Mon 28 Jun 2010
A Movie Review by David L. Vineyard: DARK INTRUDER (1965).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[11] Comments
DARK INTRUDER. Universal Pictures, 1965. Leslie Neilsen, Mark Richman, Judi Meredith, Werner Klemperer, Charles Bolender, Vaughn Taylor, Gilbert Green. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon. Director: Harvey Hart.
It’s foggy turn of the century (1890) San Francisco and the city is being stalked by a murderer, but no ordinary killer — he’s killing in the name of Lovecraftian demons from the ancient past. Only a handful of victims stand between him and eternal life, leaving behind a mystical ivory demon with a parasite on its back that grows smaller with each murder as the time grows shorter between the date each new victim dies.
Who is the disfigured monster stalking the foggy streets and what is his true face, and what is the demonic killer after? There’s even the mummified body of a demon in the possession of a mysterious Chinese who aides our hero.
Chinese: How bad? This is a Sumerian god, ancient before Babylon, before Egypt. It is the essence of blind evil, demons and acolytes so cruel, so merciless, all were banished from the earth and they are forever struggling to return. In the old days people were possessed by demons. These demons.
Leslie Neilson is amateur supernatural sleuth Brett Kingsford (“The seventh son of a seventh son has a reputation to uphold”) — replete with secret crime lab, a Latin motto “Omina Exeunt in Mysterium” (Everything is a Mystery), a library of occult tomes, and a dwarf assistant named Nikola (Charles Bolender):
Kingsford: Yes poor chap, destined for ultimate evaporation I’m afraid. The penalty for telling a Dyak witch doctor to go jump in the lake.
Kingsford is called in by the Police Commissioner (Gilbert Green) to help find the killer (“You seem to specialize in obscure acquaintances.”), which he does while maintaining the pose of a playboy a la Lamont Cranston or the Scarlet Pimpernel (“For me to be any value to you at all the company of a narcotics addict is preferable to a police commissioner.”), though he is less than happy when Kingsford suggests they are hunting a ritual murderer in the thrall of ancient Sumerian gods who must be locked away “… where all such unearthly things belong.”
Nielson has some fun as the Sherlockian Kingsford, who is a master of disguise and fully as high handed as Holmes at his best. Judi Meredith is Evelyn, whose psychic trances aide Kingsford in his hunt for the demonic killer, fiancee of wealthy importer and a friend of Kingsford, Robert Vandenberg (Mark Richman).
This was originally shot as a pilot for a series, The Black Cloak, that never developed and released theatrically by Universal as a feature as sometimes happened then.
Night Gallery producer Jack Laird produced it and the teleplay was by Barré Lyndon (screenplays for The Lodger, Hangover Square, War of the Worlds, Night Has 1000 Eyes — with Jonathan Latimer — The Man Who Could Cheat Death, and his play The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse), so the mix of horror, mystery, and detective elements were natural. The eerie score is by Lalo Shifrin.
Enjoying himself playing Kingsford, Leslie Nielsen gets to indulge in disguises and flights of Holmesian reasoning, and the scenes with Mark Richman as wealthy Robert Vandenberg have a nice bite to them.
Kingsford: No, he had claws.
You’ll have to look closely for Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes, in a key role with a distinctly Lovecraftian twist if you recall the plot of “The Dunwich Horror.”
Handsome Robert Vandenberg has a demonic twin, Professor Malachi, born at the same time on an archeological dig, and brought up by a nurse who was midwife to Robert’s mother, who won’t be happy until he has traded bodies with his half brother and ushered in his demonic father.
A set piece when Malachi confronts Vandenberg in a foggy church is nicely done with one last twist when the misshapen Malachi plunges to his supposed death…
And he’s right as he races to save Evelyn from a fate much worse than death:
Nicola: If they did sir, nobody would get a decent night’s sleep.
This is an entertaining little exercise in the mix of detective and horror elements with an attractive cast and Leslie Neilsen in a lead role long before he revealed his comic flair in the Airplane! movies.
At a mere 59 minutes it is tightly written and directed and moves along nicely never pausing long enough for any pesky doubts to cloud the viewers enjoyment of the precedings.
This was on everyone’s wish list for years, and when it showed up a few years ago on the gray market it was a bonus to discover it was every bit as good as the memories it evoked. It’s an attractive little black and white entry in the mystery/horror genre that manages some genuine chills and solid fun.
More than a few more expensive productions fail to deliver as much atmosphere, action, and fun as this one does. It may remind you of the similar Chamber of Horrors with Patrick O’Neal and Cesare Danova, another pilot turned feature, though this one, thankfully, does without the “Horror Horn.”
Dark Intruder is a fine example of a period when the pilots that failed were sometimes more interesting than the ones that succeeded.
June 28th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Barre Lyndon wrote the plays THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET (THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH) and THE AMAZING DR. CLITTERHOUSE that the films were based on and is credited as co author on the novelization of THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH with Jimmy Sangster (the novelist and Hammer screenwriter) though I believe the book and the screenplay are by Sangster alone.
Lyndon’s other television work includes the “HERCULE POIROT” episode of the Ronald Reagan hosted G.E. TRUE THEATRE with Martin Gabel as Poirot, and the adaptation of Robert Bloch’s “YOUR’S TRULY JACK THE RIPPER” with John Williams and Donald Woods for BORIS KARLOFF’S THRILLER.
DARK INTRUDER was his penultimate screen/teleplay, his last work an episode of THE F.B.I. in 1966.
June 28th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Lyndon also wrote the screenplay for “Don’t Look Behind You,” an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour that Mike Tooney reviewed here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1864
As I was reading along in the review, everything was going smoothly until I hit the part that said that this film is only 59 minutes long. 59 minutes? There’s two hours of story here, I’d have thought, at the least!
There all kinds of reasons why a pilot never makes it into a series, but given a decent budget, it might have made a good one.
David, would the series, do you think, have been anything like THE X-FILES? If not, what TV series that came along later would it have been the most similar to?
June 28th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
I don’t think it would have (or did) resemble X-FILES in that the supernatural here was always obvious and accepted and a good deal of the series would have dealt with Nielson’s various disguises and odd and sinister friends. Even the police commissioner character only gives him a little argument about the supernatural. The skepticism I mention at the end is about the only time it comes up, and then only to the extent the Commissioner doesn’t want the public to know the body in Mark Richman’s grave is Werner Klemperer’s Professor Malachi (Klemperer’s voice isn’t used either so he is doubly hard to identify).
The series it most reminded me of was from the same period, THE WILD WILD WEST — particularly a handful of supernatural episodes done on that series (and of course the latter also used a little person in a key role — albeit a villain). I looked a good deal like many of the episodes from TWWW’s first black and white season.
It also reminded a bit of some other pilot films, RITUAL OF EVIL and FACE OF EVIL, with Louis Jourdan as psychiatrist David Selby, where a supernatural sleuth combated straightforward occult forces. And it resembled the short lived THE SIXTH SENSE and a summer replacement series that specialized in weird late 19th century science, QED.
There haven’t been too many series, supernatural or not, that really fit this pattern. It really was modeled on Sherlock Holmes with a touch of the Shadow (minus the powers), and it was clear that Kingsford’s keeping the true nature of his work hidden from the world as a sort of secret identity was going to be a running theme. In the pilot he uses two disguises including an Englishman and a sailor though it only runs 59 minutes (it does pack two hours of material in that short time, and still manages to get a bit of atmosphere in). Some time is spent at the beginning establishing that everyone believes he is nothing but a playboy and eccentric (replete with a mandrake plant that acts as a living lie detector). I’m guessing had it aired it would have been in either a 75 or 90 minute slot and then been an hour long series.
This would have been an unusual series by any standards. CHAMBER OF HORRORS, which I mention, was also a pilot designed to revolve around a 19th century pair of sleuths (Cesare Danova and Wilfrid Hyde-White) who ran a wax museum specializing in bizarre crimes — each episode would have revolved around what would become an new exhibit, the first one mad killer Patrick O’Neal who cut off his own hand to fake his death.
No one is exactly sure, but this may well be the first use of Lovecraftian elements on television outside of a few episodes of THRILLER that suggested them. Notably producer Jack Laird adapted Lovecraft on the later Rod Serling NIGHT GALLERY series. Lovecraft had been done on radio (SUSPENSE repeated “THE DUNWICH HORROR” with Ronald Colman on every Halloween).
RE CHAMBER OF HORROR, the ‘Horror Horn,’ for those who never saw it, was a William Castle style gimmick ‘sounding’ whenever there was a brutal crime on screen. It’s almost as annoying as it sounds though the film is fairly entertaining with Danova and Hyde-White (who was also Louis Jourdan’s partner in the David Selby films)entertaining as the sleuths.
But I can’t really think of anything quite like DARK INTRUDER on American television, though it looked a bit like Sheldon Reynold’s SHERLOCK HOLMES series that starred Ronald Howard and a few British series over the years.
As far as I know it never aired as a pilot, but it did get a theatrical release and deserved it.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:05 pm
I really didn’t think THE X-FILES was a very good example, based on the original review, but it was the best I could come up with that I thought most people might be familiar with.
When you said it “really was modeled on Sherlock Holmes with a touch of the Shadow (minus the powers),” that’s what put it even better into focus for me.
I wonder if there have been British TV series that come close to being what this one might have been. They’ve always done a lot more with ghosts and thingies, especially as Christmas time specials, than has been done in this country.
(I think I’m right about this, and if I’m not, I’m sure to hear about it; and if I am, why the emphasis on Christmas time?)
— Steve
June 28th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
The Christmas ghost story even predates Dickens, but certainly the British tradition is for a bit of a fright at the holidays (Dickens wrote more than one). For that matter the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in BEETON’S CHRISTMAS ANNUAL. Even today DOCTOR WHO always does a big Christmas special.
Most of the major British supernatural writers have one Christmas ghost story among their works. And quite a few mysteries use the season including Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
Though a bit more adventurous than DAK INTRUDER, SAPPHIRE AND STEEL with Joanna Lumley and David McCallum was something of a supernatural DR. WHO — and over the years DR. WHO has played with variations on the theme though always proving to be science fiction rather than the occult. I can’t think of the names, but there have been three recent supernatural British series — one about a dead private eye who comes back to aide his partner and another about a defrocked priest ( I recall a really good episode dealing with the Irish death coach) and yet another about a reluctant medium that took on unambiguous supernatural themes with a detective twist. Aside from that the series HEX and JEKYLL both dealt with the supernatural theme with a twist (HEX is HARRY POTTER with a sex drive).
Christmas as we celebrate and know it got it’s roots and many of its traditions in the late 18th and early 19th century — which is also the period of the Romantic Movement and the Gothic movement, so the association of the holiday with ghosts and the supernatural may arise from that as much as anything, but from A CHRISTMAS CAROL on ghosts and Christmas have been inseparable — particularly in England. Recently Terry Pratchett’s Discworld take on Santa Claus, HOGFATHER, was a mini series (shown here). LORD OF THE RINGS
Maybe its the melancholy, the snow fogs, the supernatural side of Father Christmas, and the idea of the original Christmas miracle.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Sorry, that got posted with an inclomplete sentence thanks to a complete cat. What I was saying before the cat got impatient was that LORD OF THE RINGS
June 28th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
I give up.
Seriously, LOTR, NARNIA, and GORMENGHAST all have Christmas related themes.
Hardly worth the trouble was it?
June 29th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Just thought I’d throw in a few spare factoids about CHAMBER OF HORRORS:
– I’m a litle surprised (so to speak) that David didn’t mention that COH also has a dwarf in the cast, who would have been a regular had it gone to series. This was Tun Tun, who if memory serves was a popular comedian in Mexican films and TV (could be wrong on that). The first time I saw COH, I thought Tun Tun bore a distinct facial resemblance to William Shatner, which added another comic level to the proceedings.
– COH was supposed to be called HOUSE OF WAX as a series, and was actually announced as ABC’s fall 1966 entry at 10 pm (9 central) on Fridays. This was the season that the ad director at Bristol-Myers was permitted to rearrange the ABC fall slate to his liking, causing several announced shows to vanish without trace.
One of the other missing shows was SEDGWICK HAWK-STYLES, PRINCE OF DANGER, a Sherlockian spoof starring Paul Lynde, which has an underground reputation as one of the funniest unseen pilots ever (Lynde thought so to his dying day). Anybody have an idea where that one can be found?
– One of Tom Weaver’s interview collctions has an interview with Stephen Kandel, who wrote COH, and would have ben its script editor had it sold. Worth checking out.
– You can find a write-up about DARK INTRUDER in Martin Grams’s ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS COMPANION; apparently Hitchcock’s Shamley Productions had a hand in its making.
– DARK INTRUDER was shot in Black-and-white in 1964. Had it been picked up as a series by NBC, for whom it was made, it might have had to be converted to color for the ’65 season. Wonder hat that would have looked like.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Mike
You’re right, I forgot Tun Tun, and he did look a little like Shatner didn’t he. It’s an entertaining movie though. One of those intriguing might have beens.
Among the most famous series that never quite made it, ABC planned for a series called COMMANDER JAMAICA about a secret agent operating in Jamaica from his yacht Goldeneye. Ian Fleming wrote the scenario and when the idea fell through he ended up using the material for DOCTOR NO.
He wrote a series of scenario’s for CBS for a JAMES BOND SECRET AGENT SERIES that ended up the short stories in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY while the series ended up DANGER MAN/SECRET AGENT.
Donald Lam, D.A. Doug Selby, Brock Callahan, Michael Shayne (with Mark Stevens), Modesty Blaise, Mike Hammer (by Blake Edwards no less), Hercule Poirot (with Martin Gabel) are all characters who ended up in unsold pilots — some that aired. What might have been…
November 1st, 2013 at 12:39 pm
Is the play, “THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET” public domain? Anyone know??
August 14th, 2023 at 12:18 am
Far Beyond the Realms of Belatedness:
Just rereading this, years after the fact –
-Louis Jourdan’s character in those NBC TV-movies was named David Sorell.
Never too late …