Attack of the Puppet People (1958) – Review

As a production house, American International Pictures was mostly known for quick and cheap films that would capitalize on a current fad or the latest popular movie, often with plots centring around teenagers as they were a key demographic to the studio, and when Universal Pictures had great success with their adaptation of Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man it was AIP who turned to director/producer Bert I. Gordon to bring something small to the big screen.

“I love my dolls and I’m quite sure they’ll never leave me.” That creepy line from this film’s eccentric dollmaker perfectly encapsulates the theme of Bert I. Gordon’s Attack of the Puppet People as it deals with a man’s inability to handle rejection, a man who reels at the very thought of abandonment and will do anything to prevent it from happening, and this disconnect from humanity is the basis of the film’s tangible undercurrent of horror. The plot of this movie surrounds the madness of one Mr. Franz (John Hoyt), the proprietor of Dollmaker Incorporated, who has a personal collection of very lifelike dolls stored in glass canisters which are locked in a display case and it just so happens these dolls are real people that he has shrunken down to doll size. The story gets going when Franz hires Sally Reynolds (June Kenney) to be his new secretary – we later learn his previous secretary has recently joined the others in one of those glass canisters – but when a relationship between her and travelling salesman Bob Westley (John Agar) becomes a threat to Franz’s status quo, well, poor Bob gets the doll treatment.

 

“I thought you’d like a man who was 12 inches.”

As the story unfolds, we learn that Franz was once a well-known marionette performer but his career ended when his wife ran off with an acrobat – who hasn’t had that happen – and this rejection clearly did not sit well with Franz because from that moment on anyone in his circle of acquaintances who seemed about to leave, even if just to retire from the Post Office and would no longer be delivering his mail, he would use a shrinking machine that he had devised to turn them into living dolls. He would keep these "action figures" in a state of suspended animation until the urge to let them out to “play” hits him, which is as horrifying as it sounds. What is not explained is how someone goes from being a puppeteer to a dollmaker to a mad scientist with the ability to construct a machine that can alter the size and matter of living things, did he sign up for some kind of mad science correspondence course?

 

“I’m calling the screenwriter to get some clarification on this.”

Stray Observations:

• If during a job interview you are ever asked “Are you married? Do you have any family?” Say yes, and then leave as quickly as possible because there’s a good chance the person asking is either a serial killer or is going to turn you into a tiny doll.
• As I'm not all that familiar with doll collecting, I must ask the question “Can you actually order lingerie for your dolls?” That seems like a very risqué accessory, especially being that this movie was produced in the 1950s.
• Bob and Sally go to a drive-in that is showing the film The Amazing Colossal Man, which is another Bert I. Gordon production. Nothing wrong with a little bit of synergistic cross-promotion.
• That over a half-a-dozen people go missing in and around Dolls Incorporated, without anyone making a connection, has me wondering if the FBI was even a thing in the late 1950s.
• The principle behind Franz’s projector shrinking device seems eerily similar to the one used to shrink Mike Teavee in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

 

"Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination."

The film was shot under the title The Fantastic Puppet People which makes a lot more sense than the one we ended up with because there isn’t a lot of attacking going on in this film, a failed attempt at drugging Franz is the closest we get, but a more aggressive title was deemed more marketable to a teen audience and thus Attack of the Puppet People was chosen. Aside from the film’s misnamed title, and the plot’s very dodgy science fiction elements, what does really work is John Hoyt’s performance as a pitiful old man who goes to crazy extremes to never be lonely again and that’s not to say we ever really develop sympathy for Franz, his elevator clearly doesn’t go all the way to the top, but Hoyt does inject enough humanity into the character that he can’t be deemed as being an outright evil villain, though his decision to kill himself and the dolls when the police investigation gets too close, well, that’s a bit dark.

 

The Suitcase of the Damned.

As with most of Bert I. Gordon’s films, he was also the man behind the film’s special effects and even with his limited budget the miniature elements work rather well, even if the scale is a bit dodgy at times, but this time out he limited the number of optically processed shots – what would normally be used to put small characters next to large ones – relying instead on giant props for the actors to use and for the most part this worked admirably well. Now, is this film on par with The Incredible Shrinking Man, absolutely not, but when the film ends with John Hoyt calling out “Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me. I’ll be alone” you’ll have to admit the film is a unique offering, one that brought us a very different brand of a mad scientist.

War of the Colossal Beast (1958) – Review

 Producer Bert I. Gordon was never one to let a good idea die - or a bad idea for that matter - so after the mild success of his film The Amazing Colossal Man it stood to reason that a sequel would be a foregone conclusion, of course, there was the small problem of the title character having died at the end of the previous film, but something as inconsequential as death never stops a sequel from happening when money is on the line.

The movie opens with a little mystery in the offing, one concerning a Mexican worker named Miguel (Robert Hernandez) being chased by something that we don't see but it clearly terrifies the boy, which leads to an irate John Swanson (George Becwar) wanting to know where his truck full of produce has vanished to, as it was last seen been driving by Miguel and now seems to have been simply carried away. This event catches the eye of Joyce Manning (Sally Fraser), sister of "Colossal Man" Glenn Mann, and along with Army officer Major Mark Baird (Roger Pace) and scientist Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender), they travel down to Mexico to learn if Joyce’s brother had somehow survived his presumed death at Boulder Dam and was now running around jacking groceries from unsuspecting Mexicans.

 

When you look like this, I guess calling Uber Eats is out of the question.

Joyce and Major Baird eventually find poor colossal Glenn (Duncan "Dean" Parkin), who is now a disfigured and nearly mindless creature wandering around the Mexican hills, but with the help of the Mexican military he is captured, drugged by food brought out to him like bait, and then transported back to the United States where, unfortunately, it’s soon discovered that Glenn’s mind is completely gone and what remains is nothing more than that of a monster or wild beast, and so the government decides to ship him off to a deserted island where food would be routinely cargo dropped to keep him alive, but in a turn of events that would shock no one, he escapes and goes on a rampage across California, through Los Angeles and into Hollywood, but without even stopping at Disneyland.

 

“Don’t worry Sis, I caught a bus, I’ll be home in time for dinner.”

Stray Observations:

• When John Swanson's truck goes missing his insurance company refuses to pay due to the mysterious nature of its disappearance, in this case, the tire tracks simply end with no sign as to where the truck went, but Swanson has only to prove is that he no longer has a truck, he doesn’t have to come up with a theory as to how it was stolen.
• In the previous film, Glenn's fiancée, Carol Forrest, clearly stated that Glenn had no living relatives “I’m all that he has” but in this film, he suddenly has a very worried sister running around, so where was this concerned sibling when he was first turned into a colossal man?
• Major Baird claims that Glenn’s body was never found because the Colorado River, where the Colossal Man fell into at the end of the last movie, is a mile deep at some points, but the deepest the river actually get is about 100 feet, which would make finding a colossal man rather easy. I’m betting they didn’t even look, lazy bastards.
• When the Colossal Man is captured, various government agencies immediately begin to play “Hot Potato” to avoid the responsibility of dealing with a giant in their midst, and this bureaucratic buck-passing is probably the most credible and realistic part of this entire movie.
• Being that they didn’t have Glenn Langan as the Colossal Man for the sequel, they recycled make-up from Bert I. Gordon’s 1957 feature The Cyclops to hide the fact that a different actor was playing the part. Mind you, the make-up effect is much approved here and is really quite frightening.
• As was the case with Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms we learn that a giant monster can wander through a major metropolitan area for quite some time without being spotted.
• The film’s poster stated, “See a Sixty-Foot Giant Destroyed…In Color!” which in reality meant 40 seconds of the Colossal Beast electrocuting himself.

 

I’ll give it to Bert I. Gordon, not too many monster movies end in the creature committing suicide.

The weird thing about War of the Colossal Beast is the fact that it wasn’t even marketed as a sequel, something that goes against the very reason behind making a sequel in the first place, so when the film unfolds we get flashback footage from the original film and I bet there were a bunch of ten-year-old kids in the audience scratching their collective heads in confusion as to what the hell was going on. This is not helped by the central character being a sister who emphatically did not exist in the original, and I’m still wondering why the loving fiancée from the first film is not present here – why couldn’t the sister and fiancée have teamed up together to save good ole Glenn, and leave the men out of it entirely – but for reasons unknown to me this film has no returning cast members, which is a shame because Glenn Langan put in a wonderful performance as the tortured colossal man in the previous film, and so we are left with a movie that is a half-ass sequel and an overall strange duck.

 

“Hey guys, how about making this a trilogy?”

That all said, this low-budget outing from B-movie master Bert I. Gordon does have some fun moments, and with a film that is barely over an hour in length it shouldn't be too hard to keep your audience awake, and sure, the effects still suffer from bad optical composting that result in a more of an amazing transparent man rather than a colossal one but it is still a fun little film and the cast were certainly giving it their all in a movie whose very premise can’t be described as anything other than ludicrous and silly, what with the sister constantly wringing her hands about the fate of her brother, who has already killed several people and threatens millions of others.  The fact that the Colossal Beast spends most of the film’s short running time chained up is about as exciting to watch as a passed-out relative at Christmas time is a bit problematic but even though there may not be much actual war in War of the Colossal Beast fans of the genre will most likely get a kick out of these giant shenanigans Bert I. Gordon manages to bring to the screen, just keep your expectations lowered...a lot.

The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) – Review

The atomic age not only brought the destructive power of the atomic bomb to the world it also unleashed the power of Hollywood’s ability to take anything new, and what it didn't completely understand, and turn it into something it could make a quick buck out of, and this ingenuity would bring the world everything from radioactively awoken dinosaurs to giant ants roaming the L.A. basin. More importantly, for such enterprises, a big budget wasn’t even required to produce such stories and thus the likes of filmmaker Bert I. Gordon were able to envision “classics” like King Dinosaur as well as the sci-fi gem we will be looking at today, The Amazing Colossal Man.

During the test explosion of America’s first plutonium bomb, a civilian aircraft in distress enters the restricted airspace and crash-lands near the bomb site, where we find Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) rushing out of his “protected” bunker to try and reach the pilot before the bomb detonates, sadly, he doesn’t quite make it. Glenn catches the full brunt of the radioactive blast but miraculously he survives, despite receiving third-degree burns over almost all of his body and losing enough bodily moisture to be fatal, yet by morning his burns are completely healed. Glenn's fiancée, Carol Forrest (Cathy Downs), is told that she can’t visit him due to “security reasons” but when she goes to the hospital he’s no longer there and the staff denies having even heard of Colonel Manning. A little sleuthing later and Carol is able to track her wayward fiancée to the Nevada Rehabilitation and Research Center, where she discovers that her problems are larger than she could ever have imagined.

 

Not only is he a giant but he has developed a “Dad bod” as well.

Dr. Paul Linstrom (William Hudson) explains to Carol that Glenn's exposure to the plutonium blast caused his old cells to stop dying while his new cells started to multiply at an accelerated rate, resulting in his growing proportionately eight to ten feet in height in one day, which is one helluva growth spurt in anyone’s book. The concern here is that they have no idea as to how to arrest this rapid growth and if it continues at its current rate he will die in a matter of days. Poor Glenn soon outgrows his hospital room and they are forced to move him into a giant tent, just in case he wasn’t feeling like enough of a circus freak, but loyal Carol remains at his side to give him as much moral support as she can. Needless to say, as time passes Glenn becomes more angry and resentful as his inevitable doom approaches, made worse by the knowledge that his heart is not growing at the same rate as his body, and soon the dream of a happy future between Glenn and Carol seems next to impossible.

 

“I’m hoping to land the part as the Jolly Green Giant.”

Stray Observations:

• Stationing soldiers near a plutonium bomb detonation, so that they can experience it under “simulated combat conditions,” seems like a good way to get dead soldiers.
• A man running out during the detonation of an experimental bomb, to save someone who has inadvertently entered the test field, is the exact same premise as Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk which was published five years after the release of this film.
• After finding Glenn completely healed one of the doctors states “When skin is burned to the degree it was on this man’s body, it just doesn't grow back” in fact, skin doesn’t just grow back it heals over leaving behind scar tissue, yet the government morons chalk it up to luck. No wonder America lost the Vietnam War if that was the direction military intelligence was heading.
• It’s weird that his skin completely grew back yet his hair doesn’t, is plutonium a follicly challenged atomic power?
• When a passing motorist spots the Colossal Man, he tosses away his liquor bottle and slurs, “Not another drop! Not another drop as long as I live!” because even if you can’t afford sound special effects at least clichés are still free of charge.
• He spots the giant high-heeled logo of the Silver Slipper and gets this weird grin on his face as if this was just the thing he was looking for. Could he become the Amazing Colossal Drag Queen?

 

I don’t think that type of shoe would go well with his diaper ensemble.

This film had an interesting premise but it didn’t have the budget to back it up, thus we have another clear case of movie ads overselling the product, while the poster showed the Colossal Man fending off fighter jets and the might of the American military, all we actually got in this film was him wandering down the Vegas Strip until eventually being killed by a soldier with a bazooka as he trundled across Boulder Dam. The film doesn’t even provide us with any decent levels of carnage as not only does this film fail to give us Glenn fending off fighter jets he doesn’t even smash through buildings or toss military vehicles around, the likes of King Kong and Godzilla would be embarrassed even to be seen with the Amazing Colossal Man.

 

“Honey, how about we check out the Empire State Building?”

This film was made with the hope of cashing in on the success of Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, which had been released six months earlier, and screenwriter Jack Griffith was hired to adapt the novel The Nth Man by Homer Eon Flint, a story about a guy who was 10 miles high, into a comedy, but that was when Roger Corman was attached and when he dropped out and Bert I. Gordon was hired and the film was steered back into the direction of your generic science fiction cheapie, one that was more soap opera than sci-fi actioner. And say what you will about Bert I. Gordon but he gives his all when he makes a movie as not only did he produce and direct The Amazing Colossal Man he also worked on the screenplay and was behind much of the film’s “special” effects, and that folks, is dedication. Overall, this little B-movie may not have been able to fully capitalize on its premise but it still has a good deal of charm and Glenn Langan delivered a decent performance as a good man tortured by his circumstances and is well worth checking out.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936) – Review

You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, this is a sentiment that the title character of Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter certainly understands in this sequel to the 1931 smash hit Dracula, which deals with a woman trying to escape the shadow of her infamous parentage, of course, being a vampire herself, this goal a bit tricky.

Dracula's Daughter takes place mere moments after the events of the previous film, where Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) had tracked Dracula to Carfax Abbey and staked him to death, but with the arrival of two Whitby policemen our dear professor, who is now called Von Helsing for some reason, finds himself in a sticky situation as he openly admits to sticking a wooden stake through Count Dracula’s heart, which to your typical law enforcement personal this sounds a lot like murder. Von Helsing is quickly arrested and taken to Scotland Yard where he tries to explain to Sir Basil Humphrey (Gilbert Emery) that he didn’t murder a man but an undead creature of the night, a vampire.

 

“Next you’ll be telling me that mad scientists are cobbling together corpse parts and resurrecting them.”

Sir Basil tries to take Von Helsing’s status in the scientific community into account but he still has a dead body and a confessed killer on his hands so he points out that “As head of Scotland Yard I must warn you there are only two courses which can be taken, either formally charge you with murder and send you to the gallows or have you committed to an institution for the criminally insane” but Von Helsing quickly rebuts with “In destroying the monster Dracula I performed a service to humanity” which, sadly, is not a great defence if one is trying to prove either innocence or sanity, worse is the fact that instead of hiring a lawyer he enlists the aid of a psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), who was once one of his star students, but as he's not a legal scholar this proves problematic because having a psychiatrist lead your defence is a good way to land yourself in the looney bin.

 

“I’d have a better chance of convincing a jury that your Santa Claus.”

While all this is going on Dracula’s corpse is spirited out of the Whitby jail by Dracula's daughter, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), who after mesmerizing one of the constables, and with the aid of her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel), she has Dracula's body tossed on a funeral pyre and performs a bizarre ritual “Be thou exorcised oh Dracula, and thy body long undead find destruction throughout eternity in the name of thy dark unholy Master. In the name of the oh holiest and through this cross be the evil spirit cast out until the end of time,” this is all in the vein attempt at breaking her curse of vampirism, but how a ritual would stop her from being an ageless undead creature of the night is never explained. Needless to say, this ritual does not have the desired results and before you can say “I don’t drink wine” Marya is stalking the streets of London in search of new blood donors.

 

“Sandor, someday they will invent something called Uber Eats and it will be grand.”

After a chance meeting with Dr. Jeffrey Garth at a society party, the Countess asks him to help her overcome the influence she feels from beyond the grave, hoping modern psychiatry can cure her of vampirism where arcane rituals had failed, but his suggestion of defeating her cravings by confronting them only leads to more death, mind over matter when it comes to the hunger for blood isn't an easy contest, but things get worse when Garth’s secretary Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who clearly wants to be more than to be His Girl Friday, gets jealous of Marya’s intentions towards Garth and her actions in trying to keep them apart paints a vampire bat sized target on her back. Things come to a head when Marya realizes that hypnotherapy is not going to end her curse and she decides that the next best thing is to transform Dr. Garth into a vampire so he can be her eternal companion, which is a totally logical conclusion, and to achieve this she has Sandor abduct poor Janet so that she can use her as a bargaining chip to force Garth to agree to her plan.  There is an additional complication to this plan and that is the fact that Marya had apparently promised Sandor eternal life and he’s not the sort of person to take rejection all that well, and this does have me wondering “Do vampire servants have Human Resources departments to complain to?”

 

“Accomplice, to murder and kidnapping and all you are going to give me is a good reference?”

Stray Observations:

• The Dracula in this movie has the inconsideration of not turning to dust when staked, thus resulting in poor Von Helsing having a murder charge hanging over his head.
• Where are Mr. and Mrs. Harker? With Von Helsing being arrested for the murder of Dracula you’d think these two would be witnesses on his behalf but they are inexplicably missing from this movie.
• The comedic and cowardly behaviour of the local constabulary in this film is a clear holdover element from the James Whale entries The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein, which makes sense when you take into account that Whale was originally intended to direct.
• When Marya hands her cloak to her manservant and tells him “There is blood on it again” leaves one picturing all the mundane yet dark tasks that a servant of a monster must undertake, and whether is there a special dry cleaner they can go to?
• Dr. Jeffrey Garth's comment that “This is the only woman’s flat I’ve been in that didn’t have twenty mirrors” is the kind of thing that can get you killed if you are in a Dracula movie.
• When the story eventually returns to Castle Dracula there is no sign of Dracula's Brides, did they hear of his death and take off to parts unknown?
• One of Marya’s victims is a young girl who Sandor lures back to her studio to supposedly “model for her” which is one of the most cliché seduction lines in the history of seduction, only the production code prevented the following scene from getting really interesting.

 

“Countess Zaleska, are you trying to seduce me?”

It's no surprise that many cite this film as being loosely based on Carmilla, an 1872 Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the first published British works of fiction to deal with lesbian relationships, sadly, we’d have to wait for Hammer Films to dive deeper into that area of vampire sexuality in cinema. What is not clear is the actual relationship between Countess Marya Zaleska and Count Dracula, while she claims to be his daughter are we to consider this in the traditional biological sense or more that she is a vampire offspring? In the original story, Dracula had three brides so it’s not hard for one to assume that Marya is nothing more than one of his bloodsucking progenies and was not begotten through any act of undead sex, and while the sexual practices of vampires will take awhile to make their way to the big screen it’s clear that Marya wants Garth for more than just companionship.

 

“Until someone invents a dating app I’m stuck with abduction and emotional blackmail.”

Overall, Dracula’s Daughter is an interesting entry in the Universal Monster filmography as its protagonist is a vampire wishing to escape her curse who falls back on being a monster when things don’t turn out as she’d hoped, with actress Gloria Holden giving us a nuanced and seductive take on the female vampire, on the other hand, Otto Kruger is a less than convincing hero – not helped by the fact that I know him more for playing erudite villains in such films as Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Murder, My Sweet – but he’s even far less impressive when compared to Marguerite Churchill’s whose portrayal of the fiery secretary had me thinking that she should have been the hero and would have also made for even a better love interest for Marya.

 

“Let’s blow this popsicle stand and paint the town red.”

With this film, director Hillyer gives us a luscious and suggestive vampire tale, one that doesn’t need gothic castles and flashing fangs to generate suspense and tension – though we do end up at Castle Dracula it comes across more as an afterthought than anything else – so if you want to take another fun journey to Transylvania this sequel is well worth the trip.

How to Make a Monster (1958) – Review

The idea of a horror movie sequel is certainly nothing new, the concept is pretty much as old as the genre itself, but with the film How to Make a Monster American International Pictures took it to a new level with what could be best described as a “Behind the Scenes” meta-monster-movie as it is not a sequel to their previous hits I Was a Teenage Werewolf or I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, instead, it’s a film about the making of something that could best be described as “Teenage Werewolf vs Teenage Frankenstein” only with a mad make-up artist as the primary villain.

The film’s protagonist is veteran monster make-up artist Pete Dumond (Robert H. Harris) who has been working for American International Studios for twenty-five years only to suddenly find out that his services are no longer required, a new regime has taken over the studio and has decided focus productions on such things as musicals and comedies and not the fading horror genre. Such an indignity Dumond will not take lying down and with the aid of his mild-mannered assistant Rivero (Paul Brinegar) he comes up with a plan to bring down the studio, but what can a couple of ageing movie men do against this new wave of studio execs? How about an evil plot involving a foundation cream in his monster make-up kit which has a numbing agent that leaves the wearer pliable to hypnotic suggestion?

 

“You will go and get me a ham sandwich.”

If that seems like a rather ludicrous plan to you then strap yourself in because the movie doesn’t get any better as the plot has teenage werewolf actor Larry Drake (Gary Clarke) and teenage Frankenstein monster Tony Mantell (Gary Conway) being “seduced” by Dumond who once he has them under his hypnotic control he sends them out to kill the new studio heads – for this we must ignore the belief that a person under hypnosis will not do anything against their nature, that is if we are to believe that Larry and Tony aren't some kind of Leopold and Lobe killers – but soon things get a little out of control when an ambitious security guard (Dennis Cross) starts nosing around and the cops try and break Rivero with a rather homophobic interrogation.

 

“Are you brainwashing young men again?”

Stray Observations:

• It’s obvious that the lead character was based on legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who himself was given the pink slip after faithfully creating most of the classic Universal Monsters.
• Gary Conway returns for the part of a teenage Frankenstein monster but Michael Landon was too busy shooting Ponderosa to revise his teenage werewolf.
• We get Dumond telling Rivero how he prefers working with young actors, seeming to really care for Larry and Tony, which makes his “I’ll use them as instruments of murder” to be a rather hard left turn characterwise.
• Dumond tells Larry Drake his acting career is over once the studio stops making monster movies because his fans only know him under monster make-up, which makes no sense as he plays a werewolf and thus his fans must have seen him in human form at some point.
• A studio security confronts Dumond with his documented suspicions about the first murder, with evidence that indicates Dumond could very well be the killer, yet he does this in such a bizarre jovial manner, as if tipping off the killer that you are on to him is a healthy thing to do.
• That only one person witnessed Tony Mantell in his teenage Frankenstein make-up as he made his way to Dumond’s home across town after committing the murder is probably the most fanciful nature of the film.
• The faux-Elvis musical number that was to indicate the direction the studio was going towards is pretty accurate as AIP was soon making Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon beach movies.

 

That Elvis never made a musical monster movie is a crying shame.

In the late 50s, there was definitely an oversaturation of monster movies and the genre had quite fairly reached the end of its current cycle, which makes producer Herman Cohen’s film How to Make a Monster very timely, unfortunately, even at a mere 75 minutes in length the story runs out of steam quickly and can’t seem to sustain its own ridiculous premise, so as prescient as this film can be called it’s also an example of a combination of weaknesses consisting of a low budget and a not completely thought script that resulted in a less than stellar final product. Then there is the gimmick of the last act changing from black and white to colour that adds nothing to the proceedings and then the film ends rather abruptly with a “House of Wax” style fire burning the madman’s many works of art and such pesky questions as “Do the police charge Tony and Larry for the murders they committed under hypnosis?” are left unanswered.

 

“Don’t worry, the teens at the Drive-in will be too busy making out to notice such trivialities.”

How to Make a Monster is an interesting entry in the horror genre and if a little more time had been given to the script it could have become a classic – the reveal that his mask collection contained actual skulls within hinted at a much darker and more interesting character – alas, this was not to be, instead we simply got another charmingly goofy movie from American International Pictures, which to be fair is not necessarily a bad thing.

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) – Review

When it came to making a follow-up to AIP's box office hit I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the studio did something rather unusual, and a little gutsy, as they could have simply gone with an easy sequel and rolled out something like Return of the Teenage Werewolf, instead, they took a different monster from the Universal Monsters canon, but then also including returning actor Whit Bissell to make it almost seem like a sequel, despite Bissell’s character having died in the previous film.

In this low-budget take on Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, we have Professor Frankenstein (Whit Bissell) as a guest lecturer from England, who tells his American colleagues of his theories about organ transplants and the re-animating of dead tissue, but then his beliefs are mocked and he decides to secretly assemble a human being from the parts of young cadavers, which how any sane man would react.  With the reluctant aid of his assistant Dr. Karlton (Robert Burton) and a well-timed catastrophic automobile wreck outside his house to provide him with the first fresh corpse, he and his mad science are off and running. As with all true mad scientists, this Doctor Frankenstein has a god complex and tosses out such lines as “In this laboratory, there is no death until I declare it so” just so we don’t forget that he is an egomaniacal madman, but things really start lining up for the good doctor when a plane full of athletes crashes and after a little light graverobbing he has all the additional parts he needs, and before you can say “Igor pass me the lightning rod” the monster (Gary Conway) lives.

Note: The make-up for this incarnation of Frankenstein’s monster looks more like someone simply threw lumps of clay at the actor’s head than it does a cobbled-together monster, and it is so far from what legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce did for Boris Karloff that it’s almost laughable.

Now, because the original 1931 Frankenstein had a love interest, AIP clearly felt their film should have one as well, which leads to the introduction of Margaret (Phyllis Coates) as Frankenstein’s secretary and fiancée, a woman who quickly becomes upset due to neglect and soon starts to question the secrecy behind her betrothed’s experiments, even to the point of getting a key made so that she could sneak into the lab and get a good look for herself.  Needless to say, this was not a good idea, apparently, she has not only never heard of the story of Bluebeard and the forbidden rooms.  She also forgot that she was dealing with a man who had already hauled off and slapped her for simply suggesting that she could “find out” what he is doing if she really wanted to, so when Frankenstein learns that she has met the monster face to face his only course of action is to manipulate the creature into murdering her, and then feeding the corpse to his pet alligator.

 

I hate to blame the victim, but she did ignore a shit ton of red flags.

Stray Observations:

• Whit Bissell is supposed to be playing a visiting professor from England, yet he doesn’t even attempt an English accent. I wonder if he tried and the crew begged him to stop.
• Professor Frankenstein’s American colleagues ridicule the very idea of reanimating dead tissue but as the Professor is a direct descendant of the original Baron Frankenstein, who actually created a monster from dead body parts, how could anybody refute his claims when they’ve already been proven valid decades ago?
• Frankenstein tells his associate that to succeed in his experiments he will require body parts from young subjects and then ten seconds later there is a horrible automobile accident right outside his window, with two cars loaded with teenagers. There is convenient timing and then there is the "God of Luck" shoving a horseshoe right up your ass, this film definitely falls in that latter category.
• Frankenstein and Dr. Karlton are able to walk away from a crowded accident scene with a corpse draped over their shoulders and not a single person notices what they are doing, apparently, that lucky horseshoe went in very deep.
• The laboratory of Professor Frankenstein sports a secret pit for his pet alligator, which is used to dispose of damaged or unneeded body parts, but he is simply visiting America on a work visa, so where did he find such a location? Do they place ads for mad scientist laboratories on Craigslist?
• The final sequence is brought to us in a living colour, a gimmick that would be used in War of the Colossal Beast a year later.

 

Sadly, we never get “I Was a Teenage Mummy.”

As a horror film this entry barely qualifies as such, it does have murder and dismemberment but the script is so ludicrously stupid that it can’t help but feel a bit too campy and insane, which negates much of the story’s horrific elements. On the acting side of things, we have Gary Conway a man with about as much charisma as a piece of driftwood and whose portrayal of the monster is so lacklustre and uninteresting that if it wasn’t for the laughably bad make-up, you’d most likely nod off during any time he’s on-screen. Whit Bissell fares slightly better here because his mad scientist is so over-the-top evil that it’s clear from the outset that he was having a great time with the part, any entertainment garnered from this film will most likely come from his performance. Overall, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is nothing more than a hastily slapped-together production that hoped to do well with the Drive-In set and that’s about it.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) – Review

What if James Dean’s character from Rebel Without a Cause had been bitten by a werewolf? That was the basic premise behind American International Pictures’ horror “gem” which kicked off a brief-lived series of "teenage monster" movies that would end with Herbert L. Strock’s How to Make a Monster, but the first in this brief franchise was more notable for the casting than its premise, as it starred then unknown Michael Landon a man who would go on to fame and fortune in such television shows as Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, and Touched by an Angel.

Our protagonist for this particular AIP outing is a troubled teenager named Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) who will overreact to the slightest perceived affront, even a surprising pat on the back can instigate a complete meltdown and kick off a massive brawl and we are introduced to him during a knock down drag out fight with his classmate Jimmy (Tony Marshall) that is only stopped due to the intervention of local police Detective Sgt. Donovan (Barney Phillips), and it is through this kind officer's suggestion, as well as Tony’s girlfriend Arlene (Yvonne Lime), that Tony eventually caves into the idea of seeking professional help when it comes to handling his anger issues. This sounds good but this help comes, unfortunately, in the form of Doctor Alfred Brandon (Whit Bissell), a "psychologist" who is not only a practitioner of hypnotherapy but also of pharmaceutical manipulation that he believes is required to save the human race. When Tony is served up to him on a plate he tells his assistant, Dr. Hugo Wagner (Joseph Mell), that “I'm going to TRANSFORM him and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within... and then I'll be judged the benefactor. Mankind is on the verge of destroying itself. The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive norm, to start all over again.” As I always say, if you’re going to have science it may as well be mad science.

 

“My college roommate, Doctor Jekyll, had some brilliant ideas.”

There’s not really much plot to I Was a Teenage Werewolf, not that this kind of horror film really needs one, and most of the film consists of stupid teenagers doing stupid things that are intermittently interrupted by Tony acting like an asshat until the movie eventually gets around to him turning into a werewolf and killing a couple of his idiot classmates. What makes this werewolf movie unique is the science fiction angle, there are no gypsies offering sage advice regarding wolfsbane and the full moon, instead, we have a mad scientist using psychotropic drugs and hypnotism to regress our tragic hero into some primitive state – why this transformation is triggered by hearing a school bell is never quite explained, but hey, that’s science for you – but once he does become a hairy murder machine the local authorities are quick to round up a torch-bearing mob to hunt the poor bastard down. There are some traditions you can’t let go and chasing a monster through the forest by torchlight is clearly one of them.

 

Going after pretty girls, also a monster tradition.

Stray Observations:

• Tony is a hot head who explodes into an uncontrollable rage at the drop of a hat, if he’d been hit by gamma rays instead of chemically induced lycanthropy he could have made for a good Incredible Hulk.
• When the movie starts its Halloween but we don’t see a single Trick or Treater in sight, in fact, even the party that Tony takes Arlene to is said to be a costume party, apparently, only one person got that memo.
• At this “Halloween party” in a “Haunted House” that looks like someone’s basement rec room, the guys constantly play idiotic practical jokes on their girlfriends, and I can’t help but wonder if these guys ever get laid.
• Dr. Alfred Brandon uses drugs and hypnotherapy to "hurl Tony back to his primitive state” but shouldn’t this have resulted in a “Teenage Caveman” and not a werewolf?
• One glance at the crime scene photos of the first victim and the police station janitor comes to the immediate conclusion of “werewolf” despite the fact that a slashed throat could be caused by just about anything, that he is immediately proven right does not negate my point.
• Brandon wants filmed documentation of the transformation to show the world his amazing discovery, but he doesn’t think to put Tony into restraints before turning him back into a werewolf.

 

There’s mad science and then there is dumb science.

With a meagre budget of $150,000 thousand dollars, I Was a Teenage Werewolf does not have the look of either a gothic masterpiece or science fiction epic as the day-for-night shooting is laughably obvious and the werewolf itself looks far from convincing, but the assembled cast is surprisingly good for an American International Picture, even if the teenagers in this movie all look to be in their late twenties to early thirties, and Michael Landon pulls out all the stops as this very angry young man, even when acting like a complete jerk and is able to garner some sympathy for his character. Not only do we get great character actors like Whit Bissell and Barney Phillips in prime roles we also get Lost in Space dad Guy Williams as a uniformed police officer tasked with tracking down the werewolf, what’s not to love about that?

 

“Danger, Will Robinson!”

Overall, this little science fiction/horror flick takes an interesting spin on one of Hollywood’s classic movie monsters and while it lacks much in the way of cool werewolf action, seriously, there isn’t a lot of werewolf action other than Michael Landon in monster makeup wandering around the woods, it more than makes up for it with the calibre of acting on display. This low-budget 50s outing isn’t going to rival classic films like Lon Chaney Jr’s The Wolf Man or modern interpretations like Joe Dante’s The Howling but it’s still a fun little gem that is worth checking out.

Deadly Games (1989) – Review

A popular holiday staple for many families is John Hughs's Christmas comedy Home Alone, where a young boy must defend his home from intruders, but while that film has become a holiday classic, and is beloved by many, it was not the first film with that premise because a year earlier writer/director René Manzor brought to the world a movie with much the same idea, only a whole lot darker.

Also known as Game Over, Dial Code Santa Clause, and Hide and Freak this French Christmas horror film brought the premise of your typical Disney flick and then wrapped it up in the trappings of a Rambo movie and then wonderfully disguised it as a Christmas present. It should be pointed out that the surroundings of Deadly Games are vastly more interesting than the plot – a young boy fighting of crazed vagrant – and that’s not to say there is anything wrong with that simple premise but it’s the world of this movie, dynamically created by René Manzor, that is the true selling point. The film’s protagonist is Thomas de Frémont (Alain Lalanne), a child prodigy obsessed with action films and gaming, who lives in a secluded and high-tech castle with his widowed mother Julie (Brigette Fossey) and his near-blind and diabetic grandfather (Louis Ducreux), but when his doubts surrounding the existence of Santa Clause unknowingly results in him making contact with a local vagrant (Patrick Floersheim) through an online videotex service, this vagrant who then poses as a department store Santa to learn the location of Thomas’s home.

 

“You better watch out. You better not cry.”

What follows is a series of nightmarish events that start with the psychotic vagrant arriving at the Frémont estate, having smuggled himself inside a delivery truck and then murdering the driver, he then proceeds to kill the groundskeeper and the family chef, and right there we have a higher body count than your average Christmas family film, but things really get going when he enters the house via the chimney as any respectable Santa Claus would, and brutally stabs Thomas’s dog right before the child’s horrified eyes, and it is here where the movie quickly shifts into what becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse between Thomas and “Santa” as the kid must use his home’s security system and booby traps, all constructed by him, as well as an arsenal of makeshift weaponry, to defend his enfeebled grandfather until help can arrive.

 

“To survive war, you gotta become war.”

While a kid using booby traps and the like to thwart an intruder may seem similar to that of John Hughes/Chris Columbus Christmas outing this film is tonally very different, with the vagrant being a crazed individual with no financial motivation – he’s no Wet Bandit, he’s a cold-blooded psychopath – and Thomas is no wise-cracking Kevin McCallister as he is clearly in fear for his life and that of his grandfather, with him in literal tears as he tries to outmaneuver and out think the killer, but while the danger is certainly more apparent in this film, as compared to Home Alone, it’s also not really comparable to other such Christmas horror-themed movies like Black Christmas because while there is blood and violence on screen it’s of a more PG-13 variety, rather than what you’d find in something like Jack Frost. What makes this film really stand out is the wonderful art direction by Eric Moulard, which makes up the battleground between Thomas and the vagrant, a massive mansion littered with secret passageways, mazes and hidden rooms, and Moulard should get all the kudos in the world for bringing René Manzor’s bizarre tale to life as it almost strides the line between horror and fantasy.

 

This is the Frémont mansion, which could honestly double for Santa’s Castle.

Stray Observations:

• This kid loves playing war games with his dog and even has trigger-activated trapdoors with a net below, which does come in handy when a killer Santa is in the mix, but is adding a trapdoor into a hallway even structurally sound?
• Julie de Frémont is a loving mother who wants her child to keep believing in Santa Claus for a little while longer, which is nice, but as a business owner, she is more akin to Scrooge as her demands are a bit extreme for a company that sells toys, stating to her staff “I called this meeting because as you know, it is Christmas eve, and we will pull an all-nighter” which is a bit insane as you’d assume most parents would have purchased their kid’s toys by now.
• Thomas’s mother tells him, “You know, you mustn’t try and see Santa or he’ll get mad and turn into an ogre” and while I’m not familiar with every myth surrounding Santa Claus this aspect sounds more like Krampus than it does Kris Kringle.
• Julie’s private home phone is located in a barren attic room that is reached by traversing a bizarre maze, and I now starting to really question the sanity of this family.
• The killer eventually captures Thomas but then lets him go, stating "I win. You lose. Now... I'll go hide myself, and you'll be it. Okay?" and this is something that adds to the overall madness and fear to the story, an element that many horror films lack.

 

A killer with that kind of whimsical madness is really terrifying.

The brilliant art direction and René Manzor’s wonderfully bizarre script wouldn't have mattered a tinker’s damn if not for the powerful performance by Alain Lalanne as a nine-year-old fighting for his life, and that of his grandfather, and it's his portrayal of a terrified but courageous kid that is the true heart of this film and when finally buckles down to fight during the second act, offering the threat “Even if you are Santa, I’m going to scare you to death” you can’t help but fall in love with this little hero.  This is made more realistic by showing him having actual qualms about hurting his attack – he balks at running him over with the car and has trouble pulling the trigger when he gets a hold of the murdered cop’s gun – and when he is finally reunited with his mom it’s a more exhausted and emotionally devastating ending that what you’d typically expect to find.

 

This kid will be in therapy for years after this.

René Manzor’s Deadly Games is a truly strange holiday outing, one that turns the conventions of both Christmas movies and horror flicks on their collective heads to bring us a brilliant take on the “Clever Kid vs Adult” genre that not only has a hyper-stylized setting but a young protagonist who is portrayed in a very real and honest way, physically and emotionally – not many films of this type will have a kid dress his own wounds and then build himself a makeshift splint/crutch – and while this movie will be oft compared to Home Alone one shouldn’t forget that it was first and is also very different and a whole lot darker.