215. Scared to Death

215. Scared to Death (1947)
Director: Christy Cabanne
Writer: Walter Abbott
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

A woman arrives at the morgue and narrates, for the audience, the story of how she was murdered.

A brief studio cheapie that’s most notable for being the only color film to star Bela Lugosi. While it’s better than a lot of the Ed Wood movies he did later, it’s still pretty disappointing. There’s a real sense that the movie was banking on his reputation as being a horror icon to do the work of selling the movie.

The film is set up as a giant flashback. Laura, our narrator, has been murdered, but they don’t know precisely how. Then her voice arrives on the soundtrack telling us her story. Only Laura’s voice-over never adds anything to the movie, never provides any foreshadowing, never even gives us a sense of her character by having her describe things that are happening in the flashback. In fact, Laura’s not in the movie much at all. We see more of her lying dead as the movie fades back to her than we do in the movie itself.

Anyway, we cut from her on the table to her being examined by her father-in-law, Dr. Van Ee. He’s trying to put a blindfold on her, but she panics and tells him to stop. She accuses him of conspiring with her husband to force her into a divorce. They’d be happy if she left, but take forever to explain why. She leaves as another patient arrives—a woman seemingly trying to blackmail the doctor with knowledge that only a person he presumed dead would have. The doc kicks her out and then Lugosi, the doctor’s cousin, arrives. They used to run a racket together as touring illusionists and Lugosi is the person presumed dead. He’s not there for blackmail, though, just to rest for the night.

So much for that mystery.

Really Lugsoi’s there to play up the red herring of the doctor being in some way villainous or to be his own red herring. Meanwhile, Laura is in her room and gets sent a mask in the mail that makes her scream. Through details we learn from other characters, we can put together that Laura used to be part of a double-act at The Green Room. Lugosi remembers her and says, to no one, “The Green Man may get you yet.” Things escalate in the house with more people arriving, the maid being hypnotized to feign death, and then everyone goes into the parlor to find Laura hypnotized to perform her act from before.

During the war, Laura betrayed her partner—her then husband—to the Nazis and sent him a green blindfold for his execution. She wanted him to know she’d betrayed him. She did it, not for the money, but to be free of him and his control over her despite him being “good.” The movie’s really invested in you not being that bothered by her murder. She takes off the blindfold, sees a mask coming at her from the window, and dies of a heart attack. The husband is caught in the yard disguised as the woman who came to see the doctor earlier and we fade back to the coroner’s office where he says she was “scared to death.” THE END

It’s pretty stupid. Normally I’d find something like this charming, but it’s just throwing everything into a pot and making nothing from it. The doctor’s past and all his strange behavior, including lying about being attacked, comes to nothing. The house is full of secret passages for no reason. Lugosi has a deaf-mute little person working as his assistant because...creepy? Plus there’s a bumbling private security officer in love with the maid and a reporter who shows up for no reason with his ditzy assistant. Even the son, the man who wants a divorce, vanishes from the movie for the majority. The reason he wants the divorce, by the way, is that he married Laura the night he met her on a drunken bet.

The worst thing the movie does is make the killer someone you couldn’t possibly know. The woman who seemed to be blackmailing the doctor at the beginning was actually a character never named or described until the final scene, in disguise (so you wouldn’t know the person you didn’t know).

This is not as bad as some of the other flicks I’ve watched, it’s certainly not offensive, but it’s strangely bad. Like the decision to cut back to Laura in the morgue all the time. The cuts dissolve to her lying still and then immediately dissolve back to the movie, sometimes the same scene. Plus they’re almost never scenes that she’s in. She’s telling a story of all the things she didn’t witness.

The movie is almost, but not quite, compellingly bad, and I recommend it on those terms. It’s not fun on its own and I wouldn’t recommend it to watch ironically, but if you have friends and want to laugh at something, this movie is so consistently wrong-footed that you’d have a good time. It’s in the public domain and there are several copies available on archive.org. I’ve linked to the MPEG-2 version, because that’s what I do.

154. Shadow of Chinatown

154. Shadow of Chinatown (1936)
Director: Robert F. Hill
Writers: story by Robert F. Hill, additional dialogue by William Buchanan, continuity by Isadore Bernstein and Basil Dickey
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A shady criminal enterprise tries to take over Chinatown businesses but is constantly thwarted by a pulp writer and his tenacious reporter friend.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. To celebrate your drowning in Lucky Charms, I give you serials. I know that’s a stretch, but the only material on these sets that I know is even remotely Irish is Naked Massacre and that’s not actually very fun. Or good. Or something I’m rushing to watch again. Instead, today and tomorrow will focus on two movies cut together from movie serials—each cut in their own way and facing their own problems.

First is Shadow of Chinatown starring Bela Lugosi, which is to its credit. In fact, initially, there’s a lot to this movie’s credit. It takes 6 whole minutes to have an openly racist stereotype—the koan-spouting Chinese manservant—and, apart from him, it doesn’t really have others. Sonya Rokoff, who seems initially to be the main villain, looks like she might be a Dragon Lady type or even someone doing yellowface, but, as her name indicates, she’s just a white woman wearing Chinese fashion. She’s also part of a business concern importing and exporting Chinese goods so there’s a reason she’s wearing that. I was nervous when I first saw her, but she’s not putting on an accent and then I caught the name. Let’s be fair: the movie was made in 1936—there was a better than even chance it would be cringingly racist throughout.

None of this describes the plot, though, which is always difficult with serials turned into movies. You either have a few episodes cut together with minimal editing so there’s a lot of bloat, or you have the entire serial cut into one feature so everything’s manic and confused. This is the latter.

So Rokoff works for an import/export firm and gets a note instructing her to sabotage the Chinese businesses in San Francisco because they’re offering too much competition. She calls Lugosi who’s involved with some vague mad scientisty thing and he, an expert of disguise, sends his gang members into Chinatown looking like locals to set off bombs, shoot off guns, and generally create an air of violence that scares all the tourists away.

Plucky society columnist Joan Whiting is investigating the events in hopes of getting promoted to full reporter. She asks her friend/crush, pulp writer Martin Andrews for help, but he blows her off because, *pfft* dames, so she investigates on her own and gets captured.

Thus we have the initial setup and boy did this serial get busy. She’s kidnapped, Andrews stupids his way into saving her, he’s the key suspect in all the gang activity then just isn’t anymore, Lugosi has a longstanding grudge against him, action moves to Los Angeles but never arrives there, Lugosi turns out to be a master hypnotist and then, in the third act, to be a master inventor as well and has bugged all of San Fran with his vi-coders, chase, chase, chase, double-cross, fight, fight, all baddies die, the end.

The original serial, I think, was supposed to focus on Andrews as the hero—a pulp novelist whose stories reflect the real-life adventures he leads. It’s not a bad trope, it worked great for Murder, She Wrote, but it doesn’t come across in this edited version because there’s no time to establish that he’s writing any of this down. The only hint we get is the cigar-chomping chief of police has Andrews under suspicion because the initial set of crimes matches one of his novels.

Instead, initially the movie feels like it’s making Whiting the hero. She’s the one who goes to investigate the crimes, she’s the one who engineers her own escape, and she’s the one who wants something—she’s the character with drive. Granted, there’s a bit of a Lois Lane/Clark Kent divide there where her curiosity gets her captured and Kent/Superman has to save her, but the joke’s always been that Clark Kent is a boring, crappy, unwatchable character. Lois is the one that does stuff. In fact, now that I think about it, how many Superman stories would actually have happened if Lois Lane hadn’t investigated and shown Superman that there was something that needed doing?

God, Superman’s a garbage character.

Anyway, that only plays out for the first act. The second largely sidelines Whiting as everything’s happening on a boat and the third involves the gang turning on Lugosi out of fear, but never getting around to telling the cops what his name is. It’s kind of hilarious the contortions the movie goes through to prevent people from saying his name. Of course there’s a dart in the neck right when someone’s about to say it, but you’ll have criminals monologuing, approaching the name, and then a distraction will happen in the next room and Lugosi will rush in to hypnotize the crooks. It’s a hoot.

Back to Andrews as the hero, though. You start to see the budget limitations in Lugosi as the villain. He’s not bad as the villain—unsurprisingly, he’s the best part of the movie—it’s just that he’s too many villains. He’s initially a hired thug who’s a master of disguise. Then he’s a master hypnotist and gang leader. Finally, he’s the big bad ultimate evil moving all the chess pieces around the board. It’s too much. I got the sense that these were supposed to be three stories that eventually evolved into facing off against this final threat as opposed to Lugosi being all the threats.

What’s interesting to me is how useful the serial story structure is for planning out things like role-playing games, but how disappointing I find it for movies and narrative. Shadow of Chinatown would make a great 1920’s pulp RPG. It’s noir and sneering and dames and you could write down all the plot points of this movie (or the original serial) and have a rollicking campaign. As a movie, though, as a continuous narrative, it doesn’t work because there is no throughline.

In a serial, everything’s about hitting the next beat, driving to the next cliffhanger, and stringing the whole thing along for as long as possible. It’s not surprising to me now that I don’t like Star Wars: Episode IV. The movie follows this format—it was pitched as a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon reboot—and is imagined as a serial. I grew up watching it on TBS so all the peaks and cliffhangers fit in nicely with commercial breaks. I loved it then, but once I saw it on the big screen in one go, I realized how much it didn’t work.

And very much the same here. There’s campy fun to be had—Andrews is your typical useless non-hero and the way things ramp up in the final act is very funny—but it’s nothing that stands out too much. It’s neither great nor terrible, but it’s short and if you’re in the mood to make fun of something, it’ll serve you well. The movie is in the public domain, but Mill Creek slimed my copy so I can’t upload it. There is, however, already a copy on archive.org for you to use at your pleasure.

PD Project Horror Part 10

Ladies and gentlemen, six and a half minutes of pure win:

Now,

Disc 10

Monster From a Prehistoric Planet

An expedition to gather exotic animals for a publishing magnate's theme park nets a baby "Gappa." Only the creature's monstrous parents don't like that their child's been taken away and head to Japan to save it.

The formula of these kaiju/sci-fi monster movies is endlessly entertaining. The tribal culture that's lived with the monster for generations, the imperial hubris that disdains the culture's knowledge of the monster, the competing interests fighting over who'll profit from the monster, and then crap gets smashed! Woo-hoo! That's what we came here for mofos! Sure, the monster looks like a pigeon cross-bred with a lizard that's choking on a starfish, but it wouldn't be kaiju if the monster didn't look kind of stupid.

The movie can be pretty shocking though. A female scientist is asked why she isn't at home making babies and the film has Japanese people in blackface. There is some craziness going on here.

The Monster Walks

A woman returns to claim her inheritance after her father dies only to learn there is a theat stalking the house that may soon claim her life as well.

A not-overly-involved story of broken promises and double-crosses. The violin trick got me. That was pretty inventive. This movie's pretty okay. Just try not to cringe at the antics of the black driver.

The Gorilla

The Ritz Brothers play a group of private detectives hired to protect an attorney from a serial killer called "The Gorilla," only there may be more secrets in the house than they anticipated.

The movie's okay if you can ignore the painfully unfunny antics of the Ritz Brothers. They're like a low-rent Three Stooges, and the Stooges can be had cheap. The plot itself involves a variety of people posing as other people and the ample use of secret passages. Those parts are kind of fun. Also the maid/cook/whatever is kind of funny too. To top it off, Bela Lugosi plays the menacing butler.

A Shriek in the Night

A man falls to his death from the balcony of his penthouse apartment and two reporters covering the story start to wonder if it was an accident at all.

If you cut out the comic relief you'd have a really good movie. As it is, it's just a pretty good mystery where the villain is revealed to be secretly related to someone who'd been crossed by the victims. Not bad. The reporters have a snarky, screwball comedy relationship going on and you don't see that in movies anymore.

Next time, the penultimate disc, Disc 11. I'm almost loathe to reveal what's on it. I will say it features my favorite movie so far from this set.

PD Project Horror Part 7

Hey, where have you been?

Ahem. Yes. After some delay I am back and so is the horror. Please, try not to cry. Here we go!

Disc 7

Bluebeard

John Carradine plays an artist who murders the women who sit for his paintings.

This is a PRC picture which means it should be awful, but it's not. It's actually pretty good. I'd go so far as to recommend it unironically, and I don't do that with many movies in this project.

The Corpse Vanishes

Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who uses the vital fluids of young women to keep his wife alive and beautiful.

An interesting revision of the vampire story. I can't remember much about the movie though.

This was featured as episode 0105 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be downloaded via the Digital Archive Project or watched on YouTube (in 10 parts).

Doomed to Die

Boris Karloff returns for his final performance as the detective Mr. Wong. A shipping tycoon is found shot to death in his office after one of his ships catches fire and sinks.

Not as good at The Fatal Hour, this one drags a little bit. It's fun to note how often Wong has to break the law to solve the mystery. Ends with a disappointing revelation of guilt, but it's okay until then.

Night of the Living Dead

The dead walk! The classic film that redefined our idea of zombies. Fantastic.

Next time, Disc 8: Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., Max Shreck and none of them talking.

PD Project Horror Part 2

Disc 2

Four movies, each one starring Bela Lugosi because Bela Lugosi equals horror, even when it doesn't.

Black Dragons

On the eve of war, major American industrialists are being murdered one by one. What's their connection to this mysterious stranger who's arrived in town and why is a Japanese dagger left with each body?

More of a revenge/mystery story than a horror movie, Bela of course plays the visiting stranger. The film has an odd logic that spills over into the pacing and the logic of the film. The conclusion arrives almost in spite of itself.

The Invisible Ghost

Bela Lugosi plays a man driven mad by the death of his wife, only she's not dead and there are strange murders occurring in his house.

It's clear, early on, that Bela's the killer. What makes the movie interesting is an innocent man gets the blame, and the chair, for it. Kind of a weird piece.

One Body Too Many

An insurance salesman is hired to guard the body of a man so his potential heirs don't try to bury it and invalidate the man's will.

This isn't horror and Bela isn't even the star of this one. He plays the butler (a funny, seemingly murderous butler, but still, just a butler). The star is actually Jack Haley (the Tin Man) who plays a bumbling insurance agent. It's a simple enough murder/comedy without much mystery. The villain just steps out from the shadows at the end and announces their guilt while trying to kill one more person. But Haley, Bela and the rest are entertaining enough. It's a fun little flick, just absurd to include it in a "horror" box set.

White Zombie

Bela Lugosi plays the evil Murder Legendre, a witch doctor who uses zombie slaves to run his sugar plantation. He's asked by a fellow islander to turn a woman into a zombie so she can be stolen away from her fiancé, only the deal has a higher cost than he could have imagined.

The first zombie movie (no kidding) and kind of neat. The film indicates Lugosi commanding the zombies by doing a close-up of just his eyes, a bit of film that was then re-used in another Halperin picture, Revolt of the Zombies (which is featured on the next disc). There's a priest in this movie who sort of appears out of nowhere. It's a little strange. In fact, there's a lot strange to this film. Lugosi took the role after doing Dracula and turning down, I think, Frankenstein. He was hoping Murder would become another staple character so he could play him in sequel after sequel. Things didn't work out that way.

Saturday, Disc 3 featuring Tor Johnson, 3 movies that were on MST3K and Roger Corman directing Jack Nicholson!