The Frozen Dead (1966)

The Frozen Dead might be a schlocky sci-fi/horror B-movie with a close kinship to cheap and lurid 1950s mad scientist movies (and to both zombie and Nazisploitation movies) but it has enough odd interesting qualities to make it worth seeing. Although the majority of these kinds of movies tend to be American or European this is actually a 1966 British production.

Dr Norberg (Dana Andrews) appears to be a dedicated and kindly medical researcher living in a comfortable country house not too far from London. He’s German but the war has been over for more than twenty years and he’s popular and well-respected in the district. In reality though the war never did end for Dr Norberg. He’s actually a stalwart Nazi Party member and his medical research is far from innocuous. In the closing stages of the war he perfected a method of freezing people so that they could be revivified many years later. He froze twelve Nazi officers and they’re in his basement laboratory.

Actually to say that he perfected the method is a slight exaggeration. Defreezing people turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated and so far the ones he has defrozen have ended up with severe brain damage. He is however working hard to refine his techniques.

This has suddenly become critical. He has just been informed that the Party actually has 1,500 frozen Nazis in storage and now they want them all revived so that the Third Reich can be reborn.

To add to his troubles his much-loved niece Jean (Anna Palk) has arrived back home from a school in America earlier than expected. She knows nothing of his past or his work and he really doesn’t want her finding a basement full of deep-frozen Nazis.

On the other hand an opportunity has come his way. He has finally been able to obtain a completely fresh human head which he has been able to sever from the body and keep alive. This may give him the keys to understanding how to revive his frozen comrades successfully without damaging their brains.

This might sound like an incredibly trashy film. It is a trashy film but it’s a cut above most films of its type. There are some genuinely effective and atmospheric images. The head without a body is very well done and quite creepy.

What really sets it apart is the performance of Dana Andrews. Andrews was a fine actor who by the 60s found himself relegated to low-budget shockers but he hadn’t forgotten how to act. He plays his role pretty straight and makes Dr Norberg a mad scientist who despite being a Nazi does have some good qualities. He’s a Nazi with ethics! And his German accent is subtle and convincing.

Anna Palk is quite good as the niece. Alan Tilvern plays Norberg’s assistant Karl Essen and he also manages to deliver a fairly non-hammy performance. Philip Gilbert is the weak link as young American scientist Ted Roberts who agrees to help Norberg with his experiments. Look out for Edward Fox in a small role as a brain-damaged Nazi zombie.

Nazi fever really took off in the 1960s and fuelled a whole series of mostly Z-grade sci-fi horror flocks as well as even more lurid fare. Nazis became an obsession in television action adventure series as well. Nazis were simply everywhere in the world of 60s pop culture.

What makes this movie interesting is that it has all the outrageousness that the plot outline would lead you to expect combined with a certain British quality of understatement. It’s as if writer-director Herbert J. Leder (who was actually an American) was trying to make a quality sci-fi horror movie in the tradition of Hammer’s celebrated Quatermass films. With a limited budget and ludicrously over-the-top subject matter it’s not surprising that he falls short of his objective but at least he gave it the old college try.

On the whole this is a silly but reasonably well-made fun movie. It’s low-budget but the production values are certainly not rock-bottom. And it does have that surprisingly complex performance by Dana Andrews to give it a touch of unexpected class.

The Warner Archive disc offers a very good anamorphic transfer. The colours look great.

The Frozen Dead is pretty entertaining. Zombies, a memorable mad scientist, a head without a body and snap-frozen Nazis - what’s not to love? Recommended.

And if you love Dana Andrews in this movie he's also good as a mad scientist in the excellent Crack in the World.

The Atomic Brain (1963)

The Atomic Brain (the original theatrical release title was Monstrosity) is classic Z-grade sci-fi horror schlock.

This is a mad scientist movie and it has all the right ingredients. Of course having the right ingredients doesn’t guarantee a good movie.

The mad scientist in question is Dr Otto Frank (Frank Gerstle) and he is on the verge of perfecting the technique of brain transplantation. He’s transplanted animal brains into humans and now he’s ready to take the next step - human brain transplants.

His experiments are financed by a rich old lady named Mrs March (Marjorie Eaton). She wants to be young again and she wants Dr Frank to transplant her brain into the body of a beautiful young woman. Of course not many young women are likely to volunteer to donate their bodies and for the operation to succeed the body has to be fresh. Mrs March and her boyfriend (gigolo might be a more accurate description) Victor (Frank Fowler) come up with the idea of obtaining a young female companion from a domestic employment agency. They get three applicants, all from overseas (obviously they don’t want nosy families sniffing about if the girls happen to vanish).

The three girls are Bea (Judy Bamber), Nina (Erika Peters) and Anita (Lisa Lang). Bea is English (and Judy Bamber’s attempt at an English accent has to be heard to be believed), Nina is German (luckily Erika Peters is German so she sounds convincing enough) and Anita is Mexican (with another not wholly convincing accent). Mrs Match quickly decides that Bea is the prettiest and so it’s Bea’s body she wants, although for complicated reasons that decision changes later.

There are a couple of Dr Frank’s earlier experiments wandering about and they’re pretty much zombies, plus the telephone wires have been cut and the girls are locked in they don’t take too long to figure out that something bad is going on here. They figure that leaving might be an excellent idea but that’s easier said than done.

You might be wondering where the atomic element comes in. Atomic energy is what Dr Frank uses to re-activate his transplanted brains.

The Atomic Brain is one of those movies that pops up on worst movies of all time lists. It is pretty bad but it’s certainly not bad in the way Ed Wood’s movies are bad. There’s a certain basic level of film-making competence at work here. There’s even the occasional shot that is moderately well composed. And it has a coherent plot. I’m not suggesting it’s a good plot but it is coherent. It’s very silly, but since when has silliness been a problem in science fiction or horror movies?

The mad scientist laboratory is not too bad for a very low-budget film. There are no attempts at elaborate special effects, and that was probably a very wise decision.

The main problem here is that it’s all rather stodgy. It just doesn’t quite have that spark that makes for great low-budget schlock.

It does have its moments though. The scene in which Mrs March has Nina modelling clothes is pretty creepy when you consider that Mrs March is more interested in checking out Nina’s body (which is soon to be hers) than the clothes.

These sorts of movies tend to have very predictable endings (you know that the mad scientist is not going to get away with his evil plans) but this one does throw in a couple of decent little twists.

Something Weird released this one on a triple-feature disc along with a real obscurity called Love After Death (which I have yet to watch)  and The Incredible Petrified World (a bad sci-fi movie that is unfortunately very dull indeed). The Atomic Brain gets a pretty good transfer.

If you’re in the mood for enjoyable sci-fi silliness then you could do worse than watch The Atomic Brain, although it has to be said that there are better movies (including low-budget movies) dealing with much the same themes. Recommended, as long as you don’t get your hopes up too high.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein is the celebrated 1935 sequel to Universal’s 1931 hit Frankenstein. Both movies were directed by James Whale, a man with an extraordinary and to my mind slightly mystifying reputation as a great director of horror movies.

We start with a rather unnecessary prologue featuring England’s most degenerate poets, Byron and Shelley, listening to Shelley’s wife Mary continuing her story where the novel left off. And the movie then takes up the story at the exact point at which the 1931 Frankenstein ended, with the monster incinerated in the burning barn and the body of the hapless Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) being returned to his castle and to his grieving fiancée Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson).

Henry Frankenstein is however not quite dead. He recovers and is determined to forget all about his terrible experiments. The arrival of his old teacher, Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), changes all this. Pretorius has been working (in a particularly bizarre way) on the creation of artificial life as well, and he wants Frankenstein’s help. He intends to get that help, even if he has to resort to extreme methods to persuade Frankenstein.

Pretorius wants to create a female monster, a mate for Frankenstein’s original monster. The monster, like its creator, survived the fiery furnace and now is now roaming the countryside causing mayhem and trying to make friends, which in turn creates more mayhem. The monster’s wanderings will eventually bring him to Frankenstein’s castle where Pretorius will use him to force Frankenstein’s hand.

Finally, after an hour of mostly irrelevant sub-plots and maudlin interludes, the movie kicks into high gear as Frankenstein and Pretorius bring the monster’s mate (played by Elsa Lanchester) to life with unexpected and catastrophic results.

James Whale clearly had no genuine interest in horror films and no real respect for the genre. As in most of his horror efforts he insists on playing far too many scenes as comedy and unfortunately comedy was something for which he had little flair. The entire movie seems to be intended as a mockery of the horror genre, and of Mary Shelley’s original story and quite probably mockery of the audience as well. To make sure that the movie’s impact as a horror film is blunted as much as possible Whale agains calls on the services of Una O’Connor who had almost single-handedly wrecked The Invisible Man. She throws herself into her task of wrecking The Bride of Frankenstein with great enthusiasm.

Many many writers worked on this film so perhaps it’s not surprising that the final script is a little disjointed and unfocused.

The acting is extremely uneven. Apart from the appalling Una O’Connor we get more unfunny comic relief from E.E. Clive as the burgomaster. Colin Clive is dull, as he was in Frankenstein. Ernest Thesiger is mannered and arch and while he tries hard to be the personification of evil and vice at times he becomes just irritating.

On the credit side Elsa Lanchester is memorably bizarre in her dual roles as Mary Shelley and as the monster’s bride but gets little screen time and little time to do any actual acting. Karloff is good, as always, although he strongly disagreed with the decision to make the monster speak. Dwight Frye as the sinister Karl is another bright spot.

The scenes involving Dr Pretorius’s miniature people are technically impressive but they’re silly and pointless and they greatly weaken the film.

While the script, direction and acting are uneven the superb visuals do much to compensate for the movie’s other weaknesses. The bringing to life of the monster’s bride is a spectacular visual tour-de-force. Whale seems suddenly to come to life, throwing one stunning image after another at us. There’s some superlative editing also in these scenes. The movie is well worth seeing just for these absolutely superb sequences.

Whatever its weaknesses this is technically an exceptionally well made motion picture. The sets are excellent. The Bride’s makeup effects are terrific. John J. Mescall’s cinematography (he described the lighting approach he used as Rembrandt lighting) is magnificent. James Whale had worked as a set designer and apparently had quite a bit of input into the impressive art direction of the film.

Universal’s Blu-Ray presentation looks great and there are plenty of extras, including an embarrassingly worshipful audio commentary.

Bride of Frankenstein is certainly a vast improvement on Whale’s The Invisible Man. It has some very very good moments. The changes of tone are somewhat disconcerting. For most of the earlier part of the film it just doesn’t quite work, perhaps mostly because it’s obvious that James Whale never really wanted to do the film in the first place. The last twenty-five minutes though are as good as anything that has ever been achieved in a horror movie. Despite the reservations I have about it Bride of Frankenstein still has to be recommended.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Universal’s 1933 The Invisible Man left me decidedly unimpressed when I last saw it some years back. That was on VHS and I thought that seeing it on Blu-Ray might perhaps improve the experience. It didn’t and I will try to explain why.

The Invisible Man was directed by James Whale who established a very high reputation as a horror director with Universal with films such as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.

The adaptation, by R.C. Sherriff, takes some liberties with the plot of the original story by H.G. Wells and even greater liberties with the intent of the original.

The movie opens with the Invisible Man making his appearance, swathed in bandages, seeking shelter in an English country inn. He needs a place to work in secrecy. He is a troublesome lodger and soon finds himself ejected from the inn, a procedure to which he takes violent objection. We gradually learn the reason for his invisibility, and for his apparent instability and violence. He has discovered a cocktail of drugs that renders him invisible but with unfortunate effects on his sanity. An invisible man is potentially dangerous; an unhinged invisible man is a very definite danger.

We also learn his identity. He is Jack Griffin, a promising young scientist who disappeared from his laboratory in mysterious circumstances.

The police are soon on his trial, an undertaking which predictably presents them with extreme difficulties and as their pursuit intensifies Griffin’s behaviour becomes increasingly violent and bizarre. He starts to lose interest in finding an antidote to his invisibility drugs, preferring to daydream about the limitless power that he imagines is going to be his.

There are many many problems with this film. It’s possible that the biggest problem of all is James Whale. His insistence on treating the story mostly as comedy not only removes most of the drama and suspense, it also strips the film of any emotional depth. Whale’s contempt for the horror genre is obvious in all his films in the genre and is perhaps the reason he insisted on adding so much ill-advised comedy.

Another weakness is that the Invisible Man is ready clearly deranged and homicidal when the character is first introduced. We never see him as a presumably dedicated and quite human young scientist but only as a murderous madman. The result is that we simply don’t care what happens to him. The sooner he is hunted down and killed the better. There is no element of tragedy to the story. There is no drama and it’s difficult to build suspense when it’s impossible to care about the fate of the protagonist, and in this film it’s actually impossible to care about the fates of any of the characters.

The extraordinarily annoying performance of Claude Rains in the title role, and the excessive ham-fisted comedy, add to the problems.

We also don’t get to see anything of the relationship between Griffin and his fiancée Flora (Gloria Stuart). We don’t get to know Flora at all and Stuart’s performance is lifeless (admittedly the terrible script gives her little to work with). This means there is no effective romance angle to give us a reason to care about either Griffin or Flora. Whale seems to have had zero interest in emotional relationships. This is to an extraordinary degree an emotionally sterile film.

The acting is universally broad, obvious and generally awful. Una O’Connor screeches a lot, which seems to have the limit of her acting talents. She seems to have been one of Whale’s favoured actress and she’s as tiresome here as she is in Bride of Frankenstein.

All of this means that the movie has only one thing going for it, that being the special effects. They are impressive for 1933 and in fact are still pretty impressive today. On the whole though the movie is visually much less interesting than most of Universal’s horror movies of the period, with no real atmosphere.

Universal’s Blu-Ray release looks terrific. Unfortunately it’s let down by a horrifically useless menu system so while there appear to be some tempting extras don’t be surprised if you can’t access them.

Are the flaws of The Invisible Man serious enough to make it not worth seeing? Sadly I’d have to say that the answer is yes. Apart from the invisibility effects I can’t think of a single thing about this movie that works. It’s not just uninteresting, it’s positively irritating.

Avoid this one.

Dr Cyclops (1940)

Dr Cyclops is yet another mad scientist movie. Which is fine by me - I happen to love mad scientist movies. This 1940 Paramount release is a fairly worthy example of the breed and it looks better than most.

Dr Thorkel (Albert Dekker) has been conducting some very secretive research deep in the jungles of the Amazon. Now he has asked a number of fellow scientists to join him in his jungle laboratory to assist him in his experiments. Dr Bullfinch (Charles Halton), Dr Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and mineralogist Bill Stockton set out for the Amazon. Along the way they are joined by mining engineer Steve Baker (Victor Kilian) who has more or less invited himself along - they need to hire his mules and where his mules go he goes.

Dr Thorkel has long had a reputation for being irascible and temperamental. His new colleagues soon come to the conclusion that he is now quite mad. Perhaps he is, but he has certainly achieved something startling. It turns out he only wanted his new collaborators for a few minutes’ work after which he intends to pack them back off to civilisation. They are however reluctant to leave, having figured out some of what Thorkel has been doing, and having figured out that there might be money and fame in it. They might have been wiser to have simply left.

They should have had a clearer idea of what was going on when Dr Bullfinch discovered the bones of a native pig. A very small native pig. A very very small native pig!

Of course what Dr Thorkel has been working on is miniaturising animals. Since his now unwelcome guests refuse to leave he decides he might as well find out if his technique works on people. It turns out that being shrunk to twelve inches in height isn’t much fun when you’ve fallen into the clutches of an insane megalomaniac scientist. There’s one piece of information that might have made survival an easier proposition for our heroes but unfortunately that’s one item of information they don’t have.

Mad scientists are occasionally purely evil from the start but more often they start out as idealists who are then seduced by the lure of forbidden knowledge, and the power that such knowledge can bring. We get the impression that Dr Thorkel was probably somewhat unhinged right from the outset and that it was never going to take much to push him over the edge into full-blown mad scientist mode.

When one thinks of movie mad scientists of this era one thinks of Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill or George Zucco, or perhaps at a pinch Basil Rathbone. While Albert Dekker might not be so well known for such roles he does a pretty fair job. A Lionel Atwill might have gone further over the top but Dekker does the dangerous obsessive scientist blinded by ambition very effectively.

The supporting players are very much in Dekker’s shadow but they’re all more than adequate. Charles Halton is good as the kindly responsible but pompous scientist who is also susceptible to the lure of ambition. Janice Logan is mostly there because without her the movie would not have a beautiful glamorous female cast member although she is perfectly adequate. Thomas Coley might seem destined to play the conventional hero role, being young and good-looking (very important attributes in a hero), but he is at least a reasonably interesting character. He’s incurably lazy and selfish and is not the sort of fellow who has ever seriously considered doing anything noble or heroic.

In 1940 it was pretty unusual for a movie of this type, a movie that would normally have been regarded merely as another B-picture, to be made in Technicolor. Warner Brothers had made a couple of horror films using the two-strip Technicolor process in the early 1930s (Dr X and Mystery of the Wax Museum) but Dr Cyclops must surely be one of the earliest B-pictures to be made using the three-strip Technicolor process. Given that this is a cross between a science fiction and a jungle adventure movie it proves to be more than just a gimmick - this really is quite a visually arresting film. The special effects are mostly quite impressive and there’s some cool mad scientist gadgetry. The subject matter required the use of a lot of process shots and in 1939 when the movie was filmed using such techniques on a large scale in colour was still something fairly new. Some work extremely well while others suffer from the perennial problem associated with such techniques - the rear projected image looks much too flat. On the whole though the effects are bold and fairly successful.

The big problem is the tone. The early part of the movie builds up an effective atmosphere of menace and terror but then the film seems to switch gears and becomes whimsical fantasy. An even bigger problem is the music, which would have been perfect for a Disney cartoon but is much too bright and cheerful and playful. Scenes that should have been effectively scary are ruined by the music. It’s fairly obvious that Paramount had no clear idea of the kind of audience they were aiming for. Were they trying to make a kids fantasy movie or a science fiction/horror movie? 

Ernest B. Schoedsack’s main claim to fame as a director is King King, and he was therefore well qualified to helm a science fiction adventure movie with a jungle setting. Merrian C. Cooper, producer of King Kong, was also involved in this production. 

Universal have done a splendid job with the transfer - it’s quite stunning.

I’ve now seen all five movies in Universal’s Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection: Volume 2 DVD boxed set. The Cult of the Cobra is great fun, The Land Unknown is a terrific sci-fi adventure romp complete with dinosaurs and The Leech Woman is creepy in a camp sort of way. They're all well worth seeing. It has to be said that this has to be one of the best cult movie sets ever released, and it’s so cheap that it represents fabulous value for money. An absolute must-buy.

Dr Cyclops is a bit of an oddity. Being shot in Technicolor would of necessity have made it an A-picture rather than a B-picture but it was the sort of movie that was unlikely to attract a large enough audience to justify the expense. It has some nicely sinister moments early on (the opening sequences are wonderfully atmospheric) but then becomes a lightweight fantasy. It’s not a complete success but it’s not without interest. Recommended, with reservations.

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942)

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx is a 1942 Universal horror thriller that has all the ingredients for a terrific movie of that type. It has a mad scientist, it has Lionel Atwill and it has a guy in a gorilla suit. What could go wrong?

In fact everything goes wrong. The result is a tribute to Universal’s ability in the 1940s to make dreary and irritating movies out of even the most promising material.

The mysterious Doctor Rx is murdering notorious criminals. These criminals have all been acquitted of their crimes, despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. Doctor Rx seems to be a kind of crazed vigilante determined to see justice done when the system fails.

Captain Hurd (Edmund MacDonald) of New York’s Homicide Squad is at his wit’s end. He appeals to his friend Jerry Church (Patric Knowles) for help. Church is a famed private detective and if anyone can discover the identity of Doctor Rx it’s Jerry Church. Unfortunate Jerry has just married Feisty Girl Reporter Kit Logan (Anne Gwynne) and Kit has decided she’d rather have Jerry as a live husband than a dead hero. She doesn’t want him to end up like Detective Barney Scott. Barney Scott was a vigorous young detective determined to solve this case but after an encounter with Doctor Rx he is now a virtual vegetable. And his hair tuned white overnight from sheer fright! So Jerry turns the case down.

Of course we know that eventually Jerry will have to get involved whether he wants to or not. Getting kidnapped convinces him that he really needs to do something about the Doctor Rx situation.

What follows is a moderately interesting mystery potboiler, which is OK as far as it goes but this movie has some very big problems. 

The first problem is that all those cool ingredients I mentioned earlier take up only a few minutes of screen time. The mad scientist element is an afterthought that really doesn’t go anywhere. Lionel Atwill might as well have not bothered- he’s hardly in the picture at all. And even the brief appearance of the guy in the gorilla suit isn’t enough to make things interesting.

The second problem is the comic relief. Comic relief is the factor that ruined, or at best went close to ruining, dozens of potentially excellent 1930s and 1940s Hollywood B-movies. In this case the comic relief is so persistent, so intrusive and so irritating that it’s impossible to ignore and it really does sink the movie. Mantan Morland is bad enough but he’s comparatively innocuous compared to Shemp Howard. Yes, Shemp Howard of Three Stooges fame. Shemp Howard may well be the unfunniest comic in the history of cinema. His contributions are cringe-inducingly lame.

The third problem is the romantic sub-plot between Jerry and Kit that takes up too much time and isn’t very interesting, and isn’t even particularly romantic.

Apparently the script was unfinished when shooting started and much of the dialogue was ad-libbed, which is unfortunate because clearly none of the cast members are really capable of effective improvisation.

Patric Knowles makes a so-so hero. By B-movies standards he’s adequate. Adequate is also a reasonable description of Anne Gwynne’s performance. Lionel Atwill’s appearance is not much more than a cameo and he is given no opportunity to give the kind of Lionel Atwill performance that this movie desperately needs.

This film forms part of TCM’s five-movie Universal Cult Horror DVD boxed set. The transfer is excellent and there are at least a few token extras. The movies in this boxed set are certainly a very mixed bag.

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx was never going to be much more than mediocre but the comic elements are so dismally unamusing and annoying that there’s really no reason at all to bother watching this one. Not recommended.

The Leech Woman (1960)

The Leech Woman is a sci-fi/horror B-movie that manages to be just a little better than you might expect. It was made by Universal in 1960 and gave Coleen Gray one of her few starring roles, and also one of her more interesting roles.

Dr Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) is a scientist. He’s not the world’s greatest scientist but he is ambitious, and he’s not held back by any moral scruples. He’s particularly interested in older women - because older women would like to be young again and they would be prepared to pay a great deal of money for anything that could achieve that objective. Dr Talbot happens to be married to June, a woman somewhat older than himself. He doesn’t love her. He doesn’t even like her. But she is a convenient guinea pig and since she’s crazy about him it isn’t difficult to persuade her to play that role. June Talbot (Coleen Gray) would desperately like to be young again but she doesn’t expect her husband’s researches to come to anything. In the meantime, faced with a husband who clearly despises her, she takes solace from the bottle. She takes a lot of solace from the bottle.

Then a very old African woman arrives at Dr Talbot’s office. She proves to be very very old indeed. In fact she’s over 150 years old, a fact verified to Dr Talbot (how he verifies this fact is one of a number of holes in the plot).

This woman, Malla, not only claims that her tribe has the secret to longevity - she also claims they possess the secret to restoring youth. No surprisingly Dr Talbot is soon making plans to go to Africa to find Mala’s tribe and to get hold of this secret which he expects will make him a very rich man. He has to patch things up with June because he’ll need her as a guinea pig. They engage an experienced guide, Bertram Garvay (John Van Dreelen), and set off into the heart of Africa. Well of course it’s actually a sound stage with some stock footage not very adroitly added to give it the vague appearance of Africa.

They find Mala’s tribe, and Malla as well. And yes, the tribe really does possess the means of restoring youth. Unfortunately there are complications. Not very pleasant complications.

That’s the first half of the film. The second half brings June back to the United States and with her youth restored. Only there are more complications. Even more unpleasant ones. Maybe the secret of eternal youth is one of those things that should remain a secret.

You expect a movie like this to have a villain. This one has a multiplicity of villains. In fact every major character is, to a certain extent, a villain. These are not very nice people. They’re people who would slit your throat to get what they want from life. Villains tend to offer fine opportunities for entertaining acting pyrotechnics and the cast in this movie make the most of those opportunities. Phillip Terry gives a marvellously over-the-top performance as the appalling Dr Talbot, a real swine of the first water. John Van Dreelen as the safari guide Garvay is just as vicious. Grant Williams as the weak-willed lawyer Neil Foster is not exactly a moral paragon either. And Malla, whether young or old, is pretty much a monster as well. Even Neil’s girlfriend Sally (Gloria Talbott), the one major character who isn’t totally reprehensible, is a rather spiky and insanely jealous character.

June Talbot is as evil as any of them but the role does give Coleen Gray a terrific opportunity to show her talents as an actress. She has to play June as ageing and bitter, and also as young and glamorous and deadly. She also has to play the role mostly in very unglamorous and at times quite heavy makeup. June is evil, but she’s evil in more complex ways than the other characters and Gray really is quite impressive.

Edward Dein had a fairly limited career as a director but that career does include the truly bizarre but fascinating Shack Out On 101 (1955), which demonstrates his affinity for outré subject matter. He keeps the pacing pleasingly taut and overall he handles proceedings fairly well.

The plot twists are unlikely to cause any great surprises but that’s not necessarily a major flaw in a horror movie.

If the movie has a theme it is this - if someone suddenly has the opportunity to gain what they most ardently desire just how high a price will they be prepared to pay for it? Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, just how high a price will they be prepared to make others pay to allow them to gain it? In this movie the answer is that no price is too high. These people may be monstrous but they’re monstrous in entertaining ways and the lack of a sympathetic hero character really isn’t a major problem.

This movie is among the five that comprise Universal’s bargain-priced Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection: Volume 2. The anamorphic transfer looks terrific.

The Leech Woman is a fairly well-executed B-movie that might not deliver too many genuine scares but it does have its creepy moments, and the ruthlessness of the characters can be rather frightening. Coleen Gray’s performance is a highlight, along with Philip Terry’s scenery-chewing villainy. 

Thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Red Planet Mars (1952)

Red Planet Mars, released in 1952, is one of the more notorious American science fiction films of the 50s. Almost all American movies of that era that took what could be interpreted as an anti-communist line have over the past few decades been subjected to ridicule and dismissed as crude propaganda. Red Planet Mars has suffered in this respect more than most and it’s really quite unfair. 

If such a movie were also to deal with religious themes and to treat those themes seriously then as you can imagine that movie would be the subject of even greater derision. Such a movie is Red Planet Mars.

Red Planet Mars is an ambitious and interesting film that deals with big ideas. There’s nothing wrong with science fiction that simply offers entertainment but the genre has always been at its best when it tackles big ideas. And this movie tackles very big ideas.

This is a first contact movie. A young American scientist, Dr Chris Cronyn (Peter Graves), has received radio signals from Mars. He has been broadcasting messages to Mars and now he is receiving replies. The replies are simply his own messages repeated back to him. This could of course be explained as some kind of natural phenomenon. The signals might simply be bounced back to him. There is however an objection to that theory. The signals take just over the minutes to reach Mars. If they were being bounced back he should be receiving them just over six minutes after transmitting them. But there is an unexplained time delay. Someone or something is actively transmitting the replies.

This is all very interesting from a scientific point of view but things are about to get a good deal more interesting. Suddenly the replies are more than just repeats of Dr Cronyn’s own messages. He really has made contact with an alien civilisation.

What he doesn’t know is that he’s not the only one working in this area. He has a rival. Dr Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof) is a brilliant German scientist who was imprisoned after the war for war crimes. After being released he found employment behind the Iron Curtain. Dr Calder was in fact the man who invented the hydrogen valve which made it possible to send messages to Mars. The US government took his invention after the war and Dr Cronyn used it to build his own transmitter. Calder feels, reasonably enough from his point of view, that his invention was stolen from him. For this he hates the Americans. He hates the Soviets as well, having found that they are not exactly ideal employers. Calder has built a transmitter as well. He could use it to try to contact Mars himself, but he has a better idea, an idea that will have fateful consequences.

Dr Cronyn’s wife Linda (Andrea King) is a Christian and she’s not at all convinced that contacting Mars is a good idea. She’s not sure why the idea worries her, it’s basically a case of, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Chris Cronyn is certain that first contact with an alien civilisation can only be a good thing. If the Martians are more scientifically advanced than we are we could learn so much from them that it would usher in a golden age of progress. It turns out that things are not so simple. Sudden exposure to advanced technology causes economic chaos. The western world faces ruin. This pleases Dr Calder’s communist paymasters. It causes panic in Washington. The Pentagon’s predictable reaction to crisis is to want a start a nuclear war. It’s intriguing that in a supposedly anti-communist movie it’s the Americans who are the ones contemplating the destruction of all life on Earth.

The next messages from Mars are very different. They are religious in content and their effects are dramatic. They spark a worldwide religious revival. But this movie still has several dramatic plot twists up its sleeve which lead to a somewhat unexpected shock ending.

To see this movie as anti-communist propaganda is to misunderstand it completely. It’s as much an indictment of the materialism and hedonism and spiritual nihilism of capitalist society as it is an indictment of the brutality and inhumanity of communism. If it’s propaganda it’s religious rather than political propaganda and it’s more complex than one expects propaganda to be.

There’s some fun technobabble and some amusing gadgetry but this is the science fiction of ideas rather than the science fiction of rayguns and starships. There’s very little in the way of special effects since the story doesn’t require such things.

The script was co-written by John L. Balderston and Anthony Veiller from a play by Balderston and John Hoare. Balderston is best known for his stage adaptation of Dracula, which formed the basis for the classic 1931 Dracula movie. He wrote a number of outstanding screenplays, mostly but by no means exclusively in the horror genre. This seems to have been his only foray into science fiction, which might explain why it’s so  untypical of 50s sci-fi movies.

Peter Graves is a serviceable hero and Andrea King is reasonably good in a tricky role - LInda Cronyn could easily have become an irritatingly pious character but she mostly avoids that pitfall. Herbert Berghof gets the plum role as the evil Nazi mad scientist and he (quite rightly) goes deliciously over-the-top with it. 

Cheezy Flicks have established a reputation for releasing interesting hard-to-find movies in pretty terrible transfers. In this case the transfer is not too bad. 

Red Planet Mars is one of the few science fiction movies to attempt to explore in depth the economic, social, political and religious consequences of first contact with an alien civilisation. The conclusions it draws may be deeply unfashionable today but that makes them all the more interesting and provocative. No-one today would dare to make a movie such as this. This is not cheesy low-budget drive-in fodder. It’s an ambitious movie made on a limited budget that succeeds in its aims surprisingly well (even if some modern viewers will not approve of those aims). While you’re likely to either love it or loathe it it’s worth a look. Highly recommended simply for being It’s intriguingly different.

Murders in the Zoo (1933)

Murders in the Zoo is a 1933 Paramount horror film that is neither supernatural horror nor an Old Dark House movie. In fact you could argue that it’s closer in feel to some of the delightfully lurid tropical melodramas of that era like Kongo and White Woman.

The opening sequence is one of the most startling in horror movie history and still packs quite a punch. The scene is Indo-China and Eric Gorman (Lionel Atwill) is an animal collector who has a rather extreme but undeniably effective means of dealing with men who think they can steal his beautiful young wife away from him.

We know right away that Gorman is mad and dangerous and this is further reinforced on the sea voyage back to the United States. His problem is that his wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke) really is very young and very beautiful and she attracts feckless young men the way a flame attracts moths. Eric Gorman is clearly pathologically jealous, and with good reason. Evelyn is not the sort of woman who pays much attention to trifles like her marriage vows, especially when hunky young men cross her path. And they just keep on crossing her path. Her latest interest is Roger Hewitt (John Lodge) - young, handsome, rich and with morals every bit as flexible as Evelyn’s.

So far so good. This seems like a story with tremendous potential and when it becomes clear that most of the movie is going to take place in a zoo our expectations are raised even higher. 

Unfortunately at this point the comic relief starts to kick in, in the person of Charles Ruggles. Ruggles was actually not too bad in actual comedies but he’s out of place here and he gets way too much screen time. He plays Peter Yates, an alcoholic journalist who wangles his way into a job as the zoo’s press agent.

Yates comes up with a splendid idea to gain desperately needed publicity for the zoo - a fund-raising dinner to which the cream of the city’s high society and moneyed classes will be invited. They will enjoy their expensive meal in the zoo’s Carnivore House, surrounded by lions, tigers and leopards.

Evelyn and Hewitt have been getting very friendly indeed and Hewitt has persuaded her to run away with him. Before that happens they will both be guests at the dinner at the Carnivore House and Eric Gorman decides this would be a fine opportunity to demonstrate  another of his methods for dealing with wife-stealers.

The unhappy outcome of the publicity dinner leads Evelyn to the conclusion that she’s going to need some help. She turns to Dr Jack Woodford (Randolph Scott), a brilliant young biologist working at the zoo, and Woodford’s girlfriend Jerry (Gail Patrick). She sets off for the zoo after closing time and this sets up one of the movie’s major horror set-pieces.

By this time the terror isn’t limited to Evelyn’s paramours. A deadly green mamba is on the loose - a snake whose venom kills in five minutes and for which there is no antivenom. The stage is set for a climax of mayhem and horror.

This movie’s biggest problem is that there is much too much focus on the irritating Peter Yates and not enough on Eric Gorman, a character with the potential to be oner of the great human monsters of horror cinema.

This movie has a few flaws but don’t despair - it has plenty of strengths as well. The key horror scenes are effective and shocking and they’re also very original (and surprisingly this movie has a couple of very cool horror ideas that I can’t recall seeing in any subsequent horror flicks). Zoos make great settings for horror movies and it’s odd that relatively few horror film-makers have taken advantage of this.

Murders in the Zoo also has plenty of the lurid melodrama I made reference to earlier, and it’s spiced with some very pre-code moments. There are a couple of scenes between Eric Gorman and his wife that would certainly have been cut in the post-code days and might raise a few eyebrows even today. Evelyn is clearly repulsed by and terrified of her husband and it’s plain that this excites him very much. Very much indeed.

Lionel Atwill gets to play a variation on the mad scientist roles he did so well. It would have been nice if the movie had found time to develop his character a bit more - a bit of exploration of the roots of the consuming jealousy that has driven him insane would not have gone amiss. It would have given Atwill the chance to make his villain a bit more complex. Having said this Atwill’s performance is still splendid and he gets the chance to do some very enjoyable overacting - made more enjoyable by the fact that Atwill doesn’t push things too far so that he remains a plausible villain. 

Kathleen Burke does well as his straying wife. Randolph Scott does the stalwart hero thing  with a bit of subtlety.

Murders in the Zoo was banned in many countries and when later screened on American television was severely cut.

This is one of the five horror B-movies included in TCM’s Universal Cult Horror Collection (a set which is slightly misleadingly named since it includes movies from other studios besides Universal). The DVD transfer is superb and there are a few extras. This very worthwhile boxed set also includes the Lionel Atwill mad scientist film The Mad Doctor of Market Street.

Murders in the Zoo has a few unusual features, it has some genuine chills, a couple of fine horror set-pieces, some perverse sexuality and some deliciously overheated melodrama. Plus it has Lionel Atwill, deadly venomous snakes and rampaging lions and tigers. These virtues are more than enough to offset its flaws. Highly recommended.

The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942)

While their 1942 release The Mad Doctor of Market Street is a distinctly lesser entry in the Universal horror canon it does have Lionel Atwill in mad scientist mode and one or two other features that make it worth a look.

Several titles were considered when the project was being developed, including Terror of the Islands and Terror of the South Seas. This suggests it was initially conceived as a kind of tropical jungle romp. It ends up being a horror movie with not quite enough actual horror although the premise is promising enough (if not exactly startlingly original).

Ralph Benson (Lionel Atwill) is, like so many mad scientists in books and movies, trying to conquer death. He believes he can bring the dead back to life. The problem is that Benson is not the typical mad scientist, who usually starts out as a good man who ends up perverting his genius by pushing too far into dangerous areas of research. Right from the start he is a charlatan, a pseudoscientist with no real understanding of medical science. He might really believe he can restore life to the dead but that’s because he is not a real scientist. His research is a mishmash of garbled ideas he has stolen from others. He is not a good man who becomes evil through hubris or misfortune - he is dishonest, scheming and unscrupulous from the beginning. This is the most interesting thing about this movie and its main claim to originality.

There is a potential problem here. In most mad scientist movies we feel at least some sympathy for the mad scientist - we feel he could have been a great man if only he’d had slightly better judgment. We don’t feel any sympathy for Ralph Benson. He’s a fake, he’s dangerous and he is motivated purely by the lust for power and money (especially power). In this respect Lionel Atwill can be said to have made the right choices in his performance. Benson is a phony but he’s plausible and charming. Atwill’s performance is initially fairly restrained - he makes us feel that this is a man who could successfully fool people. As the story progresses Atwill’s performance becomes progressively more extreme (and delightfully so). As things start to go wrong we see Benson more and more as a psychopathic madman.

The story opens (moodily and stylishly) in San Francisco as an unfortunate and rather unwise young man, desperate for money, agrees to be used as a guinea pig in Benson’s experiments. The experiments go badly awry and Benson is soon on the run, wanted for murder.

He takes passage on a steamship, the S.S. Paradise, bound for New Zealand. The ship is destined never to reach its destination. It is shipwrecked and a small group of survivors find themselves on a remote Pacific Island. Among the survivors is Ralph Benson.

Benson soon convinces the natives he is a god. His scientific knowledge might be limited but he gets lucky and the natives believe he really can raise the dead. He continues his experiments, which is not good news for his fellow survivors, or for the natives. Since Benson’s science is no more than pseudoscience it’s inevitable that sooner or later he will stumble and once the natives start to doubt his godlike powers things are bound to get rather tricky for him. He is accepted as both god and absolute ruler of the island but his reign depends entirely on his ability to continue to perform miracles and of course miracles  turn out to be not so easy to perform.

There are enough good ideas here to make an excellent horror movie but by the early 1940s Universal’s horror films were tending more and more towards parody and light comedy so the ideas are not really developed sufficiently and the tone of the movie is too self-consciously comedic.

The casting is a problem. Atwill is excellent of course. The two romantic leads, Patricia (Claire Dodd) and Jim (Richard Davies), are adequate. Una Merkel was a fine comic actress but as Patricia’s Aunt Margaret she’s playing for pure comedy. She does this well enough but her performance pushes the movie too far in the direction of a lighthearted comic romp. This leaves Atwill as the only member of the cast actually trying to make a horror movie.

Despite these deficiencies there are some compensations. Joseph H. Lewis, later to become the darling of film critics for crucial entries in the film noir canon such as Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, is the director. As always his approach is stylish and imaginative and as always Lewis demonstrates his ability to make a cheap B-movie look good. It also has to be said that even though Universal’s 1940s horror movies were mostly very inferior to their 1930s masterpieces the studio still had technicians with the skills to make these movies look great. Lewis gained the nickname Wagon-Wheel Joe for his penchant for shooting scenes through the spokes of wagon wheels in his early B westerns. It’s amusing to see him using some similar techniques here. 

There are a few quite effective and chilling images. The flower soaked in chloroform with which he subdues a native woman is a nicely creepy touch.

The Mad Doctor of Market Street is included in TCM’s five-movie Universal Cult Horror DVD boxed set. The transfer is very good and there are at least a few token extras.

This is by no means a classic of the genre but Atwill’s performance, Lewis’s direction and the slightly unusual approach to the mad scientist stereotype are enough to make it worthwhile viewing. Recommended.