Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) – Review

The sexploitation films of the 60s and late 70s were a hallmark of non-explicit sexual situations but contained lots of gratuitous nudity, which kind of set themselves apart from hardcore pornography that would populate adult movie theatres of the 1970s and 1980s, yet there was a subgenre of sexploitation called Nazisploitation, which consisted of films depicting Nazis committing sex crimes and horrific acts during World War II – often following the “Women in Prison” formula – and today we will be looking at an Italian entry in this bizarre subgenre, one known also as The Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

While films like The Stewardesses and SexWorld relied on simulated sex and loads of nudity to draw in moviegoers’ films of the Nazisploitation Subgenre, such as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, added sadism, gore and degradation to “spice things up” and Cesare Canevari’s Gestapo’s Last Orgy more than aptly provided such things for its viewers, whether they wanted it or not. The general plot of this entry deals with the German SS officer Conrad von Starke (Adriano Micantoni) who is being forced to run a prison camp that performs double duty as a brothel, to take care of the needs of German soldiers on leave from the fighting, but while Starke insists that he himself would rather be fighting on the front lines his penchant for brutality and sadism clearly makes this the perfect job.

 

“Well men, it looks like we’ll be having a lot of sex, but first, some callisthenics.”

Things take an interesting turn when Starke becomes fascinated with Lise Cohen (Daniela Poggi), a Jewish prisoner who he becomes obsessed with as her spirit appears to be unbreakable, and he makes it his personal mission to break her body and soul. He tries very hard to bring her to the edge of madness, pushing the spectre of death into her face, but she has her own demons ones that keep such things as death either meaningless or even welcoming. The characters of Starke and Lise are surprisingly complex for this type of film, Lise is tortured with guilt surrounding a dark history while the sadistic Starke has a strangely submissive side, with him being dommed by Alma (Maristella Greco) a female SS guard and even being sodomized with his own whip by her.  While this is unexpected character development, director Cesare Canevari did toss in some strange “love stories” through this film, such as Lise’s best friend falling in love with a guard and Lise herself having an affair with the camp’s doctor. Most of these relationships are less than organic and are merely an excuse to get a sex scene in the offing, but this at least gives us a break from all that weird torture stuff.

 

“I guess that was a gun in your pocket.”

And just how bad do things get during this film's 96-minute running time? Not only do we the expected scenes of naked women being whipped and sexually assaulted but we are also subjected to forced lesbian incest, coprophagia, urination, women being sodomized with bats, dumped in vats of lye and in one particularly horrendous dinner scene where hear from one of the SS staff that he hopes that in the future there can be farms where Jews can one day be a source of food, and that particular moment leads to the revelation that the dinner consists of a stew made of unborn Jewish infants. When one of the female prisoners passes out in shock they douse her body in brandy and set it alight, before eating her corpse in a disgusting orgy of sex and cannibalism. So yeah, this is definitely not a film for the squeamish and it is no surprise that Gestapo’s Last Orgy was banned in many countries and put on the “Video Nasty” list across the board. I’m not sure what the target demographic was for this film but over the years it has developed a bit of a cult following, but whoever would belong to such a "cult following" I'm not sure I want to meet.

 

I bet their banquets are atrocious.

Stray Observations:

• The women prisoners are forced to march naked around the camp, but to prove they weren’t complete bastards it appears that the Nazis allowed them to wear fuzzy slippers.
• The female prisoners are checked for sexually transmitted diseases yet at one point the doctor comments that a certain woman doesn’t need to be examined because she is a virgin, and I’m unclear as to how he was able to determine this without some kind of examination.
• Despite being starved, tortured and repeatedly raped, Lise manages to keep her make-up picture-perfect and intact while her 70s flyaway hair also remains nicely coifed and manageable at all times.
• Lise is suspended upside down over what I’m guessing was supposed to be a cage full of voracious rats but in actuality was a box full of gerbils.

 

What an adorable way to be tortured.

What can be said about a movie called Gestapo’s Last Orgy, is it a good film, not really, but then again was being good actually the point of this type of sexploitation film? The acting is a little better than what could be found in your average hardcore pornographic film of the time, which is certainly damning with faint praise, and the cinematography by Claudio Catozzo is solid on what I can assume was a fairly low budget and the end product does look fairly well put together, but you first have to be able to handle the questionable content before you can even think to appreciate the craftsmanship and that’s not something easily done if the subject on display is as nasty as this one gets.

Overall, this is not a film I can recommend even to the bizarrely curious as the sadistic torture elements weren’t all that well-executed – I’ve seen better in a Friday the 13th movie – and the sex scenes themselves were rather tepid, which is odd considering it deals with vile Nazis raping beautiful women, so unless you are really dying to see a movie that deals with Nazis, cannibalism and man-eating gerbils I’d say give this one a miss.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) – Review

One of the most influential post-apocalyptic stories out there is that of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a novel that pitted the last remaining human on Earth against a world populated by vampires, and while many other authors have since tackled similar subject matter it’s Matheson’s iconic story that has stood the test of time, but as for movie adaptations, this one story had a more troubling journey.

This movie opens with “The Last Man on Earth” Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) a man living in a world where everyone else has been infected by a plague that has killed the bulk of the world's population or turned them into undead, zombie-like creatures that cannot stand sunlight.  They fear mirrors and are repelled by garlic, which makes them sound like vampires but these weak, unintelligent, and shambling monstrosities that Morgan is able to brush off with ease are a far cry from the traditional vampires we've seen in movies and literature over the years. We are first introduced to Morgan as he goes about his day, making a fresh batch of wooden stakes for his vampire hunting and carting off corpses to a massive burning pit for their disposal, as well as putting up with the nightly moaning of his ex-best friend, now vampire gatecrasher, Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), whose rantings of "Morgan! We're going to kill you!" would get on anyone's nerves.  It should be noted that Vincent Price doesn’t seem all that dynamic as a vampire killer, he simply wanders into a room to stake whatever hapless vampire he encounters, as if he’s just punching a clock rather than ending a life, and author Richard Matheson always thought someone like Gregory Peck or Rod Taylor would have been more appropriate to portray as a post-apocalyptic hero and as much as I love Vincent Price I tend to agree with him on this point.

 

“I should have called Peter Cushing for advice.”

Not long after settling us into this bleak and disturbing world, one littered with corpses and empty streets, the film rips us away from that world and into a series of overlong flashback sequence that details the arrival of the “Vampire Plague” and it is here that we see Morgan's happy family life taking a terrible turn when his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli) and daughter Kathy (Christi Courtland) both succumb to the plague, but this is before it was widely known by the public that the dead would return to life so instead of taking his wife to the public burn pit used to dispose of his daughter's corpse, as was required by government edict, he privately buries her, only for her to show up at his door later that night. As mentioned, the vampires in this film have very little in common with most literary or cinematic counterparts, other than those few vampiric weaknesses and their need to be staked.  They don’t even come across as much of a threat and when Morgan’s wife arrives at his door the film jumps back to the present and I’m left to assume that he just asked her to leave.

 

“Can I interest you in any of our wonderful Amway products?”

With those flashbacks out of the way we get back to our movie “Already in Progress” where Morgan has a brief respite from his post-apocalyptic ennui when a dog appears in the neighbourhood, but this movie has no time for any sort of “Man in His Dog” story as the poor thing is soon revealed to have become infected with the plague and Morgan is forced to bury the creature with a stake through its heart, but things start to look up when, while he’s burying his dog, he spots a woman walking around in the daylight and when he chases after he learns that her name is Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia) and that for three years she has been living on the run from the vampire hordes. Unfortunately, she fails the garlic test and Morgan is able to confirm that she is infected, yet there is a new wrinkle to her story, apparently, she is part of a new society, one that has developed a vaccine that allows them to function normally with the drug in the bloodstream and she has been sent to spy on Morgan.

 

This is why reading a dating profile thoroughly is so important.

Ruth explains that her people are planning to rebuild society as they destroy the remaining undead humans, she then points out that many of the vampires Morgan killed were still alive, and it’s at this point that Morgan starts to come to grips with the whole “I Am Legend” part of the story as he comes to the realization that he is actually the monster of this story and the only real way out is death. The film ends with a bizarre chase sequence, with a militant group of “good vampires” chasing poor Morgan around the city until eventually cornering him in a church, which allows him to get a nice “spear in the side” moment that isn’t quite as Christ-Like as the one Charlton Heston got in The Omega Man but close enough. Unfortunately, Morgan’s dying rant of “You're freaks! I'm a man! The last man!“ really undercuts his early realization that he was the real monster in this equation.

 

“Let's make one thing perfectly clear, you guys all suck!”

Stray Observations:

• A common vampiric trait is their inability to cast a reflection in mirrors, yet for some reason in this film, they are repelled by their reflections. In the book, they suffered from something called “Hysterical Blindness” and thus couldn’t see their reflection.
• Morgan keeps his home boarded up, with crosses, garlic, and mirrors at every entrance, but his bedroom window is broken and basically open, which seems like a fatal oversight.
• Even though his door is covered in a variety of “vampire repellants” it doesn’t seem to stop them from gathering around to bang on it with their fists and clubs.
• One thing that always bothers me in post-apocalyptic movies is everyone’s reliance on gasoline, despite the fact that regular gasoline has a shelf life of three to six months, and that’s if properly stored, while in this movie Morgan has been living in a desolate world for three years so the gas for his generator and car would be quite unusable.
• With the whole world to choose from it’s odd that Morgan would pick his suburbanite home as a refuge when so many other places would be easier to defend. One must assume that he stays there to futilely hang onto the one remaining piece of his past.
• Morgan gives Ruth a transfusion and she is instantly cured of her vampirism; this miraculous moment is then immediately forgotten, and I must ask “With her being cured can she stay still with this new vampire society?”
• While fleeing the “good vampires” Morgan breaks into the police armoury and grabs a few gas grenades, leaving behind several automatic weapons that would have been much more useful.
• The vampires in this film are almost zombie-like, whereas, in the novel, they are fast and capable of running and climbing, making this film a precursor to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, in fact, Romero openly admits to ripping of this movie to make his horror flick.

 

“They’re coming to get you, Morgan.”

As different as this is from the novel it still remains the most faithful version of Matheson’s story, which isn’t saying much considering The Omega Man and Will Smith’s I Am Legend barely resembled the source material, and even though the author was so dissatisfied with the result that he utilized a pen name instead of his own for screen credit one has to admit that this film at least captured the overall theme of the book, if not the mechanics of the vampire world he had created. Shot on a relatively small budget The Last Man on Earth does look fairly good, cinematographer Franco Delli Colli provided some truly beautiful black and white photography, and Vincent Price gives a solid performance as a man beaten down by the unbearable weight of being trapped in a world of the dead. With a proper script, a decent budget, and better direction this could have been a true classic, instead of being relegated as a lesser Vincent Price vehicle, and who knows, maybe someday we will get a proper adaptation of this classic horror story.

The Black Scorpion (1957) – Review

The 1950s were all about giant monsters raging across the countryside, or at least that’s how I like to think of them, full of radioactive insects and cranky dinosaurs, but in 1957 the father of one of the greatest movie monsters of all time, the father of King Kong, stop-motion legend Willis O’Brien, would take another shot at capturing that love for rampaging furor, which audiences of all ages seemed to have, and that film would The Black Scorpion.

Unlike many of the monster films of this era, the creatures of The Black Scorpion were not created by atom bomb testing or by a mad scientist dabbling in God’s domain, instead, it’s a case of God being his usual playful self and unleashing these monsters just for the fun of it. The movie opens with a narrator telling us that “For centuries, the prayers of Mexico’s peasants have been their only shield against the devasting furies that have wrecked their homes and destroyed their lives. And so again they kneel, terrified and helpless as a new volcano is created by the mysterious and rebellious forces of nature.” Geologists Dr. Hank Scott (Richard Denning) and Dr. Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas) are dispatched to study this particular “rebellious force” but while on the route they come across a smashed home, a crying baby and a totalled Mexican police car, as volcanoes are not known for performing hit and run attacks on patrol cars we find Scott and Ramos a little puzzled by all of this.

 

“This is either the work of a giant arachnid or possibly football rioters.”

When our two heroes arrive at the nearby town of San Lorenzo they are told by Father Delgado (Pedro Galván) that the destruction they have witnessed was caused by something the villagers believe to be a demon bull and not just the result of volcanic activity. Ignoring this inciteful explanation our dynamic dumb-dumbs begin their geological survey while members of the Mexican army, under Major Cosio (Arturo Martínez), arrive in San Lorenzo to begin disaster-relief efforts, they ignore his plea to not wander around the volcano and head off so that the film can have its “meet cute” in the form of local rancher Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday), who Scott immediately falls in love with.

 

His love of rocks is put to the ultimate test.

The film starts out as a bit of a mystery, with strange destruction and bodies killed by some weird organic poison, but before they can even get the results of the poison back from entomologist Dr. Velasco (Carlos Múzquiz), giant scorpions attack the ranch and the mystery is solved.  With a young boy named Juanito (Mario Navarro) in toe, because what’s a monster movie without a kid sidekick, Scott and Arturo volunteer to be lowered into a massive pit that is believed to be the nest of these giant prehistoric scorpions. That these two idiots survive wandering a cavern that contains fifty or more of these giant scorpions is probably one of the most egregious uses of plot armour I’ve ever seen, and by this point, the military has already proven that rifles have absolutely no effect on these creatures, and all our heroes thought to bring with them was a rife, a camera and a canister of gas that may or may not be effective.

 

That they survive this flies in the face of all logic.

What is effective in this film is the stop-motion animation used to bring the giant scorpions to life, done by stop-motion pioneer Pete Peterson these moments are quite chilling, of course, that is of course when the filmmakers aren’t randomly throwing in these terrible transparent matte shots where the scorpions look like terrible see-through shadow monsters.  There is one particular sequence dealing with the giant scorpions attacking a train that is both brutal and horrifying and is a real showstopper and must have had 1950s audiences at the edge of their seats as the creature pluck up passengers one by one for a little midnight snack.

 

"Is this the dining car?"

Willis O’Brien was the special-effects supervisor on this picture, with Peterson responsible for most of the hands-on work, but with one of O’Brien’s calibre on deck it is not wrong to expect there to be some decent creature attacks, unfortunately, he was working under a much smaller budget than what he had with King Kong, and this kind of explains some of those dodgy moments of bad opticals, and while we do get some really nice stop-motion scorpion attack sequences we are also subjected to the repeated use of a drooling scorpion puppet for many up close reaction shots that, sadly, never once look all that convincing.

 

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mister DeMille.”

Stray Observations:

• Richard Denning should avoid travelling south, a few years earlier a trip to South America resulted in an encounter with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
• Upon finding the smashed police car Hank and Arturo hear the dispatcher on the car’s radio calling for an update, what is odd here is that we're in Mexico and the dispatcher is speaking English and the filmmakers didn’t even bother to give the dispatcher a regional accent.
• The sounds of the scorpions are the same ones used in the classic giant ant film Them! because why bother creating new sounds for your insect/arachnid threat when you have access to a nice audio library?
• Once the threat is revealed to be prehistoric giant scorpions it’s kind of strange that our two geologists would continue to be called upon to deal with this threat. Is monster fighting part of a geologist’s university curriculum?
• The film includes a seven-year-old kid who is incredibly annoying, one who constantly gets into trouble, which is a trope that would become a mainstay of the Godzilla and Gamera movies.
• Our heroes are lowered into a large pit to find the scorpions and encounter a thirty-foot worm and a giant trapdoor spider, which isn’t surprising as Willis O’Brien used leftover creatures from his "Lost Spider Pit Sequence" that was excised from the 1933 King Kong.

 

“Beat it you stupid worm, this is my movie!”

Directed by Edward Ludwig, The Black Scorpion has some very fine moments, the aforementioned attack on a train by the scorpions being an especially effective sequence, but the film’s three leads are about as exciting as dry toast at a church picnic and any time spent with them makes us long all the more for the film’s title creatures to show up, as they are some of the ugliest, meanest, nastiest creatures ever brought to the big screen. One can’t fault the filmmakers too much for the rather tepid and forgettable romance that has been shoehorned in, as this was pretty much a requirement of the time, and while I have little use for cardboard heroes Richard Denning does at least try to bring a little character to this otherwise dull protagonist. The Black Scorpion may be a paint-by-the-numbers creature feature but when those few excellent monster moments do occur it’s actually worth the wait.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) – Review

Long before Stephen King became the first name in horror that title belonged to author Edgar Allan Poe, who was not only a master of the macabre but also considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, and like King, his stories have found their way onto the silver screen many times over and also like King, these adaptations often strayed far afield of the source material.  Case in point Universal Pictures' 1932 production of Murders in the Rue Morgue, a film that can only be considered an adaptation of Poe’s short story if you were to close one eye and squint really hard.

How far would you go to find a mate for your talking ape? That question is the basic premise of Universal’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, where a man running a carnival sideshow sends his trained ape out into the streets to abduct young women and then inject them with ape blood to create a mate for Erik, his talking ape. Those familiar with the original Poe short story will be left scratching their heads as none of this remotely happens in the Poe classic, which dealt with a sailor’s escaped orangutan that wandered into a woman’s apartment and when its arrival resulted in screams it panicked and killed the woman and her daughter, so yeah, there is nothing in that story about blood transfusions or talking apes and certainly no rooftop chase concluding with the hero having a showdown with the aforementioned ape.

 

“It wasn’t beauty that killed the beast, just her well-armed boyfriend?”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, the movie opens with medical student Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) and his beautiful fiancée Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox) visiting a touring carnival, along with Dupin’s roommate Paul (Bert Roach) and his girlfriend, and they decide to take in a sideshow run by Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a scientist who expounds on his theory of evolution, that mankind descended from the ape. The general public is not too keen on this bit of heresy but Dr. Mirakle's ape seems very interested in Camille, in fact, both Mirakle and his servant Janos (Noble Johnson) are enchanted by Camille, who Mirakle later plans as a mate for Erik. At an hour in length, Universal’s Murders in the Rue Morgue does run at a rather fast clip, with Mirakle abducting prostitutes and injecting them with Erik’s blood in some bizarre attempt at proving evolution as if he were on a deadline. It’s fair to say that these early depictions of science in the cinema were a bit dodgy, with electricity and the like being able to create wonders, that said, Mirakle’s plan makes little to no sense, "How is injecting an animal’s blood into a human body going to result in anything other than infection and death?"

 

He doesn’t even have the decency to have his lab located on a Bavarian mountaintop.

Poe’s short story was also the first example of the “Locked Room Mystery” with amateur detective Dupin deducing from the hair found at the scene that it would take someone, or something, incredibly agile and strong to make the climb and leap to that particular balcony window, but at this point in the movie Dupin already knows that there is an ape involved so there is no actual mystery to be solved and it’s only a matter of convincing the police to rush over to the secret lab of Dr. Mirakle, and this change basically undercuts the very fabric of the original tale. The only part of the mystery retained from Poe’s short story is that several witnesses give conflicting descriptions of what language the assailant was using – in the short story Dupin concludes they were not hearing a human voice at all – but here Dupin already knows who the guilty party is, so we just get him running around pointing out clues to the idiot gendarmes.

 

“Haven’t any of you read the book, this is ape hair!”

Stray Observations:

• The opening credits to this film state that it is “Based on the immortal classic by Edgar Allan Poe” but it should have said, “Based on the ravings of a writer who had heard of Edgar Allan Poe.”
• The film's opening credits use the same "Swan Lake" overture by Tchaikovsky as did Universal’s adaptation of Dracula, which also starred Bela Lugosi.
• We are told that this story takes place in Paris in 1845 but like most Hollywood productions of the time, not one person will even have so much as a hint of a French accent.
• Erik is supposed to be a gorilla but what we get is the standard "man in an ape suit" bit, and then to make matters worse there is the occasional close-up shot of its face where the filmmakers then used an actual chimpanzee.
• Dr. Mirakle has a disfigured assistant because what self-respecting mad scientist wouldn’t have his own Igor to help with the dirty work?
• Our villainous mad scientist binds his victims to a Saint Andrews Cross so that he can safely inject her with ape blood for his experiments, making him a little kinky as well as mad.

 

He has a nice laboratory/sex dungeon vibe going on here.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin was an amateur detective who used analytical thinking and observation to solve a mystery, which Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha absolutely “borrowed” when they created Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot respectively, but the Dupin found in this film is far from the brilliant detective found in Poe’s stories as to be almost indistinguishable from the source material, he’s just a medical student who stumbles across the machinations of a mad scientist, no real deductive reasoning required, and while he is a proper 19th-century hero actor Leon Ames isn’t able to imbue the character with any real substance and comes across as rather dull and uninteresting, in fact, his comic relief roommate is the only other character other than Dr. Miracle that raises the script above the standard potboiler of the time.

 

The original Odd Couple.

Clearly, major changes to the story were added so that it could be a starring vehicle for Bela Lugosi and he does an excellent job as a mad scientist, a role he would return to again in 1934’s The Black Cat, and while only a few elements remain from Edgar Allan Poe’s original short story – an ape, a murder and a man named Dupin figuring out what’s going on being the only survivor elements – we can still appreciate what director Robert Florey was trying to accomplish here, hampered by studio interference and having twenty-minutes of his film cut by the censors which left the film at an almost anemic 60-minutes, which certainly didn't help.  That all said, the Universal backlot never looked better and cinematographer Karl W. Freund created a very atmospheric 19th-century Paris and was able to imbue the proper mood for this type of tale. Overall, Universal’s Murders in the Rue Morgue is an odd little entry that had some solid elements to it, Lugosi clearly had a good time with his role but a goofy script and a truncated story stopped this one from reaching classic status.

The Deadly Mantis (1957) – Review

While space explorers were tangling with Cat-Women of the Moon and Leslie Nielsen was off seducing Anne Francis on the Forbidden Planet back on good ole planet Earth scientists and their stalwart gal-pals were doing their best to save humanity from giant insects, whether it be a giant Tarantula or the colossal ants from Them! these rather large pests made up a rather good-sized slice of the science fiction pie of the 1950s, and as the decade drew to a close we were treated to another startling insectoid threat in the form of The Deadly Mantis.

How can you make a science fiction movie on a low budget? The answer to that question is two simple words “stock footage.” All you have to add to this some nice expository narration and you can shave thousands of dollars from your budget, and for The Deadly Mantis Universal Pictures saved plenty of money in their production using these techniques, unfortunately, this sometimes resulted in the use of stock footage that didn’t even match previous shots, but who’s going to notice? This film not only relies on the heavy use of such footage but the audience is hit over the head with it right from the outset as the film opens with a ponderous narrator giving us a lengthy lecture on the importance of radar and the construction of the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning Line) that was put in place to protect all of us from a sneak attack across the North Pole, of course, this film isn’t about those nasty commies over in Russia but of a more dire and terrifying threat, and when one of these outposts goes offline it’s up to our heroes to investigate.

 

“Hey Mike, either Santa Claus is really early or that’s a giant mantis heading our way.”

Over at military-base Red Eagle One Commanding Officer Colonel Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens) is sent to investigate this lack of contact and is shocked to find the post destroyed, the men gone, and the giant slashes left in the snow outside are the only clues.  Later on, an Air Force plane is attacked by “something” and Joe is once again tasked to investigate, this time his search of the wreckage turns up what looks to be a giant claw – sadly not from the Sam Katzman film – and when a group of “top men” are unable to identify what creature this appendage belongs to the Pentagon calls upon Dr. Nedrick Jackson (William Hopper), a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History, and along with the museum’s in-house magazine editor Marge Blaine (Alix Talton), is hired to figure out just what kind of menace they are dealing with. Going by the title of this movie I’m betting it’s a mantis of some kind, sadly, it's halfway through the film’s running time before we actually see the damn title monster.

 

“If I don’t get home soon my wife is going to bite my head off.”

As is the case with many of the giant monster films of the 50s there isn’t a lot of plot or character development to speak of and The Deadly Mantis is no exception in that area, not only are we subjected to an inordinate amount of stock footage the bulk of the film is mostly people standing around discussing what is or is not going on, that is when they aren't endlessly staring at radar screens, and without much action to keep the audience awake. With maybe the exception of William Hopper, the cast of this film is so wooden that they could have been stored next to the prop of the deadly mantis, and things are definitely not aided by Nathan Juran’s direction which is as dull and listless as possible and is only partially saved by Ellis W. Carter’s nice cinematography.  As for the title creature, the well-designed and operated puppet of the mantis needed to get a better agent as it deserved more than to be in this sad film. The Deadly Mantis has absolutely no forward momentum as each scene seems to drift into the next with no sense of urgency or peril, despite what the film’s tagline implies that the world is “engulfed in terror” This is clearly not the case, and the film comes to its “exciting” conclusion with Col. Parkman flying his plane into the creature – it’s debatable if this was on purpose or another example of his incompetency – and then him marching into the Manhattan Tunnel to toss a bomb into the face of the already mortally wounded creature. Yeah, that was superheroic.

 

It wasn’t beauty that killed this beast, it was bean counters and studio execs.

Stray Observations:

• Unlike the giant ants in Them! the threat here wasn’t created by atomic testing, instead, the creatures are woken from a prehistoric slumber, much like the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but where that monster’s nap was interrupted by atomic testing the “Deadly Mantis” was freed by a volcanic eruption thousands of miles away.
• As is the case with all insects, the Praying Mantis is a cold-blooded creature, so how it was able to walk around let alone fly up in the frigid air of the Arctic is beyond me.
• Dr. Jackson states that “Grasshoppers and crickets aren't flesh eaters like the mantis” which is completely false as they are both just as carnivorous and deadly as the mantis, clearly this film has a very anti-mantis agenda.
• Why exactly is Col. Parkman tasked with hunting down the giant mantis? Is this some kind of military protocol of “I call dibs” because the commander of a radar installation wouldn’t be my top choice for the position of monster hunter.
• Actor William Hopper, who plays Dr. Nedrick Jackson, is no stranger to giant monsters as he fought the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth the same year this film was released.
• I’ll grant that a giant mantis would be a threatening creature, with its giant claws and mandibles, but when it comes to the safety of the film’s heroine I found the wolf-whistling sex-craved soldiers of the DEW Line to be a more clear and present danger to this poor woman's safety.
• When the mantis arrives in Washington D.C. its first stop is to visit the Washington Monument because even a giant insect can’t resist a good tourist attraction.

 

“Quick, someone call in the biplanes, I think it has Fay Wray.”

One of the key problems with The Deadly Mantis is that despite being told about all these attacks and horrifying tales of people being eaten it is only one giant bug, it certainly doesn’t come across as some kind of world-conquering menace, because, unlike the giant ants in Them! this is a singular threat and not a swarm of giant beasties.  And while monsters like Godzilla and Rodan were nigh invulnerable and caused citywide destruction, that is not the case here as the giant mantis is driven off by rifles and flamethrowers and is eventually dispatched after a single unfortunate collision with the hero’s plane. This is not a monster to instill fear into the populace and that is where this film fails big time as we never once feel that our cast of characters is in any real danger, mortal or otherwise, despite Alix Talton’s shrill screams to the contrary, and when the mantis's last pathetic moments unfold we pity both it and ourselves for sitting through this thing.

Note: The plot of this movie is very similar to that of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, with a creature waking up from the ice to then cause death and destruction as it marches south, so if you haven’t seen that Ray Harryhausen classic, do yourself a favour and check that one out instead.

Director Nathan Juran would helm the much superior 20 Million Miles to Earth, as well as the amazing fantasy film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, but the successes of those films I credit to the wonderful stop-motion animation work of Ray Harryhausen and not Juran’s directing skills, a man who would later give us such classics as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, which goes to show you how important the special effects men are when it comes to this genre. It should also be noted that if one were to remove all of the stock footage from The Deadly Mantis you’d probably only have enough left for a decent episode of The Outer Limits, and what we are stuck with is an incredibly tedious and monotonous film whose only highlights would be those very brief monster attacks, and while the puppet looked great those moments are barely enough to keep even the most avid monster movie fan awake.

Frogs (1972) – Review

Eco-horror in cinema has had a rather large diversity of entries over the years, with many minions of Mother Nature getting their shot in the spotlight, from spiders, bees, ants and the like, but in 1972 a rather dubious offering hit theatres that consisted of elements most often found in the gruesome pages of an EC Comic book and consisted not of simply one of natures animals going amok but a variety of species that all seem to want us dead. It should also be noted that at no point in this film will a frog actually kill anyone, I just wanted to set the record straight on that point before going any further.

“Today the pond! Tomorrow the world!”

If anything can be said about George McCowan’s film Frogs it won’t be about it not having a very clever marketing campaign because from that awesome poster to the various taglines the team behind this film clearly knew their target audience, people wanting to see a bunch of idiots being killed off one by one by various animals, and that is exactly what this movie provided. The supposed hero of this tale is freelance wildlife photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) who while canoeing around the surrounding island estate, owned by the wealthy and influential Crockett family, takes numerous pictures of the polluted swamp land, but his photo-journaling is interrupted when he gets swamped by a very drunk Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) who had been doing his best to impress his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark) with his motorboat piloting skills. A damp Pickett is invited back to the family estate where he soon finds himself embroiled in their annual Fourth of July birthday celebrations, despite the oncoming threat of Nature Striking Back.

 

“We can’t close the island, it’s the Fourth of July.”

It’s here that Pickett meets the family's grouchy, wheelchair-using patriarch Jason Crocket (Ray Milland), who will let nothing upset his Fourth of July schedule, not even the army of frogs that has started to lay siege to the mansion, or when people start going off into the woods to never return. This type of film requires the right type of menu, for the “And then there were none” aspect of the Nature Attacks genre and Frogs does not stint in that area; we have Clint’s much put-upon wife Jenny (Lynn Borden) and her two rugrats, there is butterfly enthusiast Iris Martindale (Hollis Irving) and her meek son Michael Martindale (David Gilliam) and his lackadaisical brother Ken (Nicholas Cortland) who has brought along his African American girlfriend Bella Garrington (Judy Pace) to presumably shake things up, though grandfather Jason seems more like just your regular rich asshole rather than a racist one.

 

“How did I get talked into coming to this honky affair?”

As the movie unfolds various members of the family will wander off to be killed by various members of the eco-system with Pickett Smith becoming more and more concerned that this animal uprising may be occurring all over the world, despite him having no evidence of this, and therein lies the biggest flaw as the screenplay keeps Smith in the dark for most of the film’s running time so his jumping to the conclusion that nature is fighting back makes no sense. Sam Elliott does his best to pull off a rather thankless role, one that looks to be a leading man part but is mostly a stock character designed to simply point out plot elements to the confused audience, even if such elements have no basis in fact. There is some romantic tension between him and Joan Van Ark’s character but the film has no time to really get any kind of romantic subplot going so it doesn’t go anywhere, and then there are his confrontations with the bullheaded patriarch whose insistence that his party continues despite the rising body count makes you wonder if he is suffering from some form of dementia. When Pickett eventually goes into “hero mode” he doesn’t get much in the cool action moments, a little water snake gives him some grief but it’s barely a heroic moment, and as the film’s real antagonist is the crotchety Jason there is no big payoff for Elliott's character and he doesn’t even get any cool one-liners.

 

“Sir, it’s time to take out the trash and I’m all out of garbage bags.”

Stray Observations:

• The title of this movie may be called “Frogs” but all we see on screen are cane toads so right off the hop this film is all about false advertising.
• This is early in Sam Elliott’s career and it’s almost distracting to see this fresh-faced hero without his trademark moustache.
• The family is shocked to find a snake dangling off the dining room chandelier, I’m equally shocked as snakes aren’t known for the flight so how they got on the chandelier is quite the mystery.
• After one body is found, some aggressive frog behaviour and a surprise visit by a snake, Pickett is quick to suggest that “Maybe nature is fighting back” and the only way I can see how he came to this conclusion is if he read ahead in the script.
• Michael is taken out by some tarantulas, but this is only made possible by him accidentally shooting himself in the leg and then being immobilized by strange white moss. So now we have plant life taking a page out of The Day of the Triffids?
• Ken is dispatched while at the greenhouse by some geckos who knock over numerous jars of poisonous chemicals, with the resulting toxic gas asphyxiating him, but what I’d like to know is if they’d accidentally knocked over those jars or were they somehow able to read the “Poison” label on the jars.

 

Geckos, the Professor Moriarty of the Animal Kingdom.

After watching this film all I can say is that someone should have told director George McCowan that all the “creepy” close-ups in the world were not going to make “frogs” seem scary or threatening, not even with composer Lex Baxter’s ominous score going all in to help sell the idea, but the film does have a talented cast, led by the always entertaining Sam Elliott, and while the premise of animals teaming up to attack mankind would later be used in the classic “Man vs Nature” entry The Day of the Animals this one does have some charm, not to mention, Ray Milland ranting about his birthday party will never stop being funny.

 

"Mister Milland, the croaking is coming from inside the house!"

Overall, George McCowan’s Frogs is an interesting entry in the eco-horror subgenre but it is really hampered by a lack of scope or scares of any kind. I should be clear in stating that this is far from the worst eco-horror movie out there but the cast on hand for this outing was too good to be wasted on such a weak offering, and it’s hard to be disappointed with Sam Elliot and Ray Milland.  Worse is the fact that the film set up the idea of the "rich asshats polluting the world" angle and them getting their comeuppance but this angle is pretty much forgotten from the outset as it quickly devolved into a movie about frogs marshalling their animal brethren like some kind of amphibian Patton, which may have worked if they had decided to make this an environmentally charged satire.

 

“Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by frogs."

Sam Elliott gives a nice performance as the outsider, facing off against the stubbornness of Ray Milland’s rich asshole, but the kills are lacklustre and the character motivations on display are anemic at best and mostly laughable, making the whole affair rather dull at times. If George McCowan’s Frogs is guilty of anything is in his failure to deliver on what the premise implied, sure, a bunch of idiots die but not in any imaginative way and the hinting of a possible worldwide animal apocalypse only has viewers wishing that the filmmakers would actually put some of that on screen. Overall, this is a disappointing entry in the genre and will now mostly be remembered for that really awesome poster

Cat People (1982) – Review

Re-making a horror classic is always going to be tricky business as it opens you up for hard comparisons, but the most successful way to tackle such a daunting task is to simply take the general premise of the original and then go off in your own wild and different directions, David Cronenberg’s The Fly a perfect example of this, and in 1982 director Paul Schrader took the foundations of RKO’s 1942 Cat People and turned it into an erotic horror film that was rife with nudity and gore, which one has to admit is about as far from the original as one could get.

I’m betting the pitch meeting for this remake went something along the lines of “I bet people will come if we give them full-frontal nudity of Nastassja Kinski.” Okay, maybe the genesis of this film wasn’t all that crass but I bet I’m not all that far off as this “erotic horror film” was heavy on the erotic and surprisingly light on the horror. When compared to Paul Schrader’s remake the original film was the epitome of understatement, relying on the dance of light and shadow to create the atmospheric mystery of their tale, but while watching this remake one quickly realizes that Schrader had no interest in making a straightforward take on that classic because other than a few nods to the original it pretty much stands on its own, and what really sold this darkly erotic tale was the casting of Nastassja Kinski in the lead role as she completely embodied the feline danger and sexuality which makes all that follows that much more believable.

 

She is the personification of caged heat.

The plot centers around the character of Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski) who arrives in New Orleans and is met there by her long-estranged brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell), they were separated at a young age when their parents died, and Paul takes his sister to his New Orleans townhouse where she is introduced to his enigmatic housekeeper Female (Ruby Dee) and from here on out the sexual tensions mount between all characters involved, which is a little concerning as it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a blood relation or not, and possibly a benefit. Cut to a prostitute finding her “John” missing and a large black leopard hiding under the bed, which horribly mauls her while she flees for her life, and this signals the rest of the cast to get involved, led by zoologist Oliver Yates (John Heard) who is aided in his travails by his assistants Alice (Annette O'Toole) and Joe (Ed Begley Jr.) in the attempt to capture this wayward cat. It's when they bring the black leopard back to their zoo that things start to really go off the rails.

 

Note: This movie does have quite the body count when compared to the original.

This vicious black leopard is, of course, none other than Paul Gallier and later in the film he explains to her their shared werecat heritage, which has something to do with primitive humans sacrificing/mating their women with black panthers to create some sort of hybrid and these “Cat People” transform into leopards when they have sex and only by killing a human can they regain their human form, but there is one somewhat icky exemption. He tells her that their parents were siblings and because werecats are ancestrally incestuous only sex between werecats can prevent these transformations. Needless to say, Irena is not at all interested in bumpy uglies with her brother and she flees into the arms of our stalwart hero, who is about as boring and uninteresting as his 1942 counterpart in the original film was.  It would have been so much better if she’d hooked up with Annette O’Toole instead, in fact, she has more sexual chemistry with her brother than she does with dry white toast Oliver.

 

Run if he starts a rendition of Singin’ in the Rain.

As mentioned, Paul Schrader wasn’t interested in remaking the 1942 classic yet he strangely included the element of a jealous Irena stalking and harassing Alice while in leopard form, but without actually bothering to set it up, so while we do get some hints that Alice and Oliver may have had a prior relationship there is nothing done on screen that would make Irena jealous of Alice, it’s almost like a switch in her head is suddenly flicked to “evil” and thus this once sweet and innocent girl is all claws out to get Alice away from her man.  It makes no sense and is very inorganic. This film suffers from some serious pacing issues and the dynamic between this love triangle is a clear victim of this, that plot element probably should have been jettisoned sometime during the early script stages because even though the “pool homage” sequence is very well executed it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to remind fans of the original film and how much better it was.

 

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Stray Observations:

• If having sex triggers the change then why did Paul transform into a cat before the prostitute had even shown up? Does masturbation also trigger the change and he just got impatient waiting for her?
• Irena stays after the zoo’s closing hours, apparently sketching a black leopard takes all day, and I know this zoo is supposed to be underfunded but how can no one notice a pretty girl standing in front of a cage long after the place has closed down?
• The cages in this zoo are so small that they pretty much qualify as inhumane, but they do let the orangutan watch soap operas on a small black-and-white television, so they aren’t all complete bastards here.
• In the original film Irena is approached by a strange woman who calls her “Sister” in Serbian and while the same thing happens here, we also get the bizarre change of having Alice translate for Irena, instead of Irena, who was Serbian in the original, knowing what was being said to her.
• Joe uses a wrist strap attached to attach an electric prod to his arm, which allows the big cat grabs the prod and drag the idiot into its clutches. The whole scene is ridiculous as no trained animal handler would ever have a tool tethered to their body as that’s just asking for the animal to grab the item, and thus themselves.
• After killing Joe, a naked Malcolm McDowell somehow gets out of the cage and out of the zoo without a single person seeing him, and once again I must point out this zoo’s really shitty security.
• I know men are often ruled by their penises but when your “girlfriend” returns from a nude stroll through the woods covered in blood you may want to rethink the relationship.

 

There are Red Flags and then there is this kind of thing.

Despite some script and pacing issues, Paul Schrader’s Cat People is a surprisingly good little film with the performance by Kinski as a sexually confused virgin being the glue that holds the entire production together and Malcolm McDowell’s creepy incestuous brother adds an extra level of horror to the proceedings.  Then there is the fantastic score by Giorgio Moroder and David Bowie’s belting rendition of the title song, which just adds more things to love about this remake. The practical special make-up effects by Tom Burman are quite solid, with the werecats literally bursting out of their skin and reminded me of the excellent werewolf film The Company of Wolves, which came out a few years later, and even if cinematographer John Bailey wasn’t the "masters of light and shadow" that cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was for the original, Bailey and Schrader still managed to create a world of dark fantasy that was steeped in sex and violence.

 

Is this the home of the Cat People or the Wakanda afterlife?

Paul Schrader’s Cat People is definitely its own animal and lovers of the original film would do best to avoid comparing the two as Schrader was able to marshal together a very talented group of actors and crewmembers to give us not a film that was not so much a remake but a darker and more sexually explicit take on a similar premise, and with Nastassja Kinski giving us the most sensual and sexiest cat in cinema history and making this is a must-see for fans of both horror and erotica.

Cat People (1942) – Review

When one thinks of low-budget horror films, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, we imagine movies that were designed to fill the neighbourhood Drive-Ins with their cheap thrills and cheaper production value, but in the early 1940s RKO Pictures had an ace up their slave in the form of producer Val Lewton, a man who could create a wonderful atmosphere and gripping tension for pennies on the dollar and one of his masterpieces was a little gem directed by Jacques Tourneur, a film that was simply called Cat People.

In 1942 Val Lewton left MGM to become the head of a new unit created to develop B-movie horror feature films for RKO and his first edict was to make a film with the title “Cat People” with no other information other than the fact that Universal’s The Wolf Man was popular and that the studios heads at RKO would like some of that box office money but done on a decidedly lower budget. To tackle such a conundrum Lewton hired his friend Jacques Tourneur to direct and tasked writer DeWitt Bodeen to develop a plot that would fit that title. Val Lewton decided this wouldn’t be the "cheap horror movie that the studio expected but something intelligent and in good taste" and the end result was exactly that, a film with a dreamlike quality with its horror percolating under the surface.

 

When horror meets film noir.

The movie opens with a typical Hollywood “Meet Cute” where Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a Serbian-born fashion illustrator, is found making sketches of a black panther at the Central Park Zoo in New York City and this is where she encounters a very interested Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), who I find about as interesting as a block of wood but then again I'm not a beautiful Serbian-born fashion illustrator, and before you can say “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the two of them are having tea at her place and are rapidly falling love. This whirlwind romance leads to a quick marriage but it’s not all moonbeams and rainbows as Irena has some severe emotional baggage, believing she is descended from a group of evil cat people and that she will transform into a panther if aroused to passion caused by either intimacy or jealousy, and this means Irena cannot perform one of the key “wifely duties” no matter how much she wants to.

 

“Are you cool with no kissing and separate bedrooms?”

Oliver is patient with her but he eventually persuades her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who tells her that these fears of hers stem from childhood traumas – her father was horribly killed in the woods and the village children tormented her about it – but before psychiatry can bring any aid to this situation jealousy rears its ugly head in the form of Oliver’s co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who Oliver stupidly confided in her about his and Irena’s marital problems, so yeah, Oliver is a bit of a dick.  Then it gets even more complicated when it’s soon made clear that Alice has been holding a torch for Oliver for quite some time – watching this guy operate I can’t see the appeal – and this is where the film’s key moments kick in as a jealous Irena begins to stalk and threaten Alice, shifting into the form of a large snarling panther to do so.

Irena takes being catty to the next level.

It is cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s wonderful Film Noir lighting that makes Cat People stand apart from other films of the genre, with his use of hard light and deep shadows to create a hauntingly atmospheric nightmare for our characters to wander through, Alice being harassed by the panther while in a dark pool is a masterclass in the use of shadow as well as sound mixing, and under Lewton’s directive Jacques Tourneur did his best to keep the nature of Irena’s transformation hidden, there is no Jack Pierce make-up transformation as found in films like The Wolf Man, and thus the moments of suspense and terror that permeate this film are more hinted at rather than being explicit. What is very clear is that Cat People is, at its heart, a film about strong women and idiot men who are just along for the ride because while, at first glance, Irena looks like a meek young thing but she did invite a strange man up to her room for tea, and when her marriage looked to be threatened she was no doormat to stepped over, not our Irena, she is a vengeful feline who will fight for what is hers. Then there is Alice who is depicted as a character with more agency than you’d expect for a rival in these kinds of plots, and she certainly deserved better than ending up with Oliver.

 

Who would actually fight over this guy?

Stray Observations:

• Irena tells Oliver that “I’m not an artist, I draw sketches for fashion magazines” I’m not sure she quite understands what constitutes being an artist.
• When Irena and Oliver enter a pet shop all the animals go wild in her presence, which is another example of a male suitor completely ignoring a big Red Flag.
• Oliver and Irena don’t even kiss before getting married and Oliver is so relaxed and understanding about Irena’s inability to offer post-marital sex it has me wondering more about him than Irena's oddness.
• Oliver doesn’t understand why Irena is angry with him over his discussing her sexual hang-ups with another woman, and I’m starting to doubt he’s even from this planet.
• The transformation in this story is more magical than physical as we see muddy paw prints turn into muddy shoe prints, no bare human feet in between, so Irena isn’t doing some kind of slow wolfman-type transformation but shifts from one form to the other almost instantly.
• Irena has a statue of a medieval warrior on horseback impaling a large cat with his sword, which is a depiction of King John of Serbia ridding the country of cats who were believed to represent evil, which is a rather strange knick-knack for a person to own if they believe they were a descendant of those self-same Cat People.

 

“I hope I don’t meet an ironic death at the end of a sword.”

Val Lewton’s Cat People was the first major supernatural horror film with a contemporary urban setting, there are no Gothic castles or fog-shrouded moors populating this tale as were found over at the Universal backlot, and director Jacques Tourneur was able to utilize this new setting to make the horror on screen seem more real and less like a Grimm’s fairy tale, despite the film’s very magical element and without actually having to show anything, which is quite impressive. Overall, this film is an experience of pure dark delight and Tourneur and Musuraca were "masters of light and shadow” and the effectiveness of their techniques made this a frightening and unforgettable tale, not to mention Simone Simon’s portrayal of a woman “cursed” is a performance that will go down in cinema history as one of the more interesting Femme Fatales ever to grace the silver screen.