Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 7: Return of the Best Buy Exclusives!

Once more, a trip to Best Buy caused me to happen upon new discs which I had not seen discussed elsewhere. Warner has released a pair of discs exclusively to Best Buy stores, and one of them (featured below) was a no-brainer purchase for me. Some would contend, such as my girlfriend, that I would have to possess little in the way of gray matter to purchase such a thing in the first place, and this would not be a statement based solely on its content… the deeper truth is that we have little or no more room for such items in our relatively cramped abode, and my predilection for purchasing books, music and movies constantly has her making the odd comment here and there about the situation.

But she should put down the knife -- at least, she can after Halloween -- since I actually did show a small measure of restraint, as I did not purchase the twin disc to this set, a double feature of the Lovecraft feature The Shuttered Room and a Roddy McDowall golem flick called, simply, It! Since I have never seen the former before and it is actually being shown on TCM on Halloween, I decided to delay its possible addition to the collection for the time being. (Shuttered’s potential is the only thing in discussion over such a buy, since It! is really not very good at all.) But if I miss out on buying it, I miss it. That’s the choice I made, and Jen should be momentarily proud over it. Here are the discs:

Warner Horror Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Chamber of Horrors
Director: Hy Averback
Warner Bros., 1:39, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 25-30 years later

The Brides of Fu Manchu
Director: Don Sharp
Hallam/Anglo-Amalgamated/Seven Arts, 1:34, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 20 years later

Two more British horror flicks from the ‘60s that somehow my mind – and I am sure that I am not the only one out there – automatically triggers on as belonging to the long and bloody line of Hammer horror films, even though they, in actuality, are not. I know that somewhere far back in my past I saw Chamber of Horrors, a gimmick-laden (and how!) revenge festival with Patrick O’Neal as a one-armed madman with a variety of stump accessories, a couple of times. But, it was so long ago, I scarcely remember it past O’Neal’s image, being one of the few times I actually watched him act. The second of Harry Allan Towers’ Fu Manchu series I recall a tad bit better, having seen it slightly more recently, though still long enough ago where reading the film’s synopsis on IMDB has me now confusing with the later films in the series that I have caught in the past couple years.

Am I suggesting that all Fu Manchu flicks look alike? Hardly, that would be mildly racist, even when I am merely attempting to be ironic. But when all five films star the great Christopher Lee in the lead role, and all five basically have the same plot – the abduction of hot girls; forcing scientists to bend to his evil whims; trying to take over the world (the same thing he tries to do every night, Pinky…) – then you can understand the confusion. Fu’s megalomania is quizzical, since he can barely control a dozen people in one room – how is he going to control everyone in the world? He’d get no rest at all, and one would certainly beg for some extra leisure time with all the hot girls around. Maybe he should shoot for a smaller goal. Like taking over a movie studio and forcing them to make a halfway decent film. While Lee’s presence, and the attendant gore and torture that follows in his notorious character’s wake, could serve as the sole reasons why the connection to the Hammer series looms so large in my mind, perhaps it is also because these were shown side by side with the Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula films in my teen years, and so that made the true connection for me. Regardless, Hammer or not, The Brides of Fu Manchu will now rest side by side on my DVD shelf with those same films, if only for Mr. Lee.

Paul Naschy Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Curse of the Devil [El Retorno de Walpurgis] (1973)
Director: Carlos Aured
Spanish, 1:24, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet in a real version

Werewolf Shadow [La Noche de Walpurgis] (1971)
Director: León Klimovsky
Spanish, 1:35, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet at all

Trick or treat? I really won’t know which until I – and I will consider the opportunity a treat until I learn otherwise – dig into one or both of these Spanish horror films this Halloween weekend and discover the truth for myself. Most people outside of horror circles are probably not all that aware of Paul Naschy, who has as large a legacy in horror films in many countries in the world as Karloff, Lee, Cushing and Lee have in the English-speaking world. If they are aware, they may not know him by name, but possibly have crossed paths with him on Spanish-language channels here and there, generally in very censored and misshapen prints of his films, or even occasionally in badly dubbed versions of a couple of his films, such as Fury of the Wolfman, on UHF and cable access channels. In addition to his appearances in scads of films over his nearly fifty-year career, Naschy has knocked out a dozen films featuring his Hombre Lobo character, a wolfman named Waldemar Daninsky, even appearing as Daninsky as recently as four years ago. I only own copies of two of his films on videotape, both dubbed and truly atrocious in recording quality to view. I was aware that several of his films, including the two released on this combo disc (which I have read elsewhere can only be found at Best Buy), had been released to DVD. I figured now was as good a time as any, with my interest in world cinema, to become truly acquainted with Mr. Naschy (nee Jacinto Molina), and to let my own opinion take over in my mind all of the comments I have read – from disparate sources, mostly negative but coddling, as though they were films proposed by filmmakers with the talents of mere preschoolers, making films for the even more infantile. I doubt this is the truth, and there has to be some level of professionalism involved for such a series to have lasted so long and so popularly.

But then I think about Police Academy, and I worry…

Psychotronic Ketchup: Nothing But the Night (1973)

Director: Peter Sasdy
Charlemagne/Rank, 1:30, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

What spells terror to you? How about a fat whore wearing a Ronald McDonald style wig-do and a bright red leather jacket crawling across the Scottish countryside? Yep, that’s what I thought. It’s horrible to even consider it…

She would be far scarier if they didn’t show her panting desperately for air every few steps, and if they also didn’t show her stopping for a sandwich break halfway through her supposedly epic crawl across the breadth of a remote island as she angrily tries to reach her young daughter, supposedly to do her great bodily harm. I know the English must have their tea time, but this is ridiculous. And this is in the midst of incredible, frenetic violence going on all around her – helicopters circle overhead, police teams leading dogs comb the hillsides looking for both her and a little boy who has disappeared, and a boat gets blown to smithereens, killing five more trustees of a place called Inver House, where the fat whore’s daughter and a group of other children are being sheltered for some possibly nefarious reason one might discover later in the film. The only terror generated by this supposed threat to the welfare of English children everywhere is the one posed by her grotesque looks, with makeup lacquered on so thickly about her facial features that you will instantly realize I am not mistaken for the Ronald McDonald reference at the beginning of this piece.

And this is surprising, because the fat whore is played by none other than Diana Dors, often known as the British Marilyn Monroe, normally blonde, normally gorgeous. I certainly did a double take when I read the credits, but there she was, trolling it up in the opposite direction that she used to, looking a fright instead of a delight. And please don’t consider my statement regarding her status as a “whore” to be misogynistic; I am merely stating her profession within the film… that of a prostitute – a bloody, frightening one by looks at that – and one who did time for murder as well, at which point her daughter was wrested from her possession and became a ward of Inver House. For reasons that I am wholly bored by, she wishes to get her daughter back… or seems to... and her daughter is consumed by memories that may or may not be her own, of terrible fires and the deaths of numerous people. She might be the reincarnation of someone else, or is there something far more sinister at play? You know, the sort of wickedness that would cause us to have to watch her wretched mother bumble her way over hill and dale, panting and heaving awfully the entire, all while trying not very hard to make it seem like she is exactly the sort who could elude detectives, policemen and the army over hundreds of miles -- and possibly plot and commit the murders of all who stand in her noxious way – for an hour and a half.

The movie begins with a trio of what seem to be the horrible murders of the first three trustees of Inver House, and then we meet this awful, screaming wretch of a child. The actress playing her is graced with the traits of the worst child actors, and plays every emotion within the same range, from whispering to screeching, sometimes within the same sentence. She’s the type of child actress that makes one appreciate the Dakota Fannings and Haley Joel Osments of the world. (The reason decent child actors seem so alien sometimes, especially in Osment’s case, is that we have become so accustomed to kids automatically sucking onscreen, we are stunned when we actually see quality and depth instead. This includes Mr. Culkin who, despite his massive success as a kid, actually was a pretty stiff actor. The right cuteness at the right time was the key to his early success.) There comes the point, for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot, that one stops wishing they would catch the fat whore, and would instead just let her through to the orphanage so she can throttle her annoying daughter for good. One tries to take into account that different times call for different levels of child acting, and to just accept the story for what it is… but then some miniature, shrieking harpy opens her trap and takes one completely out of the film again.

Oh yes, you are supposed to be watching this film because it has yet another team-up of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but when one spends half a film following a porcine, red-headed, slutty clown around instead, one needs to be forgiven the original reason for tuning in. Lee (whose production company made this underwhelming claptrap) and Cushing are both portrayed as being the heroes here, but for the life of me, I couldn’t really figure out a decent reason for their being in the film at its closing point. Lee plays an army colonel who acts with appropriate gusto and determinedness throughout the film, but he really doesn’t seem to hold much influence over anything at all. Cushing plays a pathologist – and a knighted one at that, as we are reminded about a quartet of times in the flick that he is called “Sir Mark Ashley” – and he has one of those professions where you wonder why he is actually involved with this case at all. He seems to be one of those guys just hanging around on the off-chance that somebody will die so he can offer his expertise on how they might have died, and then take the credit for solving the mystery at the film’s end. Not that he really does – he only figures out part of it, and not that any of it makes a lick of sense anyway. And Lee even ends up playing second banana in his own film, letting other younger actors carry much of the dramatic load, relegating Cushing and himself to musing about possible murder angles every few minutes.

And so you are left with two heroes for whom you can’t really understand their compulsion, and a supposed villainess for whom you cannot illicit even the slightest belief that she couldn’t even make it up half a hill without stumbling, falling down, rolling two miles back down the hill to the center of town, and then devour half the contents of a fish n’ chips shop as he crashes through its front door. Without a reservation, mind you. I reserved time to watch Nothing But the Night, and all I received was a blinding headache from the shrill cries of an immensely annoying and precocious child actress, and a lacerating head wound from when I fell down laughing at the thought that anyone in this film would believe that the clownish mother would be any sort of threat to anyone…

Except perhaps by way of STD...

Psychotronic Ketchup: Berserk! (1967)

Director: Jim O'Connolly
Herman Cohen/Columbia, 1:36, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

"I had to kill him! I had to kill them all! I had to destroy your circus! KILL, KILL, KILL! That's all I feel inside me!"

In the interests of not "pulling an Ebert" (i.e., giving away the end of a movie almost immediately within a review), I'm not going to reveal which person says the statement above. You will, upon watching the film, figure out who the killer is once this appears for the first time. This still means just about anyone in the film could be the revenge-bent murderer who wreaks happen upon the Great Rivers Circus, which appears, through the use of footage of an actual circus, to be a rather extensive big-top affair even though the small cast gives it the initial appearance of being nothing but small-time. And when this line is delivered -- badly, so very badly by a performer who should clearly no far better given their experience -- you will find the only moment in the film where you haven't wasted your time. To hear the line delivered so badly is to wish that more of the film, directed by the same man who directed around Harryhausen's bits in Valley of Gwangi (a personal obsession of mine), were just as campy as the extraordinary sound of this swiftly spat out, verbal mania.

Unfortunately, most reviewers of this film, nearly to a person, make immediate mention of having to endure the hideous sight of a then sixty-plus-years old Joan Crawford pitching woo with a man a full quarter century her junior. I say, since the man in question is former TV star and rumored anti-Semite Ty Hardin, the jerk gets his just desserts. Here's the deal: yeah, we can go "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww...." and puke everywhere over the nightmarish vision of a nightie-clad Crawford (in soft-focus, 'natch) having every guy in the film swooning over her affections, when there are clearly much hotter girls working all over the circus. Taken in context with the film, though, the combined stance of dopey Hardin and his predecessor in the film, the overacting as usual Michael Gough, makes sense, since they are basically in it for the money. None of them really think she's the -- uh, what would be the term from the time when she was actually young? -- the bee's knees. And here's the main thing regarding Joanie Baby: she actually gives it her all in this one. She seems to be having a good time, even when doing what is mere exploitation, and however deluded she may have been in her real life concerning her fading beauty, I actually think she's quite arresting in this one.

Too bad the rest of the film can't match her in willpower. Too bad that Berserk! falls apart almost from the first moment, with a ridiculous murder that, even in the most extreme of circumstances, would not have occurred the way it does. And it only does so for the sake of an interesting title sequence, with the victim swinging back and forth, causing the title to wipe on and off the scream with each wave of the body. One could write forever about how ridiculous most slasher movie murders actually are when committed, and so it seems ridiculous to have to point this out about the second murder, especially concerning such factors as timing, murder weapon of choice, the strength of the killer to actually cause an event to happen in the way that it does, and even something so simple as having the right weapon for the right place and the right props when the killer couldn't possibly know exactly where the victim would actually stop to light up a smoke.

But let's put this all aside and discuss the third murder, where the film creates its greatest disappointment -- and you will not hear this from me very often, as I normally prefer implication and subtlety -- by not showing enough blood and gore. The first murder is a mere hanging, but the second is at the very least a good, gruesome sight, and the mood is that the murders will grow increasingly profane as the film progresses. The build is there... but the follow-through is not. Given the chance to saw a woman in half, where there is even a closeup of the magician's face to imply, at least partially, that we will see some blood spatter upon his tuxedo shirt, there is but a scream, and then a cutaway to the next scene, where there is but a discussion regarding the aftermath of the murder. Not even a quick and satisfying spray for half a second. At this point, even the casual viewer will know that this is about it as far as Berserk! goes. And they would be right...

...except for that revelatory line, which is uttered in the final minute of the film. It almost can convince you that the long wait through rote murder action and the make-out moves of an increasingly wrinkly circus matriarch was worth it. If only it were true...