I'm a Horror Blogger - official!

Zombo's Closet of Horror is a blog that casts a wide eye over the genre - my recent favourite was a look at the family who built their own full-size recreation of The Munster's mansion...

Zombo has cleverly realised that bloggers love talking about themselves, and regularly invites horror specialists to write about motivations and interests. I was recently invited to join the party and Zombo, John Cozzoli, published it today. Thank you very much for the opportunity, John.

Read it here... Meet The Horror Bloggers - Black Hole Reviews

BERSERK! (1967) pre-TROG circus horror with Joan Crawford and Michael Gough

BERSERK!
(1967, UK)

I think he got the point...

This isn't as complex or as successful as Circus of Horrors (1960) but it does have the hook of being a whodunit and an early serial killfest. Both familiar traits with other Herman Cohen productions (like Horrors of the Black Museum) and those German Edgar Wallace krimis. It was also one of the first late-night horror movie experiences that I had as a teenager, making quite an impression. So much so that, every Friday night, I have an urge to watch Berserk!

Berserk! isn't a 'must see' classic from horror history, but there's enough here to please fans of Joan Crawford horror (Straitjacket, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?), Michael Gough (Konga, Batman Returns), and sixties Brit horror. It's interesting to see a 'creative serial kill' horror with so little blood in it, considering what would happen a few years later...


The curtain opens on a huge circus that's down on its luck. That's until high wire act Gaspar the Great takes his last gasp and is hung by his own tightrope. (In the height of bad taste, his swinging body swings across the screen to reveal the title of the film!) Further accidents in the circus (involving knives, tent pegs and circular saws) prove morbidly good for business, so who could be benefitting from the murders?

There are two main elephants, sorry, elements that prevent this from any wider cult fame. Too many scenes of circus acts used to pad out the running time and reduce the intricacy (if I dare use that word in this context) of the plot. The footage, actually of the famous real-life Billy Smart's Circus, serves only to remind us of when circuses were all about rare, endangered species of animals doing silly tricks for laffs. This is great for kids, but really bad for an adult horror.

Then there's the bloody awful 'comedy song' from the circus 'freaks'. These freaks are unspectacular for both freakiness and acting ability, contrasting sharply with a coachload of British thespians, fronted by Robert Hardy, who can at least breathe life into the stilted and childish dialogue. Try not laughing as you listen to Crawford announce, "Phyllis Allan and her Intelligent Poodles!". An Oscar for OTT horror-acting should also be awarded to the murderer, for the fantastic final freakout - a shrieking schizoid performance that still reminds me that it shocked me as a teen.


Unintentional amusement comes from Joan Crawford's neck always being in shadow, no matter where she's standing. Ty Hardin keeps getting shirtless, a reminder of what passed for beefcake back then. This is balanced by young women in colourful corsets, no mean feat for an already chubby ex-starlet Diana Dors.


Joan Crawford is the star, but was winding down her acting career, dividing her time between lower-budget horrors for Herman Cohen and William Castle, and an increasing amount of TV (The Karate Killers, Spielberg's pilot episode for Night Gallery). Her next film with Cohen and Gough would be her last... Trog. This was my introduction to the films of Joan Crawford - a cruel way to start, considering she had started in silent movies and become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

Robert Hardy, as the police detective investigating the circus, is still acting (Cornelius Fudge in several films of Harry Potter). Joan Crawford's junior love interest Ty hardin was in I Married a Monster From Outer Space. Ex-saucepot Diana Dors plays a nosey troublemaker and later appeared opposite Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. Young Judy Geeson became a welcome fixture of seventies TV and cinema (Star Maidens, Hammer's Fear in the Night, and the Alien rip-off Inseminoid).


Last released in America on VHS, Berserk! has recently been released on a region 2 PAL DVD in Spain. It's listed as having English audio and anamorphic widescreen, but I've yet to confirm that. A wider release would be very welcome, if only as a rare chance to see Joan Crawford in colour.


More Berserk! bits on HermanCohen.com.

Here's a really lazy original trailer on YouTube that simply SPOILERS all the murder scenes and the climax!

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939) serial killer Karloff

Part of the Boris Karloff Blogathon organised by The Frankensteinia Blog.

I can't enter the blogathon without taking time to just talk about Boris. There are some actors who I will watch literally anything with them in. They're always good, even if the film isn't, but a lion's share of Boris career were at least half decent horrors, no mean feat for such a long career in the genre. He somehow made the films better, or maybe made bad dialogue sound believable. Maybe he had the power to change things (like dialogue or his character) for the better. He always changed his appearance - hairstyles, colours, beards, moustaches, scars - you can easily name a Karloff film from photographs of his character. For instance, in The Man They Could Not Hang, his shock of straight white hair and dark eyes is instantly recognisable from this film only.

The actor I most compare him to is Peter Cushing, another brilliantly intensive actor who could make corny sound good, the unbelievable sound real - a real talent in surreal and supernatural horror. Perhaps they were too similar to appear together, they certainly had the opportunity when Boris returned to England at the end of his career, when British horror was still flourishing. They were both British, both mainly in the horror genre, both gentle gentleman offscreen. Unafraid to do horror for fear it would damage their career, they recognised that typecasting was a good, steady earner.

I had a shock the day I saw a Boris and Bela movie at the Castro Cinema in San Francisco, I think it was 1998. It was a very rare chance to see a vintage horror, The Black Cat (1935), on a huge screen. As Bela Lugosi's name came up at the start, there was a cheer and applause. When Boris' name came up there wasn't a single sound from the audience. I was so shocked. The supposed rivalry between the two actors was still being fought in the magazines of horror fandom. I know that Bela was very much seen as the underdog of the two. But for a horror audience to snub Boris like that, so unanimously, I assumed it was some sort of anti-British sentiment. How rude!

To me his career eclipsed Lugosi's in terms of creativity, range, longevity and sheer quality. Lugosi usually played the same character and rarely changed his appearance, not even for Dracula (White Zombie and Dead Eyes of London are the only exceptions I can think of). He repeatedly picked dreadful projects, even early on in his career when he was world famous. Don't get me wrong, he's a huge part of the horror genre and I love watching him, but if you ask me to choose between his films and Boris, there's no contest.

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG

(1939, US)

This starts like a typical Karloff 'mad doctor' yarn, but takes an interesting sharp turn halfway, into the world of creative serial killings!

Characteristically, Boris plays a scientist tinkering in medical experiments, until the lawmen bust in and ruin everything. In the courtroom, the jury are intent on sending him to the hangman, rather than considering the scientific facts of the case. Angry that his breakthough work to help humanity has been mistaken for murder, without the chance to clear his name, he turns a vengeful eye on the judge and jury, threatening them to an early grave, despite his impending execution...

The court scenes and the climax in the mansion are in handsomely constructed sets, the courtroom filled with extras. A larger budget is also in evidence compared to many of his later mad doctor 'b' movies. The well-defined black and white camerawork also implies that there was time to light the scenes carefully and creatively. There's even an unusual tracking shot that tilts out of a dutch angle as it pulls back.

The story is an early example of a madman working his way through a well-prepared shitlist (like the Vincent Price classics The Abominable Dr Phibes and Theatre of Blood). It also verges on the teritory of The Cat and the Canary as his intended victims are assembled together in an old dark house and told the order that they will die (a trick of Dr Fu Manchu). There's even a murder method that was repeated decades later in Dr Phibes Rises Again.

Fast-moving and visually rich, this is one of Karloff's best thrillers which didn't rely on movie monsters. The story is dramatically strong enough to sustain the scientific shortcomings at the centre of the plot. The lively and convincing cast are consistently good, though short of familiar faces. And I always love it when the dead return to torment the living...


After a long exile on VHS, this film is newly out on DVD - the pick of the 'Icons of Horror Collection' boxset, (pictured at top).


For those in the mood for more Karloff, there's a rare screening of The Man Who Changed His Mind a 1936 mad doctor movie made in Britain, also starring the spunky Anna Lee (Bedlam and In Like Flint). At London's BFI SouthBank on Thursday, December 3rd.

The lobby card above is from the excellent The Walter Film Gallery.

More thrills with Boris can be found in my extensive look at his much later Die Monster Die (1965).

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970) quite a scream, actually

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN
(1969, UK)

I was buying horror film magazines before I was old enough to see the films. After seeing the photostory in For Monsters Only magazine (really great photo spreads) and reading the Peter Saxon book The Disorientated Man, I was oh so very ready to see Scream and Scream Again when the opportunity arose on late night TV in the late 1970s.

I wasn't disappointed - dismembered body parts, gallows humour, nudity (well, that dodgy 'naked young woman on a mortuary slab' nudity) and an essential cast. Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, sorry, Sir Christopher Lee and Vincent Price all in a movie together (but not all in the same scene though).

The unusually splintered storyline is carried over from Saxon's novel. A runner clutches his chest and passes out in the street, only to wake up in a strange hospital room where he discovers he's now missing a leg. A rogue general is murdering his way into power in a takeover bid of an unnamed Eastern bloc country. A serial rapist who murders his victims and drains them of blood, is loose in London, preying on young women he picks up in 'happening' nightclubs. Three isolated storylines that gradually intertwine.

The story structure leaves the audience scrambling in the dark for clues for much of the film, also trying to follow a large cast of characters. But it's fun, fairly vicious for the time, and it eventually starts to make sense.


The three giants of horror, Cushing, Lee and Price, later appeared onscreen together in The House Of Long Shadows (1983). Any of them in a film usually makes it worth seeing. But besides the big three, there are other familiar faces for genre fans - keep an eye out for Peter Sallis (Wallace & Gromit, Taste The Blood of Dracula), young blonde Yutte Stensgaard (Lust For A Vampire), young blond Christopher Matthews (Scars of Dracula, Blind Terror), Michael Gothard (The Devils, Lifeforce) and the deadpan wit of Alfred Marks - an unusual straight role for this expert comedy actor.

When the film eventually hit VHS, and even for a while on TV, it had a re-scored soundtrack, with groovy library music replacing songs by The Amen Corner (the nightclub band) and a less effective synthesizer score replacing the original. The same problem that Witchfinder General had until very recently. Thankfully the original music was restored and the picture remastered in widescreen for MGM's DVD double-bill with The Oblong Box, which is also well worth seeing. The film is in anamorphic widescreen and includes an original trailer (chock full of spoilers, mostly using shots from the climax).

If you want a slightly mad, fast-paced, seventies mystery with outbursts of violent horror and a screeching car chase, here it is. You'll even see that most cliched of sexual symbolism, the suggestive fondling of the sportscar gearstick...



For Monsters Only cover courtesy of Monster Magazines blog (because I can't lay my hands on my own copy right now). Once again the cover art was by Gray Morrow.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933): pre-code horror finally on DVD

MURDERS IN THE ZOO
(1933, US)

I don't write as often as I should about vintage horror. Even though I regularly watch and enjoy many of them, they're harder to recommend to a potential new audience, without explaining and excusing the history of movie production, acting techniques and, er, history. But I'm delighted when any good horror film finally becomes available again, after too long an absence - this has only just been released DVD. It's one of my favourites and can even be enjoyed by today's horror standards.

It contains two of my favourite shock moments in horror cinema, one of my favourite horror stars, and is a prime example of pre-code movies.

'Pre-code' was a period of American cinema where horror movies, dramas and thrillers were pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in an entertainment that was unregulated and open to all ages. In 1935 the Hayes Code clamped down on what could and could not be shown in movies, an overly restrictive and puritanical wad of rules that even dictated the movies endings. The code wasn't successfully challenged until the 1950's.

The UK had had a hugely negative influence on horror films in the mid 1930s. The British market was a major source of income for Hollywood, but was attempting to ban and boycott sadistic horror films. A major reason why subsequent horror films were more humorous, more supernatural and more watered-down for many years.

Pre-code movies are cherished as being from a brief period of early sound films that dealt with tough subjects, demonstrating that drugs, sex and violence are certainly nothing new in entertainment. Without them there's a false impression that everything loosened up in the 1960s, not the 1920s and '30s.


Murders in the Zoo starts with a startling scene where Atwill is dealing with an amorous admirer who's been seeing his wife. He ensures that it will never happen again, and that the unlucky fellow never gets a chance to brag about it either... Collecting wild animals for the zoo, he's about to return from the forests of Southeast Asia, where the laws of the jungle are on his side.

Back in the USA, his wife (Kathleen Burke) continues to lead him into trouble, meaning that he'll have to commit a string of perfect murders where the animals take the blame... With lions, tigers, crocodiles and poisonous snakes around, how hard could it be?

I was delighted to see this on late night TV in the mid-1980s with a group of friends. While we'd been expecting a fifty-year old, polite, palatable, creaky old horror film, we were surprised at its brutality. The cold-blooded and surprising murders are capped with the use of actual dangerous animals. One scene couldn't be done today, when the cheetahs, lions and tigers all start fighting with each other - no way of faking that! What also adds to the film are the leading actors interacting with the animals, not always using stand-ins. The story still holds up today with it's clever 'perfect murder' method...

The villainous Lionel Atwill isn't as well known as Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, but starred in many horror films of the period and is still much loved by fans of vintage horror. His talent lay in playing professionals with an alternate sinister side, though he played a goodie in his first horror movie Doctor X. He made two more horror films with Fay Wray (the star of the original King Kong), but as the villain - in The Vampire Bat and Mystery of the Wax Museum. The last of which was later remade in 3D and in colour with Vincent Price recreating Atwill's role, House of Wax (1953).

After Mark of the Vampire (the remake of Lon Chaney's lost London After Midnight), Atwill joined the Universal Studios 'team-up' horror sequels, where the paths of Dracula, the Wolfman, Dr Frankenstein and his creature kept on crossing. Starting with Son of Frankenstein (1939), in which he created an indelible characterisation of Inspector Krogh, the one-armed policeman who'd fought the creature and lost. Kenneth Mars spoofed him and his wooden arm brilliantly in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974).

It's good to see Randolph Scott in a suit for a change. Most of his long career was played out in westerns, even getting a namecheck in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). It takes a little getting used to, seeing him in a horror film - like getting John Wayne in Psycho. Though Scott did star in a another big fantasy film, as the love interest for She (1935). Here he plays a veterinary scientist, meaning he has to wrangle some pretty large snakes - very impressive, Randolph.

Playing Atwill's wife, Kathleen Burke is instantly recognisable for her huge eyes. She'd debuted as the 'Panther Woman' in another Pre-Code classic The Island of Lost Souls the year before, another influential horror that's still without a DVD release.

But top of the bill is Charles 'Charlie' Ruggles, a comedy actor whose long career endured on into the 1960s, appearing in many classic TV series (Bewitched, The Munsters, The Man From UNCLE) and Disney films (The Parent Trap, Son of Flubber). While he doesn't get too much in the way, his not-very-funny business is at odds with the rest of the film, and is probably the reason that this horror isn't as highly regarded. But without him, the film would be well under an hour!

Murders in the Zoo was later remade by Herman Cohen in one of his best British Michael Gough horrors The Black Zoo, aka Horrors of the Black Zoo (1963). This hasn't had a home video release either, despite ranking alongside other similar productions like Horrors of the Black Museum and Konga that are rarely out of circulation.


Murders in the Zoo was missing from home video since the US release on VHS in the 90s. Only last month was it remastered and released on DVD from the TCM Vault in association with Universal Studios, in a similar service to the recent Warner Brothers Archives releases, where a limited number of DVDs are manufactured, just to see what the demand is. More news on these titles here. I'd be disappointed if this new approach isn't successful, and that there are only a handful of people left in the world who want to see these films - a scary prospect that too few people are interested in vintage horror.


There's another opinion of Murders in the Zoo at 1000 Mis-spent Hours and an amusing scientific analysis from And You Call Yourself A Scientist.

Here's a quick starter guide and a list of Hollywood's daring Pre-Code movies over on DVD Beaver.