White Zombie (1932): written by Garnett Weston; directed by Victor Halperin; starring Bela Lugosi (Legendre), Madge Bellamy (Madeline), Joseph Cawthorn (Dr. Bruner), Robert Frazer (Beaumont), and John Harron (Parker):
White Zombie was shot in 11 days for about $50,000 in 1932. Bela Lugosi always regretted not getting more money for it as White Zombie was a comparatively big hit.
At a trim 68 minutes or so (about five minutes have been lost, depending on what print you see), White Zombie is an engaging, creepy movie regardless of its shoestring budget. Lugosi is used well as Haitian voodoo master Legendre, allowed to underplay rather than play to the cheap seats. The acting from the other principals is mediocre at best.
Highlights include the appearances of the zombies, who stagger around wide-eyed. They're not the resurrected dead of contemporary popular culture. No, they're living people made subject to Lugosi's will by a combination of drugs and mesmerism.
The director Victor Halperin (also the producer) manages an effective use of shadows and murk throughout, along with a lot of shots of Lugosi looking hypnotic. There's a weird bit of business in which Lugosi clasps his hands together in order to control the zombies, a bit of business that seems funnier as the movie goes along. Is this the Zombie Grip?
Other than a lame bit of recurring comic business involving missionary Dr. Bruner's repeated attempts to get a light for his pipe, the movie moves efficiently along to its curiously affecting and tense climax. Those goggle-eyed zombies may not be dead, but their appearance and their movements would recur for the next 85 years in a host of zombie and zombie-esque movies and TV shows. And of course Rob Zombie would take both last name and band name from the movie. Recommended.
The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteriess of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007/ 2nd edition 2011) by Sarah Monette; containing the following stories:
- Introduction by Sarah Monette
- Introduction to the Second Edition by Lynne M. Thomas
- Bringing Helena Back (2004)
- The Venebretti Necklace (2004)
- The Bone Key (2007)
- Wait for Me (2004)
- Drowning Palmer (2006)
- The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004)
- Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005)
- The Wall of Clouds (2003)
- The Green Glass Paperweight (2004)
- Listening to Bone (2007)
- Story Notes by Sarah Monette (2007)
Overall: A well-written, revisionist 'nod' to the hermetic narrators and haunted academics in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. Monette notes in the introduction that she wanted to bring psychological realism and more fully realized characters to stories in the tradition of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.
She succeeds in terms of psychological realism and character-building, with the caveat that it seems to me that Lovercraft was far better at characterization when a story called for it than Monette's dismissive evaluation suggests. Oh, well.
Our first-person narrator is Kyle Murchison Booth. He lives somewhere in New England in the first half of the 20th century in an unnamed city. He works as an archivist of rare books and documents at a fictional museum. He has a tormented family past. In his early 30's in the first story, he's morbidly shy, agoraphobic, and a closeted homosexual who seems to be a virgin when the book opens.
Booth checks a lot of the boxes for various characters in James and Lovecraft. Whether any of James' or HPL's characters were closeted homosexuals is a matter of interpretation. In any case, Booth is a sympathetic fringe figure, albeit one locked in personality stasis for much of the ten stories. He's pretty much the same character at the end as the beginning, though he's got a little better at dealing with the supernatural because the supernatural is what he deals with over those ten stories.
The horror elements are where the stories generally disappoint. In riffing on a variety of standard tropes, the stories often lack both actual horror and a sense of the unusual or new. We open with a demon-raising gone wrong in the way demon-raisings pretty much always go wrong. We have ghosts, bodies sealed behind walls for years, a poltergeist, a ghostly memory, a ghost whose attempts to kill people are really sort of pathetic, an incubus, and an evil paperweight.
OK, I like the paperweight, though as its victim is a dick, one doesn't feel much horror about the whole thing. So, too, the fate of several other victims of the supernatural. If the supernatural kills a lousy person, does anyone care? The most M.R. Jamesian story in the collection, "The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox," suffers from a similar problem. The supernatural ends up seeming like comeuppance for venial sins in this story and others. It's a sort of EC Comics-lite.
Throughout, though, the characterization of Booth makes him a compelling narrator. His isolation and self-loathing are the real horrors here, to the extent that the supernatural could be eliminated from the stories without any real loss of narrative power. This is a good collection. As horror is a subjective quality, you may find it scarier than I did. Recommended.
The Last Witch-Hunter (2015): written by Cory Goodman, Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless; directed by Breck Eisner; starring Vin Diesel (Kaulder), Rose Leslie (Chloe), Elijah Wood (Dolan 37), Michael Caine (Dolan 36), Olafur Darri Olafsson (Belial), and Julie Engelbrecht (Witch Queen):
Vin Diesel sports an unconvincing beard-and-wig combo for the medieval flashback sequences in this somewhat ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. He's Kaulder, killer of the Witch Queen some time in the 1200's in Europe, cursed by her with immortality. He works for the Axe and Cross, a secret society of witch-fighters and, um, witch-regulators.
Assorted shenanigans convince Caulder, now in present-day New York and looking like the clean-shaven Vin Diesel we all know and love, that some bad witches strive now to bring the Witch Queen back to life. As the Witch Queen caused the Black Plague with magical Plague Flies, this could be bad. But not bad enough for anyone to notify the Centres for Disease Control!
The Last Witch-Hunter took a critical and box-office beating when it came out in 2015. It's not actually that bad. For example, it's much better than Solo, Warcraft, Alien: Covenant, and Tom Cruise's The Mummy. What praise, you say! What praise! It's about on par with the Netflix Will Smith movie Bright, also an ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. Hey, at least they're trying for something other than another superhero movie.
Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, and looks and acts pretty much like Vin Diesel once we get him out of all that fake hair. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) is fine as an unconvincing love interest, or maybe they're just going to be friends because nothing romantic happens in the movie. Michael Caine plays Michael Caine as a mentor figure. Elijah Wood is under-used and misused as a magical priest sidekick to Diesel. Someone named Julie Engelbrecht plays the Witch Queen under so much make-up and CGI than it did make sense not to cast a name actress as the main villain because she would be unrecognizable.
The direction of Breck Eisner is programmatic in the manner of a video-game adaptation. Or maybe a video-game cutscene. There are a few monster designs and production design moments that suggest real imagination in some of the visual effects houses that worked on the movie -- the spider-transformer-robot-thingie Jailer of the Witch-Prison is the best of these. In all, an adequate time-waster with enough goofy moments to keep it afloat. Lightly recommended.
Die, Monster, Die! (1965): adapted by Jerry Sohl from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "The Colour Out Of Space"; directed by Daniel Haller; starring Nick Adams (Steve Reinhart), Boris Karloff (Nahum Whitley), Suzan Farmer (Susan Witley), and Freda Jackson (Letitia Witley):
H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 story "The Colour Out Of Space" is one of a handful of the greatest horror stories ever told, eerily prescient in how it anticipates some of the effects of fallout and nuclear radiation exposure, horrifyingly vivid in its relentless description of the physical and mental disintegration of a family infected by Something From Outside.
I noted the excellent, recent German adaptation here. This 1960's adaptation takes certain liberties with the text and takes a little too long to really get rolling. But roll it eventually does, and quite effectively.
This was from AIP when it was still trying to imitate the British horror of Hammer Studios. The action of the movie has been relocated from the 1880's to the 1960's and from Massachusetts to England. A love interest has been added.
Well, really all the characters have been added -- screenwriter Jerry Sohl has modeled the doomed family in this movie on a sort of amalgam of various doomed families in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, none of those stories actually being "The Colour Out Of Space," in which a hapless family of farmers have to deal with the titular colour.
Boris Karloff is his usual magisterial self as the patriarch of the Whitley family. He's hiding a secret, one that seems to have infected his wife and his manservant. Brash, no-nonsense American Nick Adams (again, not in the original story) arrives at the behest of Karloff's wife to get Adams' fiancee Susan away from the cursed Whitley homestead. Poor old Nick can't even get a cab to the Whitley property, as the nearby town shuns the Whitleys and that whole area. This may be because the Whitley property is home to a "blasted heath" upon which nothing grows. Among other things...
Patience rewards the viewer with a gripping second half, complete with some fine, disturbing model work when it comes to monsters and disturbing make-up when it comes to infected humans. Adams is fine as a brash but occasionally bumbling hero, while Suzan Farmer has a somewhat thankless role leavened by allowing her some agency in facing the curse on her family. Also, a bracingly short 80 minutes and change! Recommended.
Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956): written by Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata, Ishiro Honda, and Al Ward; directed by Ishiro Honda and Terry Morse; starring Raymond Burr (Steve Martin), Takashi Shimura (Dr. Yamaane), Momoko Kochi (Emiko), Akira Takarada (Ogata), Akihiko Hirata (Dr. Serizawa), and Fuyuki Murakami (Dr. Tabata): Not the Japanese cut of Godzilla (well, Gojira) but the American version, a big hit in the States that helped fuel the giant monster boom of the 1950's and 1960's.
This version basically tells the same story as the original Japanese film, but with Raymond Burr interpolated into the movie as narrator and lone Caucasian (well, his editor gets a brief appearance too). Burr plays Steve Martin (!!!!), an American journalist on vacation in Japan when Gojira...errr....Godzilla emerges from the sea to wreak havoc.
Steve Martin is the only American journalist in Japan at this time, or at least it sure seems so. And what a great job he does! In the daring tradition of frontline reporters, he's pretty much everywhere Godzilla strikes, albeit never in the same shot.
He's also friends with all the major characters of the original cut. We know because they spend a lot of time talking to him, but only in the same shot when they're photographed from behind.
Anyway, I can't say as the frame story improves the movie. The characterization of the Japanese characters gets whittled down to almost nothing because STEVE MARTIN must tell us what's going on. If only they could have tricked Godzilla into putting on.... THE CRUEL SHOES.
The sequences showing the destruction of cities, people, and trains still hold a curious and elemental power. The original movie-makers weren't squeamish about showing people engulfed in flame, or doomed mothers and children about to be crushed, burned, or boiled to death.
The 'Godzilla Attacks' theme is one helluva piece of music, too. I wish the whole movie were scored to that unnerving, propulsive, jittery string-based symphony of destruction and dread! Thank you, composer Akira Ifukube!
It is interesting to evaluate the two major English-language cuts of Godzilla/Gojira together. The non-Burr version is better, scarier, and sadder. Still, reporter Steve Martin has a lot of gumption! And this American version is remarkably free of racism -- what we are presented with are simply Japanese citizens faced with an immeasurable horror. Recommended.
