The Talking Dead

Now Playing: Dead Men Walk (1943)

Pros: George Zucco and George Zucco (playing dual roles); Some good theatrical moments
Cons: Too much talk and not enough walk; Beautiful Mary Carlisle and underrated Dwight Frye are wasted in typed roles; Younger male lead is as stiff as a day-old corpse

I haven't been feeling like my old self lately. I'm lethargic much of the time, I don't feel like eating much, and despite the fact that I live in one of the sunnier climes in the whole country, I have the pallor of a workaholic mortician. I also have trouble sleeping. As the cold rays of the moon stream through my window and the leaves rustle in the night breeze, I dream of large, black shapes hovering outside, tapping, then scratching at the screens, begging me to let them in. I wake up in a cold sweat, listening, scarcely daring to breathe. After what seems like hours, I slowly, carefully lay my head back down to try to catch a few more minutes of fitful sleep.

Just this morning I applied a bandaid to a couple of angry-red marks on my neck. (Okay, so I cut myself shaving-- have you seen how expensive razor blades are these days? I like to make sure mine are good and done before they go in the trash can!) No, my problem isn't vampires -- if only it were that simple! My problem is another type of bloodsucker, the Great Vampiric Marketer Americanus, a foul, relentless creature who will stop at nothing, pursuing its prey to the ends of the earth, to extract every last discretionary cent out its target's wallet and bank account.

Since embarking on my epic move to a new city, I've canceled some services and picked up others. Little did I know that there is an unwritten rule (no doubt soon to become a law) that once you sign up with DirecTV, you can't leave. I learned the rule the hard way after a solid week of two, sometimes three calls a day from agitated DirecTV customer reps demanding to know why I had dropped their service. My protests that I was not a DirecTV number, that I was a free man, capable of making his own decisions, fell on deaf ears. (For more on this fiasco, see my post on Fabulous, Fantastic TV Shows of the Fifties.) On the flip side, I picked up a different internet service in my new home city. Little did I know that there was an unwritten rule that you can't just sign up for internet-- you have to bundle it with a TV package (preferably with premium movie and sports channels) and digital phone service. Now I'm getting calls from the new service's reps wondering when I'm going to do my civic duty and bundle up.

Is that a DirecTV salesman's face at
my window, or just a vampire's?

That, coupled with the fact that now even when I go into a drugstore to buy a pack of gum, I'm hounded about signing up for their club card, or debit card, or I'm commanded to fill out a survey… well, I think you can see that I am a haunted, hunted man. The dark, terrible images of customer representatives, phone marketers, and evilly-grinning cashiers fill my dreams and turn them into nightmares. I'm sure that it's only a matter of time before show up at my door for real, ringing the bell endlessly or scratching at my window panes, demanding to know if I'm going to go for that sweet bundle or that kicking' club card. The horror, the HORROR!

By contrast, Dr. Lloyd Clayton's problems in Dead Men Walk -- dealing with an identical twin, devil-worshiping brother who has come back from the dead as a vampire -- seem positively mundane. Still, Dead Men Walk is worth a look, if only because it offers a double dose of the incomparable B-movie villain George Zucco.

After a somewhat surreal introduction to "the dark-enshrouded regions of evil" by a disembodied head floating above the flames in a fireplace (more on that later), Dead Men begins appropriately enough with a funeral. When the pastor concludes the service by inviting the mourners to pay their last respects to the deceased in the open coffin, only one, Dr. Lloyd Clayton (George Zucco) stands up. He gazes solemnly down at… his own face in the form of identical twin brother Elwyn! His reverie is interrupted by an older woman (Fern Emmett) who has quietly entered the chapel. "How can you defile this sacred house with the body of that evil man, that servant of the devil!" she cries. As she's whisked away, the pastor apologizes to Lloyd: "Poor old Kate hasn't been quite right since the shocking death of her little grand-daughter last year."

At the family mausoleum, Lloyd discusses the deceased twin brother with his niece Gayle (Mary Carlisle) and her beau, young Dr. David Bentley (Nedrick Young): "He always seemed an alien soul, even in childhood. I think he hated me all his life. After he returned from India, Elwyn was like a man obsessed (sic) by a demon, nothing was sacred to him…" (Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to muck around in arcane Eastern religions and practices!)

Dwight Frye plays yet another demented assistant.
Sadly, this would be one of his last films.

Later, Lloyd decides to purge his evil twin's legacy by burning his "blasphemous" books and papers in the fireplace. He's interrupted by Elwyn's creepy, hunchbacked (!) assistant Zolarr (Dwight Frye), who accuses the doctor of murdering his own brother. Lloyd doesn't deny it, stating, "I fought only to save my own life." Before storming out, Zolarr tells Clayton, "You'll pray for death long before you die!"

Cut to lovebirds Gayle and David, who've decided to get married. Clayton gives them his warm approval, but the lightheartedness doesn't last long. Zolarr is busy extricating his master Elwyn's coffin from the mausoleum, wheeling it to a deserted part of the cemetery. Elwyn slowly rises, classic style, from the satin-lined coffin. "I am not yet strong," he tells the open-mouthed Zolarr, "but I have been given the power to draw ever-lasting life from the veins of the living…" (Apparently Elwyn put all those books and papers to good use before his brother burned them.)

The living dead Elwyn wastes no time drawing blood from a local woman. In the light of day, Lloyd and the town sheriff (Hal Price) investigate the fatality. The doctor observes two puncture marks on her neck, and the fact that she appears to have bled to death. Old Kate, who seems to be everywhere, steals into the bedroom and announces that she knows how the woman died. She blames Lloyd's evil twin. "He's dead Kate, and his evil died with him," he assures her. "But it didn't die, it's growing stronger every day!" she protests. The sheriff runs her off, threatening to have her locked up.

That night, Lloyd is astonished to find out that Kate is right when Elwyn's spectre confronts him in his study. "Am I losing my mind? There was no sign of life in Elwyn's body when it was placed in the vault!" he says to himself, hardly believing what he's seeing. "You'll know that I'm no intangible figment of your imagination when you feel the weight of my hatred," responds the walking dead man. "Your life will be a torment. I'll strip you of everything you hold dear before I drag you down to a sordid death!" Elwyn walks over to the window, looking out at Gayle and David holding hands in the garden. "I'll take life from Gayle," he cackles, "slowly, you'll see her life ebb day by day… and you'll be powerless to save her!" Lloyd has had enough. He grabs a pistol from his desk and empties it into the smirking phantom. Elwyn laughs maniacally and then vanishes.

Split screen shot of evil Elwyn confronting his twin brother. "I'll strip you
of everything you hold dear before I drag you down to a sordid death!"

When Gayle and David hear the shots and rush into the study, the rattled doctor lamely tells them that he thought he saw a burglar. After Gayle goes to bed, David confronts Lloyd and asks him if he's telling the whole truth about the shots. Without going into to detail, Lloyd confesses that he's beginning to doubt his own sanity. David offers to take some of the pressure off the older doctor by taking over part of his practice.

Elwyn makes good on his promise to drain the life out of Gayle. That night, a shadow hovers over Gayle as she tosses and turns in fitful sleep. Talking to himself before he leans down to sink his teeth in her neck, Elwyn reveals his plan to turn her into one of the undead like himself, to be his servant for all time.

Perhaps because he still can't quite believe what happened in the study, Lloyd has taken no precautions to keep his niece safe. But in the cold light of day, the evidence is undeniable. Something is afflicting her, and she's growing steadily weaker. The symptoms suggest an acute case of anemia. And then there are the bite marks on her neck, and Gayle's reports of terrible dreams, in which a huge bat-like creature hovers over her bed. Duh! The doctors decide to give her a transfusion, with the concerned fiance donating the blood. As they're wrapping up the procedure in Gayle's room, Lloyd turns around to see his evil twin's face hovering at the second story window! Elwyn vanishes before David can see it.

In Lloyd's study, the older doctor tries to tell David that Elwyn is behind Gayle's mysterious illness, but the rational younger doctor is having none of it: "the dead have no power over the living," he huffs. Lloyd convinces the reluctant doctor to visit Elwyn's crypt to see the state of the body-- if there's no decomposition, it will be further proof of Elwyn's vampiric existence. They discover that the coffin and body are gone. Ever the rationalist, David guesses that medical students stole it, but Lloyd knows better. At this point David thinks that Lloyd is seriously off his rocker. He proposes marrying Gayle immediately and taking her away. Clayton says he'll think it over.

Elwyn and Zolarr plot further mischief by candlelight.

While he's thinking, a grim David tells the sheriff that he thinks Clayton is trying to kill Gayle. Clayton's talk of Elwyn, sorcery and vampires is way too much for the young man of science. In the meantime, while Lloyd dithers and David voices his suspicions, old Kate, who's just crazy enough to know exactly what's going on, takes the initiative to give Gayle a protective cross to wear around her neck. It prevents another assault by Elwyn, who enlists Zolarr to get the cross so he can continue his depredations.

When the nosy Kate discovers Elwyn's new resting place, Zolarr kills her for her troubles. A local tells the rest of the town that he's seen Dr. Clayton skulking around at night, and the "leading citizens" -- who look like a disorganized assemblage of Gabby Hayes impersonators -- start grumbling about taking the law into their own hands. David, who by now has met the real, undead Elwyn, tries to convince them that gentle Lloyd is not the culprit. The good doctor has a tall order on his hands: convince the townies that his evil twin is really responsible for the murders before they string him up, send Elwyn back to the dark pits from whence he came, and save his beautiful niece from a fate worse than death.

This low-budget, low-energy horror film from the lowly poverty row studio PRC seems like a celluloid Rip Van Winkle that fell asleep in 1933 and woke up ten years later. It plays out as an almost straight, shoestring retelling of Browning's 1931 Dracula, with Lloyd as Van Helsing, Elwyn as Dracula, Gayle as Mina, fiance David as Harker, and Zolarr standing in as a combination Renfield and Fritz from Universal's original Frankenstein (1931). It even takes a minute or two out of a very short 64 minute running time to have Elwyn explain to his mouth-breathing assistant all about how he must rest in his coffin during the day, how he will sustain his immortal life on the blood of the living, etc., as if moviegoers had never heard of vampires or the rules of their game. Considering that in 1943 Universal introduced the Son of Dracula and set up a meeting between Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, and that RKO released three of Val Lewton's frighteningly good B horrors (I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man), Dead Men Walk seems all the more quaint and anachronistic.

Gayle (Mary Carlisle) looks absolutely fabulous as she
gets a blood transfusion in the comfort of her boudoir.

Worse yet, Dead Men wastes the precious talents of a couple underrated performers. Beautiful, energetic Mary Carlisle has little to do but moon at her wooden-faced fiance and look absolutely fabulous in her fur wrap (?!) as she tries to recover from her mystery anemia. (For more on Mary, see my special Halloween write-up of One Frightened Night, 1935). Sadly, Dead Men would be her last film. And poor Dwight Frye, the ultimate victim of Hollywood typecasting, plays yet another standard-issue demented assistant, complete with hunchback. Even accounting for the makeup, Frye looks old, tired and bloated. His story is especially tragic. In his write-up of Dead Men Walk in Poverty Row Horrors! Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties (McFarland, 1993), interviewer par excellence Tom Weaver quotes Dwight Frye Jr. about the depressing arc of his father's career:

There was in the latter years of his life a lot of discouragement. He'd gotten, unfortunately, into this mold of playing horror characters with lots of makeup or playing Nazis during the war or playing gangsters in the mid-1930s. He got typed and not until just before he died did he have the possibility of breaking out of type… The unfortunate and ironic thing was that when he was in New York originally from 1922 to 1928, he was a big star on the stage playing musicals, comedies and all kinds of light stuff. The moment he went to California that all stopped and he never got the chance to do that sort of thing again. [According to Frye's Wikipedia entry, the break out was to be a role in the A-list picture Wilson, based on the life of president Woodrow Wilson. Frye died of a heart attack just a few days before he was to report to the set.]

George Zucco serves up a generous portion
of ham as the mad, evil Elwyn.

Predictably for a nothing-budget B, the Dead Men (actually man-- there's only one undead creature in it, despite the title) talk a good deal more than they walk. Even by 1940s standards, there is precious little action -- the most we see is Elwyn slowly leaning over Gayle to deliver the vampire's kiss off camera, the vampire's eerily-lit face at the window (actually quite effective), and Lloyd scuffling with Zolarr and Elwyn at the climax. Coming from the mouths of most of the supporting characters, the surplus of talk is a drag. But when the evil Elwyn talks, you listen, because he's given the juiciest lines, and George Zucco is just the man to deliver them.

We get a taste of the melodramatic language to come with an unusual introduction featuring a hand grabbing a book titled "A History of Vampires" and tossing it into a burning fireplace (a foreshadowing of Lloyd's burning of his twin's blasphemous occult library). An eerie floating head then appears superimposed over the fire, challenging the audience:

"You creatures of the light, how can you say with absolute certainty what does or does not dwell in the limitless ocean of the night? Are the dark-enshrouded regions of evil nothing but figments of the imagination because you and your puny conceit say they cannot exist?"

(The bizarre intro is very reminiscent of the distorted head in the crystal ball that introduced Universal's series of Inner Sanctum mysteries starring Lon Chaney Jr. The first of the filmed Inner Sanctums, Calling Dr. Death, also debuted in 1943.)

These two sinister floating heads both debuted in 1943 to introduce B movie chillers.
(Universal's Inner Sanctum series on the left, Dead Men Walk on the right.)

Zucco as Elwyn handles similarly florid lines with such gusto and aplomb, you can't help but be entertained. By all accounts, Zucco was the complete antithesis of the sinister characters he tended to play in the Bs -- a gentle, educated man who drew praise from everyone he worked with. (For more on Zucco, see my post on The Mad Ghoul, 1943.) If Zucco was embarrassed by the formulaic roles he played in the forties, he didn't seem to show it. At his best, Zucco was able to bring out subtle hints of humanity in his villain roles (The Mad Ghoul is a good example). While there's zero humanity in the irredeemably evil Elwyn, Zucco still delivers his lines with a zeal that's hard to fake. Generous portions of ham may be salty and fatty and bad for you, but if they're Zucco-brand ham, you may find yourself, like me, wolfing them down anyway.

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Where to find it:

Amazon Instant Video

Oldies.com


"Whence came a story, told in frightened whispers, down through the ages... of witch and warlock, werewolf and vampire, and all the spawn of Hell! "

Science Meets Seance

Now Playing: The Devil Commands (1941)

Pros: Dark, forbidding atmosphere; Severe Anne Revere is a deliciously evil villainess
Cons: Ham-handed plot devices move things along briskly, but cause befuddlement and head-scratching

Since the dawn of history and humanity's first, crude attempts at reflective thought, we have been vexed and confounded by the greatest of all questions: what waits for us on the other side? (In my case, I've had a glimpse of the other side, and it's a veritable Shangri-la of green grass, a very nice deck with comfortable, all-weather furniture, and a high-end gas grill guarded by two huge black labrador retrievers, Cerberus and Pluto. Okay, so it's only my neighbor's back yard on the other side of a big wooden fence, but as old as I am, I'm not quite ready to go on the ultimate exploration of the other side, so my curiosity at this point is more earth-bound. And yes, I made up the part about the dogs' names.)

Kidding aside, the 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of interest in "the other side" and spiritualism (a horrendous civil war and two world wars that sent tens of millions to early graves, among other catastrophes, did wonders for focusing people's minds on questions of life after death). Gone (or at least held in abeyance) were the certainties of heaven and hell, eternal redemption and punishment from previous centuries. In this new scientific and technological age, there were seemingly as many theories of life after death, and pseudo-scientific methods for testing those theories, as there were people with the time, money and burning desire to answer the riddle once and for all. Ghost clubs and psychical research societies sprouted like weeds in a rundown cemetery.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes
and fervent believer in 'the Other Side'.

World renowned celebrities were inevitably drawn into the fray. On the credulous side, physician and writer Arthur Conan Doyle wanted desperately to believe in life after death, having lost his wife at the beginning of the century and a son, a brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews during and shortly after World War I. He belonged to several spiritualists' organizations and wrote numerous essays and books on the subject. On the skeptical side, magician and escape artist Harry Houdini dedicated his energies in the 1920s to debunking mediums and spiritualists (ironically, Conan Doyle, who was friends with Houdini for a time, insisted that Harry himself possessed supernatural powers -- Houdini never convinced his friend that his "powers" were simply based on very cleverly-constructed illusions).

In the 21st century, belief in life after death as another plane of existence apart from divine judgement is at a low ebb, while old-school Heaven and Hell has made a roaring comeback (at least in the United States).  Still, the war between the spiritualists and the debunkers continues, if in a somewhat muted, almost frivolous form (think John Edward and Penn and Teller).

Columbia Pictures' The Devil Commands was made at a time when it wasn't such a stretch to think of death as the gateway to another dimension, or to believe that scientific methods might ultimately reveal what lies beyond. Although it debuted toward the beginning of a war that would send millions more to "the other side" and deal yet another crushing blow to humanity's innocence and faith, the film seems the product of a different place and time altogether, at one and the same time innocent, yet dark and macabre. The mad scientist in this film is no one-dimensional stand-in for Nazi evil, but rather a gentle, scholarly man who has become unhinged by grief.

The film starts out with a long shot of a forbidding cliffside mansion on a dark and stormy night. As the camera tracks closer, one of the main characters, Anne Blair (Amanda Duff), introduces herself in voiceover and grimly intones:

"This was my father's house. In Barsham Harbor on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters that face toward my father's house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father's house. No one dares."

Now that we're thoroughly creeped out, cut to Midland University, seven years earlier. The famous Dr. Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is demonstrating an early form of an electroencephalograph to five eminent colleagues. After strapping his assistant, Dr. Sayles (Richard Fiske) into an upright gurney and clamping a bizarre-looking helmet with large electrodes onto his head, Blair confidently tells the group, "you will be the first people with the exception of my wife and my assistant Dr. Sayles, to see the proof that the human brain can give off an impulse that can be recorded!"

An early experiment in electroencephalography.

As Blair fires up his lab equipment (somewhat reminiscent of a guy named Frankenstein), a large pen slowly records wave forms on a wall-sized chart. (While this technology is, excuse the pun, a no-brainer for us today, one can imagine that this was something of an eye-opener for audiences of the early '40s when all this was very new.) Blair tells his colleagues that each brain has its own wavelength, and no two are alike. He gets a chance to demonstrate on a second person when his wife Helen (Shirley Warde) comes to pick him up. She gamely agrees and dons the equipment. Feminists take note: her graph is much more pronounced and bold than Sayles': "Every demonstration that I've made so far clearly shows that the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger and more regular than man's," explains Blair. "Evidently there's a greater natural power in the brain of woman, any woman." (Actually, everyone take note, for it will be important later.)

Before his wife can hustle him out of the laboratory to go pick up their daughter Anne from the train station, Blair boldly predicts that eventually he'll be able to record and read the thoughts of any person, and even send pure thoughts like radio waves across vast distances. (Of course, today people send their (im)pure, unadulterated thoughts instantly, to the whole world, in the form of tweets. Heaven help us!)

That same night, tragedy strikes. Helen drops her husband off at the baker's to get a cake for Anne's birthday before heading over to the train station. Circling the block in the driving rain, she crashes the car and is killed instantly. After the funeral, the despondent scientist goes back to his lab to be alone with his grief. Absentmindedly he turns the equipment on, and amidst the crackling of arcing electricity, he sees the exact same waveform being recorded right underneath the one his wife recorded on her last night! And of course, there's no one wearing the electro-helmet. From this he deduces that Helen's brainwaves still exist and can be intercepted, and perhaps he can even communicate with her.

When he tries to tell Anne, Richard and his scientific colleagues the good news, they chalk it up to his overwhelming grief. Blair's intensity frightens his colleagues, and they caution him that if he's truly right, opening up a portal to the dead might have unintended consequences:

1st colleague: But what if you do find a way to pierce the veil between us and them…
2nd colleague: And let the world of the dead back in upon the living?
1st colleague: We don't know what evil may be lurking behind that veil waiting to get through!
3rd colleague: I know one thing Julian, there are things human beings have no right to know!

A ghostly visit from the other side or something else?

It's a veritable Greek chorus of fear, loathing and dread. Seeing his boss' frustration with these small, cowardly men, Blair's somewhat simple-minded but good-hearted lab assistant Karl (Cy Shindell) suggests that there are other ways of communicating with the dead -- Karl has been seeing a medium and talking with his dead mother. Ever the scientist, Blair is skeptical at first, but then agrees to attend with Karl. The seance is presided over by the formidable looking Blanche Walters (Anne Revere), a supposed medium.

During the eerie proceedings, as the ghostly visage of Karl's mother hovers over the group and gives her son a comforting message, Blair is sizing up everything. After the seance, Blair stays behind to talk with Walters. He strides over to a nearby wall, brushes aside a curtain and reveals a cabinet from which the ghost -- a dummy wrapped in gauze -- emerges each session. He then traces a wire to a hidden microphone that broadcasts the supposed voices from beyond. Walters is clearly not pleased, and tells him to get out. Blair has one more question for the fraudulent medium: how did she manage to shock him with a strong electrical charge as she held his hand during the seance? "Are you crazy, I've never used electricity at a seance in my life!" she responds indignantly. Just like that, the good doctor concludes that in spite of her phony methods, Walters nonetheless possesses extraordinary brain and energy potential that might just allow her to communicate with the dead for real. He bribes her to come back to the lab with him for some tests (uh-huh), and sensing a meal ticket, she quickly grabs her coat.

Dr. Blair's methods are a real eye-opener for
Blanche, the phony medium (Anne Revere).

Thus begins a dark and deadly relationship. First, Blair puts the phony medium through a series of risky-looking tests involving electricity, and concludes that the woman can both "receive and transmit" huge amounts of energy -- that in effect, she's the perfect antenna for channeling communications between our world and the one beyond. Next, in order to further amplify the effect, Blair hooks poor Karl up to the equipment in a sort of psychic circuit with Walters, and succeeds in frying his brain in the process.

Walters convinces Blair to pack up, send the daughter away, and move out to the remote New England coast where they can resume their experiments without inconvenient questions from the authorities about brain-frying and other dodgy practices. But their work doesn't go unnoticed by the backward, superstitious villagers of nearby Barsham Harbor. They (and the local sheriff) wonder who the dark, severe-looking woman is who refuses to let anyone see Dr. Blair. Who (or what) is the shambling, mute brute of a man who wanders around the mansion's dark hallways? Why have seven fresh bodies disappeared from the local cemetery since Blair and his odd "family" moved in? And what in tarnation are those strange lights and eerie sounds emanating from the Blair house on dark and stormy nights?

Can Anne and Sayles save Blair from himself and the malign influence of Walters before the villagers light the torches, grab their pitchforks and take matters into their own hands?

The Devil Commands is based on a (now) little-known science fiction/horror novel, The Edge of Running Water (1939), by William M. Sloane. Back in the late '60s I discovered the novel while browsing a drugstore paperback rack. I'm not sure what drew me to it-- the cover art was unexceptional and the understated title didn't cry out sci-fi or horror. But for whatever reason I bought it, and by the time I put it down, I was having disturbing dreams. This, and Sloane's other notable science fiction novel, To Walk the Night (1937) are masterpieces of mood, well-realized and richly-described characters and places, and slowly building suspense. (While Sloane's own output was regrettably sparse -- in addition to the two novels he wrote several plays and edited a couple of science fiction collections -- he became an eminent publisher, and spent the last twenty years of his life as director of the Rutgers University Press.)

Columbia's adaptation does as good a job as can be expected of capturing the novel's dark mood and some of its more disturbing details in a crisp 65 minute running time. One of the very interesting elements of both book and movie is the mad scientist's technological simulation of a seance circle. From the book:

"The apparatus itself was so much of a nightmare that my glance slid off it the first time without any precise attempt to understand what I saw. My impression was of seated figures, human and yet horribly not human, ranged round a black table with a sort of lectern at one end…  There were seven of them. One, with its back toward me, at the rear end of the table, and three along either side. … They were, I saw, all alike, all polished till the copper of their wires glowed, and they were holding hands. At least, their arms ended in five filaments of wire and these were, in each case, linked with the fingers of the figures on either side. From head to foot they were made of wire and there was something terrible in the fact that I could look clean through them."

Science melds with the occult to produce a seance
straight from the bowels of Hell!

The movie takes this chilling description and adds an even more macabre element to it (which I hint at above). When Karloff/Blair fires up the apparatus, it moves in an uncanny and unsettling way. The Devil Commands is the most interesting and unusual of director Edward Dmytryk's B assignments, predating his breakout Murder, My Sweet (1944) by several years (see also my review of another Dmytryk-helmed B horror-thriller, Captive Wild Woman). For Boris, the film was another in a long line of cookie-cutter mad scientist roles, but to my mind, the unusual story, Dmytryk's solid direction, and the eerily effective production design set it a notch or two above his other horror-thriller programmers from this era.

But the film really belongs to Anne Revere (Blanche Walters). She exudes a quiet menace that is right up there with Gale Sondergaard's evil best. She's bad enough scamming credulous rich people as a fake medium, but when she gets her hooks into poor Dr. Blair, all hell (literally) breaks loose. Revere was nominated 3 times for a best supporting Oscar, winning for her role as Mrs. Brown in National Velvet (1944). (Ironically, both she and Dmytryk were caught up in the anti-communist blacklist hysteria of the late '40s and early '50s. She stood her ground, and didn't make another movie for 20 years. Dmytryk recanted and named names, saving his career, but earned the enmity of many who never forgave him.)

Whether you're a Boris Karloff fan, curious about Anne Revere's B movie career, or just intrigued by Gothic-tinged horror with a sci-fi twist, The Devil Commands is well worth checking out on Amazon Instant Video or DVD.

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Where to find it:

Amazon DVD

Amazon Instant Video


An Anne Revere tribute:

Leslie Nielsen, 1926 - 2010

Dark Intruder (1965)

I love the goofball Leslie Nielsen from Airplane and the Naked Gun and Scary Movie franchises. I'm also old enough to remember and appreciate his first Hollywood incarnation as a leading man and dramatic actor. If he had done nothing else but the role of J. J. Adams, commander of the C-57D Starcruiser in Forbidden Planet, I would still remember him fondly.

Fortunately, Nielsen left a long, rich legacy of acting roles -- both dramatic and comedic, in film and TV -- that we can enjoy for many years to come. Dark Intruder, a failed TV pilot turned theatrical release, highlights Nielsen's ability to pull off the leading role of an insouciant, devil-may-care playboy in a dark, atmospheric horror thriller.

Dark Intruder is lean and thrillingly mean at a spare 58 minutes (reflecting its origins as a TV pilot for a series that was to be called "The Black Cloak"). The title sequence strikes just the right note with suitably haunting music and effective graphics of menacing eyes peering out from a thick blanket of fog. After establishing the 1890s San Francisco setting, Intruder quickly gets down to business: a woman in a nurse's uniform runs screaming from an upstairs apartment, fleeing down inky black alleyways with an unseen, growling thing close on her heels. We see the thing in silhouette, a human shape in hat and cape, hunched over the unfortunate woman. Moments later, we see her dead at the foot of a wrought iron gate with claw-like marks on her face. The camera pans to a carving of some misshapen totem dropped next to the body. The scene is reminiscent of (perhaps even a tribute to) House of Wax (1953) with its own memorable misshapen, yet obviously human, thing stalking young women down shadowy, turn-of-the-century streets.

The scene quickly shifts to the lush apartment of our protagonist, occult expert Brett Kingsford (Nielsen), who is eyeing newspaper headlines about the latest murder. Kingsford, dressed in an elegant smoking jacket and nursing a hangover, reluctantly greets an opulent young lady friend, Evelyn Lang (Judi Meredith), who breezes in carrying the latest purchases for her upcoming wedding to Kingsford's best friend. Here we have a humorous, light-hearted few minutes of exposition, with Evelyn baiting Kingsford, who can barely hide his exasperation. The contrast with the first grim couple of minutes couldn't be more jarring, and screenwriter Barré Lyndon (The Lodger, 1944; The War of the Worlds, 1953) skillfully sets up the movie (and the hopeful TV series) while letting Nielsen and Meredith exercise their comedic chops. Meredith especially is so breezily good that the abrupt change in mood can easily be forgiven (see the clip below).

Evelyn (Meredith) briefly stops to remark on the motto that hangs prominently in Kingsford's apartment: Omnia Exeunt in Mysterium ("Everything Ends in Mystery"). The light mood quickly turns dark again as the protagonists deal with more murders, puzzle over the demon carvings left next to each corpse, and discover a connection to a mid-nineteenth century archaeological expedition (shades of the Mummy!) To add to the mystery, Evelyn's bridegroom-to-be and Kingsford's friend Robert  (played with melancholic intensity by Mark Richman) begins having spells, and worries that he may have something to do with the grisly string of murders. In quick succession, Kingsford gets a lesson about Sumerian demons from an oriental mystic (Peter Brocco), and has his fortune told by a hooded soothsayer, Prof. Malaki (played by a completely unrecognizable Werner Klemperer of Hogan's Heroes fame). He soon intuits a diabolic pattern behind the serial killings.

The other star of Dark Intruder is John F. Warren's rich black and white photography, which, coupled with the detailed Victorian production design, lends a big budget feel to the proceedings. After filming a number of low-budget films in the 1950s (Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, The Colossus of New York, The Cosmic Man), Warren spent the '60s exclusively lensing TV shows, including this failed pilot. Veteran TV director Harvey Hart maintains a quick, deft pace, and adds a number of unusual angle shots to keep the viewers' interest. Alas, Intruder doesn't always rise above its humble TV origins. Several times Hart makes the mistake of showing the shadowy murderer's claw-like hands, which have a cheap costume-shop-latex-rubber look to them. And most of the music, including Evelyn's perky theme, sounds like schlock TV stock. Rod Serling fans might blame the movie's deficiencies on producer Jack Laird, the man who later stepped in to produce a portion of Serling's Night Gallery series. Laird drove Serling to distraction by insisting on inserting painfully unfunny gag segments between the tales.

Alternately amusing and chilling, Dark Intruder is several orders of magnitude better than the TV fare of its day, and a worthy part of Leslie Nielsen's bountiful acting legacy. A good quality DVD copy is available from Sinister Cinema.

Rediscovering a Eurohorror Gem

Terror in the Crypt (aka Crypt of the Vampire; 1964)

I discovered Eurohorror in my early misspent teens watching the late, late show (yes, that was a long, long time ago). In contrast to the domestic product, this stuff was dark, atmospheric, exotic, disturbing, and… downright sexy. You were guaranteed to see at least one beautiful, bountiful starlet in a diaphanous white nightgown running screaming from some twisted, disfigured monster. And this being the late, late show, there was always the small hope-- never actually realized on American broadcast TV --  of seeing something… more. Later, I discovered that there were prints of these films that included scenes not shown on TV!  With all that going for them, one could excuse the bad dubbing and the wooden acting.

Terror in the Crypt, an obscure occult thriller from 1964, was one of the exotic flicks that lodged some pretty potent images in my impressionable brain: a disfigured, hunchbacked beggar; a bell tolling in an abandoned church in the middle of the night; a woman using a severed hand ("hand of glory") as a candelabra to light her way down a long, dark hallway…; and yes, the bountiful, raven-haired heroine in the almost-but-not-quite see-through nightie.

Over the years, and especially when I watched anything with B scream queen and Eurohorror specialist Barbara Steele in it, I'd think to myself, is this the one with the gnarly severed hand moonlighting as a candlestick? Inevitably, the answer was no (although Barbara's flicks were usually intriguing in their own right). Somehow I had gotten the beauteous, raven-haired Adriana Ambesi (working in American prints of Crypt as Audrey Amber) mixed up with the exotic, raven-haired Barbara. Black Sunday? Nope. The Long Hair of Death? Nope. Nightmare Castle? Nope.

So, imagine my surprise when quite by accident, I recently rediscovered the movie that had made such a lasting impression. Around Halloween I looked up Christopher Lee on Netflix, thinking I might line up a mini-Chris Lee film festival. Crypt of the Vampire (the alternate American release title) caught my eye, and in reading the description, I wasn't sure if I'd seen it or not-- a good reason right there to order the disc.

A few minutes into it, and I realized this was the film with the dark, haunting images that had stuck with me for so long -- no Barbara Steele, but this was it! And I had completely forgotten Christopher Lee's role. Not surprising, since Lee is particularly wooden in this one, wearing a one-note worried frown through the film's 82 minutes. Lee was making a ton of these things at the time, and I can imagine that he felt stuck in a "if this is Tuesday, it must be Italy and 'La Cripta e l'incubo'" kind of rut.

Lee plays Count Ludwig Karnstein, whose worries stem from an old family curse and recent, inexplicable disappearances and murders in and around the ancestral castle. It seems the Karnsteins have been haunted for years by the legacy of an ancestor, Sera, accused of being witch and murdering young girls. His daughter Laura (Ambesi) has been having vivid nightmares which foretell horrific events in uncanny detail. He fears that Laura may be under the spell of the long-dead malefic ancestor, or even be her reincarnation! In desperation, he hires an antiquarian scholar (Jose Campos) to research Sera, and especially to find out what she looked like. Other members of the household dabble in witchcraft themselves in an attempt to protect their mistress.

Just as Laura thinks she might go mad, a carriage carrying a prosperous mother and daughter breaks down in front of the castle. The mother worries that the daughter, Ljuba (ravishing Ursula Davis) may not be strong enough for additional travel, so Laura invites her to stay at the castle. Laura, right on the verge of falling for the hunky scholar, dumps him for her new, very special friend Ljuba. After a visit from a hunchbacked beggar, flirting by the two young women, more murders, dark occult rituals, tolling church bells, and strange encounters in the family vault, the real evil is revealed.

Crypt is supposed to be based on Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire tale Carmilla, but it's probably more accurate to say it was inspired by Le Fanu. Crypt exploits the Karnstein name and the theme of female evil, but there are no vampires per se in it.  Carmilla and the Karnsteins have popped up in numerous films over the years, some well-known and some not:  Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (1960), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Daughters of Darkness (1971), Twins of Evil (1971), and The Blood-Spattered Bride (1972).

Crypt's strength is its dark, forbidding atmosphere. It starts off in the dead of night, as an ethereal blonde in nightdress flees from a deserted coach, the door of which opens slowly and menacingly. She gasps, then screams, as the shadow of a nameless something envelops her. A moment later, she lies dead, her face frozen in terror.

Lawrence McCallum (Italian Horror Films of the 1960s, McFarland, 1998) describes Crypt as "atmospheric, but otherwise fairly ordinary," and speculates that it "might have been a winner had it been handled by Mario Bava or Antonio Margheriti."  While director Camillo Mastrocinque certainly cannot claim the horror credentials of those gentlemen, in Crypt he has fashioned some truly memorable, chilling sequences that compare favorably with the best of the genre.

On a dark and stormy night, Laura Karnstein (Adriana Ambesi) has another terrifying vision: