The Mummy (Great Britain, 1959)

As I mentioned in my review of Berlin Wie Es War, the magazine Cult Movies printed some reviews I had written and never lived up to their side of the deal, which was to send me a free copy of the issues my writings appeared in. The review below is a version of another review I know they (in my opinion) dishonorably and dishonestly printed.

After frightening the world with their artistically and financially successful color updates of the old horror staples Dracula and Frankenstein, Hammer films rounded up the same core elements of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958) to do their version of yet another classic of Universal Pictures’ golden age of monsters, The Mummy. Terence Fisher returned to his seat behind the camera, and in a script cobbled together by Jimmy Sangster—who had also supplied the words for the first two Hammer remakes—Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee faced each other once again as the hero and monster. Based not, as commonly assumed, on the 1932 Karl Freund masterpiece The Mummy (starring Boris Karloff), the 1959 Hammer remake mined instead the slightly less artistically exceptional movies entitled The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and The Mummy's Tomb (1942).
The plot, in short: Three English archaeologists discover and open the tomb of the Egyptian Princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). Returning to England, they are followed by Mehemet (George Pastell), an Egyptian cultist who exacts revenge for the desecration of Ananka’s grave by having the mummy kill the “disbelievers” one by one. Peter Cushing’s character is saved only because his wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux) is (surprise!) a spitting image of Princess Ananka and can command the mummy to release him. There is a mandatory chase through the local bog before the mummy lets the little lady go and sinks to oblivion.
The Hammer version of the story did indeed fill the studio’s pockets with change, but time has revealed that though lightening often strikes twice, in the case of The Mummy, it did not strike thrice. Whereas age has in no way detracted from the stylish thrills and chill of Hammer's Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy seems to be little more than a tacky mistake. Cushing and Lee do their best at what they are given, but Cushing’s John Banning is a bore that really does deserve to die and Lee’s Mummy can’t seem to decide if he should amble slowly or charge like a bull. Likewise, not only are the Egyptian scenes laughably staged and unconvincingly cheesy, but the Technicolor makes the use of “Brown Face” on the various “Egyptians” embarrassingly obvious. (Brown face may also have been common in the B&W Universals, but in B&W it is a tad easier to overlook.) The script has holes big enough to see the Pyramid through, with characters saying and doing things that are better suited for a bad television film, such as when the “archaeologists” blow up the tomb or when Isobel Banning is taken outside into the bushes with Inspector Mulrooney "for her safety." True, the scene of Cushing inefficiently blowing holes through the mummy with a shotgun and then impaling the monster with a fire poker does have a certain thrill, but one good scene doesn’t make a good movie, especially when the movie is saddled with a variety of ill-conceived comic elements. Unbelievable that a script including two (!) flashbacks didn’t go in for a rewrite.
Though Hammer has produced many a modern classic horror film in their day, The Mummy is not one of them. Obviously, all those involved must have realized this, for not one of them (other than a few minor character actors) where involved with either of the two Hammer variations that followed later, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) and The Mummy’s Shroud (1967).

Lizard Woman (Thailand, 2004)

When I first saw this title pop up on websites, the DVD-cover coupled with the flick’s name put this film at the top of my list of obscure films I just had see. I promptly took advantage of the first chance I had to get an affordable copy, despite my recent experience with another Thai horror film, Devil Species. Besides, word had it that Lizard Woman (in Thai: Tuk kae phi) had topped the box office in its home country for three weeks, so it couldn’t be all that bad, could it? I had the chance to check it out quick enough with some buds when we got together for a night of sleaze films; Lizard Woman was the first DVD to get fed to the player. An hour and a half later, after the film had ended, we all had to agree: we couldn’t figure out what the fuck had happened in the film.
Although only the third Thai horror film I have ever seen, Lizard Woman, coming so soon on the heels of Devil Species—with which it shares many common problems—leaves one with the feeling that either a lot gets lost in translation, or the Thai have a substantial inability to tell coherent stories. However, Nang-Nak/Return from the Dead, the Thai horror film that first turned me on to Thai horror, belays the latter concept, for it not only has a coherent narrative, but is really well made. But then, Nang-Nak, unlike Lizard Woman, is a big-budget film for Thailand and definitely has artistic pretentions that transcend its horror roots.
Lizard Woman, however, has no artistic pretensions: it is a horror film, plain and simple. Unluckily, though its basic concept is great and more than one scene or situation is actually rather (if not extremely) effective, the film as a whole is pretty lousy. Worse, it so obviously could have been a much better film that its failure is as highly aggravating as it is disappointing; likewise, as bad as it is, it never sinks to the level of pure incompetence that, in the end, makes Devil Species such an enjoyable fuck-up.
Like Devil Species, Lizard Woman is almost two different stories tied together with the slimmest of strings. At 20-plus minutes, the opening scene is so long that it seems like the rest of the film should continue it, but instead the film moves on to other characters and a different story, only returning to the original site for a showdown that may or may not have happened (that was one of the aspects me and me buds couldn’t agree upon).
The opening scene follows a mixed-sex group of six people spelunking; the Professor drops a wooden box with a wax gecko in it and later the group takes refuge in a deserted house when their car breaks down and the wind blows away their map. (The viewer who does not read the liner notes of the DVD will not know that the box was found in the cave and that by breaking it an evil gecko demon was released.) For what it’s worth, although the six do that normal thing that people only do in horror films—you know, separate for the most inane reasons and walk around alone and, yes, even bathe—the whole intro scene is pretty good: first we get a tastefully shot nude scene of an attractive Asian babe and then a white ghostly figure floating around before the geckos show up, people start dying, and the undead (not vampires but neither ghost nor zombie) increase. Regrettably, once the body count is over, the flick moves into its next segment and the narrative really gets lost.
Lizard Woman now turns to another character that inexplicitly appeared in the first segment once or twice in brief, totally out-of-context intercut scenes. The writer Kwanpilin (Roongrawee Borijindakul) has just finished her latest book and while on tour she buys (is given?) a small wooden box that looks suspiciously like the one the professor dropped. In no time short, gecko shit starts appearing in her apartment, close acquaintances start dying violent deaths and, finally, she gets possessed by a gecko demon and, as the titular lizard woman, is even seen eating flies from atop of a street light. Can her boyfriend Vitool (Pete Thongchua) and the photographer (Chatthapong Pantanaunkul) save her? The Lizard Woman runs off to the house from the beginning of the film—now populated by ghostly gals on swings—and the boyfriend and photographer follow close behind...
The script to Lizard Woman seems to have been written following the William Burroughs cut-up approach, for the narrative flies all over the place... in fact, just when you think the film is over, you suddenly find out it never happened—or did it? Who knows; who cares? Though the film is interspaced with some beautifully horrific scenes and surprises, everything else about the film—the pacing, script, editing and acting—can only be described as catastrophic. Don’t be tricked into getting this DVD by such seductively interesting film images as those included in this review: Lizard Woman is a total waste of time.

The Bride with White Hair (1993, Hong Kong)

For those who care, the Cantonese title is Bai fa mo ru zhuan. Like most Hong Kong films, however, it can be found or rented under a multitude of titles, the most common one being The Bride with White Hair. Based on a Chinese novel by the world famous Yusheng Liang, the film is, on the simplest level, a period fantasy love story. Anyone who likes such Hong Kong classics as A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), A Chinese Ghost Story Part II (1990) (both which starred Leslie Cheung) or (the non-supernatural) Peking Opera Blues (1990) (which featured Brigitte Lin) will enjoy The Bride with White Hair. Actually, the names involved in The Bride with White Hair all stand for good product in general: Director Ronny Yu has made dozens of kick & chop ballets as well as the hilarious Bride of Chucky (1998), many with the help of his regular script collaborator David Wu; cinematographer Peter Pau has worked with most of Hong Kong's most visually exciting directors; Lin was a big star up until she retired to become a mommy and Leslie Cheung had actually gained some international respectability due to such projects as Chinese Ghost Story I and II, Farewell My Concubine (1990) and Happy (1997) before he decided to end it all with a high dive from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on April 1st, 2003.

For all intents and purposes, the film tells the tragic story of an all-around loser. Zhuo Yi-Hang (Leslie Cheung) is first seen brooding in misery due to all that he has lost—clan, love, happiness. He sits guarding a magic flower that can revive the dead, a flower he hopes to one day use on the woman he has lost. Yu starts the film off with a small bang by allowing Yi-Hang to decimate a group of warriors in less than a minute before the real story gets told in flashback, starting with Yi-Hang's childhood. An excellent if irresponsible child student of the martial arts and sword, he is saved from an untimely death by the intervention of a mysterious flute playing girl. This scene is followed by a lengthy, somewhat slow but playful section introducing all the important characters and filling the viewer in on all the important background information. Yi-Hang grows to be the popular if somewhat irresponsible heir to the Wu-Tang clan, which is at war with Ji Wushuang (Francis Ng and Elaine Lui) a pair of evil separate-sex Siamese twins out for revenge for being banished so many years before. The girl with the flute has grown to become Lian Nichang (Brigitte Lin) the unstoppable killer for the twins, and during a big slaughter, she and Yi-Hang meet again and fall in love in a big way. Disillusioned by war and his compatriots—especially by Ho Lu Hua (Kit Ying Lam), his semi-girlfriend and only equal in the mastery of fighting—Yi-Hang would like nothing more than to leave with his new love, whom he swears never to disbelieve. While she is off buying her freedom from the twins (with her body, amongst other degradations), Yi-Hang is found by his clan and convinced by them that Lian has merely fooled him so as to kill his master and destroy the clan. When the battered Lian shows up to leave with her love, he attacks instead, the breaking of his oath and his disbelief resulting in her "suicide" and conversion into a demon with killer white hair (similar to the killer tongue in A Chines Ghost Story). By the film's end, she may have saved his life and he may have saved hers, but everyone else is dead. She leaves a broken man behind, an all-around loser with nothing to live for but the faint hope that one day she might come back....
Which she seemingly does in the sequel The Bride with White Hair II, made the very same year. That film, however, holds a less respectable reputation than the first film.
The Bride with White Hair is a triumph of style and story, an often breathtaking visual pleasure interspersed with some scenes of gore and blood, its excellent action scenes equalled by some truly boring narrative and humorous sections. A tad low budget looking at times, it is filmed with a lot of fog and strobe lights in the background, has a wonderfully mystical aura and a tragically romantic love story. True it drags sometimes, but overflows with creativity, energy, thrills and style; it never bores but often surprises. This is the perfect film for true fans of Hong Kong Bullet Ballets to show their Ang Lee worshipping significant others.

Three Strangers (1946, USA)

A strange film, but like virtually all films that teamed Peter Lorre with Sydney Greenstreet, a good one. Based on the short story Three Men and A Girl by John Huston, he had help writing the script from Howard Koch, the man behind the script to Orson Welles’ legendary radio broadcast The War of The Worlds. The project was originally developed for Humphrey Bogart and Jane Astor, and therefore is sometimes dissed as a Maltese Falcon (1941) rip-off. In truth, Three Strangers is a much different film that while sharing many of the creative features of Huston’s legendary first film is still very much its own. Much less a detective film than an oddly existential, almost depressingly pessimistic discourse on fate, the film features three protagonists whose individual stories having relatively little to do with each other, the only common bond between them being the winning horserace ticket that all three see as their savior in one way or another.

Three Strangers opens a dark and foggy night in London with Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) cruising the busy streets, for all appearances a discreet (but most likely expensive) streetwalker. She catches the eye of the lawyer Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet, who had obviously added some weight to the 280 pounds he had already carried in his film debut in The Maltese Falcon), who follows her home. There Crystal introduces him to Johnny West (Peter Lorre), and it is revealed that she is the follower of some obscure goddess and that that very night is a special night, a night in which if three strangers meet and do some mumbo jumbo stuff, they will all have their biggest desire granted. They place all their luck on a horserace ticket that West happens to have and go their separate ways, bound by a ticket even as their lives spiral further downwards. Johnny is on the lamb for taking part in a robbery while drunk during which someone got killed, the murder which eventually he (unrightfully) takes the blame for. Arbutny faces total ruin for illegal use and mismanagement (embezzlement?) of ditzy Lady Rhea Beladon’s funds. Crystal's estranged husband David Shackleford (Alan Napier) wants nothing else from her than a divorce, but she wants him back and is willing to ruin him to do so. A trio of anti-heroes, none of them particularly likeable—if Johnny ends up the film’s nominal hero, it is only by default, his evils being more weaknesses than to anything else. By the end of the film, he might be the only one of the three to still have his life ahead of him—indeed, perhaps he even finally has found the hope needed to take advantage of the new chance he has—but his situation is still hardly good, the race ticket now being too dangerous to cash in, even if not due to his fault.
A bizarre film to say the least, heavily influenced by Albert Camus and hardly the stuff one would think would get such good treatment from a studio of the time. Romanian-born director Jean Negulesco has a better grasp on the material than one would expect from someone who went on to make such films as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Despite whoever the movie’s script was originally meant for, Fitzgerald and Lorre more than make the film their own, the former excelling as a beautiful but egoistic, conniving bitch with a less than complete grasp upon reality, the latter believable as a detached, almost soulless alcoholic unable and unwilling to deal with life. As the third member of the party, Sidney Greenstreet excels (as always) as a calculating, less than honest and cold but polite lawyer who loses everything—including his sanity—at the end.