Busan Midnight Movie: The Giant Gila Monster (3/20/21)

This week on the Busan Midnight Movie: The Giant Gila Monster! A giant gila monster attacks residents of a small town.

Another deep cut from the PD Project. I mistakenly described the film then as featuring “Giant radioactive monsters and incompetent rear-projection for the win!” The mistake is that the titular gila monster is not the product of radiation, just a result of gila monsters growing large.

No, that’s really the whole story of where the giant gila monster comes from: gila monsters can get big, so here’s one that got really big. There’s no mystery as to why or how and none of the characters wonder either.

The same depth of drama applies to every part of this film. What happens in this movie? Not a whole lot. You could say the disappearance of a young couple at the start is the inciting incident since it leads to the boy’s father tasking the sheriff with finding his son (and casting aspersion upon our hero). However, that father doesn’t return until the very end of the film (where he doesn’t seem too torn up about the likely death of his son) and our hero isn’t drawn into the mystery of where his friends have gone or what’s causing all the car accidents in the area.

In short, it’s a profoundly incurious film that begs you to be interested. But at least it has several interludes of pointless singing.

Wrap Up:

The Good: Elderly teens. This is a film from back when you had people on their third mortgages playing “the kids” and it’s just kind of funny to see suit-bound men with receding hairlines get called “kid.”

The monster. They use an actual lizard shot in close-up and have it interact with models when it needs to smash things. Unfortunately the models aren’t very impressive and the lizard doesn’t so much smash them as have to be coaxed through them.

The Bad: Very little. This would be the place to bring up the songs of Don Sullivan and make fun of the movie for featuring them, but they’re just generic examples of the music of the time. The movie’s so profoundly unambitious that it doesn’t get much wrong, but that’s only because it strives to do so little. The best films of this kind have some bonkers decision on screen—anything from an over-the-top monster to a clear display of the director’s reach exceeding their grasp—and this just has nothing.

Production note: As I say in the episode, I was originally going to show Yongary, Monster From the Deep. It’s a Korean kaiju film and it’s well past time that I feature a Korean film on the Busan Midnight Movie. When I did the copyright test of uploading all this month’s movies to YouTube to see what got flagged, Yongary came up as owned by MGM. Except for the Gamera movies, I’m not aware of any other kaiju films in the public domain so I reached for Gila Monster as a replacement. Coincidentally, this is the same thing Mystery Science Theater 3000 did when they released a box set of their show with Godzilla vs. Megalon: they didn’t have the rights for that and had to pull the sets immediately. When they reissued it, they replaced Godzilla with The Giant Gila Monster

The Giant Gila Monster

Zorro’s Black Whip (Episode 3)

Busan Midnight Movie: Gappa, the Triphibian Monster (3/13/21)

This week on the Busan Midnight Movie: Gappa, The Triphibian Monster, aka Monster from a Prehistoric Planet! Explorers searching for exotic animals to populate a publishing magnate’s theme park discover Gappa, a heretofore unknown prehistoric beast! Only Gappa is freshly hatched and its parents are not happy to see it taken away.

This is a movie I wrote about briefly almost 13 years ago when I was doing the PD Project, the precursor to the Misery Mill. Back then I noted,

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.

What a difference time makes! I’m much less sanguine about the blackface now, so actively uncomfortable that I debated whether to use the movie or not. Honestly, in a few years’ time, I probably would drop it from the schedule even if I had already announced it.

Here’s what I wrote about this movie and then cut from the episode’s script:

Tonight's feature is Gappa, the Triphibian Monster and let's address the pigeon-faced beast in the room: blackface. The immediate defense of it would be "consider the context," and certainly context matters. This is a Japanese film so it does not have the same cultural associations with blackface that people from the United States would have. Still, they chose to use skin tone to differentiate the islanders from the Japanese characters, as though the shirts vs skins dichotomy of the costumes wasn't enough. The filmmakers wanted to use that idea of "blackness" as "other" and that's why the islanders look the way they do. Even if you're okay with that idea, the film has Americans playing Americans instead of Japanese people done up as mimes. That suggests that it's not that the filmmakers couldn't hire black people for the roles, it's that they didn't or wouldn't.

And context works both ways. We should not only consider the context of when the film was made but also the context of when the film is being shown: right now. Even though I'm pointing up the problematic aspects of this film, I'm still choosing to show it, still implicitly saying to my audience, "eh, you can look past this." And there are a couple reasons for that. One is laziness: I wanted to do kaiju movies all month long and, unless I wanted to do Gamera movies every week, this was what was available. I just have to hope that by announcing, "this is here and it's not okay" I'm at least mitigating some of the harm done by choosing to show this, but I have to acknowledge that I still chose to show it.

But the other reason I chose to show it is specifically to have this discussion. In the community of midnight-movie aficionados, part of the pleasure we take from these old films is that "they don't make them like this anymore," but that phrase does a lot of work. Of course it means there is a pleasure in seeing ways of telling stories that we don't use anymore. For instance, part of the appeal of old westerns is the amazing stunt work on horseback. The Western is a good example, though, because when some people say "they don't make them like that anymore," they're talking about the kind of politics that used to be portrayed on screen and lamenting their absence. The racial and gender politics in this movie--and we haven't even said a word about that "shut up, quit your job, make babies" exchange--are what that part of the audience wants. What they miss from these old films IS the overt racism, misogyny, and every other kind of hierarchy and bigotry that used to be not only the norm on screen, but violently enforced off of it. Whenever we showcase these films without highlighting and calling out those elements, we leave a space for that subset to thrive and, even worse, start spreading and normalizing the even worse aspects of their ideology.

There is a lot to recommend this film: the cinematography is fantastic, the landscapes look amazing, and, when the monsters finally arrive in this second half, they look great. Plus all the city-smashy stuff is a lot of fun. But it's no fun if we're telling our friends and neighbors to ignore problematic aspects of a film and certainly no fun for them to have to wonder, whenever things like overt racism pops up in a film and we DON'T say anything about it, if that's not what we're actually tuning in for.

So, with that unexpectedly heavy aside finished, let's return to the second half of Gappa, the Triphibian Monster.

That was cut due to time because the whole thing is as long as the entirety of the content I write for other episodes. However, it was something I wanted to say and to share. One of the things I think about when doing this midnight movie stuff is that you have to engage with the text somehow. I could say that post-MST3k it’s no longer enough to just show the movie, but the reality is these movies are readily available. What makes the experience of watching them with the framing device of a host better than just watching the movie itself? The host has to add something to the experience.

When you have a movie with problematic content like this, that kind of engagement is doubly important. As Stewart Lee notes, you’re cultivating an audience, drawing the boundaries around who is and is not included in the experience. If you let moments of explicit racism, sexism, homophobia, or a whole host of other things go unremarked, you’re telling your audience that people who take issue with those things aren’t welcome, that you don’t want them.

At the end of the day, I want, not just in my audience but in the broader community I’m a part of, to spend time with the people who would stand up and call those things out.

Wrap Up:

The Good: amazing print. The version I watched for the PD Project so long ago was a pan-and-scan 4:3 crop that was dramatically faded. This print is so good you might think you're watching a good movie.

The monster design. The improved print also lets us enjoy the high-quality monster design. The Gappas look like kaiju versions of gargoyles and that’s a twist I hadn’t seen before. Also, when I watched this for the PD Project, I described one of the monsters as something “choking on a starfish,” but in the improved print it’s clear the monster is carrying an octopus to feed its baby. Great detail!

The Bad: really? After all that?

Additionally: Pretty boring. Despite the beautiful cinematography, there’s not much action on screen, not even much activity with the monsters until the second half. On top of that, the characters are whisper-thin. Some reviews on IMDB describe this as a satire of kaiju films, but it feels much more like an unambitious pastiche, like the characters are just there to fill out a checklist rather than provide any story or interest of their own.

Production note: I was so happy to find clips of the Gappa giving the side-eye for the trailer. Being able to juxtapose those shots with the examples of blackface and misogyny in the film was a lot of fun for me.

Gappa, the Triphibian Monster

Zorro’s Black Whip (Episode 2)

The End of the Misery Mill

The first Misery Mill review went up October 9, 2015: Carnival of Crime and Absolution, two movies of no particular note. The purpose of the project was to systematically go through 5 Mill Creek Entertainment box sets to find public domain movies and upload them to the Internet Archive as I’d already done with the Horror and Sci-Fi box sets in the PD Project.

The impetus for that project, and its continuation in the Misery Mill, was the hope, still unrealized, of making a movie riffing show in the tradition of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which had not yet announced its return). I didn’t want to copy MST3k, but my contention is that post-MST3k horror host shows have to intervene in the text in some way. Just presenting the movie is not enough. Plus, at the time, no one was doing riffing on TV and I felt like it was something worth doing. For many reasons comfortably summed up as “life,” the show never happened. Instead, I wrote up summaries and reviews of 344 movies. So, was it worth it and did it work?

To answer the second question first, at the most basic level the project was a success. I had been wanting to watch all these movies since I made the first PD Project post in February 2008. These DVDs were sitting on my shelf and in the my mind for nearly 11 years and I’ve finally watched them all. I’m proud of that. I set myself a big goal and achieved it.

As to if it was worth it, not all the movies I watched were bad. I’ve liked movies that I never would have thought to look for, specifically the old black and white quickies that felt like adaptations of radio or stage plays. Likewise, among the bad movies were some that were “good-bad” as the Flop House would say. Some of these, like Top Cop and Day of the Panther, I hope to share with future groups of friends on bad movie nights. I also encountered my own personal bugbear, Marimark Productions. Having a hate-on for these pictures was a lot of fun—more fun than watching most of them. Marimark, though, gave me the opportunity to get performatively angry which most of the movies didn’t.

On a basic level, I mostly enjoyed myself and I finished the project so it was both worth it and a success. Also, all those public domain movies are on the Internet Archive. Even though I didn’t make the show I was initially thinking about, those resources are still there if and when I decide to come back to them. I haven’t given up on that completely.

However, speaking of the performative anger highlights how the project failed. I don’t think I ever developed a voice or style writing what I hesitate to call reviews. Dan Olson, I think, offered the criticism of a lot of YouTube reviews like RedLetterMedia and Nostalgia Critic that they don’t actually review the movies. Instead, they give a long-form summary of the movie. The same criticism applies to the vast majority of my posts. One reason is that I was modeling myself after RedLetterMedia and Nostalgia Critic (the former of which I still watch, although with more skepticism. The latter I’ve dropped). Since I thought of them as being “how you talk about bad movies online,” well, that’s how I talked about bad movies online.

Another reason I think the project failed is that I was going through two movies a week. Part of my ambition was to write longer essays about what the movies suggested about the culture, what they were doing that was interesting, and what about them opened up larger discussions. Work like that takes both time and context, though. I didn’t have the context of 500 movies that I have now to make those larger claims and cranking out two of these a week while also trying to keep up with the rest of my life prevented me not only from writing those longer pieces but even conceiving of them.

Even now it’s difficult to say anything definitive about all the movies I’ve watched because they were all so different—different genres, different periods, different styles. One thing I can talk about that came up in a lot of the movies is rape culture. Jesus, we wonder why people of a certain age were jumping to defend Brett Kavanaugh—they themselves saying that even if he did it (he did it), it’s not that bad and what do we expect from teenagers?—and then I see movies where women are dragged literally screaming off the street to be driven into a field and fondled. And those were the comedies! Golly, I wonder why people who grew up with that would consider literal rape not that big a deal?

I ranted constantly about Cavegirl in these posts and while it’s not as bad as many of the films I watched, it does highlight an element that popped up far too often: female consent is a problem. If she’s interested or willing to have sex, that’s the least sexy thing there could be. You have to find the girl who doesn’t want to have sex and then keep needling her, coerce her, trick her into giving it up.

The reason I’ve hammered on these ideas when they came up in the movies and once again here is because these movies weren’t made with those (or any!) messages in mind. The rapey elements aren’t there because the producers wanted to say something about sexual assault, they are there because the producers thought the audience would be okay with it. Even phrasing it that way gives the producers too much agency. That’s how they viewed sex. If there was going to be sex in their movie (and there was going to be sex in their movie) that was how sex would be portrayed because that was what sex was to them. If this is how your culture imagines sex and relationships, how can you imagine anything else? What other examples or sources of information do you have? If this is how you always see these situations portrayed in stories, how do you write a story that’s different? Why would you think you should?

You recognize a culture by the stories it tells itself: How does it portray authority? How does it portray love? Who are the heroes and who are the villains? Who suffers and who succeeds? Thinking about questions like these in response to Z-grade films seem counter-intuitive, but these are the movies that answer those questions most effectively. Oscar-bait flicks like Crash or Green Book tell us stories of how we want to imagine our culture: racism is an individual/regional/settled issue and we all agree it’s bad. Just don’t look too closely at the racist jokes in all the other movies that came out that year if the movies aren’t, in fact, all white in front of and behind the camera.

The movies I watched in these sets generally didn’t set out with a message, they just wanted to turn a quick buck. Because of that, they’re both cultural ink blot tests and Freudian slips: they’re not thinking about what they’re saying so they’re saying what they really think. How much have we moved past these ideas? How much are we able to imagine new stories and new ways of relating to each other? These movies were the background noise of a culture, so what kind of movies are the people of that culture creating today?

I don’t have answers to those questions. If I did, I’d be writing academic essays about these flicks citing all sorts of other material—another goal I had for this project that I didn’t achieve! And that seems like a fitting end to a reflection on the Misery Mill. When I started this project October 9, 2015, I basically said, “Oh God, what have I done?” 3+ years later I can say, “a little, but not as much as I’d hoped.” I think that’s the only honest response to any reflection, that and the hope that the next project, my own or someone else's, manages to do a little more.

344. The Guy With the Secret Kung Fu

344. The Guy With the Secret Kung Fu aka Cai yang nu bang zhu (1980)
Director: Chi Lo
Writer: Ji-Shang Lu
From: Cult Cinema (the final film!)
Watch: archive.org

Two fighters take on the vicious Dragon Gang, but find they may be in over their heads as they face off against a sorcerer, a demon, and official betrayal.

Ladies, blokes, and non-binary folks, this is the final movie in the Misery Mill! And we’re ending on a public domain flick that I’ve added to the Internet Archive for others to download and reuse in their own way. It’s what I always wanted: to not be watching these movies anymore.

Terrible foley work, bad wigs, and a soundtrack alternately cribbed from other PD works or composed exclusively on a Casio keyboard—and not a good one. Dubbing is awful even down to dubbed laughing that’s exactly like a parody of a kung fu movie. So you don’t even need a summary: it’s an obvious recommend!

I mean, not quite. This is one of those flicks that I could go into minute detail about because there’s a lot of stuff that happens, but little of it makes sense. Instead, I’ll offer a quick gloss:

Two of the leading members of the revolution are caught by the corrupt ruling party, but released to take out the Dragon Gang. Various action set pieces occur—they infiltrate the gang by pretending to be the female leader’s betrothed, get a special powder to defeat the half-vampire/half-human demon the gang has summoned, and, of course, battle courtyards filled with armed guards—until we get to the final battles. Turns out the corrupt official who released them to fight the Dragon Gang is actually the Dragon Gang’s leader (and is curiously comfortable with so many of his underlings being killed. Bad manager or best manager?). The woman who’d been running the gang in his absence gets defeated by one of the guys and then the pair team up to defeat the big boss, ultimately by knocking him into a coffin and hurling it across the field of battle. THE END

Yeah, the movie gets pretty silly. I mean, a recurring character is the coffin-maker who thanks the pair for drumming up business by killing so many members of the gang. You also have a sorcerer, an imprisoned butcher who’s too fat to escape, and many moments of slapstick. This isn’t, by any means, a good movie. However, it feels like a perfect example of a bad kung fu movie. The character’s movements have sound effects. The fight scenes descend into cacophonies of canned grunts. The sorcerer’s laugh is literally someone reading “ha ha ha ha ha” regardless of what his laughing lines up with.

The movie isn’t good, but it’s great for those looking for something that’s enjoyably bad. This piece is absurd and seems designed for riffing. I’d suggest getting snacks and friends and settling in with this one. As I said above, it’s in the public domain and I’d added my copy to archive.org here. This feels like a fitting piece with which to end the Misery Mill.

Now that I’m done with the Misery Mill, I’m going to move on to watching what I want at the pace that I want and writing or not writing about them as I choose. What would that even be like? Do people even do that? Inconceivable.

342. Kung Fu Kids Break Away

342. Kung Fu Kids Break Away aka San mao liu lang ji (1980)
Director: Kan Ping Yu
Writer: Kan Ping Yu
From: Cult Cinema (only 2 remain!)

Two homeless boys use cleverness and kung fu to outwit the criminal boss that runs their town and eventually defeat him.

A pretty simple plot. San Mao is an orphan looking for his mother. He had been training at a monastery, but his master was assassinated by traveling soldiers. He’s headed to the city in hopes of finding his mother. Once there, he starts using his (admittedly impressive) acrobatic kung fu skills to make money. He’s seen by Kou Pu, another homeless kid who’s constantly working a scam from pretending to be blind to collect donations to straight-up theft. After a few contentious encounters, the two team up and Kou Pu takes San Mao to his “secret hideout” where he stays with the slightly older Zsa Zsa. These are, then, your titular “Kung Fu Kids” (although they’re never called that in the movie. It’s just convenient to refer to them as such).

The town is run by the evil Mr. Chu whose thugs intimidate and shake down the residents for money constantly. They keep running into the Kung Fu Kids, but Mr. Chu’s son keeps intervening to save them since he’s falling for Zsa Zsa.

About halfway through the movie, Kou Pu gets the idea, basically, of busking while doing kung fu. In other words, it takes half the movie for the characters to figure out they could be making money doing the very thing San Mao was doing for money when Kou Pu met him. Performance goes well, but Mr. Chu’s men break it up because they haven’t paid him a bribe.

Then a representative from the General (no, I don’t know either) arrives and is murdered by Eagle, a Korean kung fu master who is then captured by Mr. Chu’s men. The Kung Fu Kids help him escape and he reveals that the General was going to give control of the entire region to Mr. Chu and that he’s there to stop that from happening. They all set up various traps around their hideout, Mr. Chu’s men come for a final showdown, and it comes down to a fight between Mr. Chu and Eagle. Just as Mr. Chu’s about to deliver the killing blow, his son jumps in and takes the hit himself. Eagle is then able to defeat and kill Mr. Chu. As Zsa Zsa is weeping over the body of Chu’s son, Eagle and the boys walk off laughing. THE END

What?

No, wait, seriously, what?

This is one of those flicks that’s confusing before it even gets confusing. The basic plot should be simple: scrappy down-on-their-luck kids using their wits and skills to get by. Grifter kid sees talented kid and they team up so grifter can take advantage of talented kid’s talent. That would be the kung fu street show. Only it takes them forever to figure that out as an option even though, as I said, they’d already seen it work. Then the plot about overthrowing the town’s leader because he’s evil and part of a larger political plot doesn’t come up until the very end. Yes, Eagle has appeared previously in the film, but it’s not clear until the assassination that he’s going to be part of the plot and there’s no indication that this will be the plot. So you have odd story choices going on even before you get to the cheery ending of the boys laughing while their friend cries over the body of a man who stood up for and saved them multiple times.

What?

I wouldn’t encourage or discourage anyone from watching this. The kung fu is really impressive. Normally I’d find movies like this insufferable. They tend to play out, in the US, as smirking, self-righteous kids pulling pranks on the idiot adults who won’t respect their Kid Power! This could easily have fallen into that, but sidesteps it by having the kids be good at kung fu. You don’t need to suspend your disbelief to think this child who’s clearly very skilled at what they do was able to defeat these adults. And the action sequences are worth seeing. Like I said, wouldn’t say avoid it, I’m just not sold enough to recommend it.

I think the movie is in the public domain, but I haven’t uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive because there is a fleeting shot of child nudity. The boys are bathing in a river and one stands up. The shot isn’t pornographic, is about as short as it can be, but it’s still kiddie bits on screen and I’m going to assume that’s a line that you don’t cross.

Year in Review 2018

Misery Mill Year in Review: 2018

Interesting times, neh? Last year I said I'd be in Korea by August of this year and that has not happened. Not for any dramatic reasons, just purely issues of timing and making the decision to spend a little time with family before going. I did leave higher ed after the Spring 2018 semester and am still planning to teach in Korea. That situation will play out in its own way.

During my final months in Philly, I had the opportunity to host Trash Tuesdays at The Bottle Shop which were a real pleasure, but also a disappointment, which is how things go. Usually it was just my friend and me watching a movie in the back, maybe one or two other mutual friends with us. Some of the movies did catch people's attention and those folks seemed interested in the idea of a regular bad movie night, but they never came back. I did leave Philly at the start of the summer--I thought I would be leaving at the end--so maybe things would have gone differently over the course of those warmer months. I'm grateful to The Bottle Shop for giving me a space to play and to indulge the fantasy of leading a bad movie night, I just wish I'd figured out how to grow it into something bigger.

I have thoughts about coming to the end of the Misery Mill, but those can wait for the complete wrap-up post which will go up two weeks after the final film gets posted. When this post goes live on the site, I will have finished watching all of the movies in the Misery Mill and will be glad to be done with them.

As of this posting, I've watched 341 of the 401 movies, but, because some of the movies are featured on multiple sets, I've actually knocked 398 movies off the list (also, because my list includes the movies from the Sci-Fi and Horror packs that I watched before, the number is actually 498 out of 501). I said when I started this project that it would take me until August 2019 to finish. Last year, I said the final date would be January 18, 2019. The current end point is January 11, 2019.

Fun movies of note from this year:
The Brother From Another Planet
The Headhunter
Messiah of Evil
Voodoo Black Exorcist
Death By Dialogue
Metamorphosis
The Devil's Possessed
Virus
Trapped By Television
The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane
Idaho Transfer
Star Pilot
Unsane

Here, as of December 31, 2018, are the movies currently available through the Internet Archive. Links lead to the Misery Mill posts which have links to streaming copies:
All the Kind Strangers
The Amazing Transparent Man
Anatomy of a Psycho
Atomic Rulers of the World

The Bat
Battle Beyond the Sun
Beast From Haunted Cave
The Big Fight
Black Cobra
Black Fist
The Blancheville Monster
Blood Mania
Bloodlust!
The Bloody Brood
Bloody Pit of Horror
The Brave Lion
A Bucket of Blood

Carnival of Crime
City Ninja
Counterblast
Curse of Bigfoot

The Day the Sky Exploded
Death Machines
Death Rage
Deep Red
The Demon
Devil Times Five
The Devil’s Hand
The Disappearance of Flight 412
Don't Look in the Basement
Doomsday Machine
The Driller Killer
The Dungeon of Harrow

Embryo
End of the World
Eternal Evil
Evil Brain From Outer Space

Fighting Mad
Four Robbers

The Ghost
The Giant of Metropolis
Good Against Evil
Grave of the Vampire
Green Eyes
Guru, the Mad Monk
The Guy From Harlem

Hands of a Stranger
Hands of Death
Haunts
The Headhunter
Horror Express
Horrors of Spider Island

I Bury the Living
I Eat Your Skin
The Image of Bruce Lee
The Impossible Kid
Infernal Street
Invaders From Space
Invasion of the Bee Girls
Iron Angel
It's Alive

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

Keep My Grave Open
Kung Fu Arts

Lady Frankenstein
The Lazarus Syndrome
Legacy of Blood
The Legend of Bigfoot
Life Returns

Mama Dracula
Man in the Attic
Manos: The Hands of Fate
The Manster
Mesa of Lost Women
Messiah of Evil
The Mistress of Atlantis
Monstroid
Moon of the Wolf

Nabonga
Night Fright
Night of Bloody Horror
Night of the Blood Beast
Ninja Death
Ninja Heat

Prehistoric Women
Prisoners of the Lost Universe

Radio Ranch
Rattlers
The Real Bruce Lee
The Return of the Kung-Fu Dragon
The Revenges of Doctor X
Rocket Attack U.S.A.

The Sadist
Scared to Death
Scream Bloody Murder
Shadow Ninja
Shadow of Chinatown
Shaolin Deadly Kicks (removed)
Shaolin Temple
Shock
Silent Night, Bloody Night
Sisters of Death
Slashed Dreams
Snake People
The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane
Snowbeast
Star Odyssey

The Tell-Tale Heart
The Thirsty Dead
Throw Out the Anchor!
Tiger Love
TNT Jackson
Track of the Moon Beast
Trapped By Television

Virus

War of the Robots
Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory
The Werewolf of Washington
The Wild Women of Wongo

337. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory

337. Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory aka Lycanthropus (1961)
Director: Paolo Heusch
Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi
From: Chilling (the last one!)
Watch: archive.org

Girls at a reform school are being brutally murdered. Could it be the philandering professor, the creeping caretaker, or the new doctor with a disturbing past?

WARNING: The title and blurb are more exciting than anything in this dull-as-dirt movie, a movie I’ve watched far too many times for how much I don’t enjoy it. I’ll get to my history with this flick in a moment, first, the plot.

The setting is a girls’ dormitory/reform school. Julian, a new professor has just arrived and is told the girls there (all played by women so check off “elderly teens” on your bad movie trope list) would otherwise be in a reform school, but are being given a second chance. Julian, likewise is getting a second chance. He and the headmaster have a mutual friend so he’s being hired despite having previously been a doctor and stripped of his license for “reasons better left unsaid.”

The reasons, by the way, are that he was fired from his previous job for killing a patient he’d taken as a lover. White guys: can’t be wrong, only fail up. (mark that trope too).

That night, Mary, a student at the school runs off to meet up with a philandering professor. (mark “pedophile”) She wants him to get her out of the school or she’ll reveal their relationship. He wants the letters he’s sent her. One her way back to the dorm, she’s killed by a werewolf.

Priscilla, Mary’s friend, starts investigating the death. Priscilla is in the school for attempted murder because she nearly killed a sailor that was attacking Mary when they lived together. It’s not clear from how it’s told if the sailor was Mary’s lover or a John or if the movie wants us to see Priscilla as a victim of circumstance or as someone who’s not as noble as she acts. I’d chalk that up to the translation (oh yeah, mark “dubbing”). Anyway, Priscilla starts uncovering all the details: Mary’s liason’s, Julian’s past, and even encounters the werewolf. She’s threatened by the philanderer’s wife, but then the wife is murdered.

Yada yada, the woman who died under Julian’s care was a werewolf and she died as he was perfecting her treatment. The philanderer orders the caretaker to find Mary’s letters, but the caretaker is caught in the dorm, flees, and falls from a tower to his death. The headmaster finds the letters on the body, confronts the philanderer, and hands the letters over. Julian and Priscilla visit the philanderer that night as he’s packing to flee the area, confront him with what they know, and he commits suicide.

Meanwhile, we see the headmistress doing experiments on a wolf. The werewolf comes in, she injects him, and he turns into the headmaster. Before she can deliver the second injection and cure him, the wolf she was working on attacks and kills her. The next night, the headmaster turns into a werewolf, tries to attack Priscilla, but Julian shoots him. They get the full story from the headmaster before he dies and Julian and Priscilla leave together. THE END

As I said, I’ve watched this movie a lot, and never on any horror host show. It’s just too boring. The most compelling part is the incongruous opening song, “The Ghoul in School,” which is missing from my print. I think that may be due to some copyright trick/workaround, but the song is a hoot and you should check it out.

I first saw this movie almost twenty years ago on a different cheapo movie box set with some roommates who went on to tell me to kill my dog. They sucked, but it turns out I’m not the guy you cross. We were all riffing it and having a good time when, about twenty minutes before the end, we all passed out. We weren’t drinking, weren’t using any substances, weren’t even flagging in the run-up to passing out, we just all went like someone had thrown a switch. I watched it a few times since then just to see the end and in previous attempts to go through these sets. Most recently, I sat down to write a riff script for the movie as part of a horror host show I was putting together with a friend. I tell ya, if the movie is boring to watch straight through, it’s excruciating to watch in 15-second chunks, constantly pausing to write gags and annotations.

To put it another way, the movie is highly riffable and I recommend it in that context. On its own, it’s really dull and I’m not 100% sure why. Part of the problem is it commits to the white guy as the hero (mark your list). Priscilla is the hero for the first third to half of the movie and then the attention and narrative agency switches to Julian. He’s not the hero, he’s one of the red herrings. When we move away from Priscilla, who’s pretty awesome as a hero, we lose a lot of the investment in solving the mystery. Yes, she wants to reveal the werewolf to protect herself, but she’s also trying to avenge her friend and root out the corruption at the core of this school. When you shift the burden of the investigation to Julian, you lose the personal investment in previous victims as well as the impetus to clean up the organization. In fact, he’s part of the corruption (although he’s actually been hired to share his research on a cure for lycanthropy, but, again, that becomes a new motivation arriving pretty late in the film).

Also, the movie’s called Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory. As Nelson says of Naked Lunch, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” I know I bag on a lot of these movies for gratuitous nudity so I sound like a hypocrite when I ding a flick for not being more salacious, and I’ll try to avoid that here. My complaint is that there’s a level of gleeful absurdity promised by the title that isn’t followed through. Also, the werewolf is never in the dormitory. The werewolf isn’t in the movie much at all. A werewolf movie needs more werewolf attacks, especially if it has one within the first five minutes.

I will say I enjoyed the movie more this time compared to the other times I’d watched it. That may be due to context—I’m grateful that it’s not another Marimark production—or may be due to familiarity—I could watch it with nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still boring, but I wouldn’t tell you to stay way. I would say make sure you’re ready to rip into it and have friends with you to keep you awake.

This movie is in the public domain and available from archive.org here.

336. The Thirsty Dead

336. The Thirsty Dead (1974)
Director: Terry Becker
Writers: Charles Dennis from a story by Terry Becker and Lou Whitehill
From: Pure Terror (only 1 remains!)
Watch: archive.org

A death cult uses the blood of kidnapped women as an ingredient in their immortality serum.

A cult is kidnapping women in Manila and yet no one thinks to call Black Cobra to save the day. Consider my suspension of disbelief gone! Although we hear that many women are being taken, we follow a specific group of four. They’re taken into the jungle where they meet a cult whose goals are unclear at first. Eventually, our main character Laura learns that they’ve had visions of her coming. Who she’s supposed to be or why she’s important isn’t clear, but the cult wants her to join them.

The cult is an immortality cult that bleeds its victims and mixes the blood with special herbs to remain eternally young. Laura is going to be inducted, but watches the cultist drain one of her fellow captives which makes her refuse. She gathers the other women she was kidnapped with and escapes, but they’re captured and sent back to the cult. The high priest, though, has had a change of heart and decides to help her and her friends escape. One woman refuses, slightly misunderstanding the situation. She thinks if Laura refuses the offer to live forever, one of them can take it instead. She tries to tell the high priestess that she’ll join the cult, but falls into a pit and dies.

The other three women, with the help of the high priest, escape, but he starts aging rapidly once he crosses the magical barrier surrounding the cult’s land. He stays behind and dies as the women flag down a passing motorist and return to the city. Laura comes back with the authorities, but they can’t find any trace of the cult. The high priestess watches through a telescope as Laura says, “I was there.” THE END

Another movie without much going on. While there are two escape attempts and the horrific revelation of what the cult’s doing as well as what awaits those who refuse to be inducted, the moments all stand apart. It’s not that there’s no connective tissue, it’s that there isn’t much lead-up or foreshadowing of anything. The movie has an ambling tone to it, if that makes sense. We don’t jump from scene to scene nor do we gallop through events, we move at a nice casual pace through each essential plot point, never revealing too much or putting much weight on any revelation. What’s lacking from the movie is any sort of tone—either perilous or strange. The nature of the threat the women are facing isn’t particularly clear to the characters and it’s not made clear to us. Likewise, the surrealism of being offered membership of a cult that dreamed of you before your arrival isn’t played with at all. It’s all just kind of bland.

I feel like I’ve had a string of these lately, the movies that I recommend neither for watching nor avoiding. This ones feels a little slighter than the others, a little more nothing, but not so much as, say your typical Marimark film. I feel like everyone involved in this movie did the work, but only the bare minimum, like it was something they worked on between gigs in commercials.

While I’m not recommending it, I will note that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. I don’t know that it has much riffing potential, but it might be fun to use a b-roll in an editing project or for a music video.

330. Four Robbers

330. Four Robbers aka Si da tian wang (1987)
Director: Chin-Lai Sung
Writers: Kuo Chiang Li and Chin-Lai Sung
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A gang of four robbers work their way up the ranks of the Hong Kong criminal world.

Four robbers interrupt a drug deal stealing both the money and the drugs. This brings them to the attention of one of the Hong Kong kingpins. Initially, he wants them killed. However, when they not only manage to survive a setup that was put together to kill them, but actually kill a bunch of the kingpin’s men, he’s interested in bringing them in to work for him.

And what follows doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of the four, the gang leader is the responsible one with the other three making short-sighted choices that lead to trouble. That is until the leader gets caught in a police sting because he’s offered slightly more money for stolen watches than the kingpin is offering. He escapes, but needs to accept the kingpin’s help hiding out in Thailand.

Once in Thailand, they keep seemingly ingratiating themselves to the crime lords only to have those crime lords betray them, but have the betrayal thwarted by how badass the four robbers are. In the end, the four robbers end up in a shootout with the cops. They all get shot up pretty bad, but the leader says, “we’ll all die together,” and they go out in a blaze of glory. THE END

Just as it appears apropos of nothing in the movie, let me note here that the movie has nipple licking.

Ew.

Moving on, as I’ve said of other movies in these sets, if your characters don’t have motivations, you don’t have a movie. I was never clear on what these characters wanted. The only one of the four robbers that stands out is the leader, and that’s because he’s making decisions and reacting to things. He had a junkie brother who killed himself (in a hilarious flashback), and that’s about all we know about him. He has some principles—he won’t accept money until he’s handing over the goods—and seems to have a preternatural ability to stay one step ahead of the people plotting against him, but there’s no sense of what his endgame is. Does he want to be a crimelord? Does he want revenge on the syndicates for what happened to his brother? The only motivation I can glean for any of the characters is they want to be criminals. That’s not a lot.

So we have various setpieces with unclear stakes where the characters aren’t clearly differentiated. There are a series of betrayals, but because the leader is so smart, the betrayals fail. Instead of an escalation on the parts of the antagonists, every failure leads to them liking the titular robbers more which mitigates any sense of tension. As the movie went on, I found myself asking more and more often, “Does this even matter?” A lot of the time the answer was, “no.”

The movie does offer some entertainment. The voices for the dub are terrible, just hilariously awful, and there is more than a bit of a Poochie element to the heroes: they’re on screen all the time, and when they’re not, everyone’s asking, “Where’s Poochie?” I don’t know if that’s enough to make it a recommendation, though, even for riffing. It just never grabbed me on any level.

The movie is in the public domain so you can see if it meets your standards. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here so you can judge for yourself.

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane aka Emperor of Shaolin Kung Fu aka Chuang wang li zi cheng (1980)
Directors: Hsi-Chieh Lai and Sung Pe Liu
Writers: Liang Chin and Sung Pe Liu
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A one-armed princess searches for patriots to help her kill the bandit king that has murdered the Emperor and spuriously claimed the throne.

Opens with text on screen and a voice over telling the same story but clearly reading a different text. Could we be on the cusp of watching my most beloved movie ever?

A bandit leader has gathered a personal army and is finally assaulting the walls of the Ming Emperor’s castle. Rather than be captured and humiliated, the Emperor orders all the castle residents to kill themselves as he himself is about to. His daughter, the third princess, refuses, saying they can flee into the countryside and rally an army of loyalists. He says there’s no honor in this and personally tries to cut her down, but only cutting her arm off in the process. The bandits raid the castle, find everyone dead, and the princess escaped. The bandit leader orders a search for her since she can challenge the legitimacy of his claim.

The rest of the movie is the princess trying to rally loyalists to her cause, taking them to challenge the bandit leader, and failing, usually at the cost of the loyalist who joined her. There are a variety of double-crosses and double-crosses of double-crossers and the hilarious repetition of the people who’ve aligned themselves with the princess realizing the cause is lost, telling her to flee, and her refusing as the loyalist gets pincushioned trying to protect her.

The pattern continues until the very end where things do and do not go as you’d expect from this kind of movie and the princess retires to a Buddhist monastery to become a nun. THE END

I very slightly loved this movie, and I’m not sure it that’s due to an error on my part. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a comedy or if it becomes comedy through the act of translation. I mean, I’m not even sure if the voices aren’t all dubbed by one person trying to sound like different people throughout. So the movie’s hilarious on just a technical level, but I’m not sure if the original film itself wasn’t meant to be a comedy.

As I said in the synopsis, the movie repeats the pattern of “Let’s slay the bandit king! Oh, we’re no match for the bandit king! Flee, princess! I won’t leave you! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! I won’t leave you! GTFO princess! I flee! *Dead*” Even the final confrontation follows that model. There are also scenes like the princess’ first encounter with a loyalist where she thinks he’s an agent of the bandit leader following her. She hides in a field, he approaches and shouts, “Show yourselves!,” and a bunch of ninja jump out and fight him. Once he defeats them, he again shouts, “Show yourself!,” and another samurai emerges. They fight, he wins, and, again, shouts, “Show yourself!” The movie cuts to the princess hiding in the weeds wondering if anyone else is there until he says he means her and there’s nobody else hiding in the weeds.

That had to be a joke in the original Chinese, right? That can’t be something added in the translation process, right? Part of the final battle involves the bandit king using his carriage as a weapon by shifting in his seat. This has to be a joke.

So, yes, I highly recommend this movie. I was not eager to watch it because, as I’ve said in other reviews, I don’t know kung-fu films well enough to say what makes one good or bad, but this one surprised and delighted me throughout. I believe it’s in the public domain so have added a copy to archive.org here. Give it a watch. It’s silly fun.

322. Haunts

322. Haunts (1976
Director: Herb Freed
Writers: Anne Marisse and Herb Freed
From: Chilling (only 1 remains!)
Watch:archive.org

A murder in a small town sparks paranoia and awakens repressed memories in one young woman.

Our lord and savior, Cameron Mitchell, is here, but not even he can save this movie.

We open with the killer being spotted disposing of his victim in a barn. He gets away, but everyone in town is in a panic now. Ingrid, a woman who lives alone on another farm at the edge of town, is nervous about the attention she’s being paid by Frankie, an asshole who works at the general store, and Bill, a newcomer that’s joined her church choir. She keeps having imagistic flashbacks to something that happened before: we see gates closing, a girl sitting on a man’s lap while her leg is suggestively stroked, and a couple in bed. These get clearer as the movie goes on.

On Ingrid’s way home from choir practice, a drunken Frankie propositions her and drives off in a huff when she turns him down. Meanwhile, Bill is at a bar turning down the advances of a local woman. He leaves (both the bar and the movie-). As Ingrid walks home alone, the killer tries to attack her, but she manages to hit him in the head with a rock and escape. Ingrid’s Uncle Carl (Mitchell with dark hair) tells her to calm down and not call the sheriff, but she calls anyway. The sheriff dismisses her concerns because he’s been getting calls from women all night.

Frankie picks up his girlfriend and she notices an injury on the side of his face. They fight and she leaves. The woman who’d been flirting with Bill at the bar gets in her car and is murdered by the killer. Her body is dumped at Ingrid’s farm. Now the sheriff suspects he was wrong to dismiss her concerns.

As far as the audience is concerned, there are three suspects: Frankie, Bill, and Uncle Carl. Ingrid has increasingly vivid hallucinations (that we don’t realize are hallucinations until the end of the movie) including Frankie breaking into her house to assault her. She goes to church to tell the priest about Frankie, but can’t bring herself to say what happened. Frankie comes in to talk to the priest and, from what Ingrid overhears, it sounds like he’s admitting to the assault. They both leave separately and the killer attacks Ingrid in the graveyard. While she’s in the hospital getting checked out and accusing Frankie of the crime, the priest tells the sheriff that Frankie has gotten the sheriff’s daughter pregnant—that’s what he was telling the priest.

While the sheriff goes to arrest Frankie, the killer is seen trying to murder someone else. The cops chase him down and kill him. It’s Bill (welcome back to the movie). Frankie is released and Ingrid goes home. She knows Frankie is the killer, though, and grabs a shirt that should have his fingerprints on it. When she gets downstairs, she finds Uncle Carl tied to a chair and Frankie threatening her with a pair of scissors. They struggle, Ingrid stabs Frankie in the back, and Uncle Carl says he’ll take care of the body. He tells her not to call the cops because they won’t believe her.

He buries the body and then walks in on her in the shower the same way Frankie had earlier. She flees, goes to the cops, and tells them the entire story. They don’t fully believe her, but go to her house anyway. It’s too dark to find the body and the sheriff spends the night on the couch to continue the search in the morning. They find the grave except it has her goat in it, not Frankie. Frankie’s still alive. When the sheriff goes upstairs to check on Ingrid, he finds her dead from suicide in the tub.

After the funeral, Uncle Carl (Mitchell with gray hair) arrives and gets the whole story from the sheriff. Ingrid had imagined the assault and everything else with Frankie and had even imagined her Uncle’s presence. Uncle Carl reveals that Ingrid’s parents died within a week of each other and that he hadn’t seen her since he’d had her sent to an orphanage. From the flashbacks we’ve had with Ingrid and the more detailed ones with Uncle Carl showing his face, we learn that he’d had an incestuous relationship with his sister, was caught in bed with her by Ingrid on the day of her father’s funeral, and that led to her mother’s suicide.

The sheriff drops Uncle Carl off at the house. He steps into the bathroom where the taps start pouring blood. He looks in the mirror and sees (I think) Ingrid standing in the shower. He turns and approaches her. THE END.

I don’t know what to do with this movie. I’d watched it before in the earlier attempt to see all these flicks and remembered most of it. The key things I remembered were that I didn’t like it because it made Ingrid’s rape accusation a false rape accusation. There were extra layers like her having to “confess” her sin of being a rape victim to the priest and then the priest seemingly hearing Frankie admit to it, but dismissing the admission. That Frankie is admitting something else and the movie is trying to make us misinformed the same way Ingrid is doesn’t help. Instead, it implies that accusing someone of rape is a sign of being unbalanced, not something to take seriously.

That was my impression the first time I watched it. This second time, my position has softened slightly, but only slightly. The sheriff believes Ingrid’s accusation. His doubt at the very end—the doubt that leads to her suicide—stems from having caught the killer in the act and killed him. So he’s confused about what’s going on instead of dismissing her claim. However, his explanation to Uncle Carl at the end doubles down on the movie presenting the perspective of rape accusations as something not to be trusted.

Narratively, the twist that Uncle Carl wasn’t really there and that she imagined Frankie’s assault becomes too much. All the details have to be revealed in an info dump at the end in the squad car. Not only does it kill any energy that may remain at the end of the film, it adds an extra 10-15 minutes. If Frankie had been a second killer, if he and Bill had been working in tandem (or even Bill, Frankie, and Uncle Carl), you’ve got a tight 81-minute feature that ends with a real bang. Instead it putters to its conclusion.

Oh, and the incest and implied child molestation. All of Ingrid’s flashbacks are literally flashes of scenes that are carefully blocked to hide who’s doing what to whom. I understood what they were because I’d seen the movie before, but we have to have the key provided by Uncle Carl at the end to explain all this stuff we’d been seeing throughout the movie. Even then, he’s lying so we don’t know how much really happened and how much was imagined by Ingrid because the movie’s just told us we can’t trust her claims of sexual assault!

The implication from how Mitchell delivers the lines is that he maybe murdered Ingrid’s father, was definitely having an affair with her mother/his sister, and when they got caught by Ingrid, Ingrid’s mother committed suicide. However, while he’s providing voice-over for the flashback, we also have his hand stroking young Ingrid’s leg. So did he molest her? Did the mother find out leading to him murdering her? Because there’s a shot of him coming out of the bath, standing over the mother’s corpse, dripping which seems to contradict the shots of the mother seemingly having committed suicide.

And the ghost he sees in the mirror—is it Ingrid, the mother, or his own imagination? And why’s it called Haunts? There are no ghosts until the end, if that’s even supposed to be a ghost.

Anyway, it’s not good. If it lost about twenty minutes from the end, it’d be a fine Saturday afternoon thriller to stumble across on Retro TV or something. What it actually is isn’t worth watching. It is in the public domain, though. I uploaded a copy to archive.org here almost exactly four and a half years ago. With some creative editing, you might be able to make something better from it.

320. Night of Bloody Horror

320. Night of Bloody Horror (1969)
Director: Joy N. Houck Jr.
Writers: Joy N. Houck Jr. and Robert A. Weaver
From: Pure Terror (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

The romantic partners of a man with a disturbed past end up murdered. Is he having a relapse or is something else at work?

We open on Wesley having sex with his fiancée. When they finish, Wesley has what looks like a migraine attack and his vision is clouded by a blue swirl. When his fiancée asks if he’s okay, he snaps at her and leaves. She goes to church to make confession and the person posing as the priest stabs her through the eye with a knitting needle, killing her.

Then not much happens. Wesley spends the next year drinking, gets mugged by some guys at a bar, and is saved by a nurse. They start dating but, once again, he gets the blue swirl, snaps at her, and then finds her dead on the beach with an axe in her chest. Wesley is accused of the murder, but his handler/mother’s employee bails him out. When they return home, a female reporter is waiting for Wesley and invites him to a bar that night.

At the bar, Wesley is recognized from news coverage of the murders and gets into a fight. His psychologist is called in to get him out of jail which is when we learn that, thirteen years prior, Wesley was institutionalized for shooting his brother. We’re more than halfway through the film at this point. The doctor takes Wesley home, Wesley’s mom refers to conversations with her husband, and the doctor acts confused.

Wesley has a dream where he’s hooking up with the reporter, but she turns into his mother and he strangles her. Wesley seems to leave, someone kills the doctor, and Wesley arrives at the reporter’s house. They start to sort of hook up (?). It’s unclear because it seems like it is a romantic situation, and then like she’s accommodating him to protect herself, and then her sticking her neck out to protect him when they hear the police have issued an APB after finding another woman’s body.

She goes to the house to get the doctor who can provide Wesley an alibi, the cops catch Wesley at her place, but he convinces them to go to his house. The reporter has been captured by Wesley’s mother, the real killer, and is being held in a room with the corpses of Wesley’s brother and father. The mother explains she’s been taking revenge on Wesley for murdering her other son and driving her husband to suicide; since Wesley took everything from her, she won’t allow him to have friends. Cops rush in, shoot her, and she dies just before Wesley walks in and starts screaming. THE END.

That we don’t learn about Wesley’s past until more than halfway through the movie pretty much sums up what’s wrong with it: nothing is happening and nothing is telling us what to be worried about. The movie would be much better if we had a sense of any of the characters, but, despite all the time spent with them, none of them do or say anything that defines who they are.

Plus the mother being the killer the whole time and channeling her dead husband was kind of obvious. The movie gave off big Psycho vibes from the start so the twist wasn’t a twist at all. Normally, when you manage to recognize that there’s a twist you can start spotting all the clues throughout the movie. Here you have the mother, after the fiancée’s funeral, step into another room to talk with the father. Two characters having a conversation off screen? It’s one person talking to themselves and this is a Psycho rip-off.

However, that happens really early in the movie. We don’t get another nod to the mother imagining conversations with her dead husband until the doctor shows up and looks confused when she says she’s been discussing Wesley with her husband. The doctor is about to say something, then decides to wait. Those are the only two clues. Nothing else happens to suggest the twist so nothing else in the movie is pointing toward the ending. With nothing pointing toward the ending, there's no sense of motion or matter in the movie.

So it’s not a recommend because it’s pretty dull. No energy, no wit, no mystery, it just plods along to its inevitable and obvious conclusion. The only thing in the movie’s favor is that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here.

316. Snake People

316. Snake People aka Isle of the Snake People aka La muerte viviente (1971)
Directors: Juan Ibáñez and Jack Hill
Writers: Jack Hill, Juan Ibáñez, and Luis Enrique Vergara
From: Chilling (only 4 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

A police captain is dispatched to an isolated island to stamp out the practice of voodoo, only the people’s dedication to their faith may be more than he can handle.

The pre-credits sequence has what turns out to be the assistant and a little person performing a ritual over a coffin. The assistant opens the lid and starts kissing the now-resurrected woman inside while the little person laughs. The scene makes a promise that, unfortunately, the rest of the film fails to live up to. The opening moments are campy and ridiculous with more than a splash of Coffin Joe to them, and then the rest is just bland and predictable.

After the credits, Anabella, a temperance worker, and the new police captain arrive in the village. They find the police station in shambles and the Lieutenant who’s supposed to be in charge lounging in the courtyard. The Captain promises to whip everyone into shape.

The Lieutenant takes the Captain and Anabella around the village to introduce them to everyone including Boris Karloff, a retired scientist investigating the powers of the mind. Turns out he’s Anabella’s uncle and his aide is the zombie priestess. The movie delays the revelation that Karloff is involved with the local cult for a long time even though it’s clear from his introduction.

The Captain learns more details about the Voodoo practice on the island—the wrinkle this movie adds is the practitioners are all cannibals. From there the plot goes as you’d expect, though unfortunately slow and uninventive. Voodoo agents cast spells on the new arrivals, recruit people to their cause using magic, and things escalate. The Captain turns to torture to try to get the identity of the high priest Damballah and then entire police force deserts.

Karloff catches his assistant with the zombie bride and has the priestess destroy the zombie. The assistant goes to the Captain to reveal the time of the next big ritual. The Captain calls for the Lieutenant, the niece gets kidnapped by zombies, and the assistant is killed. The Captain and Lieutenant infiltrate the ceremony and watch as Anabllea is prepared for sacrifice, but the Captain is revealed. The Captain is bitten by a snake causing him to shoot Karloff. The Lieutenant saves Anabella as the Captain, wired with explosives, lets himself collapse into a fire, blowing up the ritual site and sealing the practitioners within. The Lieutenant and Anabella escape and walk off together. THE END

Like I said, it doesn’t rise to the more extreme aesthetics suggested by the opening. The colors of the opening sequence are lurid and the costumes are ridiculous in the way that only a horror production from the 70’s could be. I really wanted to like this, but couldn’t even pay much attention to it. In the end, the only positive I can think of is that the movie is in the public domain. There are several copies on the Internet Archive already, and I added an MPEG version here. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching it, but it’s just not particularly compelling.

315. Lady Frankenstein

315. Lady Frankenstein aka La figlia di Frankenstein(1971)
Directors: Mel Welles and Aureliano Luppi
Writers: Edward Di Lorenzo from a story by Dick Randall
From: Chilling (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter returns home after completing her training as a surgeon. Once the monster kills Dr. Frankenstein, his daughter continues his work by trying to build a man for her own pleasure.

A public domain “classic” that I’ve seen several times due to having multiple copies of it. This is the basic story of Frankenstein--Frankenstein creates his monster, his hubris leads him to making several fatal mistakes, and both the creation and creator are killed at the end—with a twist: titties!

Werewolf Ambulance would get a lot of use out of their titty bell for this movie.

The titular “Lady” is Frankenstein’s daughter. She’s recently returned from university where she’s completed her training as a surgeon and is eager to join her father in his research. While she suspects, she does not know that he’s working on reanimating the dead until she goes down to the lab while he’s working on the creature. Frankenstein refuses her help mostly because he doesn’t want her to be held liable should the truth of his experiments be revealed before he’s ready.

Then the creature wakes up and kills him.

As the creature wanders the village massacring people and working its way through the gravediggers who worked for Frankenstein, Lady Frankenstein convinces her father’s assistant to continue the work. They come up with a plan to murder the handsome but mentally-challenged stableboy and put the assistant’s brain in the body. The assistant agrees because he’s an aging man in love with the young Lady Frankenstein.

The transplant is a success, but now the creature is working its way back to the castle to take revenge upon the assistant. Also, the local police captain has started piecing everything together and knows Frankenstein was responsible for the creature. When the creature arrives at the castle, it faces off with the assistant who realizes Lady Frankenstein doesn’t love him, she just wants the glory of having completed the process. As long as either the assistant or the creature lives, she achieves her ambition.

The two monsters battle, the assistant wins, and, while having sex with Lady Frankenstein, chokes her to death. Meanwhile the townspeople have descended upon the castle and set it aflame, destroying the creatures and any evidence of Frankenstein’s work. THE END

As I jokingly implied at the top, there’s a lot of gratuitous nudity here, even beyond the expected nude scenes of Lady Frankenstein. The movie’s entire conceit is that it’s Frankenstein, but with the creature being made to satisfy sexual desires. What’s unexpected is the creature, during its rampage, just stumbling across a couple having sex in the middle of a field during the day and carrying off the naked woman. Or the random instances of toplessness here and there. These moments clarify exactly what kind of movie this is, but also provide a certain dissonance because the movie doesn’t look or feel like a cheap, perfunctory exploitation film. The sets are expansive, the colors lush, and the creature satisfyingly grotesque. In other words, this feels like a gothic film done in earnest that had Martin Skinemax come in to do a final pass.

Also, the movie’s kind of boring. There isn’t much drama or tension around the creature, the murder plot, or the police captain getting closer to the truth. The characters largely state their intentions and then act upon them without much struggle or challenge. As I said at the top, I’ve seen this a bunch so I watched the Elvira version just to have something going on to keep my interest. As she notes in one of her riffs, the monster walks around the castle like he owns the place, like he’s just going down to the kitchen for a snack, which maybe tells you all you need to decide if you’d like this flick.

While the movie isn’t good enough on its own, it does have a certain good-bad quality to it that would make it a lot of fun for a bad movie night or a bunch of riffing. To that purpose, we’re lucky that it’s in the public domain and available for download on archive.org here. I’d recommend it in that context. Outside of that, this doesn’t really strike me. To clarify, I’ve seen this several times and I remembered the host segments from Elvira more than I did any part of the movie.

314. Trapped By Television

314. Trapped By Television (1936)
Director: Del Lord
Writers: Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman from a story by Sherman L. Lowe and Al Martin
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An inventor seeking investment for a new form of television has to deal with saboteurs trying to undermine him.

For something called Trapped By Television on the Sci-Fi Invasion set, you’d expect something more, well, sci-fi. Instead this is a pretty low-key studio one-off. The movie doesn’t have much drama or plot and is just a hair over an hour long so it feels like it was made to fill time at movie theaters.

Rocky is a bill collector with an interest in science. He’s sent to collect a debt from Fred, an inventor working on a new form of broadcast camera and television. Rocky is so enamored with the idea of Fred being an inventor that he doesn’t collect the debt and instead gets Fred a job as a bill collector himself. Fred then goes to collect a debt from Ms. Bobby Blake, a, for lack of a better term, venture capitalist. He accidentally hands her a schematic for his invention and she decides to become an investor. She takes the proposal over to Mr. Curtis at the Paragon Broadcasting Corporation to get him to invest in finishing costs. Mr. Curtis is in a bad way because the engineers he’s been paying to develop broadcasting equipment for him have gone missing. One has kidnapped (then murdered) the other and is working with two people inside the company to make sure Curtis buys their equipment instead.

It sounds more complicated than it is and more complicated than how it plays out on-screen. Basically, Fred is the honest man at the root of a series of grifts.

I’m inclined to leave the description there because I enjoyed this movie—I found it charmingly ridiculous—but I’m not sure if it’s possible to spoil something like this. It’s a movie from 1936. The villains interfere with the inventor, he has a falling out with Blake who he’s started to fall in love with, and he’s both materially and romantically triumphant by THE END.

As I noted, the movie’s only just over an hour and there’s not a lot of drama. You’d expect the villains to play a larger role in the piece, but they really only show up for two scenes: one to explain and enact their plan and one to try to sabotage and assault our leads. Otherwise, it’s just the protagonists working toward their goal and worrying about whether they’ve placed their faith in the right people.

And I found the movie charming. It’s a simple bit of fluff with actors who know what they’re doing. Everything has the look of a cheap noir, the actors even sound like parodies of those kinds of figures, but everyone’s tongue is firmly in their cheek, no one more so than Rocky. He’s the tough bill collector who keeps repeating, “Science is my hobby.” He’s the tough guy easily distracted by a shiny bauble, always toeing the line of being cartoonish without ever crossing it. I mean, the movie has a scene where he’s in a cab demanding the cabbie drive faster. The cabbie responds, “If you think you can do better, you drive.” Next shot, Rocky’s driving.

It’s such a simple, stupid moment and the movie included it because that moment is precisely the tone and ethic of the film. I don’t say this about a lot of movies, but it charmed me, I was legitimately charmed by this movie. So I recommend it. It just makes things feel a little nicer.

To make things even better, the movie is in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. You should give it a peek.

313. Prehistoric Women

313. Prehistoric Women (1950)
Director: Gregg G. Tallas
Writers: Sam X. Abarbanel and Gregg G. Tallas
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A narrated tale of prehistoric women finding husbands.

I also watched this just over ten years ago as part of the Sci-Fi set and, frankly, didn’t like it any better back then. The entire movie is narrated including having the narrator describe action occurring on-screen. When the narrator isn’t talking, we instead get dialogue in prehistoric gibberish. It’s all a bit much. I mean, the first ten minutes are the narrator telling us about the wise woman of the tribe telling the story of how the tribe was founded. So it’s someone telling us a story of someone telling a story.

It’s not meta if it’s stupid.

So, very briefly, because there’s nothing to say about this movie, we start with a tribe of prehistoric women—only women. Their tribe was founded when their former leader attacked the chief of their tribe that was using all the women as slave labor. The new matriarchal tribe thrived, but was attacked by the monstrous caveman Guadi who stole a few members and killed the leader. Now, fifteen years later, all the children have grown up and are ready to get married.

What follows is what you’d expect: The women capture men, fight over one of them, then the men escape using fire and kidnap all the women. Proper order is restored of women doing back-breaking labor in service of men. On the way back to the men’s tribe, Guadi attacks. The men burn Guadi to death and agree to return to the women’s tribe and marry them. THE END

Another one of those flicks you can’t even get mad at. I spent the whole time knitting, checkng Twitter, and wondering if it was done yet. I could go into plot holes like somehow the women are stymied by these men even though their tribe was founded by women overpowering men and their tribe has thrived by collectively acting against the men. Then the men are all isolated and yet the women don’t organize against them. And if I wanted to get snarky-political, I’d say this is a film that dares to ask what the world would be like if you don’t take the red pill, but it doesn’t even warrant that kind of effort, not that kind of scorn.

I mean the narration gets a little obnoxious talking about the “weaker sex” even though the women here are consistently kicking the men’s asses, but I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully ironic. I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully anything. Plus it’s hard to imagine it’s saying anything about men and women at all, that it’s interested in women at all. Like all those sword & sandal pics, this is about having buff young men run around shirtless and oiled up. I don’t think the intended audience was too interested in anything “between” sexes, let alone battle.

Unless you’re into the idea of femdommed cavemen (and I’m sure somebody is), there’s just not much in this movie to recommend it. Even if you want beefcake, the print is too washed out to really provide any visuals. Let me emphasize any. This movie made the bold choice to forego day-for-night shots and just shoot at night without any lighting. The women are doing an ecstatic ritual dance, but good luck making any of it out in that inky black frame.

The movie is in the public domain and I’ve added a copy to archive.org here, just be warned that there’s not much to it. The movie is easily riffable, but just becomes a bit of a slog because there’s nothing going on.