Mmm, Reptilicious

My quest, the one I’ve entitled See Reptilicus And Die — my quest to see every film depicted in the pages of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies — the book he wrote by taking dictation form my childhood nightmares — my quest, I say, is not far from completion. If you visit the pages where I listed the films I had to track down and see, you’ll observe that most of the entries are now coloured BLOOD RED, meaning I came, I saw, I choked back my vomit.

Here’s a list of movies located but still to be watched —

THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR: killer moth romp with Cushing. Lovely.

MURDER CLINIC: never knew what this was, turns out to be a giallo. Got a very scratchy, very pink copy.

THE PHANTOM OF SOHO: actually got two radically different cuts of this krimi kaper, in different languages. Will watch both, become confused, write post.

INVISIBLE INVADERS: an Edward L Cahn atrocity.

WILLARD: rat movie with Michael Jackson theme song. Figures. Anyone remarked how the lyrics of “Thriller” describe accurately Jacko’s use of THE EXORCIST to terrify small boys into sexual submission?

THE VAMPIRE (1957): around this time somebody also made THE WEREWOLF. I guess it was time somebody noticed those basic titles hadn’t been exploited.

GAMERA VS JIGER: monsters duke it out at the 1970 Japan World’s Fair.

KING OF THE ZOMBIES: one of the easiest to see, since it’s actually online, and one of the hardest to sit through (I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried).

RETURN OF THE APE MAN: the original was pretty bad. This phony sequel at least George Zucco and John Carradine to bolster Lugosi (and by “bolster” I mean “physically support”).

THE RETURN OF COUNT YORGA: it is entirely possible that I’ve seen this, on a b&w portable TV in my bedroom when I was 17. But I’m not sure that counts, since I don’t remember a damn thing about it.

BLACK DRAGONS: is going to be an ordeal. What drugs do you recommend to enhance the experience?

THE MONSTER MAKER: Ralph Morgan as a mad scientist is an attractive prospect, though part of me wishes it was his brother Frank.

DEAD MEN WALK: Zucco always cracks me up.

INVISIBLE AGENT: this ought to be good fun.

THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET: watched half an hour before sinking into a coma. Will try again, using strong stimulants. Even duller than remake, THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH. Even with the lovely Helen Walker, an immortal snore.

THE DEVIL BAT: has to be at least watchable.

EQUINOX: one of several Gifford titles to have received the Criterion treatment. And I’m not just talking about classics, but THE GRIP OF THE STRANGLER also.

THE HYPNOTIC EYE: I just tracked down a copy of this nasty-sounding thing. Beatniks, hypnosis and mutilation.

REPTILICUS: the mother of all Danish dinosaur movies.

The tricky ones are still the remaining rarities I haven’t laid hands on, of course. But plans are afoot…

The Sunday Intertitle: Cave Art

“In order to launch a product, a good enough publicity idea.”

From QUANDO LE DONNE PERSERO LA CODA — WHEN WOMEN LOST THEIR TAILS, a sequel to the popular, dumb, wildly unfunny Italian stone-age sex comedy QUANDO LE DONNE AVEVANO LA CODA, or WHEN WOMEN HAD TAILS.

Both movies are spectacularly stupid, devoid of wit, and waste a vaguely promising comedy idea, done rather better by Buster Keaton in THREE AGES (which is one of his least interesting films). The fact that the films, directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile, use rock-carved intertitles, sets up a promising expectation that they might do without dialogue. Italian audiences love slapstick, and cavemen often communicate in grunts in the movies, so this seems like an interesting exercise for the filmmakers to undertake. But they don’t undertake it. All they undertake is curvaceous German import Senta Berger in a fur bikini, surrounded by a lot of hideous Italians in fright wigs, in a big ugly artificial Flintstones set, where the boulders actually cast shadows on the sky.

CAVEMAN, which I was always perversely curious to see, is a lot more ambitious. The cavemen grunt in this one, using a primitive language created by Anthony Burgess farted out by writers Carl Gottlieb and Rudy De Luca, which should clear the way for visual gags to drive the plot. Unfortunately, there are (almost) no gags worthy of the name and (actually) no plot. Ringo Starr plays the hero, which would be funnier if he DID speak English. Ringo is only really funny when he attempts verbal acting. Future Mrs Starr and former Bond girl Barbara Bach plays the sex interest. A very cute young Shelley Long plays the love interest, Dennis Quaid is the best friend (so young!), and it’s all very wretched indeed, apart from the dinosaurs.

How wretched? A major “comedy” moment involves Ringo drugging Barbara with knock-out fruit so he can rape her in her sleep. And she’s meant to be the bad one (she gets dropped in dinosaur poo at the end). Of course, Ringo fails to get his drumstick in her, so we can all laugh, can’t we? Er, no.

(The Italian one has Senta Berger subjected to unsophisticated caveman mating techniques too, until a more sensitive, modern caveman turns up who teaches her the kama sutra, or something. Naturally, he becomes the enemy of the other troglodytes. Either way, both movies exude an authentically stone-age sensibility.)

But the dinosaurs! Jim Danforth  and Dave Allen, of EQUINOX fame, created some beautiful goofy monsters for this, which give by far the best performances and get all the laughs. And they actually manage to have charm, when surrounded by this putrid film. Actually, maybe the job of the movie is to make them look good. At the climax, Ringo rides atop a saurian, and the animated Ringo doll gives a much better perf than the real Richard Starkey. The best shots are the ones where the top half of the real Ringo has been matted onto the bottom half of the doll straddling the dino’s back. The stop-motion ass and legs are infinitely more nuanced and expressive than the live-action torso, arms and head.

EQUINOX is a movie so bad, with monster effects so good, that somebody has helpfully posted all the monstery bits on YouTube. Somebody should do the same with CAVEMAN.

The device of mixing live-action and stop-motion, with little animated people interacting with the big beasts, and match-cuts between miniature and real actors, all seems to date back to Keaton, who has brief but beautiful dino action in THREE AGES. His inspiration was Winsor McCay, who had interacted with a hand-drawn brontosaurus in GERTIE THE DINOSAUR way back in 1914. That seemed an impossibly long time ago even in 1923: Keaton’s collaborators told him he not only knew his film history, but his prehistory.

McCay, a brilliant cartoonist for the Hearst press, used to exhibit this film in the music halls, speaking to Gertie, anticipating the action in the cartoon so she would seem to obey his instructions. At the climax he would step behind the screen as Gertie lifts an animated McCay onto her back… all of which utterly trumps the seventies and eighties fantasy-farce of Campanile and Gottlieb, as far as I’m concerned.

Wait! Maybe I’m being unfair? Maybe these filmmakers, Campanile and Gottlieb both, are trying to make films the way actual neanderthals would? Such films would be concerned only with eating, fucking and shitting, and would avoid any kind of intelligence or originality in favour of wallowing in universally understood cultural effluent. Abandoning all efforts at aestheticism, they would crudely fashion their cro-magnon movies out of animal hides, bark, and bits of flint, projecting them by firelight on the cavern wall using a projector made of tusks and dung.

No, I can’t see it. Cave art is way more beautiful than these movies.

(Note: Gottlieb is co-writer of THE JERK, which is a funny film, in which he also plays the small part of Iron-Balls McGinty. De Luca worked on some lesser Mel Brooks flicks, including HIGH ANXIETY, which is a funny film. But any writing team needs to avoid self-satisfaction, with each writer spurring the other on to greater heights. My impression: that didn’t happen with  CAVEMAN.)

Ten Bad Dates With Roddy McDowall

“It was all going so well! And then I had to say that thing about the bridge. Stupid! Stupid!”

From CURSE OF THE GOLEM, A.K.A. IT!

You really don’t need to see this film, unless like us at Shadowplay you grew up with a copy of Dennis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies in the house, or regularly borrowed from the library. Other monster movie books might also do the trick, or Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (I only ever discovered one outlet that carried this publication as a kid. While on holiday. I could only afford two issues, which was a wrenching choice to make as they all looked so tasty. There was no possibility of buying more… There was a big article about BARBARELLA, which my mum wouldn’t let me watch when it came on TV, and an ad in the back for something called EQUINOX.)

If, like me, you were exposed to the right kind of literature in childhood, you probably saw a still of the big stone guy in this movie. You probably marvelled at his massive stone body, mighty stone limbs, big stone skirt and pointy stone head. He doesn’t look like any other monster. And what you demand most of all from your monsters is NOVELTY, so that has to be good. Having seen quite a bit of Dr. Who, you might have suspected that the Golem would be less impressive in motion that he is in a still image. And you’d have been right. But children of the pre-C.G.I. age, we expected our monsters to lumber, didn’t we? If they jerked across the screen in a Harryhausen strobe of animation, so much the better. But we certainly never wanted them to slink around, weightless, in a series of algorithms.

Anyhow, CURSE OF THE GOLEM is written and directed by Herbert J. Leder, auteur of such cinematic goitres as THE FROZEN DEAD and THE CHILD MOLESTOR.  Good luck with that career, Herbert.

One hates to judge a film-maker’s personality by their work (gloomy Bergman was known to his friends for a great deal of jollity, sentimental Frank Capra once punched his wife unconscious), but going by this film I would probably characterise Mr. Leder as a BIG IDIOT. Roddy McDowall, as Arthur Gordon Pym (!) finds he can command an ancient Jewish statue to do his bidding. Since he lives with his mother’s decayed corpse (though this has no real bearing on the story, and no explanation), he’s probably not the best person to be granted this awesome power. He uses it to kill his boss, and in a failed attempt to impress Otto Preminger babe Jill Haworth. It seems golems are good at bludgeoning irksome employers, but utterly useless as an aid to modern dating.

Paul Wegener doing his cute, Susannah Hoffs-style look-to-the-side.

The golem seem to me an underused monster. Paul Wegener portrayed the animate clay statue thrice, in DER GOLEM of 1915, sequel THE GOLEM AND THE DANCING GIRL two years later, and prequel/secret origin THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD, which is the version that survives.

Although he was certainly some kind of influence on Hollywood’s FRANKENSTEIN, the golem never surfaced in a bona fide Hollywood remake, instead emigrating to France, where he raises his ugly head in Julien Duvivier’s characteristically stylish LE GOLEM of 1936, which incorporates imagery from FRANKENSTEIN while essentially reprising the original Golem legend dramatised by Wegener. Many of the pre-Nouvelle Vague filmmakers deserve to be rediscovered, and I carry a special torch for Duvivier, whose PANIQUE and LA FIN DU JOUR strike me as truly major works, on the verge of being completely forgotten.

1951 gives us an authentic Czech golem at last, in THE EMPEROR’S BAKER AND THE GOLEM, a comic fantasy directed by Martin Fric, which guest-stars a wonderfully monumental golem who can’t actually articulate his limbs, and therefore walks like a chair.

Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been a really truly golem-centred movie, although ceramic heavies have occasionally disported themselves upon the screen in a supporting capacity. I’d welcome a good remake, or else an adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s fantastic novel The Golem, in which the colossus does not actually appear, but assumes a kind of allegorical omnipresence in the story. My colleague, B. Kite, the Brooklyn Behemoth, himself a stony homunculus enlivened by rabbinical sorcery, once co-authored an atmospheric and highly imaginative screenplay based on this work.

Anyhoo. Some Youtubing genius has helpfully provided this abridged version that allows you to consume the whole thing at a single, ten-minute sitting. Had I realised this I could have saved myself eighty minutes or so.

Here, by way of a palette-cleanser, is the great Jiri Barta’s animated THE GOLEM, a pilot/trailer for a feature Barta hopes to complete. The collapse of communism in Europe (a good thing in itself, don’t get me wrong) has left many brilliant artists like Barta and the incomparable Yuri Norstein stranded in a marketplace they have no experience dealing with. Somebody help!

The more numerate Shadowplayers among you may have noticed that this post contains only one bad date with Roddy MacDowall. I maintain that one bad date with Roddy is worth ten with anyone else, but I’m happy for you to nominate nine more if you feel up to it.

STOP PRESS! What the heck is THIS?

And THIS?