The Cobweb

I've reviewed MGM's 1955 melodrama The Cobweb on my other movie blog, Classic Movie Ramblings. This is a film that cult movie fans may well find to be worth checking out - it's totally insane.

Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

Hunchback of the Morgue (El jorobado de la Morgue) is one of Paul Naschy’s non-werewolf horror flicks from the 70s. It’s a tragic horror movie about a man who is turned into a monster by mistreatment.

Javier Aguirre directed, with Naschy co-writing the script.

Naschy is Gotho the hunchback, who works in the morgue at the hospital. He is mildly retarded and is by nature a gentle and sensitive soul but he is continually teased and tormented not just by children but also by medical students at the hospital.

Gotho has befriended a patient in the hospital, a girl dying from consumption. In fact they’d been childhood friends and now Ilse (María Elena Arpón) has no family of friends to care about her. She only has Gotho. She is devoted to him, and he is equally devoted to her.

When some medical students mock Gotho for his attachment to Ilse he shows the first ominous signs of violence. He attacks the students. Fortunately one of the female doctors at the hospital has taken a liking to the unfortunate hunchback and treats his injuries after he is attacked by children.

Of course eventually the day comes when Ilse dies. Her body is to be used for anatomy lessons for medical students but Gotho steals the body and hides it in a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels that he has discovered, a labyrinth that only he knows about. Gotho cannaot accept Ilse’s death and he asks a famous medical researcher for help. Dr Orla (Alberto Dalbes) is a brilliant man but he is also, as we soon discover, a mad scientist.

Dr Orla promises to bring Ilse back to life in exchange for the use of Gotho’s underground lair as a laboratory (since the university has ordered him to cease his crazy experiments). In fact Dr Orla has his own agenda, a scheme for creating artificial life. Whether he ever really intends to try to bring Ilse back to life is somewhat uncertain.

Things don’t work out the way Gotho expected, and they won’t work out the way Dr Orla expected either. Gotho will seek a violent and hideous revenge for the wrongs inflicted on him.

Although the makeup effects aren’t that great Naschy gives one of his best performances. He’s both sympathetic and genuinely frightening. The relationship between Gotho and Ilse is touching and is rendered with sensitivity. The supporting cast is good with Alberto Dalbes making an excellent mad scientist.

The real highlight of the movie is Gotho’s subterranean labyrinth, a magnificent gothic setting for what is in fact a gothic horror movie despite its modern setting.

Mya’s DVD is light on extras but offers a very good anamorphic transfer.

Hunchback of the Morgue is a good old-fashioned monster movie with a sympathetic monster that raises the question who is the real moster, Gotho or the people who tormented him. In this sense it’s very much in the style of the old Universal monster movies that Naschy loved so much, but with 1970s gore. Highly recommended.

First Man Into Space (1959)

First Man Into Space is, oddly enough given its American setting, a 1959 British science fiction movie. It’s cheesy but it does have some interesting and original ideas.

Lieutenant Dan Prescott (Bill Edwards) is a US Navy test pilot. His brother Commander Charles Prescott (Marshall Thompson) is in charge of a project involving rocket-powered experimental aircraft. The aircraft are carried aloft by a B-29 and then released. The objective is to fly into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and eventually beyond the atmosphere into space.

The Y-12 rocket plane reaches a record altitude but then loses control and crashes into a field.

Dan Prescott is unhurt but his brother suspects that he made an error of judgment. In fact he suspects that Dan deliberately disobeyed orders. There has always been tension between the two brothers. Charles is the responsible one who always obeys orders while Dan is always pushing the limits of not just his own endurance but of any kind of discipline.

Despite the accident the Navy wants to go full speed ahead with the project and the Y-13 is ready to go. This time there is no question that Dan disobeys orders. Instead of turning the aircraft and returning to Earth he keeps going and leaves the Earth’s atmosphere, thus fulfilling his dream of being the first man into space. Unfortunately he then loses control and has to eject the nose cone containing the cockpit. The nose cone is found in a field but there is no sign of the pilot. The canopy has been shattered and Charles realises there is no way his brother could have survived.

So far it’s a straightforward science fiction adventure but now it takes a dramatic turning into monster movie territory. The nose cone of the Y-13 is coated in a strange unidentifiable substance. And now a series of gruesome murders takes place in the area where the Y-13 came down.

Charles Prescott and Doctor van Essen (Carl Jaffe) come up with a theory. If there was life in space it would need protection from cosmic rays. The strange substance coating the nose cone of the aircraft could be such a protective coating. Could Dan have had an encounter with some sort of alien life form that lives in the vacuum of space?

In fact we already know that Dan encountered a strange cloud on his ill-fated mission.

Charles and van Essen also suspect that Dan himself was coated in this substance and that Dan is the monster, a monster that for some reason craves blood.

If Dan is still alive and has become some sort of monster, how much of his personality still survives? Will it be possible to save him, or to cure him?

This is a sympathetic monster movie with a monster who is a genuinely tragic figure. This was common enough in American monster movies but is more unusual for a British production.

The acting is more than adequate with Marshall Thompson and Bill Edwards being more than just cardboard heroes. Roger Delgado (better known as The Master in Doctor Who) contributes an amusing cameo as a mercenary Mexican politician.

The monster makeup is quite effective. This movie makes very extensive use of stock footage, but the stock footage is well chosen and used effectively.

Overall this movie is quite a bit more interesting than you might expect with some moments of real horror and some poignant moments. It’s an often overlooked movie and it’s well worth a look.

The Region 4 offers an acceptable print without any extras.

Isle of Forgotten Sins (1943)

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Isle of Forgotten Sins (AKA Monsoon) is a typical example of Ulmer’s low-budget movies. Ulmer couldn’t do the spectacular visuals that he’d been able to do on his early big-budget movies like The Black Cat but he still managed to come up with a stylish and very entertaining (and rather outrageous) adventure romp.

Ulmer made the movie on a six-day schedule, which was more than enough time for Ulmer who was a master at making interesting movies on impossibly low budgets with impossibly tight shooting schedules.

Marge Willison (Gale Sondergaard) runs a bar, gambling  joint and brothel called The Isle of Forgotten Sins on a South Pacific island. Marge is in love with Captain Mike Clancy (John Carradine), a rambunctious  rogue who spends his life drinking, fighting and looking for ways to make easy money. When he recognises the voice of Captain Krogan (Sidney Toler) he thinks he’s found his chance. Krogan was the skipper of the Tropic Queen, which supposedly went down with all hands and with $3 million in gold bullion. But Captain Krogan and his purser are obviously very much alive and Mike figures that Krogan knows where the gold is.

In fact this is just what Krogan hoped would happen. His plan is to let Mike and his partner Jack, who are expert deep-sea divers, retrieve the gold and then Krogan and his confederates will steal it. Mike knows this was Krogan’s plan but he’s confident that he can outfox him.

Mike and Jack spend much of the movie trying to kill each other since they are rivals for Marge’s affections. Now they have to stop trying to kill each other long enough to get that gold. While this is going on one of Marge’s girls kills a client so Marge and her girls have to flee. Mike decides to cut them in on the deal.

The diving sequences and the various miniatures sequences are pretty good when you consider the movie was made on a zero budget. In any other movie they’d have looked hopelessly hokey but Ulmer always could get away with stuff like this. There’s plenty of fun in this movie and plenty of action. The strange storm sequence with the clouds mirroring each other like a crazy Rorschach blot in the sky is a typical clever Ulmer touch.

John Carradine chews every piece of scenery in sight, and Sidney Toler approaches his role with the same gusto. Gale Sondergaard males a great madam and their spirited performances are a delight to watch.

While Mike and Jack try to raise the sunken gold a huge storm approaches the island. The native chief warns Krogan that a big wind and a big wave are going to wash the island away - there is much bad magic in sea and sky. But everyone else is too intent on getting their hands on that gold to worry about the impending cataclysm.

Ulmer was a major director who found himself trapped in the world of ultra-low budget movies but instead of bewailing his fate he got on with the job and turned out a series of fascinating oddities, with this film as well as Bluebeard (also with Carradine in one of his best-ever roles) and the amazingly paranoid film noir Detour being among the highlights of his 1940s work for PRC. No matter how small the budgets all of Ulmer’s movies are worth a look. All contain touches that show a master film-maker at work.

Alpha Video’s DVD is typical Alpha Video. It’s a horrible print but at least it’s watchable and the dialogue is understandable.

If you’re an Ulmer fan this one is worth chasing up, especially if you can get hold of the DVD at a bargain price. Highly recommended as an exercise in sheer fun.

Before I Hang (1940)

In Before I Hang (a curiously  appropriate title although not quite in the way we initially expect), made by Columbia in 1940, we once again see Boris Karloff as a mad scientist sentenced to death, and of course we fully expect that once again he will cheat the executioner. You have to wonder why any executioner would bother to try to hang Karloff!

This time Karloff is Dr John Garth, a kindly doctor who has been working on a serum to defeat old age. Unfortunately when he tried it on a human subject it failed, and Dr Garth took pity on his elderly patent and ended his sufferings. Not surprisingly this resulted in his being charged with murder, convicted, and sentenced to hang.

Dr Garth is convinced he was very close to success with his serum, but tragically it seems that now he will never get the chance to complete his experiments. Then fate takes a hand. The prison doctor is a great admirer of Dr Garth’s work and he convinces the sympathetic warden to allow Dr Garth to continue his work in prison until the date of his execution.

Dr Garth now has just three weeks to perfect his serum.

Of course when you’re working in a prison hospital you have to work with the materials that are to hand. If you need blood then the most convenient source is condemned prisoners. But that means working with murderers’ blood! And who can tell what might happen if the experimental subject is inoculated with a serum made from murderers’ blood?

Dr Garth does perfect his serum, and the results seem more than promising. But the serum has other results as well, which Dr Garth could not possibly have predicted.

This is the sort of role at which Boris Karloff excelled - he gets to play a gentle kindly man who only wants to serve humanity and he gets to play a terrifying monster as well. As usual Karloff is equally effective in both roles and he gives us a monster with whom we can sympathise to an extraordinary degree. We desperately want things to turn out well for Dr Garth but of course we know that since this is a horror movie that’s not very likely. Dr Garth’s struggle to overcome the consequences of his one scientific mistake is both tragic and moving, and this is due almost entirely to Karloff’s greatness as an actor.

The supporting cast comprises the sort of fine character actors who helped so much to make this period of movie-making a golden age. Evelyn Keyes doesn’t get enough to do as Dr Garth’s daughter Martha but what she does do she does well.

Director Nick Grinde was one of those solid journeyman directors who rarely reached any great heights but were good at bringing in B-movies on time and on budget and could be relied upon to produce satisfactory results in just about any genre.

As with so many horror movies this one explores the theme of science trying to do too much, to go too far. In the world of horror movies this is always a dangerous thing to do. As Dr Garth tells a young colleague, in the war that science wages against death there will be casualties. It’s by no means an anti-science movie; it merely points out that scientific advances always come with a price.

This movie is one of four in Columbia’s excellent Boris Karloff: Icons of Horror Collection. The transfer is of very high quality although it’s lacking in extras. But at the price this set is a must-buy for all serious horror fans.

Before I Hang is a solid horror B-movie that would be reasonably entertaining anyway but Karloff’s performance gives it that extra something that elevates it a little above the usual B-movie standard. Recommended.

Vampire Circus (1972)

Vampire Circus was one of Hammer’s best 1970s productions. This was partly because they’d brought in a lot of new blood - producer Wilbur Stark, screenwriter Judson Kinberg and director Robert Young. The result was a gothic horror movie that felt fresh and original.

Combining circuses with horror always works well and this movie handles the combination particularly well. The circus us more than just a colourful background setting - the Circus of Nights is the cause of the horror.

It starts with what seems like a very traditional Hammer opening sequence. Led by the Burgomeister, villagers with flaming torches descend upon the castle of the evil Count Mitterhaus, who has been seducing and murdering the village girls. The castle is razed and the wicked count is staked. Before he dies the count threatens not just the destruction of the village but also all its children.

Sixteen years later his threat seems to be coming true, although not in quite the way you’d expect of a vampire movie. The village is being decimated by a horrific plague. The surrounding villagers have put a cordon around the village and threaten to shoot anyone who tries to leave. The village doctor believes this is purely a medical problem and forms a plan to escape and reach the capital so he can bring back medicines to cure the plague.

With the village under quarantine the last thing you’d expect would be for the circus to come to town, but that’s what happens. The Circus of Nights is led by a gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri). In fact she’s someone the townspeople should recognise but don’t.

What the villagers don’t know is that the circus is composed mostly of vampires and their plan is not just to carry out Count Mitterhaus’s threat, but also to resurrect the count. They will start by killing the children of the men who led the attack on the count’s castle. There isn’t really much more to the plot than that but it’s more than sufficient for a gothic horror film. The focus is on atmosphere and on the characters of the men who had destroyed the vampire count.

The setting is the usual Hammer 19th century setting but the circus adds a fresh new feel. Director Robert Young handles proceedings with skill.

Apart from Thorley Walters who plays the Burgomeister (and plays the part very well as usual) the actors are mostly fairly new to Hammer, although Anthony Corlan who plays the mysterious animal tamer Emil had appeared previously in Taste the Blood of Dracula. He’s particularly impressive. Also impressive is Lalla Ward (later to be better known as Romana II in Doctor Who) as a vampiric acrobat.

The circus scenes are the highlight of the movie and feature some quite impressive visual effects with acrobats transforming into bats and panthers transforming into beautiful women. There’s also a memorable routine with an almost naked panther woman. And of course there’s an evil clown.

There’s more nudity than was usual in Hammer films and there’s a general air of depravity and perversity that is more reminiscent of European horror than of Hammer’s usual offerings.

The Synapse combo set includes both DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Both transfers are excellent but the DVD is so good that the Blu-Ray transfer is more or less superfluous. Also included is an excellent and fairly lengthy (and very informative) documentary on the making of the film.

Vampire Circus proves that Hammer could still make the grade in the early 70s. This is a gothic horror classic and is highly recommended.

Alligator People (1959)

Alligator People is a great example of the problems with many 1950s horror movies. There isn’t any horror. There’s a good idea and a good story and the potential was there, but they forgot to add the actual horror.

Jane Marvin (Bevery Garland) is a nurse who’s been displaying some odd symptoms under narco-hypnosis. Patients are not capable of lying under this treatment, but the story she tells defies rational belief.

Her name is really Joyce, and she is really Mrs Paul Webster. When she was married her husband left the train that was taking them to their honeymoon in strange circumstances and was never seen again. She spends the next year trying to track him down and her search eventually leads her to the bayou country of Louisiana. There she meets Paul’s mother Mrs Hawthorne and the story gets a lot stranger.

She already knows that Paul was horribly injured in a plane crash and she’s already expressed surprise that he is totally free of scars and you’d never know he’d been in a plane crash. What she doesn’t know is the reason for this - a revolutionary treatment developed by Dr Mark Sinclair (George Macready). The treatment involves alligator hormones and it’s spectacularly successful. Unfortunately there are side-effects - a year or so after treatment the patients begin turning into reptiles.

Dr Sinclair believes he may have the answer to this problem - massive doses of radiation from Cobalt-60. As every good doctor in the 50s knew, radiation was the answer to everything.

Paul’s mother tries to keep all this from Joyce. But Joyce persists and eventually finds out the truth. Dr Sinclair intends to go ahead with his experimental treatment, but he hasn’t counted on interference from Manon (Lon Chaney Jr). Manon works for Mrs Hawthorne and he hates alligators. He lost a hand to an alligator some years earlier and since then he’s been taking his revenge on any alligator he can find.

That’s it for the plot. There are no unexplained disappearances. There is no rampage of terror from the alligator people. The alligator people are completely harmless. Paul is completely harmless. The horrors we keep expecting fail to eventuate.

Roy del Ruth had been a reliable director for Warner Brothers in the 30s but he clearly did not understand the horror genre. If he had, he would have insisted on major changes to Orville H. Hampton’s screenplay. It’s fairly obvious that he just did this movie for the pay cheque and filmed the script as it stood.

Beverly Garland, a fine actress, does her best to inject some life into this movie. George Macready is quite good and Lon Chaney Jr provides the only real excitement but with a dull talky script and unadventurous direction his best efforts fail to provide the chills this movie so badly needs.

Fox’s DVD provides an excellent 16x9 enhanced widescreen transfer of the Cinemascope original but lacks any extras.

Alligator People is a dull and slow-moving offering and is best avoided.