Monday, July 22, 2024
Monday, July 15, 2024
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (USA, 1942)
A far cry from the short-lived, action-packed, Victorian-set, proto-lad and (naturally) full-color franchise with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (as, respectively, Holmes and Dr Watson) that director Guy Ritchie foisted upon the world in 2009 (trailer),* Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror is the third movie of the classic, 14-film B&W series of Sherlock Holmes movies that spanned from 1939 to 1946 and starred Basil Rathbone ([13 Jun 1892 – 21 Jul 1967] of Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet [1965]) and Nigel Bruce (14 Feb 1895 – 8 Oct 1953), the former actor as the legendary detective and the latter as his helpful if usually befuddled friend, Dr Watson.
* Though both this movie and the follow-up Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011 / trailer) were quite successful, both financially and as movies, the franchise has long been stalled; Sherlock Holmes 3 has been in development hell forever. Currently, it seems to be inching forward with the same lead actors but a new director, Dexter Fletcher.
Fan trailer to
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror:
The prior two entries of the classic series, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939 / trailer) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939 / trailer) were period-set and made by 20th Century Fox — indeed, The Hound of the Baskervilles is the first known Holmes movie to actually be set in the Victorian Age of the original stories. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes likewise transpires in that period, but when Universal Studios bought the movie rights for Sherlock Holmes from the Doyle estate in 1942 and took over the series from 20th Century Fox, Universal promptly pulled the legendary detective and his mate out of the Victorian Age and plopped them smack dab into the middle of then-modern England. As it is, when the Holmes films are viewed nowadays, the sudden transplantation of the two into wartime England is hardly jarring at all, as the "modern" world of 1942 now seems just as distant and ancient as that of Victorian England.
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Much more jarring, however, is the noticeable drop in the production standards in the Universal films from those of 20th Century. "A" projects at 20th Century, the series became decidedly "B" programmers at Universal — though the standards remain noticeably higher here in The Voice of Terror than in the cheapest-looking entry of the franchise, the fourth Rathbone/Bruce film and one worst of the series, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942 / trailer).
Production values aside, like so many classic programmers and low budget Universal movies, all of the Rathbone/Bruce movies exude that special something that makes them eternally watchable and fun despite their often glaring flaws, especially if you're a fan of old movies and you're watching the restored versions. But probably due to production values and costs, Universal handed the project to one of their contract B-movie directors, John Rawlins (9 June 1902 – 20 May 1997), a man well-versed at quickly making no-nonsense, fast-paced second features. He did not fail to deliver, but for whatever reason The Voice of Terror remained his only entry in the series: the series' regular director, Roy William Neill (4 Sep 1887 – 14 Dec 1946), took over as of the next entry, the inferior Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, and helmed all the remaining movies of the franchise (including the best ones).
The Voice of Terror is an entertaining if a now at times excruciatingly painful piece of propaganda. But if you ignore the numerous lectures about the glory of England (excuse me?) and how evil the Nazis are — yes, Nazis, like the fascist Republicans of the USA today, are evil, but continually stating the obvious can become tiresome — you have a well-acted, competently directed little thriller which, despite a weak and predictable script,* fully delivers all that can be expected from a low budget B movie — and more. (Besides, considering the time, place and situation that the movie was made, the propagandistic aspects of the film are understandable, if not justifiable. It is hard to have anything good to say about a land that is not only out to conquer the world but is regularly flattening your country.*) So grit your teeth when yet another character lets loose a load of outdated hot air and enjoy the film for its other aspects.
* If you want to see just how flat, may we suggest you watch the rather pleasant Ealing comedy Hue & Cry (1947).
Based, laterally, on Doyle's 1917 short story His Last Bow and the actual activities of Lord Haw-Haw, the script for The Voice of Terror was supplied by the Cherokee "eternal bachelor" and occasional "non-romantic escort for Hollywood actresses" [Rollie] Lynn Riggs (31 Aug 1899 – 30 June 1954) and the productive wordsmith Robert Hardy Andrews (19 Oct 1903 – 11 Nov 1976). In then-contemporary Great Britain, Holmes is pulled in by British Intelligence — to be exact, by Sir Evan Barham (character actor Reginald Denny [20 Nov 1891 – 16 Jun 1967], whose final role was in Batman [1966 / trailer]) — to find out who is behind "the Voice of Terror", an English-language Nazi broadcast that is subjugating England to a regular aural attack, forever revealing some new terrorist abomination over the airwaves, seemingly the very moment the event occurs. (If the scene of the train derailment looks familiar, it is because it was lifted directly from The Invisible Man [1933 / trailer].) Later, when Gavin (the always uncredited Robert Barron [3 Apr 1898 – 22 Apr 1958]), one of Holmes' stoolies, literally falls dead through the sitting room door at 221B Baker Street as he gasps the name "Christopher", Holmes, with Watson in tow, enters the underbelly of London to find out what the important clue might mean. In a sleazy bar Holmes convinces Gavin's Kitty (Evelyn Ankers [17 Aug 1918 – 29 Aug 1985]) to help him, and in an eloquent speech about what is to be English, she basically convinces every criminal in the city to lend a helping hand. (Big flaw in the story here: even if we accept that Kitty is the Mark Anthony of cheap ladies of the night, the fact is that just before Holmes enters the bar, the Nazis almost kill him with a thrown knife, so if the unknown bad guys are so close, why don't they recognize Kitty later when she integrates herself into the personal life of the movie's main Nazi Meade [Thomas Gomez (10 Jul 1905 – 18 Jun 1971) of Phantom Lady (1941)]?) Slowly Holmes gets on the right track, convinced both that the Voice of Terror is out to do more than simply strike fear in the hearts of England and that it is somehow connected to the very heart of the British government. Could one of the very men for whom he is working be a spy?
Amongst the various plus points of The Voice of Terror is the occasionally truly fun humorous interaction between Holmes and Watson — as when Watson stops Holmes from donning his traditional hunting cap, or when Holmes reveals to a completely amazed Dr. Watson that he knew they would be met by a woman because he had been told so in advance — as well as an outstanding performance by Thomas Gomez as Meade, the most repulsively evil of all the Nazis. (The Voice of Terror is Meade's first silver screen credit; already a known Broadway actor at the time, his face is a familiar one to many a couch potato, as he was a regular guest star on the classic TV shows of the 60s and early 70s.)
Equally noteworthy in The Voice of Terror is famed Queen of Screamers Evelyn Ankers as Kitty, yet another slattern with a patriotic heart of gold. Ankers, who mostly left the biz in 1950 at the age of 32 to play housewife and died of ovarian cancer on Maui in 1985, was one of the industry's most popular vocally exuberant B-movie heroines throughout the 1940s and can be found in many an entertaining minor classic, dud and non-dud of the time; she returned two year later to play a new character in one of the best of the Sherlock Holmes franchise, The Pearl of Death (1944 / trailer).
Oddly flat, on the other hand, is the usually dependable Henry Daniell (5 Mar 1894 – 31 Oct 1963] of The Body Snatcher [1945]) as the unlikable red herring Sir Alfred Lloyd. Daniel eventually went on to replace Lionel "Pinky" Atwill (of The Vampire Bat [1933], House of Frankenstein [1944] and so much more as Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945 / a trailer) and excel.
Tuesday, July 2, 2024
Zombie Shark (USA, 2015)
A.k.a. Shark Island. Another dispensable movie for which one has no reason to waste their time on, but which, if watched, is about as easy to digest as baby food and about as satisfying — unless, of course, you are into paraphilic infantilism.
In the good ol' days when cheap flicks with titles as low brow as this were shown at grindhouses, such a title would have at least guaranteed gore and guts and gratuitous nudity alongside the bad acting and bad direction and cheesy effects and lack of logic. But nowadays, when films with titles like this get made for (and shown on) cable TV, guess which of the previously listed seven aspects are lacking and which are not.
For that, Zombie Shark does offer a few surprises not usually found in low-grade, by-the-number product of this caliber: for one (Spoilers!) the token Afro-American character of note, Lester (Roger J. Timber), survives the film; furthermore, the deaths do not necessarily happen in the normal order expected, one death is particularly ironic in that the victim dies during a rare act of altruism, and the final death is truly unexpected in more ways than one.
Trailer to
Zombie Shark:
But lest you think Zombie Shark might be in any way "good", that is not the case. The TV flick simply has some pleasant qualities — including the pleasantly game lead trio of well-cleavaged females with distinct, fully developed personalities: Bridgette the Bathing Suit (Becky "firm but one assumes pliant" Andrews of Ozark Sharks [2016 / trailer]), and the similarly assumedly firm but pliant siblings, Amber the elder and unloved former problem child (Cassie Steele of Paint It Red [2019 / trailer]) and Sophie the younger little Miss Perfect (Sloane Coe of Ghost Shark [2013 / trailer]) — that make the movie somewhat less crappy, and thus much easier to watch, than many other films of its ilk.
The rather obtuse non-story concerns how the three of them, along with Amber's hapless beau Jenner (Ross Britz of Aftermath [2014 / trailer]), come, off season, to the north and unpopular side of Redplum Island, a resort island on the Gulf of Mexico, where the experiments in flesh-regeneration conducted by the well-minded Dr. Palmer (Laura Cayouette of Flight of the Living Dead [2007] and Hell Ride [2008 / trailer]) go off the rail when her main test subject, the highly intelligent shark Bruce, escapes and begins spreading a zombie virus which, as some viruses naturally can, jumps from shark to human.
In any event, even as their numbers dwindle — guess which hapless fellow is the unexpected first to die (excluding the surfer in the opening scene, waiting for waves on a waveless expanse of water) — our intrepid trio and Lester and military man Maxwell Cage (Jason London of Blood Ties [1991] and The Rage: Carrie Two [1999]) try to save their skin and the day and to stop the virus from spreading.
As mentioned previously, despite a relative high body count Zombie Shark lacks gore and guts, the blood and visceral all being not only substandard CGI but seriously non-copious — but then, seeing how poorly the sharks and shark-swimming scenes are rendered, it would seem all such scenes were possibly made in the CGI 101 class of the local community college. Nudity would have seriously enlivened the movie, but any boobs in focus anywhere in the proceedings are displayed as deep cleavage or in a bikini — women with well-developed personalities have no need to get nekkid in cinematic endeavors like this one. (Indeed, it would seem that in contemporary flicks like this one, much like per-marital sex in the slashers of the '70s and '80s, getting nekkid — even demurely — means guaranteed death.)
The narrative of Zombie Sharks, supplied by one Gregg Mitchell (Snakehead Swamp [2014 / TV spot]), like the special effects, is sorely lacking in everything but holes, and even within the realm of "TV movie" the somewhat padded movie suffers from a noticeable vitamin deficiency. Its saving grace, aside from its strong cast of females, is that it keeps throwing the viewer unanticipated curve balls. From the first character of note to die and onwards, the deaths have a humorous kick and are often unexpected, with some of them even working up to a delayed visual punchline. (Still, one too many minor or non-character has obvious problems not laughing at the stupidity of the procedures they are involved in.)
Incongruently enough, however, for all the movie's obvious aim for bad-movie laughs á la the whole contemporary killer shark genre, the unexpected resolution of Zombie Sharks is a head-scratcher and gut-puncher, one that only fits in that it is as bleakly ironic as much of the film is humorously ironic — and stupid.
Is Zombie Sharks a good film? Shit, how can you even ask a question like that about a movie with that title? It's a barely passable if majorly flawed lump of lard laced with an occasional surprise, some fun humor, and a truly unexpected ending, but it hardly offers enough to make anyone want to watch it a second time. But for a one-off with a six-pack and smoke, it's passable contemporary fare. Director Misty Talley, in any event, has since gone on to three subsequent shark films, the last being the Christmas season-appropriate Santa Jaws [2018 / trailer]), all with nary a naked breast in sight.
As an extra:
Zombie shark scene from the Netfux series
Zom 100 – Bucket List of the Dead (2023):
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
The Naked Witch (Planet Texas, 1961 / 64)
Gay-Darlene Bidart, the Love Witch:
No, The Naked Witch at hand here is, instead, an early directorial project of the infamous Texan schlockstmeister Larry Buchanan (31 Jan 1923 – 2 Dec 2004),* and, far from being lost, it is easily available online — at the Internet Archives, for example. Buchanan co-wrote and co-produced and co-directed The Naked Witch with the fellow Texan Claude Alexander,** an owner of a drive-in who was in desire of some exploitation product featuring a lot of nudity — so he hired Buchanan to help make a low-budget exploiter.
* Some sources list The Naked Witch as the directorial debut of Larry Buchanan, nee Marcus Larry Seale Jr., but according to his autobiography It Came from Hunger! (as well as to Psychotronic Video #24), prior feature-film projects include his lost directorial debut Grubstake (1952) and Venus in Furs (1956), the latter "a made-to-order adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story". If anything, then, The Naked Witch is Buchanan's earliest surviving feature-film directorial project. Prior to taking up direction, Buchanan briefly had a virtually non-existent career as an actor; indeed, the name by which he is known was given to him by 20th Century Fox. That career reached its apex when he played the lead, Homer, in the military "hillbilly musical comedy" short, Personal Hygiene.
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** From a wasted life's Babes of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls entry on Erica Gaven: "While not much can be found about Claude Alexander online, Brian Albright's book Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews does offer an interesting and tragic bit of trivia in its entry on The Naked Witch: 'Producer Claude Alexander was involved in a car accident in 2002 that killed his then girlfriend [84-year-old] Peggy Moran, an actress who had appeared in The Mummy's Hand (1940 / trailer) [...]' and Horror Island (1941 / trailer) and The Mummy's Tomb (1942 / trailer). Claude Alexander, a protégé of Kroger Babb, remains elusive and obscure, but he seems to have died around 2007."
Personal Hygiene:
Buchanan himself once claimed (see: Psychotronic Video #24 [1997]) that he based The Naked Witch on the tale of the "Luckenbach Witch", a supposed local legend of the very area in Texas where he shot the film, but the truth of the matter is that he simply swiped, tweaked, and simplified the narrative from an obscure Finnish horror movie, Roland af Hällström's The Witch / Noita palaa elämään (1952 / trailer below). That Finnish film, which displays greater artistic intention than Buchanan's and is one of that country's first sound horror movies, was rather a scandal in its day due to its copious nudity and overt sexuality.* It also features a much larger cast: Buchanan's virtually non-existent alleged budget of $8,000 demanded a small cast, and he managed to shrink it down to well under a dozen that are actually given names (excluding, of course, the probably non-existent Saengerbund Children's Choir, which help pad the film by warbling a tune and prancing around in lederhosen and little-girl dirndls).
* Needless to say, the oft-quoted film history importance bestowed upon Buchanan's The Naked Witch by Heather Greene in her book Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television (McFarland & Co., 2018) that Buchanan's film is "the first to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch" should actually be bestowed upon the earlier Finnish film — or at least be amended as "the first American-made film to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch".
Noita palaa elämään:
Shot without sound, most of The Naked Witch forgoes dialogue in favor of narration, usually underscored by some extremely tacky Hammond organ music supplied by Raymond A. "Ray" Plagens (5 June 1924 – 23 May 1972), a regional talent. But before the movie ever even gets to it supposed tale, a good ten minutes are spent with a verbose and often factually incorrect lecture on the history of the witch, narrated by an uncredited and then-unknown Gary Owens (10 May 1934 – 12 Feb 2015) over a collage of pictorial details of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 9 Aug 1516) and, possibly, Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
Trailer to
The Naked Witch:
The actual narrative of The Naked Witch concerns the rather loquacious and feckless un-named student, played by future Christian minister (and author of both The Gospel According the Peanuts [1965] and The Parables of Peanuts [1968]) Robert L. Short (3 Aug 1932 – 6 July 2009),* who, while pursuing his thesis on the German villages of contemporary central Texas, ends up in the town of Luckenbach when his sports car runs out of gas. (At one point he claims the area is reminiscent of the area around the Rhine River in Germany, which only proves that he's never been to anywhere in Rhineland.)
In search of a room for the night, he meets the pretty blonde Kirska Schoennig (Jo Maryman), who not only sets him up for a room at an inn run by her grandfather Hans (Charles West) but also both tells him of the local legend of the Luckenbach Witch (Libby Hall a.k.a. Libby Booth**) and gives him a book about the legend. As might be expected, that night the un-named student wanders out, finds the witch's grave, digs the grave up, and removes the stake from her heart — because, well, that is what Texas college students do. As he runs away, she slowly regenerates, her atrocious make-up and hair perfect but clothing long gone.
* Interesting to note that almost every online obituary or biography of Mr. Short found online pointedly overlooks both his stage career and this movie, his only "acting" cum film credit, though one does briefly mention that he "worked as an actor, and was a director of religious dramas".
** According to Buchanan, (see Psychotronic Video #24), Ms. Booth was a direct descendant of the assassin John Wilkes Booth (10 May 1838 – 26 Apr 1865) as well as the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth (10 Apr 1829 – 20 Aug 1912) — an amazing feat, seeing that the two men are not related. She ended up marrying The Naked Witch's soundman, S. F. Brownrigg (30 Sept 1937 – 20 Sept 1996), which would make her full name Elizabeth Ann Booth (imdb), a.k.a. Libby Hall Brownrigg (imdb). Brownrigg, of course, is [in]famous for his directorial debut drive-in hit Don't Look in the Basement (1973 / trailer) and his later Scum of the Earth a.k.a. Poor White Trash Part II (1974 / trailer). The short filmography of Ms. Booth/Hall, whom someone claims (in the trivia section of the film at imdb) was a nudist, also includes Buchanan's Common Law Wife (1961 / full film), the extremely obscure (and lost) cheapie Beauty and the Cave (1961 / trailer), and her son's cheapie sequel to her husband's first film, Don't Look in the Basement 2 (2015 / trailer).
Buchanan's The Naked Witch is not exactly the most exciting film out there, and it seems almost impossible that it took two people to put together a snoozer as dull and terrible as this turkey, but as crappy as this lump of extremely low-budget flotsam is, the movie does have an oddly surreal appeal, providing you are of a forgiving nature. As skin flick, The Naked Witch fails miserably because the nudity is as discrete as it is gratuitous, and as a horror film it fails miserably in that it is anything but scary. As most of the film is in voiceover, the acting is very much on the level of that found in a bad silent film, but as bad as that is the movie manages to do even worse the few time there is any real, poorly dubbed dialogue. (We had a good laugh at the student's reading of the suave line "With your good looks and something simple and black, you would look like a cameo," which he says to Kriska at one point.)
As a whole, The Naked Witch is amazingly boring despite its unintentional surrealism, with its extremely short running time of 59 minutes coming across as interminable. It does offer a decent bad-film giggle or two, all the more so if seen with a crowd — our favorite giggle scene is the witch's post-coital dance to bongo music — but it is difficult to argue that the movie is in any way worth viewing.
Again, however, those who are of a forgiving nature might find some mild enjoyment in the movie's oddly surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, something that is augmented both by the continual voiceover and the abnormally disjointed narrative and otherworldly logic and continuity. Unluckily, this occasionally noteworthy but obviously unintentional unearthliness is, as the accidental byproduct of a filmmaker whose talents leaned more towards Ed Wood than Luis Buñuel, too inconsistent to come even close to saving the movie.
As is apt to happen with exploitation films with great titles of any genre, in the seventies The Naked Witch got rereleased on the drive-in circuit as part of a double-bill with the 1969 cheapie The Witchmaker (1969), which got re-titled as The Legend of Witch Hollow.
Trailer to
The Legend of Witch Hollow:
To add confusion, The Witchmaker a.k.a. The Legend of Witch Hollow was itself eventually re-released as The Naked Witch...
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