Horror Express: The Vampire’s Ghost (Lesley Selander, 1945)

I had a lot of fun with Lesley Selander’s The Catman of Paris earlier this month, so thought I’d make some time (only 58 minutes required) to check in on the other b-horror he directed for Republic Pictures in the mid ‘40s.

As with ‘Catman..’, the title is intriguingly silly, betraying an attempt to hang onto the coattails of Universal’s waning horror output (they’d released both ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’ and ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’ in the proceeding years), but... mixed results here, I'd say.

From the outset, ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ proves to be a rather inert and talky affair, set amid the confines of a pokey and generally uninspiring backlot version of darkest Africa, wherein a largely undistinguished cast of white colonial types trudge through their allotted paces with no great surfeit of enthusiasm.

On the plus side though, it sure has some interesting notions buried within it.

Though he’s certainly no ghost, our resident vampire here turns out to be a former member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, who - perhaps uniquely in the annals of cinematic vampirism - now finds himself running a gin joint in a fictional central African state, fleecing sailors in dice games and ruing the weary burden of his immortal condition, like some cut-price, blood-drinking Rick Blaine.

An odd fit for the vampire role, John Abbott initially looks more like the kind of guy you’d cast as an accountant or an elevator operator. But, he has a deep, sonorous voice and Peter Lorre-worthy bug-eyes, and ultmately leans into his unusual characterisation very well.

There’s an absolutely sublime scene for instance where, after being wounded by a spear whilst out on ‘safari’, Abbott uses his powers of mental persuasion to command the film’s hero (Charles Gordon) to carry him to the summit of a nearby mountain, where he luxuriates in the healing light of the full moon, his head resting on the precious Elizabethan box containing the grave soil of his original resting place, presented to him by the Queen after the Armada. Great stuff.

At first, it seems as if the vampire is going to be characterised as a variation on the Wandering Jew/Wolfman archetype - condemned to walk the earth for all eternity whilst seeking an escape from his supernatural affliction, and trying to warn the other characters away from him, lest they fall victim to his curse.

Later on though, he seems to have lost this benevolent streak, and, having given fair warning, gets straight on with the business of dominating Gordon’s mind, reducing him to a brain-dead slave, whilst he claims the leading lady (Peggy Stewart) for himself, whisking her off to the remote, abandoned temple of a supposed “death cult”, where, inexplicably in view of the film’s geography, a four-armed Hindu idol awaits them. (I liked the way Abbott plays all this with  “another day, another dollar” resignation, as though he’s been through it all a hundred times before.)

Many of these interesting and unconventional story elements can presumably be traced back to legendary screenwriter and SF pioneer Leigh Brackett, who takes co-writer and original story credits here, the same year she worked for Howard Hawks on ‘The Big Sleep’. And, as I can’t locate any additional background on her involvement with this film... that’s about all I have to say about that.

Stylistically meanwhile, the movie seems to draw heavily from Val Lewton’s then-recent series of b-horror successes at RKO, even directly mimicking ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ (1943) during scenes in which the white folks sit nervously in their bamboo-shaded bungalows, muttering darkly about the jungle drums affecting the productivity of the natives down at the ol’ plantation and so on, whilst the presentation of the vampire’s killings seems to echo both ‘The Leopard Man’ (1943) and ‘Cat People’ (1942) in places.

Unfortunately though, Selander proves unable to muster even a fraction of the atmosphere Jacques Tourneur brought to those projects - largely through no fault of his own, I’m assuming, as a “first take, best take” policy clearly seems to have been in operation, whilst even the film’s best ‘horror’ moment (the vampire’s murder of the bar's sultry dancing girl Adele Mara, in a shadowed bedroom with the incessant pounding of the drums as a backdrop) is subjected to a disappointing early fade.

As ever with movies like this, I’m also obliged to note that events play out in what is very much the boilerplate “white man’s Africa” of the era’s pulp magazines and Jungle Jim serials. So, even if it can’t quite summon up the energy to be overtly racist about it, if you’re looking for sympathetic portrayals of indigenous African characters or veiled commentary on the vampiric nature of colonialism or somesuch, well, I’m afraid you won’t find it here, partner.

As usual with these things, the sight of African-American actors forced to play benign, half-witted tribespeople gabbling away in pidgin English also rather grates, especially in view of the film’s failure to conjure any of the gravitas or sense of place which Tourneur, or even Victor Halperin (‘White Zombie’), brought to their respective entries in the sub-genre. So, if you’re the sort of sensible viewer who doesn’t feel the need to tolerate this kind of crap when watching old movies - be forewarned.

Indeed, whilst dedicated scholars of pulp horror, vampire lore or off-beat poverty row programmers are sure to find enough intriguing content in ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ to keep them occupied long after the credits have rolled, purely in terms of the film’s entertainment value, I’m going to have to close by suggesting that more general horror fans might want to think twice and/or keep their expectations in check when approaching this one.

Exploito All’Italiana: The Great Alligator (Sergio Martino, 1979)

(Holy cow, what a poster.)

The dog days of summer, when indoor spaces temporarily begin to feel like pizza ovens and the simple pleasures of falling into a stupor beckon, demand simple, undemanding entertainments; things which will induce neither tension nor agitation.

It is a time for films with bright photography – so as to hold up better to the shards of sunlight persistently creeping through the blinds - and vaguely familiar actors hanging around near oceans or lakes, or perhaps unhurriedly plodding through a jungle or something. Either way, there will probably be some water-side locations, plenty of time spent with people mopping sweat from their brows – and probably a monster.

Because, yes, having a monster is pretty important for these things. After all, none of us want to admit that we’re really just tuning in to enjoy the ambient pleasures of watching a bunch of poorly characterised bozos lazing around near a large body of water for 90 minutes. Our friends and loved ones would laugh at us for this, and would consider it insufficient justification for, say, refusing to open the curtains, or go outside.

So we need a monster. (Preferably just one monster though, and a relatively slow one confined to a particular habitat if possible, because we might tend to get a bit jumpy and over-excited if there are multiple monsters running about the place.)

Oh no, we must be able to tell our co-habitants, I can’t go to the park. I’m busy watching a movie about a KILLER CROCODILE. It’s exciting - you know, like ‘Jaws’.

Of course we know it isn’t, but we need the excuse.

What I’m leading up to, basically, is the declaration that *now is the optimum time* to watch Sergio Martino’s ‘The Great Alligator’ (Italian title: ‘Il Fiume del Grande Caimano’, aka ‘Alligator’, ‘Big Alligator River’).

If you’ve heard/read anything about this this film, you may have encountered the suggestion that Martino was reduced to shooting additional footage in his own bathtub. In truth, the effects aren’t that bad, with the offending shots of a motionless miniature croc flopping about amid some fish-tank flora wisely reduced to split-second duration, but nonetheless, ‘The Great Alligator’s failure to deliver a great alligator has understandably done a great deal of damage to the film’s reputation over the years.

This is a shame, because in most other respects, it’s surprisingly good. In fact, it is hugely entertaining, assuming you’re in the right frame of mind [see paragraphs above for details]. Certainly the best Italian ‘Jaws’ rip-off I’ve seen to date (beat that for a back-handed compliment), it stands as a worthy addition to the filmography of one Italian genre cinema’s most consistently rewarding directors.

Like a number of Martino’s most memorable films, this is essentially a generic cross-breed, taking the tried n’ tested ‘Jaws’ formula and boldly splicing in aspects of both the slightly questionable “erotic travelogue” films which enjoyed a brief vogue in the late ‘70s (you know, all those post-‘Emmanuelle’ movies about Europeans holidaying in exotic climes and getting, ahem, “awakened” by the dusky locals), and subsequently from their even more questionable cousin, the cannibal horror sub-genre.

As such, our setting here is a luxurious new tourist resort – ‘Paradise House’ - hewn straight from a stretch of remote, untouched jungle by an ambitious entrepreneur identified only as “Joshua”, played by Mel Ferrer (the ever-dignified former husband of Audrey Hepburn whose late career embrace of exploitation won him the unique distinction of having appeared in both ‘Eaten Alive’ (1976) and ‘Eaten Alive!’ (1980)).

As is often the case with these things, ‘The Great Alligator’ seems reluctant to divulge the actual location of Senor Ferrer’s resort. The implication seems to be that we’re in the Amazon here, but closer scrutiny of a map of shipping routes visible on the wall of Paradise House’s radio room suggests that we’re actually in Sri Lanka, where indeed the film turns out to have been shot, back-to-back with Martino’s horror film ‘Island of the Fishmen’, which shares much of the same cast and crew.

According to the – ahem - extensive research I carried out for this review, Sri Lanka’s inland waterways do indeed remain home to both deadly crocodiles (though NOT alligators) and indigenous tribes of hunter-gatherers, so yep – that’s enough realism for me to be going on with. Well done everybody. (1)

Stepping into this treacherous tropical paradise is our hero for the day, Daniel, a hard-boiled photographer played by the late, great Claudio Cassinelli, who delivered a wonderfully off-beat lead performance a few years ealrier in Martino’s audacious giallo/poliziotteschi/comedy mash-up ‘The Suspicious Death of a Minor’ (1976, and a lot more fun than the English title suggests). (2)

Daniel has been hired by Ferrer’s character to shoot publicity material for the resort, and he arrives in the company of a statuesque black model, Sheena (Geneve Hutton in her only screen role). Sheena smokes cigarettes with a long holder and glowers at everyone, so we know she is cool. When Joshua ventures to tell her, apropos of nothing, that “I believe Eve herself may have been black,” Sheena replies, “all I know is, Adam was a stupid shit”, and terminates the conversation right there. I think I like Sheena.

Perhaps it’s just me though, but her presence left me rather confused about the nature of Cassinelli’s character. I mean, his cynical, serious-minded demeanour, five-day stubble and practical wardrobe of camo fatigues all seem to suggest a wildlife or current affairs photographer. But, if he’s brought a model to pose for him on the other hand, wouldn’t that make him a fashion / glamour photographer, which calls for a whole other set of clichés..?

I’m guessing that this chronic stereotype malfunction probably results from the fact that ‘The Great Alligator’s script rather unfeasibly required the services of no less than five credited screen-writers (including such eminent figures as George Eastman and Ernesto Gastaldi amongst their number), so…. best just let it go, eh?

Naturally, Daniel soon finds himself gravitating toward the only resident of Ferrer’s artificial idyll who is neither a greedhead nor a simpleton - and the fact she’s a knock-out blonde no doubt helps too - Ali, played by the one and only Barbara Bach. Though she is essentially employed as Joshua’s right hand woman, Ali is also serious and sensible and dresses appropriately, so she must know what’s what, right? Indeed, it turns out that she is actually an anthropologist who has only taken the job at the resort in order to allow her the opportunity to research the culture of the local tribespeople, with whom Joshua has negotiated a tenuous ‘supply & demand’ type employment agreement.

And finally, rounding out our central cast of (predominantly) white interlopers, we find a surly “Great White Hunter” type guy (SGWH henceforth) who acts as Ferrer’s head of security / all-purpose native overseer. He immediately proves himself a bad ‘un by making crude advances toward Barbara, I mean, uh – checks notes - Ali. Don’t worry about him though, because he never really gets around to doing very much. Merely weep for the fact that he is inexplicably not played by George Eastman, in spite of the fact that Italio-exploitation’s most ubiquitous heavy even apparently wrote some of the damn story for this thing.

Throughout his career, Sergio Martino could usually be relied upon to bring stronger filmmaking chops to the table than most of his contemporaries, and ‘The Great Alligator’ is no exception. The film’s locations are singularly beautiful, the sets constructed within them are fairly impressive, and Giancarlo Ferrando’s photography captures everything with flair and professionalism, ensuring that, if nothing else, this is certainly a very nice movie to look at.

The editing (courtesy of Eugenio Alabiso) is also extremely good here, with swift and relatively complex cutting rhythms keeping things pacey even during the script’s more lugubrious moments, and successfully distracting our attention from the more questionable effects work. The strengths of Alabiso’s editing are particularly evident during the film’s opening stretch, in which proceedings are livened up by some exuberantly stylish montage sequences, built around the snappy, rhythmic freeze-frames of Cassinelli’s photography, and cut to the tempo of Stelvio Cipriani’s enjoyably unconventional, minimalist score.

Though Cipriani’s work here is unlikely to ever rival the cult status enjoyed by his compositions for Ovidio Assonitis’s similarly themed ‘Tentacles’ (1977), ‘Great Alligator’ certainly finds him striking out in some interesting directions, ditching his trademark staccato harpsichord workouts to deliver a set of lithe, rubbery p-funk and electro/disco jams, foregrounding heavy, fretless bass and quasi-“tribal” percussion in a manner which somehow manages to sound more enervating than cheesy. Worth a listen.

Back to the movie meanwhile, and, as Daniel has a good look around the resort complex, we learn amongst other things that an impregnable underwater fence has been installed in order to keep crocodiles out of the designated swimming area, thus allowing guests the thrill of paddling around “nose to tail” with the terrifying beasts. Can we detect a touch of grinding, new-career-low despair creeping into Mel Ferrer’s eyes as he takes a deep breath and gamely reassures us that there is no way this can possibly go wrong?

Sadly, ‘The Great Alligator’ also forces us to bear witness to one of Italian cinema’s more surreal incidents of animal cruelty, as the SGWH guy is shown tying a bunch of tiny piglets to ropes and throwing them into the water, ostensibly as bait to attract crocs to the ‘viewing bridge’ from which tourists are encouraged to gawk at them.

It is impossible to process the fact that this scene only exists in order to allow Cassinelli’s character the opportunity to decry the resort’s inhumane treatment of animals (“is cruelty one of the features of the tourist programme?” he sneers), whilst the filmmakers meanwhile are actually throwing cute little piggies into the river in order to demonstrate this. I mean, one hopes that they pulled the little critters out again, and that they survived their ordeal, but I’m pretty damn sure they didn’t enjoy it very much. W and indeed TF, Sergio?

Meanwhile, the ‘erotic travelogue’ bit comes into play as Sheena becomes entranced whilst watching the local tribe’s rituals – perhaps there is supposed to be some sub-text about her “returning to her roots” or something here, but probably best not think too deeply about that – and instigates a flirtatious exchange of body language with a young male tribesman. Naturally enough, this leads to her ducking the resort’s sunset curfew in order to enjoy a nocturnal rendezvous on the tribe’s forbidden ‘Island of Love’.

Unfortunately however, Sheena’s career as a budding Emmanuelle is abruptly curtailed when the couple are rudely interrupted on their journey home by none other than KARUNA, the tribe’s big daddy God-Alligator, who, apparently angered by the incursion of modern civilisation into his realm, has returned to stir shit up, selecting Sheena and her heretical beau as his first victims. Man, what a drag!

Filling us in – in a manner of speaking – on the legend of Karuna, we find none other than good ol’ Richard Johnson (whom you’ll recall either as that “the boat can leave now” guy from ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, or as Dr Markway from ‘The Haunting’, depending on the classiness of your horror fandom), appearing in an extremely strange cameo as a missionary who has been driven out of his mind after witnessing an earlier manifestation of the God-Gator, and is now reduced to a raving, loin-cloth clad wild man with full-on Ben Gunn style wig and beard, living alone in a remote cave, where he has kept himself busy by carving a big alligator head out the rock itself.

Perhaps the scene in which Daniel and Ali track Johnson down and try to talk to him was intended to invest the movie’s monster with a certain degree of Lovecraftian grandeur, but to be honest, it’s all just… really weird. Which usually strikes me as a good second best, so, great! Let’s move on.

This being a ‘Jaws’ rip-off, you will of course be unsurprised to hear that missing persons, native unrest, giant alligator sightings and sabotaged radio equipment constitute no problem whatsoever to Mel Ferrer, as he happily welcomes his first cohort of gawping, cretinous guests to Paradise House for the resort’s big opening weekend.

This brings us to another reason why ‘The Great Alligator’ may have taken a critical battering over the years – namely, the fact that the film’s English dub is extremely poor, certainly far below the usual high standards of the era’s export-minded Italian product, and the sections of the film dealing with the tourists suffer particularly badly in this respect.

Although more sympathetic voicing could only do so much to mitigate the fact that Martino’s extras seem to have been directed in such a way as to suggest that they spend every second of the way gluttonously downing bottles of wine, indulging in goon-ish disco dancing, leering at each other and wantonly disrespecting the natural environment, their sloppily rendered comedic banter, alternately incomprehensible and irritating, certainly doesn’t help matters.

As tension mounts, alligator attacks intensify and the local tribespeople become actively aggressive – parading around in big, paper mache crocodile heads, wielding spiky weapons and so forth – the scene is set for Martino to swiftly shift gears from the movie’s rather leisurely opening hour and propel us straight into a closing act in which things go absolutely bananas, in a manner reminiscent of only the very finest ‘80s Italian genre films.

This descent into chaos is initially instigated when Joshua – obviously - decrees that the scheduled nocturnal river-boat trip he has laid on for his inebriated guests must proceed, turning a blind eye to the growing body of evidence suggesting that conditions on the river increasingly resemble a cross between ‘Piranha’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ (even the SGWH guy thinks it’s a bad idea, forgodssake).

Meanwhile, the tribespeople have kidnapped Barbara, and tied her to a wooden frame on a special sacrificial canoe, sending her out onto the river as an offering to placate Karuna! Naturally, Cassinelli is soon in hot pursuit, machete in one hand, outboard tiller in the other.

Before too long of course, Ferrer’s party-boat (the thatched-roofed ‘Tarzan’s Raft’, which frankly looks to have been a pretty precarious vessel even before anything went wrong) is sized up by the God-Gator, who prepares to split it down the middle like a human-filled taco. Safe to say, any of those extras who were assured they wouldn’t get wet have another thing coming, and the production’s invaluable “big chomping jaws” puppet and fake blood supply are about to get a serious work-out.

Although *literally everything bad* which has happened in this film has been his fault, Ferrer’s character suddenly manifests a surprising degree of concern and competency once the proverbial shit hits the fan, working hard to save lives and get his inebriated charges to safety, instead of making a cackling getaway with a big suitcase full of money, as is usually de-rigour for his character-type… but needless to say, his last minute efforts at redemption prove too little too late.

When the first bedraggled passengers scale the spiked anti-croc fence make it back to shore, they discover that the tribe’s warriors have launched a full-on slash n’ burn massacre against the resort’s remaining residents, turning the place into a flame-lashed killing field, littered with corpses. Soon, children, OAPs and Hawaiian shirted yahoos alike are being crushed and trampled against that underwater fence, as Karuna chomps away behind them and a rain of flaming arrows meets them from the shore. It’s absolute fucking carnage, and it’s all your fault Mel, all your fault!

As I hope my synopsis above has helped make clear, ‘The Great Alligator’ has a lot more to offer the world than irritating dubbing and poor special effects. Though many of the films which fall loosely into this particular “Italians go nuts in the jungle” bracket can prove risky propositions, both from the POV of morality and watchability, Martino as usual puts us safely over the line with this one (give or take a few traumatised piggies).

By taking us from the “sittin’ on the dock of the bay” drowsiness of ‘Tentacles’ or Lamberto Bava’s ‘Devil Fish’ to the “literally ANYTHING could happen next” mayhem of Cannibal Apocalypse or ‘Nightmare City’, with healthy doses of sleaze, racial insensitivity, unintentional hilarity and flat-out weirdness along the way, this absurd little number definitely earns its place in the pantheon. If you can summon the strength to reach for it the next time the mercury creeps up to ‘heat wave’ levels on a weekend afternoon, you will not be disappointed.

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(1) If you’re wondering at this point about the whole alligator/crocodile thing, well, good luck to ya, although in fairness this IS briefly addressed in the script, when Barbara (who is clever) notes that the idol worshiped by the local tribespeople represents the head of an alligator, which are not native to – quote – “the orient”, thus marking the film’s monster out as something immediately distinct from the area’s resident crocodiles.

(2) An always likeable actor in both lead roles and character parts, Cassinelli is sadly probably best known today for the manner of his untimely death, which occurred when a helicopter stunt went badly wrong on the set of Martino’s ‘Hands of Steel’ in 1986.

Exploito All’Italiana: Zombi Holocaust (Marino Girolami, 1981)

(In the absence of any decent scans of an original Italian poster, let’s enjoy this splendid effort from Thailand.)

When it comes to the “rip off” aesthetic that increasingly dominated Italian genre cinema from the late ‘70s onwards, wherein cash-strapped producers ceased even trying to differentiate their product from the prior hits they were cashing in on, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more glorious example of the phenomenon’s ultimate, self-consuming end-point than ‘Zombi Holocaust’ – an infamously shoddy venture that forms something of a line in the sand for fans of Euro-horror/exploitation.

For many, this film represents the bottom of the barrel in terms of mindlessly derivative cine-sludge, whilst for others of a less discerning / more adventurous nature [delete as applicable], it instead forms the gateway to a whole new subterranean kingdom of trash-horror wonderment. Either way, it’s quite the thing to behold, and even the highest minded aficionados of this-sort-of-thing probably owe it to themselves to sit down and give it a try at some point – if only to test their individual tolerance for further trash-gore spelunking.

Often playing more like an extended cult cinema in-joke than a stand-alone movie, the sheer opportunistic shamelessness of the logic behind ‘Zombi Holocaust’s existence (basically: ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ was a hit? ‘Zombi 2’ [aka ‘Zombie’ (U.S.), ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (U.K.)] was a hit? Et Voila = ZOMBI HOLOCAUST!) is already somewhat irresistible, whilst the fact that one of the films it is chiefly cannibalizing was *already* an unauthorised Italian sequel to a successful American movie (‘Dawn of the Dead’, released in Italy as ‘Zombi’) takes cinematic plagiarism to what at the time must have been new and giddy heights. (I’m sure if you follow the bread-crumb trail a few years down the line, you’ll find that someone in turn started making rip-offs of ‘Zombi Holocaust’, and so the glorious cycle continues.)*

Actually, the lengths to which ‘Zombi Holocaust’ goes to rip off Lucio Fulci’s film in particular are really quite extraordinary. I mean, I can see the rationale for borrowing the basic plot outline, using similar zombie make up and even rehiring the same lead actor (fan favourite Ian McCulloch) - but was there REALLY an audience back in 1980 who were liable to sit there thinking, “OMG, that isolated house in the jungle looks EXACTLY like the one in ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, and that low angle shot where the Landrover arrives in the village is exactly the same too! I am so psyched!”..?

I don’t know, but if such peculiar viewers did exist, they certainly would have found themselves well catered for here, as ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly reaches that baffling point on the “rip off” spectrum wherein the effort taken to painstakingly recreate entirely incidental details from an earlier film exceeds that which would have been necessary to feign originality by actually just shooting some new stuff that might have proved more appealing to the target audience… and scratching one’s head over the twisted logic of such decision-making is but one of many, many small pleasures that help make Girolami’s film such endlessly charming viewing for us jaded 21st century know-it-alls.

Taking a “2 + 2 = ?!?!” approach to combining elements of its two source texts, ‘Zombi Holocaust’s New York set opening – in which cultists belonging to an obscure Asian cannibal sect are found to be rampaging around a city hospital misappropriating body parts – is a pure, politically questionable b-movie delight. Reminding me somewhat of the equally unlikely Quetzalcoatl cultist sub-plot in Larry Cohen’s ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’, I can’t help wishing that they’d spun this idea out into an entire movie of its own.

But at the same time, I’m also glad they didn’t, because then we would have missed out on the earnest discussions conducted between the police and the pipe-smoking “Professor Drydock” (no, really) from the University, and their decision that the best solution to this problem is to ask the Mighty McCulloch (is his character a doctor of some kind, or a policeman? I’m not really sure it’s make clear) to step in and head up an expedition to the remote islands in the East Indies from which the cult originated, where, accompanied by a photogenic anthropology-studying nurse (Alexandra Delli Colli), some other guy and the obligatory interfering journalist, he will uncover the secrets of this benighted cannibal tribe and… well, I don’t know really.

I mean, wouldn’t be easier to just arrest the people who are getting up to all the monkey business at the hospital, and go from there? You know, interrogate them, look for witnesses, that sort of thing? But what do I know of police work. Pack your khakis and don’t forget the mosquito net - the boat leaves at dawn!

And so, as absurdity piles upon absurdity, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly demonstrates that, despite its aspirations toward innard-chewing, brain-sawing video nasty infamy, at heart it really has more in common with old psychotronic favourites like ‘Mesa of Lost Women’ (1953) or ‘Horrors of Spider Island’ (1960) – a goofy, comforting little b-movie that is fully aware of its own silliness, whilst simultaneously remaining conscious of the fact that actually cracking a smile would cause the audience’s enjoyment to crumble like the Walls of Jericho.

That the credited director of this mess was actually the FATHER of Italian action supremo Enzo G. Castellari was something I initially found inordinately amusing (it’s easy to imagine Enzo taking breaks from whatever ‘Jaws’/’Dirty Dozen’ rip-off he was making at the time to field excruciating “No Dad, THIS is how you do a tracking shot..” style phone calls) - until that is, I checked IMDB and discovered that ‘Zombi Holocaust’ was actually Marino Girolami’s seventy second film as director, and that he had in fact been calling “action” on lower budget genre pictures pretty much non-stop since 1950.

We could speculate as to whether it was a deficit of quality or sheer bad luck that ensured that none of Girolami’s films prior to this one have ever gained much exposure outside of Italy, but given the number of technically accomplished European directors who found themselves delivering absolute rubbish when the VHS horror boom hit in the ‘80s, it would seem manifestly unfair to make a judgment call on his work based solely on ‘Zombi Holocaust’ - so I won’t.

Either way though, it seems likely that the director’s veteran status may have contributed somewhat to the strangely old-fashioned feel of ‘Zombi Holocaust’. Whilst it is ostensibly still a gore-soaked rampage through a tropical hell, the film somehow ends up feeling just sort of… I don’t know… nice, even whilst poorly paid local extras in ridiculous b-western Indian get-up are gobbling cream of tomato soup from some poor unfortunate’s latex torso.

Despite what I take to be the producers’ best efforts to pile on the nastiness, this one entirely lacks the mean-spirited extremity or queasy gross up agenda of a contemporary Fulci or Deodato film. Much like the minimum-of-effort “bloodshed” usually employed by Jess Franco, this is purely emblematic gore – any resemblance to the real thing is purely coincidental. Like everything in ‘Zombi Holocaust’, it’s all offered up in a spirit of pure, casual fun, with little suggestion that anyone is ever actually in pain.

And, essentially, I could continue trudging through a blow-by-blow account of all the great stuff in ‘Zombi Holocaust’ until the cows come home. There’s the square-jawed, cheque-collecting determination of McCulloch’s “I-failed-the-audition-for-Indiana-Jones-and-woke-up-here” lead performance for instance - or how about the perfectly shaped stone mold that the cannibals have lying around ready for Delli Colli after they strip her naked and body-paint her with some pretty flowers? (Hippy cannibals, eh? Well, you live and learn.).

From the adorably off-beat antics of Donald O’Brien as one of the least hygienic yet most strangely sincere mad scientists seen this side of the 1950s, to the to the bit where one of expedition’s dubiously portrayed ‘native porters’ almost throws an “oh man, you mean I gotta bury ANOTHER body..” style teenage strop after our heroes respond to the grizzly demise of his friend with scarcely more than a “huh, there ya go” shrug… well, you get the picture. There is just so much to enjoy here.

You can mock ‘Zombi Holocaust’ all you like, but to give Girolami his due, at the end of the day it is a vastly more entertaining prospect than most of the other bottom-feeding zombie/cannibal snoozefests that emerged in the early ‘80s (yes, I’m looking at you, Eurocine). This is chiefly due to the fact that, for all of its many shortcomings, the picture rattles along like a goddamned freight train, never resorting to dreary ‘padding out the run time’ type footage and rarely going more than a couple of minutes without throwing us something divertingly awesome and/or ridiculous to chew on.

Add one standing ovation-worthy Classic Gore Moment (all I need say is: outboard motor), the eventual appearence of some genuinely kind-of-scary looking zombies (well, I liked them), and a pitch perfect grinding, electronic dirge of a score from Nico Fidenco (whose 70s/80s CV is so sleazy, this almost counts as a career highlight), and, for those with the alchemical suss to suitably process it, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ is pure gold - a mighty anti-classic that no one with even the slightest fondness for Italian trash cinema could fail to love like a disfigured child.

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* On the cannibals-meet-zombies tip, Bruno Mattei’s actually-pretty-great ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ aka ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ (which premiered about six months after this film) springs to mind as an obvious ‘Zombi Holocaust’ descendent, although I’m not exactly about to call the lawyers in over that one, y’know what I mean.

Franco Files: The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968)

AKA:

‘Fu Manchú y el Beso de la Muerte’ [Spain], ‘Der Todeskuss des Dr. Fu Manchu’ [“Dr. Fu Manchu’s Kiss of Death”, Germany], ‘Kiss & Kill’ [U.S.A.], ‘Against All Odds’, ‘Kiss of Death’ [U.S. video titles, according to IMDB?].

Context:

Having recently looked at one of the highlights of Jess Franco’s tenure with Harry Alan Towers, it seems only fitting that we should turn our attention to one of the flat-out stinkers… or at least, that’s how Franco’s two Fu Manchu movies usually seem to be viewed. Personally I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this one, as we shall see below.

The Fu Manchu series was of course the flagship of Towers’ modest production empire through the mid/late 60s. He wrote the scripts for all of them under his ‘Peter Welbeck’ pseudonym, and whilst they’re certainly no classics, I think the earlier entries certainly stand up well as entertaining rainy afternoon type fare.(1) As the decade progressed though, the audience for these kind of old fashioned adventure movies was beginning to drift away, and I can only imagine that interest in the series (which was already pretty outmoded when it began, let’s face it) was fading fast.

So, enter Jess Franco! Put to work on the next Fu Manchu picture by his new paymaster, and lumbered with a characteristically daft ‘Welbeck’ script, Franco fans will recognise that such circumstances usually spell kryptonite for the director’s creativity, but hey, at least he got to shoot in Brazil and hang out with Christopher Lee, and… well, I think he probably made the best of a bad job, all things considered.

Content:

Rich with the kind of dazzling invention and realism that if the hallmark of Mr. Welbeck, the plot here concerns – what else? - Dr. Fu Manchu’s latest devious plan for world domination, which this time consists of hypnotising kidnapped slave girls and dispatching them to the homes of world leaders and sundry other important men, whereupon – get this – they will kiss them with their Cobra venom covered lips, resulting in blindness, coma and (eventually) death! Quite what advantages this plan has over, say, sending them letter bombs or something, I’m unsure, but y’know, it was the ‘60s - gotta make an effort.(2)

One of the first victims of this characteristically half-baked diabolical scheme is Fu Manchu’s dogged arch-nemesis, Nayland-Smith of Scotland Yard, who as a result is blinded and thus spends much of the film off-screen, wrestling with cobra-induced fever. Presumably this turn of events was written into the script after actor Douglas Wilmer, who played Nayland-Smith in the three earlier films, bailed on the series shortly before shooting began, leaving insufficient time for his replacement (Richard Greene) to step into the breach.

Nayland-Smith’s absence from proceedings is unfortunate, not least because it temporarily shifts the burden of heroism across to his ersatz-Watson sidekick Dr. Petrie (Howard Marion-Crawford), who sadly is portrayed here as an utter buffoon, with practically every line of his dialogue reduced a weak joke about how much he misses rainy old blighty and wants to have a nice cup of tea – a fixation that seems to obsess him to such an extent that he should probably seek whatever equivalent of addiction counselling is available to one-dimensional movie characters (he’s even moaning about not being able to reach his Thermos whilst he’s chained up in Fu Manchu’s dungeons!). (3)

As Petrie blunders into the Amazon rainforest following rumours of Fu Manchu’s last known whereabouts, the hero vacuum is somewhat eased by the introduction of rugged jungle adventurer type Götz George (German production money ahoy!) and wandering medic Maria Rohm (producer’s girlfriend ahoy!), who have also stumbled onto the trail of the villainous mastermind for… well, I forget the reasons to be honest, but they are around, anyway.

Much faffing about and several long digressions follow, and during its middle half hour, the film takes everyone by surprise by suddenly turning into a kind of South American jungle-western! Here, veteran Spanish actor Ricardo Palacios spits out scenery and cackles with gusto as a quasi-revolutionary bandit chief named Sancho Lopez. Together with his gang of sombrero-wearing cut-throats (must have been a long ride down from old Mexico?), Lopez takes command of the remote village where Rohm’s character is based, staging bloody massacres and raucous, whore-filled parties with equal enthusiasm.

Just a hunch here, but do you get the feeling maybe Franco or Towers or somebody came back all fired up from an early screening of ‘The Wild Bunch’ just before they started making this one..? It’s all pretty good fun anyway, so if you like the idea of Jess Franco knocking out about thirty minutes of a pulpy south-of-the-border western, dig in.

For the final half hour we’re back in more familiar Fu Manchu territory, but to be honest nobody really seems to have their heart in it anymore, as Franco’s camera starts wondering off to look at foliage and the film’s shaky adventure movie syntax frays to breaking point, with only a nice waterfall, a few sloppily choreographed fight scenes and Christopher Lee’s patented “stand up straight / say the lines / collect the cheque” methodology saving things from collapse.

Kink:

Watching these Fu Manchu movies, I always find myself wondering who the hell they were aimed at, and who actually bought tickets to see them back when they were in cinemas. I mean, on the surface they’re pretty much just old-fashioned, kiddie-friendly adventure movies, very much in the spirit of the b-movie swashbucklers that Hammer used to knock out for the half-term holidays, but as the series progressed, they seemed to start throwing in all these vaguely kinky, Sadean sorta elements that seem squarely aimed at a more adult, horror/sexploitation audience – a stylistic disjuncture that leads to a pretty schizophrenic feel at times.(4)

I probably don’t need to tell you what effect hiring Jess Franco had vis-à-vis this trend, and right from the opening shots, things are amped up considerably here. The movie opens with scantily-clad slave girls being marched through the jungle in chains by whip-wielding henchmen, and before we know it, they’re being man-handled by a leather-masked torturer and suggestively mocked by Fu Manchu’s daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin). This kind of BDSM slave fantasy stuff was already bubbling under the surface in earlier instalments, but it’s pretty full-on here, becoming almost as sleazy as one of Franco’s Women In Prison films.

The implicitly erotic figure of Lin Tang plays a bigger role than usual here too, basically taking on the bulk of day-to-day evil-doing business from her father, as he largely scales back his involvement to just the all-important “standing around talking about the plans” element. In numerous scenes, she can be seen bossing around the female captives and behaving to all intent and purposes like one of the sapphic wardresses in Franco’s later WIP epics, whilst towards the end of the film, she’s even seen cackling to herself on her father’s throne, suggesting the possibility of a fun ‘Lin Tang takes over’ plot-line that I don’t think was ever fully realised in these films(?). Anyway, I like her a lot in this one - she’s pretty cool, and Chin seems to actually be having fun in the role for once too.

Elsewhere, this film’s stand-in for the obligatory Franco night-club scene arrives via a sequence in which one of Fu Manchu’s hypnotised slave-girls walks out of the darkness to perform a libidinous dance for Sancho Lopez during his gang’s victory celebration. Going on for far longer than it reasonably should in this sort of movie, this sequence proves to be surprisingly strong stuff, with only the thinnest of diaphanous gowns hiding her boobs from the full glare of whatever kind of mixed up crowd did actually go and see this movie as she rubs and writhes with abandon… before Lopez prematurely ends her performance by bloodily shooting her, which must have further delighted parents and moral guardians, I’m sure. (And yeah, they were definitely goofing on ‘The Wild Bunch’ here, weren’t they?)

For those still keeping score after that point, there are fully bared breasts to be seen on several other occasions, along with assorted whipping and dungeon bondage bits, as any remaining illusions about these movies being made for a juvenile audience go completely out of the window.

3/5

Creepitude:

Mildly gruesome tortures and a few bits Kensington gore keep things on a Hammer-esque “good ol’ blood-thirsty stuff for the kids” sort of level, whilst smoke and dungeons and skulls and cobras and so forth during the Fu Manchu hideout scenes all perpetuate that particular kind of pulpy horror-not-horror atmosphere that defines these kinda films, whilst mixed up bits of DNA from jungle adventure movies, euro-spy flicks and westerns further dilute the brew elsewhere.

2/5

Pulp Thrills:

“The moon is full… the moon of life. Let her taste the kiss… of DEATH!”

So, just to recap, we’re talking here about a motion picture in which Dr. Fu Manchu, as played by Christopher Lee, hangs around in a hidden citadel in the heart of the Amazon, hypnotising kidnapped girls and using ancient Inca rituals to impregnate them with deadly cobra venom, for the eventual purpose of wiping out world leaders and thus conquering the planet. Those trekking through the treacherous, unmapped jungle to oppose him include a dysfunctional Holmes and Watson-esque duo, a proto-Indiana Jones two-fisted archaeologist and an obese Mexican bandit chief who appears to be getting paid by the guffaw. If that ain’t pulp enough for you, I’d suggest a trip to the saw-mill.

5/5

Altered States:

This is far from the most far-out film Jess Franco made, but if you were approach it from the opposite direction, as an example of a low budget matinee adventure film gradually going off the rails, I think it would emerge as being at least moderately weird.

In between the aforementioned hi-jinks, there is much ‘down-time’, much wondering-camera foliage footage and many focus-blurring scene transitions. Much like a more regular Franco film, things soon settle down into a familiar pattern, mixing exciting / kinky set-pieces with segments of plodding, procedural drag that could soon have the casual viewer (and with a movie like this, is there gonna be any other kind?) snoring in vain.

A brief montage demonstrating the progress of Fu Manchu’s schemes around the world does briefly highlight a few bits of absolutely eye-popping, pop art production design – very much in the style of the same year’s astonishing ‘The Girl From Rio’ and, more than likely, probably spliced straight in from unused footage shot for that film.

Music by Franco’s favoured composer Daniel White meanwhile is sadly not much to shout about, dominated as it is by assorted variations on an insipid tune that sounds like a slight variation on ‘Que Sera Sera’, which seems to play incessantly through the film’s middle half hour.

2/5

Sight-seeing:

Most of the jungle footage here appears to have actually filmed in some corner of the Amazon rainforest, insofar as I can tell, and indeed, the locations used are very interesting and impressive, including some genuine stalactite filled caves, and a monolithic waterfall that adds greatly to the scope of the film’s otherwise rather uneventful conclusion.

Usually with these things, one tends to assume that all the locations used were probably just a quick bus ride from Rio, where Franco and Towers were based for the simultaneously shot ‘The Girl From Rio’, but, given that the Southern-most part of the Amazon basin is right over on the other side of Brazil, maybe they actually relcoated completely? Or, maybe there IS sufficiently Amazon-like terrain to be found within spitting distance of Rio? I dunno. If anyone can identify the surely-that-must-be-quite-famous dam/waterfall that appears in the film, maybe we can pinpoint it on our sadly non-existent Jess Franco Locations Map? (Obviously it would be a transparent map on a Perspex wall with flashing lights, like the one Fu Manchu always has knocking about in his hideouts..)

Meanwhile, all the scenes in the town besieged by the bandits and the colonial governor’s mansion where Götz George is kept prisoner look to have been filmed back in Spain, with distinctly familiar-looking grand interiors, and a few exterior shots that I *think* might match up with the complex of buildings memorably used a few years later in ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ and numerous of Franco’s other early ‘70s productions.

I’d have to run some of the films again to be sure, and I can’t be bothered to do that right now, but… someone should do a book about this stuff, y’know? Big coffee table hardback thing – “In The Footsteps of Franco” – combining the middle class travelogue market with the cult movie freaks, it should be a good seller. I’m game, if any publishers out there want to pay for the plane tickets.

Oh, and the Fu Manchu hideout stuff is largely done on sets that I’m guessing are redressed versions of the ones seen in ‘Brides..’, and god knows what else besides. (Hey, you need a dungeon? Give Harry a call.)

4/5

Conclusion:

‘The Blood of Fu Manchu’ is not film that really gets much love, but I must say, I quite enjoyed it. Sure, it’s sloppy, tedious, cynical and practically the dictionary definition of “a load of old rubbish”, but the sheer amount of stuff going on gives it a strangely epic flavour that few other Franco productions can really match, and, whilst fans of the director will have to accept that it explores his favoured themes and obsessions only in passing, taken as an example of a rainy Sunday pulp adventure movie that’s completely lost the plot and wondered off into unknown realms, I think it has a lot to recommend it. I’d definitely place it toward the top end of Franco’s catalogue of work-for-hire genre exercises.

‘The Castle of Fu Manchu’ followed later the same year from Franco & Towers, and even commentators who hated ‘Blood..’ admit that it looks like Citizen Kane compared to that one, so…. that’s something to look forward to I suppose?

--

(1)‘The Face of Fu Manchu’ (’65) and ‘Brides of Fu Manchu’ (’66), both directed by Don Sharp, are quite a bit of fun (I reviewed ‘Brides..’ here). I’ve not seen the third instalment, ‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’ directed by Jeremy Summers, but I think I’m gonna walk not run on that one given that Summers also made the unspeakably bad ‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ for Towers.

(2) Which is more than Christopher Lee and the film’s make-up team are doing here incidentally – aside from the floppy moustache, Lee isn’t even trying to appear Asian by this point in the franchise… which, though a let-down for fans of casual movie racism, is probably for the best, all things considered.

(3) My favourite thing about Marion-Crawford’s performances in these movies is his habit of yelling “FU MANCHU!?” in moustache-ruffling, outraged surprise at least once per film.

(4)If you think about it, I guess Hammer were actually doing much the same thing too, as ‘The Swords of Sherwood Forest’ gave way to ‘Prehistoric Women’ and ‘The Viking Queen’, although these Towers films, being considerably closer to the margins, tended to get more sleazy more quickly. As I mentioned in my earlier review, ‘Brides of Fu Manchu’ has to be the most erotically charged movie ever to be granted a ‘U’ certificate by the BBFC, and I’ve subsequently seen evidence that they even shot some alternate nude sequences for it (“for the Japanese market”, no doubt).

The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925)

It may not be readily apparent based on my writings thus far on this weblog, but over the past few years I’ve developed an inexplicable fondness for what I suppose you might call ‘lost world / explorer type adventure movies’. An overly specific designation perhaps, but necessarily so. I mean, if I just said “jungle movies” or something, chances are that would immediately conjure images of Tarzan, and fur-bikinied jungle girls, and strange exploitation quickies about women being menaced by guys in gorilla suits, and those sleazy, cut price cannibal / amazon movies that Eurocine and Jess Franco were churning out in the ‘80s… all of which are fine ways to pass an evening, I’m sure, but they’re not quite what I’m getting at. Plus, the intrepid explorers in the stories I'm talking about here are not always confined to the jungle - deserts, inaccessible mountain ranges and the bottom of the ocean all provide equally rousing backgrounds to their adventures.

But if I just said “adventure movies”, well, that would open up the field to swashbuckling films, pirate films and light-hearted historical capers of all descriptions. So no, what I mean is that particular tradition of lost world / lost continent / lost something or other tales, in which great white heroes of safari-suited colonial oppression travel to uncharted realms, treading upon ground untouched by man for millions of years (the natives just can’t be bothered, y’see) and encountering, well… dinosaurs, usually. I mean that’s what we paid our money for right?

What really gets me about these movies though (and likewise the books and serials that inspired them) isn’t just the opportunity to witness an endless parade of stop motion beasties, random wild life stock footage and square-jawed character actors smoking pipes and looking stern. Rather it’s the palpable feeling of wistfulness and nostalgia generated by a form of fantastic story-telling that has been rendered entirely obsolete by the social, scientific and technological advancements of the past hundred years.

For me at least, this nostalgia relates not so much to the abhorrent notions of Western imperialism and Caucasian manifest destiny that underpin these tales (in fact these regrettable ideologies are often addressed in these stories in such a quaint and off-hand manner they almost become perversely charming), but to the almost total disappearance of the glimmer of speculative plausibility that used to fire the imagination of their original audiences.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote ‘The Lost World’ in 1912, ok, it perhaps wasn’t likely that there was an untouched plateau sitting in the depths of the Amazon basin inhabited by giant prehistoric creatures… but it certainly wasn’t impossible. The book was inspired by a 1911 lecture presented to the Royal Geographic Society by renowned explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, during which he reported seeing “monstrous tracks of unknown origin” whilst undertaking a survey of the Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. And who else, back in 1911, was really in a position to cast doubt on his assertions? Have YOU surveyed the entire region by aeroplane, he, like Conan Doyle’s aptly-named protagonist Professor Challenger, may well have asked his audience. Have the Royal Geographic Survey succeeded in compiling a detailed map? Have any groundsmen staked out the terrain beneath those untold hundreds of miles of forest canopy?

Well, no, but I’d damn well like to give it a try, the eager young reader would be primed to respond, and a million dreams of adventures into The Unknown were born; dreams that have gradually faded ever since, as the world has become smaller, more heavily populated and more freely accessible, and that are now snuffed out entirely, rendered dead on arrival in the era of GPS, Google Earth and gap year geography students goofing around on Skype from the depths of the rainforest.

Could there still be an untouched plateau, deep in the heart of – well no, there couldn’t, we’d have found it already - end of story. We can relocate our mysteries and monsters to outer space or other dimensions or, at a push, to the bottom of the ocean or the wilds of Antarctica - but it’s no substitute really. On dry land at least, The Unknown is no more, and that spine-shivering sense of adventure that began when mediaeval cartographers first scrawled ‘here be dragons’ across their charts has finally been extinguished, leaving only these foggy tales of rampant brontosaurs and unconvincing ape-men as a final memorial.

As befits the somewhat wistful feeling evoked by these stories, I guess it follows that I often tend to enjoy cranky, flawed and ill-conceived entries in the canon to the big successes, and as such, what better place to begin such an examination than with First National Pictures’ 1925 adaptation of ‘The Lost World’ - a grand commercial failure in its day, now primarily viewed merely as a curio - a rather cranky warm-up for the formula that stop motion maestro Willis O’Brien would perfect a few years later on ‘King Kong’.

‘Kong’, it must be admitted, is a vastly more accomplished entertainment in every way, but somehow, in my usual bloody-minded, underdog-supporting fashion, I actually find ‘The Lost World’ more enjoyable. Great though ‘Kong’ is, these days it just seems so… over-familiar, with such a flat, brash, under-developed kind of narrative, exhibiting none of the rambling, discursive strangeness of its predecessor.

And it’s worth noting at this point that when I describe ‘The Lost World’ as "rambling" and "discursive", that’s based on the experience of only watching about one half of the material that comprised the original theatrical cut. Actually, there have been so many alternate presentations of this film over the years, so many rumours of lost reels, destroyed negatives and unconfirmed running times, that just trying to piece together what the hell is going on with the versions available to us today is a bit of a challenge. But most likely, the story goes something like this:

Originally running around two hours, ‘The Lost World’ was brutally chopped up by its distributors after it initially flopped, doing the rounds in subsequent years as a 30-something minute short (presumably consisting entirely of dinosaur action), before eventually being restored to a shaky 64 minute feature that turned up on a slew of public domain releases in the ‘90s. (1) A slightly more complete restoration emerged later, bulking things up to around 90 minutes, but it was the 64 minute cut that I ended up watching prior to this review, and… well, I was quite happy with it, to be honest.
 
Normally of course, I’d be appalled at such wholesale butchery of a motion picture, but in this case, I found that the one hour hack job hit the spot quite nicely. I’m assuming all the dinosaur footage and action/running around stuff stayed in (for indeed, there is enough of it to satisfy even the most rabid monster fan), but so seemingly did all of the necessary plot info, and the introductions, motivations and developments of the central characters, the threads of the various sub-plots and diversions etc. – are all also present and correct, making me wonder just what the hell the missing extra hour might have consisted of. Having sat through a number of arse-aching Silent Era ‘epics’ over the years – all seemingly falling victim to the fallacy that greater length equalled greater prestige – I fear the answer might simply be: an awful lot of faffing around.

As you might imagine, relatively little faffing remians in the 64 minute cut, and if the opening scenes that bring us to Professor Challenger’s pivotal lecture at the Royal Society seem a little choppy and meandering, all doubts are put to rest as soon as we get a look at the Professor himself and realise that THIS GUY is about to launch a daring expedition into the prehistoric unknown:

The guy in question is of course veteran Hollywood hellraiser Wallace Beery, and his singularly rousing performance is only one of the things that help make the scene depicting Challenger’s lecture so much fun.

“Bring on your mastodons! Bring on your mammoths!” demand the crowd of jeering, football rattle waving Edwardian students, before the Professor takes the stage to lay out his evidence for the existence of a lost Amazonian plateau rich in prehistoric flora & fuana, and of his plan to lead a rescue party in search of his unfortunate colleague Professor White, who has disappeared shortly after posting home the tantalising reports of his discoveries. It’s a shame that the 64 minute ‘Lost World’ doesn’t allow us to actually see these reports, instead cutting straight to the ‘WHO’S WITH ME?’ part of the presentation, as Challenger – having presumably reduced his critics to a state of cowed submission - canvasses for volunteers to join him on his perilous mission.



Happily, those who step up to the plate are exactly the crew the conventions of a lost world explorer type movie demands. Reporter and anxious ninny Lloyd Hughes takes on the juvenile lead / audience surrogate role, his character’s fiancée having apparently demanded that he must prove his manhood by facing some exotic dangers prior to their marriage; an unusual request perhaps, but observing Hughes’ chinless mugging here, I think I kinda get where she’s coming from. Lewis Stone meanwhile essays the obligatory safari-suited great white hunter Sir John Roxton, and does a very fine and dignified job of it too, whilst some other guy is an absent-minded, elderly scientist type (he’s probably a geologist or something, I forget, and presumably included to provide a contrast to Beery’s brow-furrowing human wrecking ball), and most importantly, Miss Bessie Love is on hand to add some glamour to proceedings, as the daughter of the missing Professor White, braving the travails of the tropics in search of her father. (2)


As an interesting aside, Love’s character, and the notion that Challenger’s expedition was launched with the intention of tracking down her father, is an addition to Conan Doyle’s source text, and a slightly unnecessary one you might think – perhaps merely a convoluted justification for including a new heroine and giving her a reason to accompany the chaps into the jungle. Actually though, a spot of Wikipedia-based “research” reveals that this alteration to the story in fact served to give the film a bit of a contemporary twist.

You see, Percy Harrison Fawcett, the man whose lectures inspired the original novel, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1925, whilst leading an expedition in search of an ancient lost city, provisional named “Z”, that he fervently believed to be located in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. The subject of much publicity and speculation at the time, Fawcett’s disappearance prompted numerous ill-fated ‘rescue missions’ in the years that followed, and it initially struck me as likely that the alteration to ‘The Lost World’s storyline must have been undertaken as a timely, if perhaps slightly distasteful, reference to these events. However, IMDB states that the film premiered in February 1925 – several months prior Fawcett’s final communications - so, assuming these dates are accurate, I suppose we should probably view the film’s script more as an eerie premonition of the explorer’s fate than as an exploitative cash-in. (3)

Anyway, getting back to the movie, we all know what’s coming next, so why waste time in getting there, eh? Before we know it, our intrepid band is kayaking down the Amazon with the help of their obligatory retinue of comic relief servants (a cockney, a bloke in black-face and a pet monkey are all on hand). Plentiful insert shots of mangy tigers, sloths, apes and so forth abound, providing the ‘wildlife footage’ angle that inevitably accompanied jungle tales prior to the era of TV wildlife documentaries, with some beasties (a big snake, primarily) even sharing shots with the actors amid the back-lot greenery and dry ice swamp smoke.

Soon the infamous plateau is in sight, and the proto-monster kids in the audience can rejoice, as they finally start to get what they paid for. Our initial monster sighting – a pterodactyl - has a bit of an Oliver Postgate look to it – shoddy and clumsily animated with a sort of jerky, one-frame-in-three style of motion, but pretty charming at the same time. Disappointingly for those who demand accuracy in their monsters, the rest of the creatures we’ll soon we introduced to largely follow suit, and actually, the dodginess of the monster effects is probably one of ‘The Lost World’s biggest pitfalls as regards its failure to really enter the canon as a pioneering monster movie.

I suppose on the one hand, we’ve got to remember this WAS 1925, and that this WAS the first time anyone had ever attempted to create ‘realistic’ moving creatures for a film on anything like this scale. But at the same time, given that the technical triumphs of ‘King Kong’ were only eight years away, the limitations of ‘Lost World’s wobbly, plasticine beasties speaks volumes about the astonishing progress O’Brien made with his work in the intervening years.

But thankfully, the questionable quality of 90 year old animated dinosaurs isn’t really a dealbreaker for me, and watching a lovingly rendered Allosaurus (“the most vicious pest of the ancient world”, according to Professor Challenger) going toe to toe with an alpha male Triceratops is a rousing sight irrespective of the level of formal sophistication used to achieve it. In fact, personally find that these scenes are actually enhanced by the jerky movements and rather malleable shapes of the combatants, and, from my own cranky, retrogressive viewpoint at least, they’re far more characterful and fun than the swish beasts of yr latter-day Jurassic Park sequels, just as the scientifically inaccurate stone dinos in Crystal Palace Park remain a lot more personable than their more solemn cousins in the Natural History Museum.

For modern viewers, the momentum of these dinosaur scenes is liable to be hampered not so much by the effects themselves but by the production’s rigorous insistence on fixed camera angles, which sees most of the prehistoric battles take place in static long shots, broken up only by occasional cutaways to leering close-ups dino faces (which are admittedly pretty great), and disconnected shots of our human characters cowering in fear, giving us their best ‘awe’ from amid patches of studio undergrowth. Presumably these drawbacks were imposed by the limitations of O’Brien’s stop motion technique – problems which an additional input of time and imagination would no doubt have solved, as was the case by the time ‘King Kong’ rolled around.

Shots in which monsters and people interact were also clearly a tricky business at this point in time, but although ‘The Lost World’ suffers from a modern POV for including very few of them, the ones that are here are generally very nicely done, particularly during by far my favourite part of the film: the exciting, city-wrecking conclusion!

For yes, after the chaos of the volcanic eruption that precipitates our heroes’ escape from the plateau, they find themselves in the enviable position of being able to trap a dazed and confused brontosaurus, prompting Challenger to decide he’s going to ship it straight back to London in time to hit the chattering classes with the ultimate “I told you so”. As you might expect, things do not go entirely to plan…

If this direct warm up for ‘..Kong’s dramatic conclusion fails to feature buzzing airplanes, tall buildings, imperilled heroines or tenderly and sympathetically portrayed monsters, what is DOES have is the sight of a crudely animated brontosaurus rampaging through the streets of a painstakingly detailed recreation of Edwardian London. And I don’t know about you, but there are few things I can imagine seeing in a motion picture that would please me more than that.

Although the whole London segment adds up to little more than five minutes of screen time (in the 64 minute cut), it’s a gloriously action-packed blue-print for all that would subsequently become required of such sequences. Smash, bash, crash goes the frightened and enraged leviathan, selectively laying waste to the area around Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, as top-hatted crowds flee in blithering terror! (Look out in particular for the shot in which a life-size dinosaur tail swishes by to knock a crowd of gawpers off their feet – I thought it was great).

Wasting no time, the beast moves on to menace and demolish a public house – ‘The Blue Posts’ – which seems to have attracted its particular displeasure. One brief sequence shows a cloth-capped pub patron (presumably an underworld ruffian of some kind) firing a pistol at the monster’s looming feet as he attempts to save a stricken lady from a stomping – stirring stuff indeed, and a welcome contrast to the rather sedate dino action that transpired back on the plateau.(4)

Rather brilliantly I think, the brontosaur’s haphazard reign of terror reaches its conclusion when it crashes through the surface of Tower Bridge mid-crossing and determinedly swims off down-river towards the coast. At this point, the people of London choose to call it a day and celebrate their victory over the dinosaur, irrespective of the fact that an unhappy prehistoric behemoth will presumably be wrecking havoc in Chatham or Gravesend before the night is through. Because hey, London is safe for now, so let’s all put our feet up and raise a glass to the inadequate weight-bearing capacity of our bridges, for truly, the sloppy standards of British municipal engineering have saved the day once more.

Watching these dazed Londoners celebrate the conclusion of the first of the innumerable urban monster rampages that would follow in the subsequent years feels strange indeed; a mirror perhaps of a few handfuls of perplexed yet overjoyed young silent-era cinema-goers, cheering the awkward birth of a modernist pulp aesthetic of cinematic destruction that would help define the next century of popular culture, just as surely as the fusty, safari-suited adventure tropes that opened the film had defined the previous century’s daydream excursions into the great unknown.



(1) Another version of events claims that the movie was actually a colossal success, and that all the original theatrical prints were destroyed for legal reasons pending completion of a never-to-be-completed sound version, or something like that. But again – who knows.

(2) Appearing here towards the start of a long and varied screen career, Love went on to feature in more interesting flicks than you can shake a stick at, even clocking up ‘old lady’ cameos in the likes of Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ and Tony Scott’s ‘The Hunger’ in her declining years, not to mention an walk-on appearance in Jose Larraz’ ‘Vampyres’, of all things.

(3) Apparently described as a “Neitzschean explorer spouting eugenic gibberish” by the Canadian explorer and historian Dr John Hemming, you’ll be pleased to learn that a 1911 portrait of Percy Harrison Fawcett shows him sporting a mighty handle-bar moustache, a pipe, deerstalker hat and a singularly piercing gaze. Lack of dinosaurs notwithstanding, his Wikipedia entry suggests a life more eventful than anything that transpires in ‘The Lost World’.

(4) Central London currently boasts no less than six pubs named ‘The Blue Posts’ – a brief discussion of the theories behind the proliferation of the name plus further details can be found here. I won’t hazard a guess as to which of these establishments the brontosaurus was bothering (assuming it was based on a real location at all), but if any more daring (and bored) Londoners want to examine the screen shots and give it some thought, be my guest.