THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936)
Article #32 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-17-2001
Posting date: 8-30-2001

This isn’t the first movie to deal with tiny people (a handful of them pop up in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN), but it may be the first where the concept is central to the plot. A man falsely convicted of murder (Lionel Barrymore) manages to escape from prison with the help of another inmate, who happens to be a scientist experimenting with a process of reducing animals and people to small sizes and controlling them mentally. When the scientist dies, the convict joins forces with the scientist’s widow (Rafaelo Ottiano), and, in disguise as an old woman who makes toys, uses the small people to gain revenge and prove his innocence.

Despite the fact that I have several problems with this movie, I really like it; in fact, I find something tremendously moving in Barrymore’s relationship with his daughter. One of the movie’s problems is that it feels like two different movies that somehow got mixed together; the convict-proving-his-innocence story has a serious edge that seems at odds with the lighter-toned miniature people angle. You could have made two different movies out of this story.

Nevertheless, I quite enjoy it. Lionel Barrymore is always fun to watch, even though I don’t find him entirely convincing as an old woman (for that matter, I have the same problem with Lon Chaney’s similar performances in both versions of THE UNHOLY THREE, of which this movie may be a partial remake), and Rafaelo Ottiano’s bizarre crippled widow with the shock of white hair is one of the stranger characters out there; Tod Browning certainly had a big hand in coming up with this character. And the ending of this movie where Barrymore meets his daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan) atop the Eiffel Tower is a truly poignant scene.

THE DEVIL BAT (1940)
Article #31 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-16-2001
Posting date: 8-29-2001

In this movie, Bela Lugosi as Dr. Paul Carruthers develops a strain of giant killer bats that attack people who wear a specific after-shave lotion, also of his design. He uses it to eliminate those who made a profit off of his other creations. Fortunately, a reporter is investigating the murders, along with his photographer, “One-Shot” McGuire (a tribute to low-budget director William “One-Shot” Beaudine, maybe?).

This is one of PRC’s first horror movies, and it’s fairly entertaining, despite the obvious cheapness of the production. A little too much time is spent with the reporters, especially the sequences where they fake a photograph of the bat. Lugosi does a fine job, as usual, and watching how he gets his victims to use the after-shave lotion is part of the fun of the movie. I also find his motivation novel and interesting; rather than seeking revenge on those who scorned his scientific theories, he is a disgruntled employee who thinks he should have gotten a greater share of the profits.

This movie was more or less remade a few years later as THE FLYING SERPENT, with George Zucco.

DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (1966)
Article #28 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-13-2001
Posting date: 8-26-2001

Tartu is a Seminole witch doctor who has placed a curse on his burial site; if anyone desecrates the area, he returns in the form of an animal and wreaks vengeance. You can guess what happens when an archaelogical expedition with lots of teenagers invades the area…

This very cheap ancient curse epic has a few things going for it; the movie was shot in the Florida Everglades, so the swamp looks quite convincing indeed. Also, some of the attack scenes have a certain visceral impact, particularly when the snake repeatedly bites one of the teens in the face. The teens are a fairly uninteresting lot, though: they dance to music, make out, and do all the things teens do in these movies, and they really don’t have much in the way of character beyond that. And the final sequence —

SPOILERS COMING

— when Tartu turns into a Seminole warrior and chases one of the girls for several minutes is more silly and annoying than scary; as a rule, I tend to dislike scenes which have hysterical women continually screaming. Instead of striking terror into my heart, I’m left with the feeling that the director just chose the easiest way he could to convince me that what was happening was scary, and I’m left with the sense of the laziness and cheapness of that technique.

Incidentally, back when I was a kid and I first started watching my local Creature Feature show, my mom used to sit up and watch with me and complain about these old movies being in black and white. This movie was the first one in color that the show had aired; my mom was not home that night to see. I always wonder if the presence of color in this movie would have automatically made it superior in her eyes to the Universal Classics they were largely showing at the time.

DEAD MEN WALK (1943)
Article #27 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-12-2001
Posting date: 8-25-2001

A man discovers that his recently deceased brother has become a vampire, and sets out to destroy him.

The plot description is pretty basic, and I don’t think there’s a whole lot beyond that; I remember it as being a fairly dull, drab affair. The most interesting aspects of this film are the rather silly doom-talking elderly spinster, Kate: Dwight Frye, in one of his very last roles as Zolarr (and he doesn’t look at all well); the fact that the movie does not follow conventional vampire lore, as the brother becomes a vampire through the use of black magic; and finally, George Zucco in a dual role. This is particularly surprising; Zucco is not one of the actors I would imagine in a dual role, but he does quite well. It’s also interesting to to consider that neither of his two roles are conventional roles for him; I rarely see him as either a heroic figure or a vampire.

With all these unusual elements in the movie, I wish I didn’t find it as lifeless as I do; it should have been much more interesting.

DAY OF WRATH (1943)
Article #26 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-11-2001
Posting date: 8-24-2001

This movie is about a young woman who becomes the second wife to an elderly pastor against the wishes of the pastor’s mother. Her own mother, now dead, was accused of witchcraft, but the pastor had her charges dropped out of love for her daughter. When another old woman in the neighborhood is accused of witchcraft, she turns to the pastor for help, which does not come; she is executed to the sound of a children’s choir (a truly unsettling scene), but not before she prophecies the deaths of both the pastor and another member of the church tribunal. Meanwhile, the wife has met and fallen in love with the son of the pastor from his first marriage, and finds herself wishing for the pastor’s death.

This may not be strictly a horror movie, and those expecting one may well be disappointed. It is, however, a dark, brooding and quite powerful drama, directed by Carl Dreyer (VAMPYR) in Denmark during the German occupation. With its themes and subject matter, it certainly could not have been made in Hollywood at the time. I find it haunting and tragic, with that same touch of ambiguity to be found in the Lewton films; whether the young wife is a witch or not depends on how certain events that occur near the end of the movie are interpreted.

DAGORA, THE SPACE MONSTER (1964)
(a.k.a. DOGORA)
Article #24 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-8-2001
Posting date: 8-22-2001

In this movie, jewel thieves and detectives hunt for diamonds that keep vanishing, and everyone thinks everyone else has them. As it turns out, the culprit is not human, but a giant jellyfish/octopus monster that lives in the sky and feeds on carbon (diamonds, coal, etc.).

This is one of the strangest monsters Toho ever produced; not a man in a monster suit, but a rarely seen half-puppet half-animated creation with tendrils that reach down out of the sky to retrieve what it wants. This is the only appearance of this monster; it did not even appear in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, as it really doesn’t work on the same level as Godzilla and his friends. In fact, so much time is spent on the gangsters, detectives and scientists that the monster almost feels like a subplot rather than the main subject of the movie. I believe the movie had a satiric and/or comic intent, but only traces of this can be found in the somewhat confusedly dubbed American version; I would very much like to see a subtitled version of this one day.