Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (USA, 1988)

"The name's Earl, but the ladies back home call me Longhorn, maybe you can guess why." 

Earl Hooter (Lee McLaughlin)

 

Okay, we admit it: we were fans of Elvira's original Movie Macabre broadcasts way back in the day when we lived in the Bryson on Rampart in L.A., long before it was designated an L.A. Historic Cultural Monument. It was Elvira's cleavage that first drew our attention, but we slowly also became to appreciate the movies she hosted. Sure, most of the versions presented were cut and edited, and the intercut commentary was not always a welcome addition, but many of the movies were actually really good: for every "good" bad flick like  Werewolf of Washington (1973 / trailer) or Thing with Two Heads (1972 / trailer) or Beware! The Blob! (1972 / trailer) — three disasterpieces, to say the least — you had something like Silent Night, Bloody Night (1970/72), Blacula (1972 / trailer), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), The Murder Clinic (1966 / trailer), Horror Express (1972), Peeping Tom (1960 / trailer), Fearless Vampire Killers (1967 / trailer), The Baby (1973 / trailer), Messiah of Evil (1974) and more. Most movies was saw back then, if not all, we subsequently enjoyed more and without commercials when VHS (later DVD) came about, but over the decades we never truly could forget Elvira's cleavage. (Two thumbs up! And definitely more than two handfuls.)

"Whoa. Must have taken too much antacid in the sixties." 

Elvira

 

Trailer to

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark:

In any event, nowadays she is an American icon,* possibly more famous than Vampira (a.k.a Maila Nurmi [11 Dec 1922 – 10 Jan 2008] of The Beat Generation [1959 / full movie], Plan 9 from Outer Space [1958 / trailer], I Passed for White [1960 / full movie], Bert I. Gordon's Magic Sword [1962 / trailer] and more), from whom Elvira took much of her look and shtick. (Much like any given male creature-feature host took his from some other male creature-feature host — hell, Vampira later admitted that she herself was inspired by the then still-nameless Morticia Addams from Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons). Considering Elvira's look, icon status and cleavage, it is a bit odd that it took us 36 years to finally get around to watching her first movie outing, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988). But, hey! Better late than never!

* Is there any bigger proof of being an American icon than getting your own DC comic book? Mohammad Ali only got a one-shot special (Superman vs. Mohammad Ali) in 1978, but she had a full 11 issues of Elvira's House of Mystery (1986-87) at DC followed by 168 issues Elvira Mistress of the Dark at Claypool.

 

"Listen, sister. If I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you."

Elvira

 

The basic plot of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark sees Elvira (Cassandra Peterson of The Working Girls [1974 / trailer] and All about Evil [2010 / trailer]) lose her movie-hosting job* when the TV station is sold and the new boss, Earl Hooter (Lee McLaughlin [4 May 1936 – 20 Sept 2007] of Ed Gein [2000], The Car [1977 / trailer] and Up Your Alley [1971, with Haji and the Great Uschi]), goes full Harvey Weinstein over her cleavage. Jobless and dreaming of a show in Las Vegas, for which she needs $50,000 to get off the ground, fortuitous fate suddenly makes our breast-advantaged heroine a beneficiary of the estate of her previously unknown and now dead great-aunt.

* The film she's hosting that day is Roger Corman's five-day-wonder, It Conquered the World (1956 / trailer below, with Dick Miller), which was originally released on a double bill with The She Creature (1956 / trailer). As there is no such thing as flogging a dead horse in Movieland, Texan anti-talent Larry Buchanan (see: The Naked Witch [1964?] and our Dead but (Not) Forgotten look at Dale Berry) remade Corman's It Conquered the World in 1966 as Zontar, the Thing from Venus (trailer).

"I've seen the People's Court. I'm entitled to one phone call and a strip search." 

Elvira

 

Trailer to

It Conquered the World (1956):

And so across the country she goes, to Falwell, Massachusetts, a super-conservative town full of the prudish and judgmental kind of people who nowadays would wear MAGA hats. Her inheritance proves meager, though: a dilapidated house, a poodle, and a cookbook...

The plot is pretty inconsequential, if you get down to it, and pretty much follows the time and tried template of the typical outsider-vs.-conservative-town movie like, say, Footloose (1984 / trailer) or Harper Valley PTA (1978 / trailer), the latter of which — aside from starring a MILFy Barbara Eden — was supposedly a key influence. Unlike the leads in those two movies, however, the heavenly topped heroine in Elvira is unable to open her mouth without something appropriately inappropriate slipping out.

 

"Oh well, there's nothing wrong with G-rated movies, as long as there's lots of sex and violence."

Elvira

 

To ask whether or not Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a good movie pretty much misses the point: it is a well-made, low-budget, and ultra-eighties campy, intentionally "bad" movie about a walking, talking goth Valley Girl who is virtually incapable of speaking in anything but innuendos or malapropisms. The movie is the character and the character is the movie, and the character is built to feel up be a bizarrely sexy Mae West figure. Definitely and intentionally more a comedy than a horror movie, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a bit too episodic in nature and the jokes tend to be more juvenile than intelligent, but the movie maintains a good-natured innocence even when "off color". Whenever the good nature falls away — the scene in which Elvira causes and drives away from a gas station explosion, probably killing the asshole gas station attendant (co-scriptwriter John Paragon [9 Dec 1954 – 3 Apr 2021] of Echo Park [1985 / trailer]), or when she shows up late and like a gangbuster for the reading of the will — Elvira's obliviousness and slinky innocence takes a turn towards the narcissistic and self-obsessed, regardless of the level of self-mockery and camp. The horror elements never become scary, but then they weren't meant to be — in that sense, despite the supernatural trappings floating about, the movie definitely owes more to Footloose in that the true theme is: the freedom to be yourself and to do your thang is worth defending.

 

"Boy, am I a horn-dog. Is this face taken?"

Chastity Pariah (Edie McClurg)

 

In that sense, though Elvira might be a goth wet dream of sorts, she offers more than meets the eye. She is an empowered woman who wants and takes control of her life — and has the final say about her looks and sexuality. Even when she's twirling tassels* — the show she puts on in the final scene is amazingly both in-step and out-of-step with the rest of the movie; it even outdoes the classic tassel-twirling performance given in The Graduate (1967 / trailer) by Dick Miller's wife Lainie Miller — she does it for herself and not for chauvinists. Elvira isn't going to let anyone else tell her what to do or dress or how to be; in that sense, she is truly a great role model. 

* Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) mastered the art of tassel twirling during her younger days; early in her career she was a topless [if underage] Las Vegas showgirl and stripper.

 

"If they ever ask about me, tell them I was more than just a great set of boobs [...]"

Elvira

 

So many jokes (especially of the verbal kind) get tossed around that not all stick, but in general the viewer will find themselves laughing more than groaning — and, to tell the truth, the groaners also mostly work within the story that unfolds onscreen. The sheen of the '80s is found in almost every scene in the clothing and the music and the hair and the jokes (many of which wouldn't make it onscreen in these woke times), and it definitely works like a familiar, much loved added spice.

 

"It'll be a guaranteed standing ovulation!"

Elvira

 

Interestingly enough, the evil machinations of the judgmentally moralistic (and mostly two-faced) townspeople and the movie's evil warlock Vincent Talbot (W. Morgan Sheppard [24 Aug 1932 – 6 Jan 2019] of The Devil's Dozen [2013 / trailer], Needful Things [1993 / trailer], Wild at Heart [1990 / trailer] and The Keep [1983 / trailer]) maintain an oddly contemporary feel, if only because of the fanaticism of the current religious right-wingers in the US and their basic inability to see when they are being hoodwinked and by whom. (In truth, it is sad to admit, that is an inability that has since spread to greater America.) But unlike the aftertaste of today's immoral moral majority, the aftertaste left by the film is rather sweet: it is, ultimately, a feel-good movie, and it works as one, laughing all the way. 

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was not the biggest of hits when it came out, which is why a follow-up movie took a long time coming. 23 years later, in 2001, Elvira proved that she is ageless by releasing a prequel of sorts titled... 

Elvira's Haunted Hills —

trailer:

 

Asides that have nothing to do with the movie.

Are we the only ones that initially assumed that Elvira's muscular love interest of the movie, Bob Redding, (C-movie action hero Daniel Greene of After the Condor [1990, with Charles Napier], Soldier of Fortune [1990 / German trailer], American Rickshaw [1989 / trailer], Hammerhead [1987 / trailer], Hands of Steel [1986 / trailer], Stitches [1985/ trailer], Pulsebeat [1985 / clip], etc.) would turn out to be a closet gay? (He doesn't.)

And speaking of gay, or at least gay-for-pay, keep your eyes open for gay-for-pay icon — and long ex-boyfriend of Cassandra Peterson — Bill "Circumsized" Cable (2 May 1946 – 7 Mar 1998) doing a quick appearance as a cop, much like he does in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985 / trailer). That's him below to the right modeling underwear with an even bigger gay icon (a reported 9 inches vs. maybe 7), Gordon "Circumsized" Grant (possibly 1956-1993).

Handsome and proudly hirsute, Bill Cable modeled nude and appeared with a whip in Wakefield Poole's arty gay porn classic Bijou (1977 / info / NSFW "trailer"), but never seems to have actually done a gay sex scene; even in the straight porn flicks he took part in, like (among others) future-suicide Carlos Tobalina's Last Tango in Acapulco (1973 / full x-rated film in Spanish) and Jungle Blue (1978 / full x-rated film), he may have shown his muscles and Oscar Meyer, but he tended to use a stunt cock — John Holmes's, for example, in Jungle Blue. That said, if you search hard and one-handed, you might still find him hard online in straight pictorials. He died, paralyzed, as a result of a motorcycle accident. Gordon Grant's demise is more apocryphal, as "the facts" about him are all relatively undocumented and possibly only alternative facts. 

Bill "Stoner" Cable as Tarzan

(from Jungle Blue):

Lastly, are we the only ones to have the feeling that there is an interlude in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark that may have mildly influenced John Waters's last movie, A Dirty Shame (2004 / trailer)? 

Elvira sings

Two Big Pumpkins:

Hickok (USA, 2017)

Opening amidst a Civil War battle in which the nattily dressed-in-black Hickok (Luke Hemsworth, yet another hot-bodied Hemsworth brother, this one generally found in genre films like Death of Me [2020 / trailer] and The Osiris Child [2016 / trailer]) appears to be the only survivor, this well-made but hardly inventive western promptly jumps to seven years into the post-Civil War future, one in which Hickok has obviously slid down the economic ladder. Having blown his apparently last cents on a bordello babe and a bath, he suddenly has to "leave" town and ends up, more or less purely by chance, in Abilene, Kansas (the current — as in 2025 — location of the Greyhound Hall of Fame and, of lesser interest, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum). An act of frontier humanism at a poker table leads the town mayor, George Knox (Kris Kristofferson [22 June 1936 – 28 Sept 2024] of Blade [1998] and so much more), to offer Hickok the position of town marshal, which Hickok accepts, if but for purely mercantile reasons...

 

"No one's harmless with a gun and a belly full of liquor." 
Wild Bill Hickok (Luke Hemsworth)

 

Trailer to

Hickok:

In Hickok, like most movies dealing with folk heroes, be the hero Beowulf or Robin Hood or Wild Bill Hickok (27 May 1837 – 2 Aug 1876) or Bonnie & Clyde, diverse rumored truths and more-likely truths and total fabrications are woven into the narrative tapestry in whatever way that best fits the filmmaker's desires,* so the movie can hardly claim to be even a mildly realistic biography of the famed gunman's life. But then, seeing that historical veracity is not something innate to the "known" life stories of folk heroes and legends — and especially not to those of the Wild West — factual exactitude should neither be expected nor held as a benchmark.** The real question is simply, does the narrative*** (and, in turn, the movie) work?

* For example, John Wesley Hardin (26 May 1853 – 19 Aug 1895) may have been in town while Hickok was marshal, but he never became the town's deputy. And while there was indeed a showdown between Hickok and Philio Houston "Phil" Coe, it was anything but that as presented in the movie, and it hardly involved an ex-flame. And... And... And... And... 
** While alive, Hickok was known to be a teller of tall tales and fabrications regarding his exploits. Indeed, his penchant for doing so is aptly illustrated in a small but fun character-building scene in which he distracts an injured boy, Joey (Hunter Fischer), by spinning a cliffhanger adventure from his past.
*** The film was scripted by the less than productive Michael Lanahan, whose limited resume of credits (only four films?) appears to have begun with forgotten director Steve Carver's (5 Apr 1945 – 8 Jan 2021) singular '80s T&A comedy, the minor cult fave (at least for those into '80s T&A comedies) Jocks (1986 / trailer). Carver himself was a master of exploitation, as evidenced by his trash classics The Arena (1974 / trailer), Big Bad Mama (1974 / trailer, with Dick Miller), Drum (1976 / trailer) and more, who left film and the world too early.  

It does. The tale told in Hickok might not be new and is a bit by the numbers, but it unrolls at a comfortable speed that allows for action and moments of quietude, if not even character development and occasional dashes of humor. Along the same lines, the cinematography is clear and well shot, while the entire mise en scene rarely calls overt attention to itself or screams film set.

Across the board, Hickok forgoes the filth and realism of the contemporary, revisionist westerns, not to mention the grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies of the spaghetti westerns, aiming instead for an overall cleanliness that is almost traditional, and much closer to the westerns featuring cleanly shaven and dressed but manly men that many of us grew up watching on after-school television. (To its advantage, the movie also totally forgoes posse chases, cattle drives and "Injuns", things that were very much a staple of most old-school westerns.)

 

"I'll tell you one thing — guns are good for business." 
Doc (Bruce Dern)

 

As for the direction, the productive genre filmmaker Timothy Woodward Jr.'s* handicraft also seems to echo the old-school western. In Hickok, he evidences a solid grasp of form and an eye for pleasant framing, but never dips his toe into visual innovation or playfulness or unnecessary Wow!-moments. His action scenes and shootouts might rely too much on editing, but the flow and rhythm of direction works well with story told. Of equal importance, he obviously has a hand for directing his performers, for they all deliver decent performances. 

* Timothy Woodward Jr. doesn't seem to have had any "big hits" as of yet, and a move to the A-levels is still waiting, but his productive career (since 2012) as a reliable producer of genre product reveals a regularity of "quality" that makes one think he'll be around a while. Some of his films of fun include: Gnome Alone (2015 / trailer), Seven Faces of the Ripper (2014 / trailer), Decommissioned (2016 / trailer), Gangster Land (2017 / trailer), The Final Wish (2018 / trailer), The Outsider (2019 / trailer), The Call (2020 / trailer), and Till Death Do Us Part (2023 / trailer).

Of Hickok's cast, Cameron Richardson (of Rise: Blood Hunter [2007 / trailer], Women in Trouble [2009 / trailer], Wreckage [2010 / trailer], Dead Ant [2017 / trailer] and Hotel Noir [2012 / trailer]), who plays Mattie, the fictitious woman of the tale, deserves special mention: over the course of the movie, she makes her rather one-note if mercurial character likeable and, ultimately, both believable and understandable. As the movie's central bad guy, Phil Poe, big-man country singer Trace Adkins (of Maneater [2022 / trailer] and Trailer Park of Terror [2008 / trailer]) is also noteworthy, convincingly presented an alpha personality that slowly burns to an explosion.

 

In general, actually, the casting of Hickok works well: like most Woodward Jr. feature films, it utilizes an excellent cult-worthy mixture of familiar, semi-familiar and unknown faces;* going by this film, and assuming Woodward Jr. has some say in the casting, he not only possesses a decent grasp of perfect casting by type but also knows how to get his thespians to give decent performances.

* The familiar, cult-worthy names of Hickok are, of course, the old timers Kristofferson and Bruce Dern (of The Glass House [2001] and so much more), the latter as the alcoholic Doc Rivers O'Roark. As to be expected, both Dern & Kristofferson are given headlining credit in what must have been a one-day shoot for Dern and a three-day shoot for Kristofferson. Both men are given, at different points, portent and oddly inappropriate dialogue (particularly in the case of the alcoholic doctor played by Dern) regarding how a man must become a man and face his demons and stop running from the past. Kristofferson in particular seems to be a sage of the Wild West, spouting platitudes with enough gravitas that they don't necessarily sound stupid...  

Trace Adkins top-twenty hit from 1996,

There's a Girl in Texas:

When not in rags, Hemsworth's Wild Bill is far more cosmopolitan than the real, almost dandy-looking Bill (that's him below) probably ever was. Hemsworth is definitely a lot better dressed and cleaner, and by the looks of it a lot more muscular and chiseled — you never see Bill/Hemsworth fully naked, but he does have a nice shirtless scene that reveals a body worth drooling for. As for the 100% fictional Mattie, the woman of the narrative, aside from being well-acted and emotionally layered, she too is pleasant to the eye.* Unexpectedly, for this day and age, she has a nude scene; much too short and discrete, to say the least, and with a twice-as-stacked body double, but what cis-gendered dude is going to complain about that? 

* Named #52 on the Maxim magazine Hot 100 of 2005 list, she should have placed higher.

As a movie, Hickok could perhaps best be described as factually challenged comfort food. Nicely, if somewhat stodgily directed, it never looks cheap or on-the-fly and, to the contrary, plays out as if everyone involved wanted the do the best they could. As a movie, Hickok might not offer anything new, but much like well-made comfort food it has all the right ingredients put together in the right way. Hickok makes for easy viewing, and as such is a highly pleasant diversion — and not just for western fans.

The Terror by Night (USA, 1946)

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night."
Psalms 91:5

 

Of the numerous series that Universal had in production in the thirties and forties, the Sherlock Holmes series was definitely of the most consistent in quality. True, there were one or two turkeys amongst the twelve films featuring Basil Rathbone (13 Jun 1892 – 21 Jul 1967) and Nigel Bruce (4 Feb 1895 – 8 Oct 1953) as the famed detective and his good friend Dr. Watson – Sherlock Holmes & The Secret Weapon (1942) or Sherlock Holmes & The Voice of Terror (1942) are the two that come quickly to mind – but unlike any of the movie studio's horror series, most Sherlock Holmes entries tended to be either of equal or better quality to the film that preceded it. Terror by Night, the second to last film, is of no exception. Nowhere is to be seen the boredom that Rathbone supposedly felt for his reoccurring role, a boredom that led him to leave the series after Dressed to Kill (1946 / trailer) in search of stage work, notwithstanding the fact that four more movies were in pre-production. 

Colorized trailer to

Terror by Night:

Despite the title of this movie, the overall mood and feeling of Terror by Night is much less "horrorific" than such superb entries as The Pearl of Death (1944), The Scarlet Claw (1944), The House of Fear (1945) or The Woman in Green (1945). In fact, more so than most of the films that preceded it, Terror by Night is a traditional mystery story, a simple tale of a crime (and murders) committed by a person or persons unknown and how the crime is solved – and the criminals foiled – by the master detective. Gone (or at least substantially subdued) are the long shadows and seemingly supernatural or monstrous trappings that made many an earlier Holmes film almost come across like a horror film disguised as a mystery. 

In Terror by Night, the "why" is known from the beginning: the famed 400 carat "Star of Rhodesia" diamond is stolen, the people who die do so either to facilitate the crime or hide the identity of the criminals. The only question that remains unanswered is "who", and as to be expected, Holmes (Rathbone) solves the mystery as Watson (Bruce) and Lestrade (Dennis Hoey [30 Mar 1893 –25 Jul 1960]) bumble along for the ride. (They do so in more ways than one since the film is set on a train.) 

That the film is more of a traditional crime film is possibly due to the scriptwriter brought aboard for this entry, author Frank Gruber (2 Feb 1904 – 9 Dec 1969). Though Frank Gruber earned most of his money in his later years writing western novels and teleplays under his name and the pseudonyms Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston, C.K.M. Scanlon and John K. Vedder, Gruber began his writing career writing lightly comic, hard-boiled pulp detective stories and novels. In fact, just prior to writing the screenplay for Terror by Night, he supplied the scripts to two acknowledged minor crime film classics, Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios (1944 / trailer), starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and the George Raft vehicle Johnny Angel (1945 / trailer). Hardly surprising, then, that Terror by Night is such a straight crime mystery. 

In theory an "original story" using minor plot elements from diverse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, the screenplay almost seems influenced by Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express, which was first published twelve years earlier in 1934, as all the action in Terror by Night takes place aboard a night train. (In this case, not the Orient Express but one heading from London to Edinburgh.) 

On the train, Roland Carstairs (Geoffrey Steele [27 Jun 1914 – 7 Feb 1987], in the biggest film role of his life — a full five minutes of screen time), the son of Lady Magaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes [1 Jan 1883 – 22 Jul 1974] of The Picture of Dorian Gray [1945 / trailer]), hires Holmes (Basil Rathbone, of course) to accompany them on the journey for protection since there had already been an unsuccessful attempt in London to steal the famed Star of Rhodesia. (The piece of ice and its legendary trail of bad luck seem to be modeled after the actual Hope Diamond.) Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey, in his last appearance in the series) is also on the train, obstinately on his way to a fishing holiday, though it is pointed out to him that it is not fishing season. At the last minute Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) and Maj. Duncan-Bleek (Alan Mowbray* [18 Aug 1896 – 25 Mar 1969]), Watson's old army buddy from India, also manage to catch the train as well. No sooner does the train chug off into the night does Holmes find a mysterious note telling him to bug-off, Roland is found dead, and the diamond stolen! 

* Mowbray is a familiar face seen in many a film, usually in the background. Amongst others parts, he played Inspector Lestrade in the 1933 version of A Study In Scarlet (full film) and has a memorable bit part in the underrated but truly great film noir classic, I Wake Up Screaming (1941 / trailer). 

Well, actually, a fake diamond gets stolen, for Holmes exchanged the fake for the real one when he first got on the train. Lestrade takes the diamond into his possession but, of course, it gets stolen from him. Everyone in the train car is now a suspect, but most turn out to be red herrings — even as the body count grows! Holmes comes to suspect that the mathematical genius Col. Sebastian Moran, the evil compatriot of his arch-enemy Moriarty, is the brain behind the crime, but since the train seems full of people who pass the time doing math for fun this little tidbit doesn't help much. Of course, the viewer can figure out the bad guy long before anyone in the film does, but the ending does have an unexpected — if not possibly far-fetched — twist to it. 

Terror by Night is an enjoyable 50+ minutes of quick-paced entertainment with some fine moments. The fight scene in which Holmes is nearly thrown to his death from the train is probably one of the great highlights of the entire series, and even now, almost 50 years after it was filmed, it still packs an exciting wallop. Lestrade is surprisingly bearable, and Dr. Watson, though a buffoon as customary, is actually rather humorous at times – especially during his interplay with the suspect Professor William Kilbane (Frederick Worlock [14 Dec 1886 – 1 Aug 1973] of Ruthless [1948 / full movie] and She-Wolf of London [1946 / trailer]). 

The movie also features — and under-uses terribly — one of the great beauties to ever appear in the series, Renee Godfrey (1 Sept 1919 – 24 May 1964) as bad gal Vivian Vedder. She never had a career to speak of, but every scene in Terror by Night that she appears in she manages to steal completely from all other actors present. Her career, on the other hand, was stolen first by children and then by cancer.