Reviews

A real curiosity, featuring colonial zombies and cargo cults shuffling past rear-projection shots of Phnom Penh and wandering around a large Japanese restaurant which is supposed to represent Cambodia. The picture started life as a sequel to the Halperin Brothers' 1932 hit White Zombie, but legal issues removed Lugosi and for its initial release, even the word 'zombie' in the title (the plural was made to bypass the injunction). General wisdom is that this is a really lousy film which deserves its obscure status, but several very odd additives make Revolt of the Zombies an eccentric and singular potboiler. Its ineptitude as a narrative/technical construction is obvious--and also irrelevant in the face of its singular apparition as an outrageous anomaly in the annals of olden horror.

On the Franco-Austrian front, the Allies experiment with using zombie troops, until the horrified Central Powers convince them that this could unleash a tidal wave of Third World undead and "mean the end of the white race". The Allies quickly concur, and the Buddhist monk (William Crowell) who first gave the zombification formula to France is now condemned to life in prison (!). A very weird quasi-Russian semi-Asiatic aristocratic linguist (Roy D'Arcy), seemingly on the Allied side (which beggars the question of the Russian Revolution - Is he a White? Or a Kropotkin-like class traitor? Or some subaltern secret agent?), kills the monk and steals a holy parchment which holds the secrets of the zombie elixir. A group of soldiers and academics is then dispatched by high command in-country to find and destroy access to this terrible weapon. But a love triangle has developed among the mission's leaders: Dean Jagger and Robert Noland quarrel over the fair Dorothy Stone. Jagger goes ape when Stone choses against him, and then deciphers and utilizes the zombie formula for his own carnal-dictatorial ends. This means starting a zombie army and demanding that Stone marry him, after zombifying his competition. He turns the rest of his colleagues and the colonial troops into hypnotized robots, planning some kind of world conquest to accompany the solemn nuptials of his union with the blonde. However, Stone convinces him to relinquish his dark powers and promises to at least like him a lot if he frees his army of mental slaves. When he does so, the Cambodians storm the building and kill him in revenge. This means that Stone can now marry her real love interest--and also that the white race has presumably been saved.

The megalomaniacal Jagger recognizes that resorting to utter ruthlessness is what places the white race above all the others and therefore, he must use this same strategy to win the girl. He states this creed several times: once to his rival, during a discussion of the correctness of social Darwinism and how hot Miss Stone is; and secondly, to his main zombie assistant (Teru Shimada), as both as an explanation of why imperialism is successful and why a successful anti-imperialist resistance must be equally ruthless. These two conversations are fascinating, especially as the rest of the script is either unintentionally funny or achingly banal.

The shots of Angkor Watt were actually taken by production crew scouts, but scheduling incompetence drastically reduced the film's budget and we end up with an incredibly strange pastiche of cinematic corner cutting, mismatched cuts, and a general poverty-stricken atmosphere of torpor and resignation. The mediocre actors deliver their lines in a waxen and frigid manner, even flubbing them upon occasion, which only adds to the dreamlike adolescence of the flick. The 'Cambodians' are all played by Japanese and Filipino extras (with the noted exception of the monk, who's white), and the pace is more like an episodic adventure serial than a contained whole, with a few very crude double-exposures interspersed into the isolated cliffhanger scenes (one striking repeated series of shots shows the marching colonials weaving up and down the walkways of the mansion/restaurant in a quasi-kaleidoscopic formation). In the end, the film basically just stops, as if time and money had run out. The colonials are still ravaging the big house, leaving the fate of the anthropologists uncertain. Just go home. We're done.

Revolt of the Zombies is definitely a total trainwreck, but the ingenious scenario and the fact that the film deals with colonial conscripts in the Great War also make it highly original. I can't help but think it was mined by those who caught it on late night TV, perhaps by George Romero for Day of the Dead (especially in his original shooting script, which differs very much from the final film). The stunning Yamashiro Restaurant in LA, used for the Cambodian outback, is still in business today. Many other films, including Teahouse of the August Moon, Death Wish II and Memoirs of a Geisha, also used it.

Of the Cambodian 'contribution' to the cause of European freedom, we read that "the Governor General of Indochina, in January 1916, called for 7,000 men (seven battalions) of reserve and active soldiers from Indochina to be sent and also requested a further 12,000 volunteers, 10,000 skilled workers (trained nurses, interpreters, etc) and 20,000 unskilled workers. Cambodia was called on to provide 1,000 volunteer infantrymen and 2,500 workers to go to France. By April 7, 1916, the number of enlisted volunteers (workers and soldiers) totaled 1,015. This was not up to the expectations of the French. King Sisowath was urged to have his functionaries double their efforts to recruit the necessary numbers by further publicizing the recruitment drive, establishing special offices with flags and posters in every provincial salakhet, promising benefits, etc." And that after the armistice "in 1919 the mayor of Phnom Penh announced a contest for the erection of a commemorative monument called 'To those who died for France' to be dedicated to the French, Cambodians and Asian residents of Cambodia who died for the French cause. Strangely enough, only French nationals were invited to offer submissions. Seven years after the end of the war, on Feb 14, 1925, the monument was finally inaugurated." It was torn down decades later by the Khmer Rouge. The spot is now a traffic island.

Kyanq ("Life"), made in 1993 opens with a beautiful woman in close-up profile, apparently in the throes of ecstasy. Soon, an arm in scrubs enters the frame and we see that she is actually in a medical theater (the hand is a doctor or relative's; blurred vertical planes are parts of the metal delivery bed; a glowing orb is hospital lighting). She is in labor, which is a mundane and sentimental subject for a film. The use of the close-up in film, crowding the screen with sweat and 'emotion', is an easy manipulation of the viewer's emotions. It also bares the chill of forensic pathology, which seizes the living as if the body were a puzzle useful only for illustrating hazard or solving its own crime. The soundtrack is music by Verdi, which stops and starts fitfully until it is finally freed from the film's editing, adding a skipping unreality to the formal 'realism' of Life. The only other sound is a heartbeat amplified over the beginning (and note, not the electronic blip of a monitor), which remains slightly audible under the requiem mass.

Though the film follows the simple timeline of a woman giving birth, the editing follows the inward time of a mother. The use of extreme close-up is now clear: in the epochal scheme of a general, universal time, the close-up is used to make myths into statues or it captures momentary passions as if these passions or myths were the only ones in the world. But through a subtle use of jump-cuts, the viewer starts to feel an odd remove from the girl's lovely features.

Do not children kill their mothers in childbirth, with the violence of birth, with the all the terrible duties that child-rearing demands? It is one of the last taboos: the link between orgasm and birth is also the possibility of dual death, and the ruthless affirmation of Life over death which dictates that the life of the child is a supreme right against its mother. Life at all costs-the greatest of tyrannies, a monstrous physical drive which unleashes a tsunami of living over the earth: the atrocious flood of total creation. Life equals what is most terrifying within it-of it. Of life-the blank face of a genetic machine wanting itself and nothing else, consuming itself via the temptation-engines of a chattering god of sheer velocity. It is not the phantom of Death that haunts the living, but the phantom of Life. And the individual life strives to fool this specter, to shock it in its own wild onrush by producing a single life in the monolithic barrage of limitless coming-to-be. Bearing witness against this crude biological nihilism which William Blake identified as The Beast, the machine mills of the slavers' empire, one single life then occurs as many-each without repeat, yet each one the selfsame in the body of the swarm.

Against this omnivorous shadow-a cellular destiny which rises out of the solitary reflections given us by our vague notions of science, by a primary education that teaches biology as fate and terror only-Peleshian projects a woman in contortions, giving birth down by the walls of the hegemon. Things get smaller in the film. Life shrinks down to a mouth, a hand, a slight bewitching smile, ringlets of hair and beads of sweat. And here we realize that exaltation-accompanied by an Italian death mass and the heart's regular drum-is always done alone, and that its joys must be betrayed by the world from which each ecstasy severs it time and again.

She raises a finger to the corner of her mouth with its intricate sloping shadow, touching the ghost of a smile. The woman is lost in some reverie and giving birth would seem a strange time for letting the mind wander. But from the jump cuts, we know that Peleshian has edited this sequence internally, so it is far from certain when moments like this actually occurred (I counted 15 cuts in a sequence which accounts for about 5 minutes of the film's 7-minute running time). At the end, the child is tossed to her mother like a bag of apples, after being bathed in torrents of spurting water (there is no afterbirth or blood, another conscious omission). The young woman and her child then stare at the camera in freeze-frame. I can think of a thousand reasons why you shouldn't have, but you did, despite all-and I now understand why in the flood of existence you added one more as if you were adding nothing at all. This is Peleshian's only film in color, which ads credence to the rumor it was to have been his last (Happily, it was not). Color is the first sight of a guileless world seen by guileless eyes, eyes soon to fall upon the architecture of black and white and the gridlines of working rooms.

"Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam..." Verdi's Requiem Mass, 1874: deliverance (and delivery, "Libera animas omnium...") and liberation (from life, from hell, the lion's jaws), faithful souls, holy light, deepest pits. "Grant O Lord that they might pass from life death..."

Thus is the connection between life and the freeing from life, death and multiple birth sealed (Verdi's Offertorio is cut and partially repeated on the soundtrack). Now the hand at her mouth, in her hair, rack of contractions. Take and in taking, receive, "Tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus." The others-all souls-hostias, "we offer..."

The only horror flick to star Carole Lombard and Randolph Scott. Supernatural is an insane Grand Guignol story about a female serial killer's soul taking possession of a socialite in ordet to exact revenge on the scamming Spiritualist lover who betrayed her to the police. The themes of serial killing, new age mysticism, and shifting identity seem way ahead of their time, given today's louche preoccupations, but the decadent Thirties were also greedy with such sinister preoccupations. Adding its own timely cast, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then, out of ennui or nostalgia, as a voyeuristic lark.

Lombard is astonishing, giving it her all, despite reservations (she apparently hated doing the film and disliked the director, but you can't tell when she's on camera). Her genius in the classic Hawks and Hecht screwball comedies is supplanted here by a malevolent glee and an abandoned sexuality. Arching her eyebrows as if they were bent alley cats, she transforms herself from a meek and naïve wealthy showbiz ingénue into a totally unbridled femme fatale. This is Pre-Code, so it's loaded with all kinds of suggestive innuendo and outright groping (Lombard, purring as Alan Dineart paws her breast). And there was black magic all over: filming was interrupted by the Long Beach earthquake, which sent the crew screaming from the set mid-shot.

Dineart's Spiritualist lair is full of Egyptian wall hangings, skulls, and fancy occult clutter, yet it is located in a miserable cockroach-infested SRO (we see the bugs scurrying), run by mercenary landlady Mabel Mercer. When she tries to blackmail the cutpurse magus, he poisons her with a handy trick ring. The other sets are also striking: heiress Lombard lives an ultra mod apartment, while mad strangler Osborne's old place is full of modernist art. At one point, Lombard and Scott have a conversation in her estuary-a strange, inventive scene full of parrots and wild plants. Thus, the typical standing-around-and-talking bits are given a demented, fascinating series of backgrounds, beautifully lit, and gorgeously shot by Arthur Martinelli. Glittering street scenes, beautiful miniatures of the city and waterfront, an insane apocalyptic opening pre-credit sequence, and all sorts of expressionist shadow and angle play make this one of the best looking 1930s horror films, still ridiculously underrated.

With its lively use of rear projection, straight and lap dissolves, and intricate double exposures, the film mirrors the spooky woo-woo tricks used by the fake mystic, a greasy Manly P Hall mixed with PT Barnum and Manson. A particularily outrageous plot device has Dineart's seance scam dovetailing with the scientific soul-capturing prison experiments of Doc H. B. Warner (his art deco lab and crazy ideas about life essences and the transmigration of souls, couched in pseudo-psychological cum techie babble, is instantly accepted by the warden of the prison where the killer Osbourne awaits execution). In a goofy ending, Lombard's dead husband-they were a successful stage team, performing upscale vaudeville with weird Tin Pan Alley songs, one of which we hear on shellac-smiles down on her and Randolph Scott making out, using the same translucent dissembled head Dineart used to convince her he was summoning her partner from beyond the grave.

Most of the crew from the director's previous hit, White Zombie, returned for this similarly occult follow-up, which is far more indebted to the Russians and Germans than the earlier film and has a much bigger budget, courtesy of Paramount. It was not much of a success. Halperin tried for a new hit with Revolt of the Zombies three years later. Also not a success. He claimed he didn't really like horror movies anyway and retired from filmmaking in 1942. There is little about him, or his brother who acted as producer, either in print or online. This, despite the fact that he lived until 1983.

Very highly recommended. There is a recent Kino Lorber Blu Ray, and it looks great.

By now, Kharis the Mummy is completely shipwrecked in America. The plot is about the same as the prior Mummy flicks in the series: Impossibly aged Pharaonic revanchist George Zucco dispatches an acolyte, Yousef Bey (John Carradine), to the States on a critical mission. This time, it is purely to bring poor Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr) and the mummy of the dead Princess Ananka back to Egypt, after the abysmal failures of the last two projects of the cult. However, things get complex when one of the faculty, Amina Mansoury (Ramsey Ames) proves to be the reincarnation of Ananka (Note here that Kharis' previous murderous sprees are now part of the Egyptology curricula; the cops and schoolmen take it as fact, though the snotty collegiates think it's all a joke). Busting into the museum where the sarcophagus of the Princess lies, Bey and Kharis perform a ritual to accelerate the reincarnation process. Leggy Ananka/Amina inevitably becomes Bey's object of affection, which pisses of Kharis, who just wants to go home. At the climax, the mummy kills his louche master and is chased into a swamp by a local mob, cradling the rapidly aging Ananka in his arms, while the authorities and frat boys stand gaping on the shore.

This film is notable because the Mummy finally gets the girl. Also, the depressing situation of being an emigree in New England is clearly wearing, which is evident in Chaney's bedraggled and battered performance. Whether this is the actor's own exhaustion is irrelevant; fatigue adds a potent element of unreal realism to the picture. Like clockwork, the inept cult sends some faux 'oriental' who falls for the leading lady; phantoms go through their assigned roles; the detectives search badly; the girl swoons on the altar of sacrifice; the angry rabble gathers, and the eternal cycle of stock elements plays out again and again. 'I can't go on, I'll go on', like Samuel Beckett.

Being forced to amble around some sub-Ivy League whitebread college is the real ghosting of the once-exotic Mummy. In academe, the 'Aryan model' of ancient history still held sway and it remains powerful today. The Mummy is both a fetish and an irritating reminder of Afro-Asian greatness; Egyptian studies must be ghettoized into the preoccupations of cranks and the obsessions of children, and also into loopy horror movies. The Mummy's Ghost would have been truly revolutionary if the lovely Dorothy Dandridge had played the reincarnated Princess (Cf., Martin Bernal's controversial classic book, Black Athena), a missed opportunity in the occasionally predictive powers of programmer horror.

There are still some striking sequences: Carradine and Kharis in the museum at night; the mummy with the girl loping up the side of a grain silo; Miss Ames following Kharis over a manicured lawn in a trance. Austrian emigree director Reginald Le Borg is a total pro and does good fluid visual storytelling, yet this also makes for a less weird, less eccentric product. Depending on your mood, Ghost goes down better than the last two sequels and its dark finale is a genuinely gutsy move, downbeat and unexpected.

Dead Men Walk

Dead Men Walk opens with a thoroughly demented prolog which has genuine EC horror in it: burning grimoires, superimposed faces, and an evil-toned spectral VO. George Zucco plays both kindly physician Lloyd and his evil Satanist twin brother, Elwyn. Forced to kill his wicked half before the film starts, Dr Lloyd is soon confronted with the fact that his brother was also a vampire and has now returned from the dead to wreak havoc. It seems that the vile, rapacious Elwyn had pledged his life to the Devil and was given near immortality as a reward while studying the black arts in India (?!). Elwyn announces his incestuous intentions to vampirize his own daughter and, assisted by loyal hunchbacked servant Zolarr (Dwight Frye), revenge himself on his old persecutors. Local wandering nutter Kate (Fern Emmett), whose son seems to have been killed by the undead warlock, had predicted just this type of demonic resurrection, and she now joins Lloyd's crew in hunting down Elwyn's sovereign resting place. Though she is killed, she leaves enough clues to guide the good guys, who have wasted a lot of time in talky drawing room scenes, to the logical place of Elwyn's unholy rest: his own house. The whole foul plot ends in a pyrrhic victory for the forces of Good.

Sam Neufield directs this demented PRC quickie in a somnolent, glacier manner which gives it a feel not unlike Carnival of Souls or even Herzog's Heart of Glass. The actors stand facing each other and intone the ridiculous dialogue as if they were statues; the other set piece places them in shrubs and bushes, staring blanky ahead at action we have just witnessed, miming shock or sniggering evilly. The doctor's mansion is used like an Escher print; impossible sightlines move the action along despite their physical impossibility, with the camera obsessively returning to the goddam bushes. In a 'folks with the pitchforks' trope, a local mob of yokels and poltroons who attack the mansion is made up of about eight people dressed in Western outfits left over from yesterday's cowboy shoot. Poor Dwight Frye, the greatest maniacal laugher in the history of cinema, is here cast as a pastiche of his classic mad assistant roles in one of his last films. He gives it his all, ending up screaming for his master under a cardboard altar to Lucifer. The climax uses some rudimentary editing and angled camera shots, which look like the work of Eisenstein when compared to the hypnotized stasis of the rest of the film. This dramatic shift from the previous hour of delirium to real bargain basement excitement works particularly well.

Dead Men Walk is pretty good, though perhaps against its own intent. Time has been kind to this cheapie, extracting its static faults and transforming them into haunted ellipses and repetitions. The loopy dialogue now sounds cryptic, meandering symptoms of a dysphoric universe. Its set-bound nature becomes flea-bitten claustrophobia, staggering and dreamlike, like some regional Marienbad before its time. And doctors being the Janus face of the ancient dark wizards is a common suspicion which never gets old.

Completely bonkers guignol pastiche of American traditions that were already sacred by 1942: mad science (eugenics), serial killing of women, and manic suspicions about sinister 'foreigners'. Faded prints of The Corpse Vanishes cropped up regularly last century, presented by Vampira or Zacherle or Svengoolie, depending on where you lived. It also ruled the 3 AM slots, oozing its way into anyone's conscience who chanced upon it, half asleep or half sober, fever sick or insomniac. And indeed, this is the kind of shipwrecked flick best caught in little gnawing snippets, as the whole thing eludes the mind, senses... any sense of reality. The Corpse Vanishes must have been fertile inspiration ground because the films of Kuchar and Lynch owe a great deal to its loopy contortions and asphyxiated frame. Less mannered than either auteur, director Wallace Fox grinds out a bone fide cutpurse nightmare with relentless water-logged illogic, sans any kind of schooled self-awareness. Kitsch is as far from this film as any ideas of methodical cinematic construction: things are not so much paced as exploded, shuttled from scene to scene as if the events on screen were trying to outrun the actors, ever charging ahead regardless of what happened a few seconds before.

A spate of inexplicable murders of young brides via poisoned orchids, followed by the disappearance of their bodies, sends wise-cracking cub reporter Luana Walters to the lair of botanist-surgeon Dr Lorenz (Bela Lugosi) looking for info on the murderous qualities of plants. The doc lives in a mansion outside of L. A. (?) with his shrew of a wife and a gaggle of demented dark ride assistants he calls his 'family'. After being stranded there by a storm, Walters and her lover boy physician sidekick (Tristram Coffin) figure out that Lugosi and his henchmen are actually behind the killings. The stolen brides are placed in suspended animation in order to be harvested for a glandular fluid which keeps the iron lady of the house young and beautiful (yet really bad tempered). The moronic Angel (Frank Moran) chases the comely reporter around the subbasement lair of the place, but she is rescued by Lugosi after she swoons. In the morning, he tries to convince her it that was all a bad dream, planning to kidnap her later and requisition her bodily fluids. Safe back at the newspaper, she convinces her boss to lay a trap for the mad doctor and his gang--now somewhat depleted due to Lugosi's uncontrollable fits of rage--thereby getting the scoop on the crime of the century. The cops and the press chase the fiends back to the cardboard mansion, after Lugosi's plan to zombify Ms. Walters quickly falls apart. In the finale, he faces rough justice from his own humiliated servants...

The utterly unhinged performance of Elizabeth Russell, sister of Rosalind, as the Bathory-like Baroness Lorenz steals the show. Snapping at anything that moves, she struts around the dingy sets in dime store Diva poise, turning cast members into mice and hyperventilating between poker-faced viciousness and drained exhaustion when she needs a fix. As her husband, Lugosi grows more docile, curls up and evaporates into the corner whenever they share the screen. He knows it's useless to compete. Besides, at this point in time, he was working heavily with the anti-fascist emigree community in California, as well as dodging J Edgar Hoover, who had hated him for his socialist politics and ardent union organizing for over a decade. I imagine whatever pittance Monogram paid Bela for this outrageous mess went to antagonizing the collaborationist Horthy regime back in Hungary, as well as the stateside Hungarian Nazis Lugosi regularily reported to the OSS (only to have the OSS report Lugosi back to Hoover as a suspicious alien). Never a self-aggrandizing man, Lugosi took little credit but much as an anti-fascist, according to a fine recent biography ('No Traveler Returns', by Gary Rhodes & Bill Kaffenberger). In light of these contemporary activities, I hope that Hoover was driven to watch The Corpse Vanishes looking for stealthy communist subversion and the damn thing gave him a nervous breakdown.

Crawling through the catacombs under the mansion, the lunatic family members almost resemble Goya figures scrubbing the walls. These are the film's finest moments. Unforgettable also is Lugosi's character kicking his dwarf servant Toby to the literal curb, a scene which has true nastiness in it. Toby is played by the great Angelo Rossitto, whose career spanned from early sound programmers and Freaks (1932) to Welles' Other Side of the Wind; he also appeared on album covers by Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. Not a bad run. I'm surprised no one has written a book about him, and even more disappointed that he never published an autobiography.

The Corpse Vanishes is a prime example of American junkyard express filmmaking, a strange Mobius strip which gets more inscrutable with every agonized viewing. Easily available on line, and the rattier the copy, the better.

One of the more bizarre Mummy films, not least because much of it was physically snatched from other Universal horrors, this is a direct sequel to the dire Mummy's Hand (1940). Thirty years after violating Princess Anaka's tomb, the annoying protagonists of the earlier film are targeted by the Pharaonic revivalist cult of Karnak, whose high priest (George Zucco) has miraculously survived. New acolyte Turhan Bey is sent to a small town in Massachusetts, where he reactivates the gimpy Kharis in order to kill off the family of the now-doddering sacreligious adventurers. But Bey falls for the comely Peggy Moran and things go haywire when he wants to marry her and father a new line of immortal priests. The cops figure out his evil plan and rally the villagers to descend on Bey's center of operations in the local cemetery, killing him, while the mummy runs off with the girl. Everything ends in a fiery climax at the tomb robbers' palatial estate, with pallid Good triumphing over exotic Evil.

Dashing Turhan Bey represents a 'Moorish' threat to Main Street and its Blue Blood mercantile aristocracy, hence the lynch mob (made up entirely of footage from 1931's Frankenstein) lead by the cops, which gleefully descends on him. No fear though! Undefiled, the very Aryan Peggy Moran's virginity is saved for the young rich scion (Dick Moran) and the terrifying threat of miscegenation is foiled! Actor Bey was actually Turkish-Austrian and his mother was Jewish, making him the perfect symbol of wartime paranoia and timely suspicions of 'Oriental' fifth column sneakiness. He registers as Black in the film, hovering over the supine Moran, eyes on her chastity, tempted by the supposed physical perfection of the white race, using necromancy to further insidious plans that are both sexual and cultural. This makes the film pretty interesting as an exercise in American fearmongering via cheap programmer, an illustration of the country's intrinsic bigotry in stock horrorshow tropes and weird juxtapositions. Scenes of Kharis wandering around store front sets give a strange vigorous collage insert effect to the pedestrian whole, and set-pieces like Bey's faux Egyptian temple smack in the middle of a cardboard gothic cemetery show what loopy inventiveness these type of flicks often have.

Things snap along without the agonizing comic relief of the earlier film; The Mummy's Tomb seems less cramped and confused. It lacks the parody and delirium of Karl Freund's great pre-code Mummy of 1931, but it has its own peculiar sleaze, evident especially in its perfunctory racism and immigrant bating. Case for witting or unwitting subversion: Bey and the mummy are a hell of a lot more exciting than the insipid and intolerant townsfolk or the flat, rather thick heroes. Moran's character should have accepted the Egyptian offer, which would have saved her from the carpeted doom looming ahead: the endless drab cocktail parties and barbecues, bridge tournements and analysts, a lifetime of suffering at the edges of bourgeois success in a purgatorial 'civilized' hinterland. After all, even a brutal imperial caste system like the Second Kingdom accepted queens and goddesses. The most Massachusetts can give her is a handful of barbiturates now and the possibility of death in Florida as an act of mercy.

So this is not a total waste of time. And by moving the mummy to the West, the flick set the tone for most of the Mummy films to come, with plot derived from a weird 1903 Bram Stoker 1903 (Jewel of the Seven Stars) and the long life of Hollywood Orientalism. Lon Chaney Jr. Is Kharis, as he would be for the next three Universal Mummy sequels, but you can't it's him under the wraps. His main turn is acting shocked when Bey orders him to grab the blonde chick for carnal purposes. Otherwise, Lon Jr. Just limps and slumps around under the expertly done makeup and goes for the throats of various provincial hickoids.

Made in 1972 in the wake of Vietnam, Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey prowls the warm sickly halls of an old New York flophouse á la search-and-destroy. The place must have looked like cold storage at the time, but today it appears almost luxurious - a relic from an era when the poor could still afford a room from the small-time slum operator. By the 1980s, hotels such as the Monterey fell to the liberalization clearances fueling the NYC bankruptcy fire sale, like the old diners that gave your Ma a job for life and the palaces of the Deuce. Who'd have thought that that hoary nemesis of American industry, the mustachioed Evil Landlord, would have won out in the end? In 1971 the gold standard was abandoned, courtesy of Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle.

Look at where Miss Akerman's old hotel once stood, then you will see why people believe - poor people, black people, sickened believers - that some pathogen has been loosed by scientists or that the old inhabitants were turned into monster food. Such conspiracies metaphorize the Neo-Medieval policies of the Rentier class, using the lamppost flyer and pulp plotting particular to a desperate but wise underworld of inner-city DPs. Speculative power, phantom liquidity, the gnostic mythos of finance and brute brokerage force - an overpowering propaganda that convinces you to submit your own failure, to give them the last thing you are permitted to own. "We have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime." (Robert Fitch)

Hotel Monterey is silent on soundtrack but it is not really a silent film. Rents accumulate without noise; elevator doors bellow like waxless accordion keys - these things are rendered mute because Akerman is interested in surfaces and not in guessing about a psychology of loneliness. The first shot shows a strangely-placed small mirror in the foyer which reflects the front desk; soon, a hatted figure crosses the frame, right out of a Magritte. It seems to be in late evening in the Monterey, but this may be as deceptive as the hours of a casino. Ackerman is a scientist of the modification of time and the hydra-headed social contract. City housing is a political many, a multiplicity of actions public and private, acted out per square foot in magazine spreads, municipal code and law, and vacant skyscraper floors. The halls and doors of this little hotel conceal a grand machine: the basement is the menial heart, near the end of the film, under decades of express feet. Off Bowery, the year of the pig draws to a close.

The alienation of big cities is best captured by foreigners, who easily perceive the energetic lines of power in billboards and off-ramps, marble faces flashing for a siren moment in a crowd - especially port cities like New York. The late Miss Akerman made the slowest, most thrilling films. She ends this one with a narcotic pan over the rooftops, while the sequel, News from Home (1977), follows the different immigrant zones of Hell's Kitchen at a crawl by car. For all her haunts, Akerman was a materialist with a big nosey heart. Hotel Monterey was made a year prior to the coup in Chile, with Babette Mangolte on camera, who also shot Jeanne Dielman... The Monterey itself is now a Days' Inn franchise. Rooms are comparatively affordable, from $69 a night.

United Fruit, sponsor of coups and mass killings all over the Americas, merged with United Brands in 1970. In the hands of avant corporate raider Eli Black, it spun out into insolvency and fraud. Black jumped from his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in 1975. It would have taken him about an hour to walk to the Monterey or twenty minutes by subway.

A study in microscopic paranoia, Zontar is one of the more outrageous products of mid-sixties UFO Fordism. Its roadkill 'plot' shoulders on Body Snatchers territory: an absurd papier-mache creature plans world domination by zombifying the Military Industrial Complex one scientist at a time, beginning with a lonely SETI outpost in the Mojave. Most of the inaction takes place in clapboard rec-rooms, abutted to stock footage of missile silos and pans of a stark desert moonscape (the latter is actually a suburb of Dallas, according to scholars of this film). Inside their pre-fab hells, the inmates mix drinks and threaten each other, occasionally erupt in spasms of wild emotion, then settle down again in the ruthlessness of stage-bound budgeting and the confines of a near-constant medium-shot frame.

In a performance that must have been influenced by Stanley Milgram's torture experiments, Tony Huston is especially manic and perplexing as Zontar's first human dupe, a NASA egghead named Keith. There are hints of a deep-seated nihilism behind his near-hysteria, but seeing that he also wrote the script, maybe it's just the dark glee of a strange and lonely pride as he recites lines issuing from his own pen. His foil is John Agar, an actor who always seems to take on the attributes of the furniture around him. His acting partakes of Taoist wu, the necessity of presence - neither more nor less, neither lousy nor striking, just there but certainly there.

Zontar of Venus finally arrives on earth and sets up command and control in a cave, where he cuts a touchingly vulnerable figure. As he is quite immobile - perhaps because Agar's salary ate up most of the budget - he is assisted by strange airborne skeet-creatures who zombify the local servicemen and townspeople by stinging them. Repetitive shots of these cardboard demons flying over telephone wires, suburban bungalows, and stalled trucks look like captures of today's drones haunted-up in cold war black and white. This is indeed skeletal filmmaking, images at the margin of afternoon fever-dreams, with a genuinely purgatorial atmosphere of mortal cramp and marginal reality. Zontar himself looks splendid: a Duk-Duk fetish, proud and pitiful in glaring cheap fabrication and inept lighting, an abandoned carny nightmare decaying in front of overgrown children, waiting for the end like a Mormon angel.

Agar soon realizes that Zontar is an intergalactic fascist whose plans are not liberation but human slavery. In a climax more desperate than thrilling, he rids the universe of both Zontar and himself with something called 'plutonium ruby crystal.' Yet the addled viewer feels a terrible certainty that the 'story' will repeat in a never-ending informational loop, the living and the dead will again assume their places and carry out their tasks once more, until the last flickering of recorded time. This sense of cyclical production is perhaps the ghostly product of Zontar's eternal run on rosy-hour TV for the last half-century, as if the film itself had taken on the substance of its own interminable repetition. Zontar is cousin to Milstar. Voyeur/ voyant.

The film has an occult undercurrent of loathing and cynicism that is strangely difficult to convey or qualify to those who haven't sat through it. Line-readings are deadened but feel deviously mannered when taken as an (un)dramatic whole; the dialogue ignores Victorian ideas of psychological depth in favor of old-world Manicheanism, typified by Agar's Augustinian pronouncement of the seduction of evil ending in "death... fire... disillusionment... loss". The awful boredom of endless scenes in interchangeable rooms is eerily hypnotic, resembling the cycles of Bioy's Morel or the tenants of Marienbad. These interiors form a wheezing geometrical figure that holds the participants hostage rather than leading them to any dramatic resolution, despite the conspiracy and murders coagulating around them. It seems fruitful here to ask whether Zontar is a reactionary film. Is this Brechtian dramaturgy really a right-wing Modernism á la Marinetti and Lewis? Is its indictment of middle-class complicity with alien martial entities or just xenophobia demanding a military coup?

Robert Alcott's savant camera captures the séance-like proceedings like a weird ethnographic documentary, and the film is not so much edited as occasionally interrupted. I hazard that Larry Buchanan, the auteur behind this and other narcolepsies such as The Eye Creatures and The Naked Witch, may be the last unexplored property in the American cult terrain, perhaps because he is seen as the most indistinguishably wretched - if he's seen at all. There are some encouraging signs that this may be a major critical miscalculation.

As evidence prima facie in the case, consider Zontar's similarities to post-war German cinema: both Fassbinder and Buchanan are obsessed with the traumatic scars of inertia; Zontar's documentary camera predicts Thomas Mauch's and its cheap look resembles Kluge's futurist Marxian epics; the ensemble nature of Buchanan's films puts him squarely in the avant-garde, while his workmanlike ethic is pure proletarian. The picture was actually made for television, which goes some way toward understanding its rat-like, neurotic direction, but not the choices of a director who embraces each limitation as a mark of personal pride. On top of the humiliation of being small screen, Zontar is also a remake of Roger Corman's junker, It Conquered the World, churned out ten years earlier. So Buchanan's film is therefore a de facto critique, as well as a revision.

It is entirely beside the point that Zontar is a 'terrible' film; it is obvious that bourgeois questions of formal unity, technical proficiency and diegesis do not apply here. Rather, its 80 minutes are hard to forget and give, for my insomnia, more pure unheimlichkeit than any of the more respectable fantasies of the period. It also offers far more to us today than say, The VVitch or Heredity - to name two recent neoliberal swindles made by people who once read about art in college and dress groan-inducing simplistic ideas up in murky Silicon Valley blues.

This 1944 racket takes place in a strange Wilder-Lovecraft hamlet called Twin Falls, and features Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor trying the revive his living dead wife. A few backlot exteriors show the paranoid wastespaces marking the underside of programmer production, a desolation held off on screen by table cloths, dining rooms dying with doilies, and other signs of a Middle American jive sophistication. This is a desperate sign that the frontiers of Protestant austerity are under siege by vague memories of the bourgeoisie's hickoid prior lives: it may all vanish to unveil the Jukes and white lightning bubbling beneath.

John Carradine's sub-Lennie Small character lopes along, plays a conga at black magic rituals, and caresses the pretty girls he steals for his master's bizarre immortality project. He also strangely resembles an art school student gone senile, searching glumly for his tattered copy of the "Long-Lost Friend" and stroking the captive girls' hair. Carradine and his Cro-Magnon sidekick (Pat McKie) are overseen by a petit bourgeois white Conjure Man (George Zucco), who uses a gas station to waylay potential victims. These kidnapped bints are given to the lovesick Dr Marlowe (Lugosi), who employs mysterious machines to bring back his wife from a kind of living purgatory.

After their essences are extracted by a séance-cum-invocation which, despite constant assurances that the deity 'Ramboona' is all-powerful, never really works, the hijacked girls are made into zombies (Zucco's voodoo rites resemble a Hoodoo catalog cover, while his garb is strictly Shriner). Ellen Hall is memorable as Lugosi's moribund wife, a Beardsley waif sleepwalking until she can consume enough souls to live again. The zombie women are kept in cabinets with glass doors, making for an effective set piece combining Cocteau with the small-town dark ride. Voodoo Man is set not in California but in some Midwest windtunnel, where no one knows how they got there or why they are doing what they are doing, but yet they must keep on doing whatever it is. Raise the dead, drive the car, solve the case.

Director William Beaudine moves his camera only reluctantly, sometimes arranging his actors in mock-Hindu (Lugosi at left, Zucco in the center, and Hall at right, with arms, skulls and magic implements fanning out behind them), and at other times, shuffling them along conveyer-belt style through fake cramped caves and plywood hallways. Tod Andrews, pretty irritating as a Hollywood scriptwriter who soon stumbles on Lugosi and Co en route to his own wedding, initially tells his boss that newspaper accounts of the Twin Falls kidnappings will not make for a hit film. In the last scene, he drops off a script entitled "The Voodoo Man" and recommends that Bela Lugosi play the heavy (Andrews takes a few moments to remember the great man's name, which I read as a dig at a public which has even forgotten Dracula). Thus, that old trendy device now gussied up as 'meta' lets us know that real life and scripted life are essentially the same and nothing in either should be taken seriously.

But questions stubbornly remain unanswered. Is Zucco's warlock a new Joseph Smith or has he just been hanging around with Obeah practitioners, despite his posh exterior? Why is everyone so vested in Lugosi's project, and why is their dogged devotion to it so oddly moving? And the fact that the unreality of the distant Second World War for the United States-a war known mainly through war bonds, rationing, newsreels, and propaganda pieces targeting the Japanese-is quite remarkable in these period flicks. Everyone else was getting bombed and genocided by the barbaric end result of centuries of European 'culture'. Our homeland dreamed, sent a few shell-shocked souls to the madhouse, and made out pretty good after the shooting stopped.

Barely passing an hour, Voodoo Man is an effortlessly realistic film.

Damned, damned, damned Egypt fetish flick from 1980. Was the idea to cash in on crap like The Omen and the slasher craze by driving patrons out of the theater to see other Columbia-EMI-Warners playing on neighboring screens? Or did the producers simply need to park mob money? The Awakening is a candidate for a front if ever there was.

Rather moody beginning, but things slide into a droning whirr soon after, and star Charlton Heston -- as an academic! -- moves around like he was looking for his lost apes and vampires. In The Awakening, there is no mummy. There are however lots of scenes of people huddling over desks. This is also a New Age reincarnation flick a la Audrey Rose, so Heston's daughter is another Nefertiti. Moments of greasy near-incest heighten the underlying feel that this is realy a quickie, trussed up in fancy photography and deadening Egyptology cant. The writers of this thing also wrote Roeg's Don't Look Now, a fact which I find impossible to believe. Stoic Monte Hellman was hired to do the final cut. The Awakening is based on a strange, static Bram Stoker novel--the literary ancestor of all Mummy pictures--which is a key to why these kind of flicks are mostly scenes of people standing around talking. So much for the evidence.

The only reason to see The Awakening is the memorable performance of Stephanie Zimbalist, unjustly savaged in almost every review here on IMDB. They don't get it. To my amateur mind, she is extraordinary. Consciously out of place, she recites her lines like a living statue and wanders around somnolent and Tide-commercial beautiful, until she wholly consumes herself in the big finale. Her flashing eyes and convulsions are striking, as if she woke up from the dire proceedings and decided to act like an actress out of pure spite. This may be lousy acting per se, but Miss Zimbalist accrues a kind of morbid sincerity after enduring two hours of gloomy interiors cut with pans of omenous thunderclouds. She comes across as a truly vengeful spirit who knows she has been unjustly used, hissing back with genuine anger and sexual fury at the frigid and suffocating impotent constructions all around her. The set falls apart via her libidinous will--the sublimation of ideas can find no other expression in a $5 million waste product like this--burying Heston beneath papier-mâché stone and sarcophagi. Her reward was low box office returns, mercifully no Return Of The Awakening, and a more comfy career in TV, where this clunker occasionally crops up. It was a bad memory for all involved or so I read, but she should feel no shame.

One other notable thing: the French film poster, artist unknown, is exciting, crude, and inspired. Opposite of the film.

A beautiful, hallucinatory film. The ridiculous plot is a concoction of Mesozoic-era pulp and outrageously improbable chance mechanics, of amnesiac leftovers from warhorse Gothic mysteries and rip-offs of still other programmers released six months before. Mistaken identity, somnambulism, loopy psychology, doubles --- all of it motorized by people accidentally seeing something that is not what it appears to be. Everyone seems trapped in a dingy merry-go-round, deliriously and strikingly laid out by ace director Joseph H. Lewis (he would make the even madder classic, Gun Crazy, in 1950). Last Year at Marienbad is a actually pretty good comparison, if you excuse several cosmetic differences and are easy with cinematic time travel.

Bela Lugosi's home is the scene of several murders, which the idiotic police pin on his daughter's fiancée, who is actually executed for the crimes (Chance, the wheel of these melodramas, forsakes him). Mild-mannered Lugosi is the real killer. Why does he di it? It turns out Lugosi's dead wife is not dead after all: after a car accident, the now brain-damaged waif is secretly cared for on the mansion grounds by loyal servants. Her accidental apparitions send Lugosi into a homicidal rage, a kind of 'trigger' for his grief (to use today's psychobabble, just as silly as this film's plot). The case is finally solved by the twin brother of the wrongfully accused, who has now fallen in love with his almost sister-in-law.

All this faux incest, sleepwalking, and haunting by the living... Lewis never misses a chance for an ominous glimmer behind streaked glass, a moody theatric exterior breeze, for a drywall corridor transformed into genuine nightmare. By this point, the absurd plots of these films were well beyond parody. They had become either a blackboard for a series of impressionistic and inventive maneuvers (Ulmer, Hawks, Tourneur), or the dissipated scrim for outsider flicks made by PRC studios or second-tier Universal or Republic product. Lewis manages a dialectic between both, employed here by the notorious Monogram Pictures. In this type of horror flick, a convulsive, paranoid interior imprisons the wraith-like 'characters' and the director's job is to speed these moving shadows through stairwells and rooms, picking out diversions and abstracts along the way. Lewis manages to stuff the demented plot to the point of sinking overflow, never losing his eye (which is newsstand baroque) and walking the line between control and total giving-over to the absurd, leaving moments that stick in the mind because of their unreal realism. Art needs the Lewis kind of proletarian speed, all the more unnerving when the film's locomotion is stopped dead by some mysterious granite effect or dreamlike flash: a woman's shape in a storm looking up Lugosi as he looks down at her, for example --- trite as hell maybe, but here strangely alive and out of time, like life can be, at times.

Lugosi delivers a moving performance like usual, fully conscious of the tight world closing in around him like a fire sale. Workmanlike is no insult: Lugosi was always a workman, from his working youth as a miner to his work on stage and screen. This is one of his best films. The Invisible Ghost's double negative title tells all: there is no real ghost. But there are plenty of sinister powers, the masterminds behind Grade B programmers who utilized true artists upon occasion, sentencing them to work in the trash heap, far below the Californian heavens. And why is Lugosi's agony when he sees his luminous other half so inexplicably moving? He would have been superb as Clov in Beckett's play Endgame, reciting with his great inner power: "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more..."

Made many years after Karl Freund's delirious Pre-Code Mummy, this clunker started the belated sequel machine. Wallace Ford and several dopey sidekicks go into the tomb robbing biz, where they encounter the vengeful new rags: Kharis. You see, Kharis had pulled the same stunt Karloff's Imhotep did back in the Middle Kingdom --- i.e., falling in love with Pharoah's daughter -- recounted via flashbacked 1932 footage, with a few new shots cannily inserted. Innovation: Instead of the old coffin scroll, fanatical Pharoanic revanchist forces now use Tanna leaves to raise the slow-footed menace. The Mummy has become a golem-Frankenstein hybrid; his masters are the old ruling class, at war with colonial Mandate forces. The sequals all feature tarboosh devotees chanting over the bubbling Tanna chay, as Kharis rises again and again to continue his dead labor, limping along from desert to swamp, looking more and more lonely (an unintentional element of pathos, making its first appearnace here, and already seeming ancient).

George Zucco, a cutpurse Gielgud, plays the high priest of a secret society which guards the tomb of the old Dynastic bint, Princess Anankha (Kharis' immortal beloved). Kharis chases interloper Ford and Co around a confined little set everyone calls "The Valley of the Seven Serpents", until Zucco goes ape over Ford's love interest (played by the comely Peggy Moran, a reincarnation of the Princess, and easily the highlight of the film). Ford's drunken sidekick shoots the besotted Zucco, who dies begging Isis for forgiveness on the steps of a temple left over from The Phantom Empire. The film finally ends on a cute joke back at the casbah.

Mostly a real drudge, The Mummy's Hand does contain several memorable moments: a nice angular shot of Zucco ascending a stone staircase; moody close-ups of the Mummy's face, with black and tongueless glistening slug-mouth; Kharis vainly attempting the lap up the spilt Tanna tea with arthritic desperation... Other than that, there is much inaction and some innunedos that were long dead by the end of vaudeville.

The picture is basically an Innocents Abroad comedy, a dry run for the better Abbot and Costello Mummy movie made a few years later. It's shot in the California desert of Jack Parsons. Kharis aimlessly lurches through its filtered rubber oasis, lopes along Mayan/Martian ruins in search of some irritating cast member to kill. Apparently, Universal's Orientalist Dept was already barren one reel into the series, able to add nothing of the sex which oozed from Freund's original cloth, or the demented programmer energy typical of contemporary Monogram and PRC junkers. You might just get a kick out of this dry bones if you're watching only half the time, cooking noodles in your lonely apartment the other.

The kind of semi-respectable second tier sequel once competently churned out for good box office draw and decades later, ending up on teenage horror host TV to show a little contrast to the usual ultracheapies. These solid programmers always have a few saving graces-in this case, thanks to the incredible Siodmak brothers, working in scenario and direction. Lon Chaney Jr is Count Dracula, called Alucard in the first use of a palindrome which is used more times the more times it's used, rendered charmless and flat as pasteboard by a performance universally derided as awful. Which it may well be, but the Siodmaks use it very curiously-the real revelation waits until the last third of the flick. The whole thing takes place on a plantation with obsequious Black servants and appears to be about money, like everything else American. Proto Goth chick Louise Albritton, alternately flaky and merciless, has fallen for the Count back in Transylvania and seems to be totally under his control. He moves to the US after literally sucking his own countryside dry, which he describes this in a very apocalyptic, Great War manner. After killing Albrotton's aging dad in the first ten minutes, he gains sole proprietorship and attempts to remove anyone who interferes with his plans, including the guy Miss Goth was originally engaged to (Robert Paige). Things turn even odder when it's revealed that Albritton cares nothing for the inheritance money and is using the painfully dull Dracula to get eternal life and then to offer this boon to her neurasthenic, manic childhood love. She appears to this poor slob in his jail cell, where he is babbling to himself after getting arrested for murdering her (the bullet passes through Dracula in an earlier confrontation), and then trying to tell everyone that some heavy supernatural biz is going down at the plantation. She convinces him to kill Dracula so they can live eternally together as vampires. This is what is really going on and reduces the Count to a passive player who does not really know what's going on. Cheney's Dracula comes across as a third-generation aristocrat with no charisma aside from cheesy propagandistic reuses like hypnosis and his infamous name, a solidly fascist émigré who is used by far more canny forces for their own particular reasons. This is evident even the confusion as to who he really is: Alucard, 'a relative of the Count' (possibly, according to the Van Helsing clone), Dracula himself (according to the credits and several characters), The Son of Dracula (according to the title, but stated nowhere else). This is just like the shape shifting nature of the politically advantageous turns of fascism, its names and identities, and the use of front organizations and spies. Also, myth and PR. Cheney's wooden, lusterless performance is now completely understandable in this light, especially because he has very little screen time and does not seem to understand at all where he is (the US), an archaic leftover still trying to remain in power. He ends up decaying in the sun, pathetically pleading with his half-mad adversary. Albritton's Siouxsie ancestor is burnt by her now exhausted boyfriend in a beautifully shot finale. In another curious aside, interested party Frank Craven actually reads a copy of Dracula to gain insight (we see the page and the quote; it is from Chapter Three of Stoker's book). Bestsellers tell you what you need to know. Everything is in the open, especially the machinations of darkness. The special effects are lovely and work on forms: Dracula is a bat on a wire, which scrolls down to become his caped figure, and the photography is dark and beautiful throughout. All in all, this is a clever and ingenious collage of tropes: Wuthering Heights, pop occultism, paste-up and allegory. The fact that it was made in 1943 by two Jewish immigrants whose films were attacked by Goebbels himself supports the idea that they wanted to turn Dracula into a banal aging Junker with little personality who is just in the right place at the right time, demythologizing the invincible Machiavellian Will-and perhaps even the choice of a plantation setting. Thus, Son of Dracula can be seen as a revisionist work, like Herzong's Nosferatu or Romero's Martin, cleverly inserted into the modest formula of a sequel to an already iconic hit (Lugosi's Dracula). Striking set pieces like Dracula's coffin rising from the swamp rise to the level of poetry (so much for running water) and its fast pace, show that this little picture actually is more visually exciting than most of Browning's original of 1931, and is almost as good as the delirious Dracula's Daughter, another eccentric sequel, made seven years before. Bobby Siodmak dismissed this pretty item quickly, but it shows his ability to think fast and to stitch elements from Tennessee Williams, Wuthering Heights and the crime caper into an efficient machine, with plenty of ideas, and enough modern steadiness to move along effortlessly on its wires.