The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)

Although it looks like something turned out by Universal's B-movie unit in the forties, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake was actually one of the low budget horror films released by United Artists in the fifties.  These films can trace their origins back to the poverty row studio PRC, whose TV and re-release distributor, Madison, United Artists bought in the fifties.  Four Skulls is certainly in the spirit of the old PRC movies, albeit with a somewhat more polished production.  For its day it was, as the trailer indicates, surprisingly graphic with various severed heads, decapitated bodies and head shrinking going on.  Unfortunately, the trailer not only shows pretty much all of the film's shock highlights, but also gives away the twist ending - that Henry Daniell's character is actually one of the living dead.  Not a traditional zombie, but rather his living head has been sewn onto the body of a South American native.  (Apparently this is the secret of immortality).  The fact that he is a 'white man's head on a brown man's body' seemed to be considered as shocking as the decapitations by the film's makers.  

The plot is suitably bizarre, involving a curse placed upon the Drake family by a witch doctor nearly hundred years previously for the then head of the family's massacring of a South American tribe.  The massacre was apparently prompted by the tribe's killing of his agent.  The curse involves each direct male descendant being decapitated at the time of their death, (they all die at age sixty), their head shrunk and their skull turning up in a cupboard in the family crypt.  After his brother dies aged sixty, Jonathan Drake naturally becomes worried about his own head.  Mysterious natives with sewn together lips lurk around the grounds of his house, fog swirls in, Henry Daniell's mysterious Dr Zurich turns up and hard nosed investigating police detective Grant Richards dismisses ideas of supernatural involvement in the disappearing head of Drake's brother, but eventually is forced to accept that there is some weird shit going down.  Daniell, of course, turns out to be the supposedly dead agent who is ensuring that the curse is carried out.  

To be fair, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake is, in places, quite atmospheric in the same pulpy way as the old Universal B-horrors had been.  Moreover, its central plot idea is reasonably original for a low budget horror movie and B-veteran director Edward L Cahn manages to conjure up some striking imagery, notably the native henchman with sewn together lips.  At seventy minutes it doesn't have time to outstay its welcome and moves through its action smoothly and efficiently.  Not a great movie, but by no means a bad one, either.