The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) – Review

Despite being shot to death at the end of both previous instalments the Gill-man is back for this third and final entry in the Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy, where they bring the creature out of the “Rampaging Monster” category he’d found himself trapped in for Revenge of the Creature and now he’s firmly in the “Mad Scientist” genre and with a few added wrinkles to the Gill-man’s character as well.

What if we could genetically enhance humans so that they could survive on other planets? This is the motivation that drives the plot of The Creature Walks Among Us, where we have the somewhat unhinged Dr. William Barton (Jeff Morrow) leading an expedition into the Everglades to capture the creature, using his luxury yacht that is fully stocked with everything a mad scientist could need to fulfill his weird plan of genetically modifying the Gil-man. Along for the ride is geneticist Dr. Tom Morgan (Rex Reason), their guide Jed Grant (Gregg Palmer) and two other colleagues Dr. Johnson (James Rawley) and Dr. Borg (Maurice Manson), who handles a fish finder with flair, but the real problem doesn’t stem from the dangers of tracking creature with a kill list a yard long, instead, we have Marcia Barton (Leigh Snowden) the abused wife of this film’s resident mad scientist to rachet up the tension.

 

It should be noted that the beasts really outnumber the beauty in this film.

After a little drama involving Marcia diving too deep and suffering from the “raptures of the deep” - which forces him to go into full-on hero mode to save the day - and then there is the fact that during all this the Gill-man was doing some underwater stalking of his own, but eventually, we get our group deciding to do a little night fishing to catch the creature and they outfit a small motor launch with harpoons guns and rifles. Needless to say, things don’t go all that smoothly, despite Borg’s adept use of his portable sonar device the creature is able to launch several attacks against them, and you really have to question the tactics of these idiots as they know this creature is incredibly strong and has killed many times before yet they think puttering around on a small boat in the dark is a good idea. Lucky for them, the Gill-man catches his own case of the stupids and it leaps aboard the boat, grabs a can of gasoline and pours it all over himself.  This may sound strange to you but it’s even weirder to watch.

 

Did he think he was a Buddhist monk fighting oppression?

When good ole Jeff tosses a lighted torch at the creature the poor thing bursts into flames and dives back into the water, but as it had already been hit by a couple of harpoons laced with sedatives its badly burned body floats to the surface and is taken back to the ship, where they quickly realize that the creature’s outer scales have burned away, revealing a layer of “human skin” underneath.  While the creature’s gills have been melted shut they discover dormant lungs and so they decide to perform a tracheotomy to jumpstart the lungs and the Gill-man into just a man, well, a rather large and powerful man that is still quite capable of rippling through doors and tossing people around like tenpins. And this is where the film runs into problems, it stops being a “Creature from the Black Lagoon” movie and quickly turns into a Frankenstein’s monster movie, with the creature lumbering around like a knock-off Boris Karloff, and where we once had Bud Westmore’s amazingly designed Gill-man suit to strike awe and terror in all who witness it, we now have this mutated and muddled mess wandering around in sailcloth pyjamas.

 

This look of the creature is more pathetically sad than frightening.

Stray Observations:

• Rex Reason and Jeff Morrow had previously teamed up in Universal’s This Island Earth, but in that film, Morrow played a bit of a dickish alien who was doomed to die, while in this one he’s a psychotically jealous husband who is doomed to die. I guess one could call that range.
• The tracking of the creature via sonar, as it swims after our heroes, reminded me of the scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien where the crew of the Nostromo tried to track the xenomorph through the ship’s air ducts, with the same amount of tension here.
• The creature doing some underwater stalking is also an obvious callback to him tracking the beautiful Julie Adams in the original.
• They bring the creature on board to save it after having set the poor thing aflame, but then they just leave it alone and unrestrained so that it can simply get up and attack the unwary whenever it wants.
• Seeing the Gill-man wrapped up in bandages had me briefly wondering if I was still watching a Creature from the Black Lagoon movie or had suddenly switched over to watch one of The Mummy sequels instead.

 

“Do you think it’s Boris Karloff under those bandages?”

Directed by John Sherwood, who would later go on to direct the rather bizarre science fiction flick The Monolith Monsters, this third entry in the Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy leans heavily into the soap opera drama; between Jeff Morrow’s insanely jealous husband, Leigh Snowden as the abused wife and Greg Brant’s sailor turned attempted rapist, while the Gill-man is forced to play second fiddle to all this melodrama. We do get some interesting moments where Morgan and Barton have philosophical discussions on whether the creature is predestined to be a mindless killer or whether it has gone through some sort of sped-up evolution, making it more human and thus will return kindness with kindness of its own. This pseudo-bullshit doesn’t really go anywhere and the film spends way too much time with the ex-Gill-man moping around a sheep pen, that is until Barton murders Grant in a fit of jealous rage and then tries to frame the creature for the deed. I must say, when your title monster is turned into a plot device for a lame love affair you know you’re in trouble.

 

“Could someone call my agent?”

I won’t fault the actors for this film’s failings, poor Greg Grant didn’t have much to work with as a one-dimensional asshat/rapist, and even the director did the best he could under the limited budget the studio saddled him with, but when the amazing Creature from the Black Lagoon is relegated to playing second fiddle to this collection of misfits one can’t help but be a little disappointed with the end result, and while there is still some nice underwater photography, with Rico Browning again performing great work as the Gill-man – even if a lot of this footage is borrowed from the original film – but the issue of making the Gill-man an unsympathetic lumbering monster is unforgivable and the film's startling conclusion is as ambiguous as it was lame, with the creature once again being shot full of holes and disappearing into the night. Basically, The Creature Walks Among Us is another middle-of-the-road B-movie that works best if you forget it has any connection to the previous entries and just consider it another “Atomic Age” science fiction film.

Revenge of the Creature (1955) – Review

If a bunch of white jerks invading your home and riddling you with bullets isn’t enough to warrant revenge then I don’t know what it is, and that is the basic premise of Universal’s Revenge of the Creature, the second entry of The Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy, where once again a group of idiots are going to tangle with a beast that should have just been left alone.

In this sequel, we find Captain Lucas (Nestor Paiva), one of the survivors of the events of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, once again piloting his boat towards the mysterious Black Lagoon, but this time instead of carrying a group of scientists looking for fossils, on this trip we have Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) as a man who has been hired to capture the Gill-man and is to “Bring it Back Alive” to a Sea World type attraction in Florida called Ocean Harbor, and while there are claims made about this being for “scientific purposes” it’s clear that it's more about making a ton of cash by publicly exhibiting the poor creature than is about advancing science, cause you know, commerce always wins out in these situations. It should also be noted that this movie does not bother to address how the creature survived being filled full of holes at the end of the last movie, but I guess a sequel about finding the Gill-man’s riddled corpse wouldn’t have been all that exciting, though the heroes of this film almost finish off the poor creature before the movie even gets going.

 

Are we supposed to be rooting for the humans in this movie?

The Gill-man (Rico Browning) is almost killed because our “Good ole Boy” thought the best way to capture a missing link of the Devonian age was by tossing dynamite into the lagoon and giving it a concussion, and though this idiotic plan does work as it brings the creature to the surface toot sweet, it also results in putting it in a coma.  This is not an ideal situation because a limp and dying creature would not be considered all that thrilling of a park exhibit, so this is definitely a setback. Lucky for the park investors, once safely back in civilization Hayes is able to revive the creature and soon tourists are lining up to see this marvel of evolution, but like any movie of this type we have a pretty face for the monster to fall in love with and while Julie Adams does not return for this entry we get her replacement in the form of lovely ichthyology student Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson), but we also have animal psychologist Professor Clete Ferguson (John Agar), who arrives at Ocean Harbor to study the Gill Man, and he has also set his eyes on winning Helen’s heart.

 

This is one truly messed up love triangle.

This middle chapter in the Creature from the Black Lagoon Trilogy paints the Gill-man in a more tragic light, with the poor creature being shot, concussed by explosives and repeatedly tortured with underwater cattle prods, but in taking the story in that direction the mystery and magic that made the original film so compelling was lost as it now follows all the standard tropes found in the other Universal Monster films like The Mummy’s Ghost and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. But the most ridiculous aspect of this film is the fact that the Gill-man is somehow able to track Helen to her motel room and then later abduct her from a jazz club, which puts it on par with King Kong finding Fay Wray amongst all the other Blondes in Manhattan, and I’m left wondering “Did the Gill-man manage to place a GPS tracking device on Helen?”

 

Is he a tragic creature victimized by humanity or just a pervy stalker?

Where the film really drops the ball is in the development of its human characters, with Joe and Clete being nothing more than your average two-dimensional heroes and Helen your stereotypical damsel in distress, and while we do get an odd scene where Helen and Clete discuss whether or not she should give up her career in ichthyology and pop out babies, there is nothing in this script that raises any of these people up to a point where we’d give a damn if the Gill-man murdered them or not. This failure is exacerbated by the film’s pacing because even at a mere 82-minutes in length it does tend to drag at times, not helped by all the “Fun at Sea World” footage that adds nothing to the proceedings and comes across more as a commercial for the Florida attraction than it does something integral to the movie, and while Rico Browning still does great work as the Gill-man he’s not the threatening menace he was in the first film, he's more a pathetic creature with a strong fixation on human women that continues to get him killed, and yes, he dies the same way here as he did in the original, not that this will stop him from coming back for the third installment.

 

He really needs to join some self-help group to get over his fixation on women.

Stray Observations:

• Five people lost their lives during the expedition to the Black Lagoon in the previous movie, yet in this sequel, we find Captain Lucas once again piloting his boat to this "region of death" and there is no mention of how much money it would take for him to risk his life again.
• For some reason Joe brought along a classic deep-sea diving suit for this mission but such an outfit is ridiculous for the job, not only does its large copper helmet severely limit one's ability to see what’s coming at you it also gives the wearer absolutely no maneuverability, basically, with that thing on you are a large half-blind piece of slow-moving meat for the creature.
• The Gill-man is placed in a saltwater tank but as he comes from a freshwater lagoon in the Amazon this would not be all that healthy for the creature, and this has me doubting the scientific credentials of our heroes.
• The idea of an aquatic terror being brought to an amusement park would later be revisited in such movies as Gorgo and Jaws 3D.
• Professor Ferguson's theory that a well-fed cat won't kill mice is insane, clearly, he’s never owned a cat because killing for fun is a favourite pastime of pretty much all cats.
• The Gill-man is strong enough to overturn a car which means any underwater fight between the creature and a human should last about three seconds.
• Helen clutching a buoy and then being dragged underwater by the Gill-man has definite Jaws vs Chrissy moment vibe to it, I wonder if Spielberg was a fan of this film.
• The lab assistant helping Ferguson on this silly project about cats is none other than a young Clint Eastwood, in his first onscreen appearance, still, he would get another bit part as the lead fighter pilot who napalms the giant arachnid menace in Jack Arnold’s other 1955 monster flick Tarantula.

 

“If you’d like, I could napalm this Gill Man for you.”

While making the Gill-man a more sympathetic creature could have resulted in a more interesting movie, with the creature being abducted from his natural environment and being exploited for financial gain, which is an obvious direction for this story to go, sadly, what we ended up with was nothing more than another “rampaging monster” flick, but with a monster that barely rampaged – he doesn’t quite of have the size to properly rampage like King Kong and Godzilla – and the stock company of supporting characters did nothing to elevate the material and even the Gill-man's suit is shabbier looking, with bubbles leaking out of it at inopportune times, and thus Revenge of the Creature is never able to raise itself above its B-Movie status and is stuck in the lower tier of Universal Monster offerings.

She-Wolf of London (1946) – Review

After Henry Hull’s turn as a lycanthrope in Werewolf of London had resulted in a box office disappointment it was Lon Chaney’s The Wolf Man that became Universal Pictures's default creature of fur and fangs, but in 1946 the studio released a werewolf movie that starred June Lockhart as a woman who believes that she has become a Wolf-Woman, and I must stress, she believes that she has become a Wolf-Woman and this is an aspect of the film that fans of werewolf movies will bemoan.

The plot of this Universal horror flick surrounds the plight of Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart), the young heiress to the Allenby estate, who along with her cousin Carol Winthrop (Jan Wiley), and her domineering aunt Martha Winthrop (Sara Haden), live near a fog-shrouded London park that has of late been plagued with attacks that those with a more superstitious bent have been calling werewolf in nature, especially Scotland Yard Detective Latham (Llyod Corrigan) who is convinced that a female werewolf is preying on the citizens of London. Needless to say, his boss Inspector Pierce (Dennis Hoey) is less inclined to put stock in the supernatural, as one would expect from a man of the law, but when these brutal incidents continue and the Yard is seemingly unable to track the culprit, it looks like only "one who is pure of heart" can stop these attacks.

 

“If I’m murdered by a she-wolf tell the inspector to bring in Sherlock Holmes.”

The ostensible hero of this tale is Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), a London solicitor who is engaged to marry young Phyllis, that is until she begins to suspect that she's been making nightly sojourns into the park to commit heinous crimes, like brutally tearing apart a young boy and slashing open the throat of Detective Latham, and much to Barry’s chagrin calls of the engagement. And just what evidence does Phyliss have to back up this bizarre belief? Well, it turns out there is something called the "Curse of the Allenby's" and this so-called legend ties her family with wolves or some such nonsense, and then there’s the fact that she wakes up each morning to find her bedroom slippers covered in mud and her hands stained with blood.  Clearly, the only reasonable explanation is that she has been slipping out into the night to transform into a she-wolf so that she can feed her unnatural fury. That or it’s the evil aunt gaslighting her so that she won’t go off and get married and leave her and her cousin Carol (Jane Wiley) homeless and destitute.

 

“Don’t worry dear, we’ll get you a private room at the asylum.”

Stray Observations:

• While not a sequel to Werewolf in London this movie does take place in London, and for some reason, neither Don Porter nor June Lockhart made any effort to conceal their American accents.
• Aunt Martha walking up the stairs with the drug-laced mile is either an homage or a blatant rip-off of Cary Grant doing much the same thing in Hitchcock’s Suspicion.
• One of the pieces of “evidence” against poor Phyllis is a three-pronged garden cultivator found near her bed, but why would a person believing herself to be a werewolf need a weapon to claw her victims?
• Much of Martha’s gaslighting plot hinged on the gullibility of Phyllis and that she would believe in “The Allenby Curse” but her drug-fueled dreams of turning into a werewolf are a little too plot convenient.

 

“I should never have joined that book of the month club.”

Of all the Universal Monster movies She-Wolf of London is easily the weakest, yet it’s not because of poor acting or directing as in both those areas this film is more than adequate, and the cinematography by Maury Gertsman is top-notch, but where the movie does fail is in the very transparent mystery that even the most obtuse viewer will figure out within the first few minutes, not to mention the fact that we don’t actually get a werewolf in this movie and not even a proper imposter – there is no Scooby-Doo villain in a werewolf mask in this flick, just a woman walking around in the fog with a gardening tool – and the only possible reason to watch this film is to see the mom from Lost in Space slowly be driven crazy. Universal's She-Wolf of London is guilty of being more boring than scary, making this Universal offering an easily forgotten entry in their monsterverse, one that should only be watched by classic horror movie completists.

The Mummy’s Curse (1944) – Review

The poster for Universal’s The Mummy’s Curse promised viewers “New Thrills! New Terror!” but this third and final sequel to The Mummy's Hand provided nothing new or much in the way of thrills for that matter, and while it did include “Two mummies for the price of one” it was just another stock retread that was resplendent with stock footage from previous entries and not much else.

Inexplicably set in the Louisiana bayou, this sequel deals with the Southern Engineering Company trying to drain a local swamp but their efforts are being hampered by the superstitions of the workers, they believe the area to be haunted by the Mummy and his bride, which is odd when you consider the fact that the Mummy and his bride sank in a swamp about a thousand miles away in Massachusetts. Two representatives of the Scripps Museum, Dr. James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe) arrive on the scene and present their credentials to the head of the project, Pat Walsh (Addison Richards), and ask to be allowed to search for the missing mummies, but before they can get permission they are interrupted by news that a workman has been murdered. Once on the scene, it becomes evident that the murderer had found the mummy of Kharis and killed the only witness of the discovery.

 

“Only a mummy could have left a hole like that.”

In what should be a surprise to no one, Zandaab is secretly a High Priest of Arkam and the murderer in question is his disciple Ragheb (Martin Kosleck), who after killing the worker that unearthed Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) had taken the immobile monster to a deserted monastery. Meanwhile, the mummy of Ananka (Virginia Christine) rises from the swamp all on her own and she immerses herself in a nearby pond - a girl needs to get clean - and then proceeds to wander through the swamp in some kind of fugue state, that is until she runs into Cajun Joe (Kurt Katch) who brings the poor girl to Tante Berthe (Ann Codee), the owner of the local pub, who aids the girl until Kharis shows up and murders Berthe while Ananka flees into the night. Watching The Mummy’s Curse it becomes quite clear that being anywhere near Ananka is the equivalent of a death sentence.

 

“Don’t look now, but I think your impending doom is behind you.”

What follows is a series of mummy murders with the two idiot priests trying to get their grubby little hands on Anaka, and the occasional protagonist trying to help the amnesiac Ananka in between the killings – Halsey even gives her a job working for him just so that he can be impressed by her incredible knowledge of ancient Egypt – but with everyone running around searching and killing its hard to get invested in much of what’s going on, we’ve seen it all before and the cliches and tropes are trotted at frequent intervals. Things become so absurd that one can’t help but question how any of this makes a lick of sense, even from a supernatural point of view, and with all the Egyptian priests travelling to America on missions for the sect of Arkam I have to imagine what conversation between the High Priest of Arkam and immigration officials at the airport would have sounded like.

Agent: “What's your purpose for travelling?”
High Priest: “I must retrieve the mummy of Kharis and the reincarnated body of Princess Ananka.”
Agent: “Right, and how many bags are you checking?”
High Priest: “Two sarcophagi to use to bring back our wayward ancestors.”
Agent: “Great, just make sure you’re not bringing any fruits or vegetables into the country.”
High Priest: “I do have some tana leaves, does that count?”

 

“Sir, I’m not sure we’ll be able to sneak him through customs.”

Stray Observations:

• Zandaab gives a lengthy explanation of the legend of Kharis and Ananka to Ragheb, after retrieving the mummy from the swamp, but wouldn’t a disciple of Arkam know all this already? At this point in time, I bet they’d have training films and souvenir T-shirts stating, “I went to America and all I got was murdered by the Mummy.”
• Kharis had to be found, uncovered and then fed a brew of tana leaves to be revived, but Ananka crawled out of her swampy tomb all on her own, clearly, a reincarnated princess is more badass than some silly male mummy.
• Louisiana water has truly miraculous qualities, Ananka crawls out of her muddy grave and after one dip in a nearby pond her hair is perfectly coiffed and her face completely made up, resplendent with eye shadow, eyeliner, mascaraed eyelashes and even lipstick. Mary Kay Cosmetics should definitely look into bottling this stuff.
• Pieces of the mummy’s bandages are left behind at every crime scene like some kind of ancient Egyptian calling card.
• That Kharis survived being “destroyed” by flames in two movies is problematic at best but here we are expected to believe that a mummy would remain in mint condition after soaking in a swamp for twenty-five years, and I call bullshit on this entire endeavour.

 

The preservation techniques of the ancient Egyptians were goddamn amazing!

The plot of The Mummy’s Curse is basically a retread of stuff we’ve already seen in the previous films; Egyptian priests coming to America to retrieve Kharis and Princess Ananka, the Mummy being revived and wandering around until it bumps into some idiot that it can strangle, and then an Egyptian priest will forgo his mission when he gets the hots for a local girl and all culminating with the Mummy being defeated by a group of two-dimensional protagonists. The only new wrinkle here is the resurrection of Princess Ananka, as this film’s supernatural MacGuffin, but this mostly consists of Kharis coming after her and then some poor slob getting killed trying to help her, which then results in Ananka escaping.  Rinse and repeat until the movie is over.

 

“I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers, too bad they always get murdered.”

This also includes another thankless and uninspired performance by Lon Chaney Jr – that is when he’s not being doubled by his stand-in due to the actor's on-set drunkenness – but I’d probably overindulge in spirits if I was stuck playing a shambling creature covered in Jack Pierce’s ever-decreasing in quality mummy makeup, and with the increasingly unthreatening presences of the Mummy – who I swear to god gets slower each movie – and the repetitive nature of these sequels it’s not surprising this was the last entry in the franchise, if you don’t count Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and we can only hope that Kharis has finally been allowed to rest in piece.

The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) – Review

You would think being set aflame twice would have ended the reign of the Mummy, or at least dampened his spirits a tad, then again, maybe that explains why the title of this entry is The Mummy’s Ghost, could Kharis have actually perished and this is nothing but a vengeful spirit? Surprisingly, that is not the case here, but as nonsensical as the Universal Monster Movies get this one was a definite step up from The Mummy’s Tomb, just not that big of a step.

If the Mummy franchise has told us anything it's that the work of a High Priest of Arkam is never done, the job of protecting the tomb of Ananka ruined by American interlopers has caused him no end of troubles, and now Andoheb (George Zucco) must send a new lackey to America to retrieve the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.), as well as the body of Ananka so that they can be returned to their rightful resting place in Egypt. This task is given to Yousef Bey (John Carradine) and if you think he’s going to have an easy time of it then you’ve clearly not seen the previous two films.  New priests of Arkam have the shelf life of a mayfly. Meanwhile, in Mapleton, Massachusetts, Professor Matthew Norman (Frank Reicher) has become a bit of an expert on the current mummy problems and one of his students, Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery), is particularly interested in the subject matter because his current girlfriend Amina Mansori (Ramsey Ames) just so happens to be Egyptian.

 

“Sweetie, you're not a reincarnated Egyptian princess, are you?”

Unfortunately, the Professor’s experiments with the brewing of nine tana leaves, which is the mixture that gives the mummy life, brings the bandaged menace to his door and it strangles him, downs the life-giving concoction and then shambles off into the night. Needless to say, when the Sheriff (Harry Shannon) and the Coroner (Emmett Vogan) discover a strange mould around the dead professor's throat they know right away that this means the Mummy stalks Mapleton again.  And before you can say “Boris Karloff” the town’s people are up in arms and the local hardware stores doing great business selling torches and pitchforks. But this heightened alertness doesn’t stop Yousef Bey from calling on Amon-Ra to aid him in his quest, so he brews some tana leaves of his own to summon Kharis, but their plan of stealing the mummy of Ananka is hit with a snag when after breaking into the museum, Kharis touches the mummified body of Ananka it disintegrates.

 

“Dammit, I told you to clean your hands before coming in here.”

Yousef Bey is quick to realize that this means Ananka's soul has been reincarnated into another form and it's up to him and Kharis to track her down, which doesn’t take long as all this mummy hocus pocus has been having a bad effect on poor Amina, causing her to sleepwalk whenever the Mummy is near and her hair turning white, and she hypnotically wanders into Kharis’s clutches who then brings her to Yousef Bey so that he can end her life and send her soul back to oblivion. Well, that was the original plan until he saw what a dish Amina is and he decides they’d make a great couple and screw his mission for a bag of chips. Sadly, true love is a hard thing to obtain and his plan of keeping Amina/Ananka for himself enrages Kharis, which leads to a fight and Bey’s inevitable death.

 

You just can’t get good help these days.

Stray Observations:

• Kharis was set aflame in The Mummy’s Hand and once again set on fire when the Banning Home was torched in The Mummy’s Tomb, and this movie opens with him wandering the woods of Massachusetts with no explanation as to how he survived, I must say, that is one very durable mummy.
• Even if one were to forgive the Mummy inexplicably surviving its fiery death at the end of the two previous films I call bullshit on it wandering around Massachusetts for days on end without being spotted by someone.
• The museum in this movie needs to hire better night watchmen, the one here doesn’t check to see if all the patrons have left and fail to hear a three-thousand-year-old mummy break down a steal door. Even Ben Stiller could handle a night at the museum better than this.
• Hollywood has never been that great when it comes to casting ethnic actors so of course the Egyptians in this movie are played by actors who don't look even the slightest bit Egyptian, I mean seriously, who is supposed to believe that John Carradine is an Egyptian?
• Ananka's soul being reincarnated in this film can be considered a call back to Princess Anck-su-namun being reincarnated in the original 1932 The Mummy.
• Once again the Mummy requires its victims to be practically paralyzed with fear because his slow shambling attacks are so pathetic that he’d be hard-pressed to catch a toddler.

 

“This won’t hurt a bit, just hold still for five or ten minutes.”

The continuing story of Kharis the mummy never quite brings enough plot to the table to make things interesting, with poor Andoheb constantly trying to accomplish his one job and failing at this due to his poor outsourcing, and once again Chaney’s mummy is less than compelling because he’s more an ineffective lackey with poor impulse control rather than a threatening villain.  Then there is the franchise's recurring problem of casting leading men who are about as interesting as tapioca pudding and Robert Lowery as this film’s love interest is as bland and as boring as they come. I’d rather hang out with a three-thousand-year-old mummy over this guy. And once again at sixty minutes in length, this film has more the feel of a couple of chapters from a Republic Serial slapped together than it does a feature film, and when it tries to do something interesting, like having the Police Inspector (Barton MacLane) coming up with a plan to lure the Mummy into a pit trap using tana leaves as bait, this is abandoned so that the hero and the townsfolk can chase the Mummy and his reincarnated love into the swamp.

 

“Sorry Tom, but you knew this was never going to work out.”

Overall, The Mummy’s Ghost is another Universal outing that lacks any real punch and the only surprising element is that the female love interest doesn’t survive, this is one of the rare Universal Monster Movies where the female lead doesn't make it to the end credits as she ends up aging three-thousand-years while being carried into the swamp, and this had me wondering if the screenwriters of this film understood how reincarnation is supposed to work. That the next installment, The Mummy's Curse, would be the last entry in the franchise is no surprise as the plot elements in these movies had become as old and thin as the mummy’s threadbare wrappings.

The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) – Review

Discounting the comedic outing of Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, this would be the last in the series of Invisible Man movies from Universal, and we can be thankful for that because this water-downed instalment was more a psychotic pot-boiler about revenge than it was a decent science fiction flick about an invisible man.  We are only lucky that John Carradine makes an appearance as a mad scientist or the film would have been a complete write-off.

“In this house, you have to believe what you can’t see,” and with those prescient words, from the great John Carradine, we are off to the races with this fourth and final Invisible Man movie.  In this outing, we must follow the murderous adventures of psychiatric hospital escapee Robert Griffin (Jon Hall) who is seeking revenge against those that have wronged and betrayed him. The most interesting thing about The Invisible Man’s Revenge is that the plot while overly complicated is also rather underwritten, the film starts with escapee Griffin arriving in London and making a house call to the home of his old business partners Sir Jasper Herrick (Lester Matthews) and Lady Irene (Gale Sondergaard), where he accuses them of leaving him for dead in Africa and keeping his share of the diamond he discovered.  When he demands full restitution Lady Irene drugs the poor bastard, then they steal evidence of their partnership and callously throw Griffin out of their house where nearly drowns in a nearby river. Lucky for him, he is saved by a local Cockney cobbler by the name of Herbert Higgins (Leon Errol), who sees the plight of Griffin as a chance to make some good money.

 

“You aren’t homicidal by any chance?”

Plans to get what is rightfully owed him fail miserably, due to the dubious talents of a hired shyster and a half-assed blackmail attempt, and then to make matters worse the local chief constable (Leonard Carey) declares Griffin's claims to the Herricks' estate as void and orders him to leave his jurisdiction. Things look hopeless until Griffin stumbles across the home of enthusiastic scientist Doctor Peter Drury (John Carradine), whose questionable research in invisibility has resulted in a menagerie of invisible animals, but with Griffin’s arrival he is able to make the jump to human trials, unfortunately, Drury’s scientific over-eagerness causes him to overlook his volunteer’s mental state and before you can call up H.G. Wells we have a crazed invisible man on our hands, one bent on revenge against the Herricks.  But that’s not all, he also wants Jasper to hand over his daughter Julie (Evelyn Ankers) to him in marriage, needless to say, this kind of plan is bound to have complications, such as it’s hard to get a woman to see you as husband material when she can’t actually see you, of course, Griffin won’t let such trivialities as that stand in his way.

 

Do think Harrods Department Store stock Invisible Man bandages and glasses?

Stray Observations:

• Despite having the same surname as three other “Invisible Men” Robert Griffin bears no relation to those people, so we must assume that simply having the “Griffin” name is going to lead to invisibility no matter what.
• It’s a bit of strange casting to have Jon Hall play the villainous invisible man in this film when he had already played the heroic invisible man in The Invisible Agent.
• A fugitive wanted for murder who keeps press clippings of his crimes in his own coat pocket is either someone who subconsciously wants to be caught or he’s a complete idiot.
• An invisible dog coming in from the rain would show more than his harness floating mysteriously in the air as the water on his fur coat would shimmer in the light, making the dog more translucent than invisible. Later Griffin uses water from an aquarium to make himself “visible” so clearly the writers understood the concept.
• As is the case with this entire series, the whole "Invisible Man" idea makes no sense as the eyes of an invisible man could not reflect or refract light and if his eyes don't refract light he would be blind.

 

“Does anyone know where I can get a seeing-eye dog?”

What makes The Invisible Man’s Revenge stand apart from other entries in this series is two-fold, first, there is the fact that in the original it was the invisibility formula that drove Henry Griffin mad while here he was a psychotic murderer long before the injection was given to him by Doctor Drury, secondly, in The Invisible Man Returns the idea of the cure to invisibility by way of blood transfusion was introduced, but in this film, it now requires a full body transfusion and due to the nature of this being fatal to the donor we have a nice little vampire motif to bring a bit of extra darkness to the proceedings.  Sadly, those differences are not enough to make this chapter in the Invisible Man series more than an odd curiosity and even John Carradine cannot elevate this mess of the script.

 

He's not even a mad scientist, it’s more a case of him being naively stupid.

Overall, this entry is only notable for the somewhat interesting blood transfusion cure, which is only temporary thus Griffin is required to murder again and again if he wants to remain visible, and while the invisible man effects aren’t terrible they’d already been done better in previous entries. What really hurts the film is the plethora of useless side characters, most notably Evelyn Ankers as the supposed love interest who has even less screen time than the invisible dog.  Even the film’s ostensible hero, reporter and rival for Julie's hand Mark Foster (Alan Curtis), is so bland he may as well be invisible. I’ll grant that the idea of a psychotic murderer being granted invisibility is a frightening premise it’s just a shame that the writers failed to utilize it properly instead of creating a rather pedestrian and lacklustre outing. Overall, The Invisible Man’s Revenge is a plot in search of a middle and an end, neither of which are to be found here.

Invisible Agent (1942) – Review

With the United States entering World War II it was up to Hollywood to do their part, which meant providing propaganda films and some serious flag waving for the people on the Homefront, but where the likes of John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart facing off against the Axis powers made sense it was a little trickier for Universal Pictures to gear their stable of monsters for the war effort. Enter the Invisible Agent, a film that would pit one of Universal’s "sort of monsters" against the Axis threat.

In this movie were are introduced to Frank Griffin Jr (Jon Hall), the grandson of the original Invisible Man, who runs a print shop in Manhattan under the assumed name of Frank Raymond – I guess the stigma of the Griffin name has reached the United States but why people assume he has the invisibility formula is never made clear – unfortunately, his assumed identity wasn't good enough to fool foreign agents working for the Axis powers and he is confronted by four armed men in his shop, led by German intelligence officer Conrad Stauffer (Cedric Hardwicke) and his Japanese counterparts Baron Ikito (Peter Lorre), and they are both very interested in the invisibility formula to the point of offering Raymond either a handsome bribe or the loss of some fingers, whichever method will provide the best result.

 

“Would you, by any chance, also know the location of the Maltese Falcon?”

Needless to say, our hero is able to escape with the formula and while he is at first reluctant to release it to the U.S. government, the Attack on Pearl Harbor spurs his patriotism into gear and he agrees to "limited cooperation" with the Allied forces, with the understanding that he is the only one to use the formula. His first secret mission has him being parachuted behind German lines where he meets up with a coffin-maker named Arnold Schmidt (Albert Basserman), whose job is to reveal the next step of Griffin's mission, which is to obtain a list of German and Japanese spies within the United States, a list that is believed to be in the possession of Stauffer. Raymond’s contact is female Gestapo double-agent Maria Sorenson (Ilona Massey) who will attempt to seduce the information from Stauffer's second-in-command, Gestapo Standartenführer Karl Heiser (J. Edward Bromberg), but due to some drunken invisible man antics this plan collapses and soon Maria and Raymond find themselves caught in an invisible web of treachery and deceit, one that will lead to the most unlikely of allies.

 

“How about we sneak into Hitler’s bunker and put his hand in some warm water?”

Stray Observations:

• We are told that Frank Griffin is the grandson of the original Invisible Man but the original Invisible Man was Jack Griffin, who was never married nor did he have any kids, so this means Raymond is actually the son of Jack’s brother from  The Invisible Man Returns, which makes him the nephew of the original.
• Raymond waits to inject himself with the invisibility formula just as he is about to parachute into Germany, which is all kinds of stupid as this allows the Germans below a full view of his invisible striptease as he discards his clothing on the way down. That he wasn’t shot to pieces is a bloody miracle but worse is the fact that this idiocy tips Stauffer off to the fact that there is an invisible man on the loose in Germany.
• Raymond is also a really terrible invisible agent as he immediately jeopardizes Maria’s cover by pulling off stupid invisible man stunts while she is entertaining a high-ranking Nazi officer. You wouldn’t find Bogart playing practical jokes at a time like that, and once again, this reveals to Stauffer that the "Invisible Agent" was in Maria's room.
• Because Maria wants to “see him” he puts on clothes, glasses and some cold cream makeup so that he can be visible to her, which is idiotic as this would leave him vulnerable if the Germans were to suddenly burst in again.

 

I’m starting to suspect he’s not that great of an invisible agent.

Universal’s Invisible Agent has more in keeping with the old Republic serials than it does with a Universal Monster Movie, the villains are as cartoonishly evil as they are stupidly inept at stopping the hero, only a brief moment where Baron Ikito’s goons drop a net lined with fishhooks on Raymond do see a glimmer of intelligence from any of the film's adversaries and speaking of Baron Ikito, Peter Lorre portrayed the fictional Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto in several movies throughout the 1930s and here again, we find Hollywood casting a white actor to play a character of Japanese ethnicity and while Lorre is probably the best part of Invisible Agent seeing him in Asian makeup is a little disheartening. That he kills Stauffer and then himself, performing ritual seppuku, was a nice conclusion to their character arcs but the fact that Peter Lorre’s character is more compelling than the hero is one of the film’s major missteps.

 

“Where is Sidney Greenstreet when you need him?”

As mentioned, the plot of this film is fairly basic and very predictable and it’s only the addition of invisible man gags that sets this film apart from any of the other countless other WWII espionage films of the time, worse is the fact that the script does nothing interesting with the character of Frank Raymond and actor Jon Hall provides such a bland and boring performance it's almost sleep-inducing.  The script also fails to even mention the key side effect of the invisibility formula, that the user will eventually slide into madness, as nothing of the sort befalls Raymond here. How cool would it have been if we had gotten an insane invisible man running around Germany and terrorizing the Nazis? That could have been very interesting, instead, the premise of an invisible spy is almost the background colour to this weak spy thriller and the only good thing about this entry was the casting of Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre as the film’s two heavies. Overall, Invisible Agent is another forgettable entry in the second half of the Universal Monster run and only completists need to go out of their way to watch this one.

The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) – Review

With this sequel, Universal Studios not only told the world that there was still life in the shuffling bandages of the Mummy but that they would also bring Lon Chaney Jr. back into the fold, the man who had created the role of The Wolf Man, rocked it as The Son of Dracula and he even had a turn playing the Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, which makes Chaney the incomparable king of the Universal Monsters.

The movie picks up thirty years after the conclusion of The Mummy's Hand where we find a grey-haired Stephen Banning (Dick Foran) recounting to his family the story of his long-ago encounter with mummy Kharis, with guests in his Massachusetts home that includes his son Dr. John Banning (John Hubbard), his girlfriend Isobel Evans (Elyse Knox), her mother Ella Evans (Virginia Brissac) and Stephen Banning’s sister Jane Banning (Mary Gordon), and while his listeners are entertained by his story of curses and walking mummies it’s clear they take these to be nothing more than tall tales and not factually based, meanwhile, over in Egypt, we see that Andoheb (George Zucco) had somehow survived being shot by Babe Hanson (Wallace Ford) and he now explains to the new High Priest, Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey), that his mission is to unleash the Mummy against their enemies, “Now swear by the sacred gods of Egypt, that you will never rest until the last remaining member of the Banning family is destroyed.”

 

First on the chopping block is good ole Stephen Banning.

After the creature kills the aging archaeologist it’s up to his son to uncover the murderer, I guess you can't worry the authorities about such things, but when Babe Hanson arrives in town his claim that it’s either Kharis returned or another mummy is quickly ignored by John and the police, that is until poor Jane is killed in the same fashion and with mummy dust found on her throat.  That this killing is soon followed by the murder of Babe finally gets the authorities on the same page, which is "There is actually a mummy running around." It should be noted that all these killings require people to be either paralyzed with fear or being completely inept in escaping a creature that has the top speed of an aging turtle, and this fact does lessen one’s ability to feel sympathy for the victims. We also get a silly time crunch added, with John having to solve the murders before having to turn up for military service, and one can only assume that this element was added here to remind the audience of the war effort, which I doubt many people in 1942 would have needed reminding of. Then things get even more complicated when Mehemet Bey becomes smitten with Isobel and he puts the “Destroy the Banning family” mission on the back burner for a chance at some American cheesecake and he orders the Mummy to kidnap the woman before she has a chance to marry John.

 

“Kharis, I’d like you to be my wingman.”

Stray Observations:

• Taking place thirty years after the events of The Mummy’s Hand this would realistically place the events of this movie somewhere in the 1970s, but as WWII is apparently still going it seems the filmmakers thought it would take the Allies three decades to defeat Hitler.
• Stephen Banning is able to recount his encounter with the Mummy to his family via clips from the previous film but as he was not a witness to all of these events we must assume that Banning is a bit psychic as well as a badass hero.
• No explanation is given as to why Andoheb waited thirty years to unleash the Mummy against those that defiled the tomb of Princess Ananka. Did it take him that long to find a disciple on the evil equivalent of  Craigslist?
• Andoheb explains to his servant how the Mummy survived its fiery demise “The fire meant to consume Kharis only seared and twisted and maimed” but when he opens the sarcophagus it looks to be in perfect mummy shape.

 

I guess they used really good fire-retardant bandages back in ancient Egypt.

At a running time of only one hour, The Mummy’s Tomb barely feels like a movie, worse when you consider that the first ten minutes consisted mostly of footage from the previous film and the explanations as to how Andoheb and Kharis survived the events of that entry were so lame that they’d barely pass muster for a matinee serial chapter. The casting of Lon Chaney Jr. as Kharis was an obvious case of stunt casting with the studio using his famous name to get bums in seats because anybody could have been in those bandages and as good of actor Chaney is, he certainly didn’t add anything to the role that Tom Tyler hadn’t already executed perfectly well in The Mummy’s Hand. It’s not like shuffling slowly towards camera takes a lot of acting craft. Then there’s the third act left-turn when Mehemet Bey becomes a victim of “love at first sight” and decides to use the Mummy to cockblock Stephen Banning and make off with the girl, which is about as lame as it sounds. One must assume it was a studio mandate stating that it’s not a proper Mummy entry if an unconscious girl isn’t being dragged off somewhere.

 

In the future, Ubers will replace using a Mummy for this kind of thing.

If seeing an unrecognizable Lon Chaney Jr. shuffling across the screen is enough to interest you then this installment may be worth your time – especially considering you’ll only be wasting an hour – but this entry is a definite step down from The Mummy’s Hand and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the original Karloff film, and while it does have the stock tropes of the Universal Monsters, including torch-bearing mobs screaming for justice, there isn’t much substance here as all the characters themselves are thinner than 3,000-year-old bandages and the plot is laughably lame. This may not be the worst of Universal's second wave of horror films but there is very little here for fans to sink their teeth in.

The Invisible Woman (1940) – Review

The fact that this movie was released in 1940 should make it apparent to most people that this film isn’t about Susan Storm of  The Fantastic Four fame as she didn’t make her debut as the Invisible Woman until 1961 in the pages of Marvel Comics, in actuality, this is the third entry in the Invisible Man series for Universal Studios, but instead of a man driven mad by the invisibility formula, it’s a woman caught up in comedic shenanigans.

The novel “The Invisible Man” was a science fiction horror story by the legendary author H.G. Wells and its 1933 Universal adaptation with Claude Rains was fairly faithful in both the science and the horror aspects but come 1940 and the third entry in Universal’s Invisible Man series we find that science is a little more slapdash and the horror aspect has been replaced by comedy. The plot of The Invisible Woman deals with playboy Richard Russell (John Howard) whose many entanglements with the fairer sex are driving him to the poorhouse, not to mention driving his much put-upon butler George (Charles Ruggles) to distraction, but he has been funding inventor Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore), a man who can best be described as the proto absent-minded professor, and whose creation of an invisibility device could save Russell from financial ruin.

 

“Is there any chance you could invent Flubber?”

The only wrinkle in the Professor’s plan is in finding a volunteer for his experiments, with most responses to his ad in the personals considering him a crackpot, but Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), a department store model, sees the idea of becoming invisible as a perfect chance to get even with her cruel and mean-spirited boss Mr. Growley (Charles Lane).  If this seems like a rather thin premise for a movie about invisibility you’d be right, comedic schtick and goofy invisible shenanigans trump logic at every turn, but with legendary actor John Barrymore leading the charge you can forgive the script for not trying to work too hard. This is not to say the story doesn’t throw in some interesting complications, like the invisibility process being affected by alcohol – when Kitty gets drunk it prevents her from becoming visible – and then there is gangster Blackie Cole (Oscar Homolka) who has been exiled to Mexico and sends a trio of moronic thugs to steal the invisibility device so that he can sneak back into the States, and while none of it really makes much sense the movie races along at such a breakneck pace you really don’t have time to sweat the small stuff.

Note: One of the members of the gang is Shemp Howard of the original Three Stooges, which pretty much sums up what kind of comedy you are watching.

Stray Observations:

• Unlike the two previous entries in the Invisible Man series, the protagonist here is shown visible before being turned invisible.  I guess Universal didn't want to deny us a pretty face.
• You know you’re in for a treat when the cast list includes the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, and she’s great as the housekeeper to Barrymore's nutty professor.
• Despite the light comedic tone of the movie, Universal didn’t stint on the budget and with a cost of $300,000.00 it was one of the studio's most expensive productions that year.
• Of all the films in the Invisible Man series this is the only one where the name "Griffin" is not used, either as the invisible one or as the inventor of the serum.
• As this film was made in the 1940s I’m surprised that the League of Decency didn’t protest a film that basically had a woman parading around in the nude, that she’s invisible is just a technicality.

 

She is in violation of every 1940s dress code.

The comedic moments to be found in this movie are fairly predictable, with Kitty’s invisible antics allowing her to get revenge on her asshat boss and end the threat of the gangsters by playing a nice variation of Wack-A-Mole by utilizing a large wooden hammer against various thugs, and the special photographic effects by John Fulton are more than up for the task, as is the whole cast of zany characters in what can best be described as a science fiction romantic comedy, which certainly wasn’t the norm in the 1940s. Overall, The Invisible Woman is a light and frothy comedy with sharp dialogue, fun invisibility gags and a collection of great acting talent that was a nice surprise to find in such an offering.