The Werewolf

The Way We Werewolf


The Werewolf USA 1956
Directed by Fred F. Sears
Sony Region 1


Warning: Big, hairy spoilers if you’re 
that worried about it on a title like this.

So here we have the director of such “classics” as Earth Vs The Flying Saucers (it’s in my “to watch” pile people, be warned) and The Giant Claw (reviewed here) directing what is probably a not so classic... and not that fun either, B movie.

I’ve begun to get a little respect for these Sam Katzman produced B movies because, although they’re not always as entertaining in the “so bad they’re good” kinda vein in which I would prefer to be watching them, you have to give them some credit for taking the terrible scripts quite seriously. None of the actors are particularly good in this one and a lot of them are spouting some really terrible 50s nuclear paranoia clichés to boot (you will be saying the lines out loud before the actors get there themselves) but they all seem to be really trying hard to sell this improbable story and make it work. Which has got to be worth something.

Now you may think from the title of this little mini epic that it’s a classic werewolf tale in the Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolfman mould, as did I, but I was wrong. The only thing this bears any resemblance to in the typical Universal template is that The Werewolf in this one is actully quite a tragic figure, more so than Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot character, in fact, because he’s a complete innocent who has been made what he is by the less than sincere intentions of a couple of “questionable” doctor/scientists and he also has a wife and young son who he needs to be mindful of.

Yeah, that’s right, “evil scientists” have made him into a werewolf in this one, not a gypsy curse living on in the bite of another like previous incarnations of this pseudo-myth. In fact, I’m led to believe that this is the first ever, pseudo-science fiction explanation for a werewolf used as a plot point in the long history of werewolf cinema, as opposed to the superstitius wolfbite explanation... so if any of my readers can refute that and let me know about it, I’d be happy to hear from you. This movie is very “50s scientists are evil and meddling in things they don’t understand” in its preoccupations and, as a result, we don’t have any of the full moon stuff happening as a trigger in this one... which means, quite often, the werewolf transformations take place in broad daylight and it does its hunting where we can get a good look at the cheesy make-up (with added drooling saliva content in this one, it has to be said).

Actually, the make-up's not completely terrible. It’s a bit like the kid in The Munsters but with much lighter hair and, since the guy is wearing a crumpled suit throughout the movie, this is what the werewolf is wearing in all its scenes too (I guess it saves on make-up time and costs when only the face and hands have to be “wolfed up good” for his close-ups. Because of the clothing and also the general grey tone of the wolf make-up, the titular character much more resembles Henry Hull’s incarnation of a wolfman in the 1935 film Werewolf Of London (my favourite werewolf movie) than any of the other screen predecessors of this one.

The direction is pretty competent here, nothing to relly complain about... or laugh at. The opening shots where a troubled man walks towards camera while a “poor man’s Rod Serling” voice-over tells us about lycanthropy is actually quite atmospheric and effective to be fair... or at least it would be if that damned lethargic narrative would shut up.

This movie is also interesting in that the film is really not told from the point of view of the werewolf at all, but more from the point of view of the village sheriff and his team. The actor playing the sheriff looks quite a bit like Fred McMurray and so has strong, heroic features with which to deliver his terrible lines and add some conviction to them. Consequently, he spouts rubbish, but it’s rubbish with gravitas and so he’s fairly okay as a likeable but incredibly dumb hero figure. I understand the actor had previously played the burned up land version of the gill-man in The Creature Walks Among Us (the third and final part in the Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon series) and so he probably saw this as a step up from what he was used to... poor guy. He’s actually quite likeable and cuts a fine figure of authority... just a pity he wasn’t doing it for a more upscale production.

The film ends quite abruptly and also quite bitterly for a movie of this type. You won’t go away from this one thinking, “well the police did a good job here” and the movie jumps to the end caption almost too quickly, like they want you to forget the incredibly dark consequences for other characters which will occur from the conclusion you’ve just seen. This is not really a happy ending like you might have hoped for on this one folks... this one’s a bitter pill to swallow.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I could recommend this one to anyone except dyed-in-the-wool B-movie fans or those who like werewolf movies. Most people are going to be bored by this one, I suspect... I wasn’t but then again, I love B movies so it’s not a worry for me. Approach this werewolf cautiously and with a certain amount of experience in the field, is what I guess I’m saying. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

Zombies of Mora Tau

Mora The Same!

Zombies of Mora Tau

US 1957

Directed by Edward L. Cahn

Sony Region 1

Ok... so onto another movie produced by Sam Katzman. These movies are, admittedly, B-movie fodder to be thrust onto an unsuspecting public but, like the previous two movies I saw produced by this guy, there’s always something which serves by way of a redeeming feature. In this one it’s a certain special effect which... well, let me not get ahead of myself here.

Zombies of Mora Tau is Katzman’s attempt to catch on to the burgeoning voodoo zombie craze of the time (still over a decade before Romero’s seminal classic Night Of The Living Dead) and it’s basically the story of a group of... hmmm... “entrepreneurs” who go after a legendary batch of lost diamonds off the coast of Africa... only to find that these diamonds are guarded by murderous, undead sailors of decades past who will not rest until, apparently, the diamonds are thrown into the sea... even though they are pretty much recovered from the sea in the first place by our gang of cutthroat protagonists.

The acting is pretty wooden on this one and the script is quite dire (no surprise there then) but the photography on this one is a fairly crisp black and white and has some nicely competent shot compositions. And that’s not the only good stuff in this movie. Mischa Bakaleinikoff, who also provided musical composition for Katzman classic The Giant Claw delivers a strikingly appropriate score for the kind of movie this is and one of the small sailor roles is played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan! Remember him from such serial’s as the classic Undersea Kingdom?

That being said though, this is a trashy movie after all, and fans of clumsy, trash cinema should find all their buttons pushed in this little opus. The rivalry between the wife of “the boss” and the pure of heart girl who is visiting her gran (who has been on the island the best part of her life to try to bring peace to her walking dead husband - no, not making this up people) is pretty clichéd and hard to swallow and the ridiculous effect at the end, when the diamonds are thrown back into the sea which enables the only zombie who happens to be in shot wink out of existence suddenly, leaving his clothing to fall to the ground, definitely hit a funny bone with one of the people I was watching this with.

Talking of special effects though, I have to give this movie respect for going the length with the idea that they wanted some underwater zombies in it. I always thought underwater zombies were a “relatively” new thing introduced by dodgy Italian zombie movies and people like Lucio Fulci in the 1970s, but here they are in 1957. What’s really great about the underwater sequences in this one however, is the inventiveness of the effects work. Main pretty boy diamond smuggler protagonist goes down to the bottom of the sea in his deep sea diving suit with bubbles galore coming up from his helmet... but when he gets to the bottom and the zombies come to attack him... well they don’t have a diving suit, obviously, as they’re dead already (and slow enough with it) and so the underwater sequences are shot on a set where everyone is just moving around in slow motion to fake being underwater. But what really impressed me is how the special effects crew have hit on the idea to have a soap bubble blowing machine fitted to the helmet of “our hero’s” diving helmet. This gives the rough idea (very rough but it’s such a genius idea that I’m more than prepared to let it slide) of air bubbles rising to the surface as the actors sloooowly prance around the pseudo-bottom-of-the-ocean. Great stuff.

All in all, I’d have to say that Zombies of Mora Tau is not the greatest of movies but it does have a lot of charm, especially when you’ve got such terrible lines being spoken with such conviction by the actors... and, for me, the sheer inventiveness of some of the “make do and mend” style solutions to various effects problems lend it a certain charm that will lead me back to watching this again some day... maybe on a double-bill with the much superior Val Lewton produced zombie remake of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I Walked With A Zombie. That would be a nice companion film for this one I reckon.

Creature with the Atom Brain

Atom-splitting Headache!

Creature with the Atom Brain US 1955

Directed by Edward L. Cahn

Sony Region 1

This is another film in a four DVD set of films produced by Sam Katzman (along with The Giant Claw, Zombies of Mora Tau and The Werewolf) and, I hate to say it, but I was much more impressed by this hunk of hokum than I was expecting to be. I’ve seen a lot worse movies than this which were unintentionally funny, and they’re always good for a laugh but this one actually has a fair amount going for it, although it may be not as funny as some other movies by this producer. It certainly holds its ground on sheer entertainment value, though, with some of the more respected giants of B-movie monster movies such as Creature From The Black Lagoon and It Came From Outer Space.

The plotting is, as you would expect, absolutely ludicrous... but this goes without saying for the majority, if not all, of the monster movies made around this time... and once again, man’s harnessing of the atom is the spark that causes all of the trouble to the heroes main protagonist, Dr. Chet Walker, played here by Richard Denning, one of the top liners of the aforementioned Creature From The Black Lagoon. This one tells the story of returning mobster Frank Buchanan, who is out to get revenge on the people who testified against him years earlier, landing him some serious jail time. In order to take his revenge he has his “pal” Dr. Wilhelm Steigg, whose research he has funded with his dirty mob money, make super-strong radio controlled zombies from the dead bodies of freshly deceased people.

And of course, since the plot is to do with the utilisation of the mighty atom in the fifties, this involves both him and the doctor putting on oodles of heavy protective clothing and crawling through a small polythene tunnel to their “workspace” where they feed their creatures (dead reanimated humans) and perform highly sophisticated screw-top brain surgery on them so they can speak to them through their radio transmitter and bark their deadly instructions to said corpses while being able to receive television signals from their eyeballs... obviously, since they need to be able to see what they’re doing.

Two things about that then, before you ask. Yes, they perform said sophisticated brain surgery wearing all their heavy protective clothing, including thick hoods/masks and gloves (try wielding a scalpel in a pair of those, it isn’t easy) and yes, as commented by granite-jawed hero Chet Walker when he is explaining his suspicions to a group of characters especially written to eat exposition like candy, the optic nerves transmit back to the controllers only what the dead eyes of their freakish experiments can see.

Why then, I ask myself, is it that the footage being transmitted back to the evil mobster and not quite so evil but compliant enough scientist filled with reverse shots and profile shots and shots with not so nimble-footed cameramen being reflected back in rear view mirrors? I only ask because this is obviously the same bizarre phenomenon of physics that has been influencing an uncanny force on various Republic serials over the years... and I’d really like to know the science behind it if possible. The footage “transmitted” back from these dead people seems to be extremely well edited in light of the recent circumstances of the unfortunate “transmitter” creature.

Anyway, I was all excited for a while because it seemed that Richard Denning would be aided by none other than King of the Rocket Men himself, Trisram Coffin... looking suitably suave with an interesting hair style incorporating white streaks which can sometimes change appearance from scene to scene. Alas, my excitement was short lived as Mr. Coffin winds up being the second of the victims of the Creature with the Atom Brain or, if I wanted to push a point of terminology both in terms of singular vs plural (since these dead people are only good for a short while before you have to move onto the next one) then I’d have to be pedantic and say that Mr. Coffin’s unfortunate demise was brought about by “One of the Atom Powered Zombies with the Radio Controlled Brains”... there, that’s much more accurate and almost half a better title to boot in some respects... "zombies" tend to get more press than mere "creatures."

This film has a lively plot and keeps things running at a fair pace. The silliness of the storyline will soon be forgotten as you marvel at, or are repulsed by, the repressed character of Joyce Walker aka "Mrs" Doctor Chet Walker as she does everything she’s told and lovingly condescended to by her he-man Doctor of a husband and his needy police friends. She also fails to lovingly and properly watch out for “daughter of Mrs and Doctor Chet Walker” when a police friend of the family is killed without anyones knowledge, brain-stitched and controlled remotely to “blend in” at the Walker residence to find out what our heroes plan is. Since the zombies have no real personality and can only dully speak the words their masters transmit to their so-called atom brains, it really is neglectful how Mrs. Walker manages to half-heartedly interact with this zombie while simultaneously being too busy in the kitchen to notice the dead, monotone shell of a man that used to be her friend... her condescending “this is man’s talk” friend. And yes, the film is harsh in it’s expectations to convince us that this is normal everyday behaviour in 1950s sleepytown America... my one big worry with all that and the thing that keeps me from watching that with the pinch of salt I’d rather take, is that I’ve got a worrying suspicion that attitude might have been rife behind closed doors in 50s America... rather than just something to be found on the silver screen.

And that’s about it for this review I’m afraid. I don’t have much else to say about it other than it’s a fairly entertaining romp which I will almost certainly come back to before the current decade is over. If your tastes run to 50s B-movies which would not look out of place on the shelf with the likes of The Mole People or The Monolith Monsters, then you could do a lot worse (I know, I’ve seen them and they can be really boring) than checking out Creature With The Atom Brain.

NUTS4R2’s Astonishing Trivia Treats: Apparently this was one of the first films to use squibs to simulate gunshot wounds... although I have to say I honestly didn’t notice them when they went off!

Claw Abiding Citizens!

The Giant Claw 1957 US

Directed by Fred F. Sears

Sony DVD Region 1

Warning! Giant sized spoilers... if you’re reallly going to worry about stuff like that in a movie like this!

The Sam Katzman produced The Giant Claw is exactly the kind of movie I like to put on to relax to when I don’t want to have to overcomplicate my life with any unnecessary thinking or, as in the case when I watched this one... I’m too ill to concentrate too much on the intricacies of the plot.

There are B-movies and there are B-movies but this one definitely fits snugly into the blissful category of a B-movie’s B-movie!

The film stars Jeff Morrow (you may remember him from such seriously cool B-movie classics like This Island Earth and The Creature Walks Among Us) as electronics engineer Mitchell “Mitch” MacAfee who spots an unidentified flying object while out in his plane. He’s just the kind of hard, granite-jawed statue of a man to quickly thaw the frozen charms of hardcore mathematician Sally Caldwell played frigidly, then playfully, by Mara Corday (from Tarantula). As their romance develops, so too does their investigation into the deaths and disaster’s caused by Mitch’s UFO, which turns out to be a big, silly looking, Pelham puppet style giant bird... and believe me, the entertaining footage of this squawking, feathered harbinger of death is more than worth the price of admission alone. In fact, all the terrible model shots used in this movie are so bad they’re great.

The script is quite bad too. There is a genuine, quick-fire chemistry between most of the leads in this one and they seem to make the most stupidest of B-movie dialogue work in their favour. Real pros these... I would love to see this movie with a modern day audience and see what reactions you get to big, camply quotable lines of dialogue like “I want you two to hold yourselves in readiness...” today!

And then there’s some of those great bits of B-movie fluff moments you just know aren’t going to hold up under anything like close scrutiny... but these are the films that the term “suspension of disbelief” were made to extoll. Like the wonderful moment where Jeff Morrow draws some seemingly randomly placed dots on a map and then says there’s a flight “pattern” to this giant bird... and then shows this by joining up the dots with an Archimedean spiral. Now I’m no maths expert like the character Mara Corday plays in this mini monster masterpiece but I’m pretty sure that any position of a few randomly placed dots could be made to fit an Archimedian spiral of some size or proportion!

You might also find yourself having to bite your tongue a little (and then hold in your sides) when the professor/scientific adviser character explains that the bird is of extraterrestrisal origin and it shields itself with an anti-matter forcefield! Great stuff for morbid, late 50s scientific obsession.

Right from the start the film shows that it’s just not in the same league as some of those more eminently watchable B-movies we all know and love today. It opens with some voice over narrative on a shot of the earth “from space”... just like the opening of Creature From The Black Lagoon. Now we all know that it never occurred to people in those days of pre-space age shots of planets to figure that you would see all the cloud cover on the earth... fair enough... but this world looks like a badly crafted rubber ball - which is all I can assume it is. A film then, that wears the cheapness (and in the case of the monster... cuteness) of its special effects on its cheesy 1950s sci-fi sleeve.

The style of the narrative continues into great chunks of the movie too, Dragnet-style, and one wonders if this was added over certain sequences, where the dialogue is quite heavy (but unheard on the soundtrack), in order to cover up some of the more dubiously written and performed parts of the script... if such a thing is posible. It’s a crazy authoritative style of narration which tries to be both dead accurate with the time (to the nearest minute... 11.37am, that kind of thing) while being quite hazy with the bigger picture... “It was on the eleventh of the month...”. What month? This is one crazy, mixed up script!

At the movies end, it’s up to our science heroes to create a big electronic thingamujig (you know it’s highly futuristic because it has valves) which will knock out the antagonistic avian’s anti-matter force field. Once this is achieved, the airforce’s big guns bring it down and it splash-crashes into the sea... the last shot of the movie is the giant claw sinking slowly beneath the surface... waving goodbye to a thoroughly entertained audience.

I don’t know about you but I really like B-movies and this one is going to get frequent flyer miles in my DVD playlist from now on. A bird-brained, avian abomination like no other you’ve seen before!