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Private Notes
This is one strange hacked-together film, you get the feeling that the bond company had to come in on this one, I'm not surprised - there's very few credits on it, who would want to be associated with this film? The acting of all involved is terribly stilted and the plot jumps around all over, it all makes very little sense. As I said before it looks like the bond company had to come in because it seems like there was a lot of footage that wasn't shot that needed to be, and all the music was very ill-fitting library music - cheap, I guess. Very, very odd.
Only seventy-four minutes long, but seems much more, a dreary, sanitised Exorcist-style plot is trotted out in typical seventies TV movie style. That means no violence and very little action as a group of satanists plot to stop their chosen disciple from falling in love with any man who will stand in the way of her union with the god Astoroth. Too much chocolate box romance and too little horror sinks this one. Not suprisingly, this pilot movie didn't launch a series. I guess the producers realised that there wasn't much they could do with the format of a priest and a lovesick man mooning around the country looking for his lost love and throwing in the odd exorcism every week.
The first thing I should say about The Human Monster is that it was the first film to receive a 'H' certificate for Horror in England. Up till then they were all rated 'O' for 'Orror. By the way, The Human Monster is the American title. The original title is The Dark Eyes Of London from the Edgar Wallace novel of the same name. But we'll get back to Edgar later. It was directed by Walter Summers who had suffered the indignity of having his films afflicted with American re-titles throughout his career. His last film, At The Villa Rose, became House Of Mystery in the colonies, whilst Traitor Spy transformed into The Torso Murder Mystery, and McGlusky The Sea Rover became Hell's Cargo.
I know I'm prone to saying this, but in this case it's absolutely true. Tonight we have a true classic of cinema. No, I'm not kidding. Look, just to show you how serious I am, it's a silent film and in black-and-white, so don't adjust your sets, though you may want to turn the sound off and add your own soundtrack - no Pink Floyd though. And do remember to turn it up when I come back in the intermission. So, now I'm proud, no, privileged to introduce to you one of the most influential horror films of all time.
There's murders taking place at a Southern California drive in, and the cops are investigating, but who is responsible? Is it Germy, the former carnival geek who now does the cleaning up around there? He is pretty spun, and his former friends were chickens from the carnival he worked at, so he's a likely candidate. So is the drive-in's manager, who is a bitter man who is overworked and underpaid and dresses like he's the devil or something. Or is it the local voyeur, who is on parole (or probation) and doesn't want his neighbors to know he's a pervert? At any rate, we have some rather unrealistic decapitations and even a sword through a neck that also looks rather unrealistic, and it's always young couples just on the verge of getting it on. The cops even go undercover, one dressed in drag, to find our killer but to no avail. Is the mystery ever solved?
Brooding Boris plays Doctor Victor Sartorius, an ailing doctor working in Morocco. He teams up with Mona Goya as Lady Yvonne Clifford, in a plot to poison her husband, Sir Charles Clifford so he can collect the 20,000 pounds necessary to save his experiments and his funding. Roger Clifford, the son of Sir Charles has also been marked for death. The only one who can stop the murder plot of Sartorius is Nurse Eve Rowe, played by the beautiful Joan Wyndham. This is one of the few Karloff genre movies from the thirties that is often overlooked and rarely discussed, and there are reasons for this.
When a number of hikers are found torn apart in a national park, the police and park rangers alike are left baffled. Slowly their darkest nightmares are revealed as surmounting evidence points to the existence of a terrifying beast, known only in folk-lore. With the rangers trapped in the park, they're forced to make their escape on foot, through the forest. Along for the ride is an obsessed Yowie hunter with a secret agenda. Only then does the true nature of the beast reveal itself.
House On Haunted Hill is the only film to be made with the quaint cinematic process known as Emergo. Now, Emergo was an early prototype of a truly holographic 3D movie process that wouldn't require the audience to wear silly glasses. Emergo was a simple motion path generator consisting basically of a...skeleton...on a wire. There's a point in the film when the skeleton would be pushed out from the top of the screen along a wire above the heads of the audience. They stopped it when kids kept shooting at the skeleton with BB guns and, in some neighbourhoods, Uzis.
We start off at the cafe with the sax wailing and Maxwell shooting the audience with words of wisdom. It's a great opener to our story. Dick Miller is great as Walter Paisley who makes you root for our down trodden busboy. Plus, who knew landladies were so controlling back then? Sheesh, a guy can't even bring a dame over! Add great support especially from Julian Burton who's Mr. Brock really lives it up as the ultimate beat poet and has a terrific time doing it! He kind of reminds me of a Beatnikesque Oliver Reed. Leonard De Santis provides laughs as the stuck up cafe owner who learns to stop belittling Walter if he knows what's good for him. All in all, Bucket of Blood is a whole lot of fun.
From Seymour's alcoholic mother to the cop so hard that even the death of his son is met with a shrug, the whole film is full of darkly comic touches that drew some nice laughs from me. This comic approach helps the film because really it is a silly plot and the fact that the script was tongue-in-cheek meant it was easier to swallow, if you pardon the choice of words. As a horror it doesn't really work but it does have a schlocky property that Corman films tend to have – not high quality but low-budget b-movie fun. The cast match the material and all buy into the joke, watching them also shows that the cast in the musical are really pretty much just impersonate the actors here.
Roger Corman has had an extremely long and prosperous career in the b-movie industry. Ever since 1954, Corman has been cranking out dozens of b-movies, and has paved the way for many actors and directors, including the likes of Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola and Ron Howard. It still seems as if old age hasn't caught up to Roger yet, as he is still quite active in low budget film-making. Now, having paid my sincere respect to the b-movie king, let's take a look at Creature From The Haunted Sea, which was Roger's thirty-second time in the director's chair. This low budget film actually turns out to be a parody of horror thrillers mixing gangsters, revolutionaries, a sailor who communicates in animal noises, and a sea creature that may or may not be fake.
A photographer is kidnapped by kids who want him to pretend to be their father. They have already kidnapped a mother, so they need a matched set. The kids aren't psychotic or overtly evil. It's like The Waltons. They dress in rustic clothes. Send a scout named Gilbert, an eight year old who is really about twelve, to lure innocent adults to their lair. There are so many holes in the story, that it just falls apart.
Night Of The Living Dead was originally written as a horror comedy called Monster Flick which, at the time, was about alien invaders who befriend a group of teenagers, and could possibly be mistaken for Teenagers From Outer Space, so they returned to the writing board and added the living dead which Romero called ghouls, after the television executives he had as clients. Then he was inspired by I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and came up with the more apocalyptic scenario we're watching tonight. I Am Legend, of course, was adapted as The Last Man On Earth, which was the first film I screened, thus the Cycle Of Life and the Public Domain revolves.
