The Red Eye Report's 2010 October Horrorthon #23: "Voodoo Man"

If horror films have taught us anything, it's to never trust the open road. In 1944's Voodoo Man, a line-up of lovely ladies learn this the hard way when a phony detour sign leads them right into the hands of the demented Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi). For the last two decades, Dr. Marlowe has been obsessed with resurrecting his dead wife, using the life essence of girls he kidnaps to do so only for very brief periods. The snarky Stella Saunders (Louise Currie) is snatched up en route to her cousin's wedding, but luckily, she has the groom, Ralph Dawson (Michael Ames), as a traveling buddy. A Hollywood screenwriter who's seen it all, Ralph is quick on the case when Stella turns up missing, leading the charge to get to the bottom of Dr. Marlowe's witchery and save Stella from becoming a shell of her former self.

Well, kids, I guess they can't all be winners. Lugosi is as revered as classic horror stars get, his name synonymous with terror and the vampire's image for years -- but man, was he in some real stinkers. Everyone knows about Lugosi's collaborations with the infamous Ed Wood, but the cheapie Voodoo Man popped up a decade before the two crossed paths. It's the sort of picture many horror icons of the time made on the fly (or a speedy seven days, in this case). The production's thriftiness sure shows in the all-around crummy quality, but Voodoo Man doesn't reach the epic awfulness of a Plan 9 or a Manos. In fact, for a B-movie, it's pretty low-key, with little to its name other than some traces of nostalgic cheesiness. It even came out while Lugosi was still doing his best work, hitting theaters close to The Return of the Vampire and a year before he tangled with Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher. For a man whose career unfortunately became a joke as it progressed, Lugosi made the best of it and delivered a halfway decent performance here.

Needless to say, Voodoo Man still possesses some quirky aspects that make it an amusingly dumb flick. For one, the voodoo man of the title isn't Lugosi's Marlowe but more so George Zucco's character, a henchman who leads a dark ritual meant to sap the souls of young women. Of course, this being the '40s, the film's concept of "voodoo" consists of guys in Snuggies covered in Lucky Charms symbols and chanting gibberish (and don't even ask me how Marlowe's hypnotism experiments are supposed to help out). Also, in addition to Lugosi and Zucco, horror vet John Carradine shows up in what the Netflix disc sleeve claims was his least favorite role. Carradine appeared in worse flicks in his time, but I do see how it'd suck having to play vacant-eyed, bongo-bashing flunkie to Lugosi's stare-happy madman. The "normal" characters are plenty bland but inoffensive, the actors caring enough so as not to come across like they're ready to take their slim paychecks and run.

Voodoo Man isn't a very good film, but it's not the be-all, end-all of B-cinema, either. You can find it in a lot of those sets of 20+ public domain horror movies, or if you're in the mood for a chuckle, Rifftrax sells a version with its own damn funny commentary track. But Voodoo Man is nothing to get worked up over, not rancid enough to make enemies or endeardingly corny enough to win over Lugosi completists.

The Red Eye Report's 2010 October Horrorthon #22: "The Unseen" (1945)

As would Jamie Lee Curtis and Carol Kane after her, Gail Russell assumes the role of a babysitter who's really in for it in 1945's The Unseen. Russell plays Elizabeth Howard, a young woman hired by the stern David Fielding (Joel McCrea) as governess for his children (Nona Griffith and Richard Lyon). But she's hardly had time to unpack her things before realizing she's stepped into the nuttiest house since the Femm estate. All manner of strange characters drift about the Fielding residence, including a shifty real estate agent, a handyman who keeps odd working hours, and a former nanny who's not about to move on. From all of this hubub emerges a peculiar mystery, involving a recent string of murders and a figure rooting around the house next door. When she learns the Fielding kids know more than they're admitting, Elizabeth attempts to gain their trust and crack the crimes before her name ends up in the obituaries next.

It was but a few days ago that I ragged on Return of the Living Dead 3 for having bugger-all to do with its namesake series. But now we have The Unseen, a film I like a fair deal more than has even less to do with its own supposed roots. You can see from the poster that The Unseen was billed as a follow-up to 1944's The Uninvited and is accepted as a sequel in certain circles. But not only do none of the latter film's characters show up here, the former completely ditches the supernatural angle in favor of more earthly chills. The only common threads are director Lewis Allen and star Gail Russell, no longer playing an outright victim but a more proactive part this time around. Strangely, though, I didn't mind so flimsy a connection, since the first film's spirit is present here, even if the spirits themselves are not. The set-up is straight out of The Turn of the Screw, wherein the relationship between governess and children provides the film's emotional core, as well as its main source of conflict.

But here's where The Unseen gets a bit murky, kids. The resentment kids have towards any foreign authority figure is natural, and the junior actors here convey this very well. But Griffith and (mostly) Lyon do almost too good a job of exuding brattiness, so much so that the story's flow suffers as a result. With much of the mystery hinging on what the Fielding kids know but won't tell, it gets irritating to see the resolution prolonged because one of them is being a stubborn little demon spawn. As such, The Unseen is often left trying to find stuff to do, and though it only lasts 81 minutes, it's still dishing out red herrings an hour in. It doesn't develop an intricate puzzle so much as it just makes everyone but Russell look guilty as all get-out, resolved whenever's convenient for the culprit. This doesn't give Russell much of a chance to really play detective, but she still delivers a sweet and sympathetic performance, particularly when she puts up with McCrea's crusty ways to an almost saintly degree.

Though I've exhibited more jeers than cheers, The Unseen isn't at all terrible. Again, Allen nails the atmosphere, which is dark, foggy, and teeming with spookiness. Although the supernatural isn't part of the plan, you still find yourself getting nervous over what real-life terrors await Elizabeth in the surrounding mist. Even more hard to find than The Uninvited nowadays, The Unseen isn't worth breaking a sweat over, but should the Turner Classic Movie gods feel generous enough to schedule it, it's worth catching just to say you've seen it.

The Red Eye Report's 2010 October Horrorthon #3: "The Boogie Man Will Get You"

When Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell) bought a dusty old country house, she thought a few creaky floorboards were the worst she'd have to deal with. Sure, the farmhands are a bit nutty, and weird Professor Billings (Boris Karloff) carries on some funny business in the basement, but they're just some harmless eccentrics. But little does Winnie know that the professor's experiments in turning men into super-powered beings have left her with a few well-preserved corpses tucked in the cellar. Not only that, but some shady houseguests check in, there's a mad bomber on the loose, and a killer has taken to stalking the premises. The Slade estate is getting screwier by the minute, and Winnie's ex-husband Bill (Larry Parks) is the only one sane enough to try and figure out what's going on.

Anyone who says that old movies are boring can put The Boogie Man Will Get You in their pipe and smoke it. A surplus of subplots is tough for any movie to handle, but this one clocks in at 66 minutes and still whips itself into entertaining shape. But it should be said that this isn't a true horror movie. There's no ordained "Boogie Man" to speak of, and that Mothman guy on the poster is nowhere to be seen either (what, did the artist think the flick wasn't busy enough?). We have Peter Lorre gussied up like the Reverend Harry Powell, but even he gets in on the goofiness pretty quickly. Nah, Boogie Man isn't an official fright film but rather a farce with a cheerfully diabolical sense of humor. In tone, it's closer to Arsenic and Old Lace than Frankenstein, with Karloff's nutty professor humorously lamenting many a human guinea pig lost in the name of science.

Still, the light approach works best for Boogie Man; with a workload like the one it takes on, truly sinister overtones would've killed its charm. As it, the movie has some trouble keeping up with itself, occasionally dishing out gags and side bits for the sake of having something to do. But with its short running time, Boogie Man wraps up long before it has the chance to really wear out its welcome. It's too cheery to hate, especially when you see the actors having just as much fun. Karloff has a blast defying God's will any chance he gets, but I was even more impressed with Lorre's performance. To be honest, I'm not as up on my Lorre as I should be, but he was wry comic gold here, playing the town jack-of-all-trades who joins up with Billings to make a few quick bucks. Donnell and Parks are just fine as the prototypical bickering lovers, and Maxie Rosenbloom enjoys some good-natured goofs as a particularly dimwitted shuckster.

The Boogie Man Will Get You comes packaged with Boris Karloff's Icons of Horror set, where it's easily the least frightening of the bunch. It's not the first time this has happened, but it's of more respectable quality than Karloff's lighter material tends to be. Sunny and amusing over campy and intolerable, The Boogie Man Will Get You is the very picture of macabre hilarity.

The Red Eye Returns

Well, as you can tell, October has ended and with it the Red Eye Report's first Horror-thon. I want to thank everyone who visited the site and sent me feedback on what they thought.

But now that I've had a little breather after my mainly Rockstar-fueled blog orgy, I'm soon going to set out on what I meant the Red Eye Report to be: a hub for all things horror for yours truly. In the next few days, I'll be posting links to various horror-related articles I've written for other sites, as well as posting the occasional review straight here. I thought I'd get the party started with two "best of" lists I wrote for ReelTalk Reviews and Classic Movie Guide in October:

"Flicks with Bite" - The 5 Best Vampire Movies You've Never Seen...Maybe -- http://reeltalkreviews.com/browse/viewitem.asp?type=feature&id=555

"A.J.'s Top Ten Horror Classics" -- http://classicmovieguide.com/content/view/521/69

Also, I wanted to thank my good friend Dom Coccaro for coming up with a rather kickass logo, which you can see for yourself at the top of the page. And be sure to peruse Dom's chuckle-inducing thoughts at his own blog, "Random Reviews":

http://rrincorporated.blogspot.com/

More reviews will follow in the next couple of days, so stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

October Horror-thon #5: "The Black Cat" (1941)

Rich old crone Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus) is on her deathbed, which means her nearest (and not so dearest) relatives have come out of the woodwork in search of a handout. But while Henrietta already has one foot in the grave, someone wants to ensure she completes the journey. After stipulating that no one will see a cent until she and her many cats have passed on, Henrietta dies in what her money-grubbing kin are glad to accept as an accident. But family friend Gil Smith (Broderick Crawford) deduces foul play, that greed got the best of someone who just couldn't wait. The trouble is that he's the only one who thinks a murderer is among them, forcing him to confront various spooky goings-on to prove his suspicions.

Long before Roger Corman made a mint with The Pit and the Pendulum, Universal Studios padded its own horror library with the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The Black Cat came as the trend was winding down, with more focus set on developing monster properties, and it has even less to do with the Poe story than Universal's other film of the same name from seven years prior. In fact, The Black Cat has a great deal in common with The Cat and the Canary, which the studio itself adapted in the '20s. It's a comedic mystery more than a straight-out chiller, a clever idea until you consider Universal's track record with blending humor and horror. More often than not, you got something like The Invisible Woman, a painfully campy blemish on an almost sterling genre catalogue. The Black Cat never gets that silly, but its jokes aren't always on the ball. Most of the film feels like an aborted Abbott and Costello routine, especially where Hugh Herbert's bumbling antique dealer is concerned. The story also gets lost in the shuffle; by the time the mystery is finally revealed, you're still trying to figure out how the movie made it there.

Still, The Black Cat had its share of endearing charms. Crawford did great work as the scaredy cat hero, there were some choice moments of dark humor, and, as with the best Universal thrillers, the production design was really top-notch. You're more liable to have a freaky good time with the studio's other Black Cat, but this one's worth a glance should it work its way onto Turner Classic Movies.