Burl reviews Plan 9 from Outer Space! (1957)

 

Greetings, friends! I am Burl! We are all interested in movies - that is why you are here! And now, for the first time, based only on a recent VHS viewing experience and many previous viewings at home and at the cinema, I present to you a picture thought by many to be the worst film of all time! Ha ha, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about Plan 9 From Outer Space?

 

We’ve all seen it, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably attended a midnight screening or two of it, complete with the hooting and the howling and the sweet drifts of herbal smoke! But is this really the worst movie ever made? Of course not, and anyone who thinks it is simply hasn’t seen very many movies! It may have been made without skill or craft or art or resources, but it was made with heart and passion, and that alone puts it out in front of its deadly-dull compatriots like Manos: The Hands of Fate, or soulless and mercenary stinkers like, say, Jaws: The Revenge!

 

The heart and passion in the picture came from Writer-Producer-Director Edward D. Wood Jr., who, though it might be thought impossible, declined still further from pictures like this into worse ones – by the end, he was doing oddball pornoo of which The Young Marrieds is the ultimate example! But, if the biographical picture Ed Wood and the terrific book it’s based on, Nightmare of Ecstasy, are to be believed, Wood insisted Plan 9 was his masterpiece: his final statement on the human condition and the alien and zombie problems that occasionally beset it!

 

Bela Lugosi, of whom we all are very fond from his appearances in pictures like Island of Lost Souls and the wonderful The Black Cat, appears in a few scraps of near home-movie footage Wood shot a short while before the drug-addled boogey-actor’s death! The main story features a stolid pilot, Jeff Trent, who, based on the set dressing, is flying around not in an airplane but in a shower stall! He’s played by Gregory Walcott from Jet Attack and The Sugarland Express, and he can hardly believe his eyes when a paper-plate saucer dips and bobs in the sky beside his flying shower stall!

 

Yes, ha ha, saucers, seen over Hollywood! Trent and his wife, who live beside a cemetery, are puzzling over the sighting when some new problems raise their heads – right out of their graves, ha ha! It seems the saucer aliens are using revivication guns to animate corpses, like the old man played unwittingly by Lugosi, and his buxom wife, essayed by the proto-Elvira known as Vampira! Soon enough these two attack and kill a giant policeman, Inspector Daniel Clay, who is of course played by the mighty Tor Johnson, and the next thing you know he’s been zombified too! A full-bird colonel played by Tom Keene from Dick Tracy’s Dilemma gets involved, and soon there are repeated visits to the old cemetery, where the alien spacecraft somehow hides in a spinney and looks like a round pie plate in long shots and like a concrete bunker when seen in close-up sitting on the ground!

 

It all comes down to a gang of fey extraterrestrials with a crazy plan that’s evidently supposed to save the Earth from the dastardly power of the solemenite bomb! Ha ha, you say solemenite, but just what is it? Well, it hardly matters! Nothing the aliens do or say makes any sense at all, and the human characters are all boneheads who use handguns to gesture with and to scratch their foreheads! The filmmaking incompetence is bone-deep in this picture – even routine accomplishments like framing an image properly are beyond Wood’s abilities!

 

But I guess that’s the fun of it! Some people no doubt watch the picture to feel superior, or to exercise their insecurity-based desire to snark and scoff, but there’s also a terrible fascination and a great deal of entertainment to be had from the experience! Wood, of course, gets kicked around a lot, but he made movies at least, and for that he’s got my admiration! Ha ha! While it really exists outside of any possible rating system, even one as abstract as my own, I’m going to give Plan 9 From Outer Space two battle-axe jerkins!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man! (1943)

 

Ha ha and arooo, by the light of the full moon it’s Burl, here to review some Universal monster horror! This isn’t the best of the run, but it’s far from the worst, and like any of them it makes for some fine October viewing! The name of this picture is, and could only be, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!

It serves more as a sequel to The Wolf Man than anything else, though by the end it plays as a standard Frankenstein picture! Our man Lon Chaney Jr., known from My Favorite Brunette, is the constantly anguished Larry Talbot, who, as the picture begins, reposes peacefully in his grave, not bothering anyone! In a striking sequence marvelously directed by Roy William Neill, who also brought us the delights of The Scarlet Claw, two foolish grave robbers decide to pilfer the Talbot family crypt, and on the night of the full moon no less! Ha ha, these two miscreants are soon weeping copious tears as the hirsute terror revives himself and goes full wolfman! (An interesting trivia is that one of the robbers is played by Cyril Delevanti, who later appeared in pictures like Son of Dracula, The Night of the Iguana, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, played Johnnycake Jones in the Hudson’s Bay teleseries, and ended his career in Jack Arnold’s blaxploitation picture Black Eye, playing a character called Talbot! Ha ha!)

A hapless Welsh constable catches a fatal wolfmanning as well, and then Larry is found dazed and confused and human again, and having no idea how he ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff! He tracks down Maria Ouspenskaya, the old Gypsy woman whose son Bela put a biting on Larry in the first picture and turned him into a werewolf, but all she can do is point him in the direction of a certain science doctor she knows of! Well, of course this is Dr. Frankenstein, but when Larry arrives at the castle, he discovers two astonishing things: one, the doctor is dead; and two, the Gypsy woman’s son Bela, thought dead, has somehow been transformed into a Frankenstein Monster, and is reposing in an ice cave beneath the ground!

Of course Bela, the new Frankenstein Monster, is played by the great Bela Lugosi from Island of Lost  Souls! Replacing the departed doctor is a new doctor, Dr. Mannering, played by Patric Knowles from Another Thin Man! He quickly becomes obsessed with the secrets of life and death, which alarms Frankenstein’s daughter, Baroness Elsa, while down in the town the mayor, Lionel Atwill from Night Monster, tries to keep the increasingly anxious townspeople from lighting up their torches for a mob run up to the castle!

Ha ha, this mob is headed by the local malcontent, a large gentleman with a fulsome walrus moustache and a delightfully modern taste in shirts, who’s played by Rex Evans from Midnight Lace! And his gang includes the great Dwight Frye of Dracula fame! It all comes to a head just as Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man are finally throwing down for their climactic monstero-a-monstero, and while I won’t tell you who wins, I will say that the results are inconclusive thanks to a great wall of water unleashed by the constantly grousing Evans!

The bald fact is that if you like Universal monster movies, you’ll like this one, because it’s got just about everything you could hope for from the form! It’s a bit scary, a bit silly, and suffused with backlot atmosphere, and the tone does get a bit grim with Larry Talbot's constant hankering for the sweet release of death! This was the first of the monster-mash pictures, but not the last, and of course eventually the comedians would get involved and we’d have such works as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff! But at this point they were still trying to be scary, and they halfway succeeded! I give Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man two and a half ice windows!

Burl reviews The Black Cat! (1941)

Ha ha, it’s Burl “in da house!” Today I thought I might review The Black Cat! What’s that? No, not the great 1934 Edgar Ulmer picture starring Boris and Bela! Hmmm? No, not the 80s Lucio Fulci version either! Or the weird 1960s super low budget version! Ha ha, this one was made in 1941, and if it has any actual connection to the Edgar Allen Poe story after which it is ostensibly named, it flew right by ol’ Burl!

Bela is in this one though, I should note! I wonder how many other stars appeared in two totally different films that have the same titles? Not many, I’d guess! And do you know what else: Basil Rathbone is in this picture, and later on made another version, an animated short, with that very same title! So two of the stars of this Black Cat also appeared in two totally different movies also called The Black Cat; and on top of that Rathbone also appeared in Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror, an omnibus picture that featured a segment called The Black Cat! Ha ha, that’s the vicissitudes of Hollywood for you!

But on to this version! As I mentioned, Bela is in this movie, lurking around the edges mostly, just as he did in Night Monster! Here he’s not a butler though, but a gardener, and again serves as just about the most obvious red herring you could conceive of! The plot concerns a rich, ailing old lady who loves cats – but not black cats, the racist! – and is surrounded by her vulture-like relatives who are waiting to grab her fortune the moment she croaks! One of them seems quite willing to help her along!

Broderick Crawford, of The Vulture, appears in the Lon Chaney Jr. role of the husky, romantic but rough-around-the-edges dupe – he’s a real estate agent who hopes to broker the sale of the house and its contents, but he’s not as rapacious as the others! Along for the ride is the comic relief, Mr,. Penney, an antique dealer who wants to sell off the old lady’s furniture! His running gag is that he believes antiques can be sold for more if they’re damaged, so he goes around scratching and scraping and breaking the various pieces, and admonishing the movers for being too careful with the items! It’s not quite as tiresome as the comic relief often found in these old dark house pictures, but only just!

These fellows I’ve mentioned and a whole lot of others all get trapped in this house by a rainstorm, and of course there’s a murderer loose! The eventual solution to the mystery is highly unlikely, but ha ha, I guess that’s the point! It’s not a great picture, and you could fairly accuse it of wasting Bela, and the comedy gets on your nerves, but it looks fantastic, the cast is game and it has a few spooky or at least atmospheric sequences, so I can’t judge it too harshly! And after all, it runs barely more than an hour, so it doesn’t take too much of your time even if you hate it! I’m going to give this version of The Black Cat two poisoned bowls of milk, and I’ll try to get to the 1930s and 1960s iterations sometime very soon!  

Burl reviews Night Monster! (1942)

Hello, hello, it’s Burl! I’m here to review a creepy old Universal picture from the olden days, those innocent wartime days when you could just put together a bunch of people in a scary old house and you'd have a brand new booga-booga movie for the bottom half of the bill!

Of course it helps if some of those people in that scary house are the likes of Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi, even if Bela’s just playing a butler! You keep waiting for him to turn into a bat or something, but he’s pretty much just a stiff old butler with a strong sense of loyalty to his employer! Of course we well know that Bela’s abilities ranged far beyond such portrayals, so in a way it’s kind of nice to see him just play a fairly regular if still somewhat creepy guy!

Bela’s far from the main character in this picture! It seems there’s an elderly invalid whose arms are like old batwings, just leathery husks, completely useless, and whose legs are quite simply gone! He got that way in spite of the efforts of a trio of doctors who’ve been invited for the weekend! In addition there’s the invalid’s possibly-mad sister; a lady psychiatrist the sister has invited to see if she’s crazy or just being gaslit by the others in the house; a sinister housekeeper in the Mrs. Danvers mould; a friendly neighbour who writes murder-mysteries; and a be-turbaned swami with weird knowledge of Eastern occult practices! Ha ha, quite a crew!

It was when the swami showed up, and when it turned out that his hocus pocus was of central importance to the narrative, that I began to suspect that here, finally, is another picture in the tradition of The Amazing Mr. X! Ha ha, I really like these movies where a vein of Eastern mysticism makes its way into a spooky All-American situation! I guess I just like that particular chemical mixture!

Of course there are murders – in fact, the murders started before the movie even did! There’s a foggy, froggy swamp near the mansion, and it seems a doctor had been found there, the victim of a pretty stiff neck-twist! And a chambermaid who was going to spill the beans – same thing! And every time the sinister strangler is afoot, all the frogs in the swamp fall eerily silent! Soon the neck-twister is roaming the house, taking care of the very doctors who had failed to save the helpless invalid’s limbs! But it couldn’t be him, could it, somehow taking revenge personally on these sawboneses?

Well, there might just be some limb-regenerating going on, but I don’t want to give too much away! I’ll just say that the concept behind this strangler’s means of locomotion is pretty spooky! This was an altogether enjoyable picture, in fact! If you can get around the idea of Bela playing a supporting butler role, and you like that gleaming monochromatic Universal Pictures atmosphere as much as I do, you might enjoy it quite a bit also! I give Night Monster three empty pant legs and an extra turban jewel to Nils Asther who plays the role of the swami!

Burl reviews Island of Lost Souls! (1932)

Ha ha, am I not Burl? I am, and I’m here to review the first screen version of H.G. Welles The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was titled Island of Lost Souls for some reason! I’ve seen this one a few times, but it just gets better and better, and just the other day I saw the new DVD version that was recently released, and that was the best of all!

The story is pretty well known, I would think! A castaway ends up on Dr. Moreau’s mysterious South Seas island, where it transpires that he’s been using weird science to transform animals into human simulacra! Some of his beastpeople, like Lota the Panther Woman, are more successful than others, and some of them have Hungarian accents for some reason! Ha ha, that would be the Sayer of the Law, played by Bela Lugosi sporting the greatest beard ever filmed!

Moreau is played by Charles Laughton, who wears the second-greatest whiskers of all time! They’re shaped like an anchor, and perfectly suit Laughton’s great, haughty moon face! The whip-cracking Laughton is simply perfect in his part as the oily and sadistic but undeniably genius sawer of bones! He can be a real hambone, though I really enjoy his performances in that mode; but here, at least until the last few minutes of the picture, he plays everything pretty well down, to great and chilling effect!

Ha ha, they really play up his sadism in this version! The doctor seems not to have even heard of anesthetic, and so his surgeries are conducted without its benefit; but of course it would probably be a lot easier and more pleasant for him if his subjects weren’t squirming around and bellowing in pain! I guess he’s dedicated not just to the speeding-up of the evolutionary process, which is his stated goal as a scientist, but also to the delivery of pain! No wonder he’s nicknamed his operating theatre The House of Pain!

This is a top-notch picture, and I’d put it up there with other creepy pre-Code horror classics like Freaks and The Black Cat, two pictures I’m just wild about! The climax, with the beastpeople on a vengeful rampage, recalls that of Freaks quite a bit, though it lacks that extra frisson you get from watching actual deformed people slithering through the mud with castra*ion knives clutched between their teeth! But it’s safe to say that Moreau comes to an appropriately sticky end!

The movie looks great, the acting is flavorful across the board and the makeup on the animal fellows is absolutely as good as it gets! Why, this is an excellent picture! I give Island of Lost Souls four drunken seacaptains and urge you to see this remarkable and horrific movie!