Horror Express: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

 Darker, creepier and more intense than the other ‘mad doctor’ movies Boris Karloff made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, this fourth and final instalment in the loosely connected series finds incoming director Edward Dmytryk really upping the ante, delivering a film which remains startling and somewhat unnerving to this day, in spite of its brutally foreshortened 64 minute run time and all too evident budgetary constraints.

A brief but highly effective prologue gets the antennae of us Lovecraft-fanciers tingling right from the off, as the daughter of Karloff’s Dr Julian Blair delivers an ominously deadpan voiceover narration, intoned over a series of very well done model-shots which take us on a slow pan toward the doors of a derelict, storm-lashed cliff-top mansion;

“In Barsham Harbour, on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters which face toward my father’s house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father’s house. I don’t know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave.”

I don't know about you, but I’m sold.

Thereafter, we rewind seven years, and the film’s first act settles down into a pattern very much in keeping with the Karloff’s other Columbia pictures, as the gentle and soft-spoken Dr Blair, a research fellow at a fictional New England college, astounds his fellow boffins by demonstrating that the human brain generates an electro-magnetic impulse which can be recorded, and potentially ‘read’, via electrodes attached to the subject’s temples, hooked up to a primitive, EEG-like encephalogram. (1)

Claiming that “the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger than man’s”, Dr Blair uses his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) as his primary experimental subject. His beliefs become both more questionable and more obsessive though when, stricken with grief after Helen dies in a car accident, he observes that his machinery is still recording the unique ‘signature’ of her brainwaves, convincing him that his wife’s spirit remains present in the ether, attempting to communicate with him.

As you might well imagine, ‘The Devil Commands’ becomes a gloomy and rather sad affair at this point, and Karloff conveys Dr Blair’s misery and exhaustion with almost painful conviction. Viewers who had previously turned out to see Karloff in Nick Grinde’s ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’ (1939), ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ or ‘Before I Hang’ (both 1940) will have been more than familiar with the path the good doctor subsequently takes, as his mental health gradually crumbles, and as he repeatedly ignores the advice proffered by the film’s procession of straight-laced supporting players, who urge him to give up his weird work and take a well-earned break.

The film’s tone shifts considerably however when, on the advice of his simple-minded assistant Karl (Cy Schindell) - only potentially mad scientists are assigned one of those, you see - Dr Blair attends a séance conducted by a renowned medium, the stentorian Mrs Blanche Walters (Anne Revere).

Though Mrs Walters is initially pretty pissed off when the doc busts up her phony séance, easily exposing the assorted gimmicks she has been using to hoodwink her clients, she nonetheless reveals herself to be as cold, avaricious and amoral an operator as any film noir spider-woman - so naturally, when Blair suggests that she could make herself a great deal of dough assisting him with his experiments, she’s all ears.

Before long, the doctor’s increasingly unhinged attempts to channel vast amounts of electricity through Mrs Walters’ brain in an attempt to make contact with Helen’s roving spirit lead to poor old Karl getting accidentally lobotomised. Blanche, who seems suspiciously well versed on how to handle such situations, suggests they duck out and make a quick getaway before anyone finds out about the accident, prompting the unlikely trio to flee the campus and hit the road, setting themselves up in the remote cliff-top manse we saw during the film’s prologue.

Once this memorably eerie set-up, reminiscent both of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and the unhinged finale of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X a decade earlier, has been established, palpable fear and loathing on claustrophobic interior sets is soon the order of the day. In a neat turn-around, we’re reintroduced to our characters a year or two down the line, through the eyes of the county sheriff, who comes a-knocking, investigating, oh, y’know, just some bodies which have gone missing from the local cemetery (uh-oh).

After the door is opened by a cowering, lantern-bearing maid (a great performance from character actress Dorothy Adams), the sheriff soon encounters the lumbering, Igor-like Karl, before Blanche descends the rickety, shadowed staircase, glaring daggers in full-on, imperious Lady Macbeth mode. And as to the good doctor, who shambles into view behind her, meanwhile… well, he’s certainly given up brushing the dust out of his hair, let's put it that way.

Under Blanche’s encouragement no doubt, Blair has of course gone full loony by this stage, and the crooked couple have indeed been re-appropriating the carcasses of the local citizenry for use in their experiments. In a breathtaking tableau of psychotronic weirdness, they have in fact wired up the mouldering corpses in what look for all the world like antiquated, metallic diving suits with flashing Tesla coils appended to their helmets. They are seated around a table with their arms out-stretched, in some perverse, quasi-scientific imitation of a séance, whilst the doctor’s banks of McFadden-esque electrical equipment whir and drone behind them. Good lord!

With shit like this going down, it’s naturally only a matter of time before a torch-wielding mob is called for - but, given that we know the house is still standing seven years hence, they’re required on this occasion to nix the flames and do their worst with clubs and wooden poles instead. Yikes.

Edward Dmytryk would soon of course go on to play a significant role in defining the aesthetic of film noir with the classic ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944), and he takes the opportunity here to prove himself a post-expressionist stylist per excellence here, ladling on angular shadows, spot-lighting, venetian blinds and dutch angles as if they were going out of fashion, and employing harsh, jagged editing patterns to produce a rather fevered, dissonant tempo.

The film’s production crew meanwhile douse practically every scene in thunder, lightning and squalling gales, undercutting the science-based plotting with the kind of quasi-gothic atmos you could cut up and sell by the pound, whilst mournful cellos saw away on the stock music score, emphasising the essentially tragic nature of the storyline.

Towering over the bumbling, submissive Karloff during the second half of the film, Anne Revere likewise acts up a storm, giving us the kind of vile, emotionless femme fatale / heartless bitch character who could eat Phyllis Dietrichson or Mrs Danvers for breakfast.

The uncertain nature of her relationship with Karloff’s character is in fact one of the movie’s most intriguingly perverse elements. Could they really have a romantic connection? Seems unlikely, given that Dr Blair is still utterly fixated on trying to establish contact with his late wife. We’ve already established that Mrs Blanche Walters is driven by a desire for money, but surely hanging around in a dilapidated mansion living off the diminishing resources of a crazy old geezer wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Does she just get a kick out of lording it over the doctor and his mindless servant, or - is she hooked on the thrill she derives from having thousands of volts of electricity (and potentially the disembodied brainwaves of the dead) blasted through her nervous system on a regular basis..?

The latter possibility could have conceivably made her an early precursor to Barbara Crampton’s character in Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of From Beyond, but, forced to rattle through its potent story at breakneck speed to hit the era’s one hour b-movie finishing line, ‘The Devil Commands’ is allowed little time to explore such niceties as character motivation, leaving a wealth of rampaging ambiguity in the gaps between scenes which makes the film all the more fascinating.

Of course, the title and poster blurb assigned to this movie by Columbia upon its release are a complete misnomer. The film contains no reference to the devil, and he certainly issues no commands. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there is no allusion to religion or Christian belief to be found anywhere in the film; even the obligatory blather about defying God’s law or somesuch which was routinely shoehorned into this era’s post-Frankenstein mad doctor movies in notable by its absence.

Perhaps one explanation for this is that the script for ‘The Devil Commands’ (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews & Milton Gunzburg) was loosely derived from William Sloane’s science-based supernatural novel ‘The Edge of Running Water’ (first published in 1939) - an acclaimed work, often hailed as a landmark in the field of ‘cosmic horror’, which I’ve been meaning to obtain a copy of for many years at this point. (2)

Whilst I’d imagine that the film probably ditches or reworks many of the details of Sloane’s story, disquieting remnants of what I understand to be his core premise remain. Namely, we’re talking here about the idea that, whilst Dr Blair believes that his experiments allow him to make contact with departed human souls, he is actually tapping into something else entirely.

This truly frightening concept, beautifully implied by the novel’s title, is realised rather more bluntly during the frenzied climax of Dmytryk’s film, wherein we see Dr Blair’s table of wired up corpses become possessed by some unholy St Vitus’ dance as the riled up mob of townsfolk approaches, summoning up what, in their audio commentary for the film’s blu-ray release, the ever-reliable Kim Newman and Stephen Jones identify as perhaps cinema’s first example of a full-blown trans-dimensional vortex.

If on one level ‘The Devil Commands’ remains a morbid and joyless rumination on the self-destructive futility of seeking solace from beyond the grave, it is simultaneously animated by a crazed spark of total morbid madness which proves extremely compelling. Crashing heedlessly into the realm of what-man-was-not-meant-to-know with a fervour far more alarming than than anything generally encountered in the rather sedate world of early ‘40s scientific horror films, it stands as a raw, wild and genuinely unnerving classic of the weird/cosmic end of the genre.

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(1) I’m no scientist, but it’s interesting to note that, whilst Karloff’s learned colleagues in ‘The Devil Commands’ treat his theories as if they pretty far-out speculation, Dr Blair’s initial ideas about brainwave activity are essentially correct, and paper-and-ink EEGs very much like the once he demonstrates in the film had actually been in use since at least the early 1920s.

(1) This 1967 Bantam edition of Sloane’s novel, with its IMPOSSIBLY CREEPY cover illustration, is a particular paperback holy grail of mine.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

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Pre-War Thrills: Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Until recently, I’d tended to accept the received wisdom that the few, scattered, horror films made in the UK during the 1930s were pretty creaky and timid affairs, their ambition stymied both by the era’s censorious climate and by the British film industry’s steadfast refusal to treat the nascent genre with anything approaching acknowledgement or respect.

Like viral infection or rock n’ roll though, horror will always find a way, and as such, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, rather than the mere historical curiosity I was expecting, ‘Dark Eyes of London’, shot in the less than palatial surroundings of Welwyn Garden City over eleven days in April 1939, is actually pretty damned great.

Headlined by imported star Bela Lugosi - who seemingly undertook a journey across the Atlantic by ship solely to appear in the film - this adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s 1924 novel is in fact fairly strong stuff for its era, conveying a morbid, decidedly unsavoury atmosphere and including some moments of sadism grim enough to provoke comment even in the more open-minded United States (where the film played in 1940 as ‘The Human Monster’, having been picked up for distribution by Lugosi’s regular employers at Monogram).

Whilst the film’s violence never reaches a level which viewers alive today would deem ‘graphic’, there is a certain, base level nastiness to the depredations of Lugosi’s villainous Dr Orloff which remain disturbing. From the steel water tank in which it is implied the good doctor drowns his victims before dumping them, pre-deceased, into the Thames, to the scene in which he uses an electrical current to deafen a bed-ridden, blind-mute beggar, there is some nasty business going on here and no mistake.

In view of all this, it difficult to believe the film was produced at all, given that the UK’s censors had effectively banned all horror films just four years earlier, having thrown their toys out of the proverbial pram when confronted with the comic book excesses of Universal’s ‘The Raven’ (Lew Landers, 1935). I’d certainly be interested to learn how ‘Dark Eyes..’s domestic release played out under such circumstances, although it was, I note, the first film to be awarded the short-lived “H” (for “horror”) classification by the BBFC, meaning that persons under sixteen would theoretically be refused admittance.

It is telling that, between 1939 and 1950, when the ‘H’ certificate was more or less phased out in favour of the more iconic ‘X’, only one other domestic production achieved the dubious distinction of being “rated H” (Ivan Barnett’s little seen 1950 take on ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’). Instead, the dreaded ‘H’ was reserved exclusively for imported American horror pictures, leading me to surmise that its introduction in 1939 must have reflected the censor caving in to pressure from representatives of the American studios, particularly Universal, who had of course returned to making horror films in earnest at around the same time, and presumably needed a way to get their product onto UK screens. Beyond noting the unique position in which this leaves ‘Dark Eyes of London’ though, perhaps that’s a subject best left for another day.

It is possible, I suppose, that ‘Dark Eyes..’ journey to the screen may have been further aided by the fact that it sprung from the pen of a phenomenally popular, household name author, celebrated (if not exactly respected) for his mystery and crime - as opposed to horror - fiction.

Indeed, for all its unpleasantness, the movie is framed as a police procedural rather than a gothic horror, with the approach taken by director/co-screenwriter Walter Summers reminding me, not so much of the Universal-derived horror you might have expected from a production which went to trouble of luring Bela Lugosi across an ocean, but of Alfred Hitchcock’s then-recent series of ground-breaking contemporary thrillers.

In particular, 1934’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ shares this film’s down-at-heel East London setting, its diabolical Hungarian-accented villain, and even the idea of a charitable/religious institute being used as a front for criminal activity. More importantly though, ‘Dark Eyes..’, like Hitchcock’s British films, has the decency to remain fast-paced, modernistic and ingeniously plotted, imbuing its convoluted storyline with a strong, character-driven through-line to keep us hooked.

Along the way, Summers (along with co-writers Patrick Kirwen and producer John Argyle) give us plenty of interesting diversions, good-natured banter and running gags to break the tension / ghoulishness, and, whilst it’s probably fair to say that Summers lacks the touch of mastery we’d routinely assign to Hitch, the film is nonetheless very nicely done, with solid performances across the board and some impressively detailed production design, making for a rather charming, neatly turned out entertainment whose incongruously breezy tone must have further eased the censor’s worries.

For those who are neither keen readers of Edgar Wallace nor familiar with Alfred Vohrer’s excellent early ‘60s German quasi-remake of this film (of which more below), the plot of ‘Dark Eyes..’ concerns a number of suspicious corpses fished out of the Thames, all of whom turn out to have been customers of the Greenwich Insurance Company - a small-time outfit operated by one Dr Orloff, a seemingly kindly and well-meaning fellow with - AHEM - a murky past as a disgraced medical researcher, who also maintains close connections to The Dearborn Institute, a Limehouse-based home for the blind operated by his - AHEM - close personal friend, the sightless Rev John Dearborn.

As well he might, dashing young Inspector Holt of the Yard (a brisk and likeable Hugh Williams) smells a rat, and, given that Dr Orloff is clearly guilty as sin from the outset, the film’s subsequent ‘mystery’ largely consists of mapping out the precise size and shape of that rat. Less of a ‘whodunnit’ then, and more of a ‘what in god’s name is he doing!?’, if you will.

Of course, further complications arise across the film’s 76 minutes of densely-packed plottin’ and chattin’, not least the introduction of Norwegian actress Greta Gynt, providing a surprisingly strong and self-sufficient heroine as the daughter of one of Orloff’s earlier victims.

In this telling of the tale, Inspector Holt is also accompanied - presumably for reasons of transatlantic sales potential - by a hard-boiled, gun-toting Chicago cop - played for laughs by Edmun Brian - who is sticking around after delivering an extradited convict in order to learn something of Scotland Yard’s rather more genteel methods. It’s a testament to the film’s overall quality however that, rather than functioning as an insufferable comic relief goon, Brian is actually quite an appealing presence. Providing an effective foil for Holt, he even manages to achieve a few unforced laughs here and there, allowing the film to pioneer the ‘chills n’ chuckles’ formula which would later be repeatedly taken to the bank by Rialto Film’s post-war Wallace adaptations in West Germany. [Please consult the Krimi Casebook for further details.]

Jess Franco fans in the audience will no doubt be gesturing frantically and jumping up and down by this point, so yes, let’s briefly pause to acknowledge the fact that, given that the name ‘Orloff’ does not appear in Wallace’s source novel, Uncle Jess clearly must have been very fond of this movie, given the many and varied Dr Orloffs who abound throughout his mammoth filmography, beginning, of course, with Howard Vernon’s memorable portrayal in 1962’s The Awful Dr Orlof [sic].

Technically I suppose, this makes ‘Dark Eyes of London’ the inaugural entry in the Orloff saga, a loose accumulation of cinematic oddities which went on to include not only Franco’s numerous reiterations of the character, but also such mind-boggling spin-offs as Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (1970) and Santos Alcocer’s ‘El Enigma del Ataúd’ aka ‘Les Orgies du Docteur Orloff’ (1967). (1)

As such, Euro-horror fans may wish to pause to consider the fact that the screen’s very first Dr Orloff was in fact embodied by no less a personage than Bela Lugosi - and a pretty bang up job he does of it too, I must say. Gifted with a more ambiguous and multi-faceted role than he was generally called upon to play in Hollywood, and with his confidence presumably buoyed by both his top-billed status and (we must assume) a level of respect and financial recompense commensurate with his talents, Lugosi actually delivers what I’m inclined to consider one of the very best performances of his career here.

Though Lugosi clearly makes little effort to try to convince the audience of the innocence his scripted character pleads during the film’s early scenes, he instead builds Orloff into an exquisitely loathsome, duplicitous, scene-stealing villain, the like of which old Bela was born to play, but so rarely actually did. The way he can switch from acting the soft-spoken philanthropist one moment to turning on his EVIL STARE and revealing himself as a diabolical mesmerist the next is truly remarkable.

Rivalling Lugosi’s hold over the imagination of the movie’s original viewers meanwhile is the more literally monstrous figure of ‘Jake’ (played here by Wilfrid Walter), the hulking, blind stooge whom Orloff uses to carry out his dirty work (somewhat pre-empting the character of Morpho in Franco’s Dr Orloff films).

Monogram’s publicity materials and re-titling certainly made Jake the star of the show upon the film’s American release, and, although the character was portrayed in more naturalistic, and more terrifying, fashion as ‘Blind Jack’ (Addy Berber) in Alfred Vohrer’s Die Toten Augen von London (‘The Dead Eyes of London’, 1961), Walter makes an impression here nonetheless; if not for his acting, then at least for the absolutely extraordinary make up job achieved by the film’s technicians.

Framing this unfortunate brute as a full-on monster, complete with pointed ears, protruding jaw and bulbous, orc-like fangs, Jake’s utterly fantastical visage provides another wonderfully diversion from the stultifying rules of ‘good taste’ which confined the ambition of so much British cinema in this era.

Speaking of Vohrer’s film meanwhile, that’s certainly another matter we’ve got to discuss here. Going into ‘Dark Eyes..’, I was worried that that it might pale in comparison to the more stylish, more sensational quasi-remake which hit screens over two decades later. And indeed, there is a lot of crossover between the two films, with at least some scenes and visual motifs in ‘Dead Eyes..’ appearing to directly recreate material first seen here. But, there are also enough differences between the two in terms of character and storytelling for them to avoid treading on each other’s toes too much, allowing them to co-exist as equally enjoyable alternate versions of the same tale.

As is extensively discussed by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones on the special features accompanying Network’s new blu-ray edition of the movie, ‘Dark Eyes of London’ feels in many ways like a bit of a cursed film; if not exactly an unheralded classic, then certainly a solid and historically significant effort which has never really gotten its due.

Being released in the UK six weeks after Britain’s declaration of war with Germany probably didn’t exactly help ‘Dark Eyes..’ prospects at the domestic box office - and, sadly, this same historical circumstance made the prospect of Lugosi returning to the country to promote the film, or to work again with the its producers, an impossibility. (2)

Slipped out with little fanfare by Monogram in the U.S. a year later amid a glut of creatively and financially impoverished Lugosi vehicles, it was all too easy for ‘The Human Monster’ to fall through the cracks, filed away between the likes of ‘The Devil Bat’ and ‘Spooks Run Wild’ in the memory of young audiences ill-equipped to appreciate the movie’s rather different cultural context.

With the majority of extant prints comprising blurry, severely degraded copies of this U.S. release version, the film has subsequently languished in Public Domain hell (see this version for a representative example). As a result, it has failed to gain much traction even amongst die-hard classic horror buffs, whilst Vohrer’s 1961 version has meanwhile been (justifiably) enshrined as something of a cult classic.

It is only really with this year’s pristine restoration (see link above) in fact that ‘Dark Eyes of London’ has finally, over eighty years later, been given another chance to find its audience. If you’re still reading this far down the screen, I’d bet that you’re a potential member of that audience, and as such, I’d urge you to take the plunge.

Ok, so the sight of Bela Lugosi lurching around claustrophobic faux-London sets menacing blind people whilst some bantering cops close in on his tail probably won't exactly change your life, but for fans of pulp mystery fiction or classic horror cinema alike, it will at least prove an absolute hoot, if not something of a minor revelation. It seems strange to retrospectively crown such a marginal and unbeloved production as probably THE best British horror film of the pre-war era, but, such is the dearth of competition that I’m damned if I can think of a better one.

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(1)In the commentary track included on Network’s blu-ray, Kim Newman puts forward the theory that ‘The Dark Eyes of London’ influence on Jess Franco’s work goes far beyond merely repurposing the villain’s name for his own purposes. Newman suggests in fact that Franco scattered references and homages to the film throughout his filmography - an idea that, as a Franco fan, I find fascinating, but can’t immediately dredge up much evidence for. Certainly, there are similarities here to Franco’s script for ‘The Awful Dr Orloff’ (1962) - particularly re: cross-cutting between the villain’s crimes and the police investigation thereof - and Franco did indeed obsessively return to the same narrative framework across his subsequent career. But beyond that..? I’m not so sure. In an ideal world, I’d love to discuss this idea at length with the esteemed Mr Newman, perhaps over a few drinks and a slap-up supper, but I’d imagine he probably has more pressing matters to attend to (not least his new novel, which sounds great).

(2) As also observed by Newman & Jones, it is notable that ‘Dark Eyes..’ producer/co-writer John Argyle’s next project was another Wallace adaptation, ‘The Door With Seven Locks’ (aka ‘Chamber of Horrors’), which debuted in October 1940 with Leslie Banks, who had of course beautifully cribbed Lugosi’s style in ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ (1932), in the leading role. We may surmise therefore that that pesky war may perhaps have deprived us of the pleasures of an entire series of Lugosi-starring, UK-produced Wallace pictures.

Horror Express 2020 #7: Doctor Blood’s Coffin (Sidney J. Furie, 1961)

 Following a move to London at the dawn of the 1960s, the first project young Canadian director Sidney J. Furie got off the ground was the off-brand horror picture about the son of the local GP in a picturesque Cornish village performing Frankensteinian resurrection experiments in an abandoned tin mine.

Echoing the predicament faced by Furie himself to a certain extent, the film finds Dr Peter Blood (Keiron Moore) cheerily skipping back into the quiet life of his father Robert (Ian Hunter - not the Mott The Hoople guy, needless to say) after four years spent studying bio-chemistry in Vienna. 

Given that the re-appearance of Dr Blood Jr. neatly coincides with a rash of mysterious disappearances in the local area and repeated thefts of medical equipment from his father’s clinic, few viewers will be surprised to learn the it is the younger doctor’s ‘coffin’ we’ll soon be peering into, in spite Moore’s bland, leading man good looks.

There is a certain amount of promise here - not least the somewhat novel idea of wrapping up the romantic lead and the mad scientist within the same character. Unfortunately however, Nathan Juran’s script proves decidedly ropey throughout.

Full of excruciatingly poor dialogue (“Do you know that I had analysed the protein value of an acorn by the time I was six?”; “You want me to deny God and instead kneel down and worship a new God - science!”) and low level absurdities (why do a bunch of blokes who look as if they’ve never left the local area in their lives need to rely upon guy who’s just returned from four years overseas to lead them through the local caves?), Juran’s tale also, fatally, retains some long stretches of uneventful tedium in its first half, instantly consigning ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to the status of half-remembered ignominy within the Brit-horror canon.

Given that Juran was better known as the director of ‘The Deadly Mantis’ (1957) and ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ (1958), it makes sense that (according to Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, at least) his script originally took place on the other side of the Atlantic, in an Arizona mining town. Quite why Furie went to the trouble of importing and anglicising this unpromising potboiler though is another matter entirely.

The story’s American roots can perhaps be glimpsed through the actions of Kenneth J. Warren’s policeman character (it’s incongruous to see an English copper organising the occupants of the local pub into a posse on the slightest pretext, and yelling down the phone that he needs “twenty armed men” to form roadblocks), but for the most part it seems to have survived the Transatlantic crossing surprisingly well - which is a shame in a sense, as some out-of-place Americanisms might at least have livened things up a bit.

By the time he got around to directing ‘The Ipcress File’ a few years later, Furie had reinvented himself as a mod-ish, cinematic stylist, but unfortunately there’s little sign of that ambition here, as he approaches his craft with dogged, nailed-down-camera conventionality, seemingly imitating that static, old fashioned style which Hammer’s Terrence Fisher was often (rather unfairly) accused of perpetrating.

On the plus side however, the whole thing is at least handsomely realised despite its presumably low budget, utilising some absolutely splendid - very early '60s - colour photography to highlight the picture-postcard shooting locations. (I’m obliged to mention at this juncture that Nicholas Roeg served as camera operator under ‘Zulu’ DP Stephen Dade.) Meanwhile, the film also benefits from a propulsive, Hammer style orchestral score, courtesy of Buxton Orr and the ubiquitous Philip Martell, which helps considerably with the pacing issues.

Though the cast boasts no big names, a few of the supporting players will be familiar to more discerning British horror fans. You’ll recall the aforementioned Mr. Warren for instance for taking work which should rightly have gone to Milton Reid in the likes of ‘Demons of the Mind’ and The Creeping Flesh, whilst Fred Johnson - here playing a Hugh Griffiths-esque undertaker - also essayed “old geezer” roles in ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’, ‘City of the Dead’ and ‘Brides of Dracula’ amongst others.

Most significantly of course, our leading lady (indeed, the ONLY lady on the cast list) is Hazel Court. Playing widowed nurse / mad doctor love interest Linda, she brings a strong and radiant screen presence, but her noble efforts are probably best consigned to the “does her best with a thankless part” file.

The film’s horror content meanwhile is slow to make its presence felt, but, clearly inspired by Hammer’s success in the field of medical horror, there are a few bits of ‘Curse of Frankenstein’-inspired surgical grue, including some gruesome beating heart close-ups and so forth. This is all framed by Furie without a great deal of additional, atmospheric fuss, as if he believed that success within the genre was entirely predicated upon proximity to corpses and body parts.

This approach lends the film a rather morbid, unsavoury aura, despite its relative mildness, which reaches its apex during the conclusion, when, in a fit of spurned petulance, the younger Dr Blood digs up Hazel's dead husband, who's been mouldering in the grave for over a year, and actually sticks a new heart in what's left of him. Yuck!

As a horror film, I found ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to be entertaining enough in an undemanding sort of way, despite its myriad weaknesses - perfect for the Monday night on which I chose to watch it. What I enjoyed most of all about the film though was actually its extensive use of Cornish locations. 

[The evocatively named hamlet of Zennor, near St Ives, largely stood in for village, whilst the cliff-top ruins and abandoned mine workings were played by beauty spots near St Just and Botallack - a full breakdown and a wonderful set of ‘then and now’ photos can be enjoyed on the Reel Streets website.]

As well as looking absolutely beautiful in their own right under the nigh-on atomic glare of Dade and Roeg’s Eastman Colour lighting, the village exteriors provide a wealth of time capsule-worthy period detail, which I’m sure anyone who grew up in a similarly remote corner of the British Isles should be able to enjoy. (Athough this was of course considerably before my time, the Hillman touring cars, the curtain fabrics and Court’s costumes, even the occasional glimpses of the village shop, all provide a shudder of tribal recognition.)

Even during the film’s longueurs, there’s a certain pleasure to seeing familiar actors trudging about these out-of-the-way provincial locations, so rarely visited by British genre films, which is worth the entry price alone. (In this regard, I’m reminded of the even more mundane and uneventful ‘Night of the Big Heat’, filmed in Dorset and Buckinghamshire a few years later.)

In fact, I’m even go so far as to say that gazing upon the quiet cottages of Zennor circa 1961 gave me a real twinge of sadness, reminding me that I've not been able to make it out to the coast or the countryside at all this year. All the while, the memories of earlier days and older ways of life, fleeting captured on celluloid here as an incidental backdrop to the clumsy tale of Dr Blood gadding about with his chloroform and formaldehyde bothering Hazel Court, fade further out of sight with each turn of the season, buried deeper ‘neath the wheely-bins and people-carriers of the 21st century day-to-day.

Exploito All’Italiana / October Horrors 2019 # 2: Death Smiles on a Murderer (Aristide Massaccesi, 1973)

 ‘Death Smiles on a Murderer’ [a direct translation of the domestic release title, ‘La Morte Ha Sorriso All'Assassino’] is a 1973 Italian horror film so narcotic in its effect that I have now watched it three times – and read the booklet, and listened to the audio commentary – and I still have no idea what happens in it.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I don’t understand the plot” (that’s only to be expected), I mean - I actually remember very little about the nature and order of the events which are portrayed on screen.

Quite an achievement for gifted cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, here making the first and only proper feature film he would direct under his birth name before taking on the better known (nay notorious) alias of Joe D’Amato.

An unstable melange of gothic horror and giallo tropes with some additional envelope-pushing gore, ‘Death Smiles..’ lingers in my mind rather like a frustrating, three-quarters forgotten dream – a formless haze of pink cheeks and red lips, huge, dewy eyes, creased silk sheets and hyper-real green grass photographed in crisp, bright sun-light; of spatially disorientating extreme close-ups, looming low angle shots, languorous palacio exteriors, psyched out fish-eye madness, occasional bursts of garish blood-letting and an overriding feeling of claustrophobic immobility and confusion.

Further suffocating my rational senses meanwhile is Berto Pisano’s exquisitely languorous, melancholic main theme, which plays more or less constantly throughout, and which sounds like the accompaniment to a ballerina suffering from tuberculosis expiring during her final dance and witnessing the dust of her bones reforming itself into the shape of a gliding, celestial swan.

Though occasionally interspersed with the obligatory searing fuzz guitar stings and hideously jaunty ballroom dancing music, this remarkable melody tunnels its way into the viewer’s brain across the course of the film like a flower-bearing, funereally-garbed earwig, and indeed, the double LP soundtrack release which was recently issued alongside Arrow’s blu-ray upgrade of the film contains about 156 variations on it, all equally wonderful.

Trying to piece anything together beyond that feels like dipping into some deep and unsavoury region of the unconscious mind, but if I recall correctly, things might get underway with ubiquitous blond-mopped wild man Luciano Rossi, who is even more wild than usual here, playing a character who I think is the unhinged brother of a woman who may or may not have been murdered by the residents of the palacio, so he is running around like a madman and suchlike.

Then I think we switch to a flashback, or flashforward, or something, bringing us to a bit of business cribbed from LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (or perhaps indirectly from Hammer’s ‘The Vampire Lovers’), in which a young blond girl in a black and red cloak (Ewa Aulin) is rescued from a coach accident, and invited into the nearby palace to recover.

Disconcertingly, Klaus Kinski plays the doctor overseeing her recovery, and, when no one is looking, he pulls out a big needle and sticks it directly into her eyeball (I certainly remember that bit). Kinski, it soon transpires, is actually a Frankensteinian mad scientist, and before long he’s down in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine, in the finest tradition of such characters.

There is some kind of sub-plot about an ancient Inca medallion(!?), which Ewa seems to have brought with her, and which Kinski declares contains the secrets of life and death within it, or something. So, he goes to work trying to reanimate a subject on his operating table, but sadly he doesn’t get very far with this, as he is promptly killed – possibly by Rossi, or possibly by his creature… or perhaps Rossi IS his creature, I really don’t remember – but either way, this regrettably spells the end of both the mad science plotline and the thing with the medallion, which I don’t think is ever mentioned again. Au revoir Klaus!

Meanwhile, we spend loads of time with the rich occupants of the palace, characters who feel so ephemeral that I’m still not really sure who they are. Are the man and woman husband and wife, or brother and sister? And, does it even MATTER in a movie like this? Inevitably, the man (Segio Doria) gradually falls in love with Aulin’s character, who, vaguely following the ‘Carmilla’ blueprint, also seduces the woman (Angela Bo) too. I mean, you’d think I’d remember THAT scene at least, but no dice.

I think Aulin is probably a ghost who is seducing these folks in order to take revenge upon them after they murdered her in an earlier time period, but I’m not entirely sure about that. There is also some stuff with a maid, who is being haunted and/or menaced by Rossi, who is possibly also a ghost, or just a bad memory?

At one point, Giacomo Rossi Stuart (whom you’ll recall as the male lead in ‘Kill Baby Kill!’, alongside a wealth of other Italian genre credits) turns up, playing Doria’s brother or father or something, but as their characters look fairly similar and neither of them have any actual personality traits, it kind of just seems as if the ‘man’ character has split in two.

At another point, the maid character flees the palace in terror, and gets her face blasted off with a shotgun, in full on blood-drenched papier-mâché Eastman colour glory. Again, I remember that bit!

Then there’s some stuff with Ewa getting bricked up behind a wall, Poe-style, a lot of torch-lit running around in the catacombs, and, towards the end, Rossi gets his eyeballs torn out by an enraged cat (a scene memorably depicted on the film’s visceral Italian poster design).

And there my friends, my recollection ends.

Describing a film as a “mood piece” usually implies that it will slow and stately, but ‘Death Smiles..’ is quite the opposite – indeed, Massaccesi’s directorial approach here is fairly deranged, cutting relentlessly between exhausting close-ups of over-wrought, rose-cheeked faces expressing mad emotions we’ve either forgotten the significance of or never understood in the first place, and throwing in every kind of disorientating photographic effect he can think of along the way, as if convinced that he was still essentially a cameraman, treating the film as a head-spinning show-reel to try to impress potential employers.

Perhaps ‘Death Smiles..’ does actually anticipate later Joe D’Amato horror films to a certain extent, in the sense that it intersperses long, languid passages of nothing-in-particular with startling moments of grotesque, rub-yr-nose-in-it gore, and also in the way in which the whole feels imbued with an inexplicable aura of diseased wrong-ness, but from my own POV, I certainly found this one much livelier and more watchable than the likes of ‘Anthropophagous’ (1980) and ‘Absurd’ (1981).

Though much of what transpires within it may be pretty mystifying, it’s too loud and visually restless for even its most meandering moments to be written off as “filler”, unlike D’Amato’s later films, in which he often seemed to be killing time waiting for the next outrageous incident to occur. By contrast, it feels as if he is always trying to put SOMETHING worthwhile on the screen here, even if the question of what exactly that ‘something’ was supposed to be often hovers unanswered like a bluebottle above a sugar bowl.

Despite having apparently been driven to watch it three times, I’m not even really sure whether or not a would consider this a good film. I can’t really think of a conventional measure by which it may be certified as such, and, even when assessed using the less rigorous criteria of a ‘70s Erotic Castle Movie, the film’s anxious, volcanic instability, bright, weirdly hyper-real photography and distracting sado-gore moments all mitigate against the kind of languorous, psychotropic sensuality I favour in such ventures.

But nonetheless, I seem to keep watching it, so I suppose I must enjoy it? I’m sure I’ll find cause to watch it again too, trying again to penetrate its secrets. And each time, I know I’ll feel more and more like William Hurt in ‘Altered States’, descending into his isolation tank to plumb the primordial depths of consciousness… who knows, maybe I’ll eventually turn into Luciano Rossi and go on a rampage in the zoo or something? Watch this space.

Blood Island Journal # 4: The Blood Drinkers (Gerardo de Leon, 1964)

Previously in this hastily scribbled and mysteriously stained journal, we’ve raised the question of what exactly happened vis-a-vis the career of Filipino horror auteur Gerard de Leon in the interim between the sombre professionalism of 1959’s Terror is a Man and the outrageous Tiki bar camp of 1968’s Brides of Blood. 1964’s ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is the answer, and I’m happy to report that it is a very satisfactory answer indeed.

Originally filmed in the Tagalog language under the slightly more poetic title ‘Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi’ [“Blood is the Colour of the Night”] and re-cut and re-dubbed for U.S. audiences shortly thereafter, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ turns out in fact to be an under-appreciated masterwork of world-wide weird gothic cinema – a uniquely oneiric excursion into monster movie dream-space, in which ‘logic’ and ‘narrative’ are reduced to distant, blurry figures waving vainly from the far-off hills, whilst de Leon instead conjures a pungent, indelible atmosphere that at various points bears comparison to the work of Jean Rollin, José Mojica Marins, and the productions of Abel Salazar’s Cinematográfica ABSA in Mexico.

So, yes, basically what I’m saying is, if you were to boil down all of your old Mondo Macabro DVDs into a magic potion, drinking it would probably produce a vision rather like ‘The Blood Drinkers’. I hope I’m not over-selling it, but seriously folks, this is great stuff.

One thing that immediately differentiates ‘The Blood Drinkers’ from the Blood Island movies is the lack of American involvement on the production side. Both de Leon’s regular collaborator Eddie Romero and U.S. co-producer Kane Lynn are notably absent from the credits, with future action-exploitation kingpin Cirio H. Santiago instead acting as sole producer.

As noted, the film was shot in Tagalog, presumably with the expectation that a local audience might actually want to watch it, and – joy of joys – it features no slumming American b-movie actors in garish short-sleeved shirts uncomfortably wiping sweat from their brows. (“It’s nice to know the Filipinos can make a monster movie without John Ashley,” cracked Michael Weldon in his Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film.)

This lack of foreign investment carries with it an accompanying lack of budgetary resources which, strangely, actually works in the film’s favour in some respects. Most notably, a shortage of colour film stock led to the majority of the film being shot in black and white, heavily tinted in post-production with a wild array of hues (red, blue, purple, and everything in between) to give the illusion of colour – a technique which I don’t think had been used this extensively since the silent era.

Although this could easily have been seen at the time as a cheap, misleading gimmick, in retrospect the decision to use tinted B&W was inspired. It lends ‘The Blood Drinkers’ a ‘feel’ that is entirely unique within ‘60s horror, and, whereas the film’s few genuine colour sequences (used to differentiate scenes of ‘normal’, everyday life) look blurry and drab, as if shot with sub-par, bin-salvaged stock, the quality of the black & white photography (courtesy of veteran Filipino DP Felipe Sacdalan) is frequently magnificent.

The antiquated aura created by the tinting process is furthered when, straight out of the credits (blaring, ‘40s Universal style music needle-dropped over crude, blood-dripping typography – very Coffin Joe), we see an extremely ornate Victorian funeral carriage (where on earth did they find one of those in Manilla?!) rolling down an uneven country road, in shots that look as if they could have come straight from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’… until that is, we see a (presumably contemporary) black-finned American sedan following close behind.

If the temporal dissonance created by this seems strange, it’s as nothing compared to the raw weirdness generated by the crew who eventually disembark from these vehicles, after they’ve passed through the spiked iron gates of the obligatory crumbling, colonial-era mansion.

I may not have been very impressed by Ronald Remy as the Mad Doctor of Blood Island, but rewind a few years and he’s absolutely fantastic here as Dr Marco (note THAT surname), our resident vampire overlord. (Yes, the vampire is also a scientist, got a problem with that?)

Bearing a passing resemblance to a shaven-headed Marlon Brando (imagine if he’d played Colonel Kurtz ten years earlier in life and you’ll get the general idea), Remy projects a sinister and imposing screen presence, communicating with his underlings using dramatic, sweeping hand gestures, and modelling a fetching pair of futuristic, wraparound shades alongside his regulation opera cape and crumpled evening dress.

Clearly a “belt and braces” kind of guy when it comes to assistants, Dr Marco employs the services of both a capering dwarf and a snaggle-toothed hunchback, and he is also accompanied by an impossibly beautiful young woman, who also sports shades and, in this opening scene, wears a glistening snake-skin dress. Played by Eva Montes and credited as ‘Tanya, the Vampire Bride’ on IMDB, this woman’s taciturn, unexplained presence - reminiscent of Vulnavia in the Dr. Phibes movies - adds greatly to the film’s eerie atmos, not to mention its subliminal erotic charge.

Completing this uncanny procession is a middle-aged lady in a heavy black shawl – she turns out to be the aristocratic mother of the deceased – and of course, the occupant of the hearse herself: the perfectly preserved body of the woman who turns out to be Dr Marco’s Great Love.

Now, personally I would have thought physical death was more or less compulsory for the romantic partner of a vampire, so I’m not sure what the assembled weirdos are all so upset about, but hey, I don’t write these things. Anyway, Dr Marco seems determined to revive his beloved – “in all other matters I have risen above human feelings, but I MUST save Katerina,” he declares at one point. So, before you know it, she is laid out on the slab in the mansion’s cramped chapel of rest, hooked up to his ramshackle array of whirring mad scientist machinery (it mostly looks like WWII-era radio equipment?).

In order to save Katerina, the Doctor announces, he will need to claim the still-beating heart of her estranged sister, who lives down in the village, blissfully unaware of all this. Said sister turns out to be our soon-to-be-long-suffering heroine Charita (Amalia Fuentes, who naturally also plays Katerina with the aid of an unflattering blond wig), and the vampiric cohort begin their plans for her by promptly murdering the elderly adoptive parents to whom Charita’s mother abandoned her twenty years earlier. Nasty.

At the funeral, Chairta’s birth mother (posing as her aunt) basically tells her, “ok, you must come and live with me now”, and her surviving male relative and the local priest are both like, “yeah, I guess that’s probably the best thing to do here” – but Charita herself is unsure. In particular, she is anxious about the fact that she and her deceased parents seemed to be operating some kind of proto-Air B&B / guesthouse type arrangement, and that some guests – Victor (handsome young Eddie Fernandez) and his two sisters – have arrived from the city in a shiny red convertible, unaware of their hostess’s travails.

Thankfully though, Victor and the girls are nice folks, so they understand that Charita might not have had a chance to make the beds and so on - and indeed, they turn out to be happy to help her out in her fight against the vampire and his weird minions, which is super lovely of them.(1)

And…. that’s about all we’re getting here in terms of plot, which is fine by me. The remainder of the film basically consists of a long series of nocturnal stalkings, random vampiric encounters, eerie, fog-shrouded mesmerism and stern lectures on vampire lore, all of which tend to blur into one, in the best possible way.

In a sense, this mirrors the kind of “characters wandering around bumping into each other” stuff that blights the middle acts of the Blood Island films, but the superior artistry and atmosphere of ‘The Blood Drinkers’ manages to transform this directionless drift into a far more pleasing sensation of woozy, nightmarish delirium, comparable to that subsequently perfected in Europe by the ‘Erotic Castle Movies’ of the early 1970s.

In one particularly startling ‘primal scene’, Charita is awakened in night, only to find the ravenous zombified corpses of her recently buried parents stomping toward her in their grave-clothes. They proceed to man-handle her and attempt to chew her neck with their newly acquired fangs, until Dr Marco materialises out of the darkness and begins flagellating his badly behave undead minions with a giant bull-whip! Holy hell.

Elsewhere, Tanya and Katerina (who now seems to be wandering around under her own steam after drinking some blood, so I’m not sure where that leaves the plot…?) emerge from massive banks of fog (seriously, this film goes toe-to-toe with 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’ for sheer quantity of dry ice), diaphanous gowns swirling as they sl-o-o-w-l-y approach their hypnotised victims, Theremin blaring wildly on the soundtrack. It is all absolutely marvellous.

Until I watched ‘The Blood Drinkers’, I was unaware that the concept of “too much theremin” was one that I would ever need to acknowledge in waking life, but verily, this film’s soundtrack (music “directed” by Tito Arevalo, although I don’t know whether any cues were actually recorded specifically for the movie) has TOO MUCH THEREMIN.

Meanwhile, Victor gets stuck into some creditable punch ups with the hunchback and the dwarf, and Dr Marco calls upon the services of BASRA, seemingly some kind of supernatural bat spirit thing which hovers over him in the form of an adorable flappy-winged bat puppet.

Apparently this whole Basra business was the invention of the film’s American distributors at Hemisphere Pictures, who, whilst recutting the film for the U.S. market, decided that they liked a few brief close up shots of the bat so much, they determined to repeat them about twenty times over the course of the film, giving it a name, and inserting accompanying reaction shots of Ronald Remy singing its praises!

A bastardisation of de Leon’s original film? No doubt, but with the director’s initial Tagalog cut apparently lost to the ages (most likely a victim of vintage Filipino cinema’s catastrophically low survival rate), we’re stuck with Hemisphere’s version, and personally I’m more than happy to accept Basra and his repetitious antics as yet another loopy element crammed into an already rich smorgasbord of demented horror movie imagery. In fact, I really love the little fella. Look at him go!

“Remember my dear, the colour is blood red. Basra is calling, you must discard all other thoughts... you shall utter no word without the permission of BASRA. Remember Basra is your master, Basra is watching!”

As is clearly signalled by the fact that our head vampire is also a scientist (who also seems to venerate some kind of god-bat), ‘The Blood Drinkers’ take on the whole “science vs religion” thing as regards vampirism is a bit confused, to say the least.

At one point, the good guys consult the local priest (voiced in the English dub by your friend and mine, Mr Vic Diaz, who also provides the film’s totally redundant voiceover narration). “Vampires, vampires, ah – here we are,” the priest mutters as he runs his finger down the index of his Big Black Book of Evil (every clergyman should have one), and, facts suitably checked, proceeds to lay down the lore.

Interestingly, the priest insists that stakes plunged into the hearts of the undead must be wooden, because, and I quote, “the mysterious germ, the bacillis vampiris, creates in the body of the vampire a fluid which is similar in chemical composition to that of glue”. This means that they cannot be harmed by bullets, but, “wood turns the glue into water”. Curious stuff indeed.

Subsequently, the priest also clarifies that, “vampires are not afraid of the cross, it is the icon’s reflection that they really fear; they're afraid of the glare of the light”, so, uh… ok, bearing in mind that this movie was probably dubbed into English on a pretty tight deadline, I’m just going to leave that there for more pedantic souls than myself to unpack.

Despite these pseudo-scientific musings however, the priest soon pulls himself together and remembers who’s paying his wages, telling Charita, “there is something more valuable than bullets or wooden stakes, and that is... prayer and faith my child!”

Elsewhere, the Catholic background of Filipino culture makes itself strongly felt, as de Leon fills his mise en scene with crosses, crucifixes, rosary beads and chintzy porcelain icons of one kind or another, and, as things progress, the film seems to follow the lead of its resident spiritual advisor by doubling down on the more church-y side of the equation.

Following a midnight mass and ad-hoc exorcism session at the high altar, the power of our heroes’ collective prayer seems to instigate an extraordinary sequence in which Dr Marco and Katerina awake, apparently freed from their vampiric curse, and emerge into the world of full colour, walking hand in hand through an over-saturated, sun-dappled rose garden. An intoxicating, weirdly moving, non-sequitur, this scene feels almost like a lost fragment from a ‘40s Powell & Pressburger film, encouraging us to feel a certain empathy for the austere romantic dignity displayed by the previously monstrous Dr Marco.

It also feels very much like it should be an ending, but, there’s still twenty minutes left on the clock so, inevitably, things don’t work out for the immortal lovers, and we’re soon back in the blood red netherworld of Basra and Gordo the hunchback for a final good vs evil showdown, including the extraordinary sight of the priest, bible in hand, leading a cross and torch bearing procession of robed church-goers, who square off in the graveyard against Dr Marco’s ever-growing army of the undead. (So, not much room for ambiguity there vis-a-vis the film’s religious intent!)

As more open-minded vintage horror fans will be well aware, the explosion of regional gothic horror production which spread across the world in the wake of Hammer’s ‘Dracula’ (and, to a lesser extent, AIP’s Poe cycle) in the 1960s was a rare and wonderful thing to behold. The progress of this wave can literally be traced border to border across the entire globe, but, within the further reaches of the cycle, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is probably the best explicitly Western-influenced ‘60s gothic horror film I’ve ever seen from an Asian country - a heavily qualified boast perhaps, but an impressive one nonetheless.

In view of the presumably minimal resources available to them, the film stands as an extraordinary achievement on the part of de Leon and his collaborators. Over half a century later, it stands out for its beautiful photography, intelligent and emotionally engaged direction and wildly imaginative production design, as well as for its richly pungent atmospherics and – die-hard gothic horror viewers should take particular note of this final point – for its *pacing*.

Yes, within the context of its oft-plodding genre, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ moves like a rocket, with almost non-stop spooky action, and relatively little dialogue-based down-time. Imagine - a ‘60s gothic horror without any stuffy scenes in which people sit around an oversized dining table making awkward small talk, and get shown to their rooms because they must be tired from their long journey etc. Incredible though it may seem, Gerardo de Leon proved it was possible. Praise the lord, or Basra, or whoever!

----

(1) Checking out Eddie Fernandez’s IMDB profile reveals a whole secret history of (now presumably lost) Filipino crime movies and spy adventures, informing us that he appeared “in the title role” of ‘Johnny Oro: Kaaway ng Krimen’, ‘Hong Kong 999’, ‘Triggerman’, ‘Wanted: Johnny L’ and ‘The Lucky 9 Commandos’, amongst others. Oh, for a time machine, and the necessary funding to establish a temperature-controlled film preservation facility in Manila circa 1966, etc.

Blood Island Journal # 3: Mad Doctor of Blood Island (Gerado de Leon & Eddie Romero, 1969)

Back on Blood Island a year or so after all that business with the sludge monster and the sacrificial virgins, and things actually seem to have changed quite a bit for this non-continuous quasi-sequel.

For one thing, the island itself seems a bit more developed than it was the last time around. The islanders now enjoy the benefit of some paved roads, a pony and trap and at least one electric generator. Sadly, there are far fewer totem poles, but the main village now boasts a “government house”, whatever that is.

For another thing, the outrageous colour palette of the previous picture has been toned down, with the exotica / tiki bar vibes scaled back slightly (perhaps to a “7”, down from “10”), lending a marginally more naturalistic feel to proceedings that reflects the film’s curiously morose, down-beat emotional timbre. Despite the promise of that irresistible title (what’s the matter doc, Market Street not good enough for ya anymore?), it looks as if shit’s about to get real on the ol’ Isla de Sangre.

Which, I must confess, is a development that is not entirely to my liking. Watching ‘Mad Doctor..’ for the first time, I found myself missing the goofy charm and over-saturated excesses of ‘Brides..’. Though a “dark and brooding” approach can often work well for Filipino horror (look no further than Terror is a Man for a perfect example), I have my doubts re: how far it can really go when it comes to distracting our attention from the meandering pacing and slapdash production values inherent to these late ‘60s Hemisphere horrors.

Thankfully however, Romero and de Leon at least came up with a fool-proof strategy to help keep the mid-west drive-in crowds in their seats – namely, cranking up the gore and sleaze to what at the time must have seemed fairly preposterous levels.

This intent is clearly signalled by one of the most attention-grabbing pre-credits sequences this side of Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’, in which we see an anonymous, stark naked Filipino girl fleeing through the (rather scrubby looking) jungle, before getting bloodily mauled by a hairy-handed green zombie / monster. Yikes!

Following this unambiguous statement of intent (surely the exploitation movie equivalent of a hand-on-heart oath of allegiance?) however, we’re soon back to the grind of PLOT and TALKING, as a new shipment of outsiders approach the torrid coast of Blood Island – but hey, at least a wealth of “so, why are we going to this island again?” type expository chat allows us to clearly establish who’s who this time around.

This is just as well, because, as seems to have become a trademark of Eddie Romero’s films in particular, ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ has, frankly, too many characters.

Shipping in on the boat, we firstly have an American couple (John Ashley and Angelique Pettyjohn) who have come in search of Angelique’s estranged father. I’m not sure if the reasoning behind the father’s presence on Blood Island is ever made clear, but he seems rather like one of those “trading company agent” type characters found in colonial-era South Seas tales. He’s certainly a sweat-drenched, alcoholic misanthrope who seems to have been driven mad by the malarial climate, at any rate.

Played by one Tony Edmunds (in his only screen role), he initially rejects the opportunity to re-establish a relationship with his daughter (presumably because it would upset his busy schedule of sprawling around in a state of fever-ish dissolution). (1)

Also on the boat is an alternative Filipino protagonist, Carlo, played by Ronaldo Valdez. Having been raised on the island, he is heading back there to track down his mother (played by veteran Pinoy character actress Tita Muñoz), after receiving the news that his father has died. *She* seems be ensconced as the live-in servant and lover of one Dr Lorca (Ronald Remy, star of Hemisphere’s earlier ‘The Blood Drinkers’ (1964)).

As you might well imagine, this guy is the “Mad Doctor” of the title, although disappointingly he never really gets very “mad” here, in the usual horror movie sense of the term. In fact, he remains disconcertingly chilled out through most of picture, regarding the assorted hullaballoo caused by his errant experiments with a sense of expressionless neutrality. Whether Remy was heroically resisting the urge to over-act (going instead for “cold scientific distance”), or simply lacked the necessary charisma for the role, is largely a moot point however, and will likely depend on your level of sympathy for the production.

In addition this lot meanwhile, we also have another significant character, Marla (Alicia Alonzo), an island girl who seems like a twisted and vengeful variation of the upstanding Alam from ‘Brides..’. A childhood playmate of Carlo, she now seems fixated both on seducing him, and on taking revenge against Dr Lorca for the death of her lover, Carlo's late father.

So, yes – if you’re thinking that this seems like an awful lot of human drama to try to cram into a movie that is basically being sold on the promise of seeing naked girls being torn apart by a slimy green monster, you have a point.

Some commentators have suggested that the introduction of a parallel storyline involving Filipino characters could have been an attempt to broaden the film’s appeal for local audiences, but actually this seems doubtful. ‘Mad Doctor..’, like its predecessors, was shot in English, with the majority of funds coming from overseas, and - insofar as I’m aware – the possibility of a theatrical release in The Philippines was never even considered.

Nonetheless, it’s certainly nice to see that the filmmakers were confident enough by this stage to devote a significant portion of screen time to characters of their own nationality, and it is interesting to note that this coincides with the introduction of a more pervasive sense of melancholy than was present in the old fashioned, “white folks getting into trouble in the jungle” tales that characterised the preceding Blood Island films.

For all the monsters and bloodthirsty japes, just about everyone in ‘Mad Doctor..’ is basically deeply unhappy, with most of the characters struggling with grief or loss in one form or another. The arched eyebrow “humour” that dominated dialogue exchanges in ‘Brides..’ has largely vanished, whilst the Carlo / Dr Lorca storyline incorporates a queasy undertone of incestuous desire which culminates in a handful of uncomfortably harrowing, taboo-skirting scenes in the film’s final act

If all this sounds pretty intriguing on paper however, I wish I could report that it was a bit more enjoyable on celluloid. Unfortunately, the means by which Romero and de Leon choose to unpack these complex character relationships – think long stretches of bland, monotone dialogue and repetitive shot / reverse shot editing patterns – soon poses a challenge both to viewers’ attention spans, and potentially their very wakefulness.

Never fear though, because the monster is here, and, if he’s not even remotely as much fun as ‘Brides of Blood’s world-beating sludge-beast, he certainly scores a few points in terms of sheer unpleasantness.

This time around, the film’s wacky, quasi-scientific premise involves Dr Lorca’s technique for reviving / extending animal life through the direct injection of chlorophyll - which results, inevitably, in the creation of one or more shambling, psychopathic moss-zombies.

Half-man, half-cactus, is the general idea here I suppose, and, though fairly laughable from a make-up POV, the green paint-splattered, paper-mache headed menace that periodically emerges to terrorise Blood Island nonetheless has a genuinely icky feel to it that puts me in mind of the muesli-faced fiends found in second string Italian zombie movies of the early 1980s. This comparison remains pertinent with regard to what the creature actually does too; boy, he sure goes for it!

Succumbing to the temptations of the cartoonish, full strength gore approach inaugurated earlier in the decade by Herschell Gordon Lewis, de Leon and Romero cheerfully employ a range of special effects that make Lewis seem like a champion of gritty surgical realism by comparison, transforming ‘Mad Doctor..’s monster attack scenes into a ludicrous rampage of flying mannequin limbs, screaming, blood-splattered naked people and shock zooms into piles of steaming entrails, sure to leave any seasoned connoisseur of trash cinema beside themselves with delight.

Considerably less delightful for most viewers however will be the rather unique “in-camera effect” that is utilised throughout the film’s horror sequences. Basically, this consists of the camera operator relentlessly cranking the zoom function in and out again, in time with some pulsing rhythm of his own devising, much in the manner of a child fooling around with a video camera for the first time at a family picnic.

Personally, I found this gimmick absolutely infuriating. It makes many of the film’s livelier scenes feel disorientating and difficult to follow, and some potentially great visuals are ruined forever by the murky motion blurring which results. Individual tolerance may vary however, and I can at least appreciate the fact that enjoyment of this technique is largely a matter of context.

Say what you will about the folks behind Hemisphere, but they certainly knew their market, and I can well imagine that, in a Saturday afternoon matinee full of screaming kids, having this pulsating, zoom-y weirdness kick in whenever the monster is nearby must have proved very effective. For your humble correspondent however, sitting alone beside the blu-ray player half a century later in earnest contemplation of a cinematic text (god help me)… not so much. (2)

Unfortunately, a further – significant - obstacle for most 21st century viewers attempting to enjoy ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ hoves into view about halfway through, when the filmmakers decide to include a short, but still extremely unpleasant, display of real life animal cruelty.

Regrettably, the ill treatment of animals is an aspect of Filipino culture that can often be seen creeping into the nation’s genre cinema, but there can be no cultural justification for the reprehensible conduct we see here, as some unfortunate pigs and goats are tied down and stabbed as part of a staged “tribal ritual”.

Thankfully, this footage is mercifully brief (comprising only a few seconds of screen time), but it’s still pretty difficult to stomach, so – viewer discretion (and/or a speedy hand on the remote control) is advised.

Moving swiftly on however, ‘Mad Doctor..’s non-zoom-damaged, non-animal slaughtering segments can at least boast a few other attractions that may (or may not) make the whole thing worth ploughing through, including, but not limited to:

1. Loads of lascivious, erotic dancing from the island’s more shapely young residents (I suppose the extended dance party finale of ‘Brides of Blood’ must have gone down well with audiences).

2. The spiriting sight of the gum-chewing, slightly Southern accented John Ashley unleashing some gone-to-seed white guy kung fu as he scatters spear-wielding guards like nine-pins, as well as rocking an incongruous powder blue suit and wing-tip collar to complement his kiss-curled, Ricky Nelson-type looks.

3. The unique presence of Angelique Pettyjohn, an unconventional leading lady whose emergence from bed when disturbed by a moss-zombie banging at her door (a scene coincidentally blessed with some splendid, Bava-esque gel lighting) must have lingered long in many adolescent imaginations. Gamely gallivanting around Blood Island in a frilly pink mini-dress being menaced by zombies, snakes, surly tribesmen and the like (Tito Arevalo’s bombastic scoring gives equal weight to all of these potential threats), she’s a great screamer who leads me to want to use the word “lascivious” twice in the space of a few paragraphs. (3)

Having got that out of the way, I’d like to move things on to a brief discussion of this film’s assorted promotional ballyhoo – chiefly dreamed up by Hemisphere marketing consultant and later Independent International Pictures mogul Sam Sherman – which is a lot of fun, and must have played a significant role in ensuring that ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ remains probably the most infamous and fondly remembered of the “blood island” films, despite being arguably the weakest instalment in the series, in purely cinematic terms.

Shot on spec by Romero using Caucasian teenagers apparently rounded up from the domestic quarter of the nearest U.S. military base, the film’s “green blood” prologue, in which patrons are encouraged to drink whatever hideous fluorescent potion the distributors managed to hand out whilst reciting the “Oath of Green Blood” is an absolute hoot, whilst the film’s demented trailer – inexplicably featuring a voiceover performed by legendary underground theatre performer and New York eccentric Brother Theodore – is an absolute classic too.

For all this attention-grabbing tomfoolery however, ‘Mad Doctor..’ for the most part remains a rather grim, potentially headache-inducing trudge of a viewing experience. Despite the polystyrene walled dungeon finale and occasional moments of classical gothic atmos in fact, the film in retrospect seems interesting for the way in which it moves beyond the campy, ‘40s-derived template that still defined most low budget horror films of the late ‘60s.

Instead, the dour pessimism and envelope-pushing content lurking behind the garish marketing materials makes the feel – at a push - somewhat more like a precursor to the more explicit and downbeat horror films that would begin to emerge from both Europe and the USA during the 1970s. Certainly, if the purpose of a horror film is to be horrible, ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ succeeds about as well its production circumstance could have allowed, providing enough unsavoury content to warp the minds of monster kids and morality campaigners alike. Apparently it managed to fly under the radar of the latter group however, and must have proved sufficiently popular with the former that Dr Lorca returned, less than a year later, in ‘Beast of Blood’. Sanity allowing, I’ll be landing once again on the golden sands of Blood Island soon to bring you the low down on that one. God help us all.

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(1) As an aside, I found it interesting that the “alcoholic dad” character is identified by the islanders as “Mr. Willard” – presumably a nod to Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, which is curious, given that both Eddie Romero and John Ashley worked behind the scenes on the Filipino shoot for ‘Apocalypse Now’ a few years later.

(2) Yes, in case you were wondering, anecdotal evidence suggests that these movies were regularly screened to pre-teen crowds throughout the USA, with any trims for gore and nudity presumably at the mercy of the theatre manager’s scissors. What a great time to have been alive!

(3) At this point, I think we are duty-bound to mention Pettyjohn’s later claim that she and John Ashley were doing the deed for real during their brief love scene in ‘Mad Doctor..’. Though naturally nothing to support this assertion survives on screen, it’s certainly a pretty steamy sequence, and, given that Pettyjohn went on to become one of the few ‘legitimate’ actresses to move into hardcore porn during the ‘70s whilst Ashley is widely remembered as an irrepressible horndog, such shenanigans don’t seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility.