Thu 7 Jan 2010
A Sudden Flurry of Horror Movies, by Dan Stumpf.
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[4] Comments
I’m afraid I’ve recently watched a lot of dreck, just for the sake of completeness. Things like William Castle’s abominable remake of The Old Dark House (Columbia,1963) and The Mad Monster (PRC, 1942) a film so cheap one is amazed by the very fact of its existence.
Then there was The She-Creature (American International, 1956), a film with an odd patina of melancholy arising from the sight of its two stars, Chester Morris and Tom Conway, both promising young actors once, now trapped in this strange, low-budget miasma. At least it boasts a good monster.
But there were a few gems, too: I re-watched a lot of the Universal Monster movies from the 1950s (The Deadly Mantis, Monster on the Campus, The Monolith Monsters, the Creature series, and my personal favorite, The Mole People, featuring a minimalist lost-civilization conquered by flashlights) and was pleasantly surprised by the air of professionalism about them.
There’s even, from time to time, a moment of artistry or a flash of intelligence in the fast-moving flurry of destruction. Most horror buffs and film historians concentrate on Universal in the 30s or 40s, but I think these deserve a sharper look.
After these came the zombie movies: White Zombie (1932, United Artists) inspired by W.B. Seabrooks’ eerie travelogue The Magic Island, the former a film with atrocious acting and worse script, but infused with a visual poetry that lifts its trite story to the level of a folk tale.
This was followed by I Walked with a Zombie (1943, RKO Radio Pictures) which is Jane Eyre set in the West Indies, with Tom Conway (remember him?) as a brooding Rochester to Frances Dee’s doughty nurse.
The last ten minutes of this thing is played out without dialogue except for a minute of voice-over narration by a narrator who isn’t even in the movie, producing a climax of pure abstract Cinema.
Then last, but far from least, there’s King of the Zombies (1941, Mongram) where Mantan Moreland’s deft comedy relief easily steals the film from its nominal stars and monsters.
January 7th, 2010 at 12:50 am
It sometimes struck me that the only people showing any sense in these films were usually Mantan Moreland, Willie Best, Stepin Fechit, and Snowflake. KING OF THE ZOMBIES is one of those films where you end up wishing they had stopped interrupting the comedy relief with the plot such as it was, a bit like some of the later Charlie Chan’s where Moreland’s routines were the only bright spot in the film.
THE SHE CREATURE is one of those oddities that almost achieves something simply by the application of mood and a pair of old pros, and at least the first of the three Black Lagoon CREATURE films achieves a kind of poetry (if memory serves doesn’t Clint Eastwood have a brief scene in the second film in the series?) especially in the underwater scenes with Julia Adams and Ricou Browning in the Creature suit.
DEADLY MANTIS is one of the better giant insect films (with THEM! the unapproachable high point), plus you get Paul Drake and Peter Gunn in the same film, and MONOLITH MONSTERS has always struck me a underrated, and shot imaginatively. A paleontologist friend of mine says Mantis has his favorite line in a movie when William Hopper, who plays a paleontologist in the film, tells someone “You take a claw and you build a dinosaur around it.”
THE MOLE PEOPLE is often picked as the worst Universal film of this era, but I’ve always kind of liked it. Any film with John Agar, Hugh Beaumont, and Alan Napier can’t be all bad. Or, even if it is, at least worth watching.
Re Chester Morris, he had one last great film in him — opposite James Earl Jones in THE GREAT WHITE HOPE. Poor Tom Conway simply continued his downward turn to a bad end.
I WALKED WITH THE ZOMBIES is one of those curious Val Lewton classics like THE CURSE OF THE CAT WOMAN, not really a horror film, but as you say almost pure abstract cinema. It may well be the most beautifully shot horror film since Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY, a sort of visual poem.
January 7th, 2010 at 7:27 am
You might add that the first half-hour of DEADLY MANTIS is about 55% stock footage.
January 7th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
I hate to confess it, but the only versions of “The Deadly Mantis” and “The Mole People” I’ve seen are the ones they showed on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
January 7th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
I’ll have to agree with David on I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. The photography is stunning, considering the microbudget that Val Lewton had to work with. In addition, in true Lewton form, the horror in the movie (what little there is of it) is masterfully suggested, rather than shown.
Lewton was a master at this kind of film. Following the unexpected box office success of THE CAT PEOPLE, the studio gave him the title of I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and told him to make a movie out of it. Lewton, never one to kowtow to studio bosses, shot an opening scene of a woman walking down a deserted beach with a “zombie.” There was a voice over talking about zombies, and that was the last connection with the title in the entire movie.