Not Your China Doll

Queen Wong

Not Your China Doll
The Wild And Shimmering 
Life Of Anna May Wong
By Katie Gee Salisbury
Faber
ISBN 9780571388677

I’ve seen just a few movies with Anna May Wong in them over the years but never really knew much about her. So sometime around a year and a half ago I bought this beautiful looking, new hardback of Not Your China Doll, subtitled The Wild And Shimmering Life Of Anna May Wong by Katie Gee Salisbury. Well, because of the usual book accumulation problem, I only got around to cracking those attractive covers late 2025 but, alas, when I got to around about three quarters of the way through, a long drawn out personal tragedy hit my life, culminating in the passing of my father. As regular readers will know I shut down the blog for just over a month but I also stopped reading this tome at the same time, because I didn’t think a book this well written and illuminating was something I could fully concentrate on after his passing.

But, both the blog and my somewhat eclectic ‘book life’ are both back in action and so, it was time to finish what I started. Which proved to be an absolutely charming book about the Asian-American actress, born in Los Angeles in 1905 under the name Wong Liu Tsong... which apparently, translated from Chinese, means Frosted Yellow Willows.

And, I have to say, this book was teaching me new things from the start. I mean, beginning with the arrival of D. W. Griffith in LA in 1910, it’s the first time that I was made aware that the reason that the film people who flocked to what would become Hollywoodland in California decided to go there in the first place was because the area has a way more consistent light source to be able to make movies in. I’d never even thought of it before. And in a time when ‘No Jews, Actors or Dogs Allowed’ was a familiar sign hanging on doors, we have a young Anna May Wong who was obsessed by the movies and sneaking off to visit the sets/locations and also spend hours in her local nickelodeon shows.

Without going into all the details, she finally got some acting jobs in films (while working at her father’s laundry each day after wrapping on set) and her fourth role in The Toll Of The Sea (reviewed by me here) proved to be her big break because it was the film in which Douglas Fairbanks saw her and offered her the role in his silent version of The Thief Of Bagdad (as it’s spelled on the titles of that particular movie... review will hopefully be forthcoming at some time during this next year on this blog, it’s already written).

The book then charts her career on screen in such classics as Piccadilly (as part of her European tour to help give her career a boost and reviewed in my second ever post for this blog here) and Shanghai Express for Von Sternberg, opposite Marlene Dietrich (review coming soon) whom she posed with, along with Leni Riefenstahl, for a photo at a party in Paris years before (and yes, that photo is one of the pictures which dot the book as a start to each chapter). The book talks about an important playwright lover from London as well as her hanging out with famous friends such as Paul Robeson and Emil Jannings (and wife Gussy Holl). And even a brief romantic dalliance with her leading man in a stage show at one point, a young Vincent Price.

It also covers her reception in China and details her tour of that land in 1936 (also talking about the documentary on the Chinese people she filmed as one of her projects while she was there), noting such incidents as a native cantonese speaker asking her to go back to English because of her atrocious American accent.

If I had one small criticism of the book it’s that her later years of ill health are not covered in as lengthy a fashion as I might have wanted but, then again, I don’t blame the author as the book is so well researched that one assumes that not a lot of information was as forthcoming about this period of her life as others. Or, indeed, it just may have been a shade duller than what makes for good reading. And this is a good book, make no mistake. The writer’s words flow into the mind easily and even wax quite poetic at times. 

And I was there for it... I really enjoyed this one and want to read more about the subject matter if possible (I bought another tome on the lady towards the end of last year, while attending a film at the BFI’s Anna May Wong season). 

Also, thanks to Katie Gee Salisbury, I now know what a cheongsam is and realise that this is what the Anna May Wong Barbie doll I recently purchased is probably wearing (not my China doll perhaps but, maybe my plastic effigy). And, yes, I even bought a couple of Anna May Wong quarters from the US, which is just a small reminder of the cultural impact that the lady in question has had over many generations of cinema lovers over the years. I’m not sure what the other, perhaps more sensationalist, portrayals of Wong are like but, this one is certainly a great piece of biographical writing. So, if this particular Asian star of yesteryear, who was at one time receiving over 500 fan letters a week, is your thing, then I would wholeheartedly recommend you pick up a copy of Katie Gee Salisbury’s Not Your China Doll - The Wild And Shimmering Life Of Anna May Wong. It’s an absolute banger of a book and I wish I’d read it sooner. 

The Invisible Man Returns

The Price In Sight

The Invisible Man Returns
USA 1940 Directed by  Joe May
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

After the success of Son Of Frankenstein in 1939 (which I reviewed here), Universal’s interest in revisiting their classic horror stable was renewed and the first out of the gate was The Invisible Man Returns which is, as the credit following this one at the start of the movie proudly emblazons, ‘The Sequel To The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells’. It’s also, more to the point, a direct sequel to James Whale’s successful ‘adaptation’ of The Invisible Man (which I reviewed here).

Indeed, Claude Rains photograph is even briefly referenced in a newspaper near the start of the film as we are informed that the main villain of the last film left behind a brother, Dr. Frank Griffin, played by John Sutton. He’s not the film’s lead protagonist though... that would be the title character whose name is Geoffrey Radcliffe. Radcliffe, played here by a young Vincent Price, long before horror movies became his thing (and this isn’t really a horror movie anyway, of course), is in prison awaiting public execution the next morning for the murder of his brother... even though Dr. Griffin and Radcliffe’s fiance Helen know he is innocent.  Helen is played by Nan Grey, the same young lady who fell victim to the early vampire lesbionics in Dracula’s Daughter (reviewed here).

But wait, what’s this? Following a visit by Dr. Griffin the night before his execution, Radcliffe mysteriously vanishes from his cell. Could it be his friend has given him a dose of the old invisibility formula so he can walk out undetected, find the real culprit for his brother’s death and clear his name. You betcha! That’s one of the two things which the story works towards resolving here...

One plot is the attempt by Radcliffe to clear his name, by terrorising a confession out of both men responsible -  the boss of Radcliffe’s coal mine operation, Richard Cobb, played by Cedric Hardwicke (who would turn up a few times in these Universal monster movies) and his nefarious henchman Willie Spears, played by Alan Napier who would, of course, grow up many years later to be the elderly Alfred the butler opposite Adam West’s Batman.

The other plot thread is Frank Griffin’s race against time to try and discover the antidote to invisibility which had eluded his brother before Radcliffe suffers the same fate and is driven to insanity by the dangerous chemical used in the formula. Meanwhile, of course, both he and Helen are also trying to thwart the intelligent but kindly Chief Inspector Sampson (played by Cecil Kellaway) and his police force.

So yeah, it’s a romp and... it’s okay. It is kind of an enjoyable piece of fluff and the special effects, for their time, are very good it has to be said. I mean, yeah we get the old rocking chair with nobody in it trick and various other episodes of moving scenery and props to denote the passage of the invisible Radcliffe but we also get some quite sophisticated tomfoolery with various camera tricks. There’s even a sequence where he pulls up Willie Spear’s legs to tie him up with a piece of rope and then they cut to a close up of the ends of his legs... which are dummy legs as they don’t flex at all... and what looks like stop motion animation of the rope tying around them. Presumably there was some flexible wire inside the rope to ensure it would stay in position for every frame that was filmed.

There’s also a nice bit where Radcliffe’s almost lifeless body reverts back to visibility near the end, allowing Griffin to save his life with an operation after all! First we see his skeleton appearing, then some of the veins, then the muscles and skin etc... revealing Vincent Price in the flesh, finally. I don’t know if this was the first time that this kind of anatomical precision was attempted in film but it’s astonishing for the period, I think.

There’s the occasional bit of cute dialogue too. When the two guards who let Radcliffe escape from his cell at the start of the film are being questioned, instead of saying... “That’s the way it was, so help me God!”, one of them says “... so help me Bob.” He then follows it up with “Wasn’t it Bob?” After which, the other copper, who is presumably named Bob, puts his oar in. So, yeah, some good humour carrying on in James Whale’s tradition which certainly makes the film agreeable and watchable.

What’s perhaps also as impressive as the special effects in this, though, is the fact that, while the various ‘bobbies’ are tumbling about in their usual ham fisted shenanigans as Radcliffe escapes them time and time again, Inspector Samson is actually quite an intelligent fellow who works out the truth of certain elements of the plot way before everyone else and is often two steps ahead of most people in the film. He even, in one nicely done special effects sequence, fills his general area with cigar smoke which reveals that the invisible fugitive is standing mere inches away from him. So, yeah, an intelligent police inspector in the film is a refreshing change of pace from the way the police are treated in most set ups.

The film is elevated by the scoring of Frank Skinner and Hans Salter with, as you might suspect given Universal’s musical modus operandi in this period, some lifts from Skinner’s score for Son Of Frankenstein. It’s not the most memorable score in the series though and there are lots of silent passages throughout too but it certainly works a charm and is good as a stand alone listen too.

Things buzz along to a double ending, first at the coal mine where the main villain of the piece comes to a sticky end and then, of course, in the race to try and save Ratcliffe’s life. I seem to remember this coal mine set though and I’m pretty sure that the same place was used in one of the many Mummy sequels a few years after this film was shot. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

So there we are. Not much to add here on The Invisible Man Returns other than Vincent Price would, of course, very briefly reprise his role as the voice of The Invisible Man at the end of Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein. He would continue on in much more romantic, matinee idol kinds of roles such as his turn in the famous film Laura until, at some point in the 1950s, he would become indelibly linked to the horror genre which he is still mostly remembered for. The Invisible Man films would continue on without him, of course, with the next two in the series being very unusual entries in the directions they take. In fact, the next movie doesn’t feature an invisible man at all... but I’ll get to that when I rewatch it again for this blog sometime soon.

Tigon - Blood On A Budget

The Tigon Empire

Tigon - Blood on a Budget
by John Hamilton Hemlock Books
ISBN: 978-0993054198

John Hamilton’s Tigon - Blood On A  Budget, for Hemlock, is an addition to their library which I personally find fascinating because it tells the story of a studio who I’ve never really taken all that seriously or known much about. Tigon were, of course, the third of the three British studios who were especially known for producing movies in the horror genre, being perhaps the second best competition to the absolute masters in the business of churning out commercially successful product for a longish period of time... the Hammer studios, who became 'Hammer Horror' in a lot of people's minds (and still, to this day, remain so). Of course, Hammer’s main rivals in the terror trade were Amicus studios (you can read my review of the book about their anthology films here) but Tigon also put out some classic rival movies in their time and so, a tome on them was about due, I think.

Now, there’s good and bad with this particular volume and the main problem is the quantity of text. This book is, surprisingly, an extremely thin volume, totalling just 128 pages in length. So, less than the size of certain thick magazines and, while it’s a little oversize in that it takes the form of a square shaped aspect ratio, the design inside the book, which includes a lot of photographs from the various productions, both in full colour and mono, also eats into the amount of room that could have been used for more text. That being said, I suspect the text of this thing was about as much as one could get out of the miniscule amount of information and documentation still left about the studio... so I don’t feel short changed in any way (and especially since it was a birthday present from my cousin). Studios like Hammer and even, to a certain extent, Amicus were probably bound to have more documentation available and so I suspect this isn’t simply a case of not enough time and research being put in.

The writer does a pretty good job on it, in fact... starting with a brief history of the early careers of the people involved in either forming or working with the company and then, once each mini biography is done, moving on to highlight the films they worked on in turn. Of course, as is customary in these kinds of ‘review and making of’ volumes, the writer stops at strategic points to meander a little into the backgrounds of writers, directors, actors and actresses along the way, as and when they come up for the first time in the chronology. Included are some useful snippets of information which I’ve only ever heard made passing reference to in documentaries over the years. For example, the intent and approach of the tragically short-lived director Michael Reeves, whose films I have mostly steered clear of since seeing a version of his much applauded film for Tigon, Witchfinder General.

I have, however, seen one of Reeves other films for Tigon back in my dim and distant past (on late night 1970s BBC television, if memory serves) called The Sorcerers, which starred Boris Karloff and, like Witchfinder General, Ian Ogilvy... who I best remembered as Roger Moore's Simon Templar replacement in the TV show, Return Of The Saint. There are little stories of the ‘behind the scenes’ progress on him and various other directors including a couple of films that I’ve only seen fairly recently from the Tigon catalogue... The Blood On Satans Claw (reviewed by me here) and The Curse Of The Crimson Altar (reviewed by me here). I was very interested to learn some of the things Hamilton has either dug up or confirmed about these and other films such as, in the case of The Blood On Satan’s Claw, the fact that it started off life in script form as an anthology of horror stories and these were later compressed or combined to make up the one tale which we are now familiar with.

The design of the book is quite lively, colourful and more like I would expect a lot of these kinds of books to be presented in the current market place. It’s way more interesting than various others in this niche genre where the designers have maybe gone a little over the top with their aesthetic decisions at the expense of clarity or, as is more often the case, not pushed the boat out enough in terms of making an exciting and attractive package which serves to communicate the content. That being said, there are at least two pages where the designers slip up a little to my mind. One is the standard error of 'first time designers for print' in that the back tone underneath some text has had the usual dot gain on the printing process, whereby the tint used is just a little too strong to be able to easily read the text over it.

The other problem lies on a page where the designer has tried to wrap the text around a complex shape and opted to have the lines split vertically by a cut out object but, rather than running the text down either side in columns, has left the split so the reader has the mighty hard task of reading the text from left to right over the two lines split horizontally, forcing the eye to constantly jump in the middle of each line of type. Sometimes designers forget that their number one job on such projects is to make the communication easier, I think. In these two instances I’ve highlighted above, it makes it a heck of a lot harder to read. However, these two pages are in a minority and, for the most part, it’s a well and excitingly designed book which serves the text very well.

My biggest gripe about the actual content is that there is not really much mention of the scores for these things and their composers. I have the music to The Blood On Satan’s Claw on a CD, for instance, and although it's currently out of print, I understand that it’s a well thought of score. Although that, of all the films covered n this book, does get a mention in the main text, it really is just a passing name check and so some composer-centric observations really wouldn’t have gone amiss in the book as a whole, I think.

Still... assuming you’ve got the inclination to read something about Tigon and the money to justifiably buy such a slim tome, the book won’t let you down if you want a taste of what the only other credible UK rival to Hammer and Amicus was. I would hope that, somewhere down the line, more material will be unearthed and a more encyclopaedic volume can be written about the rise and fall of the Tigon studios. However, until such a time comes, Tigon - Blood On A Budget is certainly the best book of its kind on the subject and I’m pleased I got the chance to read this one. While it didn’t, unlike the Amicus anthology book, furnish me with a list of movies from the studio that I need to add to my 'to watch' list, I think it’s a nicely written and informative book that people who have an interest in horror films will be able to treasure for years to come. So if you find yourself matching that description... miss it at your peril.

Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs

Bomb Voyage

Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs 
aka Le Spie Vengono Dal Semifreddo
Italy/USA 1966
Directed by Mario Bava
American International Pictures
DVD Region 1

Okay, so I watched the first film in this sequence of two, Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, very recently and reviewed it here. I didn’t think a heck of a lot of it, to be fair, even though it’s just the kind of oddity of a movie I usually relish. However, I was really looking forward to this sequel because Mario Bava is one of those amazing directors who can make even the blandest of subjects look interesting and inject it with some inspiring photography, imbibing it a vitality all his own. So I couldn’t wait to see what he did with subject matter like Dr. Goldfoot and his ridiculous schemes for world domination. Well... hmmm... to say I was underwhelmed would be a little harsh but, it has to be said, it’s a terrible movie and I was really surprised that Bava had ended up directing it

The history of the movie is somewhat strange in that it turns out that it started off life as a sequel to a film I mentioned, completely by coincidence, in my review of Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, namely the Goldfinger spoof Due Mafiosi Contro Goldginger, which starred a very famous duo of Italian comedians called Franco & Ciccio and this second Goldfoot film, also, features them quite heavily. However, to help secure funding, the producers got the help of American International Pictures and AIP would only come on board with the backing money if the film was a sequel to their own spy spoof, the aforementioned Doctor Goldfoot. So the plan was to have two completely different cuts of the film, one which would feature more of  Franco & Ciccio (as the Italian cut apparently does... although they’re all over this cut of the movie too) and one version which is a Dr. Goldfoot film... except in the UK where it apparently had to be released as Dr. G And The Girl bombs because a real Doctor named Goldfoot threatened legal action.

The other thing I learned, and I’m sure I knew all this before because I read Tim Lucas’ excellent Mario Bava bible, All The Colours Of The Dark, many years ago... is that Bava really didn’t want to be involved with this movie in any capacity and, frankly, it shows. He was, however, under contract so he... well... he did his best with it I guess.

The film opens up with a bizarre reminder of the first movie as the credits play out with footage from the previous installment with a voice over by Vincent Price, narrating what happened and bringing the audience up to speed. Except, it’s really weird because Price as Dr. Goldfoot is the only actor/character carried over from the first film and so footage of Franco, Ciccio and “singing sensation” Fabian from this movie is also inserted in the recap, to somehow try and fool the audience into thinking their characters were in the first movie too. Um... moving swiftly along...

Franco and Ciccio don’t dominate the movie as they apparently do in the Italian version but, it has to be said, they don’t seem to jell well with a lot of the surrounding story. I can kinda see the appeal of them actually and would love to see them in other stuff but, seriously, I suspect this movie is not a good vehicle for them. Their comedy is very broad, often slapstick in places, and with maybe a dash of the anarchic humour of the Marx Brothers thrown in... served up with a generous helping of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedy violence at the drop of a hat. They even throw in a version of the Harpo/Groucho mirror scene from Duck Soup, only performed with Vincent Price and one of these two in this one. So they really should have fit into this movie pretty well in theory... but the reality is it’s a clunker of a film they’re in and, sad to say, that if you think Frankie Avalon’s comedy performance in Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine was particularly bad (I know I did), well, lets just say that Fabian makes Frankie Avalon look like the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

Price himself is enjoyable enough but, honestly, the tone of his performance in this one is at odds with what he did with the character in the first. He really hams it up even more and spends most of the film actually talking to the audience. He’s kind of brilliant but, honestly, he doesn’t just break the fourth wall, he torches it and then dances on its ashes. I think he probably spends as much time mugging at the audience and filling them in on what’s going on than he does interacting with the other characters, in all honesty. There’s some funny stuff here but, when you pitch it against the plot, it seems kind of out of place and unnecessary. He still has lady robots clad in gold bikinis, who explode when kissing their victims this time around but, they seem to lack even the intelligence of the gals in the first movie and somehow seem to be a bit unsteady on their feet, it seemed to me.

There’s some terrible Bondian references again... such as one of Goldfoot’s personal assistants being called Hard-Job, after Goldfinger’s Odd Job. There’s also an homage to the periscope spy scene in From Russia With Love but... with a ridiculous comedy periscope that extends wherever he wants it to go and follows people around, stretching around corners etc, without anyone seeming to notice it. Honestly awful. Maybe he should have just stuck to using the “magically seeing anywhere he wants to” cam he seemed to have invented in the first film, perhaps?

The film has not much of an excuse for a plot and, if you thought the overlong comedy chase at the end of the first movie was dull and monotonous... well you should try sitting through this one which, pretty much, lasts the entire last third of the movie and which is equally less than entertaining, devolving into a fight with fire extinguishers on an airplane.

Ultimately, I was expecting to see a lot of Mario Bava’s perfectly framed photography and trademark bright colours but, while there certainly is some in this movie at some points, I found myself wondering if Bava was even on the set half the time because... some of it looked like it had been directed by somebody else. I feel sorry for Bava having to direct this rubbish under contract and, looking at other reviews of this movie, I think it’s generally agreed that this is the worst film he ever put his hand to... something I didn’t know when I started watching this monstrosity.

There’s not much more to say about this. Lallo Gorri scored the Italian version of this film and I would certainly like to see that version and definitely hear his score. This American version of the film is scored, once again, by Les Baxter and I have to say that I liked this score a lot more than the one he did for the first movie. It’s a lot jazzier and bolder than that one, I think, and it reminded me a lot more of what other American composers were doing in spoof spy films at the time... which is honestly not a bad way to go with it.

One last thing. There’s an uncredited actor in this called George Wang who plays one of Goldfoot’s assistants. All the way through this I recognised him but couldn’t quite put a finger on where I’d seen him before. Turns out he’s the Chinese guy who gets killed by Ursula Andress with her bullet shooting bikini at the start of The 10th Victim (reviewed here) and he’s got quite a distinctive face. I also found out he died just a couple of weeks before I saw this film... which is kinda sad since he’s only just properly appeared on my radar. Apparently he used to turn up in a lot of spaghetti westerns also... so I’ll look forward to a bit of Wang spotting now as I watch more movies.

Dr. Goldfoot And The Girls Bombs is the weaker of two very bad movies. There’s a lot of potential entertainment value, I feel, in movies with villains who have ridiculous names and even more ridiculous plots for taking over the world but, alas, and much to my surprise, neither of the Dr. Goldfoot movies live up to that promise. I am, however, happy to have seen them because that particular box tick was a long time coming. If you are a fan of Vincent Price then it’s probably worth a watch. If, though, like me, you’re partial to a bit of Mario Bava, well... you might not like what you find here.

Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine

Gold-Footing The Bill

Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine
USA 1965 MGM/AIP
Directed by Norman Taurog
DVD Region 1

Wow. I’ve been wanting to see Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine and, more importantly because of its director, the sequel (Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs) for a while now and... well... it’s certainly a corker. Not sure if I enjoyed it in quite the same way as the director, producer and writers would have wanted me to but... well, I certainly did appreciate the movie, to some extent and it was more than once during the running time when I thought to myself... they just don’t make movies like this anymore. Although, what I was really thinking, truth be told, was... yeah, they really couldn’t get away with making movies like this anymore.

So hot on the heels of the previous year’s hit British film, Goldfinger, the American International Pictures studio goldfooted the bill for a movie which could hopefully ride the same box office take by making the title slightly reminiscent of that film (and they were certainly not the only studio doing stuff like this... anyone remember Due Mafiosi Contro Goldginger nowadays?). Of course, if you’re going to have a film trying to ride the same kind of bandwagon then you need a title song with the same power right? Well yeah... kinda. The opening credit sequence, featuring bizarre claymation, stop motion animated models of the main cast driving around in Goldfoot’s trademark aladdin-style shoes (well not really, he only wears them in one scene that I could spot) is set against a song performed by The Supremes... yeah, as in Diana Ross and The Supremes... and it’s... hmm. Well it’s fun. In the absence of availability of an album containing Les Baxter’s score you can download the opening title song, at least, for 99p on iTunes. So there’s that.

After the credits close, the song still seems to be going on. It’s almost as if the opening credits sequence animators got bored or ran out of money (On an AIP picture? Well fancy that.) or, perhaps more likely, it was put together independently of the music. Either way, since the producers obviously didn’t want to waste any bang for their buck with The Supremes, the song continues on and we’re introduced to footage of the crazy streets of San Francisco as seen through a car windscreen as it makes its topsy turvy way around fast corners and eventually into a tram tunnel. I’m pretty certain that some of this footage must have originally been shot to be incorporated into the uproariously un-hilarious final chase scene, but didn’t make the cut so the film-makers just decided to edit it all together at the end of the title sequence. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to tie up to anything else in the movie either footage wise or, more expectedly, theme wise to any events that happen. Certainly, the next title card reading San Francisco - The Day After Tomorrow and the following scenes don’t even attempt to match the shots from the windscreen section.

Okay, after this the film has a fairly strong opening, with the beautiful Susan Hart playing Number 11, as she walks down the city streets wearing a fetching hat and grey raincoat. After she is shot at for accidentally interrupting an armed bank robbery, it becomes clear to the audience that she is not what she seems. When she enters a restaurant and inserts herself into the life of secret agent Craig Gamble, played by teenage, singing heart throb Frankie Avalon, she does the old sight gag of drinking a glass of milk and having the milk run out of all the bullet holes she took a hit with in the previous scene. After this, she whizzes Frankie back to his apartment until she finds out, from the ever watching Dr. Goldfoot and his assistant Egor, that she has the wrong man and leaves in search of her real intended victim Tod Armstrong, played by Dwayne Hickman.

Of course, the reason evil super-villain and mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot, played with a certain amount of hamminess by the irrepressible Vincent Price, and his assistant Egor, played by Jack Mullaney, can see what’s going on wherever they like is through that old 1950s -1970s super-villain trick of having some kind of magical camera which must fly around undetected to any spot in the world they choose to view on their viewing screen...

Honestly people! So many movies rely on these unlikely, alchemical devices with absolutely nobody in the audience... NOBODY!... questioning how the villains of the piece always seem to have a camera which can show them the exact view of the world at large at the flick of a switch. Blimey! What the heck were we on that we could be spoon fed this kind of utterly unconvincing claptrap and, more importantly, why have we stopped doing it now. Seriously, we are now living in a period where a bad guy could literally hack into all the many security cameras around the world and see pretty much any view of anything he liked once he’d sorted out a nefarious computer hack of some sorts... but you never see any main antagonists using this time honoured technique of the “unquestioned cam view” now when we’re actually, for once, living in a point in time where this could actually be feasible. But, hey, whatever... back then, these movies were doing it all the time. Were the audiences just filled up to the eyeballs with drugs all the way through these things? Don’t answer that.

Now, Dr, Goldfoot’s plan is to get his many robot girls he made with his titular Bikini Machine, all who wear gold bikinis for some reason, to marry various billionaires around the world and get them to sign off their property over to his mechanical ladies, making him into the sole beneficiary and a very wealthy man. Presumably so wealthy that he can afford to equip his evil lair with expensive camera feeds that can see every part of the world at the flick of a switch... oh wait, That’s right. He already has that, doesn’t he? What the-?

So, anyway, I was waiting for a long while to see if Dr. Goldfoot’s plan got any bigger or more ambitious than this... rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of a more sophisticated and ingenious plot befitting the time and attention of a super-villain but, after a while it dawned on me that nothing further would be forthcoming. Instead, I had to watch the blatantly unfunny comic antics of Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman as they attempted to solve the mystery of this questionably ingenious plot. And, frankly, it felt like I was watching a Walt Disney Herbie film for adults but without the sophistication or charm that a "grown up" might likely expect for the price of a cinema ticket.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are entertainments and distractions in this movie galore. What with cameos by various other actors who, like this one, share credits on the Beach Blanket style films AIP was putting out at the time. People like Annette Funicelli, for instance, popping up in one of the dungeon sets used by AIP for the famous Roger Corman Poe films starring Vincent Price. Or other kinds of cameos such as some of the portraits of Price as Dr. Goldfoot’s “ancestors”, which are also from films like Fall Of The House Of Usher and Tomb Of Ligeia too. There are some nice little jokes from the time as well, such as Price and a talking skeleton doing the old Señor Wences “S’alright?” “S’alright.” catchphrase routine.

That being said, though, this film is not exactly a laugh a minute... no matter how much it’s trying to be in some places. Frankie Avalon’s character is Agent Double Oh and a Half. He’s not allowed to carry a gun around until he becomes a digit, not a fraction. If you find these kinds of lines funny then you’ve got a more tolerant sense of humour than I have, I think.

There is, though, a lot of inventive stuff going on including a disintegrating beam lipstick, a briefcase with an arm with a boxing glove that pops up when opened (due to the miracle of movie magic) and the entrance to Goldfoot’s lair via a slide at the bottom of a coffin in his mortuary. There’s even an appearance of the binoculars which, when you turn the dials to change the focus, have deadly spikes which pop out and into your eyes. Actually, this is the third film I know of to contain this concept. The first being the 1959 Horrors Of The Black Museum which, I sadly haven’t seen yet (don’t worry... it’s on the other side of the room as I type, in one of my “to watch” piles) and the other one being the 1996 version of the exploits of the comic book character The Phantom. 

And then, just so we don’t forget who the producers snagged for their title song, they repeat it again over an end credits sequence of Dr. Goldfoot’s go-go dancing girl-bots. Which is at least entertaining in some ways.

However. for all the inventiveness and hard work on display here, the cleanly designed but not interesting enough to hold the attention style shots don't amount to a heck of a lot and it never feels like there’s anything truly remarkable or noteworthy going on in this one. I certainly wasn’t bored but, I think, my attitude throughout most of this one was of interest rather than enjoyment... although, that being said, I think it’s true to say that I’d watch it again. I would strongly suspect though, that this was definitely, with its constant slapstick routines and knowing winks to the target audience, a movie which was probably far more fun for the actors to be involved with than it is for an audience to actually have to endure. On the other hand... what do I know? They did make a sequel, after all. Talking of which, the sequel is directed by one of my favourite directors, Mario Bava... so I am really looking forward to seeing what he did with the title character. Frankly, with Bava in charge, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it will certainly be colourful.

When all is said and done, I can’t really recommend Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine to anyone unless they’re very much into that era of cinema and would be as interested in this kind of “only in the sixties” movie as I am. I can't quite bring myself to write it off either, though. Vincent Price once commented that the film would have been a lot better if the original song and dance numbers had been left in. Whaaaaaaat? The mind boggles but... that’s a version I’d definitely like to see. At the end of the day, I think you’d know if this kind of movie is going ot appeal to you or not and, if you decide to give it a go, then I wish you luck and hope you enjoy it just a little better than I did. And you can be sure, I’ll be reporting on just how good or bad the sequel is, at my earliest opportunity (it’s on the pile).

War Gods Of The Deep

Reservoir Gods

War Gods Of The Deep 
aka The City Under The Sea
aka City In The Sea
1965 UK
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
DVD Region 1

I was looking forward to this movie after just having listened to the score a few times and wanting to know how the music “fit the picture”, so to speak. Well... I think to best summarise my experience would be to say that War Gods Of The Deep is a very... um... interesting movie.

That is to say...it’s quite a bad movie on many levels and, unfortunately, it doesn’t quite (for me at least) fit into the “so bad it’s brilliant” category of cheesy B-movie that I’d kinda been hoping for, although there are many bad judgement calls made along the way. However, where it fails in certain areas, it does make up for with other factors so... wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Let me put a few facts before you first.

The director of this mini adventure is none other than the famed genre director Jacques Tourneur who made such classics as the original Val Lewton produced movies Cat People (a brief review of which is included here), The Leopard Man and I Walked With A Zombie (the latter of which is famously, of course, a zombie remake of Jane Eyre). He also directed the brilliant “adaptation” of M.R. James Casting The Runes as the film Night of The Demon/Curse Of The Demon (reviewed here), which is another piece of cinematic horror movie brilliance. I was, therefore, rather surprised when I saw he’d directed this piece of tosh, to be honest.

The film is distributed by AIP who was in the middle of a string of hits with films that were adaptations (aka inspired loosely by a scene or two) of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and so they’d kinda started really cheating on the extent they could get away with tagging up movies with the legendary author’s name. The movie known as “Egdar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace”, for example, is not actually based on Poe’s poem of the same name at all. It is, instead, an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s brilliant tale The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and the “Poe” designation is, barely,  justified by including a few lines from Poe’s verse at the end of the movie. My understanding is that, at this time, Lovecraft was a bit less known and not the legend he is today.

War Gods Of The Deep suffers a similar fate in countries where it was marketed as either The City Under The Sea or City In The Sea, because it was pretending to be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem City In The Sea (see the link below this review for a reading of this poem by Hypnogoria) but all it has in common with that piece is some lines of the poem recited by Vincent Price, who was at that time (and possibly still is to some extent) the figurehead for all things Edgar Allan and I suspect even he knew that for a lot of people he was “Poe made flesh” in celluloid. The “E. A. Poe-To-Go” guy, so to speak. Oh well, alright then, it does technically have a city in the sea in it too... but you don’t really get to see much of it, to be honest.

What we have here, then, is a completely made up story about stumbling upon a city under the sea off the coast of Cornwall, peopled by immortal smugglers who have been kept alive for hundreds of years due to... um... the properties of the water... and who have captured the leading lady of this movie because she looks like someone Vincent Price’s character used to love, many decades past.

The film starts off quite promisingly, actually, with some locals finding a washed up corpse on the beach and among them is leading hearth-throb Tab Hunter, who is quite convincing as a tough, cynical character... for about 3 minutes, until he goes up to “the house” to see his new lady friend acquaintance to tell her one of her guests is missing. From that point on his “acting switch” just seems to get turned off and he seems to be wooden, contradictory to his character’s initial set up and just generally inappropriate in his acting style for the entire rest of the movie. When his ‘lady friend’ gets kidnapped by a gill-man, he goes off with his other new friend, played as complete comic relief by David Tomlinson... and Tomlinson’s pet chicken.

They find a secret passage through a bookcase in the house which takes them down to a City In The Sea... too complex a labyrinth for them ever to find their way back (or so we’re expected to believe). There they see a young Tony Selby chained up in a water filling cavern and try to rescue him for all of 10 seconds before running off and saving themselves instead, which is not that great behaviour for ‘the good guys’ really but then again, who hasn’t wanted to drown Tony Selby at some point in their lives (no, don’t quote me, I’m kidding). Then they meet Vincent Price, who had apparently only read the script six days before arriving in England for the shoot. He plays the evil leader of the smugglers in his best and most earnest Poe style... which is also completely inappropriate for the style of the picture as it’s been playing so far.

In fact, there is no real chemistry in this movie at all with, it seems to me, any of the actors and actresses involved. They all seem to be very much doing their own thing with no thought about how their acting style fits in with anybody else and how it may help or, in this case, damage the picture... which is a bit of a shame because there’s some nice stuff happening on a technical level with the movie which is really quite brilliant.

Anyway, it turns out the dwellers of the city under the sea are looking for a way to plug up the underwater volcano which has been threatening to erupt and destroy them all for many decades now... so Vincent Price gives his new captives the job of finding out how to nullify the volcano with a deadline of three hours, or they will both be killed. Which is kind of unfair, really, considering he’s been trying to figure out a way of doing it for many years with no result. It turns out, of course, that the smugglers can’t return to dry land by day or the sunlight will rob them of their extra years and they will all die of extreme old age in moments... which is why they use their friends, the gill-men, if they need to “acquire” anything from the land above the sea.

At this point, our heroes meet the only person in the movie who actually seems to be doing a really good acting job and who is trying his best (and mostly succeeding) in fitting in with all the different modes of acting expression going on about him... as a new character helps our heroes escape and shows them a route back to their home which, naturally, involves wading about in diving suits and warding off gill-men and underwater crossbow armed smugglers in a long and quite tedious, extended chase scene. That actor is... John Le Mesurier.

Yes, that’s right. Sergeant Wilson from Dad’s Army acts everyone else off the screen in this film.

And that’s about as much of a simplistic and, frankly, impenetrably contradictory plot you will get out of this film. The volcano happens to go off before even our heroes’ three hours are up and it really does seem to be a bit of a coincidence that, after decades upon decades, the volcano decides it’s going to go off right this minute.

So... acting and script aside, the actual direction and cinematography on show in this one is quite astonishing. It’s always been my long held belief that Corman’s use of extreme colour contrasts in certain scenes in his Poe films for AIP are what contributed to the eventual assimilation of a design style which led to psychedelia within the public consciousness of late 60s pop culture and my personal belief is that this is because he saw a lot of the foreign product put out in a re-edited form by AIP, notably the films of Mario Bava. And this highly saturated method of colour work is something that some of the other AIP films kind of inherited too. Certainly War Gods Of The Deep is no exception. One could be excused for thinking the director is channelling Bava in no uncertain terms as deep reds and lime greens are pitched against other within shot in the least naturalistic and artificial way you could imagine.

And it looks incredible... especially when the design of the shots is so clean.

Tourneur also seems to have inherited Corman’s trick of leaving doors in the background of the sets open so another set shows through from behind, to give the shot a general sense of depth. One can be forgiven for ignoring the obvious mish-mash of different architectural styles and artefacts juxtaposed in the sets, which obviously are mostly borrowed from previous productions (it suddenly all goes a bit Egyptian at one point for a little while, for no apparent reason) because the composition of the shots and the way he directs the actors to move around them, is all very breathtaking.

This makes up for a lot but, it must be said, the gill-men aren’t all that great. They’ve tried, as films which came after this like Island Of The Fish Men and Humanoids From The Deep have also tried, to make the monster costumes be a stylistic flashback to the original Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon films... but, like those other two movies I just mentioned, fail utterly to capture the sheer impact and appealing quality of that first costume from the fifties film series. So that’s a shame... but the first fight in the house between a gill-man and Tab Hunter, where they throw things at each other for a bit, is still pretty good.

Stanley Black’s score for this movie is also pretty good, I would say, pushing the adventuresome qualities of the movie to their full... probably a lot fuller, actually, than I would have expected but it certainly adds to the fun. It’s just a shame it’s being showcased in a less than perfect movie.

So there we have it. War Gods From The Deep is really not a Poe film and if you go into this thinking it will be then you’ll probably be disappointed. The acting and script are both laughable elements but this is saved by some good shot design and execution. Steer clear if you are not a fan of trashy b-movie AIP films but certainly go and have a look if you are interested in exploring the less successful spin offs from the ‘Poe Fever’ that was on everybody’s mind at the time. For this reviewer, however, one Poe quote certainly springs to mind... “Nevermore.”

To hear a reading by Hypnogoria (aka Jim Moon) of Edgar Allan Poe’s City In The Sea, click here. 

Homicidal/Madhouse Double Bill

Far From The Madhouse Crowd

Homicidal US 1961

Directed by William Castle

Madhouse UK 1974

Directed by Jim Clark

Spoiler Break! This is your one minute spoiler break... if you don’t want to know the terrible secrets lurking in this double review, leave this article and click on one of my other reviews to read... I won’t laugh at you and point my finger at you... honest!

Okay! So once again I had to “wear shoes on a Sunday” to make it out of the house in time for @cyberschizoid and @scaresarah‘s latest London double bill to support their Classic Horror Campaign, launched to persuade the BBC to bring back their classic horror double bills of yesteryear. This month it was a double bill of two movies I’d never seen before... and I have to say, two movies I wouldn’t see again in all honesty. In fact, the reason I am reviewing them both as a double bill this time around is because I was none too taken with either of them (well, it would have been hard to follow last months killer double bill of Black Sunday and Horror Hospital) and don’t think I could find enough of interest to say about either of them separately to fill up a full on entry for each.

That being said, however, one of the best reasons for getting yourself along to these double bills is to soak in the atmosphere of like-minded people watching along with some of their favourite old friends (films can be friends) and often laughing at the twisted but camp thrills as they appear on screen. So, honestly, please don’t let my review of this one put you off getting yourself down to one of these brilliantly organised little events and make sure you sign their petition too!

Homicidal is a William Castle movie (he of the ballyhoo and gimmick publicity stunt) and it’s not a film I knew anything about. I think my only exposure to William Castle in my life has been his movie House On Haunted Hill and John Goodman's character based on him in Joe Dante's Matinee. So I'm perhaps not the best qualified person to comment on all things Castle. However, I did take note that it had been “influenced” by the success of Psycho, though it doesn’t have too much in common with that film from the previous year asides from some “through the windscreen” driving shots with the only other similarity being one of sexual identity.

Now, I might have been roundly surprised by the end of this movie had I not known of the tenuous links to Hitchcock’s movie. Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes into the film where everyone is talking about a character called Warren who has yet to show up in adult form, I suddenly twigged that the leading “homicidal” lady was almost certainly going to come back on the screen at some point as “Warren”. Sure enough, although the transformation is pretty good, the actress was soon back in a dual male/female role which gives you the entire end of the movie once you’ve realised this. If my mind hadn’t been working overtime in the background on this I probably wouldn’t have seen it coming... nor noticed the bad dubbing whenever Warren spoke. As it is, the rest of the movie was spent with me wondering when at least one of the other characters in the movie was going to catch up on this.

The general direction, acting and cinematography on this one was more than competent but nothing special and the score by Hugo Friedhofer is in the full-on romantic mode which he was used to writing and orchestrating for Erich Wolfgang Korngold... not the cooled down atmospheres favoured by Bernard Herrmann.

William Castle’s 60 second “fear break”, where you had 60 seconds to leave the theatre and go to coward’s corner to get a refund before the end sequence, was fun but... well... if you’d already figured out there was a twist coming then it kinda killed it.

So yeah... I didn’t have the best reaction in the world to this one but... it was okay and I’m glad I saw it. Ditto for the second movie which followed the usual intermission and “classic horror quiz with prizes” which is a regular feature of these shows.

Now I really like some of Vincent Price’s horror work from the early sixties to the mid seventies (that’s my favourite period for his work in this manner anyway), especially his famous collaborations with Roger Corman on the Poe movies (as a kid in the seventies I didn’t think much of these but when I finally saw them in my thirties in the proper aspect ratios as opposed to the truncated versions shown on 70s TV, I realised what little masterpieces these particular movies actually are). However, I found myself a little disappointed by Madhouse after a very short time.

For starters... Vincent Price, who plays a Hollywood actor synonymous with his role in a series of horror movies as a character called Dr. Death, is so built up as the fall guy that, when the “real life” Dr. Death murders Price’s wife to be after some heated words between them... it’s so obvious that the killer is not actually Price himself and this kinda put a slight dampner on things again for me because this all happens before the credits roll.

The credits sequence was actually quite well done, however, utilising still photography of Dr. Death and his victims and got a big laugh when Michael Parkinson came up in the cast (yes, he’s playing himself in this) and was impressed by the mention of Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff... although their only actual input in the movie turned out to be old AIP movies used to mimic the films of Dr. Death... such as Twice Told Tales and The Raven.

I was a little more impressed by the movie’s actual cast in that Peter Cushing was sharing screen time with Vincent Price in this movie as is Robert Quarry... and a horror themed party sequence during the film shows Cushing dressed as his regular on-screen nemesis Dracula while Robert Quarry gets to wear the same costume he wore when he was playing Count Yorga, Vampire.

However... while the plot of the film and the throwaway nature of some of the more novelty murders were all quite entertaining, there was nothing to really grab me in this one and when the second murder happens in the movie, some twenty or so minutes in, I pointed to the “real” Dr. Death on screen and whispered to my friend... “Is that Peter Cushing?” Alas, it turns out at the end of the movie that this is, indeed, Peter Cushing framing his friend for a new set of murders... many years after he had done the same with the murder of Vincent Price’s wife as seen in the pre-credits sequence (ushered in with the most ludicrous and highly comical scream you could imagine from Price as he goes to see his loved one and her head falls off).

The score on this one didn’t really do it for me either but I have to say at this point that, although I didnt get a great deal from either film here... at least I’ve been able to see them now without paying out vast sums of money for DVD versions and whether the films are any good or not is really secondary to the real reason for going to these Horror Double Bills which is, as I said before, the wonderful atmosphere created by the audience at the Roxy.

Please help keep these events going and support the Classic Horror Campaign by going to their homepage here... http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ or tweeting the organisers here... Cybershizoid http://twitter.com/#!/cyberschizoid and ScareSarah http://twitter.com/#!/ScareSarah

High Phibes Diet

Dr. Phibes Rises Again 1972 UK/US

Directed by Robert Fuest

MGM Midnight Movies DVD Region 1

Abominable spoilers rise again.

Well, if you read my recent review of the first of these movies you’ll know the primary reason for me shelling out the achingly hard earned cash to purchase these was because the lovely Caroline Munro appears in them. You’ll also know of my crushing disappointment on discovery that her appearance in the films is uncredited as she plays the brief footage of The Abominable Dr. Phibes dead wife.

Caroline continues that role in the second of the Phibes movies and, to be fair, there’s a fair bit more footage of her in the second movie as she is pushed from pillar to post (or in this case, perhaps pillar to pyramid may be a more appropriate expression) as Phibes rises from his sleep/death which he commenced at the end of the last movie. Apparently this was the plan all along as he waited for the moon to come into some kind of alignment so he can cart his beloved Victoria (Caroline) away to Egypt and take her on a journey on the river of life once he has got to the critical time when he can unlock the gates and let some chambers flood and the course of the river resume (I think I’ve got that right... it’s all kinda vague and illogical to be honest... not that this matters of course). And of course, in order to do this, he also has to stand in the way of an interested party named Beiderbeck who has been living hundreds of years by extending his lifespan unnaturally but who wants to take that River of Life journey himself... so Phibes pretty much kills all of the Beiderbeck friends and colleagues one by one, naturally... much to the consternation of the English policeman and his boss, making a return from the last movie.

And it’s not just these two making a return here. Various character actors from the last movie (some killed in the last movie in fact) are back as different characters in this one (people like Terry Thomas) as is his mute assistant, the always good looking Vulnavia... although, to be fair, in this one she’s played by a different actress. There’s absolutely no explanation as to how she’s back after she was accidentally killed by a hideous acid Dr. Phibes death-trap which backfired in the last film... but she does turn up from some kind of heavenly lit tunnel and campily returns there at the end of the movie when her job is done. Bizarre!

Also on hand are a host of other character actors making quickie appearances, such as Beryl Reid and Peter Cushing. In addition there is also a young and, then relatively unknown actor, by the name of John Thaw who gets unconvincingly pecked to death by Dr. Phibes raven. The deaths in this movie aren’t exactly as sparklingly innovative as those in the first movie but the surprise tease of the first death is quite shiny and unexpected. A couple of snakes are left in the Billiard Room and the victim crushes them before they can do any harm. He realises they are just mechanical snakes and so ignores the third which turns out to be real and bites him. He cuts his wound open and sucks the poison out and gets on the phone to alert the police... however the phone has been rigged with a special receiver which sends a sharp spike through the man’s head... in one ear and out the other. Almost but not quite as haunting as being impaled by a catapulted statue of a unicorn which was one of the deaths in the first movie.

It’s not really much surprise that Dr. Phibes has an almost carbon copy of his London catacombs already pre-built in the egyptian tomb in question but it was unexpected to see the clockwork jazz band from the first movie back with him. All the elements are in place for a fun movie and although it’s in some ways a tribute to the old Universal Mummy series of movies from the 30s and 40s, it’s still not quite as entertaining as the first movie. All the stylistic trappings of the director are back in place but I suspect he’s better off with more episodic and less story driven fair... this movie does tend to pause more than the first to give more explanation as to what’s going on. I still think his absolute masterpiece was his third film, The Final Programme... but not that many people would agree with me on that one... especially not the writer of the original source novel on which it was based.

Still, Dr. Phibes Rises Again is certainly not a terrible movie and a fun enough time than a lot of other movies... even if it doesn’t have so much of the aforementioned Miss Munro in it! I’d have to say if you liked the first movie then you certainly should take a look at the second one. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to remake these for a modern cinema-going audience yet!

Good Phibes Rations

The Abominable Dr. Phibes 1971 UK/US

Directed by Robert Fuest

MGM Midnight Movies DVD Region 1

Abominable spoilers included.

There were three reasons why I finally broke down and bought myself the Midnight Movies double bill DVD of the Dr. Phibes movies...

1. I’m how old? 42 and still never seen those damned, well loved Phibes movies! Get a life... or more pertinently... get a DVD copy and watch it!

2. The Dr. Phibes movies are directed by a person who made one of my all-time favourite sci-fi movies, The Final Programme. I really ought to watch some more of this guys work.

3. And then, of course, there was the clincher. This was the one really big reason that made me want to see these two movies... Caroline Munro is in them.

And therein lies my only real problem with the first Dr. Phibes (and is probably true for the second movie too) on my initial viewing. A day or so before I watched it, one of the people I follow on Twitter, BlackHoleDVDs, pointed out to me that the lovely lady in question is not really in them as such... and this is quite true. She actually plays the titular character’s already dead wife and is therefore only seen in a few still photos and briefly at the end of the movie, looking lovely as ever, lying in her coffin. And adding insult to injury... she doesn’t even have a screen credit in the film.

So okay, that major disappointment aside... how did I like the movie?

Well it was great. All the spectacular and off-beat quirks which made The Final Programme the film it is are in evidence to some extent in The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Vincent Price plays a Phantom of the Opera-like serial killer who is killing off the doctors who were unable to save his wife’s life after a fatal accident. Phibes himself is hideously burned but talks through a microphone pressed to his throat, sounding extraordinarily good and Price-like for a person of his misfortunes. The mask and accoutrements which he wears over his grotesquely burned features makes him look exactly like, well... Vincent Price.

He rarely says much and just goes around with his beautiful and silent female assistant, Vulnavia, to commit inventive and sometimes bizarre executions of the aforementioned doctors... when he’s not playing the organ in a clearly unfeasible manner or conducting his brilliant clockwork band on giant and unusual sets which seem to be something of a stock-in-trade for this particular director.

Some of the deaths are wonderful... hands up who else in the history of cinema has despatched his victim by spearing him with a catapulted unicorn? And the giant frog’s head fancy dress mask which keeps tightening as it slowly crushes the wearer’s head was, in the context of when this film was first released, a bit of a novelty death too. Other deaths are more questionable than elaborate. Why, for instance, does Terry Thomas just sit there timidly while Dr. Phibes slowly drains his blood. Did I miss something? Were drugs involved.

And talking of Terry Thomas, the cast is full of little cameos by various well known English character actors and this also includes a brief appearance by writer and one time Doctor Who companion Ian Marter. And in a little bit more than a cameo appearance is actor Joseph Cotton... having a lot more to do in this movie than in the last film I saw him in (Island of the Fishmen)... thankfully. He really is on top form in this one and it’s really nice to see him making the effort.

There is no real story development in this movie. The action keeps flip flopping between Phibes going for a kill and the two policemen who are trying to track him down with Joseph Cotton’s help, Cotton being the last of the doctors that Phibes has set his sights on. Everything is kept very simple and I get the feeling that this is how the director liked it. Frankly the exquisite frame compositions, Dutch angles and suggestively twisted imagery is enough for the eye to concentrate on in the first viewing without adding the extra encumbrance of a slowly developing plot line you really have to concentrate on.

Everything proceeds to its inevitable final scenes where the police rush in and assist Joseph Cotton who has been forced to operate on his son to find a key to remove him from an acid trap (Hmmm... crushing face masks, keys hidden in live people... I only ever saw the first Saw movie but... homage much?) which ends up with Vulvania on the receiving end of the acid instead while Dr. Phibes lies down in a double coffin with his beloved dead wife (did I mention she’s played by the glorious Caroline Munro) and embalms himself as his final trap plays out and he “brings the darkness”... which we don’t get to see because, well, you know, it’s all dark... roll credits.

Despite the lack of “the first lady of fantasy” for the majority of the film, I still really enjoyed Phibes and look forward to seeing the second part soonest... I understand Caroline Munro might be in it.

Blog Writer Struck Down: Vampire Virus

The irony doesn’t escape me that, as I write about a man who is the sole human survivor of a virus that has killed the rest of the world and left the rest of the population as vampires, I am struggling desperately to string this sentence together through all the sniffing, coughing and splitting headache that I have at the moment. I presumably don’t have the same vampire virus that kills the world off in this movie, but I can tell you now... I’m finding this hard just to find the right keys to hit... let alone focus on the screen properly. So apologies if the grammar and spelling go a bit wrong on this blog post... or at least, wronger than usual.

The Last Man on Earth 1964 Italy

Directed by Ubaldo Ragona

MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

Okay... it’s been a while since I last saw this movie and the only reason I thought I’d check it out again now is because I recently... kind of accidentally... bought yet a third DVD version of it... due to it being the second half of a double bill on one of those brilliant old MGM Midnite Movies release, dual-sided flipper-discs. I desperately wanted to see Panic in Year Zero so I ended up with another digital print of Last Man by default.

The Last Man on Earth is an Italian movie and is the first of four loose “adaptations” of Richard Matheson’s excellent novel... I Am Legend... the other three being The Omega Man 1971 with Charleton Heston, I Am Omega 2007 with nobody special and I Am Legend, also 2007, with Will Smith. Out of the four of them, The Last Man on Earth is by far the most faithful to the original source novel... perhaps because, before he disowned the movie on it’s release, Matheson wrote the rejected Hammer Films screenplay on which this movie was based and is credited under a pseudonym. It has to be said though, that while this is a great little movie... The Omega Man, which throws a lot of the book out the window, is by far the most fun version.

Just in case there’s anyone left in the world who isn’t already familiar with this story, the main character played by Price is a doctor who is the last survivor of humanity (his blood is the vaccine but he hasn’t figured out why yet). By night he barricades himself in against the vampire attacks... and they are proper vampires like in the novel in this version with garlic and crosses and stakes through the heart... and tries to find any human survivors on his ham radio by day and also kills and buries vampires by day. Not realising that a group of vampires who have been working on their own cure all fear him as a monster and that he has become “Legend” to these people.

There’s not much bad that can be said about this version of the movie. Vincent Price provides a voice over narrative during most of the film as he talks to himself in his head. It’s a real tour-de-force for Price and viewers perhaps only familiar with his more “hammy” roles will be surprised to see what a great actor he really was. He really knows how to hold your attention through body language and it’s a pretty challenging role to have to carry most of the film with no large chunks of dialogue.

There’s this moment in it where you think he is going over the top and then... how to explain it... you know Kevin Smith’s Dogma. There’s a scene near the end where Ben Affleck’s fallen angel starts laughing hysterically and then it turns into tears because he is not sure if he is happy or distraught and he’s caught between these two emotions which he’s trying to express simultaneously... the point when you realise, despite contrary opinion, what a great actor Ben Affleck actually is. Well, Vincent Price got there first... he does exactly that kind of thing here... an over the top Doctor Evil laugh which turns into an absolute expression of grief and tragedy. There’s not that many actors who could really pull that off methinks.

Another thing to recommend on this movie is... you know how in those old movies you’d get a montage of the hero and heroine in love with shots of them having a good time superimposed over various places... or a montage in a hard boiled detective movie which shows the detective constantly plodding while various location names float around him... well I’ve been trying to think of another one but I reckon this is the only movie I can come up with that has a hunt and stake vampires montage done in the same tone! Anybody else know where a vampire killing montage has been attempted? I’m sure there must be one... I just can’t think of one.

There is also an almost iconic shot of Price burning bodies in a pit, wearing a gas mask to protect himself from the smoky fumes of the dead.This film really doesn’t pull any punches like a modern movie might in certain scenes. Like the scene where he sees his freshly dead young daughter thrown into that same burning pit from years before.

If you like of sci-fi movies and especially post-apocalyptic movies or just vampire movies in general... The Last Man on Earth is definitely worth at least a look. And now, having done my duty and written this... I can collapse back into bed and try to ignore this horrible virus that’s eating up my body. Thank goodness for spell checkers.