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 Great White Space (1974) by Basil Copper: The amazingly prolific Basil Copper gives us a splendid homage to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, with perhaps a smidgen of Moby Dick, in this tale of an expedition into a mysterious cave system located beneath mountains somewhere in Asia. The exact location is never given because the narrator doesn't want anyone to follow in his expedition's footsteps for reasons that become abundantly clear as the narrative progresses. He only is escaped alone to tell thee.
Narrated decades after the (thankfully fictional) attempt of the 1932 Great Northern Expedition to penetrate the mysteries of that cave system, The Great White Space goes not into the southern polar regions (as Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Jules Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did) but beneath the Earth.
Copper devotes a lot of space and detail early in the text to explaining the technical and logistical preparations for the descent and then the long voyage to 'The Black Mountains', where the entry to the cave system exists. Along the way, two different and somewhat odd Asian tribes are met, and possible taboos about entering the caves encountered. The natives do not go in there, through an artificial cave mouth that stands several hundred feet high.
Once inside the system -- which is, to use a favourite Lovecraftian adjective, cyclopean, as in monstrously huge -- the expedition soon discovers that the entire cave system is artificial, carved or somehow otherwise scooped out of the rock through unknown technological means. Something lurks, of course, though much of the terror of the novel lies in what comes before the Big Reveal.
Unnerving details and an attention to both the squeamish and the Sublime build to the revelation of what waits in the region of The Great White Space, a region paradoxically located miles beneath the Earth. There are things in bottles, a library, and great forms glimpsed in the distance, coming closer. And there comes occasionally from far off the sound of enormous wings.
Some may find this brief novel a tad slow -- the horrors come on-stage fairly late in the game, and explanations are abandoned in favour of mystery and dread. I quite liked the modulation of this novel -- it's quiet and it demands concentration, but it's a page-turner nonetheless. Highly recommended.
The Mummy (1932): adapted by John Balderston from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer; directed by Karl Freund; starring Boris Karloff (Imhotep) and Zita Johann (Helen Grosvenor): Boris Karloff only appears in full Mummy garb for a few seconds in this Universal horror offering. For much of the film, he's slow-moving but recognizably human, having apparently doffed his bandages during the eleven years that pass between the movie's prologue and main story.
Karloff is Karloff, underplaying so as to instill menace, talking in a sepulchral whisper. Karl Freund's first American film as a director, The Mummy looks terrific in its play with shadows and light. The first Universal Frankenstein movie had made Boris Karloff a big enough star by the time The Mummy was released that the legend 'Karloff!' dominated the posters. And Karloff and the set design are really the stars here -- Karloff's co-stars are a terribly forgettable lot. I've forgotten them already.
Of course, Karloff only appears in full mummy regalia for a couple minutes. For the rest of it, he's sinister but human-looking as the resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep, mummified alive for the crime of loving the Pharaoh's daughter. But you can't keep a good monster down.
Inspired by stories of the Curse of King Tut's Tomb, The Mummy sends Karloff on a tour of vengeance and love, as he seeks the reincarnation of his lost love. Yes, reincarnation. Not something the Ancient Egyptians were known for believing in, but what the Hell. Who can tell Hinduism from Egyptian mythology?
Karloff is great as Imhotep. In one of his first full speaking roles as a horror star, Karloff seems to intuitively understand something that a lot of early sound actors did not: Less is More on the big screen. He has that great Grinch Karloff voice, and he knows how to use it -- for the most part, insinuatingly, softly. His movements are slow and patient, befitting a 3700-year-old man-mummy. Every time I see Karloff in a movie, major or slight, I'm again impressed by what a natural-seeming, finely tuned screen actor he was. I can pretty much happily watch him in anything. Recommended.
The Mummy (1999): developed by Stephen Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre from the 1932 screenplay by John L. Balderston, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer; directed by Stephen Sommers; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnahan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep/The Mummy), and Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay): Created for people who found Raiders of the Lost Ark to be too realistic, The Mummy is a perfectly disposable popcorn movie that vanishes almost entirely from the memory after you've watched it. The main cast (Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and John Hannah) pretty much defines affability.
Arnold Vosloo as the titular character almost seems to have wandered in from a different, better movie. He gives Imhotep, a role that originated back in 1932 with Boris Karloff, some heft and pathos. That he's stuck speaking ancient Egyptian (well, whatever the filmmakers decided that was) for pretty much the whole movie seems like a handicap the film-makers needed to fix. The central visual effects image -- the face in the engulfing sandstorm -- was striking enough to be recycled in The Mummy Returns and in the recent Tom Cruise version of The Mummy (2017). Lightly recommended, especially for kiddies.
The Mummy Returns (2001): developed by Stephen Sommers from the 1932 screenplay by John L. Balderston, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer; directed by Stephen Sommers; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnahan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep/The Mummy), and Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay): Not so much scripted as assembled from its predecessor and other sources. Those sources include the then-new computer game Diablo 2. I kid you not.
Stephen Sommers just keeps shoveling as a director and writer, riffing on The Lost World in one scene, Raiders of the Lost Ark in another. He even throws in some gratuitous reincarnation stuff for, um, the sake of character motivation? There's also toilet humour, a precociously annoying boy, a steam-punky home-made dirigible, endless ranks of CGI soldiers, and a horribly rendered CGI Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the Scorpion King, soon to be spun off into his own movie. Enjoyable, just. Lightly recommended.
Freaks: written by Tod Robbins; directed by Tod Browning; starring Wallace Ford (Phroso), Leila Hyams (Venus), Olga Baclanova (Cleopatra), Henry Victor (Hercules), Harry Earles (Hans), Daisy Earles (Frieda), and Rose Dione (Madame Tetrallini) (1932): You really don't watch Freaks for the acting or the writing or that static, early sound-era direction. You watch it because the disabilities and deformities are real, because the story has the crude power of a fable, and because Tod Browning does manage a couple of effective scenes in the dark and the rain, when he's able to stage something that doesn't require camera movement.
So far as I can tell, the longest restored version runs 64 minutes, lacking about 20 minutes of lost footage that were cut from the film after its first couple of weeks of release. The lost footage apparently deepened the horror while also making the 'Freaks' of the travelling carnival more sympathetic and the 'normal' people much less so. What's left is still stunning, and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of the carnival grotesques who are simply trying to make a living in a world where the best they can hope for is life as a sideshow attraction.
Besides the unnerving night-time attack scene and the late-movie revelation of what revenge the carnival folk took on the homicidal trapeze artist, other scenes also achieve a sort of Grimm's pastoral. A scene involving 'pinheads' and their protector playing in the woods near the village they're visiting has a grace to it, and a grace note of kindness involving one of the townspeople's treatment of the frolickers.
Only a coda added to the movie after its bowdlerization rings absolutely false. The rest is crude and powerful and impossible to imagine being made today. The horror of the movie begins as a contemplation of distortions of the human form and ends as a classic tale of horrific revenge in the manner of EC Comics or Poe's "Hop-Frog." The viewer's identification moves inexorably towards that of the 'Freaks,' and away from those who would harm or kill or even just mock them. Highly recommended.
Gabriel Over the White House: written by Carey Wilson and Bertram Bloch, based on the novel Rinehard by T.F. Tweed; directed by Gregory La Cava; starring Walter Huston (President Jud Hammond), Karen Morley (Pendola 'Pendie' Molloy), Franchot Tone (Hartley 'Beek' Beekman), C. Henry Gordon (Nick Diamond) and David Landau (John Bronson) (1933): Made by William Randolph Heart's production company in 1932, this movie was held back by its Hollywood distributor until March 1933 because the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, was a staunch Republican who didn't want this movie released during Herbert Hoover's presidency. It's certainly one of the oddest movies of the 1930's, a paean to fascism and socialism in the service of the Greater Good.
Walter Huston plays Jud Hammond, a corrupt President who does whatever big money and the leaders of his (unnamed) political party tell him to do. But then he gets in a car accident and, instead of dying, emerges from his coma as Super-President!
After firing everyone in his Cabinet except his personal secretary "Beek" Beekman and his former lover Pendula (!) Molloy, Hammond leaps into action to save America from despair, starvation, civil unrest, and organized crime. He declares martial law, making himself the de facto emperor of America, and then puts all the unemployed men to work in his new peacetime army of the unemployed. Soon, the President has opened up all manner of cans of whoop-ass on the forces of evil in this world.
Does the newly energized President have enemies? Sure. But he's also got help. Angelic help. Though we never see the archangel Gabriel, the movie makes it pretty clear that the President has divine help in his campaign to save America and, indeed, the world. Apparently, God is a socialist with fascist tendencies. Who knew?
Huston. always a fine actor (father of John Huston, grandfather of Anjelica) makes a convincing President here under the circumstances -- indeed his acting is finer and subtler than the film itself. Huston makes Hammond slightly off-kilter while he's possessed by Gabriel (or getting advice from him, or whatever's going on) -- he really does seem to be receiving direction from outside his body, direction only he can hear. The rest of the cast is liveable, with a young Franchot Tone solid as idealistic secretary Beekman. All this in less than 90 minutes!!! Recommended.
