MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS. Universal International Pictures, 1958. Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore, Judson Pratt, Nancy Walters, Troy Donahue, Whit Bissell. Director: Jack Arnold.

   Don’t let the exploitation title fool you, as Monster on the Campus is actually a surprisingly captivating 1950s science fiction/horror film. Indeed, it’s of a quality far higher than a lot of the forgettable dreck churned out during the same era. Directed by Jack Arnold, this Universal-International movie stars Arthur Franz as Professor Donald Blake, a university scholar who, while researching a prehistoric fish, discovers a serum that – stay with me, folks – reverses the evolutionary process.

   As you might have guessed from the title and the premise, Franz transforms into a hairy apelike monster. He – or his monster alter ego — roams around a California university campus wreaking all sorts of havoc and mayhem. There’s murder, mystery, and a little on campus romance thrown in for good measure.

   Call it a werewolf film without lycanthropes or King Kong without Skull Island, but Monster on the Campus is actually something of a minor, if at times unpolished, gem.

   Filmed in black and white, with a good some particularly effective atmospheric moments, it also benefits highly from Arthur Franz’s strong performance. Although he was primarily a character actor, the other movies I’ve seen in which he had starring roles (The Sniper and The Atomic Submarine) have been taut, suspenseful thrillers that I was certainly glad I watched. The same can definitely be said for Monster on the Campus, a highly evolved creature feature that’s worth a look.

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VOODOO WOMAN. American International Pictures, 1957. Marla English, Tom Conway, Mike “Touch” Connors, Paul Blaisdell. Written by Russ Bender and V. I. Voss. Directed by Edward L. Cahn

THE DISEMBODIED. Allied Artists, 1957. Paul Burke, Allison Hayes, John Wengraf. Written by Jack Townley. Directed by Walter Grauman

   Movie fans remember 1957 as the year that brought us Bridge on the River Kwai, Twelve Angry Men, Paths of Glory, and The Spirit of St. Louis, but I will always recall it fondly as the banner year that delivered not one but two ersatz jungle epics with schlocky monsters and witchy women portrayed by iconic starlets of that tawdry form.

   Voodoo Woman is a thing of shreds and patches, apparently thrown together by producer Alex Gordon in the wake of The She Creature — a remarkable film on its own — with bits and pieces of that film’s eponymous monster, director Edward L. Cahn and stars Marla English and Tom Conway, who sports the silliest headgear ever committed to film.

   Conway plays a Mad Doctor determined to combine “the white man’s science and the black’s voodoo” to create a monster that will do his bidding. Which may seem a bit redundant in these days of the Internet, but he finds the perfect subject for his experiments when Marla comes strutting into his Jungle Hell.

   Marla English had a rather brief and unheralded film career, but her appearances here and in The She Creature ensure her a place in the archives of tacky movies. In She Creature she projected a virginal impassivity that made her the perfect palimpsest for Chester Morris’s regressive enterprises. Here she gets to vamp it up as the most literal of femmes fatales, a woman literally consumed by greed who cheerfully drags her cast cohorts down with her.

   We first see Marla hanging out in some junglefront dive, plotting to track down hidden treasure in the tropical backwoods. Or what passes for the tropics here; mostly it’s the usual stock-footage long-shots intercut with a sound stage sparsely furnished with defeated-looking foliage and bespoke rubber undergrowth. There’s even a moment when Marla and her guide (Mike “Touch” Connors) cuddle around a campfire, and as the camera pans to take in their antics we see two stage hands jump out of the way!

   It all gets a bit hard to take seriously, particularly when Mad Doctor Conway decides amoral Mara is the perfect subject for his experiments in monster-making, and she agrees whole-heartedly, as a means to acquire the lucre stashed somewhere thereabouts. She is duly promoted to monster-in-chief (actually played by Paul Blaisdell, in parts of his She Creature costume, a plastic mask and mop-wig) and proceeds to wreak low-budget havoc about the place until we’ve reached a respectable running time and can end the suffering.

   Well it ain’t much, but director Cahn was a past master at moving things along quickly, hero Mike Connors shows plenty of the charm that led him to TV stardom, and Tom Conway does a splendid job of not dying of shame. With all this and Miss English too, Voodoo Woman ranks as a genuine Guilty Pleasure.

      

   Moving on to The Disembodied, I can praise it with faint damns by observing that it’s a bit less tacky-looking than Voodoo Woman. The fake jungle is a bit less threadbare, the costumes not so tacky, and star Allison Hayes makes a splendid entrance, trying to kill her husband with a voodoo curse.

   Allison Hayes was literally one of the giants of Really Bad Movies, with a starring bad-girl turn in Roger Corman’s Gunslinger, followed by Zombies of Mora Tau, The Undead, The Unearthly, The Hypnotic Eye, The Crawling Hand, and of course Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Her very presence in a starring part guarantees a certain sleazy splendor, and Disembodied offers one of her best(?) roles as a part-time voodoo queen, slinking about in silky dresses, high heels and/or animal skins as she falls for a passing wildlife photographer (Paul Burke) and decides he’d be perfectly cast in her road-show production of Double Indemnity when tribal magic proves ineffectual in killing her husband.

   It seems Allison moonlights (again, literally) as the local Voodoo Priestess, and when Burke shows up with a dying buddy in tow, she saves the man’s life by cutting the heart out of one of her worshippers—some religions are just harsher than others, I guess, but it makes me glad I was raised United Brethren.

   Anyway, the voodoo magic saves the man’s life but it has the deleterious side-effect of turning him into a zombie, possessed by the dead native’s spirit. And I’m afraid that’s all the Monster we get for this picture.

   Director Walter Grauman is no Edward L. Cahn, either. Where Cahn moves through Voodoo Woman with commendable speed, Grauman lets Disembodied bog itself down in long stretches of needless dialogue, courtesy of writer Jack Townley, who spent much of his career writing for Gene Autry and the Bowery Boys. In their hands, Ms Hayes’ alluringly repellant screen presence goes for very little, and the surprising thing is that she manages to radiate so much energy and still not be the least bit convincing.

   So on points, I’d have to award the Oscar in the fakey-jungle-monster-movies category to Voodoo Woman, but for lovers of awful movies, both films are required viewing.

MAURICE SANDOZ – The Maze. Doubleday Doran, hardcover, 1945. No paperback edition.

THE MAZE. Allied Artists, 1953. Richard Carlson, Veronica Hurst, Katherine Emery, Michael Pate. Screenplay by Daniel Ullman. Directed by William Cameron Menzies.

   I love it when learning one thing leads to learning another.

   When I mentioned to Ray that I was reading /watching this, he mentioned right back that it was based on a true story. This prompted a bit of research that led me to the story of Glamis.

   Glamis Castle in Scotland is a place of legend, the setting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, reputedly the scene of a card game between the laird of the manor and Satan himself, and the seat of an impenetrable mystery involving a secret room and an unseen denizen half-haunting the manse. This was the basic material that Maurice Sandoz took for his short novel, The Maze.

   Like a classic ghost story, Maze is set in a frame, as an unnamed narrator tells of a chance meeting with Edith Murray, the kind of spirited old lady familiar to readers of this sort of thing. It seems that some years ago, Edith’s niece Kitty was engaged to marry Gerald MacTeam, who, as we get into the story, is related to the MacTeams of Craven Castle, which has a mysterious history and odd ways with its guests, who are forbidden to enter parts of the house and grounds and are locked in their rooms at night.

   Sandoz throws in a few more teasers like this and promptly moves the plot along as an uncle dies, Gerald inherits the estate, goes to the castle to settle things, then abruptly breaks off the engagement with a letter that (fittingly for this sort of thing) foreshadows a grim tale to come and throws Kitty into tearful confusion.

   But not for long. Aunt Edith isn’t the kind of lady to see young love go unrequited, and not many pages have turned before she’s a guest in the castle and busied with the usual night-time perambulations through twisty corridors and sinister paths, to a conclusion in the mysterious maze of the title.

   I have to say though that I closed this book with a sense of mild disappointment. It’s smoothly written, suspenseful, and the illustrations (by Salvador Dali) are just dandy, but overall it lacked any real drama, and the resolution seemed just a bit too pat and convenient. Worth reading, but hardly memorable.

   The film, on the other hand, is definitely worth your time. Directed by William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come, Invaders from Mars, etc.) in his best off-kilter style, it fairly drips with menace and gives real, visceral feeling to the creepiest elements of Sandoz’s book: the sound of something unworldly moving through the castle halls, the thing half-seen in the shadows which sanity must reject, and the palpable sensation of persons keeping a secret they wish they didn’t know.

   Writer Daniel Ullman, who did his best work in B-Westerns, rings in the changes one would expect from Hollywood; here it’s young and attractive fiancée (Veronica Hurst) who instigates the investigation and heads it up when Aunt Edith (Katherine Emery) wants to back off. And when the end comes, it’s with a fine flurry of activity and jump-in-your-seat scares.

   Richard Carlson, that reliable stand-up guy of 1950s sci-fi puts in his usual earnest performance, and Michael Pate, the vampire gunslinger of Curse of the Undead (1959) adds a bit of depth to his sinister butler part, but the film really belongs to Menzies, whose striking visuals and sense of pace keep things going wonderfully.

DIE, MONSTER, DIE! American International, 1965. Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Freda Jackson, Suzan Farmer, Terence de Marney, Patrick Magee. Screenplay: Jerry Sohl, based on the story “The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft. Director: Daniel Haller.

   An admirable attempt to adapt to film what might have been Lovecraft’s closest attempt to wrote science fiction. Admirable, since there’s much to like, especially in the first half, but doomed to failure when they tried to make a monster movie out of it, rather the a study of the not very beneficial effects a radioactive object landing from space has on all the surrounding terrain.

   For some reason the movie was filmed in England, and so naturally they moved the story there as well, rather than (I believe) somewhere in austere New England. At least they called the nearby village Arkham. Nick Adams plays the boy friend of Susan Witley (Suzann Farmer), whom he met in college back in the states. Boris Karloff plays her father, intimidating even in a wheelchair, and orders young Stephen Reinhart off the premises.

   He refuses, of course, but even stepping off the train, he knows that not all is well with the Witley family. All of the village fold shun him immediately they know his destination. Susan’s mother is not well, the one servant is on his last legs, and old Nahum Witley has secrets he will not tell, including what caused the large pit just down the drive from the manor house, and the totally blighted area around it.

   The first half of the movie is extremely well done, beautifully photographed and the old mansion filled with all the accouterments an old family mansion should have. With hints galore, of course, that there are secrets here that man, perhaps, is not meant to know.

   So of course when the secrets are so slight, and the telling so indifferently done, the second half can hardly live up the billing. If some of the details of the the history of the house and those who have lived in it had been set out more precisely, it would have helped. But the even the title of film promises a monster, and when all we get is a few momentary chills and a display of what happens in the end to old Nahum Witley, shaggy eyebrows and all, there isn’t anything left to do but wish that a stronger hand had been on the controls.

CAT GIRL. Insignia Films/AIP, 1957. Barbara Shelley, Robert Ayres, Kay Callard, Ernest Milton,Jack May. Written and produced by Lou Russoff (brother-in-law of Samuel Z. Arkoff, head of AIP). Directed by Alfred Shaughnessy.

   A British-born variation on Val Lewton’s classic Cat People (1942) this is cheap and a bit crude, but oddly sensual for a 1950s Monster Movie.

   Director Alfred Shaughnessy went on to some acclaim writing Upstairs Downstairs (1971-75) and writer-producer Lou Russoff was responsible for classics like The She Creature, It Conquered the World and Beach Party, so you can appreciate the dynamic tension present in the creative process here.

   It all opens up in a creepy (and rather cheaply-furnished) old castle on a dark & stormy night, where Barbara Shelley is summoned to inherit the Family Curse, which has something to do with a psycho-spiritual link with predatory cats. Seems rather a heavy burden to bear — especially since the old man who passes on the familial blight gets mauled by a cheetah shortly thereafter — and I can’t imagine why the family didn’t simply opt to pay a fine instead, but I guess that wouldn’t make much of a movie, would it?

   Anyway, Barbara has more to contend with than mere Doom; it also seems she’s married to an unfaithful boor who makes the Curse of the Cat People seem a mere inconvenience: greedy, condescending, completely self-centered, and it’s a bit of a relief when Barbara finds him out on the castle grounds shaking the bushes with a comely female guest and, in the words of one critic:

   Well, that’s a good deal stronger than anything you’ll find in Cat People, and Barbara Shelley’s sexuality is much more overt than Simone Simon’s: she sleeps in the nude and goes about in a strapless gown apparently held up only by her firm anatomy — which in 1957 was pretty strong stuff, especially for a monster movie supposedly aimed at kiddies, but I digress.

   Up to this point Barbara has all our sympathy, but it quickly develops that she’s still in love with an old boyfriend, now a happily-married psychologist, who begins treating her obvious symptoms of dangerous insanity. And naturally he decides that the best thing for her is to move in with him and his mousy missus, as the attentive viewer mutters, “Yeah, right,” or the functional equivalent.

   At about this point, Cat Girl begins aping Cat People pretty shamelessly as Barbara’s jealousy turns to evil, and she starts plotting her rival’s demise. We get a variation on the birdcage scene from the earlier film, then a repeat of the night-stalk, leading up to a rather muddled conclusion where… well I won’t give it away, just take my word: it’s muddled.

   Yet I still enjoyed Cat Girl, and if you have a taste for cheap monster movies you will too, thanks mainly to Barbara Shelley. Her sheer screen presence in a role with a bit of depth to it lifts this well out of the ordinary. In fact, even before I watched this last week, I remembered it with affection from when I saw it on its first release, sharing a double bill with The Amazing Colossal Man.

   Now THAT was Bang for your two-bits!

CHAMBER OF HORRORS. Warners, 1966. Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Laura Devon, Jeanette Nolan, Marie Windsor, Jose Rene Ruiz, Wayne Rogers, Patrick O’Neal. Written by Stephen Kandel and Ray Russell. Directed by Hy Averback.

   If you only watch one movie in your lifetime, it should be Chamber of Horrors.

   This gaudy comic-book of a film was originally conceived as the pilot for a projected TV series to be called House of Wax, with Cesare Danova and Wilfrid Hyde-White as co-owners of a Baltimore wax museum, circa 1900, who solve the grisly crimes on display in their emporium. When the result was judged a bit too intense for network TV, a few scenes were added and it was released as a feature film. Something similar happened in 1964 over at Universal with their updated version of The Killers, as the once-rigid line between big and small screen began to blur.

   The result in this case is hokey but fun, with an able cast and some dandy bits of business to delight the adolescent boy in all of us. Chamber offers splendid sets, lurid color and tricky camerawork to highlight the efforts of several perfectly-cast players: Cesare Danova fills his shirt neatly as the strapping hero, Wilfrid Hyde-White is his lovable old self as his partner-in-detection, Laura Devon (who would cap her brief career the next year in Blake Edwards’ Gunn) looks awfully good in a part with a bit of range, and Jose Rene Ruiz (billed here as Tun-Tun, his persona in several Mexican films) adds diversion as a diminutive helper. But the film really and truly belongs to Patrick O’Neal as a mad killer named Jason — think about it.

   Jason makes his entrance here forcing a preacher at gunpoint to marry him to a corpse, and from there on, things just get fruitier. Apprehended through the efforts of the Police (Wayne Rogers) and our team of amateur sleuths, he escapes from the train taking him to his execution by cutting off his own manacled hand and leaping from a bridge into a river where he is presumed drowned.

   But we know better, don’t we?

   We next see Jason with a leather apparatus attached to his arm in place of the missing extremity, being fitted by a sinister Oriental (Barry Kroeger, one of the slimiest bad guys of Hollywood’s noir days) with a variety of attachments to suit his sinister needs: hook, scalpel, cleaver, etc. and preparing to enact a baroque revenge on his erstwhile nemeses.

   Given a part like this, many actors would have been tempted to ham it up in the campy Batman style of the times, and O’Neal does give it a full-blooded (sorry) rendering in the classic Lugosi style, but he stops short of self-parody. When Jason has a victim in his clutches, O’Neal really seems to enjoy it:

         JUDGE: (Surprised) “But-but you’re dead!”

         JASON: “Yes. Won’t you join me?”

   … and when he celebrates his triumphs with a cigar, you can almost feel the nicotine rush. This is a movie villain in the classic style, one who enjoys evil for its own sake, and he approaches a fitting climax in a running battle through the wax museum as good-guy and bad-guy fight with prop spears, torches and battle axes, set against a background panoply of gruesome wax murders.

   In all, a film to savor, and I hope you do, but I should add that what they tacked on to turn this into a feature film is sort of absurd: the “Horror Horn” and the “Fear Flasher.”

   When Jason is just about to butcher another victim, a horn sounds and the screen flashes “So that the faint-hearted can look away or close your eyes” an announcer tells us in a prologue.

   Fine, except that there’s no gore and very little blood to be seen, and when the lights and noises come, it’s generally to presage a moment of almost tasteful metaphor: Jason swings his ax, the camera pans decorously away… and what was all the fuss about?

   Still and all it’s a harmless bit of fun in a film you shouldn’t miss.

THE PHANTOM CHARIOT. Svensk Filmindustri, Sweden, 1921. Also known as The Phantom Carriage. Swedish title: Körkarlen. Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Astrid Holm, Tore Svennberg. Director: Victor Sjöström. Shown at Cinefest 18, Liverpool NY, March 1998.

   Victor Sjöström is not only a pioneering and notable Swedish film director and actor, but the acknowledged mentor of Ingmar Bergman, and for about four years, from 1924, [as Victor Seastrom] a successful Hollywood director of Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped, Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter and The Wind, and Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman.

   The Phantom Chariot is his best-known Swedish film and a classic of the horror film. According to legend, a person who dies at midnight on New Year’s Eve is condemned to drive Death’s chariot for a year, gathering in souls.

   In part a moralistic drama (a drunken, abusive husband is redeemed by his vision of Death’s chariot), it is the recurrent visions of the chariot that linger in the memory, a fantasy haunting an austere, realistically filmed narrative.

                                 

               

I, MONSTER. Amicus Productions, 1971. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Mike Raven, Richard Hurndall, Susan Jameson. Director: Stephen Weeks.

   There are moments in I, Monster, an Amicus film based on and inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde where Christopher Lee is at the absolute top of his game.

   One early scene in particular comes to mind immediately. It’s when his character, the psychologist Charles Marlowe, scalpel in his hand, cradles one of his lab rats and eerily mimics the rat’s facial expressions. Of course, at that point, Marlowe (Lee) isn’t all Marlowe. He’s also Marlowe’s alter ego, the barbaric Edward Blake.

   And that’s by far the best thing that I, Monster has going for it: Lee in a dual role as Marlowe/Blake, wherein the famed British actor gets to demonstrate just how well he can portray screen villains.

   Unfortunately, however, this lesser known entry in Lee’s vast filmography suffers from a decidedly mediocre, if not tedious, script that does little to keep the viewer fully engaged with the story.

   Even worse, as much as it pains me to say this, Peter Cushing’s presence in the film is just underwhelming. Sure, it’s great to see Lee and Cushing go at each other in the final sequence. But it’s simply not enough to make I, Monster more of a missed opportunity rather than the cult film it might have been.

THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE. Sokal-Film GmbH, Germany, 1926; original title: Der Student von Prag. US title: The Man Who Cheated Life. Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Agnes Estherhazy. Script by Henrik Galeen and Hanns Heinz Ewers, based on the short story “William Wilson” by Edgar Allan Poe (1839). Director: Henrik Galeen. Shown at Cinefest 18, Liverpool NY, March 1998.

   A legendary German horror film that lived up to its reputation. Veidt is the student who sells his reflection to Krauss for the love of an heiress and is drawn into a nightmare that culminates In a magnificent sequence in which he confronts his mirror reflection and tries to destroy it.

   The haunting cinematography and art direction are by Guenther Krampf and Hermann Warm (art director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). A scene in which Krauss stands on a hilltop and orchestrates the elements and the activities of a hunting party reminded me of Veidt’s summoning of the storm in The Thief of Bagdad (Korda) and a long shot, later in the film, in which we see only the elongated shadow of Krauss’ arm and hand as he reaches up toward a garden terrace is equally unforgettable.

   Veidt is perfectly cast as the obsessed student and his deterioration is reflected in an extraordinary alteration of his face, which seems to grow thinner and more furrowed in the course of the film. A great film.

CHLOE, LOVE IS CALLING YOU. Pinnacle, 1934. Olive Borden, Red Howes. Georgette Harvey, Philip Ober, Francis Joyner, and The Shreveport Home Wreckers. Written and directed by Marshall Neilan.

   An intriguing little B-movie from 1934, with no one you ever heard of, perfunctory screenplay (the characters enter, explicate and move on to the next scene) and rudimentary direction. Needless to say, I found something worthwhile and memorable in it.

   The story is something about old black Mandy (Georgette Hervey) returning to her former home in the swamps with her grown-up light-skinned daughter Chloe (played by the lovely and tragic Olive Borden) and Jim Strong, another light-skinned black man, who loves Chloe in vain. Jim is played by Philp Ober, who will always be remembered for his short scene as Lester Townsend in North by Northwest, and who looks about as black as a Vanilla Wafer.

   It seems old Mandy has returned to take Voodoo Vengeance for the lynching of her husband, some fifteen years ago, and the opening scenes, as the roving camera tracks her skiff through the bayou are really rather effective. Likewise the notion of retribution for racial injustice is surprisingly daring for films of this era.

   Then, alas, we get into the plot, as Ol’ Colonel Watsisfuss sips mint juleps with handsome young Wade Carson and they tell us that Carson has been hired to look into thefts at the Colonel’s Turpentine Plantation or some such.

   They also tell us that old Colonel Whatisfuss, had an infant granddaughter who supposedly drowned in the swamp maybe fifteen year back or so.

   It takes about five minutes for Wade to meet Chloe while sleuthing in the swamp, and less time than that for them to fall in love, but Chloe knows their love can never be, because she be black.

   You have guessed the ending? So did I, but director Marshall Neilan (a rather interesting personality in his own right) walks us through it at his own pace, which could be charitably described as Lame. The acting is hard to judge fairly, given the spartan script fed to the unhappy thespians, but I have to say they handle themselves with a sincerity I found pleasantly disarming, with Chloe and her two suitors at odds while the Turpentine Rustlers and Voodoo Hoodoos hatch their fiendish plans between musical interludes by the Shreveport Home Wreckers, until we reach the ending, when poor distraught Chloe runs off through the swamp and is promptly grabbed by the local Voodooers for their weekly fish fry and human sacrifice.

   At which point the movie actually gets pretty good; the scenes of the Voodoo ritual are hauntingly evocative, with, big old Oak trees dripping Spanish Moss behind a huge bonfire, while black silhouettes writhe and dance in the foreground like souls out of Hell. And the images of poor Chloe tied to the sacrificial altar as Wade Carson and Jim Strong battle to her rescue recall the very best pulp-cover art, providing a lurid finish to a distinctly uneven but somehow memorable film.