LET’S GET PHYSICAL: TREASURE OF FEAR (1945) * ½

FORMAT:  DVD

Jack Haley (from One Body Too Many and… uh…  The Wizard of Oz) stars as a bumbling reporter who is sent by his asshole editor to cover a wine festival.  Naturally, since he’s such a putz, he winds up on the wrong bus.  When the passenger sitting next to him is murdered, Haley quickly becomes the prime suspect.  Before long, a gangster arrives on the scene looking for some priceless chess pieces, and it’s up to Haley to come back to his editor with a story… if he can survive, that is. 

I’ll tell you.  A little of Haley’s shtick goes a long way.  His jittery demeanor and twitchy behavior don’t exactly translate into laughs.  (The scene where he engages in a battle of wits with a car horn and loses is especially tiresome.)  I guess when you’re covered in silver face paint and playing third fiddle to Judy Garland, this kind of routine can be tolerable.   However, as a leading man, he’s borderline insufferable.  (The irritating know-it-all Encyclopedia Brown wannabe junior detective kid will also grate on your nerves.)

I was able to stomach Haley’s brand of comedy while rewatching One Body Too Many.  That’s mostly because that film was deeply rooted in Old Dark House murder/mystery cliches, and I have a certain affinity for the genre.  Here, he’s stuck inside what is essentially a tepid whodunit comedy, and he flounders.  Badly.  (Even the requisite scenes of secret walls, hidden passageways, and bodies suddenly turning up feel awfully tired.) 

I guess die-hard Wizard of Oz fans may enjoy it.  For me, this Tin Man wasn’t just missing a heart, but he apparently lost his funny bone as well.  As for Treasure of Fear, it was in desperate need of an oil can too, as it was creaky as fuck. 

AKA:  Scared Stiff.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on November 13th, 2007)

Some thoroughly bland white dude (John Archer), his pilot (Dick Purcell), and his manservant (the hilarious Mantan Moreland) crash land on a jungle island where the evil Dr. Sangre (Henry Victor) dwells. He welcomes the trio into his home where unbeknownst to them; he keeps a cadre of zombies. Sangre also tries to turn a military VIP into a zombie so he can steal vital information for his vaguely Nazi government but is foiled at the last minute by the now zombified Purcell.

King of the Zombies offers no surprises whatsoever, but it also gives you exactly what you’re expecting, so you can’t say that you’re disappointed by it. Nobody will ever mistake this flick as the definitive zombie picture, but it’s a lot of fun and it moves pretty briskly.

Mantan Moreland’s performance is far and away the best thing about the movie. Some people frown upon his performances and say they are “politically incorrect”, “stereotypical”, and worst of all “racist”, but I say that the man is one of the most overlooked comedians of all time. Today, some snobs may look back at his work and say it was borderline offensive, but Moreland really had no choice in the matter. Hollywood only offered him the roles of stereotypical black porters, chauffeurs and servants, so what was the guy to do? He played what could have been insignificant, underwritten and one-note roles and made them his own, infusing them with a lot of warmth and humor. In King of the Zombies, he gives one of his best performances. You can say that his role in it is stereotypical if you will, but he’s actually the one who discovers the zombies; it’s just the stupid white people who don’t believe him.

Mantan gets all the best lines in the movie and easily steals the film from his boring (white) co-stars. When they first arrive on the island, he muses, “Harlem was never like this!” When he wakes up in a graveyard he hollers “We in someone’s marble orchard!” When he first encounters the zombies he yells, “They’s fugitives from the undertaker!” In short, Mantan is one funny son-of-a-gun and has a lot more chemistry than anyone else in the flick.

The only other person who comes close to matching Moreland’s performance is Henry Victor. A lot of you may recognize him as the strongman from Freaks. He gives a decent performance as the voodoo doctor obsessed with hypnotism. If he seems to be channeling Bela Lugosi in some scenes, it’s probably because the role was originally intended for Lugosi, but Victor was cast at the last minute when Bela proved to be unavailable.

The movie maybe kind of light when it comes to zombies (there’s only about four or five), but the climatic voodoo ceremony is pretty memorable and features a lot of extras screaming something that sounds approximately like, “Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! We love cocoa beans! Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! Zombie! I need cocoa, I need cocoa!”

If you happen to catch King of the Zombies on television (or in a bargain DVD bin) you’ll probably enjoy it. You’d probably think that it’s hardly Academy Award material, but you’d be WRONG! The musical score was actually nominated for an OSCAR, but it lost. (I’m not quite sure HOW it got nominated as the music is mostly jungle drums and comical suspense build-ups like “Doo-doo-doo-doo-DOOOOO!”)

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE GORILLA (1939) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 17th, 2007)

The Ritz Brothers, who were a popular comedy team in the late ‘30s, star in this comedy/mystery. They aren’t very funny, but if you’re a fan of old dark house murder mysteries, like man in a gorilla suit movies, and love Bela Lugosi, then this flick is for you! The Ritz’s star as three bumbling detectives who are trying to solve “The Gorilla Murders”. Lionel Atwill is the intended victim, and Lugosi is his butler and prime suspect. (They both were in Son of Frankenstein the same year.) Lugosi later turned up in other films with comedy teams like The Bowery Boys (Ghosts on the Loose), Abbott and Costello (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) and Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo (Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla).

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 17th, 2007)

In this fun horror/comedy from director Roger Corman, Dick Miller plays his best role as Walter Paisley, a meager busboy in a hep cat bohemian nightclub who someday dreams of being a famous beatnik artist. He tries sculpting but is no good at it until he accidentally kills his cat and decides to sculpt over its carcass. When his “Dead Cat” sculpture is an unexpected hit, he soon has to turn to murder to find willing “subjects”. Miller gives a great performance and Corman balances the chills and the chuckles nicely. It would make a good double feature with Corman’s better known Little Shop of Horrors (also with Miller) which came out the following year. Co-starring a young Bert Convy as a victim. Remade in 1995 with Anthony Michael Hall.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: ONE BODY TOO MANY (1944) * ½

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on March 11th, 2008)

Insurance salesman Jack Haley (The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz) goes to an eccentric millionaire’s house for the reading of his will on a dark and stormy night.  The squabbling relatives are all bound to the house until the old coot is interred into the family vault, even after a murderer starts bumping off the family members in hopes of getting his hands on the inheritance.  Bela Lugosi plays the creepy butler, and his Glen or Glenda co-star Lyle Talbot is one of the bickering relatives.

 

Yep, it’s yet another one of those Old Dark House comedy/murder/mystery/whodunit deals.  This premise had pretty much been thoroughly run into the ground by 1944, but if you’re a fan of the genre, you might groove to this otherwise creaky flick.  If you’re a Lugosi fan like me, you’ll be able to suck up most of the rampant clichés (the relatives get stranded because the bridge gets washed out in the storm, the murderer uses secret passageways to get around the house, dead bodies end up in peculiar places, etc.) and tolerate the unfunny comic relief (Haley is particularly grating) and just enjoy his performance.  He’s severely underutilized and his role is rather small, but to me, any movie he’s in is worth watching just to see Lugosi, especially when he says things like “There are too many rats in this house!”  Otherwise, it’s pretty tough going. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: MY MOM’S A WEREWOLF (1989) *

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on May 13th, 2011)

John Saxon stars as a pet shop owner who’s also a werewolf.  He seduces a lonely housewife and mother (Susan Blakely) and bites her on the toe; slowly but surely turning her into a werewolf.  Her daughter and her horror movie nerd best friend then try to help reverse her curse before she becomes a werewolf permanently.

 

My Mom’s a Werewolf was obviously trying to ride the coattails of the '80s horror-comedy craze of such films as Teen Wolf and My Best Friend’s a Vampire.  I actually dig this subgenre, partially for nostalgic reasons.  But even I don’t have enough love for the subgenre to enjoy this mess.

 

First off, the flick just isn’t funny.  I mean it’s pretty sad when your big comedic guns are Ruth Buzzi and Marcia Wallace.  And I know I use some pretty bad puns to write these reviews but the puns in this flick are awful.  (Sample dialogue:  “I want you to be my were-wife!”)  Ugh.  When a potentially funny gag comes around (like when Blakely franticly tries to shave her legs) they just keep hitting you over the head with it until it just gets annoying.

 

And the “horror” stuff is pathetic.  You have to seriously wonder if the people who made this movie ever saw a werewolf movie in their life.  I mean when’s the last time you saw a werewolf that DIDN’T change during a full moon?  And the final werewolf make-up is crappy as fuck.  They’re nothing more than a cheap Halloween mask with lots of fake hair.  It’s pretty sad.

 

There were some things I liked.  I liked John Saxon’s performance.  And the movie geek character who reads Famous Monsters, Fangoria, and Gorezone and has posters from other Crown International pictures like Galaxina and Prime Evil on her wall.  And of course, the ‘80s fashions were appropriately cheesy. 

 

Other than that, My Mom’s a Werewolf is a dog of a film.  Sure, that’s a bad pun.  It’s no worse than the puns in the movie though.

 

AKA:  My Mum’s a Werewolf.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966) NO STARS

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

In the mid ‘60s, fertilizer entrepreneur and fledgling filmmaker Hal P. Warren made a bet with screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a horror movie with less than $20,000. His background in the fertilizer industry is evident because the result is one of the shittiest movies ever made. If it wasn’t for its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000, it would have faded away into obscurity, but thanks to MST3K, Manos now rivals Plan 9 from Outer Space as the best-known bad movie ever made. Like Plan 9, Manos is fascinating to watch for the sheer incompetence both in front of and behind the camera, but unlike Ed Wood’s masterpiece, it’s completely wretched. The only proper way to watch it is on MST3K with Joel and the ‘bots riffing, otherwise, you’ll probably able to stand about ten minutes of it before suffering some sort of breakdown.

Warren stars as Mike, who piles his family into the car and takes them on a vacation. They get lost and drive and drive and drive (the only movie that rivals this one for the largest amount of pointless driving scenes is The Brown Bunny) until they come to a remote lodge ran by the caretaker Torgo (John Reynolds). It would be a tremendous understatement to say that Torgo is one of the most insipid characters ever to grace the silver screen. He speaks in a jittery tone, and his body movements are equally twitchy, a fact compounded by his enormous knees. Mike wants to stay the night, but Torgo warns them that “The Master would not approve”. The Master (Tom Neyman) is collecting a harem filled with women in negligees and has his eye on Mike’s wife for his next bride. Torgo also wants her too and defies the Master and he scolds Torgo by burning his hand off. In the end the Master steals Mike’s woman (and young daughter) and turns him into the new reigning Torgo.

To say this movie is merely bad is being generous. The thesaurus doesn’t even begin to help you comprehend the awfulness that is Manos. The editing is atrocious, the dialogue was badly dubbed (by no more than three actors apparently), there’s visible crew members and film slates, and don’t even get me started on the acting. A pall of unpleasantness hung over this movie long after its release when THREE actors (including Torgo himself) committed suicide shortly after filming. They were the lucky ones.