance company kicked him out.  Severely weakened by the stress and Parkinson’s, he came home and died a month later.  I still find myself thinking about how, if he just hadn’t gone to the store that Sunday, he never would have been in that accident and he would still be alive today.  Did I say that I merely think about it?  It’s actually something that I’ve been obsessing on, even since the hospital first called me to tell me what had happened.  I had a hard time watching this episode of CHiPs and I’m having a hard time writing about it right now.

It’s a good episode, even if it is very different from the episodes that came before it.  Ponch, Jon, and a group of experts (known as the MAIT Team) attempt to determine what caused the accident.  With a lefty state senator (played by Victor Newman himself, Eric Braeden) and an insurance investigator (Michael Bell) both eager to put the blame on Cahill, it falls to the MAIT Team to figure out what caused the accident and to assign blame.  In the end, just as with my Dad’s accident, they discover that no one was truly at fault.  The setting sun reflected off a distant mirror and temporarily blinded the driver.  Cahill ended up in a ditch after she swerved to avoid him.  The other drivers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Life is like that sometimes.

The emphasis here was on everyone working together to get to the truth.  Even the state senator and the insurance investigator played an important role in discovering what happened.  By being skeptical, they forced the MAIT Team to question everything and truly uncover the facts of the accident.  As this episode made clear, the MAIT Team wasn’t formed just to exonerate Cahill.  Instead, the MAIT Team was all about getting to truth, no matter what that truth might be.

Though this episode was not an easy one for me to watch, it was a good one.

Montana Incident (1952, directed by Lewis D. Collins)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Whip Wilson (played, in a fortunate coincidence, by Whip Wilson) and his partner, Dave Conners (Rand Brooks) work for the railroad company as surveyors in the old west.  They’ve come to the town of Martinville to convince the citizens that the town would benefit from having a train station.  Mostly, they just want to go to the saloon, have a beer, and flirt with the local gals.

Albert Hawkins (WIlliam Fawcett) is the leader of the local homesteaders and he’s all for bringing the railroad to town.  Land baron Max Martin (Hugh Prosser) disagrees.  Martin is not really a bad person but his daughter, Clara (Peggy Stewart), is a greedy fanatic who doesn’t want to lose the water rights to the land.  With her boyfriend, outlaw Arnold Benson (Bruce Edwards), Clara rules the town with an iron fist.  Whip and Dave must defeat Arnold and Clara so that progress can come to the frontier.

Montana Incident is a standard western programmer but it is distinguished by having an evil female land baron instead of the usual male land baron.  Stewart tears into the world, proving that she can be just as dangerous as any man.  Fans of the old Adventures of Superman TV show will immediately recognize Noel Neill, playing the role of Clara’s much nicer sister.

If you’re a fan of B-westerns, Montana Incident is watchable enough.  Wilson and Brooks are bland heroes but Peggy Stewart is so good at being evil that she makes the movie worth watching.