Avenue Kurtodrome

Django may be incredibly popular in Italy, the UK, the US and Germany, but the rest of the world is often unaware of this spaghetti western hero. Quite a shame, so let’s talk about the film.

The main character’s name, Django, refers to Django Reinhardt, the famous jazz musician. Django wasn’t just known for being an exceptional musician, he also had a copule of fingers missing. Why director Sergio Corbucci chose this name for the main character of his movie will become painfully clear when you see the movie.
A sick joke, yes. But far from the only sick joke Corbucci has put in the movie.

Django was supposed to be shot on a spaghetti western set. Sadly, heavy rainfall had made the grounds considerably muddy, probably too muddy for a western to be shot there. Corbucci did not despair, he even liked what he saw and decided to make the set even soggier. This is just one of the details that draw you into the movie when you’re watching the opening scene.
While not many spaghetti westerns will start with the film’s hero dragging himself through the mud, Django has another extra: the hero is dragging something along with him, a coffin.
As human beings tend to be curious, you want to find out why someone’s carrying around a coffin and who or what is inside this coffin. The film’s main character is definitely not the guy that’ll tell us: Django is a mysterious character. It would be wrong to describe him as a hero, he’s more of an anti-hero, just like it’s hard to find a good character inside this film.

Franco Nero is excellent as Django, in fact so noteworthy lots of producers tried sticking the name Django to all their spaghetti westerns with Nero. Actually, Nero didn’t even have to be in the film… it was enough that the movie was a spaghetti western. With more than 20 movies using the name Django, it should be noted that there is only one official sequel, Django 2: Il Grande Ritorno, made 20 years later with Nero once again as Django. Sadly, the movie is not that good.
Much more noteworthy is Django Kill, a spaghetti western that was released just a couple of months after Django and which had its title changed from If You Live Shoot, much to the annoyance of director Questi. While being completely unrelated to Django (the main character is played by Tomas Milian), it is the one movie that comes closest to the unhealthy atmosphere of Django and is even way sicker (the scene where bandits pull golden bullets out of a wounded guy’s chest springs to mind).
Django itself has its fair share of whipping scenes and torture scenes, including a rather notorious one where one guy has his ear cut off and then has it put in his mouth.

You’ll notice the bad guys wear red masks. Great (it stands out so much you remember those scenes forever), but it wasn’t planned. A major production that was being shot at the same time as Django had hired the best-looking extras, so Corbucci could only get his hands on ugly extras and had them wear capes.
This is probably what makes Django such an interesting picture: if the extras are ugly, have them wear capes; if the grounds are muddy, make them muddier and insert a scene where the prostitutes are sitting by a stove in an attempt to get warmer, that’ll convince the viewer it’s late autumn or even winter.
Add to this the wonderful looks of Franco Nero, who looks good but isn’t as clean cut as many heroes in spaghetti westerns. You could actually believe Nero spent a couple of weeks in cold and dirty areas. In fact, once again movie magic helped establish that: the make-up crew gave Nero a few extra wrinkles, to make him look tougher.
All in all, that’s what makes this film so exceptional: its combination of luck/coincidence and a relentless creativity that manages to work all the misfortunes into the film as if it had always been planned like that.

One important name hasn’t been mentioned in this review: that of the assistant director, one Ruggero Deodato, who later became a director himself and got his name into movie history books as the director of Cannibal Holocaust.

Being quite brutal, the English censors did not take kindly to the film and had Django banned in the United Kingdom. The British audience only heard about the film’s reputation and were only introduced to Corbucci’s film when The Harder They Come was shown in British theatres, a reggae movie that included a few scenes from Django.
This is the sort of stuff that does wonders for your reputation.

There’s a good occasion to review Messiah of Evil (a.k.a. Dead People) now: it became a public domain movie a couple of years ago, but now it’s become downloadable (legally!) at the Internet Archive.

The film’s plot is wacky enough: a young woman (Marianne Hill) goes to California to find out what has happened to her father, an eccentric artist. Once she arrives at the beach house, she finds out her father wasn’t the only peculiar guy around. What a strange town it appears to be!

The movie is decent and the scene in the movie theatre should be labelled as downright classic. Five years before Romero’s Dawn of the Dead this movie had an idea where zombies go when they’re roaming around. The supermall is fine, how about a ticket to the movies?
The theatre sequence builds up slowly (it lasts well over six minutes) but effectively: we (unlike the girl) know she’s the only human in the theatre and know trouble is brewing when the audience is filling up (ever so slowly) by dead people. While the character is awaiting the main attraction (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - surely a joke if you know the town is taken over by zombies) she and you are treated to some trailers. That’s always a sign of a love for cinema… genuine cult cinema likes to include clips from other movies, just remember how Django was incorporated into The Harder They Come (1972).
(If you can’t wait to watch this scene from Messiah of Evil, don’t despair: you can find it at the bottom of this article.)

The writer and director of Messiah of Evil is Willard Huyck. Huyck directed only four movies, with Messiah of Evil as his debut and Howard The Duck as his (erm) swan song. His penultimate directing job was Best Defense, a comedy with Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy. All this makes you wonder: how can it go so bad for a director?

But, rather than wondering about that, let’s look at what Huyck was able to pen: that list includes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and American Graffiti. American Graffiti was released in the same year as Messiah of Evil, by the way: 1973 must’ve been Huyck’s creative peak. Let us also not forget the influence of Huyck’s wife, Gloria Katz. Huyck and Katz tended to write together. Messiah of Evil is the only movie where she also helped him direct (albeit uncredited).

As 70s cult movies come, Messiah of Evil was released under a shower of alternative titles. Apparently the official title is Dead People, but I must confess I never saw a print of the movie under that title. The quite generic The Second Coming is another title and of course there’s Revenge of the Screaming Dead, which makes you assume you’ll be treated to a gore movie. Messiah of Evil sounds more occult and is therefore the best title for this movie. It may not be the scariest movie you’ll ever see, but it packs loads of atmosphere and definitely deserves more recognition.

Occasionally the movie plays like a bad trip, especially in the scene where our heroine, in the artist’s peculiar house, sticks a needle into her leg and has a rather nasty hallucination:

Messiah of Evil is available (as Dead People) over at the Internet Archive. You can download it as MPEG1, MPEG2 or MPEG4 here. You can also download it from the equally legal Public Domain Torrents (link). It’s also available on DVD. It’s on a double bill with the Belgian horror The Devil’s Nightmare, courtesy of TGG Direct (link) or, courtesy of Alpha Video, on a disc together with Sisters of Death (link). Both fine movies, but let’s not forget today’s star attraction: Messiah of Evil.

And here it is, the doomed trip to the movies…

Welcome back for part two of our Kurtodrome Vault double bill of men being madly in love with women (oh, and not for the good of mankind). This time we move to Japan for a movie called:

PART 2. THE HUMAN VAPOR (Gasu Ningen Daiichigo)

“At first I could not understand the terror in Dr Sano’s eyes. Then I knew: I had been transformed into something terrifying. Something repellant….”
Maybe not necessarily repellant, but the sight of someone’s body vaporizing till he becomes invisible… well, I’ve seen prettier things.

First the good news
The second feature of this double bill isThe Human Vapor and was directed by Ishirô Honda, the man who also gave you Gojira (a.k.a. Godzilla) and countless sequels with the rubber-suited monster.
Honda worked for Toho Studios who, apart from Godzilla and Samurai films, made four movies about humans who could change the state of their bodies. The Human Vapor, released in 1960, was the last of these four films.
So no monster in Gasu Ningen Daiichigo (to call The Human Vapor by its original title) but a librarian who agrees to be a test subject for a scientific study. Little did librarian Mizuno know the other test subjects had died during the test. He discovers he can vaporize his body and kills the professor (by asphyxiation).
Mizuno might want to turn his back to humanity, but he’s also madly in love with a beautiful dancer who’s been saving for her comeback performance. He decides to help her by robbing the bank. Maybe not such a bad idea, but it’s a crime my friendly neighbourhood officer tells me.
The police pursue his trail (he might be invisible, but his car isn’t) to the place where Vapor-Man abandons his car. Smart move, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s only one house nearby. That’s where She lives and when She suddenly appears to have enough money for her comeback and can’t/won’t reveal any information on her maecenas, she’s arrested.
This makes Mizuno so angry he becomes even madder than he was before (it seems like the test affected both his visibility and his sanity) and he wants revenge for the imprisonment of his beloved dancer. More banks are robbed and more people get killed.
That’s as far as I’ll go because, who knows, you might want to check this movie out and as the saying goes, there’s no crying over spilt spoilers. The movie is very decent and a remarkable ending.

Okay, and now the bad news.
The bad news is The Human Vapor isn’t just the American title of the film, it’s also the American version and sadly a lot went lost in translation.
First and foremost, Gasu Ningen Daiichigo was a mystery wheras in The Human Vapor the anti-hero tells his story in a long flashback. This would’ve been only half so horrible if the narration had been more interesting and if it hadn’t replaced the dialogue in quite a lot of scenes (which leaves us with the “I told him and then he said” effect). The jerking effect of the re-edited version is also not really a plus side. Even the soundtrack was changed. And if you can’t remember why the soundtrack seems so familiar: you must have seen The Fly (1958).

Crappy editing, dialogue and Americanised dubbing (Japanese characters are less credible with sentences like “Ah, go peddle your papers!”) aside, nothing can keep us from knowing this is a terrific movie. Even if it falls from 10/10 to 8/10, an eight is still better than most things you’re subjected to. The Human Vapor still has enormous amounts of tragedy and pathos, an anti-hero who can’t control his limitless powers and an enchanting but painful love story. What it lacks as a crime story, it wins as a character study. It’s fascinating to see how Mizuno evolves from a friendly lab rat into a psychotic megalomaniac.

Mizuno and Fujichiyo
We also wonder about the role of the dancer Fujichiyo.
Does she know where the money came from? Does she also love Mizuno? Her personality is quite different from the other female character in the film, the reporter Kyoko. Traditional versus modern.
Mizuno’s acts are beyond redemption, but still you feel some sort of sympathy for the Human Vapor and most of that comes from his unconditional love for Fujichiyo.
True, the special effects are minimal, but who needs special effects in a sci-fi movie when you’ve got a story?

I leave you with the trailer for the film. And the good news: it’s the Japanese trailer.

Time now to enter the Kurtodrome Vault again. This time we’ve taken two films out, both movies on men madly in love with women. They’d do anything for her. Because they are… in love.

PART 1. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)

Introduction
The Phantom of the Opera is a classic and probably doesn’t need much introduction: even if you haven’t seen this version, you’ve probably seen another version, read the book by Gaston Leroux or just heard about it. The Phantom is so famous they even made an action doll of him, even though it’s good they were nice enough to tell us who the doll was supposed to represent. Note the stunning resemblance with Lon Chaney’s character.
Perfect twins, no?

Given that the story is so known, I won’t bother about the usual synopsis. (If you don’t know the story however, you can read it from scene 1 till The End here.)

Which leaves me with a few anecdotes on the film.
Now widely regarded as an all-time classic, the film was almost never released. The filming was painful, the assigned director Rupert Julian was an unbearable dictator who even bullied Lon Chaney, without a doubt the star of this production.

Yes, if even after a pack of remakes (not to forget the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical version) this version is seen as the best version, this is mostly because of Chaney’s fantastic performance. Chaney was an excellent actor, but still it’s this movie that he’s mostly remembered for. Like Lugosi will always be Dracula and Karloff always Frankenstein’s Monster (and, to a lesser extent, the Mummy), Chaney is most of all Erik, Phantom of the Opera.
Chaney liked the part (and the opportunity) so much he wanted to star in the film, even though he wasn’t too fond of Universal and producer Carl Laemmle.

The Laemle shuffle
Laemmle wasn’t happy with Julian’s work after seeing the preview and asked for additional shots (directed by comedy director Edward Sedgwick). The ending was altered - originally the mob found Erik lying dead on top of his organ -, Mary Philbin got more romantic scenes and intertitles were written for the new scenes.

In April 1925, three months after the first version was finished, this second version was previewed in San Francisco, where the audience’s reception was lukewarm at best and Laemmle demanded another version.
Most of the new scenes (except for the climax) were thrown out and in came scenes with comedian Chester Conklin and new intertitles. When shown to Laemmle, he luckily hated the comedy scenes. They were thrown out, but the rest of this new version was good enough and this is how the movie finally premiered on September 6, 1925. It became a tremendous success (which makes it all the weirder that Universal let the copyright lapse in 1953. The timeless classic became public domain and the studio lost a fortune in royalties.)

In 1929 Universal wanted to reissue the film, but decided talking sequences had to be added along with a new soundtrack and sound effects. Chaney was under contract at MGM by this time, so someone else dubbed him.
Thousands of feet of footage were cut out to get the new version, other scenes were compressed or combined with other scenes. Virginia Pearson, who played diva Carlotta in 1925, became Carlotta’s mother in 1929, thereby making her one of the fastest-aging women in the movie history.

Okay, so it’s a classic, but is it good?
Yes, it is (as I’ve mentioned before) even though Mary Philbin occasionally slips into overacting mode and Rupert Julian clearly isn’t a great director. One of the best scenes in the film wasn’t directed by him, but by Lon Chaney (while Julian was, alledgedly, venting his rage somewhere else). This scene, the Ball scene, was shot in colour. It’s not the only scene shot in colour, but the only one that made it to the final version.

Lon Chaney was also responsible for his own (fabulous) make-up. He never wanted to reveal how he did it, so we’ll just admire it.
The dramatic unmasking scene was so unusual for those days that distributors reported it had made people in the audience faint. (But that may just be promotional peptalk, one never knows.)

Judge for yourself. Here are six minutes of the film, all surrounding that mythical moment:

Please do not faint when Erik unmasks himself, that way we can meet again for the second part of our “Men Who’d Do Anything For The Woman They Love” double bill, where I’ll tell you more about The Human Vapor. Part two will go online in two days.

For now, why don’t you watch The Phantom of the Opera for yourself? Here are some links (all of them legal, of course):
1. Watch (or download) the 1925 version at the Archive: link
2. Watch (or download) the 1929 version at the Archive: link
3. Or if you prefer, you can also watch it on YouTube: link

Long long ago I reviewed a movie called The Scar or Hollow Triumph. In case you missed my review, here’s the link.

The movie (directed by Steve Sekely of Day of the Triffids fame) has now become public domain and is available for (legal!) download on the always excellent Internet Archive site. The link is here.
I’m a little gutted they only have this movie as a MPEG4 file (some films, like Panic in the Streets, are also available as DivX files), but at least you can choose between downloading the film or streaming it on the Archive’s site.

Anyway, it’s great to see such a nice movie available again.

It’s the seventh day of the seventh month and it’s time for me to publish my 77th post. Coincidence? Frankly, yes. Anyway, it’s time for another movie review, but tonight it’s not just any movie that’s up for a review…

The next movie up for a review is ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? , a sadly much too obscure Spanish cult film from the Seventies. I say ‘obscure’ because the movie hasn’t been seen or released that much, even though it has a good reputation.
The biggest culprit here may be the film’s subject: murdering children.
The movie starts with several minutes of news footage, showing us how badly children have been treated, contrary to common belief that noone wants to harm children. There aren’t many films that’ll start with footage of WWII’s concentration camps, wounded children in Vietnam and African infants starving to death. The accompanying soundtrack of children chanting seems awkward, almost perverse.
After seven minutes of hard-hitting history lessons the movie starts with kids enjoying themselves at a beach. Up to the moment waves carry a woman’s corpse to the shore. ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? has started: enjoy yourselves.

Cast and crew
Like so many other European films from the Seventies, ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? (released in 1975) has more titles than anyone can remember: so far I’ve come across ‘Who Could Harm A Child?’, ‘Who Can Kill A Child?’, ‘Could You Kill A Child?’, ‘Trapped’, ‘Island of the Damned’, ‘Island of the Dead’, ‘Scream’ (I kid you not), ‘Todliche Befehle aus dem All’, ‘Les Revoltés de l’An 2000′, ‘Killer’s Playground’ and ‘Death is Child’s Play’. One title better than the other, still ¿Quién? doesn’t manage to beat possibly the best movie title ever, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972).
The director is Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador, the son of two actors who made two movies for the big screen and two for tv. Ever since, Ibáñez-Serrador has made his living directing tv shows. The other movie he made was La Residencia (1969), a sleazy thriller best known as The House That Screamed.

Protagonists are Lewis Fiander (Tom) and Prunella Ransome (Evelyn), a happily married couple enjoying their holidays.
Ransome is best known for being in Alfred The Great and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd.
Lewis Fiander has the best cult credentials from being in Hammer’s underrated film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the Phibes sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

Back to our film.
Tom decides to visit a nearby island he remembers visiting when he was very young. This is the biggest mistake they could’ve made. They take the boat to a little village that seems to be deserted. The ice cream is runny and there’s noone in the pub. The couple can only spot a handful of kids. So what has happened? Where is everyone?
You don’t need too many clues to figure out that the children have started killing adults and there aren’t that many left. Some people are killed onscreen and this is quite upsetting: to the children, murdering someone almost seems like a game. And perhaps it is.

I can’t tell you more without revealing too much of the plot, but there are still a few things to be said. ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a horror movie, but don’t expect it to be gory or you’ll be disappointed. I’d describe it as psychological horror, which is why the few gory bits are all the more unsettling. The movie has been compared with Children of the Corn, based on a Stephen King novel and many think King must have seen the Spanish movie before writing his book. This could have happened, but one shouldn’t forget there have been more movies and books where children end up taking over the world from adults (some of John Wyndham’s books spring to mind, especially The Midwich Cuckoos - made into two movies as Village of the Damned). ¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is a far better film than Children of the Corn, so it’s a damn shame that up to 2006 the movie was only released on DVD by a Spanish label that couldn’t see the use of adding subtitled to please the rest of the world. If you’re lucky, you might have found a French dubbed version of ¿Quien? under the title of Les Revoltés de l’An 2000, but you’d probably hear of the movie while reading a specialized cult movie magazine. Maybe that was part of the charm of the movie: the fact it was so hard to obtain.
That may be partially gone now there’s a global DVD release, but for my money the movie is still intriguing as hell. By the way, I myself own it twice, but only as a lame VHS copy of a copy dubbed in French and as a Spanish DVD without subtitles. I’ve seen the movie twice now and it isn’t always easy to understand what it’s about, but here we have a movie so clear in image language that it doesn’t really matter you won’t understand most of the dialogues (and to be honest, many scenes don’t have dialogues as the couple find the only inhabitants of the village, the children, are far from talkative).
¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? does not need dialogue to be good. The film succeeds in being both entertaining (in the way psychological horror movies entertain) and asking an interesting question: what would happen if children stopped being innocent victims? So obscure, relevant and good: movies don’t need much more to end up being cult.

¿Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño? is currently available on Region 2 DVD in Spain (try dvdgo.com) and on a Region 1 disc in the US.

My videotape of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue is living proof of how Eurotrash this movie is: not only do I find myself watching a Spanish/Italian film with an international group of actors filmed in the United Kingdom, I’m also watching the Belgian version: dubbed in French with Dutch subtitles. Yes, in just that one sentence I managed to include half of the European union (well, before the EU as it was before another ten countries joined in May 2004).

Let’s try the other Eurotrash test: does the movie own a wide array of alternative titles?
Let’s see: originally released as Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti, the film is better known as The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, except in the US where Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was deemed a more appropriate title.
The working title was Fin de semana para los muertos and my Belgian tape goes by the name of Le Massacre des Morts-Vivants and the film is also known as Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, Don’t Open the Window, No profanar el sueño de los muertos and Sleeping Corpses Lie.
In Italy, the ongoing attempts to cash in on the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (released as Zombi in Italy) resulted in the alternative title Zombi 3 (Da dove vieni?), even though The Living Dead is four years older than Romero’s classic. To complicate matters even further, there actually is a real Zombi 3 (made in 1988) and in the US Zombi Holocaust was released as Zombie 3, so make sure you don’t pick up the wrong movie. (On a sidenote: the film Virus has both Zombi 4 ànd Zombi 5: Ultimate Nightmare as alternative titles, which in a way is quite a remarkable achievement.)

Cast and crew

Manchester Morgue is an interesting addition to the Vault, as it combines the subgenres of a zombie film with that of eco-horror. Even more surprising, the film is rather decent.
The director is one Jorge Grau who wrote and directed 30 movies, most of them completely forgotten. Only two films have made the step to video and DVD, the other film being Ceremonia sangrienta (Grau’s take on the Bathory story which also has an impressive set of alternative titles). None of his films have been released on DVD in Grau’s home country Spain.
All this makes it hard to say if Grau is a good director or not, but at least we’re left with at least one good film.

You’ve probably seen the leads in other Italian cult classics: Ray Lovelock has played in over 60 films, the best known being Macchie Solari (a.k.a. Autopsy). Cristina Galbó played in many gialli and sleazy films (I haven’t seen Sex Life In A Women’s Prison, but I wanna bet it’s a bit of sleaze) of which La Residencia (by the director of that other Vault film Quién Puede Matar A Un Niño?) and What have you done to Solange? are the most acclaimed.

They’re joined by Arthur Kennedy, whose filmography of over 80 films is worth looking up, if only to come across a bunch of classics (incl. Elmer Gantry, Fantastic Voyage and Lawrence of Arabia).

The Film

One of the most startling scenes in this film is the first scene: we see the main character leave his shop and for some reason the camera moves towards a painting and suddenly green concentric circles start flashing before your eyes. And while we’re on the subject of flashing: after that first scene the movie treats us to a handful of urban views, one of which is a running woman who’s running naked through town. The relevance of this scene is still completely unknown to me.

Manchester Morgue is a slow starter, it takes quite some time before Grau gets to the main story of the film: experimental pesticides have a slight side effect of bringing the dead back to life. As mentioned before, this rather silly concept is worked out so well it makes Manchester Morgue worth checking out (and not for the reasons you’d usually check out films with improbable plots, like The Giant Claw). Less convincing is the subplot that tries to convince us the pesticides also make babies become aggressive creatures. This subplot is downright silly and it’s worked out so hastily it makes the movie lose some punch.
After all Manchester Morgue manages to deliver quite a few punches: some zombie scenes are quite effective and overall the movie has a gritty quality, especially in the last part of the movie. If the combination of a zombie film with an ecological message already seemed a bit weird, you should be warned that Arthur Kennedy’s role as a police inspector mainly functions to add a little detective flavour to the movie. At the same time the police angle helps and bothers this movie: it adds a bit of realism to the film, but it also bothers the plot from developing naturally.

The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue is an interesting film: it has its failures, but all in all it’s astounding a movie that is such a melange of a handful of odd subgenres, manages to work in the end. It’s definitely not a masterpiece, but an essential cult classic.

Wasn’t it Peter Greenaway who recently lamented that cinema has existed for more than a century and that basically we’re still watching moving paintures? If there was one director who tried to change cinema by making it more interactive (long before movies like My Little Eye were made) it’s William Castle.

William Castle had been making movies since 1943, not necessarily the kind of movie you’d still remember the next year, but nicely made movies.

In 1958, however, he decided to make movies more interesting by adding gimmicks. People who went to see Castle’s Macabre were asked to fill in a form that would give $1,000 to their loved ones in case they would go and see Macabre and would die of fright. Add to this, the movie’s tagline (”Keep saying to yourself: it’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie” - a tagline that Wes Craven would borrow a couple of decades later) and you’ll know why Macabre gave Castle’s career a boost.

Tonight we focus on two of Castle’s movies, both well equipped with an intriguing gimmick:The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill.
Because it’s a shame that Castle is contantly overlooked by movie buffs who want to write their history of the silver screen. If one really tried to innovate cinema by making it more interactive, we shouldn’t look down upon this director as a creator of gimmicks. Tonight we give Castle the spotlight he craved for and frankly really deserved…

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

Here’s a reason never to have kids: Castle’s kids recently gave Hollywood the chance to remake some of his movies. But without the creative mind of Castle these remakes were even much worse than the remade fodder we’re normally subjected to. While Thirt13n Ghosts still had the merits of adding glass walls it didn’t come close to Castle’s original (13 Ghosts) and the way they wrote the title didn’t help much either. House on Haunted Hill (1999) didn’t even change the title, it just took out everything that was fun about the original Castle movie. And yes, House on Haunted Hill (1959) was lots of fun. Vincent Price stars as a millionaire who invites a group of people to spend a night in his house. If they survive the night they’ll get $10,000. And that’s when we get a display of blood dripping from the ceiling, moving skeletons… all the things you’d expect from a spook show.

Is it a scary horror film? No. As Sean Axmaker put it, “William Castle’s gimmick-laden comic thriller is not so much a horror movie as a fairground funhouse come to life.” Even Emergo, the gimmick invented for this movie, is an example of the funhouse fun Castle tried to put into this movie: at the time when the skeleton moved towards the screen, Castle made sure an actual skeleton (that was hidden behind a curtain next to the screen) would come flying towards the audience. House on Haunted Hill was an improvement onMacabre, both as a movie (the script and performances are better) and as far as the gimmick was concerned.
However, this wasn’t the last time Castle would try and invent gimmicks to give his movies just that little bit extra.

THE TINGLER
This is probably the best-known of Castle’s movies. Could that be because of Vincent Price playing the lead (again)? Could it be because this is a black and white movie with one colour scene (the bloody delirium)? Or because William Castle outdid himself with the gimmick? Probably it’s all of these factors combined.

A tingler is a little creature that grows inside you when you’re afraid and you don’t scream. If you scream the tingler stops growing. But if you don’t shout the tingler keeps growing until you… die! That’s why you better scream for your life when you’re afraid. The thing is, how do you know that there’s a tingler inside you? Well, when you’re afraid you’ll feel it grow, as if there’s an electrical impulse going through your body. And yes, people, you’ve just guessed Castle’s gimmick: he had made sure there were some wired seats in the audience. Somewhere during the movie there’s a scene where the movie pretends to stop: the screen goes black and you only hear the voice of Vincent Price, informing you that the tingler has escaped and it’s loose. If you feel the tingler, shout… shout! Shout for your life! At which point you’d feel a buzz and probably started shouting.

The Tingler has a decent script and good performances, which is why this is so much more than a gimmick movie.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a scene where blood is running from a tap and because it was too expensive to shoot the movie in colour and because this scene wouldn’t be so effective in B&W this scene is shot in colour. It actually works and gives the scene a touch of delirium, much like in these days flashbacks are occasionally shot in black and white to appear like ‘older’ footage.

If you look at the full package (script + performances + gimmick) it’s hard to find a better Castle movie than The Tingler. Then again, if you see that a full package needed to make a good movieThe Tingler may just be the best movie in the world.

OTHER GIMMICKS
Castle also invented gimmicks for some of his other movies. For the movie 13 Ghosts you needed 3D glasses to see the ghosts, while Mr. Sardonicus was an early experiment of interactive viewing: the audience got to decide the fate of the bad guy at the end. They could hold up a green or a red card to vote whether the evil character would live or die. Apparently the audience always voted for the bad ending, sparking a discussion as to whether Castle had actually made a second ending. Allegedly it was made, but it seems nearly impossible to track down.

We save the best for last: Homicidal’s gimmick was the Coward’s Corner. If you were too scared to watch the end of the movie you would get your money back at the Coward’s Corner. The drawback: the Coward’s Corner was just outside of the screening room and you’d have to wait until the end of the movie before you’d get your money returned. Leave it to Castle to add the touch of a spotlight shining in your face, just so everybody that watched the movie until the end would leave the studio and see you clearly as the coward you really are. Castle didn’t really like the idea of people leaving during the movie, so just before we get to the climax of the movie we would hear a heartbeat warning us the climactic ending was near. A clock would appear on the screen (as pictured here) and a voiceover would inform us that if you were too scared to watch the end of the movie this would be the moment to leave the studio. Castle called this the “Fright Break”.

Castle’s creativity in movies is only matched in the autobiography he wrote, Step Right Up. You’d be daft to believe every single word, but it’s an incredibly entertaining read. It’s a shame the book isn’t published anymore, but you might be lucky and find it somewhere. It’s definitely something to look out for.

P.S. Images content of own collection, Amazon and House of Horrors.

Welcome to part two of this Sherlock Holmes double bill. Part one was a classic adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, part two not. Tonight: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.

Before joining director Neill on the set of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man as the Mayor, Lionel Atwill played the archrival of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Moriarty, in this 1942 film. Atwill is a actor who can be admired in classic films as The Vampire Bat (1933), Mysteries of the Wax Museum (1933), Mark of the Vampire (1935) and To Be Or Not To Be (1942) to name but four. Atwill was an actor on stage as well as on the white screen, just like Basil Rathbone. Rathbone combined stage and screen work till he felt that his identification with the character of Sherlock Holmes was killing his film career: he went back to New York and the stage in 1946. Apart from a few narrations he only returned four times to a movie set in the next fifteen years. In 1962 Rathbone joined other legends Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in Roger Corman’s classic Poe adaptation, Tales of Terror. A handful of films followed until his death in 1967, an uneasy mixture of classics (Tourneur’s Comedy of Terrors in 1964) and bubblegum pulp (The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini in 1966).

The Secret Weapon isn’t set in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s times: the story is transferred to the 1940s and Holmes finds himself battling both Moriarty and the Nazis. This is rather weird at first, both because you don’t expect Sherlock Holmes in the 20th century and because you don’t want to confuse your detective entertainment with war propaganda. The propaganda scenes (especially the one at the end of the movie) sometimes harm the movie, but not as much as they harmed an earlier attempt to transfer Holmes to the 1940s (Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror). All in all it’s living proof that the Sherlock Holmes stories can be timeless.

So many actors have played Sherlock Holmes, but to most people Basil Rathbone is the ultimate Holmes. Between 1939 and 1946 Rathbone portrayed Holmes in no less than 15 movies. Even more interesting, during the Rathbone era World War II took place, something that got reflected in the Holmes movies. Whereas some movies were set in the time described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle some movies saw Holmes and Watson transponed to the 1940s, ready to oppose the German troops.

Terror By Night is a more classic rendering of one of Conan Doyle’s stories and has a big plus for a movie adaptation: the story takes place on a train. Holmes has been asked to protect a famous jewel, the Star of Rhodesia, while the owner, Lady Margaret Carstairs, takes the train from London to Edinburgh. Of course Holmes cannot prevent the theft, nor is the thief (and murderer) able to get off the train. This is why train stories are among the best settings for a whodunnit: all the suspects are in their own compartments, noone can get off the train and, unlike a whodunnit in a closed room, the detective has more freedom to interrogate the suspects one by one. Of course, the whodunnits on train trips bring their own set of clichés: you can bet that someone will try and kill the detective by pushing him or her out of the train. Sadly Terror By Night isn’t without those clichés and, what’s worse, gives Nigel Bruce (as Holmes’s sidekick Watson) too many chances to spoil the movie by cracking unfunny jokes.

Terror By Night only lasts 60 minutes, so the pace is fast enough to keep the viewer interested and the movie entertaining. The movie is in the skilled directing hands of Roy William Neill, who shot this film shortly before he died of a heart attack. Neill directed more than 100 films between 1917 and 1946, of which ten Sherlock Holmes films and movies with intriguing titles as Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) and The Good Bad Girl. Apart from helming two Holmes films (this one and Dressed To Kill) he also directed the much praised film noir Black Angel (starring Peter Lorre) in the last year he lived. At least Roy William Neill left the planet in glory, a worthy end of a man who was born on a ship off the coasts of Ireland.

Tomorrow part two of this Holmes double bill.