One thing for sure, if this is a typical Korean zombie movie, then the Korean cuisine is definitely a lot better than their zombie films. (Bosintang — Yum! Yum! Yum!) Not that the direction of Soo Sung Lee (the maker of Road Kill / Rodeukil [2019 / trailer]) can be faulted — he has a good grip of everything needed to help visualize a story — but the screenplay, by someone named Choe Seung, is lacking in anything that would lead one to think that Choe Seung might be a good screenwriter. Much in Gangman Zombie has been seen elsewhere and done better elsewhere, while anything that is a surprise is more WTF-negative than WTF-positive.*
*The best case of WTF-positive that we have seen recently would be the Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958, with Allison Hayes) reference/homage that appears completely out of the blue in Love Lies Bleeding (2024 / trailer).
Trailer to
Gangnam Zombie:
Who knows what the actual budget of Gangnam Zombie was, but the movie looks and feels spectacularly tightly budgeted: most of the activity takes place in one location, and the core cast is extremely limited (though amply capable of convincingly conveying their given character). Melding martial arts with infectious zombies, the plot of Ganganam Zombie follows former taekwondo champion Hyeon-seok (Il-Joo Ji of Blades of Blood [2010 / trailer] and the feel-good but sexistly titled My Bossy Girlfriend [2019 / trailer]), who gets trapped at work when a zombie outbreak hits the building. If that weren't problematic enough, he has a major crush on his female co-worker Min-jeong (Korean pop star Park Ji-yeon* of Death Bell 2: Bloody Camp / Gosa 2 [2010 / trailer] and Wannabe / Hwanyeo (2024 / trailer]), and soon they are the last of the living in the building.
* A former member of the internationally successful K-pop group T-ara, she segued into a solo career in 2014 with the release of the album Never Ever...
Title track to Ji-yeon's
Never Ever:
As in the far-superior zombie classic 28 Day Later (2002 / trailer), the zombie outbreak is the result of a virus — possibly corona — that gets transferred early in the film from an infected cat to a small-time thief, Wang-i (Kyoung-Hoon Jo of North Korean Guys / Donghaemulgwa baekdusan [2003 / full movie]) who breaks into a storage container to steal jewellery. How the cat could get into or survive in the container is perhaps an immaterial question, as the zombies are later revealed to be virtually indestructible — thus one can assume the cat was, too. We never see whether the first person Wang-i bites and kills turns, but later, once Wang-i reaches the city of Seoul — the Gangnam District, to be exact, which at the latest became internationally known after the mega-success of Psy's Gangnam Style — and enters the building where our two heroes do their daily, low-level, start-up company drudgery, those bitten turn quickly. And thus the people fall as rapidly as American constitutional rights under Emperor Trump....
Gangnam Zombie opens with Min-jeong and Hyeon-seok already fighting their way through the zombie-infested halls of the business building, an interlude that seems to end tragically — but don't fear, there's a WTF-negative follow-up later, after the movie goes back in time and commences chronologically. We are unconvinced that the opening scene really does anything more than simply pad the movie's running time, and in that sense it is not the only scene of the movie that conveys that same feeling of "filmed to pad".
The best actor of Gangnam Zombie, oddly enough, is the battle-axe landlady Soon-ja (Jung Yi-joo), a dislikeable figure but oddly convincing and believable and funny — she is directly involved in the WTF-negative "real ending", which like the WTF-negative opening scene, reveals a scriptwriter and director incapable of logical realism and, in turn, of killing their main characters. (Creative rule #1: Kill your darlings.) Main zombie Wang-i (Kyoung-Hoon Jo) is also effective — hell's bells, all the zombies are effective and believable, at least until the one (Yoon Joon-Ho) starts doing some break-dancing moves — but the obsessiveness with which the zombified Wang-i literally hunts and pursues Min-jeong and Hyeon-seok doesn't really correspond to the brain-dead-but-hungry zombie mold of the remaining undead.
Gangnam Zombie is never really scary, but it does get some laughs and a few scenes do have a certain tension, especially those in which some dumb-fuck human acts as if the zombies are just agitated citizens (specifically, an early street scene and a later scene of a guard entering a room of rampaging zombies to get them to calm down). For a horror film involving zombies, a fictional form of monster adversary, Gangnam Zombie keeps it numerous taekwondo fight scenes surprisingly grounded in reality, never going for any of the flights of fighting fantasy once common to so many Asian movies. Unluckily, this proves to a disadvantage for the movie, which could have used a few WTF-positive moments of the kind found in, dunno, flying martial arts movies like Black Mask (1996 / trailer) and/or House of Daggers (2004 / trailer) — neither of which, of course, are Korean films or feature taekwondo.
In general, Gangnam Zombie is a generic and relatively uninteresting zombie movie. It won't put you to sleep, but it is doubtful that you'll remember much of what you a day later. Definitely not imperative viewing.
War films aren't exactly the usual preferred viewing pleasure of a wasted life, unless they are bad and made in the Philippines (like Warbus [1985]), but much like western horror flicks, if we notice a serious war-set horror movie we tend to gravitate towards it. Ghosts of War, a supernatural horror set in a deserted French chateau towards the end of the Second World War, was a title unknown to us when we stumbled upon the DVD at our local Euro Shop, but once found, it was a given that we would watch it. That same evening, in fact.
Trailer to
Ghosts of War:
Written and directed by Eric Bress, whose first and to date only other directorial effort is his much-maligned but extremely watchable and apparently financially successful Butterfly Effect (2004 / trailer), Ghosts of War follows five American soldiers whose expected dream respite from the violence of war in a huge, luxurious countryside chateau quickly turns into a nightmare. And, for the most part, the nightmare makes one really good, effective and chilling movie.
Ghosts of War's narrative of a group of compatriots stuck in a house from hell is not exactly new, found as it is in films ranging from (to name the first we can think of) The Haunting (1963 / trailer and 1999 / trailer) and/or The House on Haunted Hill (1959 / trailer and 1999 / trailer) to Dead Birds (2004), the last of which even agitates within a quasi-western, post-Civil War setting. Perhaps the biggest flaw of the last-named movie is that its group of identification figures, mostly made up of deserters, is one of violent bank robbers who kill indiscriminately for greed, so identification and sympathy for their plight is hard to come by. In this regard, Ghosts of War does a much better job: the five soldiers may be hardened, blood-thirsty and/or violent, but they are clearly so due to the insanity of war. If, for example, their actions after blowing up the jeep full of Germans seem inhumane and unhinged, they only reflect what war actually is; and in the case of one soldier, Priv. Tappert (young genre-film veteran Kyle Gallner of Strange Darling [2023 / trailer], Smile [2022 / trailer], Scream [2022 / trailer], The Cleanse [2016 / trailer], Red State [2011 / trailer], Jennifer's Body [2009] and more), though his actions at the jeep reveal a cold-blooded greediness not shared by the rest of his detail, his actions when stumbling upon fleeing concentration-camp escapees at least reveal that somewhere within him there is a caring, emphatic human being.
Under the command of Lt. Chris (Brenton Thwaites of Office Uprising [2018 / trailer], Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales [2017 / trailer], Maleficent [2014 / trailer] and Oculus[2013]), the team finally arrive at the chateau, to which they have been deployed with orders to hold it until reinforcements come. It doesn't take long for the five soldiers to realize why the company they relieved were so keen to leave the house: the original residents, a family of four, who were killed by the Nazis, are out for revenge — and much like the ghosts of the average Asian ghost movie, they don't care whom they take revenge upon. (Or so it initially seems.)
For much of the movie, Ghosts of War plays like a truly suspenseful supernatural horror movie, complete with real and jump scares, and the continual intensification of unnatural events. Unlike so many horror movies, there is also character development and revelations, so the viewer has a chance to see the five soldiers as more than just blank slates. Initially, the five are somewhat slow to say "ghosts" to each other, but it becomes impossible not to do so — and then, to make things worse, a flesh-and-blood German squadron suddenly shows up as well. The resulting battle does include one WTF moment, when the hot-bodied Butchie (DILFy Alan "Jack Reacher" Ritchson, below not from the film, of The Butcher [2006 / trailer], Office Uprising [2018 / trailer], The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare [2024 / trailer] and the insanely trashy TV series that should have been successful, Blood Drive [2017 / trailer]) does something that he truly did not need to do, but the other worldly horrors of war that commence within the house are matched in part by the unnatural horrors of what the ghosts do.
For a good four-fifths of the movie, Ghosts of War is truly excellent. The tension and suspense continually increases, and the narrative is continually punctuated by well-placed and timed interludes of real war horror and ghostly chills. Unluckily, our heroes, all of whom manage to gain themselves more than a sliver of respect, understanding and sympathy from the viewer, find themselves trapped where they are: any attempt to leave proves to lead them back to where they started, as if trapped in a time loop.
And that is the point where Ghosts of War, up until then an effective and enthralling and scary and well-made and traditional horror movie, pulls the rug out from under you and, depending on how you look at it, either drops the ball completely or turns ingenious — complete with Easter-egg casting. (Well, "Easter egg" only if you're familiar with contemporary genre-film icons — and, no, it's not Brad Dourif [of, for example, Soulkeeper[2001], Bride of Chucky [1998], Progeny [1999], Urban Legend [1998] and The Hazing[2004]) or John Savage [of, for example, Empire of the Sharks [2017], Alien Lockdown[2004] and American Strays[1996] ].) We, for one, found the genre jump jarring, but everything that preceded it was so good that we are willing to go with the twist, no matter how WTF.
Interestingly enough, the closing scene of the movie actually infers that the möbius-strip aspect of the soldiers' attempt to leave the chateau is playing out on multiple levels. Likewise, some of the last scenes of the five also raise the question of whether, at least for a few of them, death might not be the preferred option.
Ghosts of War. Great ghost movie with a big twist, sort of like as if you're eating you dad's perfectly grilled steak that suddenly transmogrifies into your mom's family-recipe pumpkin pie. Both taste great, but make for an odd combination, particularly if one simply suddenly replaces the other with a blink of an eye.
That he does. Called in by Scotland Yard's Inspector Gregson* (Matthew Boulton [20 Jan 1893 – 10 Feb 1962] of The Man in Half Moon Street [1944 / trailer] and The Undying Monster [1942 / full movie]) to help solve a series of murders in which all the victims, all women, have been found missing a finger, Sherlock Holmes literally stumbles upon the nefarious plans of Moriarty (Henry Daniell [5 Mar 1894 – 31 Oct 1963]) and his henchpersons. Basically, bad-gal Lydia Marlow (Hillary Brooke in her third appearance in the series**) is luring nice, upstanding (and horny) men back to her apartment, where she hypnotizes them into committing the dreadful deed(s) so that Moriarty can later confront and blackmail them for all that they have got. Upon finding a severed finger in their coat pockets, after suffering a "blackout", even such upper-crust staples of society as Sir George Fenwick (B-movie regular (Paul Cavanagh [8 Dec 1888 – 15 Mar 1964], of The Sin of Nora Moran [1933 / full movie] and too many other fun films to mention) would rather pay up than go to the police (or his friend Sherlock Holmes). To make sure that Holmes doesn't ruin his nice set-up, Moriarty decides that the great detective must be eliminated before he can solve the crimes and, after a hypnotized sharpshooter fails at the job, he has Lydia hypnotize Holmes as well...
*As Dennis Hoey [30 Mar 1893 – 25 Jul 1960], who usually played the pointlessly bumbling Scotland Yard contact Inspector Lestrade in the Universal series was busy on another film, his pointlessly comic character is thankfully absent from the movie; his absence is even commented upon by Holmes.
**Hillary Brooke ([8 Sept 1914 – 25 May 1999] of The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956 / trailer], The Maze [1953 / trailer], The Strange Woman [1946 / full movie], Ministry of Fear [1944 / trailer] and Invaders from Mars [1953 / trailer]) is also found in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) and Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943 / trailer). In Voice of Terror, however, her part was both un-credited and negligible.
A colorized trailer to
The Woman in Green:
The eleventh film in the Rathbone & Bruce series, and even if the films were beginning to creek by then, The Woman in Green is an entertaining, painless way to spend an hour — as are most of the Sherlock Holmes programmers. Of course, unless you see the colorized version, you can never be sure what color the titular woman is wearing, but whatever she's wearing, Hillary Brooke makes a pleasing blonde villain as the bad gal Lydia Marlow. And Henry Daniell (of The Great Dictator [1940 / trailer],The Body Snatcher [1945], The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake [1959 / trailer] and a lot more) — who, like Brooke makes his third appearance in the series* — is a perfectly cast, suavely evil Moriarty. He is, arguably, the best Moriarty of the three times the bad guy appeared in the series. (George Zucco's Moriarty pulls the strings in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1939 / trailer], while Lionel Atwill's does so in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon [1942].)
*A third actor also makes his third appearance in the series: Paul Cavanagh had previously appeared in The Scarlet Claw (1944) and The House of Fear (1945).
B&W Fan-made trailer to
The Woman in Green:
The Woman in Green is nicely atmospheric and, like many of the better Holmes films, disturbingly brutal (if bloodless) at times in appearance and general feeling — indeed, to come up with and conduct the scheme they pursue, both Moriarty and the Woman in Green must be less simply evil than downright psychopathic. (Supposedly the first draft even involved the murder of young prepubescent girls, but the censors forced the change to adult women.)
The narrative, supplied by Bertram Millhauser (24 Mar 1892 – 1 Dec 1958), is an original one, though Millhauser does pepper his tale with oblique borrowings from at least two Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tales, namely The Final Problem (1893) and The Adventure of the Empty House (1903) — the shooter sort of comes from the latter tale, while some dialogue, the called-away Watson, and Moriarty's demise all blow kisses in the direction of The Final Problem. (The Adventure of the Cardboard Box is often given as a source as well, but that tale involves a woman receiving a parcel containing two severed ears and involves neither a series of dead ladies nor Moriarty.) Millhauser also borrows direct plot points from a prior second feature he had written, the Philo Vance flick The Garden Murder Case (1936 / trailer). One scene and some dialogue that is definitely from Millhauser is the following dryly humorous exchange between Inspector Gregson and Holmes over a whiskey and soda at Pembroke House, when they notice the "mature" Sir George Fenwick sitting with a much younger attractive woman (probably wearing green):
Gregson: "Is that his daughter with him?"
Holmes: "Don't be so naive, Inspector."
Holmes: "Wonder where she's taking Sir George Fenwick."
Gregson: "Don't be so naive, Mr. Holmes."
Like most of the entries, Roland de Gostrie (a.k.a. Roy William Neill) handled the directional chores, and does a nicely professional job. Likewise, Virgil Miller's cinematography is crisp and clear but ever so slightly dark and shadowy, and the acting in general still has zing. Like normal, the story has a few sketchy elements to it, with Holmes solving the crime less through detection than by coincidence. And as much as we like the associated dialogue, we here at a wasted life, for one, find it a bit too pat that Holmes should go to some club for a drink and coincidentally see Lydia Marlow, or "the Woman in Green", with one of her victims, Sir George Fenwick, who also just happens to be an acquaintance of his. And, if you get down to it, sometimes Moriarty's actions are questionable at best — are we the only ones to realize that if Moriarty had not revealed himself to Holmes, the great detective would have had a hard time proving that the villain was not dead, as was believed? Really, alpha men and their egos...
The Woman in Green is in the public domain, so scratchy B&W prints of the movie are easy to locate online. While not quite as effective as the three films preceding, The Woman in Green is still one of the better Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies. Well worth a gander, in any event.
Allison Hayes
(6 Mar 1930 – 27 Feb 1977) was an American film and television actress and
model who could perhaps be described as a poor man's Jane Russell
(21 Jun 1921 – 28 Feb 2011) — ironically, seeing that Russell was actually born
to white trash and Hayes was decidedly middle class. Born Mary Jane Hayes in Charleston, West Virginia, her father William
E. Hayes worked for the Navy and her mother, W.E. Hayes' his second wife Charlotte
Gibson Hayes, appears to have been a homemaker. The family later moved to
Washington, D.C, living at 4127 New Hampshire Avenue NW. She attended the Academy of the Holy Cross
before entering public school, and graduated from Calvin Coolidge High
School in 1948. As Miss District of Columbia, she represented D.C. in the
1949 Miss America pageant, which she did not win. She did a stint as a radio
co-host, then worked on local television, and enrolled in the Catholic
University (majoring in music), all the while working as a model (36-23-36).
In 1953, after doing a screen test for
Warner's in NYC, she was approached by a Universal talent scout visiting D.C.,
which eventually led to her signing a seven-year contract at UI. Despite an
auspicious beginning in a Douglas Sirk slab of costume melodrama (Part
I) and a Tony Curtis musical (Part
I) and swashbuckler (Part
II), Allison Hayes quickly became a B-movie staple. On the big screen, she
never managed to leave the realm of low-budget films and second features, but
on the small screen she was busy as a guest star and working on soaps.
A lifelong health fanatic, she regularly
took vitamins and supplements, which was to be her undoing: at the advice of Dr.
Henry Bieler (2 Apr 1893 or '94 [dates vary] – 11 Oct 1975), "an
American physician and germ-theory denialist" — the duck goes "Quack,
quack, quack!" — she began taking calcium supplements made from the bones
of horses. Unluckily, they were also contaminated with lead, and by the time
she stopped taking them she could barely walk, was losing her hair, and was
extremely ill. She later developed leukemia, from which she eventually died.
The beautiful and striking actress with
an amazing figure would probably be forgotten today were it not for the trash
classic, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958, see Part V), in which she
plays the titular character. Her death led the FDA to introduce
(non-enforceable) regulations guaranteeing quality standards in supplements —
but as late as 2003, two out of 15 products tested by the nongovernmental testing
agency ConsumerLabstill
had high levels of lead in them.
If it's on YouTube, it must be true —
The
Legacy of Allison Hayes:
Allison Hayes, a true Babe of
Yesteryear, had her career and life cut tragically short. And now,
here is Part VI — the last — of a
wasted life's typically meandering career review of Allison Hayes...
The Hypnotic Eye premiered in San
Francisco on 17 February 1960. Director George
Blair (6 Dec 1905 – 19 Apr 1970) is yet another director that never made it
out of the Bs, though he was very active on TV; The Hypnotic Eye is his last
cinema release. The Hypnotic Eye, a schlocky and shocking but fun and
relatively effective horror, is a rarity in "the usually good-natured"
director's oeuvre.* Other than this surprisingly visually inventive horror,
Blair's biggest distinction is that of having directed the forty-fifth of the forty-eight
Bowery Boys movies released from 1946 to 1958, Spook Chasers (1957 / trailer)
— a title unthinkable today, regardless of the possible topic of the film — by
which time none of the Bowery guys, original or subsequent, were anything close
to being a "boy".
*How much Blair directed might be open
to question, as in an interview
with Tom Weaver, when talking about Allied Artists, scriptwriter William Read Woodfield,
who seriously disrespects this movie, says, "Nobody said, 'Change the
script. Do this. Do that.' Nobody went in for final cuts. And therefore I must
tell you that all the faults in that picture [laughs], I take full
responsibility for! I really had as much control as I wanted. They wouldn't let
me direct it, but they brought in a director [George Blair] who I could just
tell what to do next! I'm not proud of that, because it wasn't a very good
movie. It's an interesting idea."
Scriptwriters William Read Woodfield
(21 Jan 1928 – 24 Nov 2001) and the unknown Gitta Woodfield (18 Feb 1921 – 25
Nov 1974)* — she appears to have done nothing after this movie — hit a homer
with this surprising effective but nutty and extreme horror film that pushes
sex and violence as far as one could in a mainstream A- or B-movie of the time.
*The website Shadowplayclaims they were married, which is possible, though most websites say he was
married to one Lili (Lily) Woodfield.
"In one of the most arresting
opening scenes in the annals of cinema, a very attractive blonde woman (Evan
MacNeil) steps into her apartment's kitchen with her hair full of lather,
apparently intending to rinse herself off in the sink. It isn't the sink she
heads to, though. Instead, the woman switches on one of the burners on the gas
stove, and as the camera shifts perspectives to watch her from beneath the ring
of blazing gas, she calmly bends over and lowers her soapy hair into the fire.
Her placid demeanor evaporates very quickly after that, and she starts
screaming loud enough to wake the dead as the flames engulf her head and hands.
[1000
Misspent Hours]"
The opening scene of
The Hypnotic Eye:
"Cue the opening credits and
dramatic police siren music and we're off and running (spoilers ahead). Police
detective Dave Kennedy (Joe
Patridge [21 July 1930 – 3 Jun 2023]) arrives on the scene and finds the
severely burned victim already heavily bandaged and near death. Casing out the
apartment, he is told by the attending medic that the victim's self-inflicted injuries
were just an accident. 'Are you trying to tell me she couldn't tell that range
from that sink?' he asks, to which the medic responses in classic Dragnet-fashion,
'Dave, I just try to patch 'em up the best way I can.' The flat, deadpan nature
of the dialogue often has a dual effect; on one level, it's morbidly funny if
unintentional but it's also reflective of and true to the movie's cynical,
exploitative nature. [Cinema
Sojourns]"
Trailer to
The Hypnotic Eye:
The plot: "A young lady sets her
hair on fire in front of a mirror. She turns out to be one of many young women
who have recently disfigured themselves, or worse. After Dodie Wilson (Merry Anders
[22 May 1934 – 28 Oct 2012]*) washes her face with sulfuric acid, her friend
Marcia (Marcia
Henderson [22 July 1929 – 23 Nov 1987]) and Marcia's detective boyfriend
Dave (Patridge) think that it may have been due to a hypnotism show by local
performer Desmond (Jacques
Bergerac). Dave's friend Dr. Hecht (Guy Prescott
[19 Jan 1914 – 7 Mar 1998] of Pharaoh's Curse [1957 / trailer])
thinks that the strange behavior might be due to post-hypnotic suggestions, and
Marcia is sent in to test the theory. She is hypnotized by Desmond, who uses a
human eye surrounded by strobes to do his tricks. She resists his initial
attempt to hypnotize her by pretending, but agrees to go along with his suggestion
that they meet later on. When they do, Desmond succeeds in hypnotizing
Marcia. After a night on the town (much to the chagrin of the detective),
Marcia invites Desmond upstairs. Enter Desmond's assistant Justine (Allison
Hayes), who attempts to make the still-hypnotized Marcia step into a scalding
shower. She is interrupted when Dave knocks on the door. Justine claims to be a
school friend and leaves the suggestion for Marcia to tell her boyfriend, who
is immediately suspicious due to the fact that Marcia did not go to a boarding
school or have a roommate. The three decide to arrest Desmond during his show,
only to have Justine capture Marcia. Not only must they rescue her, but also
the audience from Desmond's power... [Expelled
Grey Matter]"
*Prior to getting a real job as a
customer relations coordinator for Litton Industries, Merry Anders's twilight-years
movies included some truly fun flotsam, The Hypnotic Eye being her first horror
movie. She went on to make Edward L. Cahn's final movie, the relatively
uninteresting horror-lite Beauty and the Beast (1962 / full
movie), the much more fun House of the Damned (1963 / trailer),
the sci-fi anti-classic Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966 / full
movie), and ultimately ended her acting career with Carl Monson's
directorial debut, the grindhouse-oriented Legacy of Blood (1971).
Trailer to
Legacy of Blood:
"Things move pretty quickly now.
There's a catwalk-level showdown involving our heroes, Desmond, Justine, and
the semi-hypnotized Marcia. We discover still more shocking truths about
Justine — she's not just his assistant, she's Mrs. Desmond! (And all this time,
he's been cheating on her with semi-awake younger women!) AND, she was horribly
disfigured. Now, as we all know from Disney films, having a scar of some sort
makes you an evil madman, and this is proven once again by crazy Justine. See,
she made Desmond disfigure all of those women so that she could be the most
beautiful woman in the world again. Keep in mind that (A) Justine is wearing
such excellent makeup that we never know of her disfigurement until the movie's
end; (B) she's still billed and recognized as 'the beautiful assistant'; and
(C) there are still millions of women to go, and Desmond only has one show per
night. [Rinkworks]"
"Cornered by cops following one
last ludicrous show, [Desmond is] easily captured, as his wife flees to the
theater catwalk. Frantically she claws away the lovely rubber countenance of
Allison Hayes, revealing the ghastly, scarred face beneath. To say the very
least, the film's horrific elements are unrestrained. But just when it has a
hope of building some genuine suspense, all shock value is undermined by
another protracted segment showing gullible theater patrons making fools of
themselves. [B Monster]"
Yes, the movie uses one of those William
Castle-like gimmicks that possibly only work in a cinema and definitely ruin
the flow of the movie (anyone for a "Fright Break"?), this time
around called "HypnoMagic". Some folks might think, however, that Odorama would have been more appropriate.
Video Vacuum
liked the movie, but not the HypnoMagic, saying, "The Hypnotic Eye has
several show-stopping scenes of horror. And surprisingly, the detective scenes
are solid enough to keep your interest. I especially liked the way Marcia took
control of the investigation. Henderson is spunky and likeable in the flick and
has a good rapport with Patridge. The film is skillfully directed by George
Blair [...]. The cinematography is crisp, and Blair's use of shadows and extra-tight
close-ups allows the flick to almost feel like a film noir at times. The film,
oddly enough, only bogs down during Desmond's hypnotist show scenes. These
sequences are a bit too drawn out (especially in the third act). I know they
were working with a hypnosis gimmick to get people into the theater, but at
home on the small screen, it doesn't quite work. At any rate, these scenes
don't diminish the film's overall impact. There are still enough worthwhile
moments here to make The Hypnotic Eye a winner."
Looking at the cast, there is an odd
credit of note: the then-famous serial imposter Ferdinand
W. Demara (21 Dec 1921 – 7 Jan 1982), whose story, as told in Robert Crichton's
1960 book The Great Impostor, was made into a Tony Curtis movie of the same
name in 1961 (trailer),
has a tiny role as a "Hospital Doctor" (in real life, he had also posed as
a doctor in the past). It is the only movie appearance he ever made, and he is
credited as "Fred Demara (The Great Imposter)".
As for the other actors, French actor Jacques
Bergerac (26 May 1927 – 15 June 2014), the former husband of Ginger Rogers
(1953-57) and Dorothy
Malone (1959-64), left the film biz after the WTF disaster that is The
Unkissed Bride a.k.a. Mother Goose-A-Go-Go (trailer)
to become the head of Revlon Paris. Lastly, when Desmond (Bergerac) goes out
with Dodie (Anders) in The Hypnotic Eye, they go to a Beatnik Bar and watch a "Beatnik Poet
Laureate", played by Lawrence
Lipton (10 Oct 1898 – 9 Jul 1975), perform...
Confessions of a Movie Addict, or,
The
Holy Barbarian Blues:
Here at a wasted life, we would agree
with Atomic
Caravan, which points out something we noted, that this movie obviously
inspired H.G. Lewis's Wizard
of Gore (1970 / trailer):
"They're almost identical in plot except for the twist at the end of Hypnotic
Eye. Wizard of Gore is a mega-cheesey yet straight forward pre-splatter film about
a magician who puts female audience members under a trance then butchers her as
a shocking 'trick' for the crowd. With the wave of a hand she's unharmed only
to go home and be found dead in the same fashion in which she was maimed by 'Montag
the Magnificent'."
We also couldn't help but think of the slight similarity to aspects of that great slab of
Eurotrash that was once part of the infamous "Orgy of the Living
Dead" drive-in triple feature, the supposed Revenge of the Living Dead,
which was actually an Italo gothic giallo titled The Murder Clinic (1966 / trailer),
which shares somewhat similar motivation points and reveal.
TV trailer for the
Orgy of the Living
Dead triple feature:
The High-Powered Rifle
(1960, dir.
Maury Dexter)
Released September 1960, there are
claims that the filming title was Duel in the City, which would be odd as
director Maury Dexter (12 Jun 1927 – 28 May 2017) has gone on the record that
the script for the movie was written after the title was decided upon by
producer Robert L. Lippert.
Currently (re: 21 Feb 2025), The High Powered Rifle
appears to be a lost film — so check your attic!
Although possibly released after
Dexter's second directorial project, the western Walk Tall (1960 / full
film), The High Powered Rifle was actually his first directorial project.
He got the job by promising Lippert that he would deliver the finished film on
time for half the original budget of $100,000; Dexter always maintained that he
did so, and thus his directorial career began. Among his "better"
titles: House of the Damned (1963 / trailer),
the "serious" anti-drug movie Maryjane (1968 / trailer),
and two female biker films, The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968 / trailer)
and Hell's Belles (1969 / trailer).
The AFI
Catalog has a full blow-by-blow description, but for brevity's sake let's
look at that of The
House of Fradkin-Stein: "Allison Hayes' next movie was her last major
role The High Powered Rifle. Detective Steve Dancer (Willard Parker) is
after a criminal gang selling heroin. Somebody is attempting to kill him and he
has a suspect in the person Dancer considers the gang's boss, Dykeman. However,
before he can confirm this Dancer has time for a little bedroom
action with Allison Hayes as his suspect's girlfriend, Sharon Hill.
The twist comes when Dancer realizes it is Hill that has been
attempting to kill him and is the real crime boss."
Oddly enough, what should be surprise
twist at the ending (that Hayes is a bad girl) is completely revealed in the
movie's poster.
A forgotten folk singer from LA named Terrea Lea
(6 Jun 1922 – 5 Jan 2013), who once ran a West Hollywood coffee shop called The Garret, supposedly appears in the
movie to sing a song or two. Which songs, we know not, but below is her
self-titled LP from 1962...
Terrea Lea's LP album,
Terrea Lea:
The manly man who plays the hero, Willard
Parker (5 Feb 1912 – 4 Dec 1996), never exactly became a leading man or a
household name. His best film that we here at a wasted life have seen —
actually, the only film of his that we've seen — is Terrence Fisher's The Earth
Dies Screaming (1964).
Trailer to
The Earth Dies Screaming:
Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre: Jericho
(1961, dir. Harry
Keller)
Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre was an
anthology Western series that featured numerous (but not just) adaptations of
Zane Grey stories; the problem seems to have been that it was quickly realized
that many his stories and novels were too complicated to be adapted into
half-hour episodes. The program lasted five years and 146 episodes, of which Jericho,
which aired 18 May 1961, was the program's last episode. The program ended when
Dick Powell got a better offer from, and moved to, NBC to do The Dick Powell
Show, a new anthology show that lasted three years, towards the end without
Powell, who died of lung cancer in January 1963. Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre later
went into rerun syndication as Frontier Justice.
Jericho — full episode:
"Another unique thing about Zane
Grey Theatre was, being an anthology series, it became a perfect 'testing
ground' for other western series [...]. Several other pilots were tested as well,
but did not sell. [Western
Clippings]"
Jericho, starring Guy "Handsome but Stiff" Madison
(19 Jan 1922 – 6 Feb 1996) as the titular hero, was one such failed pilot. The
plot, as found at imdb: "Amy Schroeder (Beverly Garland [17 Oct 1926 – 5
Dec 2008] of D.O.A.
[1949] and so much more) is convicted of killing her husband (George D.
Wallace) and sentenced to die. Jericho (Guy Madison) comes to the condemned
woman, supposedly about buying her land. Then he reveals himself as an agent
for the Attorney-General (Les Tremayne
[16 Apr 1913 – 19 Dec 2003] of The Slime People [1963 / trailer] and Fangs
[1974 / trailer])."
Allison Hayes plays Paris, whose act of paying for
Amy's hubby's tombstone unravels the nefarious plot against Amy. On hand are Claude Atkins
([25 May 1926 – 27 Jan 1994] of The
Curse [1987] and Tarantulas:
The Deadly Cargo [1977]) as Deputy Chuck Wagner and John Hoyt ([5 Oct
1905 – 15 Sept 1991] of Bert
I Gordon's Attack of the Puppet People [1958] and more) as Judge Parker,
the man who has sentenced Amy to death.
Guy Madison (born Robert Moseley; above
with two possible beards), according to rumor, was a "gay American film
and television actor discovered by Henry
Willson. [...] Although married, Madison maintained a relationship with Rory Calhoun* ([8 Aug 1922 – 28 Apr 1999] of Motel
Hell [1980]), who was also a Willson discovery, throughout much of his
life." There are nude
photos floating around the web, supposedly of an uncircumcised Guy Madison,
taken by the obscure "physique photographer" Joe Corey of Cambridge
(Mass.). Madison revived his flagging career in the sixties by going to Italy,
where he made a variety of fun genre films. He only ever starred in one horror
film, "a weird western"
that is considered one of the worst films made, and that was long prior to Italy...
Guy Madison in
The Beast of Hollow
Mountain (trailer):
*"In 1955 his agent, Henry
Willson, disclosed information about Calhoun's years in prison to Confidential
magazine in exchange for the tabloid not printing an exposé about the secret
homosexual life of Rock Hudson, another Willson client. The disclosure had no
negative effect on Calhoun's career and only served to solidify his 'bad boy'
image. [imdb]" "Henry,
unfortunately, did not have the most sterling reputation in the industry. [...]
It was fairly well-known that if you were a Henry Willson client, as Tony
Curtis once expressed it, you probably had to sexually express yourself to
Henry. [ideastream]"
"Jericho's director was Harry
Keller (22 Feb 1913 – 19 Jan 1987), a TV director who came from B-westerns and
who, today, is best remembered as the man Universal pulled in to do the
reshoots and additional scenes for Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958 /
trailer).
Kraft Mystery Theater — Change of
Heart
(1962, dir. Unknown)
Whether Kraft Television Theater, Kraft
Mystery Theater or Kraft Suspense Theater, a Kraft theater of some sort was
broadcast in the US from 1947 to 1965. An anthology show of sorts, it also
broadcast edited versions of British movies and tested pilots, as well as
reruns from other shows. Allison Hayes appeared in an episode broadcast 12
September 1962, titled Change of Heart, about which, at Thrilling
Detective, someone named Brian Cuddy says, "I remember seeing
the beginning of this episode when it originally aired on Westinghouse
Desilu Playhouse in 1960...". The website also claims that Change of
Heart was intended as a pilot "based on characters created Baynard
Kendrick" — and seeing that Baynard
Kendrick (8 Apr 1894 – 22 Mar 1977) wrote a whole series of novels and
stories between 1937 and 1961 about a blind investigator named Duncan Maclain
(the name of the detective in Change of Heart), we would tend to concur.
The concept of a blind investigator eventually
made it to the small screen in the form of Longstreet (1971-72), starring James
Franciscus, of The
Valley of Gwangi (1969), amongst other flicks. And, as the TV show credits
read: "Based upon characters created by Baynard Kendrick." Many
decades previously, Kendrick's novels inspired The Last Express (1938) and two
mystery films starring Edward Arnold
(18 Feb 1890 – 26 Apr 1956) as the blind detective, Eyes in the Night (1942 / trailer)
and The Hidden Eye (1945 / trailer).
Plot to the one-hour mini-movie: "A
blind detective (Robert Middleton) solves a series of mysteries by offering
himself as the next victim. [CTVA]"
Allison Hayes plays a woman named Helena Ford, but who knows how she fits into
the narrative...
Has nothing to do with the show —
Kitty Wells sings Change of Heart (1957):
Currently, it looks like Change of Heart
might be one of the many lost episodes of both Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse and
Kraft Mystery Theater.
Released 4 Sept 1963, the working title
was Tomorrow You Die or Don't Cry Wolf or Strike Me Deadly, depending on your
source. Keep your eyes open, and you might notice that the crawling hand is
sometimes the left and sometimes the right. Flubs like that and the exceptional
acting is one of the reasons MST3K already pounced on this movie during their
first season (it's episode 6). Personally, here at a wasted life, we find the film
more fun when watched straight... as is the case with most MST3K episodes we've
seen. That said, it's an amazing (and amazingly) "bad" movie.
Trailer to
The Crawling Hand:
Amazingly, the man who was responsible
for the cinematography, Willard Van Der Veer (23 Aug 1894 – 16 Jun 1963), whose
last film this was, once won an Oscar for his camerawork some 32 years earlier
for the documentary With Byrd at the South Pole (1930). Among the past credits
of co-scriptwriter Joseph
Cranston (29 Jul 1924 – 2 Oct 2014): He's an un-credited narrator on Russ
Meyer's Erotica (1961), the producer of Trauma (1962 / full
movie), a co-scripter of Ted V. Mikels'
anti-classic The Corpse Grinders (1971 / trailer),
and fathered some famous guy named Bryan Cranston (of Terror
Tract [2000]).
The plot, from Zisi
Emporium: "A second failed mission to the moon results in an American
space craft crashing into California. The astronaut (Ashley Cowan [26 Jan 1921 –
9 Oct 1990) is thought to have perished, but in actuality, an alien life form
overtook him before the craft exploded. After the crash, only the hand of the
astronaut has survived, and it is homicidal. As Paul (Rod
Lauren) and Marta (Sirry
Steffan) frolic on the beach, in a scene which includes a gratuitous bikini
moment, they stumble upon the hand. Miss Iceland is horrified, but Paul figures
out what it is and brings it to his boarding house so he can study it later.
Kids! Before Paul can examine his find, the hand strangles Miss Hotchkiss (Arline Judge),
the landlady, to death, and almost does the same to Paul. The Sheriff (Alan "Skipper"
Hale Jr of Terror Night [1989 / fan
trailer] and The Giant Spider Invasion [1975 / trailer])
responds and opens up a murder investigation. When the fingerprints of
Hotchkiss' throat match that of the deceased astronaut, Steve (Peter Breck
of Highway 61 [1991 / trailer]
and the a wasted life fave The
Sword and the Sorcerer [1982 / trailer],
with Richard
Lynch) and Dr. Weitzberg (Kent Taylor*)
respond from NASA in DC. The skipper isn't happy that the big boys in
Washington are taking over the case, and refuses to cooperate. On their
own, Steve and the doctor go see Paul, but now Paul has been taken over by the
alien life form and is now running through the streets with homicide in mind.
Now an alien fiend, Paul stalks the beautiful Swede, Miss Iceland. With a hand
and Paul loose, will the Earth survive?"
*For most of his life, popular
second-lead (or less) Kent Taylor (11
May 1906 – 11 Apr 1987), but for a rare film like The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues
(1955 / trailer),
managed pretty much to steer clear of C, D and Z movies (well, if one overlooks
some of his Westerns, that is). That changed with around the time of this movie
here, and by 1967 he took what he got — which included a grand total of six Al
Adamson movies, including Adamson's anti-classic, Satan's Sadists (1969 / trailer,
with Jacqulin
Cole).
Allison Hayes's part in the movie is an
embarrassingly non-part part: "Allison plays a supporting role as Donna an
assistant in a space lab. Not to worry that it looks more like an insurance
office with its tape run computers from Univac. Her 'secretary' garb was drab
but tasteful. It seems to be off the rack, but well-suited for her abbreviated
role in this movie. [...] Mostly she talks on the telephone pretending to speak
to the press and the White House saying, 'No comment at this time.' She walks
around the office wringing her hands or looking at the computers. Ultimately,
her scenes just stop. The Crawling Hand has some scary moments. The scariest
thing though is seeing how some of the older performers have aged — including
Tristram Coffin and Arline Judge. Yikes! Allison was beginning to show the
effects of the illness that would eventually take her life. [An
Internet Biography of Allison Hayes]"
"What does it mean, 'I'm stacked,'
and that 'I'm not with it'?"
Marta Farnstrom (Sirry Steffen)
The Crawling Hand was Arline Judge's and
Syd Saylor's last film. The Crawling Hand is the only horror film Arline Judge
(21 Feb 1912 – 7 Feb 1974) was ever to appear in. Syd Sayler (24
Mar 1895 – 21 Dec 1962), whose rare forays into "horror" include The
Black Doll (1938 / full
film) and The House of Secrets (1936 / full
film), plays the crabby soda shop owner that Paul beats up to the rousing
sound, playing on the jukebox, of The Rivingtons's
original R&B version of The Bird's the Word.
(Most people know the version by The Trashman, which,
titled Surfing Bird,
actually combines two Rivingtons songs: Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow (1962)
and The Bird's the Word (1963).
Fan-made video to The Bird's the Word
using The Crawling Hand:
"There are more than a dozen
disembodied hand films [...], a few which are worth seeing. This one is the
worst. There's an accident involving spacecraft and radiation and all that's
left of a man is his hand, which takes on a life of its own, a poorly-explained
homicidal life. A boy finds it, brings it home and doesn't tell anyone — this
actually rings true to me, though it probably shouldn't. The film plods along
with occasional violence but ends up with the hand getting eaten by cats in a
junkyard. I think they didn't know how to end the film, had enough in the can
and just ended it the first way they could think of.* [Down
Among the "Z" Movies]"
* On the other hand — Hah! Hah! — as
previously mentioned, co-scriptwriter Joseph Cranston did eventually conscript The
Corpse Grinders (1971 / trailer), in which cats develop a taste for human flesh, so maybe
Cranston just had a thing about flesh-eating cats.
In 1964 in the US, The Crawling Hand hit
and drive-ins as the second part of a double-feature behind AIP's The Time
Travelers (1964 / trailer below). In Great Britain, it was eventually paired
with a great film, The Haunted and the Hunted, otherwise known as Dementia
13(1963).
Trailer to
The Time Travelers:
Paul Lawrence's exchange-student
girlfriend Marta Farnstrom, below from the movie, is played by Miss Iceland
1959 Sigríður Geirsdóttir, or Sigridur Geirsdottir (29 May 1938 – 1 Feb 2020),
who became Sirry Steffen when she came to Hollyweird. Supposedly she did a nude
scene for the foreign markets — perhaps the source of her naked back on the blue
version of the poster — but we were unable to locate it online. Her very short
Hollywood career (of three films) began in a tiny role in Hitler (1962 / trailer)
and ended with an uncredited appearance in Bedtime Story (1964 / trailer).*
* In an interview in Filmfax #55, director
Herbert
L. Strock (13 Jan 1918 – 30 Nov 2005) said: "Female lead Sirry
Steffen was Miss Iceland; she was absolutely gorgeous. I would take her out to
dinner when we were discussing the show and people would come up to me and ask
me who she was. She did a nude scene for the foreign version and she wouldn't
let anybody put the body make-up on but me. I don't know why me but that's what
happened." Aside from The Crawling Hand, Strock,
who died of heart failure following a car accident, left behind some truly
memorable titles and Creature Feature "classics", most notably I Was
a Teenage Frankenstein (1957 / full
film), Blood of Dracula (1957 / trailer)
and How to Make a Monster (1958 / trailer).
He even made a third-rate (and totally forgotten) Blaxploitation flick, Brother
on the Run (1973 / full
film).
Who is that Lady? Sirry Steffen!
As for her movie boyfriend Paul
Lawrence, allegedly Burt
Reynolds tested for the part twice but was found too wooden. The handsome guy
cast, Rod Lauren (26
Mar 1939 – 11 Jul 2007), had had a minor pop hit in 1960, If I Had a Girl.
Lauren's subsequent
acting career was minor, too. Aside from this movie, he's found in The Black
Zoo (1963 / trailer,
with Michael
Gough), Lew
Landers' Terrified (1962 / trailer)
and few other even less interesting movies. While in the Philippines shooting
his last movie, Once Before I Die (1966 / scene),
he met and eventually married Nida Blanca
(6 Jan 1932 – 7 Nov 2001), one of the most popular actresses of the Philippines,
and retired to decorate her arm for 22 years.
Then, as per the L.A.
Times (20 May 2003): "Strunk, 63, is wanted in the Philippines on
suspicion of arranging the murder of his wife of 22 years — film and television
icon Nida Blanca. The 2001 stabbing death of the legendary Blanca — likened to
a Philippine blend of Carol Burnett and Shirley MacLaine — devastated the
nation. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has pledged that the government will
not rest until Strunk is brought to justice. But the case has been frayed from
the start, its plot twists more outrageous than those of a soap opera. A man's
confession implicating Strunk was followed by a tearful recantation on national
television. A former soldier who claimed he was solicited to murder the actress
was himself killed. Mystery accomplices were charged but never materialized. Then,
last week, the Philippines lost an attempt to have Strunk extradited when a
U.S. magistrate ruled that the evidence against him was 'so inconsistent and
conflicting' that it failed to meet the standard of probable cause. Strunk was
freed from Sacramento County Jail, where he had been held since federal
marshals arrested him last May as he sat with his sister on the front porch of
their childhood home. Strunk has denied any involvement in the death of his
wife."
"Rod Strunk, Nida Blanca's second
husband, ended his life on 11 July 2007 by jumping from a second-floor balcony
at the Tracy Inn in Tracy,
California. He had been staying there for three days before his death. [Medium]"
Nida Blanca singing
Bulung-Bulungan:
In The Psychotronic® Video Guide, a rare
voice of defense for the movie: "This is the movie that introduced The Bird,
by the Rivingtons, so it's historically important, besides being a classic of its
kind. [...] [Herbert L.] Strock is best known for I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
(1957 / full
film). This one's better."
Most people, however, like Bruce Eder
over at All
Movie, are less kind regarding the movie: "Director/producer Herbert
L. Strock made some movies of which he could be justifiably proud — Gog (1954 /
trailer),
Battle Taxi (1955 / full
film), and Blood of Dracula (1957 / trailer)
were neat little low- to medium-budget releases that pleased audiences. The
Crawling Hand [is] definitely not a movie of which Strock could be proud. The
acting is mostly stiff and amateurish, which is no surprise given that the
script is almost insultingly juvenile, and it's painfully obvious that a lot of
first-takes were used, despite mistakes that could not have been missed at the
time. What does make this movie slightly notable, if not exactly 'worth'
watching — outside of the context of pictures that revel in their weaknesses
(so bad they're almost 'good') — is the presence in the cast of a lot of
basically good players, veterans and otherwise. [...] The Crawling Hand is sort
of the sci-fi equivalent of all of those A.C.
Lyles-produced westerns of the same era, populated by well-known actors and
stars out of the 1940s".
*What a line. Nowadays, it would be cut from the script and/or film, if not never written; and if it were to somehow slip by, it would probably kill the film and the career.
Ten minutes of the soundtrack to
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?
Allison Hayes finely makes it back into
a lower eschelon A-production, but has only a tiny character part in this
insignificant Dean Martin comedy playing someone named Mrs. Grayson; if you
bother to watch the movie, don't blink. Director Daniel Mann
(8 Aug 1912 – 21 Nov 1991) made better movies, like the next year's Our Man
Flint (1966 / trailer)
and everyone's favorite rat movie, the original Willard (1971 / trailer).
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed features the feature-film debut of Carol Burnett.
Tura
Satana appears, uncredited, as a dancer at a burlesque joint — that's her
below, actually.
Another supposed extra without a part or
lines is the amazing body builder Dave Draper
(16 Apr 1942 – 30 Nov 2021), a fact we only mention as an excuse to embed of a
picture of his body him.
The plot, as given in detail at the AFI
Catalog: "Actor Jason Steel (Dean Martin), hero of a successful TV
medical series with a huge female audience, is engaged to Melissa Morris
(Elizabeth Montgomery), who is tiring of the delay of their wedding plans. Each
Wednesday night Jason plays poker with five cronies, but he is always
interrupted early in the game by a telephone call that causes him to leave. The
caller is always one of his five friends' neglected wives; each of them in turn
appeals to Jason for marital advice and comfort. Jason's efforts to cope with
each wife's advances lead him to become disenchanted with the idea of marriage
for himself, and he breaks his engagement. Melissa turns for help to her friend
Stella (Carol Burnett), the secretary to an analyst who is one of Jason's
poker-playing friends. Stella arranges a phony marriage for Melissa, hoping the
news will prompt Jason to propose again. Jason does become upset but turns to
the analyst for help and, under the influence of sodium amytal, reveals the
truth about his relations with four of the wives. The eavesdropping Stella is
discovered and thrown out of the office, and she immediately rushes to reveal
the details of the session to Melissa. Freed from guilt by the analyst, Jason
attends Melissa's phony wedding reception, but soon thereafter Melissa makes a
Wednesday night visit to Jason's apartment as the other wives have done. Jason
proposes again, and Stella, having arranged a fake wedding, now has to falsify
a Mexican divorce to extricate Melissa. Jason, however, makes a last-minute
decision to accompany Stella and Melissa to Mexico and thus discovers the
entire plot. Once more he breaks the engagement and once more Stella bumblingly
attempts to reunite the pair. Analysis begins to make Jason think logically,
and he finally solves his problems by putting an end to Stella's interference
and marrying Melissa."
"What's so special about Oriental
women? Once you get over the novelty of their bringing peace and dignity into
the home and their all-consuming self-sacrificing passion for their mates,
they're just like any other woman."
Scopophila,
which thinks "[Elizabeth Montgomery] looks gorgeous and gives the film's
best performance", tells it like it is: "Every time I get annoyed by
many of today's Hollywood comedies that seem to be nothing more than a
stretched out idea for an episode of a sitcom, one only has to go back into
time to find that the comedies of yesteryear weren't always much better. Of
course there were some classics, but a lot of vapid ones in the mix as well. In
fact this one is so trite that it becomes almost agonizing to sit through. It
was considered in its time to be a 'sex farce', but fails to deliver on either.
[...] Although this was made as a vehicle for Martin I feel even fans of Dino
will be disappointed. It really doesn't take advantage of his persona and he
seems as bored with the material as the viewer and just going through the paces.
Despite the interesting cast this is an all-around disappointment."
Oddly enough, instead of Dean Martin, the
forgotten singer Linda Scott recorded a Burt Bacharach/Hal David title tune for
the movie — which then wasn't used in the film. Nevertheless, it charted at
#100 US pop charts...
Linda Scott sings
Who's Been Sleeping in
My Bed?
The screenshot below shows four of five
of Dean's poker buddies. Your left to right: Tom (Elliot Reid
[16 Jan 1920 – 21 Jun 2013]), Yoshimi (Jack "The Chinese Bing Crosby"
Soo [28 Oct 1917 – 11 Jan 1979]), Sanford (Martin Balsam
[4 Nov 1919 – 13 Feb 1996] of Psycho [1960 / trailer]), and Leonard (Richard Conte
[24 Mar 1910 – 15 Apr 1975] of Cry
of the City [1948]).
Allison Hayes makes her last ignoble feature
film appearance as "Mabel", the drunken blonde woman at the bar who
lunges for Elvis as he's performing at the beginning of the movie. It is her
only scene in Tickle Me, and she does not look healthy. Life is circular: in Francis Joins the Wacs (see: Part
I), Allison's debut feature film, the lead was played by Julie Adams; here, in Tickle
Me, Allison's final feature film, the headlining female is Julie Adams.
Tickle Me is the fifth of nine movies
that Elvis the
Expanding Pelvis was to make with director Norman Taurog;
it is also the only Elvis movie for which Elvis did not record new material
and, instead, reused past releases. Nevertheless, the movie helped push one old
song (from 1962) onto the Billboard charts, where it peaked at #11 on the "Hot
One Hundred".
Used in the movie –
(Such an) Easy
Question:
The AFI Catalog has
the plot: "Rodeo rider Lonnie Beale (Elvis), a handsome singer, is
employed by Vera Radford (Julie Adams
[17 Oct 1926 – 3 Feb 2019]), proprietress of a dude ranch and beauty spa.
Although he is befriended by handyman Stanley Potter (Jack Mullaney
[18 Sept 1929 – 27 Jun 1982]), Lonnie arouses the jealousy of swimming
instructor Brad Bentley (Edward Faulkner of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters
[1966 / trailer]). Despite her suspicion that Lonnie is a fortune hunter, physical
education teacher Pam Merritt (Jocelyn Lane, below not from the movie, of The
Gamma People [1956 / trailer]
and Hell's Belles [1969 / trailer])
falls in love with him. Pam is the victim of repeated abduction attempts,
which, she is informed by Deputy Sheriff Sturdivant (Bill Williams
[21 May 1915 – 21 Sept 1992] who appears without credit in The
Body Snatcher [1945] and Zombies on Broadway [1945 / trailer]),
are inspired by her possession of a map of buried treasure. When she sees
Lonnie kissing Vera, Pam breaks up with him, refusing to listen to his
explanations. Back on the rodeo circuit, Lonnie finds himself preoccupied with
Pam and is convinced by Stanley to return to her. He and Stanley locate Pam in
Silverado, a restored ghost town and site of the treasure. During a night spent
in a wax museum, the trio is assaulted by a procession of monsters, who are revealed
to be Adolf (John
Dennis [3 May 1925 – 20 Mar 2004] of Garden of the Dead [1972 / trailer],
Soylent
Green [1973] and Psychic Killer [1975 / trailer]), the ranch chef; Jerry (Louie
Elias [21 Nov 1933 – 13 Dec 2017] of The Girl in Lovers' Lane [1960 / full
film]), the groom; Henry (Bob Hoy
[3 Apr 1927 – 8 Feb 2010] of Deadly Stranger [1988 / trailer]
and The Astral Factor [1978 / German
trailer]), the gardener; and Deputy Sheriff Sturdivant. In the
confrontation, the treasure is discovered. Assisted by Brad, Lonnie subdues the
intruders. After a wedding at the ranch, Lonnie and Pam drive off, with Stanley
trapped in a washtub he has tied to their car." (Were the film four or five years younger, one could plausibly say the plot was cribbed from a Scooby-Doo episode...)
"[Elvis] he sings nine rather so-so
songs [...], and is chased by all the wealthy bikinied pretty glamour girls who
patronise the ranch. To beef up the flagging plot a little bit, he helps out a
damsel in distress, pretty physical fitness trainer Pamela 'Pam' Merritt [...].
The legendary writers Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds had scripted for the
Three Stooges, so the movie is full of the silly slapstick comedy expected of
them, for some people arguably hilarious, for others just silly. However,
Presley is in fairly bright and lively jovial form, and the girls do look cute,
while the acting is game but nothing to write home about. [...] [Derek
Winnert]"
"Elvis is jovial and seems willing
to go along with the nonsense, but this one arrives D.O.A. to the screen. [Denis Schwartz Movie
Reviews]"
Trailer to
Tickle Me:
"Tickle Me may be the strangest
Elvis Presley movie ... but it's also probably the funniest. [...] First we start
out with an out of work singing cowboy/rodeo star that's out of work. Then we
have an exercise ranch filled with women. Then a woman whose grandpa left her
lots of money in a ghost town. And is the ghost town haunted with ghosts or
criminals? To top it all off, we also have a dream sequence with our main
characters in old west days. [...] It's entirely kooky, with werewolves [and] spooks
at the end trying to scare the leads out of the ghost town. And while it's all
so ridiculous, it kept me laughing and I had a great time watching this movie. [...]
The only downside is that Elvis Presley and his leading lady Jocelyn Lane don't
have any chemistry. [Comet
over Hollywood]"
Elwood
Ullman (27 May 1903 – 11 Oct 1985), who died an
82-year-old bachelor, and Edward Bernds
(12 Jul 1905 – 20 May 2000), had a long history of writing movies together —
most famously, as already mentioned, those of the Three Stooges. Bernds was
also know to direct movies, including Reform School Girl (1957, with Yvette
Vickers), World without End (1956 / trailer),
Queen of Outer Space (1958 / trailer)
and Return of the Fly (1959 / trailer).
Ullman preferred just to write, and his non-Bernds projects include The Ghost
in the Invisible Bikini (1966 / trailer),
Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965 / trailer)
and The Bloody Brood (1958 / trailer).
Keep your eyes open for another Babe of
Yesteryear, the curvaceous Lori Williams (of the Russ Meer roughie masterpiece,
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! [1965 / trailer below], with Hajiand Tura
Santana), making her filth
uncredited appearance as a dancer in her fifth Elvis Presley movie.
Trailer to
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!:
Also making an uncredited appearance in
the movie, Francine
York (26 Aug 1936 – 6 Jan 2017), who went on to star in two fave films of a wasted life: the amazingly
terrible Doll Squad (1973 / trailer,
with Tura
Santana) and the sordid grindhouse anti-classic, The Centerfold Girls
(1974, trailer below), starring the great Andrew "Horse" Prine. A
third movie of hers, Marilyn Alive behind Bars (scenes),
which was finally released in 1992, had previously been edited into the WTF bad
movie, Night
Train to Terror (1985).
Trailer to
The Centerfold Girls:
After Tickle Me, Allison Hayes made
guest appearances on a few television series, but by 1967 her health problems
ended her career. Ten years later, they killed her.
