Voodoo Drums Over the White House

I'm constantly amazed at the way in which people frequently miss the obvious target.  I mean, right now we've got Trump and all his right-wing crazies slandering Haitian immigrants by claiming that they are eating people's pet cats and dogs, with some of them linking it all to voodoo practices, yet they miss the obvious racist slur that the Haitians are busy raising the dead as zombies.  Surely that is no less lunatic than the eating household pets business?  And this has been a notably lunatic presidential campaign.  But really, there are all sorts of places the crazies could go with the zombie angle in terms of grossly offensive racist stereotyping.  The obvious one is that they are raising a zombie army to attack 'whitey', sending them out to eat not cats and dogs, but their owners.  Indeed, they could try to pin rises in crime rates in cities with significant Haitian communities on the zombie invasion.  Even better, they could claim that evil Haitian voodoo witch doctors are raising white people from the dead as zombies in order to commit necrophilia with them - a sort of gross out 'black-brutes-raping white-women (and men)' meme.  Or, they could claim that they are sending their black zombies out to do the raping of living white women, in an equally gross out scenario.  Maybe they are getting all those white zombies to perform demeaning acts for their amusement - even engaging in gross out decomposing orgies.

I suppose that the failure to exploit the zombie aspect of voodoo politically is simply yet more evidence of the general ignorance of right wing crackpots.  Certainly, it tells us that they don't watch cheap horror movies from the seventies, where Haitians, (or, indeed, just about any black person), were always busy raising corpses for nefarious purposes.  After all, they were very cheap monsters to create - usually just a regular guy in slightly torn clothes and greyish make-up wandering around with their arms out-stretched.  The thing is that never, ever, in any of these films did I ever see those Haitians eating cats and dogs, either as part of their zombie-raising rituals or just for fun - and I can tell you that cheap exploitation films never lie about such things.  But getting back to Trump and his right-wing loons, by ignoring the zombie angle they are missing out on the big one as far as election lunacy goes - the opportunity to tie the whole Haitian immigrant business in with Joe Biden.  That's right, they could have claimed that Biden had actually died in office, then been resurrected as a zombie by Haitian voodoo witch doctors, which is why his administration and the Democrats in general, are i thrall to the immigrant lobby.  If they wanted to go the whole hog in the offensiveness stakes by tying in Kamala Harris as well, accusing her of being a voodoo high priestess who was now controlling the zombie Biden.  But, hey, I'm afraid that they've missed the boat by getting obsessed with those cat and dog rumours.

Home Improvements

I frightened the Hell out of myself this week - I finally stirred from my regular state of torpor to actually start that clear out of the junk afflicting my house.  It was a modest start - I finally cut up that old bed base that's been stored in the spare room for years - but a start nonetheless.  (If you are wondering why I was cutting it up, well, it's easier than trying to get the local council to do a roadside collection, plus, I can re-use the wood from the frame).  If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to get out my jigsaw, (which I haven't used in years), which meant that it actually didn't take that long to cut to pieces.  But what has prompted this sudden burst of activity, (coming less than a month since I finally got rid of a load of stuff from the front room by sticking it all in the recycling bin)?  Perhaps it is the change of season - this cold snap has reminded me that I really need to get something done about my old sash windows and I really can't expect anyone to work at refurbishing or replacing them amidst all the junk I've got stored here.  I say 'stored', but it is supposedly waiting for me to actually take it down to the local dump, (for which I have to make an appointment), but I've just been too indolent.

So why start with that old bed?  Well, the motivating factor there is that now that's out of the way, I can start clearing up the rest of the spare room, with a view to finally starting on that much vaunted expansion of my model railway.  I've been talking about doing it for years and thanks to my visits to the local toy and model train fair, I now have far more rolling stock than can be accommodated on the current layout.  Not to mention the various buildings and other accessories that I've accumulated.  (The wood from the cut up bed base will, of course, be used to construct frames and supports for the new base boards).  In fact, I even started clearing up some of the other junk in the spare room today - another shock to my system!  Anyway, I'm hopeful that I can keep this momentum up and finally start sorting this place out properly: replacement/refurbished windows followed by a revamped bathroom and kitchen.  I mean, it isn't as if I haven't got the time to do this now that I've dropped out of the world of work.  (Although I might yet return to something part time at some point - I seem to have a constant stream of teaching agencies trying to interest me in various temporary positions).  So, watch this space for further developments.

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

A Russ Meyer film from the days when he didn't bother about things like plot, but instead focused on big breasts, Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) is a lot of fun if you watch it while in the right mood.  While not bothered with plot, Meyer does seem to be trying to create a broad satire of the western movie genre, with many of its conventions parodied amongst the big bouncing boobs.  Opening with an old geezer in a ghost town reminiscing about the wild times and wilder women of the town's golden years, the film seems to determined to pack in as many western cliches as possible.  We have two guys perpetually engaged in gunfight, but who are such bad shots that no matter how close to each other they are, they only succeed in shooting innocent bystanders.  There are also the local 'Indians' who spend their time tying white women (big breasted white women, naturally) to stakes and trying to burn them, (except that they can never get a light), or engaging in an ever escalating war with the 'palefaces', graduating from bows and arrows to machine guns by the film's end.  The town is also plagued by practical jokers who spend their times engaging in such pranks as tipping over outhouses when someone is inside.  There's also an hotel-cum-brothel and a lawless saloon presided over by a mean spirited old timer.  

The closest thing the film has to a plot comes in about half way through, when a stranger rides into town, conservatively dressed and apparently immune to all the shenanigans going on around him.  Eventually, of course, he dons a stetson and spurs, straps on a gun and cleans the town up.  Aside from this sliver of plot, the film is essentially a series of sight gags - many of them, such as a peeping Tom peering through the crescent shaped cut out in the door of an out house being taken aback by the fact that it contains an entire modern bathroom, complete with a squaw in a bubble bath, are pretty surreal.  Most interesting are the interior sets, which go beyond minimalist, mostly consisting of details like fireplaces and pictures simply drawn on blank flats.  Doors sit in their frames, with no walls around them and things like beds are likewise reduced to hand illustrated flats.  Even the saloon piano's keyboard is simply a flat piece of wood with keys drawn on it.  All of which gives the film a pleasingly 'cartoonish' look, which harmonises perfectly with the onscreen action.  While this was doubtless dictated by Meyer's lack of budget, but also plays into his parodying of the conventions of traditional B-westerns, in this case their use of cheap, simplistic and over-familiar sets.  In style, the whole thing is reminiscent of those sixties movies and TV series built around the 'zany' antics of various pop groups, although it actually predates all of them by several years.   At heart just a cheap 'nudie' picture, Wild Gals of the Naked West at least tries to do something a bit different and pretty much succeeds in this aim, providing an hour or so of, by today's standards, pretty innocent sex comedy, with the emphasis firmly on the latter element.

Return of the Ape Man (1944)

Despite the title, the fact that it stars Bela Lugosi and is produced by Monogram, this is not actually a sequel to Lugosi's previous Monogram hit, The Ape Man (1943), despite the fact that it was attempting to lure in fans of the earlier film by implying that it might be a follow-up.  In fact, this 'shock sequel', as Monogram's publicity described it, is what would nowadays be known as a 'thematic sequel', exploring similar subject matter, but with an entirely original story and characters.  Whereas, in the original, Lugosi had been a mad scientist who succeeds in turning himself into an ape man, who commits all the usual low budget depravities expected of B-movie monsters, here he is a mad scientist who is intent upon thawing out and reviving a prehistoric ape man found frozen in arctic ice. Inevitably, the unfrozen ape man turns out to be a brutal beast, reacting to the modern world with violence.  Lugosi's fellow scientist, played by John Carradine, wants to destroy the creature, believing it to be an uncontrollable menace, while Lugosi himself favours transplanting part of a modern man's brain into the ape man, in the belief that its superior intellect will render the beast susceptible to reason.  Inevitably, it is Carradine who reluctantly donates part of his brain to the ape man, which is where the film starts to - almost - get interesting.  

The resulting hybrid, as well as being able to speak, also seems to retain some of Carradine's memories and personality.  Now, this development offers the possibility of exploring the nature of personality and identity - is the creature now the scientist in a new body, or are these memories and and personality traits merely a veneer, an 'add-on' to use modern terminology, to the ape man's existing persona?  But this is a B-movie, so we never really go down this route.  Instead we have a now more articulate ape man, whose violent urges seem to be being filtered through the memories of his brain donor, with him escaping and instinctively going to Carradine's house, scaring his widow, who he then inadvertently kills and later kidnapping his daughter.  The whole thing ends predictably, with the ape man holing up in a tall building with the kidnapped daughter in a sort of ultra low budget version of the climax of  King Kong.  Even cheaper looking that its predecessor, made with Monogram's typically low production values, including scuzzy looking sets and murky photography, Return of the Ape Man at least saves Bela Lugosi the indignity of having to wear hairy make-up as the title creature.  Instead, he wanders through the film disinterestedly, having done this sort of thing a thousand times before for poverty row studios.

This time around, the 'honour' of donning the ape man make up supposedly goes to two billed actors: George Zucco and Frank Moran.  This strange quirk is probably the most interesting thing about the movie.  Zucco was, apparently signed to play the role and even started filming (he can be briefly seen as the frozen ape man in a lab scene), but fell ill.  Monogram, of course, were too cheap to either halt production or reshoot his scenes, instead casting Frank Moran in the role.  The original casting raises some questions, though.  Zucco was known for playing smooth and sophisticated villains, (he was the first Professor Moriarty to cross wits with Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), for instance), making it hard to imagine him spending the film in animal furs and hairy make-up, breaking up furniture and beating people to death.  Which leaves one to wonder whether the original intent was for the brain transplant bit to come earlier in the film and for the ape man to become an apparently normal human being - until he inevitably reverts and starts killing people again.  In the event, the role was taken over by Moran, who tended to play heavies and lacked Zucco's range as an actor, necessitating a quick rewrite and scaling back of the brain transplant sub-plot.  But we'll never know for sure and this has to remain mere speculation.  

As it stands, Return of the Ape Man is a typically unsophisticated, but fun, piece of Monogram output.  Tatty and cheap looking, with a top-billed star who looks to simply be going through the motions, the plot is at least less tangled than those of many other Monogram Lugosi vehicles and does feature a decent enough performance from Carradine.  Veteran B-movie director Phil Rosen keeps it all moving at a reasonable pace, wrapping everything up in just over an hour, making it all relatively painless to sit through.

T.N.T Tim

T.N.T Tim terrorises the local wildlife with his new 'Wayfinder' boots - anti-fox propaganda from Meccano Magazine, June 1967.  I have to say that he reminds me of the sort of smug kids who used 'do-gooding' as an excuse for doing horrible shit to those weaker than them, who I used to hate.  Most of us had to be happy with the standard black Clarke's Shoes that our parents bought for us as they were required as part of the school uniform, but these little shits had families well-off enough to buy them these bloody fancy 'Wayfinder' boots, which they then used to hunt down and kick foxes.  Baby snatching foxes, at that!  Yeah, anything to justify the local hunt chasing them on horses and letting their dogs tear them apart - if that bastard T.N.T Tim hadn't got there first and kicked them to death, of course. 

The Dark Side January 1993

I'm exhausted, having been embroiled in a family crisis for the past couple of days, so I just can't find the energy to come up with a proper post.  I have, however, been rummaging around in those boxes in the spare room and came across a stack of The Dark Side magazines from the early nineties. Incredibly, this publication is still going, now on its third publisher and having endured an eighteen month hiatus between 2009 and 2011, although I haven't bought or read it in years.  It fell victim to a change in my circumstances in the late nineties that meant I had to cut back my spending - magazine subscriptions were amongst the first casualties.  The thing I liked about The Dark Side was that, even though horror and fantasy films were its main focus, it also covered print media - and not just books, but also fanzines.

While it wasn't as hardcore as Shock Express in terms of its coverage of exploitation films, The Dark Side did help introduce me to many aspects of the genre, with articles on various Italian directors, 'video nasties' and the like.  It was also far easier to obtain than Shock Express, which you certainly couldn't find on the shelves of your local WH Smiths.  As you can see, this issue is from fairly early in the magazine's early run - January 1993 - although it had already switched publishers for the first time, with Stray Cat Publications taking over after the dissolution of Robert Maxwell's publishing empire, which had originally put the magazine out.  At this point it was a very slickly produced magazine, with full colour covers and printed on glossy paper.  So there you go - another brief filler post, but one about a publication that, for a few years in the nineties, played a seminal role in my cinematic education.

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

The Mad Ghoul (1943) was one of Universal's 'other' horror movies of the era, one which was always intended to be B-movie, whereas the studio's ongoing Frankenstein series, (which at this point had also incorporated the Wolfman and would shortly co-opt Dracula), were seen as slightly more prestigious, designed to play at the top of double bills, or even as A-features in second run cinemas.  It also comes from a period when Universal was casting around looking for new monsters to add to its gallery of horrors - it had already started grinding out Invisible Man and Mummy sequels as B-features.  The problem is that the title character isn't really much of a monster at all.  He certainly doesn't, as the term 'ghoul' implies, dig up graves and feast on human flesh.  Which, perhaps, isn't surprising in a film made in 1943.  Instead, we get the substitute activity of him digging up the graves of the freshly deceased in order to steal their hearts, (although he does graduate to murder, later in the film).  The lack of truly ghoulish activity isn't the only problem, though.  The fact is that the title menace ultimately has no agency of his own, effectively being a zombie under the control of his creator and needing regular infusions of heart fluid to stay alive.  The film also throws in a touch of the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic, with the Mad Ghoul periodically returning to his normal state, (he looks like a corpse and shuffles around like the Mummy when he's the Ghoul), but with no memory of his ghoulish activities.

The real villain of the piece - as he was in many B-movies - is George Zucco, here playing a professor who has discovered the secret of an ancient Mayan nerve gas, used to make sacrificial victims compliant before they had their living hearts cut out.  He's part of a love triangle, being in unrequited love with the singer girlfriend of one of his students, a pianist.  But, in a twist, the girl reveals to  Zucco that she doesn't love the student, but doesn't want to hurt his feelings by rejecting him outright.  Zucco assures her that he will take care of the situation for her.  Naturally, he uses the gas on the student to try and get him to break off his interest in the girl.  But when in his human state, the student can't be deterred and insists on following the girl on her singing tour, resulting in a series of grave robberies in the cities in which she performs, baffling both police and press.  In another twist, it turns out the girl is actually in love with her pianist, so a jealous Zucco now tries to get the student, while in his ghoul state, to kill him.  Obviously, none of this ends well, with the ghoul turning on his master and giving him a whiff of his own gas.  It ends with the dying student reverting to his normal self, while Zucco turns into corpse as he desperately scrabbles in the dirt  at a fresh grave, in search of another heart.

The film's biggest strength is its sense of utter nihilism, with virtually none of the characters motivated by any sense of morality or purpose other than narrow self interest.  Love is largely unrequited and used bycharacters to justify various unethical actions on their parts.  The object of their affections - the singer - seems either unaware of their feelings or content to let them continue to suffer by not making her lack of reciprocation clear.  Even the supposed romance between the singer and the pianist seems devoid of any obvious affection.  For their part, the authorities are plodding and stupid, seeing the ghoul's crime spree as an inconvenience and interested less in justice than simply pinning it all on a convenient scapegoat.  The press, meanwhile, are interested only in generating sensational headlines rather than getting at the truth.  The bleak and dreary sets - familiar from many a Universal B-movie - just add to the general feeling of misery generated by The Mad Ghoul.  This approach, though, also results in a narrative that fails to provide the audience with any kind of sympathetic character, let alone an heroic one, to focus upon.  You are constantly left wondering which of the various characters who parade through the film is going to pick up the mantle and provide Zucco with a string antagonist.  At various points Turhan Bey's pianist, Robert Armstrong's hard nosed journalist and his colleague Rose Hobart all seem to be about to step into the  role, but instead fall by the wayside.  Indeed, in the case of Armstrong's character he is clearly deliberately built up by the script to be the unlikely hero of the piece, only abruptly fall victim to the ghoul just when it looks as if he has solved the case, in a genuinely shocking twist.  

Not surprisingly, The Mad Ghoul - unlike Universal's contemporaneous new monsters, the 'Wild Woman' and 'The Creeper' - didn't return for any sequels.  He was a limited and pretty dreary monster who left little scope for further development or any variations in story lines.  But as a one off, The Mad Ghoul is an enjoyable, if somewhat depressing, little movie, featuring a dominant and typically entertaining performance from George Zucco.  The rest of the cast do their best with a script that offers them little in the way of opportunities, although Bey is as bland as he was the other films of this ilk that he appeared in, while David Bruce as the ghoul is decent enough but ultimately has little to do.  Evelyn Ankers as Isabel, the singer, gives a serviceable performance in a thankless role, but is nowhere near as memorable as she had been in The Wolf Man (1941).  Robert Armstrong (ten years after playing Carl Denham in King Kong) gives a lively turn as the doomed journalist, but is struck down just as he seems to be really getting into his stride, while Rose Hobart as his colleague is equally lively but has too little screen time to really develop her character.  Milburn Stone and Charles McGraw are suitably thick headed as the police detectives on the case.  James Hogan's gloomy direction conjures up a suitably downbeat feel for the film, which moves quite smoothly through its sixty five minutes of running time.  (this was to be Hogan's last film before dying of a heart attack after its completion).  Ultimately, the most memorable thing about The Mad Ghoul is its utter lack of sentimentality and sheer ruthlessness with regard to its sympathetic characters, which leads up to an unusually bleak ending.

Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)

This is another of those films which somehow got itself caught up in the whole 'video nasties' furore and ended up effectively being banned in the UK, but when seen today leaves the viewer incredulous that it could ever have been considered offensive or morally corrupting to warrant such treatment.  Sure, Night of the Bloody Apes (1969) boasts a lot of gore - including an eye being gouged out - and what seems like acres of bare boobs and bums, as a sex crazed ape man goes on a killing/rape rampage.  OK, put like that, it might sound more than a little offensive, but the whole thing is executed on the level of a comic strip with the gore laughably faked (more striking are the scenes of real heart surgery cut into the film), and the sexual molestation of women fumbled and, to be honest, rather half hearted, (the ape man never takes his trousers off while attacking women). Indeed, director Rene Cardona seems to be going for a comic book aesthetic in the way his film is shot and looks: all bold colours and scenes framed like comic panels, with exaggerated, almost stylised, action and violence.  Both plot and dialogue (at least in the English dub) are quite basic, with the emphasis placed upon the visuals. Despite this minimalism, the film is as lunatic and bizarre as Cardona's other films from this period, such as Wrestling Women vs The Aztec Mummy (1964) and The Bat Woman (1968).  In common with these and many other popular Mexican movies of the time, Night of the Bloody Apes is, to English speaking audiences, a strange and wild melange of themes and genres, combining elements of horror, sex film, police procedural and wrestling movies to create an almost surreal experience.

The film is actually a loose remake of Cardona's earlier Doctor of Doom (1962),  with both films using a mad scientist plot straight out of a forties Bela Lugosi-starring Monogram movie as their basis, but takes it in directions that the poverty row studios could only imply.  Night of the Bloody Apes sees a scientist kidnap a gorilla from the local zoo in order to transplant it into his son, who is dying of leukemia, (this treatment is not available on the NHS).  Of course, this inevitably causes said son to periodically turn into a muscle bound ape man who goes on bloody rampages, climbing up buildings and going through open windows to tear the clothes off of women and violently molest them.  Anybody who tries to stop him is bloodily mutilated and murdered.   Parallel to this, we have a plot involving a lady wrestler who, at the start of the film, inadvertently puts an opponent into a coma, with the film cutting back to her wrestling matches every so often, as she struggles with her guilt, resulting in her losing matches as she pulls her punches for fear of injuring another opponent.  Apart from the fact that her boyfriend is the cop investigating first the gorilla abduction, then the rapes and murders, this sub-plot seems to have no connection to the main plot, seemingly existing only to pad the film out with wrestling sequences and more bare breasts.  We keep waiting for the wrestling lady to somehow get involved in the investigation, anticipating a face-off between her and the ape man.  But it never happens.  The plots finally intersect when the scientist kidnaps the comatose woman wrestler and transplants her heart into his son in place of the gorilla's heart, in hope that this will halt the transformations.  Logically, of course, the son should now turn into a masked wrestler and go on rampages.  Instead, he just keeps turning into the ape man.

The failure to properly dovetail these two plots is a major misstep on Cardona's part, leaving the audience feeling disappointed, particularly in view of the fact that he had done this on Doctor of Doom.  Whatever the reason for Cardona changing the scenario in this way, it leaves Night of the Bloody Apes with a somewhat underwhelming conclusion, as the beast ends up gunned down by the police on a hospital roof top, rather than being held in a headlock by a lady wrestler.  Which is a pity as, up until then, the film had been an exhilarating experience, careening along at breakneck pace, leaving the audience little time to worry about the absurdities of the whole situation.  It offers crude, but vigourous thrills, ripped, it feels, from the pages of one of those weird pulp magazines with garish covers depicting semi-naked women about to be subjected to bizarre and painful tortures.  Yes, to modern sensibilities it might well seem offensive in its treatment of sex crime and its overt linking of sex and violence, but it is very much of its time.  Contemporary English-language horror films might have liked to think themselves more sophisticated and less overt, but they still trod much the same ground in terms of the themes explored.  Night of the Bloody Apes is basically a 1940s mad scientist film, but updated for the mores of the late sixties, adding in the sex and gore that Monogram and PRC doubtless would have liked to include, if not for the production code.  One of its alternative Spanish language titles Horror y Sexo (Horror and Sex) sums up the film rather well.