MURDER BY THE CLOCK. Paramount, 1931. William (Stage) Boyd, Lilyan Tashman, Irving Pichel, Regis Toomey, Sally O’Neil. Based on the novel by Rufus King (Doubleday/Crime Club, 1929). Director: Edward Sloman. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   This was an end-of-day screening (after 11 p.m.) that I would probably have skipped had the notes not pointed out that the film is “celebrated” by William Everson in his Classics of the Horror Film.

   Tashman had a brief Hollywood career (she died shortly after the release of this film, according to the notes), but she was worth staying up for. She’s the sultry villainess who masterminds three homicides and appears to be getting off Scot-free until Boyd upstages her in the final minutes of the film.

   This is an old-house mystery with a crusty dowager heiress who rigs her coffin in the family crypt so that an alarm can be sounded if she’s buried alive. As indeed, she appears to have been. Pichel (whose most memorable screen performance was as Gloria Holden’s minion in Dracula’s Daughter) has a hoot playing a deranged legatee and he almost manages to steal kinky acting honors from Tashman.

   An improbable but delicious early sound romp among the corpses.

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM. American-International Pictures, 1959. Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow, Shirley Anne Field, Geoffrey Keen, Gerald Anderson, John Warwick. Director: Arthur Crabtree.

    Horrors of the Black Museum is a gaudy comic book of a movie, best enjoyed if you park your good taste and critical faculties with the gum under your seat. The story, by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel (the team that brought us such classics as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Berserk) posits that a best-selling True Crime writer (Michael Gough, masticating the scenery with sadistic relish) gets his insights by committing the crimes himself — or having them committed by a young assistant in hypnotic thrall to him.

    The murders themselves are fairly grisly, including the opening bit (featured in all the previews) with a pair of booby-trapped binoculars, and are all practiced against lissome young ladies, but they have the redeeming value of being so far over the top (like Gough’s acting) as to provoke the odd chuckle.

    At one point, for instance, we are asked to believe that the killer snuck into a woman’s apartment and built a guillotine over her bed which she doesn’t see until she lies down in just the right position for it to — well you get the idea. Even better is Gough’s sanctum sanctorum, filled with acid vats, S/M apparatus and some sort of machine mounted with dials, lights and levers that seems to serve no function at all.

    Okay, admittedly the writing is perfunctory, and the acting mostly capable but undistinguished. There’s also some fairly prominent homophobia running through all this, what with the tastefully appointed bad guy keeping his handsome young assistant enslaved so they can victimize women. But I found Horrors suffused with a redeeming energy and engaging carelessness that kept me entertained throughout.

JESSIE DOUGLAS KERRUISH – The Undying Monster. Heath Cranton, UK, hardcover, 1922. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1936. Reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1946. Award A351S, paperback, 1968. Lulu Press, POD softcover, 2013.

THE UNDYING MONSTER. 20th Century Fox, 1942. James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard, Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Aubrey Mather. Director: John Brahm.

   The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish was first published in England in 1922 and is considered by some a classic tale of lycanthropy. I considered it a wanton squandering of my precious youth, but there you are. Thinking back, there were probably some inventive bits in the tale, but for me they were ruined by…. But I can’t yet tell you why. Read on:

   Undying starts out promisingly with a family curse, murder in the moonlight and all sorts of delicious Victorian nastiness. It seems that the Hammand family (local gentry with an imposing manor house and a coat of arms that goes back to the Flood) is periodically stalked from time to time by a horrendous but unseen thing that rips some of them limb from limb and scares others into gibbering madness.

   Good so far. But when Oliver Hammand, latest in line to inherit the family unpleasantness, encounters the thing in the dark, he gets off with a few bites and a case of amnesia while his companion is mauled to near death and his loyal dog is spread all over the countryside. Naturally concerned, Oliver’s sister calls in female paranormal investigator Luna Bartendale, and that’s when things get gummy.

   Luna Bartendale is probably the most irritating character ever consigned to printed page. She hasn’t been on the case for more than a few paragraphs before she’s saying things like, “I have some theories but I won’t discuss them until….” and then “This confirms what I was thinking but before I say more I must…..” followed by “I know why, but I can’t reveal it to you yet,” and “There’s a very good reason why I can’t tell it to you.”

   Now I got nothing, against foreshadowing, but a man gets tired of that kind of talk all the time. No one likes the guy who says “I told you so,” but even worse is one who says “I could tell you so — if I felt like it,” and Luna Bartendale, for all her groundbreaking appearance as fiction’s first female paranormal detective, says very little else. By the time the plot reached the point where Good and Evil were locked in what should have been a horrific struggle, I was hoping merely that the superannuated boogeyman of the title would gobble her up but (SPOILER ALERT!) no such luck.

   All the sadder then that there are glimmerings of a good story here. So good in fact that 20th Century Fox made a movie of it in 1942 — kind of. Writer Lillie Hayward and Michael Jacoby replaced the annoying Ms Bartendale with cowboy star James Ellison playing a Scotland Yard investigator — and doing it surprisingly well.

   He’s aided by Heather Thatcher as a plucky distaff-Watson, but his attentions are focused primarily on Heather Angel as the distraught sister of poor Oliver Hammond (They changed the spelling for reasons best known to themselves.) played by John Howard, who had already been paired with Miss Angel in the Bulldog Drummond series over at Paramount.

   Undying Monster is a stylish affair, thanks largely to director John Brahm, who brought similar gothic elegance to The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945) and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who will be remembered for The Wild Bunch. Together they impart an atmosphere not unlike the Sherlock Holmes series over at Universal, with evocative fog, looming shadows, and a general sense of mystery — rudely dissipated when we finally see the rather unprepossessing monster.

   And I should add a bit of trivia beloved of bad-movie buffs: the opening shot of Undying Monster is repeated exactly in a later, cheaper Monogram film, Face of Marble (1946). Understandable, since Michael Jacoby, who toiled at or near Hollywood’s bottom rung for his whole career, worked on both films. But one wonders with what weary desperation poor Jacoby found himself re-typing his own work in such reduced circumstances.

THE RAVEN. Universal, 1935. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lester Matthews, Irene Ware, Samuel S. Hinds, Spencer Charters, Inez Courtney. Based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Director: Lew Landers (as Louis Friedlander).

   William K. Everson described The Raven as “grand guignol.” He might also have added that it was probably the apex of Bela Lugosi’s career. Loud, lurid and fast-moving (only 62 minutes long) it’s got monsters, torture, bondage and obsession, and perhaps the Classic Mad Scientist of the Movies, definitively interpreted by Lugosi, whose magnetic screen presence and limited acting ability made him a tragic icon of the B movies.

   The Mad Doctor in The Raven is just about everything an evil medico should be: a megalomaniac plastic surgeon (a theme that would reappear in the classic Eyes Without a Face) obsessed with Poe, who keeps a torture chamber in his basement, falls in love with a woman he can’t have, and sets out to torment her and the rest of the cast, laughing maniacally between fits of sinister organ-playing. What more could you want from a Mad Scientist? Or for that matter, from a horror movie?

   Well for one thing The Raven also features Karloff as a sinister go-fer (the only time Boris ever played second-string to Bela in their careers) a disfigured and disgruntled killer clearly just aching for a chance to get back at his mad-doctor-boss.

   There’s also a giant, razor-edged pendulum, swinging mercilessly downward at its victims, perambulating rooms, a dark, stormy night, and a pervasive atmosphere of tasteful sadism, more quaint than kinky, closer to Fu-Manchu than Krafft-Ebbing. Plus Bela Lugosi gloating — a lot. As if Director Louis Friedlander immediately saw that gloating was his star’s forte and felt it best to give him his head. The result is a full-bodied performance in a juicy part that just begs for the kind of sonorous overacting only Lugosi could give. And a fun film all around.

   Alas, though, things weren’t all that much fun for poor Bela. Almost immediately after The Raven, horror movies went out of style (possibly because of excesses in films like this and Island of Lost Souls) and were actually banned in Britain.

   And hence, one of the premier horror actors of his day found himself unemployed and unwanted. Monster movies came back in the late 30s and early 40s, but now the former star was mostly cast as sinister butlers or red herrings, his name featured prominently on the posters but himself seen little in the films.

   That was in the B-movies. In the grade-Z flicks from Monogram and PRC, Lugosi got meaty roles once again, with a string of mad scientists, deranged killers and lots of screen time, but the meat here was generally bland-tasting, as the films themselves were slow-moving, cheap and mostly devoid of thrills.

   Only once more did Lugosi get a really good lead in a B-movie, and that was Return of the Vampire (Columbia, 1944) a classy job once again directed by Friedlander, who was now calling himself simply Lew Landers. Return has been largely ignored by Horror fans, but it has s spooky atmosphere reminiscent of Roy William Neill’s Sherlock Holmes series over at Universal, even featuring some of the players from that series and set, like them, in an oddly gothic war-time England.

   This was only the second time Lugosi played a Vampire in the movies (he’s named Armand Tesla, but with his cape, coffin and dinner clothes he is Dracula to all intents and purposes) and he takes the role in his teeth and runs with it, clearly relishing the chance to swirl his cape once more and stalk about the graveyard cloaked in fog.

   He’s even assisted by a rather unimpressive werewolf, played by Matt Willis in the best tradition of Dwight Frye, and he gets to gloat a lot once again, just like he did in the old days. Landers/Friedlander adds some fine touches, with the vampire’s presence presaged by dead leaves fluttering in through the french doors, and mist creeping all over the place, and again, when Lugosi’s being sinister, the camera’s right there in a well-lit close-up, while writer Griffin Jay, a veteran of the B-horrors at Universal and PRC, manages to polish up all the old clichés and provide a fast-moving story that seems enjoyably familiar.

   The rest of the 1940s were unkind to Lugosi, and the 50s even worse, but it’s nice to see him in Return of the Vampire, once again flashing his hammy fangs and biting the scenery as only he could.

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. American-International Pictures, 1964. Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Umberto Rau, Christi Courtland. Screenplay: William F. Leicester & Richard Matheson (as Logan Swanson), based on the latter’s novel, I Am Legend. Directors: Ubaldo B. Ragona & Sidney Salkow.

   Speaking of Sublime Cheapies, The Last Man on Earth was on the other night, the first time it’s been aired around here — cable or otherwise — for almost twenty years.

   It was worth waiting for. This film has real seat-of-the-pants tawdriness: a ragged, amateurish improvisational feel that is totally appropriate to the subject. As I watched the over/under-lighted camera-work, listened to the grainy soundtrack, and had my wits challenged by the jagged editing, I had the same eerie feeling I had two decades ago, that this film could have been made by, not about, the last surviving human.

   Needless to say, TLMOE is light years beyond its big-budget remake, The Omega Man, of seven years later.

   In the latter film, we got heroic Charlton Heston living in sybaritic isolation amid mad horde of counterculture late-60s stereotypes, treating the theme with a banality all its own. The picture in The Last Man on Earth is of the ultimate Civilized Man, cooped up in the suburbs, getting by with a jerry-rigged generator and clunky old cars as he copes as best he can with the ultimate in Unreason: Crowds of his former neighbors now turned into zombies.

   The Last Man on Earth also has the distinction of being the most poignant Monster Movie I’ve ever seen.

   In a movie this ragged, the few moments spared for Feeling take on a surprising importance: the torment of parents trying to ignore the cries of a sick child because they’re afraid to call a doctor; Vincent Price crying as he watches old Home Movies; and best of all, his pathetic joy at attracting a mangy, dying dog — all carry an emotional impact one rarely gets from even decently-made films, much less hand-to-mouth cheapies like this one.

   I should add that my esteem for this film is to General Critical Consensus as Perversion is to Love. For the last quarter-century, responsible reviewers have dismissed The Last Man on Earth as a cheap, miscast travesty of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Perhaps, years from now, Fashion will catch up with it. But I doubt it.

Editorial Comment:   It’s now 20 years after Dan first wrote this review. No longer do you have to wait for the movie to be shown on TV. You can watch it in its entirety on your computer screen whenever you wish. (See above.)

   What’s the critical opinion today? The Last Man on Earth currently has a 6.9 rating out of 10 on IMDB, and there are links to 100 external reviews. Has that last doubt of Dan’s been proven wrong?

LEMORA, LADY DRACULA. Media Cinema Group, 1973. Originally released as Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. Lesley Gilb, Cheryl Smith, William Whitton, Hy Pyke, Maxine Ballantyne, Steve Johnson, Parker West. Director: Richard Blackburn, also co-screenwriter.

   Now that I have disposed of the romantic and realistic Damsels in Distress (DID) films, honesty obliges me to admit that there is one kind of DID film that I find not unappealing ­ the bizarre or the erotic.

   A late-night film I saw recently qualifies, on both counts. Lemora, Lady Dracula is described in John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide (privately printed, 1981) as an “offbeat, surrealistic vampire flick with heavy artistic overtones,” a fairly accurate, bite-sized summary.

   The basic narrative concerns an adolescent girl who has been redeemed by a fundamentalist congregation from her worthless parents and trained as a singer to witness for the church. When she receives word that her father is dying and would like to see her, she runs away, traveling through a nightmare country inhabited by prostitutes and lascivious rustics until she is waylaid and carried off by monstrous, semi-human creatures looking like rejects from Dr. Moreau’s laboratory.

   Escaping from the stone prison they lock her into, she is “rescued” by a tall, beautiful woman dressed in black with thick white makeup and given a robe to put on for a mysterious ceremony. Both Lemora and the fey children who attend her are vampires, and the girl’s father has become one of the Moreau-like creatures who had kidnapped her. The rest of the film is taken up with the girl’s flight from Lemora and her cohorts and the vampire’s eventual victory.

   The film’s colors are predominantly black and red with glossy highlights, and there is a veneer of seductiveness and erotic titillation in almost every frame. (Even in the opening sequences in the church, the girl is dominated by a young, intense minister of whom we are immediately suspicious.)

   The depiction of the vampire children is particularly effective, a ‘blend of the diabolic’ and the pathetic. Lemora, who seems to be an untrained actress and reads her lines stagily (she is better at leering than reading) is the Dark Lady of romantic legend and exudes a sensual quality that gives the film a rather lurid cast.

   There is increasingly less distinction between the present and past, fantasy and reality, and the girl’s flight from seduction becomes a sexual odyssey that is often quite disturbing.

   Although Lemora is clearly an exploitation film and sometimes borders on the ludicrous, its implicit content pre-dates the recent rash of summer-camp psycho films but, like them, charts adolescents’ ambivalent sexual feelings.

   The most common situation is one in which young girls or women are pursued by murderous/sexually threatening men or women. The ambivalence of the spectator’s feelings toward the monster in the classic horror film (both admiration and fear) is exploited in a more troubling way.

   The classic film monster was often a tormented being with some impulse toward good; now, he ­ or she ­ is as threatening as the unspecified taboos and mysteries of sex, a disquieting visualization of the adolescents’ deepest fears and instincts.

   Another feature of these films is that very often the monster is not exorcised or destroyed. He lives again to spread havoc through one or more sequels. This was also true of the Universal Studio horror cycle, but there was usually some escape from the threat posed by the monster.

   In this open-ended narrative one can see a reflection of the contemporary fondness for unresolved plots. Like the anti-detective novel, where the narrative gaps are left unresolved, the conventions of the horror film seem increasingly to function not to quiet anxieties but to intensify them and may reflect a fairly general feeling that there are no longer satisfactory solutions to any problems.

   It may be a symptom of the disappearance of some of the traditional distinctions between elitist and popular art that popular art can feed contemporary anxieties, but that phenomenon, in itself, may be as disquieting as the fears it no longer mediates but intensifies.

BLACK MOON. Columbia Pictures, 1934. Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess, Cora Sue Collins, Arnold Korff, Clarence Muse, Eleanor Wesselhoeft, Madame Sul-Te-Wan. Director: Roy William Neill.

   This early voodoo movie is a little old-fashioned in its presentation — and you could even say out-and-out clunky and get away with it — but there some very some effective moments in Black Moon. Especially weird and strange are the scenes of native sacrifices, filmed against a backdrop of drums constantly beating on a fictional (though very Haiti-like) island in the Caribbean.

   It’s easy to call Black Moon old-fashioned today, but when you think about it, how ready would audiences have been for a movie like this in 1934?

   Isolated on the island is a small outpost of whites: a man; his young daughter; his secretary (secretly in love with him); his wife, who has been caught under the voodoo spell since she was child, even back in New York City; and her uncle, who owns a plantation on the island. (The young girl’s nanny barely counts, as she dies very early on.)

   By old-fashioned, though, I mean (for example) the story moves only in fits and starts, and one can easily wonder why everyone stays so calm (relatively speaking) when the deaths and the other strange and eerie events begin. (Some things have never changed in movies like this, not since day one.)

   Of the actors, Jack Holt does stolid well. Fay Wray as his secretary and the exotic Dorothy Burgess as his wife provide the beauty, and this they do very well, maybe even better.