PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 915

The Devil Rides Out 1968 Based on the 1934 Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name, screenplay by Richard Matheson, directed by Terence Fisher. A movie so memorable that none of us could remember seeing it at movie night in December 2009. Below is the post I made then.

Our second feature is the 1968 Hammer film The Devil Rides Out. It's based on a 1934 Dennis Wheatley novel. Christopher Lee plays the Duc de Richleau. He's an expert on the occult who's trying to save his friend Simon from the hands of a devil worshiping coven. He's got the help of his pal Rex. Good boy. They need to get Simon away from the cult before he's initiated and his soul is lost forever. Charles Gray is the leader of the cult. You might remember him as Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, or as the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "It's just a jump to the left." Gray is a formidable opponent, he's got the devil for a master. The devil does make an appearance in the movie but he's easily dispelled by tossing a crucifix at him. What a pussy. There's a lot of running around and the old cars are nice. It's set in the sort of 30's you get when you have a small budget. People still seem to like it. It gets an amazing 7.2 on the IMDb and Christopher Lee said it was his favorite film. Perhaps because it was one of the few that feature him as the hero. More were planned but the first wasn't too good a draw at the box office and they were never made. I thought it was OK but a tad boring at times. I don't see what others are crazy about in these films  but I've never been a staunch Hammer supporter. They made cheesy low-budget horror films and some are more interesting than others. Not sad I saw it but it's another that I don't need to run out and buy.   

Back to the present. I think pretty much the same now as I did then. Vincent is only barely the hero, he's mostly a failure at communication and planning. Charles Gray is more to blame for his own destruction by calling the Angel of Death.

Turns out years after seeing the movie I did wind up buying the DVD. It was packed with 20 other Hammer films in a box set that I bought in 2018 when I was trying to gather in as many Hammer films as I could before they disappeared on disc. I have a good number of them and a lot of them are much more entertaining than The Devil Rides Out.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 1931 Based on the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson  The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. We watched the nicely restored version on Blu-ray.

Fredric March play Dr Jekyll, he won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the performance, he tied with Wallace Berry who won for his role in The Champ.

Jekyll is laughed at for his thoughts on splitting the evil and good sides of a man's personality. He develops a potion and it turns him into Mr Hyde. Soon Mr Hyde controls his life with Jekyll looking forward to his life in the gutter's of London. He forsakes his fiance and takes up with a singer in a tavern. He keeps her in a flat and treats her rough with whipping and beatings. Jekyll's life falls apart and he's finally killed by the police.

It's fairly good but I watched the Dan Curtis TV film from 1968 and that was a much more interesting adaption of the story.

The Raven 1935

The Raven 1935 Screenplay by David Boehm and directed by Lew Landers. Another one I've seen 3 or 4 times already. It's the second of four films in the first volume of the Shout Factory Blu-ray series Universal Horror Collection. Despite David Boehm's name on the film as writer there were several tries at the screenplay. Both David and Lew had decent careers but nothing really stands out on their IMDb pages.

Boris and Bela are reunited for this loose adaptation of Poe. Bela plays Dr Vollin, a surgeon who's obsessed with Poe and torture. He's a sadist with a giant basement and that basement has a tall ceiling. He needs that space for his fancy pendulum set up. I could probably get my whole house in there. According to the commentaries the set was re-used from The Bride Of Frankenstein.

Bela helps a young woman surgically and falls for her but she's only interested in her fiance. Bela is mad at her rejection and wants some revenge. Boris is a hunted murderous criminal, he wants Bela to make his face more presentable, thinking that if he looked nice and people didn't fear him, he might turn into a nicer person.

Bela takes advantage and screws up Boris's face even more. He'll fix the damage if Boris helps kills the father of the young woman. The father is actively discouraging Bela's romantic leanings. Boris helps reluctantly, while posing as a servant the young woman is nice to Boris, when push comes to shove he saves her and her fiance from a shrinking room. Bela shoots Boris but before he dies he tosses Bela into the shrinking room and sets it to squish. The couple escape the house.

It's rather lurid, especially for the time, and it got banned in China, The Netherlands, Ontario and British Columbia. In the UK it triggered an announcement from the British Board Of Film Censors that said it would be the last horror passed by the board.

Not the best of Bela and Boris but still quite entertaining. It packs a good bit into it's short 61 min runtime. Bela gets the lion share of screen time, Boris doesn't show up until a good third of the film has passed. Despite Boris being a murderous robber he gets some sympathy from the audience because Bela is such a horrible monster. It's not as good as The Black Cat but I still find I'm enjoying it on re-watching.

Extras:

Audio Commentary With Author/Film Historian Gary D. Rhodes. Good commentary with plenty of background material.

Audio Commentary With Author/Film Historian Steve Haberman. Another good commentary with plenty of background info.

A Good Game: Karloff And Lugosi At Universal Part Two: The Raven. Quite short and less interesting than the featurette on The Black Cat.

Bela Lugosi Reads “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Short radio play, kind of interesting.

Still Gallery - didn't even bother to look at it.

The Black Cat 1934

The Black Cat 1934 Based on The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, screenplay by Peter Ruric, directed by Edgar G Ulmer. A movie I've seen several times. It remains entertaining after several views.

The Black Cat is the first film in the first Universal Horror Collection. Each set holds 4 films, all 4 films star Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. They appeared together in 8 films total, two more for Universal. You can also get all four of the films in this Blu-ray set in a 4 film DVD set at a much lower price. All are worth having for the classic horror film fan.

The Black Cat is a stylish horror film about a Satan worshiping architect who sacrifices young women to his god. He hangs their embalmed dead bodies in glass cases in his basement. Bela's wife is one of the poor victims. Bela is going to see Boris when the bus he's on crashes, a young woman on her honeymoon is knocked out, Bela, the husband and Boris's servant bring her to Boris's house.

That poor young woman wakes up to find herself in the middle of a nightmare of depravity and death. She would become the newest sacrifice to Satan but for Bela's help. The newlyweds are about the only ones who get out alive. It's dark, bleak and highly entertaining. The public thought so too, the film was the biggest hit for the studio that year, returning $236K on a $96K budget.

The movie looks and sounds good at 1080p and the disc is packed with some nice extras. Gregory William Mank and Steve Haberman each have their own commentaries, both were entertaining with info about the production, the stars and the people behind the scenes. I was interested in their comments on the film and the changes that happened after the film was screened for the studio. There were several days of reshoots to make Lugosi's character more sympathetic to the audience and reduce the violence. Still the film was banned in places.

Their comments on Edgar G Ulmer make me dislike the guy. The Trivia page has the incidents mentioned by Mank and Haberman in a more condensed form.

While working on this film, director Edgar G. Ulmer began an affair with Shirley Castle, who would eventually become his wife, known as Shirley Ulmer. At the time, however, Castle was married to Max Alexander, a producer at Universal Pictures and a nephew of powerful Universal chief Carl Laemmle, who did not look kindly on "outsiders" upsetting his family. Castle left her husband for Ulmer, and the ensuing scandal resulted in Ulmer being blackballed from all of the major Hollywood studios for the rest of his career. After a short period of directing micro-budgeted independent films, Ulmer went to work for the low-budget studio Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC), where he stayed for most of the rest of his career.

Harry Cording saved the life of Lucille Lund when he got her off the slab table, after he found her bleeding from the mouth. According to Lund, Edgar G. Ulmer was a sadist, who retaliated against her when she turned him down when he asked her to be his girlfriend. He also left her hanging in the glass case by her special canvas panties equipped with wires, when they all went to lunch. She estimated she had been left there for an hour. It is unclear why no one else in the cast or crew helped her, or even noticed her absence. 

Nothing surprising here, old Hollywood is filled with plenty of woe behind the scenes. Ulmer made a few good films despite the small budgets, his 1949 film Detour is an entertaining and important noir film. Too bad the man behind it is such a creep.

Other extras:

Dreams Within A Dream: The Classic Cinema Of Edgar Allan Poe – Narrated By Doug Bradley. A decent look at Poe in cinema.

A Good Game: Karloff And Lugosi At Universal Part One: The Black Cat. More entertaining and informative interviews and commentary about the film.

Vintage Footage – The Black Cat Contest. There was a contest to find the best black cat, over 200 turned up at a park to have their cat picked. It's kind of interesting but too short and without any sound.

Still Gallery. Typical jumble of pictures set to auto play. I don't need these sort of extras.

The Dark Eyes Of London 1936

The Dark Eyes Of London 1939 Based on The Dark Eyes Of London by Edgar Wallace, screenplay John Argyle, Patrick Kirwan and Walter Summers with additional dialogue by Jan Van Lusil, directed by Walter Summers. Released in the US in 1940 under the title of The Human Monster.

Bela Lugosi plays Dr Orloff, head of an insurance agency, he also lends money to clients on their policies. Turns out Dr Orloff isn't that to be a nice a guy, he's been murdering some of his client's and pocketing the insurance payout. He used a hulking deaf guy to murder people.

One client didn't tell the Dr about his daughter, she's on her way to visit her father. Greta Gynt plays the daughter and Wilfred Walter plays the deaf hulk. Lucky for Greta an inspector from Scotland Yard, played by Hugh Williams, is looking into the murder of some of the Doctor's victims. There's plenty of activity and some gruesome bits too. A good script with a bit of humor and a good cast to carry it out. Worth a gander for the Bela fan and those that like a crime story. You can take a look at a copy on YouTube in the link above.

 

The Secret Of The Loch 1934

The Secret Of The Loch 1934 Written by Charles Bennett and Billie Bristow, directed by Milton Rosmer. The first film about the Loch Ness Monster. I watched a copy from the Internet Archive. I discovered it was part of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. It's the fourth volume and it's also part of The British Film from Network.

Milton Rosmer started his career in 1915 as an actor, he has 65 acting credits on the IMDb, he worked as an actor until 1954. Milton directed a couple of shorts in 1926, a couple years later he started with the first of his 15 feature films. I've only seen a couple of them before this one, Emil And The Detectives and Murder In The Red Barn. Both were entertaining enough but nothing outstanding. The 1935 German version of Emil And The Detectives is much better. Both films are found on a nice 2013 BFI release. It's a Region 2 British release so you need some way to play that if you live outside of the UK.

The Secret Of The Loch starts with a professor trying to convince other scientists that there is a dinosaur in the Loch but no one believes him. A reporter from London convinces his paper to send him to the Loch to see if there's anything to the story. He falls for the professor's daughter when he breaks into the house while trying to get a story. She takes it in stride and eventually plays a nice trick on him.

It's fairly light and breezy until the professor mounts a deep dive. The story turns a bit darker when the diver doesn't return. The professor is put on trial, though he's acquitted, he's vilified in the press. The reporter takes it on himself to turn that around by taking a dive and looking for the monster.

He finds the dead diver and the monster. The part of the monster is being played by an iguana. The reporter manages to escape and the monster is sighted on the surface. The underwater effects are fairly common for the time, there's a panel of water in front of the camera and air bubbles up from the bottom for no particular reason.

The Wikipedia has a bit I liked: Charles Bennett said the film was based on his original idea. He later admitted it was "terrible... but amusing".

I can't say it's terrible, it's about average for a film of the time. I liked some of the characters but that reporter is a jackass. I was glad to have seen it and it does have some significance as an early monster movie and the first film about Nessie.