Halloween House of the Mummy

The Mummy and Films From Beyond wish you a Happy Halloween with plenty of treats (like your favorite movies) and no tricks or ancient curses!

Boris Karloff's The Mummy (1932) with special action figure guest Christopher Lee as Hammer's Mummy.

"It comes to life!"

A bonus gallery of Halloween sights from around my city:

Ghost children.

This neighbor knows how to do Halloween right.

My own humble display - that's a Svengoolie inflatable in the background.

Svengoolie and Big Foot guard the entrance to the house. (Who says that Halloween displays need to be thematically consistent?)

The start of the Halloween Mischief Parade in Downtown Summerlin.

The parade celebrates the Day of the Dead.

Father Autumn at the Bellagio Conservatory.

Wise owls at the Bellagio Conservatory.

Frozen with fear: The Man with Nine Lives

Now Playing: The Man with Nine Lives (1940)

Pros: In spite of the low budget and minimal sets, the film maintains great pace and suspense as it winds its way through plot twists and turns; Well acted all-around.
Cons: Scientific purists will guffaw at the script's crackpot take on cryogenics.

This post is part of the "Secret Places and Trippy Houses blogathon" hosted by Rebecca Deniston, whose not-so-secret online lair is the blog known as Taking Up Room. As Rebecca put it in her blogathon announcement,

“One of the most fascinating plot devices in storytelling, whether on the screen or in books, has to be the secret place, whether it’s a literal secret room or a weird house with secret passages, or maybe an underground city, or something that has gone unnoticed. It means that everyone who doesn’t know about these hidden places has to reset their thinking and look at the world differently, which is an interesting mental exercise.”

Not only does The Man with Nine Lives feature a secret passageway and chamber that holds the key to a tragic mystery, it features Boris Karloff as a medical researcher whose ability to look at the world differently is both his biggest strength and weakness.

But first, a bit of background (stop your groaning, this will only hurt a little bit!). We all know that dear Boris was vaulted to worldwide fame when, at the tender age of 43, he first portrayed the classic product of mad science, the Frankenstein monster.

In addition to two more stints as Frankenstein’s creation (Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein), the 1930s saw him portraying monsters, both supernatural (The Mummy, The Ghoul, The Walking Dead), and human (The Black Cat, The Old Dark House, The Raven) to great acclaim.

But as Boris aged, producers flipped the script on him, keeping him in the same old familiar horror films, but increasingly making him the creator of mad science instead of its product. And Boris stepped into the roles as if he’d been dabbling with things better left alone all his life.

Many of the roles took advantage of the real life man -- gentlemanly and gracious -- and mixed in a lot of sympathy for the character along with menace:

• In The Man Who Lived Again (1936), Karloff portrays an idealistic scientist dabbling in soul transference who is driven mad when everything he has worked for is upended by an unscrupulous patron.
• In Before I Hang (1940), he’s a kindly physician sentenced to death row for a mercy killing who gets permission to experiment in prison on a new blood serum, with horrific results.
• In Black Friday (1940), he’s a brain surgeon who saves the life of his professor friend by transplanting a portion of a gangster’s brain into the professor, with… horrific results.
• In The Devil Commands (1941), he’s a grieving scientist who invents a means to communicate with his dead wife, with, you guessed it, horrific results.

Boris had this mad doctor thing down cold.

Later, in 1945’s House of Frankenstein, the story that launched Karloff to fame and fortune came full circle when he played Dr. Gustav Niemann, who revives the Frankenstein monster (along with Count Dracula) for his own evil purposes. Still later, In Frankenstein 1970 (1958), he portrayed a descendant of the original Frankenstein who tries to create a new monster even as he hosts a Hollywood film crew at his castle.

1940’s The Man with Nine Lives gave Karloff, who had already experimented with invisible rays and partial brain transplants, a chance to tinker with yet another esoteric mad scientific discipline. In this outing, he plays Dr. Leon Kravaal, an early pioneer in the use of cryogenics (dubbed “frozen therapy” in the film) for treating aggressive diseases.

As the film opens, we’re introduced to medical researcher Tim Mason (Roger Pryor), who has gotten in trouble with his boss at the research hospital for overselling his new frozen therapy as a cure for cancer (the theory being that slowing down the body’s metabolism and functions through suspended animation will kill the bad cells, or something like that.)

Mason talks over his predicament with his trusty (and lovely) assistant Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers), speculating that if he could just talk to or get a hold of the notes of Dr. Kravaal, the preeminent pioneer in frozen therapy, he might be able to perfect his own techniques and prove the therapy’s virtues to the doubters.

Mason and Judith discuss marketing strategies for their new Frozen Therapy.™

The only problem is that Kravaal disappeared, along with a group of local men, 10 years ago in a remote town where he had taken up residence in order to conduct his research in peace.

But of course, medical research, especially mad medical research, waits on no man, disappeared or otherwise. Mason and Judith decide to travel to the remote town in the hopes of finding Kravaal’s laboratory and notes that might provide a breakthrough for Mason’s work.

In their quest, the intrepid duo stumble upon not one, but a veritable plethora of secret places. Let’s count them:

1. The island. For maximum remoteness and to get away from the prying eyes of pesky skeptics, Kravaal had located his lab on an otherwise uninhabited island. A requisite superstitious local, the boat rental guy, tries to warn Mason and Judith off of going to the island, ominously telling them of the men who had headed over there and never returned.
2. Kravaal’s ramshackle house on the island, which looks haunted enough to deter anyone except the most curious and ambitious of medical researchers and their eager assistants.
3. The secret laboratory, which the brave pair only discover when Judith falls through rotten floor boards, enabling them to discover the stairs to a secret sub-basement.
4. An ice-encrusted vault off of the lab, containing the frozen, but still living, bodies of Kravaal and the missing local men.

How's that for a laundry list of secret places in one little, unassuming B movie?

Fortunately Amazon delivers to secret remote islands, so Kravaal can keep his lab well-stocked.

In addition to all those secret places, The Man with Nine Lives packs an awful lot of mad scientific jargon, flashbacks, soulful monologues, fraught stand-offs, and who-will-survive suspense into its economical 74 minute runtime.

Even though most of the movie takes place in the claustrophobic confines of the secret lab and frozen vault, the pacing as one secret after another is revealed makes for a very satisfying, edge-of-your-seat watch.

Words can’t adequately convey all the twists and turns the plot takes in this tale of crackpot science, mysterious disappearances, and amazing resurrections (nor do I want to spoil the fun by revealing too much). Suffice it to say that Mason and Judith have stumbled on a frozen tableau of tragedy, involving a dedicated scientist trying to cure a dying man, and the man’s nephew and local officials convinced that the scientist has already killed his patient.

As a result of the confrontation, Kravaal and his persecutors are all frozen together in the secret vault with no one the wiser — effectively having disappeared for 10 years until their accidental discovery.

"Next time I'm getting a frost-free refrigerator!"

Luckily, they’re revived by trained medical professionals — Mason and Judith — who know what they’re doing. But the relief is short-lived as the passionate and single-minded Kravaal is convinced that he’s closer than ever to perfecting his work — and he’s got a whole lab full of human guinea pigs whom the outside world already considers dead. Bwwwwaahahaha!

Okay, that wasn’t fair — nowhere in the film does Karloff/Kravaal do a mad scientist’s maniacal laugh. Actually, The Man with Nine Lives fits very neatly into Karloff’s other roles from this period — that of a gentle, yet dedicated doctor/researcher/scientist whose work is misunderstood by plodding authorities and colleagues, with those misunderstandings (and Karloff’s dogged persistence in spite of it all) resulting in horrific consequences.

Of course, by this time dear Boris could do this sort of thing in his sleep, but it’s still fun watching him masterfully turning from a gentle (if highly dedicated) soul to a monomaniacal agent of destruction who is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything in his pursuit of mad science. (At one point he offhandedly tells Mason and Judith that “This work is worth a thousand lives like his [the nephew’s]).

"This won't hurt a bit!"

Karloff’s/Kravaal’s murderous intensity as he realizes he’s on the cusp of completing his life’s work is a thing to behold. Similarly intense are the performances of the supporting actors playing the arrogant and uncomprehending local authorities (plus the nephew) who intervened 10 years earlier with tragic results, and who wake up from their frozen slumber none the wiser, and far more vulnerable as they realize they’re in the clutches of a madman who views them as no more valuable than lab rats.

There’s a certain satisfaction in watching these self-righteous dullards — Stanley Brown as the nephew, John Dilson as DA Hawthorne, Hal Taliaferro as Sheriff Stanton, and Bryon Foulger as the Coroner — quake in their boots as they contemplate being sacrificed for science (and they’re so good at blubbering and quaking!).

"We're men dammit, not lab rats!"

Roger Pryor as Mason and Jo Ann Sayers as Judith also do a creditable job as the only two you want to root for — at times they seem to be channeling William Powell and Myrna Loy in their own Thin Man-like mystery (in this case, a “Frozen Man” mystery).

Behind the camera, journeyman director and B specialist Nick Grinde manages to extract maximum angst and suspense out of this odd, claustrophobic little film. Around the same time, Grinde also directed two of Boris’ better mad doctor Bs, The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and Before I Hang (1940) — see my reviews of those two in the post “Hanging out with Boris.” (Somewhat oddly, Grinde would hang up his directing duties by the mid-forties, although he lived many decades after that.)

Screenwriter Karl Brown teamed with Grinde on the same trilogy of mad doctor films. The partnership was a salutary one, as they are among the most lively and unique of all of Karloff’s B pictures.

The three films would make a very entertaining Halloween marathon, and at only an hour and some change for each, that would still leave you time to bob for apples or go on a Halloween scavenger hunt. Just don’t get trapped in some mad doctor’s secret laboratory.

Karloff deals yet again with uncomprehending idiots.

Where to find it: DVD | Streaming

Are we there Yeti?: The Snow Creature

Now Playing: The Snow Creature (1954)

Pros: The hunt for the creature in the shadowy streets of Los Angeles is reasonably suspenseful and the photography sets up a chilling, moody atmosphere.
Cons: The leads are colorless and their characters aloof and indifferent to the point of caricature.

For several years I've been contributing to the Halloween Horrors series hosted by Dustin over at his Horror and Sons website. This year, Dustin teased contributors with themes that they could claim, and once claimed, he revealed the true, underlying theme that they would write about. I chose "Hidden Horrors," which, to my delight, turned out to be cryptid movies. I briefly considered doing something fairly new, but decided to revisit an old B movie from the '50s that I hadn't watched in a long time. This October Horror and Sons has lined up a plethora of outstanding writers covering a very wide range of Halloween movies and topics, so if you haven't visited yet, get on over there.

Ever since I devoured Frank Edwards’ “Stranger than Science” books as a kid, I've had a soft spot for all kinds of paranormal subjects: UFOs, ghosts, inexplicable disappearances, and of course, cryptids.

Over the years, Bigfoot in particular has become a frequent and welcome guest at my house. My wife and I want to believe. We've watched dozens of bigfoot movies, and read dozens more books and articles about The Big Guy. We both saw the 1972 microbudget docudrama about a bigfoot-type creature, The Legend of Boggy Creek, and were creeped out in a big way.

But here's the thing - Bigfoot was not the preeminent bipedal, humanoid cryptid when I was growing up. At least in my neck of the woods, that honor went to the Abominable Snowman (or Yeti as he’s known in more fashionable circles).

Long before Bigfoot started taking big strides across movies, TV and every kind of merchandising item you can think of, his cousin the Yeti was invading the nightmares of Monster Kids and making it fashionable to wear white fur after Labor Day.

My first recollection of seeing a cryptid depiction was watching Hammer's The Abominable Snowman on a local creature feature. The 1958 film, starring Peter Cushing as a kindly botanist and Forrest Tucker as a brash American entrepreneur, is distinguished by showing the Yetis as a gentle, intelligent species who only resort to violence in self defense, and some of the humans as monsters in disguise.

Then there was Rankin-Bass’ animated holiday special Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, which in 1964 introduced Bumble the abominable snow monster to giddy American kids, and has been raising Yeti awareness over the holidays ever since.

Bumble is happily celebrating Christmas in September
 at his home in the big box store.

Somewhere in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s Bigfoot emerged from his hidey-hole and made his run for media fame and fortune to the point that he’s now everywhere you want him to be. But before that, he managed to keep a low profile.

If you do an advanced keyword search in IMDb for “bigfoot” limited to the period 1950 - 1970, the handful of results return mostly movies and TV featuring Yetis, not the classic Bigfoot as we know and love him.

One of those misleading search hits is The Snow Creature, a low budget B picture about the capture of a Yeti, released by United Artists in 1954. Snow Creature is credited with being the first American film to depict the abominable snowman, but worldwide, a Finnish comedy, Pekka ja Pätkä lumimiehen jäljillä (1954), apparently has the bragging rights of being the very first.

While Snow Creature is no classic, at least it made a small step toward popularizing a subject that up to then had been confined to pulp magazines and the occasional news story. The film tells a simple tale: Man meets Yeti, man loses Yeti, man finds Yeti in the storm drains of Los Angeles, where it is moving around undetected.

The film opens with botanist and voiceover narrator Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) readying an expedition to study plant life (such as it is) in the Himalayas. In addition to rounding up the standard complement of locals and head Sherpa (Subra, played by Teru Shimada), Parrish has enlisted an English photographer, Peter Wells (Leslie Denison) to help document the findings.

Parrish is all business and kind of a killjoy, and Wells is… well, in addition to all the other supplies and equipment, he’s brought along a case of Scotch, because, why not? He sure as hell doesn’t have to lug it himself, and looking for plant life on frozen mountainsides is cold, thirsty work. On the other hand, Parrish admonishes him not to drink in front of the locals - bad for morale you know!

Parrish and Wells relax after a hard day of not looking for abominable snowmen.

Morale plummets anyway when, in mid-expedition, Subra learns that his wife has been abducted from their home down in the lowlands by a Yeti on a midnight stroll. Subra is adamant that they have to drop everything and track the Yeti to rescue his wife, but Parrish, who is skeptical to the core, will have none of it.

Desperate, Subra steals Parrish’s and Wells’ rifle ammo while they’re sleeping. Without the rifle as a dispute resolver, the two can only helplessly look on as the Sherpa turns the expedition into a hunting party.

Parrish, the ultimate scientific drudge, seems to lack any sense of wonder or compassion for Subra, and gripes about getting back to his plants even as it becomes clear that the Yeti does indeed exist. Morale takes another hit when the Yeti conducts a surprise nighttime raid on the camp and kills one of the men.

Undeterred, the men continue to track the creature, who resorts to causing an avalanche in an attempt to escape. After the hunting party takes shelter in a large cave, Subra is excited to find his wife’s necklace on the cave floor. Before you can say “abominable,” the men spot the Yeti with his family -- a missus Yeti and a toddler. In a rage, the Yeti tries to hurl rocks at his tormentors, but only succeeds in bringing boulders down on his family and himself.

But, Eureka!, Wells got a picture of the cryptid family before the cave fell in, and the male Yeti is only stunned. Subra wants to kill the thing that carried off his wife, but Parrish stops him. The hunting party haul their prize back to civilization, where the local authorities are surprisingly accommodating in an “aw shucks, since you found him, I guess he’s all yours” sort of way.

Wells wants to sell his picture and the Yeti to the highest bidders, but Parrish insists that the Yeti be delivered to his employers at the scientific foundation. He orders a special refrigeration unit to transport the creature back to the States in chilly comfort. But stateside, the bureaucrats are not nearly as accommodating. They want to know if the thing is human or animal before allowing it into the good ol’ US of A, and in a head-scratching development, they hire an anthropologist to make the call. In the meantime, the creature has to bide his time in an LA warehouse.

Will the Snow Man melt in the heat and grime of LA?
Inquiring minds want to know!

That meantime is just enough time for the disgruntled snowman to start banging on the sides of the unit, whereupon he tips it over, breaks out, and attacks a security guard before hightailing it into the night (if this refrigeration unit is rockin’, don’t come a knockin’!)

Reports of snowman sightings and attacks (not to mention deaths) start coming in, and Parrish teams up with chief investigating officer Lt. Dunbar (William Phipps) to once again track the wayward creature. The reports suggest that the creature is ranging far and wide through the city streets, yet it’s getting around undetected by the scores of police units on alert. It can’t fly and it’s not invisible, so how?

Then, from Dunbar’s office window, Phipps’ gaze rests upon a large opening to the sewer system. Hmmmm…. Will Phipps and Dunbar be able to track the thing through the dark and the muck of LA’s sewers and capture it before it kills again?

For the complete review, see my post over at Horror and Sons!

Haunted Titanic: Exploring the spooky side of the disaster with two TV episodes

The tragic sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 is almost singular in its hold on the popular imagination for 113 years now and counting. At the time, it was the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history, leading to significant safety reforms that are still in effect today.

But maritime reforms don’t explain why the RMS Titanic holds such a grip on our imaginations. All of the elements of classic, tragic drama lined up for that fateful voyage: the glory of the largest ship of its day embarking on its maiden voyage; the hubris of steaming at nearly full throttle even as the the ship received multiple warnings of icebergs; the dearth of lifeboats that consigned more than 1600 people to their deaths in icy waters; the eeriness of the ship’s band continuing to play even as the doomed ship was sliding into the ocean.

Death was an equal opportunity reaper: it took wealthy elites like John Jacob Astor IV as well as those who boarded third class (not to mention that 3 out of 4 crew members perished)

If there ever was a chance that the unsinkable ship that sank with so much loss of life would fade into memory, the amazing discovery of the ship’s final resting place in 1985 and subsequent videos of the wreck and its interior so many fathoms beneath the surface, assured its place in collective memory for many years to come.

Of course, such a devastating object lesson in human fallibility and misplaced faith in technological progress was bound to generate more than its share of myths and legends and spooky stories that seem to suggest that Jung was on to something with his theories of the collective unconscious.

An article at The Encyclopedia Titanica, “Ghostly Tales from the Titanic,” gives a chilling overview of the spookiness surrounding the tragic event. For one, there was the sighting of the Titanic captain’s ghost by his wife a thousand miles away from the scene of the disaster. Smith’s wife, “Sarah Eleanor Smith, was in her drawing room when the door opened. She watched her husband walk across the carpet towards the window….When he reached the window, he simply disappeared. It was too early for news of the Titanic to reach her, but she knew. From the moment she saw his ghost, she knew.”

Now Playing: “Night of April 14th,” episode of One Step Beyond (S1, E2; first aired January 27, 1959)

One Step Beyond, hosted and narrated by actor-director-producer John Newland, was an anthology of true tales of the supernatural that ran for 3 seasons, from 1959 - 1961. Like its more famous contemporary series The Twilight Zone, the half-hour program featured plenty of familiar faces from TV and movies of the day, including actors like Charles Bronson, Christopher Lee, Elizabeth Montgomery, Donald Pleasance and many more. The fact that the night’s drama was, as Newland pointed out in each introduction, “a matter of human record -- you may believe it, or not…” added a touch of uncanniness to the episodes.

Just the second episode to be aired in the series, "Night of April 14th" delves into not just one but several uncanny paranormal stories connected with the sinking of the great ship. The main storyline concerns a well-to-do young bride to be, Grace Montgomery (Barbara Lord), who, as her wedding date nears, is not sleeping too well. The scene opens on Grace as she starts out of bed, with a feeling that she is drowning in icy cold waters.

She relates her vivid nightmare to her dowager mother (Isobel Elsom), who assures her that it's only pre-wedding jitters, and that, since she will be honeymooning in Switzerland, there's very little chance of drowning.

The all-too-real nightmares continue, and her sense of impending doom is only given more fuel when her cheery bridegroom-to-be, Eric Farley (Patrick Macnee), announces that he's changed the honeymoon plans, and has booked them first class passage to New York on the newest and biggest ocean liner, the RMS Titanic.

The honeymooners try to steel their nerves as the unsinkable ship starts to go down.

Grace tries to suppress her misgivings as her mother confidently states that all the experts consider the ship to be "unsinkable." But the nightmares persist, and at one point Grace protests that she can't possibly go on the voyage, as she clearly saw "Titanic" stenciled on a lifeboat in one of her dreams.

But actually tying the knot seems to calm her down, and the next scene shows the honeymooners enjoying the cruise from comfortable deck chairs. However, two other male passengers strolling the deck add to the palpable dread, as one, out of earshot of Grace and Eric, tells his companion about  dreaming of "a terrible grinding sound" and shuddering all around the ship.

Soon enough, the terrible grinding and shaking throws the couple to the floor of their stateroom. At the lifeboat station, Eric insists that Grace get on the boat. Tears streaming down her face, Grace declares that she has loved their marriage, "all 6 days, 5 hours and 20 minutes of it!" Trying to keep his wife's spirits up, Eric responds that "if you ever have another bad dream, I'll listen to you ... every word!"

The episode cleverly punctuates the poignant story of the honeymooning couple with vignettes of other eerie forebodings that suggest that certain traumatic events can affect sensitive people through the fabric of space and time: As the Titanic is sinking, a Canadian minister, preparing for his sermon, suddenly is seized with the idea that his congregation should sing the hymn to those in peril on the sea; and in New York, a magazine illustrator, as if in a trance, draws an eerie and affecting picture of an ocean liner sinking.

The illustrator wonders how he's going to sell a bleak picture of a sinking ship.

There is even a bit of gallows humor as a portly passenger in a tuxedo bellows sarcastically to a fellow passenger about the great service -- "they ran out of ice, but now that we've hit an iceberg, the stuff is all over the decks!"

Barbara Lord as Grace and Patrick Macnee as Eric provide the coup-de-grace as the unlucky couple. Especially affecting and very believable is a scene in their stateroom as the post-collision commotion is sounding outside the door. With a luxurious fur coat wrapped around her, Grace is absent-mindedly putting on her jewels as if getting ready for a fancy ball, while Eric makes wry observations to steel his and his wife's courage.

Lord guest-starred on only a relative handful of TV shows between 1959 and 1961. While she made a brief comeback on US TV in the '80s, it's a shame that such a capable actress didn't get (or want) more work. Patrick Macnee would soon go on to appear on the hit UK TV thriller The Avengers in his signature role as the dapper John Steed.

Per the show's format, host John Newland gets the last word, and it's a doozy. In his epilogue, he relates yet another extraordinary coincidence (or was it?) concerning the Titanic. If it doesn't send at least a little chill down your spine, you need to check yourself for a pulse.

If you dare, click play to see his eerie epilogue:

Now Playing: “Lone Survivor,” episode of Night Gallery (S1, E5; first aired January 13, 1971)

In contrast to One Step Beyond, which purported to be true stories, Night Gallery's "Lone Survivor" episode is all fiction. Written by the man himself, Rod Serling, the episode begins with an ocean liner steaming through fog-shrouded seas (are there any other kind in stories like this?). On the bridge, one of the ship's officers spies a lonely lifeboat through the mist.

There is a single figure in the boat, which appears to be a woman. But there's another detail that the officer spots through his binoculars that has him and the Captain shaking their heads in disbelief -- the name on the bow of the lifeboat is "Titanic."

When a rescue party gets to the lifeboat, there is only the figure, which turns out to be a man dressed in women's clothing, and a single blanket. When the lifeboat is hauled aboard the liner, the rescuers notice that the hull is barnacled as if the boat had been floating in the ocean for years.

The rescued man (John Colicos) is taken to the infirmary, where he is interrogated by the Captain (Torin Thatcher) and the ship's doctor (Hedley Mattingly). He insists that the year is 1912, and that he, a stoker on the Titanic, is a survivor. When informed that the year is 1915, he still insists that he must have survived alone on the seas for all those years.

"Have you ever been so frightened you'd do anything to survive?" the rescued man pleads with his interrogators. The ship's officers of course are disbelieving, with the Captain wondering out loud if the lifeboat and its contents are a German trick to slow his ship down (it is 1915 after all, and there's a war going on).

The survivor is in agony at the thought of being caught wearing last year's women's fashions.

SPOILERS AHEAD ON THE STARBOARD BOW!

In a fit of anguish, the survivor reveals his dark secret: "I'm a Flying Dutchman, doctor, made of flesh and blood and bones. Damned and doomed. An eternity of lifeboats, rescues... and then forever being picked up by doomed ships."

The scene cuts to a closeup of the cap of a crewman who has just sighted a torpedo headed straight for the ship. The name on his cap is Luisitania. The episode ends with the survivor once more cast adrift on the seas, and yet another ship's crewman spying the lifeboat and calling out the alert. Can you guess the ship? Click on the image below for the answer.

John Colicos turns in a great performance as the survivor, his face an authentic mask of anguish as he spills out his shame and dread to the Captain and ship's doctor. Colicos will be very familiar to fans of '60s and '70s TV, where he seemed to be everywhere you turned your dial. Star Trek fans know him as the Klingon commander Kor from the classic original Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy."

Another familiar face is the Captain, Torin Thatcher, who started out playing villains in costume dramas before inevitably settling into TV show guest spots. He also appeared in Star Trek and One Step Beyond, among other popular series.

"Lone Survivor" is a haunting episode with a sort of double-twist ending (although you have to know your maritime disasters to fully appreciate it). Serling adds an eerie overlay to his Titanic survivor/Flying Dutchman myth by suggesting that the ships that keep rescuing the man are themselves phantom ships, and their crews are ghosts that are there to carry out the curse and then vanish.

This post is part of The Titanic in Pop Culture Blogathon hosted by the unsinkable Rebecca at Taking Up Room. Visit her blogathon page for more great posts on the impact of the Titanic disaster on movies, TV and beyond.

Motivational Posters for Monsters: Special Hammer Frankenstein Edition

Back in February of 2022, Films From Beyond introduced its first line of motivational posters for monsters, named “Shockcessories” after the Successories line of sappy inspirational wall art that used to be popular in offices and doctor’s waiting rooms back in the day (and which are still around, believe it or not).

To many, they were one step above the cute kitten posters that urged you to “Hang in there!,” but somehow, somewhere, someone got something out of them, or they wouldn’t have been so ubiquitous at their peak.

The first Shockcessories line highlighted the Universal monsters. This go round, the inspiration comes from Hammer Films’ Frankenstein series. Baron Frankenstein as portrayed by Peter Cushing (and Ralph Bates) was perhaps the ultimate arrogant, cold-blooded elitist who let nothing and noone stand in the way of his illicit experiments. But I believe that underneath that contemptuous exterior was an insecure little boy who never got the encouragement he needed growing up. These messages of hope and positivity are for all mad scientists with such issues.

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Robert Urquhart in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Simon Ward, Freddie Jones and Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)

Ralph Bates in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

David Prowse as the monster in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

What happens in Vegas, slays in Vegas: Horror under the neon lights

When people think of Las Vegas, “horror” usually isn’t the first thing that pops into mind. A lot of ‘G’ words like greed, gluttony, glitz, glamor and gangsters fit Sin City like a glove, but horror, not so much.

Vegas has had it share of real world horrors (and more than its share of the gun violence that plagues the U.S), but the bright, neon lights of a city that never sleeps would seem to be anathema to the supernatural denizens of the night that like to keep to the ink-black shadows.

Or so we thought until The Night Stalker, a super-powered vampire, preyed upon those other creatures of the night, inveterate gamblers, in 1972 Las Vegas. (The Night Stalker, written by Richard Matheson based on an unpublished novel by Vegas journalist Jeff Rice, was a smash hit, becoming the most watched TV movie of its time.)

Actually, The Night Stalker was not the first supernatural entity to plague Vegas on TV or movie screens. A couple of years before Barry Atwater’s vampire showed up in Sin City, a mummy and a were-jackal (!?) mixed it up under the neon lights. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man this was not, being a grade Z monster mash-up starring Anthony Eisley and John Carradine, who were Z movie stand-bys at this point in their careers.

In The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals (1969), Eisley plays Nevada-based archaeologist David Barrie, who retrieves two ancient Egyptian sarcophagi from a crashed plane in Lake Mead (?!), bringing them back to his ramshackle old house on the outskirts of Las Vegas to prepare them for an upcoming major archaeological conference in the big city (archaeologists like to let their hair down like everyone else).

One sarcophagus with a glass lid (uh-huh) contains the perfectly preserved body of the beautiful and alluring Princess Akana (Marliza Pons). The other contains the less than well-preserved remains of a plain old mummy (who was once a nobleman who wanted Akana for himself, and was buried alive to become her protector for all time -- hey mummy fans, sound familiar?).

Barrie is obsessed with Akana, fantasizing about reviving her and gaining worldwide fame by parading the Princess around at the conference. Little does he know that just by being in close proximity to Akana, the Curse of the Jackals takes effect, turning him into a ravening were-jackal by the light of the full moon.

It seems that the goddess Isis has plans for the revived Princess to bring the Old Time Religion, by force if necessary, to 20th century Sin City. In the meantime, the were-jackal and the mummy fight it out in the streets of Las Vegas to become the one, true love and protector of Akana.

Things I learned about Las Vegas from the film:

• Casino managers look askance at rampaging mummies attacking their lounge performers.
• Armed casino guards will not hesitate to fire shots in a crowded room in order to deter murderous mummies.
• By 1969, Vegas visitors were so jaded, mummies and were-jackals shambling down the Strip elicited only bemused smirks.

Things I learned about ancient Egypt and its mythology:

• You don’t have to be bitten by a were-jackal to become one -- mere proximity to a cursed princess is enough
• Were-jackals need lots of naps between murderous rampages.
• 4,000 years ago, Egyptians perfected air-tight plexiglass for sealing up and preserving their deceased nobility.
• Egyptian mummies were supplied with handy oven mitts in case they needed to handle hot food in the afterlife.

Where to find it: Streaming

Even in 1969, shambling mummies were a dime a dozen on the Vegas Strip.

And then there’s Leprechaun 3 (1995), the third entry in the schlocky B horror franchise featuring the titular folk creature (Warwick Davis) who is significantly more ill-tempered and avaricious (not to mention homicidal) than his Lucky Charms cousin. In an inspired opening, a man who is somewhat worse for the wear -- sporting one eye, one leg and a missing hand -- unloads a “life-sized” statue of a leprechaun wearing a red medallion at a downtown Vegas pawn shop, warning the shop owner not to remove the medallion under any circumstances.

Of course the first thing the pawnbroker does is take the bejeweled piece off to inspect it, which, like removing a stake from a vampire’s skeleton, reanimates the vicious little bugger. And before you can say “faith and begorrah,” the little terror makes life a living hell for the pawnbroker, a naive college student stopping over in Las Vegas on his way to school, a second-rate lounge magician, the magician’s beautiful assistant, a sleazy casino manager, and the manager’s avaricious and ambitious female assistant.

Things I learned about Las Vegas from the film:

• Las Vegas is about the only place in the world where stage magicians are still tolerated.
• Casinos rig their gaming devices in order to cheat naive, under-age college students out of their tuition savings.
• All casino managers are sleazebags with bad hairpieces who have nothing better to do all day than grope the help.

Things I learned about leprechauns:

• Ruby medallions are to leprechauns like garlic is to vampires.
• The bite of a leprechaun can turn you into a were-leprechaun.
• Think twice about using a magic coin from a leprechaun’s stash to wish for an extreme makeover.

Where to find it: Streaming

In Vegas, a leprechaun and his stash of gold are soon parted.

Finally, vampires rear their ugly heads under the neon lights in Vampire in Vegas (2009). 300-year-old vampire and fly-by-night Nevada industrialist Sylvian (Tony Todd) is growing tired of the vampire life and wants to branch out into politics by first capturing the governor’s mansion and then the White House. But, he needs to move around during the day, so he hires a glamorous biochemist (Delia Sheppard) to develop a daylight-tolerance serum.

The biochemist uses newly-turned vampires as guinea-pigs to test the serum in the desert outside of Las Vegas. The state police are called in to investigate reports of screaming young women exploding in the sun, but they spend most of the film running around in circles. Leave it to naive bridegroom-to-be Jason (Edward Spivak) to eventually uncover the nefarious plot when his clueless buddies haul him off to a Sylvian-owned private club for a bachelor party blow-out. When the industrialist vampire kidnaps Jason’s sweet, innocent fiance Rachel (Sonya Joy Sims) for more serum experimentation, Jason summons up untapped reserves of courage to save her from a fate worse than death.

Things I learned about Las Vegas from the film:

• Hiking in the desert outside of the city runs the risk of running into mobsters or mad scientists disposing of bodies.
• For bachelor parties, it’s best to avoid vampire-owned private clubs.
• For a hungry vampire, a city that never sleeps is like a buffet that never closes.

Things I learned about vampires:

• After hundreds of years, vampires get bored and like to mix things up by finding other forms of bloodsucking, like politics.
• In Vegas, bodybuilders and exotic dancers are the familiars of choice for wealthy vampires.
• Vampires can conveniently grow wings at a moment’s notice and teleport to wherever they want.

Where to find it: Streaming 1 | Streaming 2 

When the temperature dips below 80 degrees, Las Vegans (vampires included) bundle up before going out.

Dr. Kildare takes up a sword: The Count of Monte-Cristo

Now Playing: The Count of Monte-Cristo (1975)

Pros: Intriguing cast of familiar ‘70s faces headed up by Richard Chamberlain; Kate Nelligan makes the most of her feature film debut; Looks opulent for a TV movie
Cons: Tony Curtis seems to be phoning it in; A few clunker lines roll less than lyrically off the tongues of the actors

When I learned of the Adventure-a-thon hosted by Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Barry at Cinematic Catharsis, I knew I wanted to get in on the action (and adventure) of their new blogathon, but couldn’t make up my mind about a title.

Then came the news of Richard Chamberlain’s passing, and I knew immediately that I wanted to pay tribute to this versatile actor who in the course of his prolific career starred in quite a few rousing adventure movies.

I remember occasionally sitting down with the family to watch broadcasts of Dr. Kildare, which was Chamberlain’s first recurring TV role (and which, along with Ben Casey, set impossibly high standards for the healthcare industry, with glamorous doctors who would do anything and everything for their suffering patients).

Who knew that a little over a decade later, Chamberlain would turn in his stethoscope for a rapier sword in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973), and thereafter become one of the great action-adventure heroes?

With his breakout success as Aramis in the Lester film, Chamberlain swashbuckled his way through three more Alexandre Dumas adaptations in the '70s: The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge (1974), The Count of Monte-Cristo (1975) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1977). (Please note: I'm going with the spelling of 'Monte-Cristo' according to the 1975 movie poster and the IMDb page.)

But the man’s action-adventure career didn’t end there. Starting in the late ‘70s, Chamberlain appeared in several high profile mini-series, including Centennial (1978-79), James Clavell’s Shogun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983), garnering prime-time Emmy nominations for the last two.

Dr. Kildare is ready to operate!

More screen action followed in the ‘80s when he was tapped to play H. Rider Haggard's adventure hero Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986) -- a clear attempt to capitalize on the huge popularity of the Indiana Jones franchise.

The Alexandre Dumas adaptations were a big part of Chamberlain’s '70s workload. Sandwiched between his roles as Musketeer Aramis and the Man in the Iron Mask, Chamberlain’s turn as The Count of Monte-Cristo allowed him to travel thespically from the depths of despair to the heights of hubris and self-righteousness (not to mention, he absolutely rocks a 19th century Silver Fox look).

For those needing a refresher on The Count of Monte-Cristo (I confess I was hazy on the plot until watching this adaptation), it’s a classic story of betrayal and revenge. Chamberlain plays Edmond Dantes, first mate of a ship whose captain dies enroute back to Marseilles, but not before entrusting a secret note obtained from Elba (where Napoleon is exiled) to Dantes.

Dantes is to deliver the sealed message to a M. Noirtier, who, unknown to the sailor, is a supporter of Napoleon. Upon the ship’s arrival in Marseilles, life is looking up for Dantes, who expects to be given a ship of his own, and to marry the beautiful Mercedes (Kate Nelligan in her first movie role).

The Fickle Finger of Fate is about to tap both of these young lovers.

But Dantes’ life is soon upended by two secretive and jealous rivals: Mercedes’ cousin Fernand Mondego (Tony Curtis) covets Mercedes for himself, and a fellow merchant sailor, Danglars (Donald Pleasence), is jealous of Dantes’ rapid ascension to captaincy. The pair, in the company of another disgruntled sailor, write an anonymous note to Marseille’s crown prosecutor, De Villefort (Louis Jourdan), accusing Dantes of being a Bonapartist.

The day before Dantes is to be wed, De Villefort arrests him and demands the secret note, still unopened (and its contents unknown to Dantes). De Villefort realizes that the conspiratorial message is addressed to his own father, M. Nortier De Villefort, and in the current political climate he will be toast if word gets out that his father is a Bonapartist.

"Alexa, how do you spell 'Bonapartist'?"

De Villefort glibly assures Dantes that he is completely innocent and will only be detained overnight for administrative purposes. However, to Dantes’ dismay, he soons finds himself on a boat to the dreaded island prison of Chateau D’If, to be locked up and forgotten.

Years later, an emaciated, hairy and bedraggled Dantes, pacing his dank cell and almost beyond the point of no return with regard to his sanity, is startled when he hears a weird scraping noise, and is confounded to discover that another prisoner, Abbe Faria (Trevor Howard), has dug a tunnel straight into Dantes’ cell.

Faria, an irrepressible polymath, has spent years upon years tunneling to what he hoped was the prison’s seawall, but due to a miscalculation, has ended up at his fellow prisoner’s cell. Trevor Howard, a tough, grizzled character actor and mainstay of action adventure pictures and dramas after notable roles in Brief Encounter and The Third Man in the '40s, is nearly unrecognizable under all the hair and grime. But his appearance is a highlight of the film.

"Hey Abbe, have you got a match?"
"Yeah, your face and a donkey's behind!"

While Dantes was spending years pacing his cell, Faria was forging digging tools from bits of metal, devising an ingenious sundial on the wall of his cell, tracking the movements of the stars and planets, and contemplating questions in philosophy and theology. He hasn’t let the years of solitary confinement dull his senses -- quite the opposite. Faria is quick to note the irony of their situations: he was imprisoned because of his opposition to Napoleon, and Dantes because of his supposed support.

In addition to sanity-saving companionship, Faria imparts three invaluable gifts to Dantes: the application of cui bono? reasoning to figure out who was responsible for Dantes’ imprisonment, a map to unimaginable treasure located on the island of Monte Cristo, and, upon expiring from old age, an opportunity for Dantes to escape from Chateau D’If.

As the guards prepare to remove Faria in a body bag, Dantes takes advantage of a momentary distraction to drag his friend’s body into the tunnel and wrap himself up in the bag, which is hastily thrown into the ocean.

With the treasure map in hand, Dantes embarks on the next phase of his life -- one of fabulous wealth, which fuels a mission of revenge.

All that glitters is not gold -- precious stones and pearls do that too.

The Count of Monte-Cristo makes a grand entrance as he emerges from shadowy antechambers for his introduction to French high society. Unlimited wealth goes a long way in cleaning up a hairy, louse-ridden political prisoner, his all-white hair carefully coiffed, offsetting his trim dark beard and elegant black ensemble.

Over the years of his imprisonment, Dantes’ betrayers have risen high, representing diverse pillars of French society: Danglars is a wealthy banker, Mondego a pompous military man and presumptive war hero who has had a son with Mercedes (now grown into a young man), and De Villefort is as powerful as ever as the royal prosecutor.

Dantes masterfully exploits each man’s darkest secrets and character weaknesses in bringing them down. He lures Danglars into a risky investment in Spanish bonds, then bankrupts the greedy banker by feeding him bad insider information. Next is De Villefort, who gets his comeuppance when he prosecutes Andrea Benedetto (Carlo Puri), a confederate of the Count’s, for the death of Caderousse (another of the conspirators against Dantes, played by Alessio Orano). In court, Benedetto reveals nasty secrets about Villefort that lead to his ruination in full view of the shocked spectators.

If looks could kill, Dantes' enemies would be nothing but ash heaps.

Finally, Dantes buys a prominent newspaper, which he uses to expose Mondego’s sordid past -- the officer had betrayed and murdered an ally, Ali Pasha, stolen his fortune and sold his daughter into slavery. When Dantes shows up at the military inquiry into Mondego, the two antagonists quickly end up crossing swords, with the stiff-necked members of the military court shouting at them to desist, to no avail. (Up to this point the Count had been a behind-the-scenes manipulator. At least this climactic duel afforded Chamberlain the opportunity to show off more of the skilled swordsmanship he demonstrated in the Richard Lester films.)

Dante’s three main antagonists distinguish this version of Dumas’ tale. For a man who looked like a nondescript accountant, Donald Pleasence got very good at playing villains, often ones who hid their evil under a mask of ordinariness. Nearly a decade before Monte-Cristo, he gained huge exposure playing the very extraordinary Bond villain Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967). Not long after Monte-Cristo, Pleasence got a career boost as Dr. Loomis, psychiatrist and monster-hunter, in the original Halloween (1978), and would follow that up with four more appearances in the subsequent popular franchise.

His character Danglars combines an almost nauseating unctuousness with a quiet ruthlessness in pursuing profit (a good combination for success in our times as well as Dumas’). However, Danglar’s willingness to blindly follow the investment advice of his perceived superior, the Count, proves his fatal undoing.

Danglars likes the finer things in life, but it's all about to go bust.

The Count faces another Bond villain, Louis Jourdan, as the royal prosecutor De Villefort (although Jourdan’s turn as Roger Moore’s nemesis in Octopussy was a few years down the road). Jourdan was the epitome of suaveness and courtliness, always adding an element of class to whatever he was in. He was especially effective as a villain, distracting his marks with old-world charm and sophistication even as he was plotting his heinous acts. (As such, he turns in a great performance as the titular character in the almost forgotten TV movie Count Dracula from 1977.)

True to form, Jourdan’s De Villefort is all smiles and silken reassurances that Dantes will only have to spend a night in custody -- all a formality of course -- even as he is arranging to have the unwitting Dantes carted off to spend the rest of his life in a dank dungeon.

In the courtroom scene, De Villefort is full of arrogant self-assurance as he walks into the Count’s trap. As the tables quickly turn and his dark secrets are revealed, the man's breakdown in full public view is all the more spectacular for his former smug confidence.

"Why I oughta....!!!"

Tony Curtis as Mondego is, well, Tony Curtis. The only clue to the passage of time when Mondego meets up with Dantes as the Count is a dramatic streak of white in his hair. Curtis’ natural boyish charm (even in middle age) is on full display here, which highlights his character’s self-satisfaction -- after all, Mondego is a decorated war hero with a beautiful wife and handsome, strapping son. But the Count soon wipes the smirk off his face, as well as wiping up the floor with him in the climactic sword fight.

Feature film newcomer Kate Nelligan as Mercedes has a lesser role, but makes the most her great dramatic moment, when, realizing the real identity of the Count, she appeals to whatever humanity Dantes has left after her son, trying to uphold the dignity of the Mondego family, challenges him to a duel. Before the decade was out, Nelligan would secure the role of Lucy Westenra in the bodice-ripping, heart-throbbing Frank Langella version of Dracula (1979).

"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Oops, wrong movie!

Chamberlain is impressive as the Count, wearing his cool, impassive mask over Dante’s seething thirst for revenge. He even manages ripe lines like “I shall move like the Sword of the Lord with a terrible swiftness,” without venturing into unintentional comedy. He’s at his absolute best in the late scenes with his lost love Mercedes, as it dawns on him that for all his wealth he’s still broken, and revenge has not made him whole:

Dantes: "That was simple justice, madam, and believe me it brought me no joy. But now my task's accomplished. I've no particular place in the world, no strong desire in life... but to make amends where I've hurt the innocent."
Mercedes: "Avenging angels may not ask forgiveness of their victims."

Mercedes mourns the soul-death of her dear Edmond.

This version of Dumas’ tale, produced by the UK’s ITC Entertainment, was originally envisioned as a mini-series, but ultimately it was sold to NBC as a TV movie (although it did see theatrical release in parts of Europe). As in any adaptation, some characters and scenes from the novel don’t make it to the screen, and others are given short shrift. Some details are altered, e.g., the fates of Danglars and Mondego are switched. [Wikipedia] And, the sword fight between Dantes and Mondego at the climax is not in the novel -- but it was a good call to add it.

Like its namesake sandwich the Monte Cristo, the 1975 movie serves up generous portions of acting ham and cheesy dialog, but it’s so well made and sumptuous-looking, and the veteran cast so endearing, that, even with all the other adaptations floating around out there, it’s worth gobbling up, er, looking up.

Much like the sandwich, The Count of Monte-Cristo is a sumptuous feast for the eyes with a gooey, cheesy center.

Where to find it: Streaming 1 | Streaming 2