If there's anything over there we just hope it stays.
When we said we’d watch the 1933 Carole Lombard chiller Supernatural pretty soon, we meant before a year passed, but we finally checked it out. In the set-up, woman of easy virtue Vivienne Osborne strangles her three lovers during an orgy and is tried and executed. Her body is given to a scientist who keeps her corpse animated. Meanwhile, over in a parallel plotline, Lombard’s twin brother has recently died. Because Osborne’s essence or spirit or something remains in the preserved body, she’s able to take up residence inside Lombard when the two come into proximity. Osborne’s goal is revenge on a phony spiritualist who betrayed her. That’s all the plot you need to know about this melodramatic potboiler. The movie isn’t bad, actually. It’s another one that helped establish various horror tropes, even though it isn’t scary itself. Because it’s pre-Code it’s more lurid than you’d probably suspect, though, so there’s that. It ends just after an hour, with the denseness of setting up the plot making it seem plenty full. We found it intriguing. Sometimes that’s enough.
Don't look so surprised, people. I wasn't always a homicidal frump.
Though she looked totally different from the above photo, you remember Betsy Palmer. She appeared in the seminal 1980 slasherfest Friday the 13th as the murderous Mrs. Voorhees. Before that indelible role (“Kill her, Mommy! Kill her! Don’t let her get away, Mommy! Don’t let her live!”) she had appeared in numerous television shows and several films, but hadn’t been onscreen for eight years. Friday the 13th resurrected her career like it did Jason Voorhees, over and over.
So far he's shown little interest in the scratching post she bought him.
I racconti del terrore is better known as Tales of Terror. It’s a three-part anthology film based on the writing of Edgar Allen Poe that starred Vicent Price as different characters in the three segments, and featured as co-stars Peter Lorre, Maggie Pierce, Basil Rathbone, Debra Paget, and others. The brilliant art here was painted by Renato Casaro and fits into the proud tradition of posters featuring horrible cats. You can see other examples here, here, here, and here. And just for the hell of it, here’s a poster featuring a horrible rat. It rhymes. Those are only a fraction of the historical total of horrible cat-rats on posters. As for Tales of Terror…
We won’t mince words—it’s bad. We feel the blame is mainly on director Roger Corman. Sure, Poe is melodramatic, but the movie is beyond. It’s stagy and overacted by all involved, most egregiously by Price, Lorre, and Pierce. The second segment, “The Black Cat,” is played semi-comically, but with Price and Lorre jousting hamo a hamo you’ll cringe more than laugh. We’ll admit, though, that its narrative—loosely based on Poe’s tale of the same name about a cuckolded husband who plots vengeance on his wife—contains a sidebar that manages to skewer snobby wine culture effectively. As wine drinkers we enjoyed that.
The third segment, based on Poe’s, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” has some glimmers of hope, but largely because Price, playing a dying man who’s weakening by the day, dials the cheese back from schloss to something in the range of maybe gorgonzola. There’s still a thick slab of ham underneath. However, everything we just wrote comes with a caveat: we’d had no drinks or other substances when we watched the movie. There’s possible potential for improvement if chemical compounds are coursing through your bloodstream. Tales of Terror opened in the U.S. July 1962, and premiered in Italy today the same year.
The Prince of Darkness sets his sights on Elke Sommer. And who can blame him?
Above is a poster for El Diablo se lleva los muertos, which was known in English as Lisa and the Devil—sort of. Most sources say this was originally an Italian movie, though there’s no Italian poster. It premiered at the Cannes Film Fesitval in 1973, and in January 1974 showed at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, which was a French fest that during its existence between 1973 and 1993 was focused on horror. But there’s no French poster. The movie’s first general release was in Spain today in 1974, so the Spanish poster is what you see above. It was painted by Francisco Fernández Zarza-Pérez, who signed it “Jano.”
In the end, the movie was never released in Italy in its original form. Several months after it tanked with the French, The Exorcist exploded onto global screens and the sudden cultural interest in possession presented the seeming opportunity for El Diablo se lleva los muertos to be spiced up with more vivid content—i.e. scenes of exorcism—and re-released. This happened, and the result was titled Lisa and the Devil, but director Mario Bava had his name removed, which is never a good sign. That’s where the “sort of” comes in. Lisa and the Devil is a hybrid film. We didn’t watch that version. Ours was the original.
So, what happens in the original? Not much. While on holiday in Toledo, Spain, Elke Sommer sees a fresco of the Devil, then later, in a weird shop of old books and mannequins, encounters Telly Savalas, who looks unnervingly like the painting. Circumstances lead to her and a few other stranded travelers spending the night in a creepy old mansion owned by Alida Valli, whose servant is none other than Savalas. Pretty soon a series of inexplicable events occur, ranging from Elke discovering her identical resemblance to a former occupant of the house, to gruesome deaths—including one in which a guy gets run over by a vintage car, backed over, run over, backed over, run over, and maybe backed over again. We lost count. Somehow this is all related to Sommer being a target for Satanic possession.
Sommer was never in an outstandingly good movie as far as we’ve seen yet. This one must have really disheartened her. Hopes started high all around because Bava was an auteur of sorts who’d been given free reign to make anything he wished, but proved that most directors can’t be trusted with that level of control. Some people love this film, but objectively, it’s a slog. We drifted off a few times, then someone would press the horn on that killer car—OOOOGAH!—and we were awake again. In our view El Diablo se lleva los muertos is for lovers of gothic or haunted house horror only. Or you can try the U.S. version and get more gore. We won’t be doing that. But our faith in Elke remains unshaken.
She might as well make herself at home, because she'll never be leaving.
A few years ago we shared a collection of movie posters painted by the great Hungarian artist Karoly Grosz. Among them was a promo for The Old Dark House. We’ve brought the poster back today because we just watched the film. Based on a J.B Priestly novel, the movie opens during a stormy night somewhere in Wales as five people, among them Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, and Lilian Bond, are stranded in the rain and entreat the occupants of a creepy old manse for shelter. The occupants are the Femm family and their facially scarred butler, played by Boris Karloff. Any sane person would do a one-eighty after getting a gander at him, but this is a horror movie, so they waltz happily through the front door.
As the night wears on and the house is buffeted by wind and rain, the guests begin to realize the Femms are not just a little strange, but seriously disturbed, and that there are more people in the house than at first appearance. It’s Karloff the horror specialist—of course—who eventually looses chaos upon the stranded travelers. He’s quite a creation, scowling and grumbling his way craggily through the film, and his performance is one of several reasons it’s interesting to watch an old chiller like this. When we say chiller, be forewarned that the movie isn’t really scary, but it’s atmospheric and worth a watch for fans of horror to see the building blocks of the genre. The Old Dark House premiered today in 1932.
People get topless, bottomless, legless, headless—anything goes.
This fun Italian poster, which is uncredited, was created for the monster movie Spiaggia di sangue, which was originally filmed in the U.S. and released as Blood Beach in 1980, before reaching Italy today in 1981. We riffed on it many years ago because it’s nothing more than a left coast remix of Jaws on a frayed shoestring budget, not really deserving of a proper review, in our opinion. The producers were even sued by the Jaws franchise for using a catchphrase—Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water you can’t get to it—just a little too similar to that for the previous year’s Jaws 2—Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. We said last time that you never really see the monster. Actually, you do, briefly, at the end, in all its papier mâché glory. Total. Letdown. Don’t visit Blood Beach. Instead, look at the lobby cards below and call it a day.
We recommend that you keep your distance—from the movie.
Japanese posters for U.S. film productions are sometimes so good we forget that the movies might not be. Case in point: the above poster was painted by the famed Japanese artist Seito, who was behind promos for films like Star Wars and Flesh Gordon. He produced this for the horror movie Rattlers, which premiered in the U.S. today in 1976 and reached Japan on an indeterminate date sometime afterward. The Japanese title is to the point:恐怖 ! 蛇地獄 means “Horror! Snake Hell.” The movie is its own special hell. It’s about a bunch of rattlesnakes that run wild, and it’s sssssssssssssssso bad. University of California herpetologist Sam Chew figures out how to deal with the offending reptiles, with the help of intrepid reporter Elisabet Chauvet, but nobody figured out how to deal with a bad script, a weak director, and a zero-charisma lead. You can let this one slide.
Vince waxes philosophical and discovers the secret of life—death.
House of Wax, which was produced by Warner Brothers and premiered today in 1953, was the first 3D production by any major studio. It’s a period piece set in Victorian New York City starring Vincent Price as the creator and half owner of a historical wax museum. Unfortunately, his focus on history leaves the public nonplussed, and his partner Roy Roberts, who needs capital, sets the place aflame for the insurance money. Price is burned and driven insane. Well, actually he was insane before the fire, but in a cute way. He talked to his wax figures and thought they talked back.
But after the fire he’s a barking psychopath, running around nighttime Gotham behatted and cloaked like Lamont Cranston. His goal? Revenge, of course, a craving solved early in the proceedings when he pitches Roberts down an elevator shaft with a rope around his neck. But what next? What does one do once vengeance is thine? Well, you build a new wax museum, except this time you surrender to prurient tastes and create displays of modern murder and the macabre. Screw that high-minded history crap.
Everything goes fine until Phyllis Kirk begins to suspect that the extraordinary realism of the wax figures is due to more than just artistic talent. Her suspicion is a screenwriter’s concoction—there’s no way a person could realistically make the leap Kirk does in believing Price guilty of heinous crimes. The script literally calls it a woman’s intuition. Well, okay. But in our experience that’s a myth, and it’s possibly even insulting when used as substitute for intelligence, so maybe just put a realistic clue in the script and write Kirk’s character as very smart instead. In any case, she’s definitely nosy as hell, and that’s the beginning of the end for vicious Vince.
House of Wax has many things going for it. The sets and costumes are extravagant, the early fire sequence with its melting wax figures is genuinely unsettling, the WarnerColor developing process is attractive, and the acting is uniformly competent, even by that six-foot three-inch Hillshire Farms ham Price. And it’s fun to watch Charles Buchinsky, aka Charles Bronson, as the mute assistant Igor. In the end the House of Wax works. Add popcorn, a few friends, and about of case of beer and you’ll have a great Saturday night.
I give up. Short of developing superpowers I'll never get this hair under control.
This unusual image of U.S. actress Marlene Clark was made for her 1974 movie The Beast Must Die, which is not to be confused with the 1952 Argentinian thriller released in the U.S. under the same name. The ’74 movie isn’t a remake. It’s a blaxploitation horror flick. We won’t say much about it since we’re planning to discuss it in detail. We’ll just note that even seeming like she just rolled out of her lair—uh, we mean bed—Clark looks great.
When people say the town is dying they mean it literally.
Oliver Brabbins teamed with Graphic Books to provide beautiful cover art onceagain, this time for The Corpse Next Door by John Farris. Before we get into the fiction let’s take a few moments to appreciate how good this art is. Brabbins has created multiple levels of perception in this piece. The cop outside on the street at a call box sees the woman in the foreground, and via her direct gaze, she sees you. Whatever nefarious deed she’s up to, you’re in it as well. Brabbins nailed the close-up perspective of the blinds, where the angle becomes edge-on in the middle of the scene, allowing the cop to be visible. Assorted impressionistic street details form the background, and daubs of gold at the woman’s ears and neck complete this top tier effort. With art like this, the book better be good.
This was the debut novel from Farris and came in 1956. In the story, Bill Randall, cop in the town of Cheyney, suspects murder and a frame-up in what had been officially closed as a jailhouse suicide. His belief that the official determination is wrong pits him against his own department, specifically his chief Sam Gulliver, who’s stubborn, angry, physically imposing, and dangerous. As Randall digs, the murder seems connected to past crimes and the future political career of local chosen boy Nathan Fisher, who has a raft of problems that threaten to derail his lofty ambitions.
The narrative is gritty and the action is a cut above, particularly in a scene during a shootout where a character shoves a refrigerator down a flight of stairs at two gunmen. On the minus side there’s an unlikely plot device in which a woman who’s shot in the woods removes her bra before dying in order to impart to the police that they should seek a clue at a pawn shop called Brassier’s. We let that bit pass and were rewarded with a stimulating climax, so on the whole the novel was a plus. Farris would go on to success in horror fiction, including with his 1976 novel The Fury, made into a 1978 film starring Kirk Douglas. The talent is clear in this first book. We’ll keep a watch for more of him on the auction sites, and certainly for more of Brabbins.
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established.
1945—Hitler Marries Braun
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia’s Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden.
1967—Ali Is Stripped of His Title
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon.
1947—Heyerdahl Embarks on Kon-Tiki
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.
1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
1945—Mussolini Is Arrested
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.
