Category: [Films & TV]

Been a while since we saw a film in colour, hey? Karloff came back to Universal for this one, which is quite a difference from the films we’ve seen lately; apart from being in colour, it’s a damn sight more expensive and, at 86 minutes, markedly longer than those Columbia B films. But Karloff is still the mad doctor here, albeit of a different kind… This was intended as a sequel to Universal’s 1943 Phantom of the Opera—a story which neither needs nor wants a sequel, really—so they bought the rights to a play that, as far as I know, had nothing to do with Phantom and then changed it about so the final film had nothing to do with the Phantom story nor indeed the original play… On the plus side, it does have the 1943 film’s sets (themselves reused from the 1925 version) and its colour as well, so if nothing else it’s a pretty handsome production. And, alas, I didn’t think it was much else; it generally didn’t seem to know entirely what it was trying to be, ending up kind of negligible as horror/suspense and as a music film too… for a film with so much singing in it, too, I found the music ftankly kind of crap; director George Waggner had been a songwriter before he was a director, and, well, he wasn’t at full capacity in this instance… Alas even more, neither was Karloff, who was running on kind of low wattage here; the Nice Young Couple played by Susanna Foster (star of Phantom ’43) and Turhan Bey do actually outshine him. The story’s attempt to create a mystery over the previous prima donna’s disappearance is immediately undone by showing what happened within the first reel, so it wastes that as well. It’s not bad but it really should’ve been better than it was.

The BBC have a nice piece on the 40th anniversary of Mr Gordon’s infamous adaptation of Mr Lovecraft’s infamous story:

The film was part of a sub-genre of excessively gory horror films that became known as “splatter horror”, a term coined by director George A Romero to describe his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead. From the 1960s until the late-1980s, such “splatter” films thrived, and were defined by their focus on physical gore and lack of interest in any real moral framework, or ideas of good and evil.
But while other films of this type might have similarly forced audiences to audit their relationship with the disgusting, they did so with a corrosive cruelty. Re-Animator, by comparison, is so in-your-face, so perverse, and so caked in blood that viewers cannot help but revel in the absurdity. “It’s really hard to have that participatory thing that a theatre production allows in a movie,” Combs says. “And he really did that!” When revered film critic Roger Ebert reviewed it, he noted that it was “a movie that had the audience emitting taxi whistles and wild goat cries”.
That theatrical bravado, somehow transplanted onto the screen, means that as Re-Animator rockets to a bloody climax, it becomes “not just a gore film which delivers splattery mayhem [but] also a wildly effective dark comedy”, says Duffy.
According to Combs, however, Gordon genuinely believed he was making a serious film, and the decision to play for laughs was largely down to the individual actors. “Our instincts told us we have to find release points for the audience,” he says. “I didn’t really talk to Stuart about it – neither did Bruce [Abbott] – but it’s something we decided to do. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a bombardment of gross stuff.”

Kind of stunned to think anyone might think Re-Animator was meant seriously (unless you were a reasonably young kid or something), given that Lovecraft’s original story may not be a comedy as such but it’s certainly one of his less serious efforts. The article also notes how little business it did:

When Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Market in May 1985, the initial reaction from both audiences and critics – most notably Ebert and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael – was ecstatic. Kael labelled the film “pop Buñuel… as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified – light-headed and happy”.
However, “it didn’t do anything theatrically,” says producer Brian Yuzna about its subsequent general release, making just over $2m (£1.5m) at the US box office.
That it failed to become a blockbuster hit like A Nightmare on Elm Street was in part because Yuzna declined to submit the film to the ratings board and risk cuts. Many cinema chains at the time would not screen unrated films, and newspapers often refused them advertising space. “It was very well-received,” Yuzna continues, “but from the beginning it didn’t get any real distribution [from Empire International Pictures].”

I mean… yeah, that was going to happen when you insisted on releasing the thing unrated back then, not much point complaining about it. (Empire notably insisted on Gordon’s next film From Beyond getting an R rating. That film actually did worse business, so…) Cf. its contemporary, Day of the Dead, where George Romero was given the choice of a larger budget for an R-rated film or a smaller budget for an unrated one; Romero took the latter despite knowing it’d probably damage the film. But he made his choice and, as far as I know, never complained about it. (Day also did far better business than Re-Animator on a nonetheless much bigger budget, but it did have the advantage of being the long-awaited next part of a popular series, so…)

Mike Duffy, who’s cited above, also makes an interesting point about another film, wondering if the comedic turn of Evil Dead 2 would’ve been as well received without Re-Animator‘s example. This kind of ties in with the point about the “seriousness” of Gordon’s film, cos I’ve always wondered that about the original Evil Dead and just how “seriously” it was really intended. How much did my viewing of it as at least partly a black comedy depend on knowing the sequel was meant as one? How much was it that the wilful and deliberate extremity of the whole was just too much to take seriously? I don’t know, don’t suppose I ever shall… But anyway, that’s another couple of films for a rewatch one day, along with Re-Animator itself, obviously… last I saw it was about 20 years ago, at which time it had actually lost a bit of its lustre for me, but it’s years later and it’s time for another go…

Finishing off the Karloff at Columbia set, therefore, with the satyr play after the serious business, to use a thoroughly overblown analogy… having made a string of straight SF/horrors, Karloff’s next film nearly two years later (during which time he was treading the boards in the original Arsenic and Old Lace) was a kind of parody of those films; with it being wartime by now, Karloff’s working on a race of supermen with which to fight the Nazis, and doing it from the basement of an 18th century tavern in the process of being sold and restored. Peter Lorre is the town sheriff (and everything else) investigating Karloff’s activities, but soon decides to get involved himself. But is murder afoot? Well, the ghost of a fictional character seems to be… This is thoroughly delightful stuff, possibly the most purely fun thing in this whole set, and probably a lot better than it had any right to be. The real star of the show, of course, is Lorre’s crime-detecting kitten, though obviously both Karloff and Lorre are having the time of their lives; notably, this film has probably the best nice young romantic couple of the series (the others mostly having been comparatively minor), being (Miss) Jeff Donnell and Larry Parks (speaking yet again of blacklist victims), the former as the new owner of the old inn and the latter as her ex-husband who gets suckered into assisting with her perhaps mad scheme to make the old tavern new and viable again. And former boxer Max Rosenbloom plays the sort of charming thickhead I gather he specialised in playing after boxing ended for him, as the powder puff salesman who gets involved with Karloff and Lorre for the apparent hell of it. The reminders that the US had finally deigned to join in a certain war are laid on a bit thick, and you can definitely accuse the plotting of being a bit loose, but there’s just something winning about the whole thing. Enjoyed this greatly.

This one immediately feels different to the three others we’ve seen so far; for one thing, it’s directed not by Nick Grinde but by Edward Dmytryk, for whom this was an early directorial effort before the Hollywood Ten unpleasantness and his subsequent ratting to HUAC… Also there’s a scene-setting narration that you don’t get in the others, and this one’s adapted from a novel by William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water; this is a book for which I actually have some fondness, and it has, perhaps inevitably, been somewhat bastardised for Hollywood B-movie purposes. And the other difference is that Karloff may not be entirely in charge of the mad science going on here… Dr. Blair is working on gear that will not only record people’s brainwaves, but it turns out it might just be able to communicate with the dead. He attracts the interest and cooperation of a fake spiritualist, played by Anne Revere (talking of the blacklist), who’s kind of the titular devil cos she gets even more interested in the power possibilities of this equipment and really drives Blair to work on it. The problem is, well, talking to the dead somehow requires actually dead people to drive the equipment, and that eventually draws outside attention… I don’t think this is quite as good as Everson says in his book (nor quite as visually threadbare as his pissing and moaning about Dmytryk overusing darkness and shadows might make you think), but it certainly is a good one; great basic idea, amazing pseudoscience (the scene where the housekeeper breaks into the lab and inadvertently sets the equipment off is a damned good one), Karloff is obviously fine and Revere is probably the best secondary performer in this whole series. Plus I think it’s quite bold to actually leave the end a little obscure, rather than explicitly rationalise what happens to Blair at the end; I think trying to actually show whatever he summons forth and what it perhaps does to him would’ve been unwise (and probably beyond Harry Cohn’s famous budgetary tight-fistedness), and suggesting something bleak for the viewer to imagine was a better idea.

Continuing with the Karloff at Columbia series, Karloff’s been working on a “cure” for old age, but in the course of doing so he’s managed to kill someone (much like in the first film). This time, however, he manages to dodge the death sentence, and he perfects his age-reversing serum… but, in a Hands of Orlac-esque twist (or “blood of Orlac” at any rate?), the serum uses the blood of an executed murderer, which provides an obvious complication. This one’s my least favourite so far of Karloff’s “mad doctor” films (the doctor being not especially mad in this one); apparently the original title was The Wizard of Death which I think I like more cos it makes more sense, really. Think the main problem is that I just didn’t buy the film’s basic situation, i.e. that the doctor gets to actually continue his work in jail, first while on death row and then after he commuted to life before being pardoned (this latter part struck me as a particularly unlikely detail). Director Nick Grinde dresses it up again in some nice, effective shadows, but generally I felt it lacking a bit of overall energy. Still, obviously good to have Karloff leading things, and nice also to have Edward Van Sloan on board too.

I can’t find an actual reference to this film’s budget anywhere, but it was a Columbia film so I’m guessing “not high”; Harry Cohn never liked spending money even on his big films that merited the cost, so for something I imagine he would’ve considered a piece of shit I can’t see him being lavish… but Nick Grinde did get enough to work up a pretty good laboratory set, which is good cos most of the film will take place there. Everson reckons all the Karloff “mad doctor” films were fairly similar, and in this case that extends to his character name (Dr. Krevaal) being oddly like his previous one, and in this case he’s also been working on an experiment involving reanimating frozen (though not technically dead) bodies… but this time round, he’s become the unwitting subject of his own work, having become frozen in his own ice chamber ten years ago along with the men he was demonstrating it to; he’s thawed out by a doctor searching for him, and now he needs to find out why they didn’t die and rediscover his own work… if the other men will let him, of course. I had a lot of fun with this film, which runs at some 74 minutes which is about ten minutes longer than the rest of the films in this series, so the story has a bit more room to breather; Karloff, obviously, is having a blast as Krevaal who’s less bothered by the fact he’s been “dead” for ten years than that he’s still alive now, and the rest of the cast is good too. Plus it’s rather more judicious with using music than the previous film, which didn’t use it enough. Only serious problem was the noticeable slump in picture quality in the last ten minutes or so, but I gather that’s a problem on the older DVD release so maybe it’s an issue with the existing print? Whatever, otherwise this was great fun.

More accurately The Man They Could Indeed Hang But He Wouldn’t Stay Dead, but that would’ve been a noticeably less snappy title. This is part of a series of films Karloff made at Columbia from 1939-42 which has been called his “mad doctor series”… in this particular instance, he’s Dr Savaard, who’s experimenting with a mechanical heart device with which he proposes to save the dying from death. However, technically the experiment requires someone to die first, and when the police interrupt him during it, Savaard is tried for murder and ultimately executed for it. But his technology works, all right, and Savaard isn’t taking his death lying down. Once again the main attraction here is Karloff, who’s clearly enjoying the lead role; Savaard’s original intention is evidently benevolent, but his experience of dying has left him somewhat embittered, shall we say. As the second half of the film begins, though, something about the transition to the revenge part of the tale feels off somehow, as if some scenes should’ve been filmed but weren’t, making some things a bit abrupt and unprepared for. Still, apart from that, the whole thing is actually pulled off fairly well and with some style; I don’t know much about director Nick Grinde (who also directed the next two films in the series) other than what Wikipedia says about him specialising in B films, but he pulls off some well-chosen camera angles, gets pretty fair performances from the rest of the cast, and makes the whole thing fun to watch. And Everson did say of this series that he thought it did the opposite of what series like this usually do and actually got better as it went along, so I suppose we shall soon see if I agree with him or not…

Not a horror film (though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was with that poster) so much as a crime film with a vaguely SF twist, this film kind of found the recently restructured Universal wondering what to do with its great horror star Boris Karloff now that the horror genre was considered dead in the water… the answer, evidently, was this comparatively light little number. I don’t know much about director Lloyd Corrigan, other than that he seems to have been a lot better known as an actor and only directed a small number of films (this being his second last; blu commentary suggests the pre-production was kind of unhappy thanks to script issues and Corrigan was far from first choice). Karloff plays an inventor, Mallory, who was screwed out of a fortune by the man, Ranger, he designed a famous security system for; when the latter tries to screw him again out of his new system, Mallory uses the latter against him… which draws the interest of a gang of crooks looking to employ it themselves. This is all fairly mild stuff, with most of the interest in it coming from Karloff himself; there’s something slightly hapless about Mallory, his “revenge” against Ranger is really more to irritate him than really damage him, and it’s quite a charming performance (Karloff seems to have been happy to do something different for him). Similar goes for Hobart Cavanaugh as the small-time crook Mallory starts out saving from Ranger and then becomes his partner in “crime”, he’s quite delightful too. Otherwise the cast doesn’t blow me away, I felt like the gang boss in particular felt more like the character was playing a Warners-type gangster rather than being a real one. It’s a light film, like I said, only 67 minutes long and basically a B film with not a lot in the way of excitement. But Karloff’s the star of it, and that’s not a bad thing at all.