THE SPIDER (1931)
Article #881 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-13-2003
Posting Date: 1-10-2004
Directed by William Cameron Menzies and Kenneth MacKenna
Featuring Edmund Lowe, Lois Moran, Howard Phillips

A murder is committed during the performance of a magic act in a theatre. The magician as well as his assistant become the prime suspects, and must prove their innocence.

A lot of this short movie is dedicated to the magic act, but since the act is well paced and fun, and Edmund Lowe’s performance is strong in the role of the magician, this doesn’t slow down the story at all. In fact, the whole affair is pretty energetic and fast moving, with the fantastic elements fairly strong—hypnotism, mind-reading, and a very eerie and effective seance sequence. The title refers to a minor plot point involving a ring. JUST IMAGINE’s El Brendel is on hand as an audience member who thinks the murder is part of the show.

SUCCUBUS (1967)
(a.k.a. NECRONOMICON)
Article #878 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-10-2003
Posting Date: 1-7-2004
Directed by Jess Franco
Featuring Janine Raynaud, Jack Taylor, Howard Vernon

A woman who performs in a sadistic stage show starts to blur the line between fantasy and reality.

Title check: No buses are sucked, and as for the alternate title, this has precious little to do with Lovecraft’s fictional tome.

Here we are, 878 listings into the MOTDs, and I finally hit Jess Franco. I’ve heard him described as one of the worst directors of all time; I’ve also heard him described as a genius, though even his supporters seem to think that he’s made a fair number of stinkers. I’ve seen a few of his others, and I suspect this is one of those in which he put some sort of effort into his work. He’s not talentless, and he has the occasional flare for interesting visuals, but he’s not much of a storyteller (I haven’t seen a movie of his that didn’t leave me somewhat confused), and sometimes his surreal visuals become merely silly and stupid. Quite frankly, I don’t have much use for this movie; if I’m in the mood for arty, erotic horror, I can always turn to Jean Rollin; unfortunately, I’m rarely in that mood. And I’m afraid that, despite all the name dropping of famous people and cultural icons (including the Marquis de Sade, the name people like to trot out to demonstrate that their delvings into sadism are actually high art of some sort), I suspect that there’s really a whole lot less here than meets the eye.

SCREAM, BABY, SCREAM (1969)
Article #873 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-5-2003
Posting Date: 1-2-2004
Directed by Joseph Adler
Featuring Ross Harris, Eugenie Wingate, Chris Martell

An artist kidnaps people and uses drugs and surgery to deform so he can then paint them.

Ten thoughts on this one.

1) Don’t confuse this one with KILL, BABY, KILL. Though I’ve never seen that one, I know for sure Bava had nothing to do with this one.

2) The videocassette package shows an insane bearded guy killing a woman with an axe. No such scene appears in the film.

3) The package also dares me not to scream. If it had dared me not to snooze, it might have won the bet.

4) Do you know what an LSD drug trip is like? According to this movie, it allows you to see film in double exposure and then you imagine you take the place of the animals in the zoo. I always knew drugs were overrated.

5) Most of the hideously mutated creatures in this movie consist of men able to grimace.

6) The rest of the hideously mutated creatures in this movie use makeup, but not much of it; the budget must have only allowed them to buy two eggs of silly putty.

7) The main villain looks sort of like a cross between Jack Palance and Charlton Heston with Criswell’s hair. I’ll leave it to you do decide how scary that is.

8) The last two movies I saw were in Spanish with no subtitles. The next two will probably be in Spanish with no subtitles. This one is English, but I found myself somehow wishing this one were in Spanish without subtitles. Well, you can’t have everything.

9) Considering how bad the sound is in this movie, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been in Spanish without subtitles.

10) This movie made me miss the subtleties and nuances of Ray Dennis Steckler’s THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES THAT STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES?!! Really. However, it didn’t make me miss the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis. That should you give you some idea of its quality.

SANTO AND THE HOTEL OF THE DEAD (1963)
(a.k.a. SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE)
Article #872 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-4-2003
Posting Date: 1-1-2004
Directed by Federico Curiel
Featuring Santo, Fernando Casanova, Ana Bertha Lepe

Beautiful women are being murdered at a hotel, and then the bodies disappear. Santo comes on the scene to investigate.

This is one of the Santo movies that never made it to the States, so I had to watch this one in an undubbed, unsubtitled print. I didn’t expect it to be as difficult to figure out as it turned out to be; the other Santo movies I’ve seen didn’t seem complicated. This one has a lot of elements that make it a little difficult to connect the dots; on top of the murders, there is a strange beatnik character who seems to be extorting money out of one of the other residents, and characters in cowboy hats digging in a cavern under the hotel. I’d really love to catch this one subtitled; it’s a lot of fun, and even given the plot difficulties, I could spot two surprising plot twists in the final moments in the film, since they’re done visually. And even though I’m not a particular fan of long wrestling sequences, I can say one thing for them here: they are kept to a minimum, and I had no trouble figuring out what’s going on during these scenes. Nonetheless, a subtitled version would definitely give me a chance to figure out the somewhat curious ending to this one.

And a warning to Santo; when you go driving off in your car, please pull your cape in instead of letting it flap around the wheels; I’d hate to have you pull an Isadora Duncan on us.

SSSSSSS (1973)
Article #847 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2003
Posting Date: 12-7-2003
Directed by Bernard Kowalski
Featuring Strother Martin, Dirk Benedict, Heather Menzies

A sssssinisssster sssscientissst transssforms hisssss asssssisssstant into a sssssnake.

Title check: Aha, one of the few movie titles to conssssissst of one letter (okay, I’ll ssssstop), though just calling it ‘S’ wouldn’t have been safisfiying. Now let’s apply the same technique to several other one letter titles. M would have become MMMMMMMM, which sounds quity yummy, but would not have given a good sense of the movie, and Z would have become Zzzzzzz, which quite frankly sounds boring (I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t say one way or the other). At any rate, I never encourage a movie to title itself in such a way that it invites people to hiss at it.

The basic idea is good old-fashioned mad scientist fodder, and the make up is quite good. The movie is like a cross between STANLEY, THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE, PSYCHO (the shower scene, anyway) and a teen sex comedy. It’s the script that really is the downfall here; the dialogue is very bad throughout, there are way too many characters with tiny brain capacity (a stupid college professor, a stupid jock, his bimbo girlfriend, and two stupid cops are way too many for a movie that isn’t supposed to be a comedy). Some of the scenes are incredibly clumsy; a skinny-dipping sequence has the worst use ever of masking-the-naughty-bit foliage; I guess they just didn’t want to lose that PG rating, which might also account for the fact that the hallucination sequence looks more like an easy-listening music video. The ending relies on the most incredible conjunction of coincidences I’ve encountered in a movie in some time. You might want to save this one for when you’re really in the right mood for it.

THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY (1956)
Article #845 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-8-2003
Posting Date: 12-5-2003
Directed by Noel Langley
Featuring Louis Hayward, Teresa Wright, Nancy Gates

A hypnotist discovers that his best subject is capable of dredging up memories of a woman who lived before she was born.

Title check: It’s pretty much a basic title for the story.

This movie is based on a (supposedly) true story that was a sensation in the fifties, and though the movie never claims anything more on a factual level than that hypnotism is a fairly powerful tool, it uses several techniques to try to give the viewer the sense of watching reenactments of real events. The end result is odd; it uses a great deal of narration (especially in the opening scenes), and the action is staged in a bare-bones fashion; the overall experience feels something like a cross between that of a radio play and a stage presentation. It’s not even afraid to be dull (some of the hypnotism sessions dwell on the mundane details of life in Ireland during the early nineteenth century), but that has the effect of making it seem a little more real; it’s a nice way to offset the fact that most of the acting and the dialogue is rather wooden. Whether it’s true or not, it did remind me of how I felt when I first watched THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, in that it tapped into that part of me that would really like to believe these things. There is something rather haunting in the concept that some veils might have been pierced here, particularly when we discover that the woman not only remembers Bridey Murphy’s life, but also her death and afterlife. Whatever its flaws, I have to admit I found this one a lot more interesting than many of the other movies of the time that were inspired by this story.

SHADOW OF CHINATOWN (1936/I)
(Serial)
Article #840 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-1-2003
Posting Date: 11-28-2003
Directed by Robert F. Hill
Featuring Bela Lugosi, Herman Brix, Joan Barclay

When an ambitious entrepreneur hires a mad scientist to scare competitive business out of Chinatown, she ends up with more than she can handle when his madness gets the best of him.

Title check: I didn’t notice Chinatown casting any shadows in this serial, but I suppose they couldn’t call it SHADOW OF BELA.

Let’s face it; there are some movies and serials that you largely remember for one special moment. In this one, one of the cliffhangers has the hero lying unconscious on the ground outside of his home. The villain plans to kill him by suspending a fishbowl over the hero’s head (you know he’s serious about this method of doing the hero in because he takes the precaution of removing the fish from the bowl). I think this is supposed to kill him by having the sun’s rays be magnified by the glass in the fishbowl, thus frying our hero, and though there’s a possibility that I might be wrong, I still think this is the most preposterous cliffhanger I have yet to see in any of these movies. This is a fairly weak serial; the pace is lethargic, the villain seems to be a rather minor threat (despite being played by Lugosi), and it certainly doesn’t seem well thought out. There are some really bizarre sequences and plot elements here; there’s a policeman who believes the hero is the culprit because the murders and attempted murders match those of a book the hero has written; the fact that some of these attempted murders are tried on the hero himself doesn’t seem to have much weight in this matter. There’s a montage of destruction in the final episode that simply doesn’t make any sense at all, and at least one cliffhanger has just too many shots of people giving meaningful looks to each other (they weren’t supposed to make any noise). As far as Lugosi serials go, I’m afraid I’d have to opt for THE PHANTOM CREEPS over this one.

THE SPELL OF AMY NUGENT (1940)
(a.k.a. SPELLBOUND, PASSING CLOUDS, GHOST STORY)
Article #824 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-17-2003
Posting Date: 11-14-2003
Directed by John Harlow
Featuring Derek Farr, Vera Lindsay, Hay Petrie

A man loses his fiancee to a fatal illness, and becomes caught up with spiritualists in an attempt to contact her.

Title check: THE SPELL OF AMY NUGENT is perhaps the best; SPELLBOUND isn’t so bad, but it does confuse it with the Hitchcock film; GHOST STORY is far too vague and somewhat inaccurate, and PASSING CLOUDS is nothing but a question mark, unless I missed a crucial line of the dialogue. The last one is the title on my copy.

This movie has an occasional interesting idea and a few good visual moments. It’s also poorly paced, indifferently acted, creaky and static, filled with clumsy dialogue, and what music there is is poorly incorporated into the film. All in all, this was a pretty uninvolving movie with dull characters; the most interesting one doesn’t appear until the movie is nearly half over. I can’t believe it’s sitting with a 7.7 rating on IMDB; either some people find it a lot more exciting than I do, or it’s confused with the Hitchcock version. I don’t think I’ll be going back to this one any time soon.

A STUDY IN SCARLET (1933)
Article #796 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-20-2003
Posting Date: 10-17-2003
Directed by Edwin L. Marin
Featuring Reginald Owen, Anna May Wong, June Clyde

Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of several members of a secret society.

Title check: Since the elements that explain the title of the Sherlock Holmes novel on which this movie was based are not present in this adaptation, the only relevance the title has to the story is telling you that it’s about Sherlock Holmes.

The opening credits says that the story of the movie was “suggested” by the events in the novel of the same name, which seems to me to be a nice way of saying that the movie isn’t going to follow the story of the novel, and sure enough, it doesn’t; we never even get near Utah. It takes place in the present (I can tell by the motorcars), so this is certainly not period Holmes either. The story itself seems more similar to TEN LITTLE INDIANS than any of the Holmes stories, as each member receives a verse of a poem that heralds his death; in fact, you should have no trouble figuring out the murderer as long as you’re familiar with an all-too-common mystery term that appears in one of the poems. Overall, it’s not too bad, with some fun scenes and a decent story, but Holmes purists won’t be pleased. The oddest liberty taken with the Holmes stories is that Holmes and Watson live at 221-A Baker Street instead of 221-B Baker Street. Complaining about a change like that is definitely picking nits, but it’s also such a pointless change from the original stories that it just calls attention to itself.

THE SHOW (1927)
Article #795 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-19-2003
Posting Date: 10-16-2003
Directed by Tod Browning
Featuring John Gilbert, Renee Adoree, Lionel Barrymore

A lady-killer who works in a carnival falls afoul of both the police and the lover of his assistant.

Title-check: The title is pretty generic, as every movie is a show of some sort. Appropriate, but vague.

Like most of Tod Browning’s silent movies with Lon Chaney (who isn’t in this one), this movie is really a lurid melodrama with slight horror elements. And also like many of those movies, this one has a circus background; the show of the title is literally a freak show combined with a magic act, and includes a reenactment of the decapitation of John the Baptist. John Gilbert is in what would ordinarily have been the Lon Chaney role, but Gilbert is the more appropriate choice here, as he fits the look of someone who would be a ladykiller more than Chaney would, nor does the role require anything in the way of Chaney’s makeup expertise. Lionel Barrymore is at his most restrained in the role of violent gangster who is jealous of his girlfriend’s interest in Gilbert. All in all, this is a fairly entertaining entry in Browning’s oeuvre.