Horror Express 2020 #2: The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960)

Over a quarter of a century after ‘The Black Cat’ (1934), and the best part of a decade since The Man From Planet X, Edgar G. Ulmer found himself in even more reduced circumstances than usual, shooting this late doors atom age ‘invisible man’ programmer back-to-back with the same year’s ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’.

Despite working under the contraints of a punishing two week shooting schedule (for both films) however, the indefatigable Ulmer still managed to transform ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ into a haunting rumination on state power, the trauma of war and the malign consequences of scientific brinkmanship, with a touch of sombre, American gothic pictorialism thrown in for good measure – all neatly wrapped up in 57 minutes.

In a scenario highly reminiscent of the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, the movie opens with an incarcerated safecracker, the pointedly named Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy), escaping from the pen (ten bucks says the brief prison break footage must have been stolen from another movie), only to find himself aided in his getaway by an attractive blonde (Laura, played by Marguerite Chapman) whom he’s never seen before in his life.

(Whilst researching this post on IMDB, I was astonished to discover that Douglas Kennedy was actually in ‘Dark Passage’, playing a detective; which seems like a fairly remarkable coincidence, but… if there’s a behind-the-scenes story here, I don’t know it, so let’s move on.)

The imitation of Delmer Davies’ 1947 film continues for at least a little bit longer as Faust and Laura negotiate a police check-point, but things subsequently takes a hard left – both literal and metaphorical – as she proceeds to drive him down a series of ominous, rather bleak looking country lanes, emerging in front of an austere, wood-panelled farmhouse, standing starkly against the landscape like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

Approaching the house, the couple are met by a surly, gun-toting man named Julian (Red Morgan), who ushers them inside, where Faust is granted an audience with Major Krenner (ubiquitous TV villain actor James Griffith), the sinister cat who seems to have been responsible for orchestrating his prison break.

(There’s a great, hard-boiled bit here as Krenner disarms Faust whilst Julian covers him with a rifle; “Y’know what one of these bullets will do from behind? It’ll rip out yr spine and roll it up like a ball of string,” Morgan croaks venomously, channelling a thousand western villains.)

Politely declining to identify the country in whose armed forces he has attained the rank of Major (any guesses?), Krenner informs Faust that if he wishes to remain alive, he will henceforth he required to assist him in his as-yet-unspecified plans, after which he is ushered upstairs to take a look at – you guessed it – the laboratory.

In a cramped, lead-lined attic set jam-packed with outdated mad science clobber, we meet Dr. Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an elderly scientist of apparent Eastern European extraction, and learn that he has been working under Krenner’s command to perfect a form of time-limited invisibility, enabled through exposure to highly unstable radioactive isotopes.

The humans retreat to a lead-lined observation chamber whilst the super-charged atomic x-rays do their work, reducing a cute little guinea-pig to a state of complete invisibility (quite a decent effect actually) - and of course it don’t exactly take a disgraced experimental physicist to figure out that Faust himself is going to find himself strapped to the same gurney PDQ.

As Faust finds himself rendered invisible and forced to break into a series of government research labs to steal a load of even more dangerous nuclear material, it gradually becomes clear that no one in this ill-fated farmhouse is there of their own will; all are being coerced by Krenner through a mixture of blackmail, threats and lies.

Ulof, we learn, is a concentration camp survivor assumed dead by the U.S. authorities. In a horribly surreal touch, Krenner is forcing him to conduct work he feels is dangerous and immoral by keeping his young granddaughter – Ulof’s only other surviving blood relative – imprisoned in a locked room right next to the lab.

The thread drawn between the atrocities of WWII and their continuation in the movie’s present feels horribly palpable in Triesault’s convincingly haunted, emotionally desolate performance, whilst the image of him subsisting on a shabby camp bed, screened off in the corner of the lab right next to the steel door of his granddaughter’s cell, is queasily heart-breaking.

An unusual protagonist, Kennedy plays Faust as essentially a big lug, his actions self-serving and fool-hardy, but he says “yeah” in that same clipped way Warren Oates does, so we know he’s got a bit more than that going on upstairs - or enough base cunning to upset Major Krenner’s unstable house of cards at the very least.

This uncertain struggle for power lends the film a weird noir grit, as characters are repeatedly whacked with bottles, threatened with guns and locked in dark rooms as the interplay between the residents of the house becomes increasingly frantic - whilst all the while, the threat posed by the heaps of lethal fissionable material casually stashed in the attic throbs gently in the background.

Offering up a bleak dose of atomic existentialism, the film’s pessimistic conclusion seems to mirror the blasted, lifeless rural location in which the film appears to have been shot – itself an echo of an imagined, post-nuclear hinterland.

Once Krenner has been overpowered and his mis-matched prisoners have made their escape, Dr Ulof hits Faust with the bad news that many viewers will no doubt have already guessed – namely, that the vast doses of radiation he has been exposed to in the course of the invisibility process has left him with barely days to live. Possessed by a sudden sense of fatalistic moral certainty, he leaves the other surviving characters to drive off toward a decidedly uncertain future, making his way back into the farmhouse for one final conflagration…

Though ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ is not really a horror movie in terms of its plotting, the characteristically doom-laden atmosphere Ulmer brings to proceedings sways it pretty heavily in that direction. Even the swampy terrain Faust stumbles through during his opening prison-break is shadowy and foreboding, whilst the relentless, sawing cello of Darrell Calker’s appropriately minimal score does an efficient job of putting us on edge right from the outset.

Whilst the impoverished circumstances under which the film was produced prevent it from even approaching the same level as Ulmer’s best work, for anyone seeking further evidence to cement his status as classical Hollywood’s favourite underdog auteur, this one is absolute gold dust.

Not only does it find the director throwing in some striking, expressionistic visuals which seem distinctly out of place in the realm of low budget ‘50s sci-fi, but he also twists writer Jack Lewis’s admittedly potent premise toward the same themes which had dominated his work ever since ‘The Black Cat’ and Detour, exploring ideas of imprisonment and inter-personal control, of the trauma of the past contaminating the present, and of inescapable, predestined doom.

Viewed in wider genre terms meanwhile, the film stands as a noteworthy, albeit minor, entry in the lineage of stark, atomic paranoia which runs from Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a few years earlier to Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ a few years later, and even, eventually, to Troy Kennedy Martin’s extraordinary BBC drama Edge of Darkness in 1985.

So far as I’m aware, ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ remains largely unacknowledged by surveyors of this particular sub-genre / sensibility, but I would strongly urge them to track it down. Though a ‘small film’ in every respect, the intrinsic merits of its strange scenario, and of its director’s cracked vision, lend it a rather haunting, morally ambiguous quality which easily surpasses its budgetary shortcomings.

Horror Express 2020 #1: Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky, 1974)

Well, who on god’s earth could resist a poster like that if it popped up outside their local cinema?

Say what you like about American International Pictures, they sure knew their marketing, and the decision to mix up a blaxploitation female revenge story in the ‘Coffy’/ ‘Foxy Brown’ mould with a voodoo / zombie movie was not just a great idea, but an inevitable one, in view of the company’s place in the market circa 1974.

Not only were AIP the originators of the aforementioned Jack Hill/Pam Grier classics, but the success of the Count Yorga pictures had also put them in the forefront of the brief trend for contemporary, U.S. set reinventions of classic gothic horror tropes. Indeed, their blaxsploitation/horror crossover line was already thriving in its own modest fashion thanks to ‘Blacula’ (1972) and ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ (1973).

As it transpires, ‘Sugar Hill’ arrived right at the tail end of these trends’ parallel box office ascendency, just before Arkoff and Nicholson started trying to realign the AIP’s output from 1975 onwards. As such, it should really have been the crowning glory of the company’s achievements in this fertile era; the icing on an already fiendishly overstuffed grindhouse cake.

Trying to assign blame for the fact that it isn’t makes for a less than edifying assignment, but…. let’s just say that, whilst watching ‘Sugar Hill’, the only thing running through my mind from start to finish was: I wish Jack Hill had made this with Pam Grier.

I mean, clearly those guys would have knocked it outta the park. Can you even imagine? Pam in full effect as the voodoo queen, commanding her zombies, as Jack got the chance to mix up the visceral pulp mayhem of his black action films with the gleeful monster kid craziness of ‘Spider Baby’. Wonderful. The late Sid Haig would no doubt have been ragin’ around as some spike-toothed mob enforcer, and no doubt they’d find someone totally far-out - like Exuma, maybe? - to play the Baron Samedi / Vodou Loa character. Allen Toussaint and Dr John might be thrown into a studio together to cook up the soundtrack, and… oh man. It would have been incredible.

Unfortunately though, that’s not the film we got. I believe Hill was still finishing up ‘Foxy Brown’ around the time this was shot, and he subsequently cut his ties with AIP following disagreements with management on the set. Grier meanwhile stayed with the company, but after ‘Foxy Brown’ she (or perhaps, her management) seemed intent on trying to make a dent in the mainstream via watered down, PG-rated re-hashes of her earlier hits like ‘Sheba Baby’ and ‘Friday Foster’ (both 1975).

In lieu of the A-team, Arkoff instead placed a call with his buddy Paul Maslansky, erstwhile producer of such AIP-distributed European horror titles as ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ (1964), Michael Reeves’ ‘She Beast’ (1965) and Gary Sherman’s classic ‘Deathline’/’Raw Meat’ (1972). Having recently returned to America after fifteen years abroad, Maslansky apparently had a yen to direct. So, Sam gave him a brief run-down on what black exploitation films were all about, suggested that combining one with voodoo would be a dead cert, then he basically just handed him the keys and told him not to dent the bumper.

In order to keep costs down and avoid hassle with the unions, production took place in the less than atmospheric environs of Houston, Texas, subbing imperfectly for New Orleans, on a punishing tight three week schedule. A script was cobbled together from somewhere or other, and actress Marki Bey - top-billed for the first and last time after playing supporting roles in a couple of pictures for AIP director/producer Arthur Marks - was recruited to play the title character. She’s not bad, but… she’s no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. (1)

Likewise, ‘Sugar Hill’ is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but… it’s certainly not an exceptional one either. The very definition of ‘adequate’, it’s one of those movies that’s just kind of…. there, for the most part. It delivers exactly what you’d expect of a 1974 AIP-produced blaxploitation voodoo movie, nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of innovation or inspiration are few and far between.

Predictably, the story begins with Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill propping up the bar in her upstanding boyfriend’s kitsch, voodoo-themed nightclub, where we get to see a bit of the floorshow, and hear Motown group The Originals’ laboured and rather heavy-handed theme song, ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman’. (‘Theme from Shaft’ it ain’t.)

The club is proving a runaway success, so naturally the local, multi-ethnic mob (led by Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry) want in on the action. Upstanding BF of course is having none of it, so before you can reach for the fast forward button, he comes a cropper in the car park, and Sugar is out for sweet revenge.

Naturally, her first stop is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who lives a ghostly existence in a decaying colonial mansion amid a swampy estate swathed in prop department Spanish moss and gallons of dry ice. After the requisite sacrifices and incantations, Baron Samedi (a wild-eyed, permanently grinning Don Pedro Colley) arrives resplendent, as his ping-pong ball-eyed zombie slaves rise from the mulch of the forest floor to take care of business.

Before you can find any more synonyms for ‘predictably’/’naturally’/’of course’ etc, Quarry and his assorted despicable cohorts begin to meet their supernatural doom in a neatly episodic fashion, and….. that’s about as far as a plot synopsis needs to go, really.

On the plus side here then; even if the swampy, Louisiana atmos isn’t quite what it should be, the blind, silver-eyed zombies are an effective, distinctively creepy creation, and must have made quite an impression on audiences back in the pre-Fulci/Raimi era, when such soil-covered, filth-encrusted revenants were a rare sight indeed on the big screen.

Colley is full of fun too as Baron Samedi, going waa-ay off the deep end performance-wise, even if his top-hatted Loa character never really manages to move beyond the more obvious clichés of his part, and the ‘gags’ he dishes out as he drops in on his assorted victims are uniformly woeful.

Also providing excellent value for money is Quarry, who, despite reportedly being cast in this film simply because AIP were legally obligated to provide him with one more job before nixing his contract, nonetheless does sterling work. Giving every indication of having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he transforms his underwritten mob boss character into a hip, razor sharp figure who actually becomes strangely likeable, especially when sparring with his dim-witted, racist blonde girlfriend Celeste (Betty Ann Rees).

Those minor highlights aside however, there’s not really a lot to shout about here. Though there’s some nice lighting and camerawork here and there, in stark contrast to Hill, Maslansky’s direction is depressingly inert. It’s bad sign that he fails to invest even the calamitous early death of the boyfriend character with much dramatic weight, and for the most part proceedings remain equally flat thereafter.

Although he went on to enjoy a highly successful production career through the 70s and 80s (masterminding the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, of all things), it is notable I think that ‘Sugar Hill’ represents Maslansky’s only directorial credit. The drably utilitarian, “will this do?” vibe of most of the footage he captured here answers the question of why he never gave it another shot pretty concisely.

I probably can’t entirely blame Maslansky (who seems like a perfectly nice guy in interviews incidentally) for my next complaint – it sits more with a combo of him, Arkoff and Nicholson, writer Tim Kelly, the whole outfit really I suppose, but…. well, how can I best put this?

Whilst employing white writers and directors to make majority black cast films in the U.S.A. was never going to be an ideal scenario, my belief is that, when AIP hired hip white filmmakers like Hill, Larry Cohen and Jonathan Kaplan to make black action films for them in the early 1970s, those directors at least gave the impression that they were trying to engage with black audiences.

They positioned themselves on the same level as their hypothetical viewers and took an honest stab at reflecting their concerns back to them, sometimes pushing back against the more objectionable content demanded by the studio, and often allowing their actors to bend the material to their own creative/personal needs. To not put too fine a point on it, good movies resulted.

‘Sugar Hill’ by contrast merely feels like it’s patronising its target audience. Though the “revenge against whitey” plotline essentially isn’t much different to that of ‘Coffy’ or ‘Black Caesar’, there’s no real depth here, no impact or involvement. As each of the bad guys in turn prove themselves racist, corrupt or despicable before getting iced by Sugar Hill’s zombies as the guffawing Baron Samedi looks on, the payback is so predictable, so simplistic, that viewers – be they black, white, blue or green – simply feel as if they’re being played for fools, more than anything else.

It’s as if Arkoff told Maslansky, look, you’ve gotta knock off whitey (and some corrupt, black criminal types too, just for the sake of balance) – that’s what sells the tickets. Lesson learned, he’s just ticking the boxes for his boss here. Social relevance? Implicit understanding of the economic inequalities underpinning racial strife? Reflections on the blighted legacy of slavery lurking behind all that voodoo/colonial mansion shtick? Sadly there is precious little of any of that here.

And that’s before we even get to the “only in the 70s” ending, which sees the aforementioned Celeste (the real villain of the piece, to all intents and purposes) being ritually offered up to Baron Samedi as the ‘offering’ to repay him for his hard work icing all the bad guys, leading to us being implicitly invited to cheer in approval as Colley, grinning ear-to-ear, closes in for what he must assume to be a post-credits supernatural rape scene. HAPPY ENDING, everybody!

Boy oh boy. Let’s just skip over unpacking the questionable implications of that one, shall we? It might take a while.

In a sense, ‘Sugar Hill’ reminds me more than anything of the British horror directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in the late 1960s, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’ and ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (both 1968). It carries the same terrible stench of wasted potential, of the lightning-in-a-bottle potential of a unique confluence of time, talent and ideas being squandered, just because the guys in the back office were more concerned with delivering exploitable pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible than they were with actually making a movie anyone in their right mind would wish to see more than once.

When undertaking creative work, I’ve always tried to remember the old axiom that, if you aim for ‘good’, hopefully you’ll get something average - but if you aim for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably end up with shit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Sugar Hill’ is shit – it’s a perfectly serviceable movie, and certainly worth a look for fans of this particular aesthetic terrain. But, if the film’s makers had borne the above wisdom in mind, it could easily have been worth two looks, or even eight or nine, if you get my drift. And the restless spirit of Mr. Arkoff may wish to note that we’d still be paying for it every time too.

Now if only they’d got Jack Hill to make this, and persuaded Pam Grier to star, and….

 ---- 

(1)In fairness to Bey, this is a criticism which can just as easily be levelled at literally anyone else in the film industry. (Werner Herzog? I mean, he’s ok, but he’s no Pam Grier.)

Horror Express 2020 intro.

 As you will have noted, October begins tomorrow.

So, it stands to reason that the annual Breakfast in the Ruins horror-movie-reviewing marathon – now renamed ‘Horror Express’, because I like the name and logo I came up with (ie, stole) earlier this year and want to do something with them – will also be kicking off tomorrow.

I appreciate of course that this particular October seems liable to prove an especially stressful and trying time for people across the globe, for a number of borderline apocalyptic reasons. Less apocalyptically, it promises to be a fairly busy month for me personally also, and thus I haven’t managed to put in as much advance preparation for October’s posts as I would normally wish to. As such, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to keep up my traditional one-post-every-two-days marathon schedule - but I’ll do my best.

I also understand that some may feel that bantering about old horror movies should not be anyone’s priority whilst so much heavy shit is going down out there in the real world, but what can I tell you… this blog exists largely for the purposes of escapism, and the older I get, the more value I place in escapism. Putting some time aside each day to engage with the kind of culture I write about here is my therapy, more or less, and I hope that, through joining me in my cobwebbed mental escape pod, others may be able to find a similar happy place in the midst of their day-to-day.

So, crank up your preferred media-playing device, pour yourself a stiff drink, and let’s enjoy the ol’ countdown to Samhain as per usual. Please just don’t spend so long thinking about old horror movies that you forget to feed your cat, wash your hands, be kind to your neighbours and vote against loathsome, simple-minded demagogues – that’s all I ask.

Golden Queen’s Commando (Chu Yen-Ping, 1982)

Although I can’t find a way to shoehorn it into any of my existing blog categories, today I’m going to go off-piste to tell you all about ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, a lackadaisical action spectacular from the depths of Taiwan’s b-movie netherworld which charmed and mystified me in equal measure as it unfolded before my sleepy, post-midnight eyes last weekend.

[Quick note: Where possible, I’ve tried to present both the Chinese and English names of cast members when crediting them, but given the extent of misinformation and general obscurity which surrounds the Taiwanese popular film industry, confusion is bound to ensue, so apologies in advance for any mistakes.]

On first glance, ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ seems like a pretty fool-proof proposition: an all-female riff on ‘The Dirty Dozen’, set in war-torn Manchuria circa 1944. Pretty straightforward stuff, you may think, but just try telling that to director Chu Yen-Ping, a man best known in the West for bringing the world the unforgettable, allegedly Triad-financed all-star headfuck Fantasy Mission Force a year later.

Suffice to say, anyone familiar with that film will anticipate trouble brewin’ with this one, and indeed, the same delirious mixture of full-spectrum sloppiness, misplaced ambition, relentless forward momentum and sheer, unadulterated craziness is already in full effect in ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, as Yen-Ping leaves any semblance of real world logic way back in the rear view mirror right from the outset.

As seems fairly sensible, the film begins with a series of short vignettes introducing us to each of our ‘commandos’, illustrating the circumstances which led to them being incarcerated together in what we’re forced to assume must be some kind of hellish, pan-Asian prison camp.

And, boy howdy, what a fantastic line-up of ladies we have to root for here! Much in the spirit of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s ‘House’ (1977), each of our heroines has a simple, one-personality-trait identity, a distinctive costume, and an easy name to help us remember them.

There’s a tattooed lady wrestler from Inner Mongolia (‘Amazon’, played by Chun-Chun Hsu/Theresa Tsui), a master safecracker and cat burglar (‘Quicksilver’, Hsueh-Fen (Silvia) Peng), and ‘Sugar Plum’ (Joyce H. Cheng), who appears to be some kind of man-eating femme fatale / call girl with a cupid’s bow tattooed on her cheek.

 Even more memorable though is ‘Brandy’ (Hao-Yi (Hilda) Liu), an alcoholic swordswoman who we we initially see debasing herself terribly as she tries to scrounge a drink in a filthy, crowded bar. Once she’s managed to glug down a flask of wine however, it’s ‘Drunken Master’ time, as she is transformed into a fearsome fighter, slicing up her goon-ish tormenters in classic chanbara fashion! Wow!

A somewhat more aesthetically complex creation, ‘Black Cat’ (Hui-Shan Yang / Elsa Yeung) meanwhile boasts a spectacular, period-defying teased hair-do, new wave make-up and ray-bans, as well as wearing an oversized black cross around her neck.

Apparently some kind of Old West-styled outlaw / gambler / preacher(?), Black Cat makes up for the fact she was born forty years too early to audition to play bass in The Gun Club by bringing her own brand of rough, frontier justice to the saloons of old… Asia?

In one of several tributes to ‘For a Few Dollars More’ scattering through ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, we initially see her calling out some no good varmint who’s unsuccessfully tried to stack a card game against her, blowing him away with a hidden pistol concealed inside a bible.

Eventually emerging as the movie’s Charles Bronson / second-in-command figure, Black Cat is undoubtedly pretty awesome, but when it comes to picking my favourite Golden Queen Commando, she narrowly loses out to ‘Dynamite’, played by Sally Yeh (who went on to star in Tsui Hark’s ‘Peking Opera Blues’ and John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ (both 1986)).

Swaggering across the Tibetan Plateau in hot-pants and a red bandana, Dynamite keeps a lit cigarette permanently dangling from her lips and specialises in – you guessed it – blowing stuff up, sometimes even using an oversized, cartoon-style detonator. (At one point later in the film, Dynamite further cements her infinite coolness by literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, and winning. Too much, man.)

As you can imagine, the various episodes required to introduce us to this mob of ass-kicking oddballs eat up so much screen-time that I was wondering whether there would actually be any time left for them to be assembled into a crack team of commandos and sent on a dangerous mission. Not that I’m complaining you understand - I could happily have watched a few dozen more of these action-packed vengeance vignettes, hit the end credits and headed off to slumberland feeling pretty satisfied.

But, ‘Dirty Dozen’ movie’s gotta do what a ‘Dirty Dozen’ movie’s got to do, and so eventually the aforementioned bad-ass dames find themselves incarcerated together in the aforementioned prison camp, being bossed around by soldiers who, in view of the historical setting, must presumably be Japanese, even though their uniforms and equipment appear to be German. Seriously though, let’s not even go there. They’re just baddies, ok?

Incredibly for a film of this vintage and general type however, the rote ‘Women In Prison’ segment which follows is entirely lacking in the kind of exploitative sadistic / sexual content one would usually expect of such material. In fact, the evil Asian Nazis don’t even so much as leer at any of the attractive women under their command, insofar as I recall. (There is a food fight instead though, if that’s any consolation.)

It’s almost as if Yen-Ping was setting out to make a family friendly movie or something. Albeit, one of those family friendly movies which involve hundreds of people being slaughtered, dismembered body parts flying across the screen and so forth - but still.

Anyway, it is whilst hanging around in this strangely non-threatening prison hell-camp that our heroines first encounter the formidable Brigitte Lin, heading up the cast list as our eye patch-sporting Lee Marvin surrogate, ‘Black Fox’.

“The Black Fox was really hot before the war – her two guns were enough to panic any mobster from Hong Kong to Chicago,” Black Cat helpfully explains. (Yes, there’s both a Black Cat and a Black Fox in this film, get used to it.)

[Hopefully Brigitte Lin will require no introduction for many of this blog’s readers, but given that I rarely cover Chinese-language cinema to any great extent, let’s just say – deep breath – ‘Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain’ (1983), ‘Police Story’ (1985), ‘Peking Opera Blues’ (1986), ‘Dragon Inn’ (1992), ‘The Bride With White Hair’ (1993), ‘Chungking Express’ (1994). You get the idea.]

Masquerading as a fellow inmate, Black Fox undertakes assorted chicanery in order to get our six heroines committed to the prison’s ‘black hole’ punishment room (basically it’s just an empty room with no lights where they hang around together, smoking cigarettes), from whence she orchestrates their escape.

Unfortunately however, the lengthy ‘prison break’ sequence that follows takes place at night, rendering the action largely incomprehensible on the badly degraded print of the film included on Golden Ninja Video’s recent Ninja Vortex compendium of IFD/Joseph Lai related films.

Presumably sourced from a Japanese VHS release if the burned in subs are anything to go by, this sadly seems to represent the only version of this film currently available in any format. Looking on the bright side though, at least it’s widescreen. Given that about 90% of the soundtrack consists of stolen Ennio Morricone music, I’m not really expecting a legit, remastered blu-ray edition to pop up any time soon either, so let’s just be thankful for what we’ve got.

A typically moody nocturnal action shot from the extant print of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’.

So, as you’ll appreciate, I don’t really know how the ladies get out of prison. There seem to be a lot of soldiers being massacred, some jeeps zooming around and some buildings catching fire, but the whys and wherefores are all lost in the tape-sourced murk. Eventually though, they regroup in some kind of hideout which Black Fox has set out for them, where they are – finally! - briefed on the details of the mission they are supposed to carry out.

A spectacularly half-hearted attempt at exposition, this briefing lasts around thirty seconds, accompanied by a single chalkboard map, and basically consists of: “so there’s this underground enemy chemical lab, and some revolutionaries are threatening to unleash a chemical attack, so we get there first and blow it all up before them, any questions?”

Well, ok, how about - whose enemies? What revolutionaries? What the hell is going on here? I seem to recall there was also some reference made to a ‘queen’ at this point, which I suppose goes some way toward addressing this film’s grammatically awkward English title, but… which queen would that be then? I confess, the complex politics of war-time Taiwan and mainland China aren’t exactly my area of expertise, but… on reflection I should stop tormenting myself with these questions and just roll with it really, shouldn’t I?

I mean, I suspect I’ve already put more effort into trying to set the scene for this thing than Yen-Ping ever did, and even if he did deign to address his story’s historical background to some extent, you can be damn sure none of his efforts would have survived IFD’s typically horrendous English dubbing process (and make no mistake, this one is an absolute shocker in that regard).

Anyway, next thing we know, we’re in some dusty rural locale, and our heroines are all riding horses! They all seem to have reclaimed their preferred costumes and weapons from the pre-prison section of the movie, and Brigitte Lin has acquired a big, furry hat which she proceeds to wear through the remainder of the picture, even though the weather looks quite warm.

Meanwhile, someone in the editing room is absolutely caning their old copy of the ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ soundtrack LP, and ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ seems determined to transform itself into a western. There are many bad men on the Commandos’ tail, which we know because we see atmospheric, low angle shots of the black-hatted riders thundering over the camera, wielding flaming torches. Cripes! 

From hereon in, the narrative more or less degenerates into a series of unrelated set pieces with zero connective tissue linking them together. So, at one point, the Commandos enter a forested area, where they all ensnared by a variety of elaborate booby traps, one of which involves Black Fox getting clobbered by a bunch of human skeletons which swing down from the sky (or something).

Unfeasibly, the instigators of these traps turns up to just be a bunch of slobbish militia type dudes. Could they those ‘revolutionaries’ we were just hearing about? I’m not sure, but whoever they are, they’re a fairly good natured bunch, which leads us to our next set piece, wherein they promise our heroines their freedom, provided they can prove their mastery of various disciplines by defeating their captors in a series of challenges involving noodle-eating, beer-drinking, archery etc.

Sadly, whilst all of these hi-jinks are going on, there’s very little time for us to spend getting to know the individual Commandos, which is a shame, because they’re all such outstanding characters I could easily have watched a spin-off solo movie featuring any of them.

There is some rather minimal back-biting / in-fighting along the way, but the chief takeaway from this is simply the realisation that Quicksilver is by far the most annoying member of the group, prefiguring Winona Ryder’s angsty android character from ‘Alien Resurrection’ by several decades as she brings the action grinding to a halt on several occasions in order to start whining about the fact that she’s an orphan and had to make her own way in the world, and so on and so forth.

I mean, I’m sure each of these women has just as much of a hard luck story to tell, but do you see them tearing up and complaining about it every five minutes? Just look at poor Amazon – she’s been snatched away from her prize-fighting career in darkest Mongolia with nothing but an animal skin bikini to her name, and she barely even gets any screen-time. She’s just quietly takin’ care of business, trying to get this action movie / western / whatever thing done, as should you Quicksilver, you ungrateful cow. Just because you’re slightly less cool than the other characters, you think you’ve got a right to monopolise our attention. Go and crack a safe or something, why don’t you!

Sorry, where were we? Oh yes, the next big set piece finds the Commandos holing up in some sand dunes for a showdown with the army of baddies who have been following them – apparently led by the heretofore unmentioned “Flash Harry, the best tracker around”. (“But it can’t be him, he’s in Brazil,” Quicksilver exclaims, inexplicably.)

This sequence soon develops into a seemingly endless series of stylish, low angle shots of silhouetted stuntmen being thrown from their horses in slow mo, as multiple explosive charges set in advance by Dynamite explode around them.

Grabbing these extremely effective pyro / horse stunt shots was presumably a big deal for director Chu, and he seems determined to milk them for as much production value as he possibly can, throwing together what I imagine must have been every single piece of footage shot for these sequences and looping ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’ endlessly behind them, creating a slo-mo, cowboy blasting montage which goes on for so long it eventually blurs into complete abstraction, resembling some avant garde / psychedelic re-appropriation of violent western imagery – an impression only intensified by cutaways to close-ups of the warrior women, rocking their assorted early ‘80s fashion statements as they blast away at their attackers with rifles.

After all this, we’re left feeling thoroughly discombobulated as the surviving Commandos (yes, some of them have sadly copped it, but no spoilers here) finally reach their destination, which appears to be a system of caves. Here, after more close-quarters soldier slaughter and more weepy shit from Quicksilver as she finally serves her purpose by cracking the lock on the big, metal door, they infiltrate the “chemical plant”, where…. well… good grief. I think this is where I finally lost it.

Imagine if you will, a cornucopia of bubbling, mad scientist beakers and chemistry equipment, full of wildly coloured liquid, all lorded over by cackling, Nazi-uniformed Asian soldiers. Meanwhile, the room’s big, raised central panel spins around (a common motif in crazy, early’80s Taiwanese films, in my experience), revealing - for some goddamned reason - the guy who was in charge of the prison way back at the start of the movie!

He is enthroned, Blofeld-style, upon a red upholstered armchair, stroking a cat, and is attended by a hefty, Eunuch-like servant wearing a one-piece yellow bodysuit. (Those still determined to wring some real world context out of this nonsense may wish to note that there is kind of white-on-red crescent/bull horns motif going on here, whatever that might imply.)

“I beg of you please, you mustn’t destroy any of this, this is not evil, it is art and science, all those wonderful theories,” the Eunuch guy pleads with the Commandos. “With this, we can take man to a higher level of civilisation, where there is peace, no pain, a paradise beyond dreams,” adds the prison boss/warlord.

“That’s a load of horseshit if ever I heard any,” Black Cat immediately responds, before opening fire and machine-gunning everything to smithereens – which I for one couldn’t help thinking seemed at least a bit premature.

I mean, admittedly, the cackling Nazis and cat-stroking Bond villain are assuredly not good signs, but this man in the yellow seems fairly sincere, at least. And after all, we haven’t actually seen any proof that this outfit are up to no good, have we? Wouldn’t it make sense to wait around and ascertain whether or not they have actually made any discoveries vital to humanity’s future, before going for full-on obliteration?

Well, apparently not. Still determined to turn itself into a western by any means necessary, ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ takes one last deep breath and goes for a kind of Bond movie-ish variation on the ‘Wild Bunch’ ending. Chaos! Blood! Screaming! Slaughter! Will anyone get out alive…?

To find out, you will simply have to commit ninety minutes to watching whatever ragged copy of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ the internet and/or grey market can provide you with. I’m confident you won’t regret it.

Resorting to a tired cooking metaphor (last refuge of the speechless movie reviewer), this film feels as if someone cleared out everything sweet or salty from the kitchen cupboard, mixed it all up in a bowl, and served it up raw for dinner. Crazy, indigestible and quite possibly dangerous to one’s continued well-being it may be… but it’s kind of irresistible too.

Filleting through errant genre tropes like an ADHD-afflicted kid trapped in a comic book archive, it finds Chu Yen-Ping dishing out happy, context free pulp adventure mayhem like the unhinged b-movie savant which for the moment I’m going to assume he is.

Justin Decloux, who compiled and annotated the aforementioned ‘Ninja Vortex’ set from which I sourced my copy of this film, informs us that ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ is “…shockingly coherent for a Yen-Ping production”. Goddamn.

‘Pink Force Commandos’, with most of the same cast and crew, followed in ’83. Wish me luck, I’m going in.

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At the time of writing, a version of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ comparable to the one I watched (actually, I think it might be a bit more cropped around the edges, if yr feeling picky) can be enjoyed on Youtube here.

Lovecraft on Film: The Unnamable (Jean-Paul Ouellette, 1988)

“The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty: no freedom – we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron straightjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.”  - H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable’

First published in the July 1925 issue of ‘Weird Tales’, H.P. Lovecraft’s brief tale ‘The Unnamable’ is an odd business, even by its author’s usual standards. Though ostensibly a conventional horror story, with an old dark house, a graveyard, scary folk tales and a grisly climax involving an indescribable monster to be found within its few short pages, Lovecraft’s intentions in drafting this one actually seem to have lain somewhere else entirely.

Seemingly functioning more as an extended in-joke aimed at the author’s fans and correspondents, ‘The Unnamable’ is in fact an archly self-aware piece of niche literary jocularity. Chiefly centred around a faux-Platonic dialogue conducted between two gentlemen lounging around in an Arkham cemetery, it also meanwhile provides a vehicle for Lovecraft’s sincerely held views on the value of mystery and ambiguity within literature and culture (as opposed to the smug, Christian Science-derived rationality proffered by his hypothetical critics).

Though identified in the story’s final sentence as “Carter”, the narrator of ‘The Unnamable’ is clearly a stand-in for Lovecraft himself – an amateur scribbler of spooky tales, criticised by his more down-to-earth friends for his “..constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things”; “..a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my low standing as an author,” the narrator informs us, tongue firmly in cheek.

Beginning with the unforgettable opening gambit, “We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham and speculating about the unnamable,” the story in fact allows us a rare glimpse of Lovecraft’s capacity not only to recognise, but to happily lampoon, the excesses of his own style, as he proceeds to pepper his text with adjective-clogged sentences so patently absurd that they surely must have been intended as a kind of winking self-parody.(1)

Much of this literary jiggery-pokery is inevitably lost in Jean-Paul Ouellette’s 1988 movie adaptation of ‘The Unnamable’, but nonetheless, the first-time writer/director does a surprisingly good job of retaining the self-reflexive tone of the piece, remaining faithful both to the flimsy outline of the story, and to the reassuringly eerie atmosphere of Lovecraft’s fantastical New England.(2)

Immediately expanding upon Lovecraft’s story, the film opens with a historical prologue which seems designed to reassure nervous Weird Tales fans that they can nix that outraged letter to the editor of ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ – this movie’s got them covered.

In the drawing-room of a shadow-haunted, colonial mansion, an aged alchemist or warlock of some kind is chilling out with his extensive collection of grimoires. But, his contemplation of the Pnakotic Manuscripts is persistently interrupted by the unholy sounds emanating from the house’s gabled attic room, causing him to recall that this is where he has locked up the unseen, and indeed unnameable, creature which used to by his wife.

One cautious (and, it must be said, extremely slow) ascent of the perilous staircase later, following some shaky fingering of the wrought iron key which may perchance unlock the big, rusted padlock which keeps the door chained, and – surprise! – we’re treated to some of the best value late ‘80s gore that money can buy, and “the unnameable” is on the loose.

Though admirable in its intent to establish an authentically “Lovecraftian” feel, the meagre resources with which this film was produced are all too clearly on view during this prologue. Though the sets and lighting are pretty decent, and the grimoires and candles and stuff look lovely, some of the other period details have a bit of an Andy Milligan feel to them, which does not necessarily bode well for what follows.

(I just couldn’t get past the absolutely ridiculous nightcap/hanky thing the old man is wearing on his head, whilst the puritan minister who turns up to declare that the house should be sealed up and shunned for all eternity looks about twenty years old, and appears to be wearing a sheet of A1 printing paper with a hole cut in the middle around his neck.)

We’re on safer ground however – in terms of costumery, at least - as we zip forward to present day, where we find ourselves in a bucolic cemetery just down the road from Arkham’s Miskatonic University campus. Here, as per Lovecraft’s tale, a group of friends are indeed ‘speculating about the unnameable’. Admittedly, the mature adults of HPL’s story (in which the narrator’s rationalist antagonist is identified as “principal of the East High School”) have been recast here as fresh-faced students, and there are three of them, rather than two, but y’know – this is an ‘80s horror movie. Young victims are needed. 

Making an inter-textual jump never explicitly stated in the source text, Ouellette’s screenplay assumes that that our narrator, “Carter”, is in fact none other than Randolph Carter, protagonist of both HPL’s titular ‘Statement of…’ (1919), and his subsequent series of Dunsany-inspired “dreamland” fantasies.

As played here by the immediately likeable Mark Kinsey Stephenson, it is also clear that this Randolph Carter is going to be anything but a sickly, introverted Lovecraft stand-in. In fact, he comes across as a lively and rather charismatic figure right from the outset, becoming more-so as the movie progresses.

An oddball aspiring folklorist possessed of nervous energy and a presumably vast knowledge of esoteric lore, Stephenson’s Carter makes for a pretty great horror movie hero all round. It’s easy to imagine him having headed up his own TV show or on-going franchise in which he traipsed around New England, collecting old stories and investigating sinister goings-on, like some more collegiate equivalent of Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘Silver John’ character.

(Though this possibility sadly never came to pass, the appeal of Stephenson’s characterisation was clearly not lost on Ouellette and his collaborators; ‘The Unnamable’s 1992 sequel is sub-titled “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, with Stephenson top-billed.)

Unfortunately, none of the other characters here are quite so memorable, but again – we’re in ‘80s horror movie territory here, so they’re all just meat for the grinder, more or less. For the most part the cast acquit themselves fairly well, with Charles Klausmeyer standing out for his young Roman Polanski / John Moulder-Brown type look in the role of Carter’s younger buddy/protégé Howard Damon. (He also seems to wear a tweed suit and tie to campus every day, which lends a touch of class.) 

In this telling of the story, Carter’s rationalist antagonist in the graveyard discussion – business major Joel Manton, played by Mark Parra – becomes so worked up about his friend’s willingness to embrace the supernatural that he stomps off in the direction of the haunted house just across the way, declaring that he will spend the night there in order to prove that nothing untoward is going on within. (Good luck with that, fella.)

Shrugging this off, Carter and Damon meanwhile return to campus, where we re-join them the following morning in the Miskatonic University library, where they discuss Manton’s apparent failure to return from his impromptu camp-out.

Meanwhile, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a routine campus slasher, as two studious sorority girls (one of whom the shy Damon happens to have the hots for) are chatted up by a pair of generic frat-boys, one of whom proudly displays that universal signifier of jockitude, a woollen sweater hanging loose over his shoulders (where indeed it remains, worn like a cloak, for the entire remainder of the movie).

Claiming rather feebly that they need to undertake some nocturnal location-scouting for forthcoming initiation-related hi-jinks, the jocks manage to convince the reluctant girls to meet them at the spooky old house by the graveyard that evening for a thinly veiled double-date, and… well you don’t need to be much of an aspiring folklorist to figure out where all this is headed. (Toward a partial recreation of 1981’s ‘Hell Night’, if nothing else.)

This mixture of quirky, Lovecraftian atmospherics and rote slasher movie cliché may seem a little jarring at first, but ‘The Unnamable’s tone actually remains pretty consistent throughout, using hefty doses of humour and raised eyebrow self-awareness to distract attention from the minimal and formulaic plotting -- much as Lovecraft did in his original tale, in fact.

Despite the low budget, the film’s photography (courtesy of DP Tom Fraser) is pretty good, particularly once the action moves entirely into the cluttered, candle-lit interior of the derelict old house during the movie’s second half, making extensive, rather fantastical use of blue gel lighting, alongside some imaginatively patterned shadows.

So smitten do the filmmakers seem in fact by their creepy gothic lighting, the film actually begins to suffer from something of a middle act slump, as characters spend a very, very long time exploring the eerily lit interior sets. Feeling suspiciously like attempts to pad out a near non-existent narrative to feature length, these extended peregrinations could well induce severe wakefulness / attention-span issues amongst late night/inebriated viewers, but as a dedicated fan of ‘60s Italian gothics, I was personally happy enough to roll with ‘em.

Likewise, David Bergeaud’s ridiculously over-bearing, faux-classical keyboard score may prove an intolerable for some, but I actually found it weirdly endearing, functioning in a sense as a persistent reminder of the film’s independent/low budget origins and determined eccentricity, lest we begin expecting it to get too slick n’ professional.

As befits a movie dealing with the, ahem, “unnameable”, much of the drag in the middle half hour results from the filmmakers’ reluctance to reveal their monster. The mystery of what the creature actually looks like is maintained for what, by 80s/90s b-horror standards, feels like an exceptionally long time. And, when we do finally start to get some glimpses of our resident beastie, well…. the hairy goat legs were a bit of a surprise, I’ll tell you that much. [Cue momentary flashback to Dragnet (1987).] 

Unfortunately, most of the posters and box art for this movie rather give the game away, spoiling the eventual appearance of the monster by utilising stills which make it look a scrawny cousin of that demon thing from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’, but if we can put that out of our minds before viewing, the creature’s eventual Big Reveal within the movie itself is…. actually quite impressive.

Portrayed by actress Katrin Alexandre, who employs a series of extravagantly theatrical, choreographed movements, this creature’s amalgam of disparate monster tropes manages to justify the “unnameable” epithet about as well as anything which could be conjured up on this movie’s budget possibly could. 

Fans may be liable to declare that it looks absolutely nothing like the kind of entity we usually think of as fitting in to Lovecraft’s universe, but they’d be well advised to refer back to the source text, wherein HPL, who seems to been on a bit of a Cotton Mather-inspired backwoods folklore kick at this point, does actually state that his indescribable creature’s attributes include horns and cloven hooves, as well as the more familiar tentacles and shapeless, shifting clods of organic matter.

Obvious though it may be, the climactic scene here in which the monster skulks in the shadows whilst a doomed jock/sorority girl couple are making out in a deserted room (thus delivering the film’s requisite minimum quantity of gratuitous nudity), rolling a severed head into the view of the female partner, is very well done – a killer scare with some sharp editing. (Meanwhile, I’ve also got to admire the fact that the couple weren’t deterred by discovering a bloody femur bone beneath their makeshift bed.)

Another highlight in the lead-up to the film’s conclusion are the scenes which find a flustered Randolph Carter indulging in a few arch, rather Jeffrey Combs-esque line readings as he ploughs his way through the deceased warlock’s grimoire collection, which has apparently been left untouched for three centuries. Kicking up as much dust as you’d expect in the process, he eventually zeroes in on (what else?) the ‘Necronomicon’ itself, and, in a development almost certainly inspired by ‘The Evil Dead’, he’s soon located the requisite “anaal nathrakh”s necessary to send the unnamable creature which was once the ancient wizard’s wife back from whence it came. (3)

(Actually, it’s implied that Carter saves the day by invoking some kind of dryad-ish woodland spirits embodied in the trees outside the house, or something – an interesting, if under-explored, twist.) 

Though not a lost classic by any stretch of the imagination, ‘The Unnamable’ is nonetheless a noble effort. Ouellette was clearly a sincere fan of Lovecraft’s work, and his attempt to make a film which might actually appeal to his fellow cultists whilst also fulfilling the commercial requirements of a late ‘80s American horror movie demonstrates a certain amount of both daring and ingenuity.

Considering that he and his collaborators were working on a miniscule budget, utilising a largely inexperienced cast and crew, and working to a script which ultimately doesn’t add up to much more than a handful of well-worn genre clichés, I think ‘The Unnamable’ actually emerges as a surprisingly accomplished piece of work, within its own modest parameters. It conveys a ‘little-train-that-could’ style sense of fun and achievement, which seasoned connoisseurs of independent American horror should be able to appreciate, even if it couldn’t hope to hit the heights so recently scaled by Stuart Gordon and co in the field of Lovecraftian cinema. 

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(1)Just as an example, try this one on for size: “Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”

(2) After working in camera tech / continuity roles on a variety of marginal New York-based productions in late ‘70s, Ouellette seems to have gotten quite a big break when he was appointed as ‘second unit director (action)’ on ‘The Terminator’ in 1984, but sadly his career in the film industry never really seems to have gained much traction after this. Aside from the two ‘Unnameable’ films, his only other feature as director is a 1990 STV actioner named ‘Chinatown Connection’, and the remainder of his sparse CV comprises short films, a TV movie script and production credits on a few little-known projects in the early ‘00s. 

(3) Yeah, I know “anaal nathrakh” is actually from ‘Excalibur’, but gimme a break here – I just like it more than the ‘Evil Dead’ incantations.

Two-Fisted Tales: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third printing 1961)

I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork, no question. The manner in which it is presented however clearly leaves a lot to be desired. With the painting apparently sliced out by hand and stuck against a decidedly unflattering white and red background, the whole thing is in fact a bit of a disaster area from the design point of view, and doesn’t look terribly appealing.

Furthermore, if you compare the front cover to the tinted detail from the illustration blown up on the back, you’ll get an idea of how brutally Bennett’s art has been squashed down here, and how much detail has been lost in the process of printing it at reduced scale. That great “huh?!” expression on the male figure’s face for instance is totally gone, along with who knows how much else.

(I would also complain that that expression seems entirely out of keeping with the stoic manner in which Hammett’s Continental Op greets the novel’s ever-increasing pile of corpses, but then the scene and characters depicted here by Bennett don’t actually seem to match anything in the book very well at all, so what the hey, right?)

It’s also interesting I think to observe how little Pocket Books chose to play up the fame and importance of this book and its author in their cover copy here. We’re over three decades away from ‘Red Harvest’s initial publication in 1929 at this point, and this edition was in fact printed in the very month of Hammett’s death (January ’61), but there’s still no “..the classic first novel from the celebrated author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’..” type blurb here, and no pull quotes from critics or noteworthy admirers.

Instead, they’ve just stuck a summary of the book’s most lurid and violent moment on the back, bluntly re-worded by an anonymous copy editor - basically treating the storied originator of the hard-boiled idiom in much the same manner as they would some random mug who just sent in an unsolicited manuscript hoping for the best. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong - in fact it’s entirely in keeping with the no nonsense / straight-down-to-business tone of the novel. It’s just… interesting, that’s all.

Could it be, that in the hey-day of more shamelessly populist detective writers like Spillane and Prather, Hammett’s vintage and reputation might have been seen to count against him in the marketplace? As in, perhaps this genre was pointedly NOT being sold to an audience who cared to read an old book that a bunch of fuddy-duddys at the newspapers liked, at this particular point in time?

Be that as it may, it’s fair to say that this hypothetical audience of uncultured brutes would surely not have been disappointed by ‘Red Harvest’, a book which still sparks with barbaric, ill-mannered energy over ninety years after it first hit the streets.

One thing I will say for the presentation of this “perma-book” is that it still remains readable after sixty years and at least one ocean crossing, and having ploughed through it this week, I’m happy to report that ‘Red Harvest’ remains my favourite of Hammett’s novels, half a lifetime since I first gave it a whirl as a teenager.

As violent, action-packed and callously cynical as anything those aforementioned later writers could have come up with, it stands above them not so much through any sense of refinement or literary pretention, but simply because it’s wittier, more stylish, more tightly constructed and more insightful in its unpacking of the ways in which corruption and back-room power games devalue life in America than pretty much any of its author’s subsequent competitors. Essential reading, needless to say.

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For the record, minimal online research reveals that Harry Bennett produced a full set of Hammett covers for Pocket Books in 1961. Most of them fared a lot better than his ‘Red Harvest’ illustration, and the blurb on a few of them at least makes an effort to sell Hammett on his ‘classic’ rep. Other people’s scans can be seen below. 

Unfortunately, I can’t find a decent jpg of his cover for ‘The Glass Key’, but it’s pretty great too. (Apropos of nothing, Bennett also produced an equally nifty set of covers for Chester Himes’ books, which can be enjoyed via Pulp International here.)