[The Australian Panther]

However, the reviewer mentioned Dorothy McGuire.  Know anything about her? I don't think I've seen any of her work. 

oops!
Dorothy Malone is one of my favorites too, which is why she came to mind immediately.
Dorothy McGuire.
You probably have seen her work.
She was in 'Ol Yeller!'  'Swiss Family Robinson' and 'Three Coins in the Fountain'.
On the other side of the ledger, she was in Elia Kazan's 'Gentleman's Agreement'

A reporter pretends to be Jewish in order to cover a story on anti-Semitism, and personally discovers the true depths of bigotry and hatred.

Not an easy film to find now, I think.
and Robert Siodmak's ]The Spiral Staircase'.

In 1916, a shadowy serial killer is targeting women with "afflictions"; one night during a thunderstorm, the mute Helen feels menaced.

Dorothy McGuire -Biography
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0570192/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

Cheers!
 

[profh0011]

I saw SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON on a theatrical reissue sometime around 1972 (I think), as the warm-up film for the main feature, 101 DALMATIONS.

I only recently was reading that SFR is considered one of the all-time worst violators when it comes to "animal cruelty" in the making a a movie.  "Disney"!!!


I just saw THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE on Youtube about a month ago!

[profh0011]

(March 26, 2023)

I am now more than halfway thru the Corman set (more or less, not counting the peripheral films)...

THE RAVEN (1963)

The brand-new Kino Lorber Blu-Ray is nice, today was the very first time I EVER got to see a "proper" print of this film-- CRYSTAL-CLEAR picture, WIDESCREEN, theoretically uncut...

Unfortunately, the copy I got has defects in 2 different places on the disc, causing it to stall and start repeatedly. I checked twice, and it's consistently in the same place on the disc, so, I know it's the disc, not my machine. I've put in for a REPLACEMENT-- I don't want a refund, I want another copy. We'll see how this goes.

I got a question ANSWERED today! There was a line I was MIS-QUOTING for years, and today, I found out why. The word "viper" appears NOWHERE in the film "THE PREMATURE BURIAL". That's because, it wasn't Ray Milland, it was Boris Karloff who used the word, referring to Hazel Court! "My precious VIPER", he called her. I can see it was that it was Hazel Court in both instances how I got confused. Court appeared in 3 Corman POE films-- all 3, playing BAD girls.



Dell's comic-book adaptation, with art by Frank Springer.
https://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2018/10/poe-1963-pt-7.html?fbclid=IwAR0vVY04UgMWZP_K-vb3-neLywGfEMYV0ICqhr8rpIC80CVHJce6JoCUxbg


I love when Boris talks about Jack Nicholson and says, "Yes, the resemblence is clear." and rolls his eyes. What's clear is he KNOWS Nicholson is NOT Peter Lorre's son.



Just dug out my 1980s videotape recorded off of Philly's Channel 3 (probably from their local "Saturday Night Dead" program which was on at 1 in the morning). As usual, the thing was in fullscreen, slightly cut, a TERRIBLE old, VERY-fuzzy print, with exagerrated colors suggesting it was a COPY of a recording done to edit out commercial breaks. Really ghastly to watch... making me once again wonder, how in the HELL did I ever put up with these awful tapes for so long?

Still waiting to get a refund on the Blu-Ray I had to return. As soon as I get my money back, I'll be ordering a replacement disc.

[profh0011]

THE TERROR (1963)

A film I never had in my collection before was this notorious oddity from Roger Corman.

Jack Nicholson in perhaps his most low-key performance ever, plays a French soldier during Napoleon's time who's separated from his unit, runs across a beautiful woman, then follows her to a spooky castle, where everybody tells him she doesn't exist. What's going on? The owner of the castle, Boris Karloff, is clearly lying, and his butler, the ubiquitous Dick Miller, are anxious to have their unwanted visitor leave.

The story goes, Corman wrapped up filming on THE RAVEN several days early, told the props people to leave the sets up, then got Leo Gordon & Jack Hill to write enough script so he could spend the 4 days left on Boris Karloff's contract to shoot scenes for a 2nd movie. What a guy!

Afterwards, the rest of the film was slowly written & filmed by Francis Ford Copolla, Jack Hale and even Nicholson (it was a non-union project, so Corman couldn't do it himself-- HILARIOUS!), over a 3-month period. When they were just about done, someone realized it still didn't make sense, so they wrote & filmed one more scene there Nicholson slaps Miller around and forces him to tell him what's going on. (ALSO hilarious!)

The film JUST-- BARELY-- makes sense-- and, possibly, works better if you DON'T know the behind-the-scenes details of how it was done. Or maybe not. Who's to say?

I've seen it 3 times over the years (so far): first on a local TV station in the 70s, then on Youtube about 8 years back (the very first movie I actually watched on Youtube, since by then I finally had "high-speed internet"), and now, on a STUNNING, crystal-clear Blu-Ray. It seems the film somehow fell into "Public Domain", so there are COUNTLESS versions of it out there on VHS, DVD & Blu-Ray. But, doing some research, I found that, apparently, the 2011 version from HD Cinema Classics / Film Chest (which comes with both a DVD and a Blu-Ray, to play on whatever machine you have) is alleged to be "the best looking release of The Terror currently available", according to a review at Blu-Ray_com. That was good enough for me! If anything, the film looks UNNATURALLY clean... but given all the horrific old TV prints I've endured over the decades, I'll take that over the alternative.

In general, the film somehow looks and feels like a European horror movie-- something you might see from Spain, France, Italy or Germany-- even though it was wholely a product of southern California.

Some random thoughts about the sets: The main castle hall from THE RAVEN with those huge, dangerous-looking stairs (how on EARTH did poor Boris Karloff manage those things, given how bad his health was getting at the time, with no railings or anything?) look far more impressive than any castle Hammer Films ever managed for Christopher Lee's Dracula!

Also, the wooden scaffolding that leads down to the underground crypt, someone suggested was "left over" from THE HAUNTED PALACE-- but that film was made after this one, not before! Given that PALACE has so little to do with its own Lovecraft source material, I'd say Corman & Charles Beaumont decided to work it in so they could use such an impressive prop 2 films in a row.

But what I really wonder is, that scaffolding looks nearly-identical to the one featured prominently in the 1941 film CONFESSIONS OF BOSTON BLACKIE. Given Corman's habit of reusing existing props from earlier movies, it makes me curious-- COULD it be the SAME scaffolding, found in some warehouse?

Someone pointed out that the finale, where Nicholson kisses a woman who abruptly turns into a rotting corpse, was very similar to the bathroom scene from THE SHINING. Gee, could Stanley Kubrick have borrowed that from here?

[profh0011]

THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963)

After 5 Poe films, Roger Corman decided to tackle something similar but different: H.P. Lovecraft. Some time ago, I found a list online of films that were either adapted from or inspired by the works of Lovecraft, and this was far from the first of those, although, apparently, it was the first time Lovecraft's name actually appeared in a film's credits!

One of the things I'm continually fascinated by, is similarities between various stories, and identifying influences. As it happens, this film goes both ways. The first time I saw it, in the early 1980s, it immediately became a favorite of mine, because its plot was SO SIMILAR to a film that came out several years later: Dan Curtis' NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS. But where that 1971 film ends ABRUPTLY, Corman's film really picks up and starts to get interesting! As a result, I might almost reccomend that people watch NIGHT... before then watching ...PALACE, as Corman's film is far more satisfying!

The story involves a warlock burned at the stake, cursing a town's residents just before being killed. 110 years later, a descendant inherits his castle, not realizing that the ghost of his ancestor is planning to POSSESS his body and continue on with his work. Vincent Price really gets a chance to play 2 drastically-different characters: the relaxed, easy-going Charles Dexter Ward (who I suspect was very similar in temperament to Price himself), and his EVIL ancestor, Joseph Curwen, who makes Price's version of Roderick Usher seem like a nice guy by comparison.

Also on board are Debra Paget (in her last film), Lon Chaney Jr. & Milton Parsons as Curwen's fellow warlocks, John Dierkes & Elisha Cook Jr. among the townsfolk, and Leo Gordon & Frank Maxwell as the most outspoken of them, but on different sides.

I was amused some years ago when I saw THE INTRUDER (also from Beaumont & Corman), in which Gordon & Maxwell played almost the identical characters, but in different situations. In both films, Gordon is the angry agitator, while Maxwell is the calm voice of reason. The irony is, in ...PALACE, the superstitious Gordon is DEAD-RIGHT regarding his fears, while Maxwell is DEAD WRONG, not realizing the danger until he comes across the underground chamber with the other-dimensional being it holds.

Available on its own in England and Germany, ...PALACE is oddly only available in the US as part of Shout Factory's VINCENT PRICE COLLECTION, Box 1. Like the 2nd & 3rd boxes, the 2013 set is out of print and now VERY expensive to find, but fortunately, unlike the 2nd & 3rd boxes, the 1st one has been reissued in 2020, and I was able to find it for LESS than the average cost of 2 films, effectively meaning I got 4 out of the box's 6 films FOR FREE! It's a pity only 4 out of the 6 films are part of Corman's Poe series. I find it baffling that nobody in the US or the UK collected ALL 8 in one set.

I've been putting up with a really HORRIBLE self-recorded videotape from Philly's Channel 17 I got in the 1980s. Fullscreen, a TERRIBLY-damaged print, fuzzy, faded, a faulty antenna signal causing repeated JUMPS in the first 10 minutes, and when I clocked it, I found it was missing 2 minutes-- including all 3 "burning" scenes.

By comparison, the Shout Factory Blu-Ray is absolutely STUNNING, widescreen, uncut, crystal-clear picture & sound-- I would describe it as "PERFECT".

Well, the movie part, anyway. The "extras" in this case really got on my nerves, and they didn't have to. I have to wonder who in the HELL at Shout Factory put together these discs. To begin with, instead of having USHER and PENDULUM together on Disc 1, the 1st disc is PIT AND THE PENDULUM with THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES. The 2nd disc is THE HAUNTED PALACE and THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. In what netherworld does that make any sense at all?

Next, the film has an optional "introduction" by critic Kim Newman. While this is fun, it SHOULD have been its own separate feature. When THE AVENGERS episodes have optional introductions by Patrick Macnee & Honor Blackman, they're usually about 1-2 minutes long. This thing went on for 10 MINUTES before the movie begins, and I had food sitting on my lap waiting for the movie before I started eating.

But as if that wasn't ridiculous enough, there are 2 separate audio commentaries-- and BOTH of them are only about 40 minutes apiece, after which, the film continues running without them. Who the HELL thought this was a good idea, especially as neither commentary actually talks about events in the film as they're running? They should have been combined into a SINGLE feature-length commentary.

You know, between this and the incessant disc-authoring "errors" on every single Shout Factory disc, I'm beginning to wonder about the people running that company.

Now, regarding influences... I want to start with Dan Curtis. Many over the decades have said that the feature film NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS (1971) is partly based on the "1970 Parallel Time" story on the DARK SHADOWS tv series. There's some truth to that. But only to a point.

In "1970 Parallel Time", you have Quentin Collins (David Selby) whose wife Angelique (Lara Parker) has died, he's left home, fallen in love and remarried, but his 2nd wife Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) is made to feel inadequate & unwelcome by the housekeeper (Grayson Hall). All of this is CLEARLY based on Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA (1938)-- which I recognized the very 1st time I saw Alfred Hitchcock's classic film adaptation from 1940.

However, on DARK SHADOWS, Angelique's never-before-mentioned twin sister arrives. Nearly everyone suspects she's really Angelique, but she isn't. She befriends Quentin, offers him sympathy, then goes to visit her sister's grave. At which point, it turns out, Angelique actually DID fake her own death. She rises from her tomb-- MURDERS her own sister-- then spends the rest of the story POSING as her.

What I didn't know until a few days ago was, the idea of 2 identical characters, where one MURDERS the other and then pretends to be the now-dead one-- was actually part of Lovecraft's story "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward"!!! In effect, the DS TV story was combining elements of du Maurier & Lovecraft's stories.

On the other hand, the 1971 movie NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS has a version of Quentin who was never the master of Collinwood, but has inherited the estate after pretty much every other member of the family was KILLED in the previous film (1970's HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS). Though he's never set eyes on the place, it feels familiar, and he slowly learns he had an ancestor who painted a portrait of his mistress, Angelique, who was hung as a WITCH. Now, it seems, her ghost is haunting the house, and working to cause Quentin's earlier persona to revive and take over his current body. It's a matter of reincarnation rather than normal possession. The effect is almost the same, though the cause is subtly different. The film ends ABRUPTLY when, just as he was about to leave, he's completely taken over by his previous personality.

So, story-wise, Curtis' NIGHT... is pretty much a lesser, inferior remake of Corman's ...PALACE. The 55-minute mark is exactly where Corman's story continues on, and becomes FAR more interesting, as Curwen tells his cohorts that "Charles Dexter Ward is DEAD"-- and then sets about to get revenge on the descendants of those who burned him alive.

Something I've become aware of in the last couple months, are some of the influences on the Corman films. Apart from the growing number of original elements in various POE comic-book adaptations that were never in Poe's stories, and appeared in the comics years before the Corman films, I'm now finding there were also earlier movies that influenced Corman's films.

For example, BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) is believed to have had a big influence on the visual style of Corman's HOUSE OF USHER (1960). LES DIABOLIQUES (1955) had a huge influence on the STORY told by Richard Matheson in PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961). GASLIGHT (1940, remade in 1944) may have influenced Charles Beaumont's screenplay for THE PREMATURE BURIAL (1962). I'm now planning to get my hands on copies of ALL of these, to compare!

And now, I find that there were at least 5 different influences on Beaumont's THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963)! Apart from Poe's 1839 poem (whose title and a few stanzas of which were slapped on the film at the very last minute by AIP), there's also...

"The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward" (written in 1927, published in 1941), of which the film is only a VERY-loose adaptation, and which deals strictly with Lovecraft's ideas about "mad science"...

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (written in 1931, published in 1936), from which the "Necronomicon", the "Cthulhu mythos" and the "elder gods" were all taken...

"Dragonwyck" (novel by Any Seaton, 1944; film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946) from which much of the VISUAL style of the film and Vincent Price's personality came from, and...

"ONE STEP BEYOND: The Captain's Guests" (1959), a half-hour story written by Charles Beaumont, about a married couple staying at a "haunted" house and the husband being POSSESSED by the ghost of an evil sea captain whose portrait hangs in the house. Clearly, Beaumont was ripping off HIMSELF here, as so much of the narrative of the film is a REMAKE of what he did 4 years earlier, on a bigger scale. (This itself is similar to how the THRILLER tv series did an episode "The Premature Burial" about a year before Corman did his similar-yet-different movie.) "The Captain's Guests", as one person put it, was NOT "The Ghost And Mrs. Muir", though one could easily say it was a dark, nasty variation on it!

Interestingly enough, when the husband is possessed by the ghost of the sea captain, he starts walking with a pronounced LIMP... which also happens to Quentin Collins in NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS!

I just love finding out about stuff like this.

[profh0011]

For some reason, "NIGHTMARE CASTLE" on the disc is named "NIGHT OF THE DOOMED". What an INSANE movie! Mad scientist keeps his mistress alive with blood transfusions, but gets jealous when his WIFE takes a lover. So he chains them both in the basement and spends weeks torturing them to death, despite his wife saying she left the house (which was in her name) to her "step-sister", who's in an asylum.

So soon after, he gets the sister released and marries her-- which infuriates his mistress. When he then invites her doctor for an extended visit to "help out" (but realy, he's hoping to have her permanently declared insane), the guy slowly begins to piece together what's really going on... particularly, the part about the castle being HAUNTED by the ghosts of the 2 murdered people!

This allegeldy started life under the name "Orgasmo" (NO, REALLY) borrowing from "The Tell-Tale Heart". I also saw bits of "Ligeia", when the spirit of the 1st wife possesses the body of the 2nd. But the middle of the film very much had a "DARK SHADOWS" vibe to it, especially Ennio Morricone's piano theme, which, I WOULD SWEAR, sounds like it inspired Robert Cobert to write the very-similar "Ode To Angelique" for DS's "1970 Parallel Time" 5 years later!! I cannot believe that Cobert never heard this. It's just too similar in style! (Especially given that "1970 Parallel Time" involves 2 IDENTICAL sisters-- one sweet, one EVIL. I think Dan Curtis must have seen this movie, too.)

Apparently this film has been "restored"-- as far as piecing together a complete, UNCUT version. But the film itselw as never propoerly "restored"-- as in, CLEANED UP, as there's some pretty noticable DAMAGE here and there. Plus, WHY in the living hell is it called "Night of the Doomed"? Is it just some THING where Italian movie-makers can never decide what the hell to CALL their movies, so they all end with with a minimum of 6 different titles?

There's a PILE of extras on this. I'm also wondering WHY the menu is SO HARD to read. Also, since there's shrink-wrap on the box when you get it, WHY did Severin Films put a piece of TAPE across the top, as late as 2015? And WHY does this disc have the "authoring error" so common to Shout Factory, when, I DO NOT recall the "EUROCRYPT" box having this problem? The movie's an HOUR and 44 minutes long. For me, that's a lot to go without taking a break in the middle somewhere.

[profh0011]

THE COMEDY OF TERRORS (1963)

Film critic & historian Tim Lucas said in his audio commentary that he felt this was Richard Matheson's FINEST screenplay of his entire career. It's loaded, start-to-finish, with an endless stream of wonderful dialogue. Well, that may be... but, truthfully, it's NEVER been one of my favorites.

Waldo Trumball married the boss's daughter so he could inherit his undertaker business, but, he managed to so completely run it into the ground (heh), that to get by he now regularly resorts to MURDER to drum up business. And meanwhile, his landlord, Mr. Black, has threatened that if the YEAR'S worth of back rent is not paid in 24 hours, he will institute legal proceedings. And thereby hangs the plot. To literally "kill 2 birds with 1 stone", Trumball decides to MURDER his landlord.

But further problems arise when his eccentric, Shakespeare-quoting landlord somehow REFUSES TO DIE. Yep, it's another variation on "The Premature Burial", only, AIP decided not to promote this as one of the POE films, despite how much it looks, feels, sounds and reads like one, simply because Roger Corman was busy elsewhere.

Just think of it as AIP's Poe film # 6B.

What a cast! Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Joyce Jameson, Joe E. Brown, Beverly Hills, Alan DeWitt, and the ever-amazing Basil Rathbone, doing a virtual parody of HIMSELF. It seems Rathbone had such an amazingly-successful stage career, mostly doing Shakespeare, before he set foot in Hollywood, that NOTHING he did on film ever quite lived up to his stage career, in his mind.

Crazy enough, given Peter Lorre's habit of ad-libbing, apparently, everyone involved loved Matheson's script to such a degree that it was shot VERBATIM, without a single line being altered. Dr. Svet Atanasov, in his review at Blu-Ray_com, suggests the LACK of any improvisation from the cast may be why the film doesn't come across as good as it should have.

If I have any problem with the film, it's simply that Price's character Trumball is so thoroughly, completely, relentlessly UNPLEASANT, such a mean-spirited BASTARD from start to finish, that it's just hard for me to actually enjoy watching him this time around. Oh well!

Now, I've been finding out in the last several weeks just how many earlier films and TV shows apparently were among the various source materials for Corman's POE films. It turns out, that goes for THIS one, too. In this case, it wasn't anything Richard Matheson did-- it was something director Jacques Tourneur did-- and it may be WHY he was recommended to direct this film when Corman was too busy.

It seems one of the countless anthology series that was on TV during that era was THE BARBARA STANWYCK SHOW, and one of the episodes was a story called "Dear Charlie", a very black comedy that starred Milton Berle as a boarder who convinces a pair of RICH old ladies to put him in their will, and pits them against each other so they both wind up murdering the other. This leaves "Charlie" with all the money-- UNTIL their CAT somehow knocks a bottle of POISON into his food. Which was what Vincent Price kept trying to do to Boris Karloff in the later movie, but never quite succeeded in doing.

And whatta ya know? The cat in the TV episode is played by the SAME one that later appeared in the movie!

I've never seen this thing, but now I'm interested in doing so.

I had a really miserable videotape copy of the film recorded off Philly's Channel 17 back in the 80s. Fullscreen, fuzzy, faded, and MISSING 4 whole minutes. What a pleasure to finally get it on Blu-Ray-- uncut, crystal-clear, widescreen. Shout Factory had this as part of their 2014 "Vincent Price Collection Box 2", but that's gone out of print and is VERY expensive to find new. Fortunately, Kino Lorber stepped up to the plate and put out a brand-new stand-alone Blu-Ray in 2021. I got one CHEAP from a seller on Ebay, but it seems Kino Lorber has it on sale for EVEN LESS right now. (I didn't know this a few weeks back, but, frankly, it's just easier & more convenient for me to go with Ebay, when it comes to most mail-orders.)

For me, the funniest bits in the film, are when Boris Karloff is overseeing a funeral and can't remember the name of the man they're about to bury; and, when Basil Rathbone repeatedly wakes up in the basement, despite appearing dead moments before. The image of Black lying in his coffin at the funeral, where we see his face TWITCH, indicating he's still not dead yet, strikes me as having come from Poe's story "Berenice", though in AIP-Corman terms, it turned up in 1960's HOUSE OF USHER.

In his commentary, Tim Lucas mentions the recurring line, "What place is this?" does not come from any Shakespeare play. What he seems to have missed, is that Matheson is quoting himself, as it's a line spoken earlier by Rathbone in TALES OF TERROR, when his character, Mr. Valdemar, is in fact ALREADY dead, but still conscious, and is seeing the netherworld he's physically denied access to. (The line is NOT in Poe's short story, either.)

My favorite line in the entire film, is during the struggle in the basement, when Rathbone pops out of his coffin and says...

"I regard your actions as inimicable to good fellowship."

It figures that Rathbone should steal the movie, as the title itself was a take-off on a Shakespeare play, "The Comedy Of Errors".

AIP planned a follow-up with the same cast, plus Tallulah Bankhead, but when Peter Lorre passed away, it was abandoned.

[profh0011]

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964)

Roger Corman planned to do this for years before finally filming it in England, and after considered it the best of his Poe films-- and possibly the best film he ever directed.

I actually have 4 copies of this now. The 1st was the one I taped off Philly's Channel 17: fullscreen, terribly-fuzzy, colors faded, "ghosts" resulting from a TERRIBLE antenna broadcast signal. And, it's missing 3-1/2 minutes, including the entire end credits sequence.

On 1-18-2006 I taped it off TCM-- UNCUT, widescreen, crystal-clear. I realized that night I had never really been able to appreciate the film before. When I got to the very end, my jaw dropped, and I thought... "This is a WORK OF ART!"

On 2-18-2023, I got it as part of Shout Factory's Vincent Price Collection / Box 1 (2nd edition / 2020). My current VCR has a problem with sound crackling, so I'm really appreciating upgrading old videotapes to discs, and I'm sure the picture is also an improvement in most cases. As I got the set for LESS than the average cost of 2 Blu-Ray movies, that means after USHER and PIT, I virtually got MASQUE for FREE. Isn't that wild? And it had 2 edits of the film-- the familiar "theatrical" cut, and the "extended" cut, which, is presumably what the film was intended to be before censors took a whack at it back in '64. I haven't seen that one yet, but I'm planning to, later this week.

What I watched last week was Steve Haberman's audio commentary. I must say, I think this was, by a mile, the BEST one I've ever heard him do! So it's rather ironic that it's also the ONLY one where he kept stuttering, stammering, hesitating, and repeating himself. He must have been having a rough night, and I guess they didn't have the time or money to have him do it a 2nd time (heh). But it's so good, I cut him some slack.

Among the MANY things he covered were the various REAL-LIFE inspirations for Poe's 2 short stories, "Masque" and "Hop Frog". Then there's the various script drafts by different writers that Corman went through over several years (very unlike most of the series). Charles Beaumont was the one who created the characters of Francesca, Gino, Ludovico and Juliana. But somehow, Corman was still not satisfied, and brought in R. Wright Campbell, who wound up COMPLETELY re-writing Beaumont's story.

As he did so, he turned Prince Prospero into a SATAN-worshipper, added all sorts of interesting levels of philosophy and social commentary, changed the intended swordfight between Gino & Ludovico to the sequence with the 5 daggers, added the entire "Hop Frog" sub-plot, and I believe also added the failed escape sequence which was inspired by “Torture By Hope” (written in 1883 by Auguste Villiers de I’Isle-Adam), in effect meaning there were 3 different stories being loosely adapted, not just 2. For 2 screen-writers who didn't actually collaborate, their combined efforts on this film produced an unforgettable masterpiece.

Haberman also gave a brief run-down on Corman's career, and discussed at some length the characters of Prospero & Francesca. He apparently believes that Prospero at some earlier point in his life had a much more positive view of humanity, but eventually became totally cynical. While Francesca slowly begins to give up hope by the film's end, Propsero is actually finding his earlier self beginning to re-emerge-- but, TOO LATE, as it happens just as his entire castle of party-guests are being slaughtered by The Red Death, who he mistakenly believes is a servant of Satan.

Great, GREAT film-- and to think, this isn't even MY favorite!

[profh0011]

I have just watched the "Extended" version. Basically, 2 scenes were removed before release in 1964. The 2nd one was the beginning of the "falcon" scene, where Francesca tells Prospero about a horrible dream she had about a room filled with evil-- or, as it a dream? Nice, not essential, but it does make the transition to that scene flow MUCH smoother than it did without it.

The OTHER, earlier scene, however... is from the story "Hop Frog". He goes to see Esmerelda, to promise her that no one shall ever abuse her again, and suggests the idea that they leave the castle. She in turn tells him that he is the only person who has ever treated her with affection. It is such a touching, warm, scene-- I'd say the MOST touching scene in the film-- it is CRIMINAL this was ever removed! I believe Steve Haberman's audio commentary (for the theatrical version) says someone decided they didn't want a scene WITHOUT Vincent Price right there. But as Price is in the scenes before and after this one, it fits perfectly, it makes the transition to the scene where he's "wandering the castle at night" seem less abrupt, and it foreshadows what Hog Frog does later in the film.

It's also one of Skip Martin's BEST scenes, dammit! In the theatrical version, after Alfredo slaps Esmerelda, the NEXT time we see Hop Frog, he's telling Alfredo the "tiny dancer" means "nothing" to him. Which makes his suggestion about the ape suit a bit mysterious. But with this important scene reinstated, you just KNOW he's LYING. As he is when he tells Alfredo... "It'll be a performance-- by the cleverest man at the masque." Alfredo think he means him-- but really, Hop Frog is referring to HIMSELF.
Normally I don't go for "outtakes" being added back in after-the-fact, but seeing these 2 scenes tonight for the first time, I think they never should have been cut in the first place. Doing so was VANDALISM.

There's only ONE problem here. It appears the print containing these scenes was a SEPARATE restoration from the theatrical version. And... this ENTIRE PRINT is DARKER than the other one on the same disc. It's not "HORROR OF DRACULA" or "DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS" bad-- but it's BAD ENOUGH. I had to adjust 4 different things on my TV at the same time to get it to look half as good as the other version. What is WRONG with some of the people who supervise these things???

[profh0011]

"CASTLE OF BLOOD" (1964)

American reporter Alan Foster, while interviewing Edgar Allan Poe during his visit to England, accepts a wager from the mysterious Lord Thomas Blackwood that he cannot spend the entire night in Blackwood's castle. Though warned that on "the night of the dead", those who died in the castle come back to life to relive the moments leading up to his death, he completely fails to realize-- or believe-- that the people he keeps meeting in the castle are all, in fact, DEAD!

Considered Italian director Antonio Margheriti's masterpiece, this film claims to be "Based on Edgar Allan Poe's Danse Macabre" ("The Dance Of Death", a phrase used by The Red Death in Roger Corman's film from earlier that same year). However, while NO SUCH STORY by Poe exists, apparently, there is a story by that name by a different author. And, it's been pointed out, the theme of the film (if not the details) do correspond with Poe's comedic tale, "Never Bet The Devil Your Head", which not long after this, was adapted by Federico Fellini in the 1968 film "HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES" (released in English as, "SPIRITS OF THE DEAD").

Georges Riviere stars as "Alan Foster", who never seems as bright as a newspaper reporter ought to be. Umberto Raho is "Lord Blackwood", while Arturo Dominici is "Dr. Carmus", who took on the bet earlier for the express purpose of learning the truth about the supernatural occurances said to be taking place in the castle.

But the standout of the film is, of course, Barbara Steele as "Elisabeth Blackwood", the sister of Lord Blackwood, who tells Alan that her brother sends someone to her once a year to keep her company. Hmmm. Very mysterious, and suspicious.

I first caught this on Philly's Channel 17, in the middle of the night and recorded it with all the commercial breaks intact. I liked it so much that over the years, I watched it multiple times despite all those damnable commercials, and the fact that, since it was recorded off a BAD antenna signal, the print, though presumably in decent condition, looked like CRAP, with fuzziness, "ghosts", you name it.

In recent years, reading about the film online, I came to understand the US print was heavily edited, and longed to see it uncut. Well, I finally have-- but it wasn't as simple as one might think.

Severin Films put out a Blu-Ray in 2015 that featured no less than 3 Barbara Steele films, with the main attraction being "NIGHTMARE CASTLE" (August 1965). That film was advertised with them saying, "Toss away your old butchered TV prints!", as the film had apparently never been issued on home video as intact as it now is. It contains multiple extras, including an audio commentary that is actually a feature-length interview with Steele about her entire career. The other 2 films are included in the "extras" menu"-- "CASTLE OF BLOOD" (July 1964) and "TERROR-CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE" (June 1965).

However, while "NIGHTMARE CASTLE" may indeed be the best version of the film ever released, "CASTLE OF BLOOD" is actually a "brand new high definition scan of the rare US version". This means, while it is in English, it's still the CUT version. And, what blows my mind, the print is in TERRIBLE shape, with damage all over the place. I mean, the print Channel 17 had 40 years ago was in MUCH-better condition if you look past the dreadful broadcast signal!

What I found most amusing (or just plain annoying) was, the recurring commercial break for the film featured Dr. Carmus, in very sinister tones, saying, "And now, YOU are NEXT!" That line was burned into my brain over the years. But on the Severin Blu-Ray, that EXACT moment in the film, the damage is so extensive, half the words in that sentence are missing. SHEESH!!!

Not one to take this lying down... I did some more research (which I probably should have done earlier) and discovered that back in 2002, Synapse Films put out a DVD that WAS uncut. The Mondo Digital site said the following: "Synapse's DVD originates from the longest possible variant, the French Danse Macabre print, with the English soundtrack married to the image wherever possible." I ordered a copy LESS than an hour after I finished watching the Severin Blu-Ray!!!

First, the good news: the picture and sound quality are STUNNING!!! This is by a very wide margin, the BEST-looking print of this films I have have seen (out of the 3 I now have). And, as far as I can tell, it IS uncut!!

Apparently, what they did, was take a crystal-clear FRENCH print (perhaps they couldn't find a crystal-clear ITALIAN print) and superimposed the ENGLISH dub on top of it. However-- since the English print was cut, all the scenes that were cut-- and therefore, previously-missing-- the language is in French, WITH English subtitles. To me, that's not a problem.

I can understand, more or less, why they cut a brief NUDE scene from near the end of the film. Ditto, the scene where the sinister blonde tries to put the moves on Barbara ("LESBIAN" scene). But I cannot understand why ANY of the other scenes were CUT in America!!!

The 1st thing cut was part of Poe's dramatic reading of "Berenice". But then the entire interview was cut. And this was some of the best dialogue in the movie! Poe was explaining his outlook on life, and explains that he feels there is nothing more tragic than the death of a beautiful woman. Which has a major connection to the rest of the story.

One WEIRD moment... at one point, Steele is sitting on her bed, and says to Alan, "Come sit here with me." This was in the US print. But in this UNCUT print--- that one line, is in FRENCH. Can you say, "Oops"? How did that happen?

Now... HERE's the down side. When I see a print that is apparently "widescreen", I automatically set my TV to "ZOOM" (as opposed to "NORMAL" or 'STRETCH"). The first time English subtitles came up, I could only see the top half of them. WTF? I played with the picture setting. This is a VERY dark movie, tons of shadows everywhere. But I found a shot that had white around all 4 edges, and then played with the setting. Turns out, the TOP and BOTTOM of the picture was getting cut off, when it's set to "ZOOM".

This means, the ONLY proper way you can watch this DVD, is if it's set to "NORMAL"-- meaning, you have BLACK BARS on ALL 4 sides of the picture. There's no other way to put this-- Synapse SCREWED UP on the size of the picture. Clearly, this was not WIDE widescreen. The English subtitles go BELOW the bottom of the picture, and they should not. OH well. It's STILL the best version of this film currently available. But it came out 20 YEARS ago. Maybe it's time SOMEBODY did an IMPROVED version of the disc.

Something I found fun... the US TRAILER-- when the film was released under the title "CASTLE OF TERROR"-- was narrated by DICK TUFELD. Just in case you don't know that name, Tufeld was the regular narrator for Irwin Allen, including on LOST IN SPACE and THE TIME TUNNEL-- but more-- he was the voice of "The Robot". SO COOL!!!!!

[profh0011]

WITCHFINDER GENERAL  (1968)

I saw this in a theatre in 1971.  10 years later, I taped it off a local station. It had nearly ALL the violence REMOVED.  It was STILL quite possibly the MOST DISTURBING movie I'd ever seen.  20 years later, I watched that heavily-cut tape again... and the story, ALONE, was still so disturbing, I decided right then I NEVER needed to see it again.

Well... several of Roger Corman's POE films are currently only available on Blu-Ray in Shout Factory's VINCENT PRICE COLLECTION box set.  And, as I wound up getting 6 FILMS for LESS than the cost of 2... I figured, what the hell, it's like I got the BEST-EVER RESTORATION of this monstrous thing FOR FREE.

I decided 2 months ago that I would NOT watch the film itself-- but instead, the AUDIO COMMENTARY, with Steve Haberman, one of the producers, and my favorite actor on the planet-- IAN OGILVY.  I was right-- doing that did put enough "distance" between me and this ATROCITY to make it tolerable.  (I hadn't seen it uncut since 1971.)

One of many things discussed was how, in the 70s, the MUSIC SCORE was replaced in America.  Some time back, it was restored to new US prints, and the original score is on the Shout Factory Blu-Ray.  (I do wonder what was on the local Philly Channel 3 print?  I'd swear it was the same one.  Hmm... maybe I shold check, just out of curiosity.)

Director Michael Reeves only made 3 features, ALL 3 with Ian Ogilvy, and ALL 3 with EXCESSIVE violence.  Ogilvy jokes that he was "a bit of a sadist".  Myself, ever since I read an interview with Ogilvy about this movie over 20 years ago, I've long felt that Reeves had IMMENSE talent as a director-- but LACKED the maturity and restraint to get his "point" about how dangerous violence is across to audiences.  As one of the commentators said, there is an argument to be made that leaving some things to the IMAGINATION of the audience can be far more powerful.

The way Reeves treated Vincent Price during the filming merely goes to confirm his lack of maturity.  If Roger Corman had done this film, HE would have discussed EXACTLY what he wanted from Price beforehand, and they'd have gotten along wonderfully.  Reeves may have gotten an AMAZING performance out of Price-- but he was a TOTAL BASTARD the whole time he was doing it.  I know which director I'd rather have worked with.

[profh0011]

"HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRE" /
     "TALES OF MYSTERY & IMAGINATION" /
          "SPIRITS OF THE DEAD" (1968)

A 3-story anthology, each by a different director, relates 3 POE stories about characters, who, while living lives of power, are abusive, self-destructive, and in the best "EC Comics" tradition, all come to BAD ends.

I just re-watched my 1980s self-recorded videotape made off of Philly's "Saturday Night Dead" series on Channel 3. Fullscreen, fuzzy, FADED (in some place WAY more than others), streaks, "ghosts", bad sound, and CUT TO RIBBONS. If the time listed at the IMDB is correct, this TV broadcast is missing 19 MINUTES of the film Geez!!! And yet, despite this, somehow, this film has continued to grow on me over the years.

Last Friday, I finally managed to see this on Blu-Ray... WOW!!! Widescreen, UNCUT, crystal-clear picture & sound, absolutely STUNNING from start to finish.

The main problem is... each of the 3 stories was recorded in a different language: English, French, and Italian (with one actor speaking English throughout). But depending on which country you saw it in, it was dubbed into English, French, Italian, Spanish... and, get this-- the English subtitles DON'T match the English dub of the film! I find that hilarious.

Now, it seems Arrow Films in England so far put out the ONLY Blu-Ray of this with the ENGLISH dub all the way through all 3 stories. They even included the Vincent Price narration at the start and end of the film, added by AIP for the US release. (My Channel 3 copy DOES NOT have this!) But this 2010 disc is out-of-print and INSANELY-expensive! I saw someone on Ebay doing an auction for a USED copy, but it became impossible to take part because one of the 2 guys already competing for it was using their "auto-bid" function which instantly out-bids others up to whatever maximum amount the person using it is willing to spend.

So instead, for CHEAP, I got the BRAND-NEW 2018 Vértice Cine Region-FREE Blu-Ray... from SPAIN. This one gives you the choice of watching the entire film in Spanish, with optional English subtitles, OR, in the original languages-- English, French & Italian (with English bits in the 3rd story), also with or without optional English subtitles. I figured, until Arrow decides to put out a 2nd printing-- or someone in America has the sense to do one of their own-- this was by far the better option.

Now, Severin Films' Blu-Ray of "THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM" actually allows you to switch between English & German language almost instantly, without really interrupting the film. This one... DOESN'T. See, I tried watching the 1st story-- "Metzengerstein" with Jane Fonda-- WITHOUT subtitles, then, turning on the subtitles for the other 2 stories-- "William Wilson" and "Toby Dammit"-- but it instantly takes you back to the beginning of the film, and forces you to start over, then skip ahead to where you left off. Next time, I'd rather just leave the damned subtitles ON.

On my wretched old videotape, "Metzengerstein" actually looks pretty good, "William Wilson" only a little less so. For some inexplicable reason, the first part of "Toby Dammit"-- the part at the airport and driving throught the streets of Rome-- the thing is not only HORRIBLY-faded, some scenes (not all, just some) looke like they've been DELIBERATEDLY faded and/or COLOR-TINTED. I honestly don't know if the film is supposed to look that weird, but I can assure you, it DOESN'T look that way on the Spanish Blu-Ray! The picture on that is SHARP and the colors CRYSTAL-CLEAR all the way through, with the notable exception of the sequence at the very peculiar TV studio, where everything looks bright and washed out-- when they turn on the TV studio LIGHTS! So that, I'm sure, is supposed to look that way.

Jane Fonda apparently did her own dubbing on both the English & French versions, and someone online reccomended watching her story in French, saying her French was better than her English (ironic, hilarious, or both?). Out of curiosity, I'm planning to watch the film the next time entirely in SPANISH.

Terrance Stamp did a voice-over narration at the beginning of his story in the English version, but for the Italian dub (which I have), someone else speaks the opening narration, before he then speaks in English for the rest of the story, while surrounded by an entire cast speaking only in Italian. WEIRD stuff, to be sure.

There's the longest "alternate versions" page I've ever seen for a film for this at the IMDB, and 3/4ths of it discusses only the various languages available in different countries.

It's rather baffling to me that the Vértice Cine disc DOESN'T have the full English dub, and NEITHER of the 2 trailers I've seen online. The US trailer is rather "normal" and perfunctory-- the sort of thing you expect from American International. But the European trailer-- WOW!!! That thing, if you've ever seen it, is a WORK OF ART unto itself!!! It's disgraceful that this Euro disc does not have it included.

In my time cleaning up, coloring & translating a mountain of POE comics adaptations, I've seen all 3 stories in this film done in comics, though I've yet to tackle "Toby Dammit". Crazy enough, my favorite comics versions of "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" both come from BRAZIL-- the former by Flavio Colin, where he expands the story (in very different ways that Roger Vadim did in this film), the latter by Osvaldo Talo, who actually adapts the version FROM THIS MOVIE, though, with the nudity, violence & sexual perversion all removed. The framing sequence with Wilson running into a church to tell a priest his confession is straight from the movie, done only months after the movie came out!

For anyone like me wishing to see this film IN ENGLISH without going broke to do it, I recommend flooding Arrow-- and perhaps several other outfits-- with mail requesting they put out a new edition of the Blu-Ray with ALL the language options and all the "extras" included.

This is a movie more people need to see!

[profh0011]

CITY UNDER THE SEA /
WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP (1965)

Writer Charles Bennett had a long career, at one point collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock. Somehow, by the 1960s, he began working a lot for Irwin Allen-- including a number of episodes of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. So his working on this film at the time amounts to typecasting.

Nearly everyone involved in this film has said the original screenplay would have worked, but producer Louis M. Heywood insisted on re-writing it, to add comedy, specifically David Tomlinson and that damned chicken. Maybe. But even if it had been played totally-serious, there's still 2 elements in the film that bug me every time I see it. One is Vincent Price's character, who is a megalomaniac who cannot be reasoned with. On one hand, he's fixated on the idea that Susan Hart is somehow his wife reincarnated. On the other, he has the insane idea that "modern science" must have come up with a way to "control" an active volcano. We're talking seriously delusional. I think things could have been handled way better if Tab Hunter had been given a fight scene with Price, to take this MADMAN on in single combat with a sword. If this had been an early DOCTOR WHO storyline, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) WOULD have done such a thing! That would have been a lot more exciting than that underwater chase.

The 2nd thing that really bugs me is the total lack of thinking or consistency to the geography of the underwater city. When Hunter & Tomlinson get there, they walk underground for a long distance, before falling into a pool, at the other end of which they find themselves in the big temple grotto. From there, they walk up one stairway to The Captain's chamber. However, after this, they describe (in dialogue too complicated for me to follow) getting around from one area of the city to another. Then, when they try to escape, to exit through one door, walk a great distance underwater, only to reach the temple grotto. WHAT? And from there, they quickly reach the surface. Only the last time I watched it did it strike me that they exited the grotto the same way they entered it, so it wasn't so much a path to the surface, as an unneccssary detour. Either way it's just maddning.

The film, of course, combines Poe's poem "The City In The Sea" (a favorite of mine, especially the audio version read by Basil Rathbone-- the only actor I rate higher than Vincent Price when it comes to reading Poe) with Jules Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA ("Captain Hugh" is NO "Captain Nemo"), a bit of LOST HORIZON, and the British legends of Lyonesse. Lyonesse was also featured in the film SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (1973) and its lesser remake SWORD OF THE VALIANT (1984). Those films don't make much sense at all, but both are more watchable than this thing.

I put up with this as a horrible print I taped off a local channel for decades. Most films, when you get to see them in widescreen, the whole experience is a vast improvement. But when I saw this a few years ago on Youtube... it didn't help. (HEH)

Kino Lorber's 2015 Blu-Ray at least sure looks gorgeous. I managed to get a USED copy pretty cheap!! It comes with very nice interview with Tab Hunter.

[profh0011]

Here's the complete Dell comic-book adaptation. I found this less annoying than the film, as you can get through it quicker (especially the underwater chase).

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2014/12/poe-1965-pt-4.html

[Robb_K]

Here's the complete Dell comic-book adaptation. I found this less annoying than the film, as you can get through it quicker (especially the underwater chase).

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2014/12/poe-1965-pt-4.html

Thanks for the link.  It's a very good comic book adaptation, and much more enjoyable than the boring film. and  the colouring is decent, unlike that of most Dell and Gold Key comic books of that period.  I had already stopped even browsing in Dell most Dell comics in late 1964, so I missed this one.  Basically, I had stopped buying comic books other than the remaining issues containing Carl Barks' last new work.

[profh0011]

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN   (1970)
The DISORIENTED Movie   (6 of 10)

A jogger wakes up in a hospital and finds his legs missing. Somewhere in East Germany, an ambitious, power-mad psychotic is torturing innocent prisoners and murdering his way to the top. A British Intelligence official is dealing with some mysterious problems. And the police are trying to track down an insane serial killer who both mutilates his victims-- and drains their blood. What the HELL is going on, and do any of these plotlines connect?

Back in 1963, Blake Edwards did a movie where multiple plotlines, seemingly unrelated, all converged about a quarter of the way into the movie-- THE PINK PANTHER. 7 years later, Milton Subotsky & Max Rosenbloom of Amicus Films decided to go him one further-- a film with 4 (or 5) seemingly-unrelated plotlines, where you don't see how they all connect until just about the last 10 minutes! A specialty of Amicus was "anthology" horror movies, where 4 or 5 short stories were presented, one at a time, with a very loose linking sequence. But here, all the separate threads actually ARE part one of big story-- but, chances are, you'll have to watch the entire film at least once, then watch it a 2nd time in order to really understand it. (If you're lucky.)

As usual with Amicus, more money was probably spent on the cast than anything else, and this modern-day horror show is far more cold-blooded than anything Hammer ever unleashed on their public.

Among the supporting players I recognize are Peter Sallis (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA) as an East German official who's murdered; Yutte Stensgaard (LUST FOR A VAMPIRE) as an innocent woman tortured to death by East German police; Uta Levka (THE OBLONG BOX) as a silent, cold-blooded nurse over-seeing slow-motion murder in a surgery; Julian Holloway (DOCTOR WHO: "Survival") as a Detective Constable; David Lodge (THE ALPHABET MURDERS) as a Detective Inspector; Christopher Matthews (THE SCARS OF DRACULA) as a Police Doctor who gets much further investigating the "vampire killer" mystery than any of the police do; and Michael Gothard (FOR YOUR EYES ONLY) as "Keith", the affore-mentioned "vampire killer".

Alfred Marks (who I have not seen in anything else) is "Detective Superintendant Bellaver", who's in charge of the case. I was frankly shocked when HE wound up murdered two-thirds of the way in, not unlike Ray Milland in THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE. When the "obvious" main character of a film gets bumped off unceremoniously like that, you can't help but be reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO to a degree.

Marshall Jones is "Konratz", the murderous, superhuman East German official. I believe he spent most of his career on stage, but his relatively few movies number among them 3 of Gordon Hessler's horrors IN A ROW. (They're the only ones of his I've seen.

And then there's the "big names". Peter Cushing is "Major Heinrich Benedek", apparently the ONLY East German military official who has even the slightest hint of humanity or a conscience in him, who's onscreen for a few minutes before HE's murdered, apparently for having a conscience.

Christopher Lee is "Fremont", a member of the British Intelligence service. He comes across not so much as a "James Bond" type, but more like an "M", and he seems at least somewhat reasonable-- until the climax of the movie, when his true colors are revealed, and it's NOT pretty!

Vincent Price is "Dr. Browning", who comes across as a rather nice, polite, slightly-eccentric scientist involved in unusual experimentation, whose house seems to be at the center of several mysteries at once. He's apparently got government connections and backing, and when confronted about his work, seems far more relaxed, laid-back and conversational than your average INSANE MAD SCIENTIST. He reminds me a lot of "Dr. Pym", the character he played on GET SMART, whose main concern on getting found out was that his work, which he'd spent so much of his life involved in, should NOT be destroyed! Frankly, Price's performance in this film made me think he was actually just playing himself... except for the part about being involved in MASS-MURDER.

This is a VERY, VERY disturbing "sick F***" of a film. Nowhere near as awful and ghastly as WITCHFINDER GENERAL, but nontheless nothing that will ever become a favorite of mine. I decided to get a copy of this after all these years because of how one of Steve Haberman's audio commentaries went on at great length about the 4 consecutive collaborations between writer Christopher Wicking and German director Gordon Hessler. This was their 2nd film together, the others being THE OBLONG BOX, CRY OF THE BANSHEE and MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE. 3 of those were AIP Poe films ("Allegedly!!") while this was from Amicus. Apparently, a running thread of all 4 films is that in these modern times, "The Establishment" are NOT going to save us from unspeakable horrors-- rather, "The Establishment" are THE PURVEYORS of the unspeakable horrors! And, that's nowhere more true than in this "sick flick".

Crazy enough, I actually read Peter Saxon's novel "The Disorientated Man" (the movie-tie-in being re-named "Scream And Scream Again") more than ten years before getting around to seeing the movie, on TV. It was "nice" (so to speak) to actually watch it again, after decades, in a decent widescreen print on Blu-Ray. One mystery I can't fathom is why the UK print has an exchange the US print is missing: "But what of the dream?" "There is only nightmare."

[profh0011]

Just listened to Tim Lucas' commentary.  One of the most bizarre moments was when he said he connected Vincent Price's totally laid-back attitude about creating artificial people with the 2 earlier DR. GOLDFOOT movies.

That's kinda like how Peter Cushing in AT THE EARTH'S CORE seems to be playing the same character he did in those 2 "Daleks" movies.  ?

[profh0011]

CRY OF THE BANSHEE  (1970)

The problem with the film as it exists is, as perhaps several IMDB reviewers pointed out, there's almost NO likable characters in it at all! Topping the pile is Vincent Price as a power-drunk murder-crazed narcissist of a "magistrate" who can get away with anything, and is absolutely bat-S*** gleeful as he does, laughing hysterically as he abuses people or worse, and the villagers alternately fear him and cheer him on when it's not them getting killed.  His entire family takes after him to one degree or another, and even his youngest son winds up killing 2 people while his daughter carelessly endangers the life of a servant by having him in her bed when her viscious, bloodthirsty father barges in at one point.

When a Catholic priest turns out to be the nominal voice of reason (apart from being suspicious of the servant-- BEFORE he's involved in anything wrong-- you've got a dodgy screenplay on your hands.  (Never expected that from the guy who played "Konratz" in SCREAM, AND SCREAM AGAIN.)

Shout Factory has BOTH the AIP theatrical cut and the unreleased "director's cut" on the same disc, as part of their VINCENT PRICE COLLECTION Box 3. I haven't seen the uncut theatrical cut yet, but I just re-watched my old 1980s local TV channel VHS, which apparently had TEN MINUTES butchered out of it. Because AIP not only edited the film for theatrical release AND moved at least one (perhaps several) scenes around, there's some arguable continuity lapses as well.  In the theatrical version, Oona curses the Whitmans at the beginning of the film.  But in the original unreleased director's version, this doesn't happen until 30 minutes in-- so, WHY are there several references to the family being "cursed" already, before this happens?  Also, son Harry arrives early in the film, yet, in the theatrical version, he's seen in the prologue-- BEFORE he came back home from college.  WHAT?

My old videotape is so fuzzy (picture and sound) I'm looking forward to watching-- and HEARING-- what the film sounded like in theatres, to compare it against the unreleased version, as they have 2 completely-different music scores. It's funny-- CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR is also avaialble with 2 completely-different music scores (though you have to buy 2 separate Blu-Rays to hear both), and this film and that one were both filmed in the SAME huge house! (So many people totally diss "THE CRIMSON CULT", but dammit, I've seen it 6 times so far, and enjoyed it every time!  Can't say the same for "BANSHEE".)

[profh0011]

I admit, I was having trouble staying awake last night (more to do with my job and insomnia than the movie), but, I just watched the theatrical cut, where AIP is said to have butchered Gordon Hessler's intentions.

I dunno.  ALL THAT uncalled-for NUDITY and BRUTALITY being missing DID NOT hurt the film one damn bit.  I did NOT need another F***ing "Witchfinder General".

Moving a few scenes around... not sure there either.  The part where those 2 arrogant ASSHOLE sons of Price go into the bar with the express purpose of SEXUALLY HARRASSING (and possibly raping) the new barmaid, only to be interrupted as they suspect another girl is selling OCCULT artifacts, I'm pretty sure, was before the mass-murder scene in Hessler's cut, not after.

I realized that the new barmaid was the one who later got accused of knowing where Oona was, and BURNED ALIVE when she could not answer. Not one scumbag in that village cried out against the magistrate & his goons MURDERING an INNOCENT woman... just because she'd earlier turned down the sons' sexual advances.

The weirdest thing about putting the mass-murder first is how it changes the structure of the story.  Harry is there... so, apparently, he took part in it BEFORE going away to college.  (If he didn't want to come back, WHY did he?)  Sot the mass-murder took place SOME TIME before the rest of the movie, rather than right in the middle of everything else going on.

Oona puts the family under a curse.  This explains why they keep saying they're under a curse.  But in Hessler's version, they're saying they're under a curse BEFORE they even learn of Oona's existence and go to murder most of her "CHILDREN!"

Also, Roderick is there, called by Oona, right after the massacre.  Yet, we then see him with Maureen, having perhaps turned down Oona's request to murder the Whitmans (so now she wants the power to FORCE him to do it).

I'll be watching Hessler's cut AGAIN, if only to hear the audio commentary, which, I assume, is only on the longer version.

Hessler cut:  1:30:34
AIP cut:  1:26:33

Local TV cut:  1:17:44 !!
(That's 10 minutes missing from the AIP version.)

[profh0011]

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)

The final AIP "Poe" film is a shambling, near-incoherent mess that bears little resemblence to anything Poe did. The plot involves a French theatre troupe being picked off one by one by a supposedly-dead man as revenge for what was done to him many years earlier.  The troupe are putting on a bastardized version of Poe's story that owes more to the 1932 film with Bela Lugosi, and borrows heavily from the 1943 film "PHANTOM OF THE OPERA", which itself was a totally-bastardized adaptation of that classic story.

Director Gordon Hessler, in an interview, says he felt audiences were so familiar with Poe's simple murder mystery that "one cannot adapt it as a film" and had to "do something different".  I call BULLSHIT on this.  To me, this film should have had a different title.

Apparently, before its release, AIP drastically re-edited the thing, removed 11 minutes, moved several scenes around, and tinted several "dream" sequences so as to remove the intended vagueness & confusion they might cause. On top of that, my local TV channel cut another 2 minutes out, and I'm at a loss to be sure exactly what was cut by AIP and what by the TV station. Either way, the film I've barely been able to put up with for decades is almost completely-incoherent.

Shout Factory's 2016 Blu-Ray (where it's coupled with "THE DUNWICH HORROR") contains the original unreleased director's cut, taken from apparently the only known intact print of it, from before AIP's mutilation.  It's a beautiful-looking film-- bright, gorgeous location filming in Spain, looking like no other "Poe" film in existence.  But it also drags on at an insanely-leisurely pace as it bounces between long, long stretches of dull tedium and SHOCKING, completely UNCALLED-FOR brutal murders, with people either having acid thrown in their faces or having their throats slashed.

I would rank this as one of the WORST films I've ever watched more than once, and I'm not sure seeing it in a stunning uncut widescreen print helps at all.

Jason Robards plays "Cesar Charron", the head of the stock company, and according to Hessler, realized 2 weeks into shooting he should have asked to play the other main character.

Herbert Lom is "Rene Marot", effectively reprising his role of The Phantom from the 1963 Hammer film, alternating from intelligent, almost-sympathetic leading man to utterly-insane kill-crazy lunatic.

Michael Dunn is "Pierre Triboulet", Marot's polite sidekick, who has perhaps the most amusing line in the film, when he tells someone he descended from royalty:  "An ancestor of mine was a court jester!"  Clearly, a reference to Poe's story "Hop Frog".

Adolfo Celi is "Inspector Vidocq", who ceaselessly works to track down the perpetrator of the growing number of horrific crimes.

It was only after trying to re-watch my local TV print that I did a bit of research, and ran across something amazing.  Reviewer Eric McMillan ("EditorEric_com"), posted, "Poe's creation of his sleuth Dupin is thought to have been based in part on French criminologist Eugène-François Vidocq, credited as the first real-life private detective."

This led me to a LONG biographical article about Vidocq on Wikipedia, where I learned he had a long career as a criminal before switching sides and working for the French police, then organizing the Surete (the undercover security force featured in the 1925 "PHANTOM OF THE OPERA" film!), later still forming the world's first known detective agency, and was the model for at least 3 different authors' detective characters.

Vidocq having resigned from the police TWICE due to incessant harrassment by new, much-younger superiors, would also seem to be the basis for the MUCH-classier, far-more-entertaining 1986 CBS-TV film "MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE" with George C. Scott in the role of "Dupin"!

It also turns out a man named "César Herbaux" was a fellow convict who, along with Vidocq, was convicted of document forgery. I have to assume the writers of the 1971 film named their main character "Cesar" after him!

I still have Steve Haberman's audio commentary to sit through, and I shudder at the thought of watching this thing once again so soon.

[profh0011]

Steve Haberman spent MOST of his commentary doing run-downs on the long resumes of those involved.  The most interesting bit of info I got from him was that the stage play in the film, which I already knew was based on the 1932 film (NOT Poe's story), also borrowed from the 1954 film, in that Karl Malden was having the ape murder women who'd turned down his sexual advances. Which is in fact what it's revealed Jason Robards for real did in the 1971 film!

I was disappointed that he didn't pick up on Vidocq being a real-life person, who was the basis for Dupin in Poe's 3 stories.

Also, I confirmed that there is NO hint anywhere in the film of the identity of Christine's father! It seems clear to me it must have been Marot (Herbert Lom), who fathered the girl BEFORE the mother agreed to marry him.

To me, this HAS to be the case, as it would tie in directly with the 1943 PHANTOM film with Claude Rains, who was written as Christine's father, but that fact was REMOVED before the film was shot for dubious reasoning.

Robards married Christine many years after he murdered her mother who turned him down.  Herbert Lom was protective of Christine.  It was Michael Dunn's character who was actually IN LOVE with Christine. I must assume her screaming bloody murder when he shows up with flowers in the middle of the night was a result of all the trauma she'd just experienced, having so many people murdered by Lom, including her husband (Robards), and then SHE herself being the one who killed Marot (especially if Marot was, as I suspect, her father!).

I totally agreed that after Robard's decapitation, the film should have ended.  Rather than a long, drawn-out SERIES of epilogues, that last murder should have been immediately follow by the chase in the theatre, climaxing with Marot's fall to his death.

I don't know WHAT the hell Gordon Hessler & Christopher Wicking were thinking... and AIP just made it worse with their tampering.

[profh0011]

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970)

I've just watched the UK print included on the Kino Lorber Blu-Ray as an extra.

It hasn't been restored, many of the colors and skin tones are "off", there's damage streaks in places, the SOUND isn't as clear as on the US print, and in general it looks closer to what one might see on TV in years past than to a brand-new Blu-Ray.

Additionally, exactly as I've read, there were numerous small CUTS made to the US print.  Although there's some slight damage in a couple spots where tiny bits of the film are missing, the UK print is more INTACT. 

Seeing it just now, naturally, I can't help but wonder.  WHY in the HELL did AIP cut the US print?  There's 3 short shots of some old man watching the killer make out with the girl in the car which are distracting, and don't need to be there.  But there's 2 shots of the police inspector hurling rocks at the killer, the 2nd of which knocks him off the sheer cliff wall he's climbing, while in the US print it looks like the killer just slipped on his own. And then right near the end, when Christopher Lee is arguing with Vincent Price, and Price says, "We must destroy the ones who went bad before it's too late", and Lee replies, "It is ALREADY too late.", they CUT the entire next exchange.  "But what of the dream?"  "There is only time for NIGHTMARE."  And then, under hypnotic control, Price commits suicide.

WHAT THE HELL was AIP thinking when they cut these bits?

And further-- WHY hasn't someone taken those bits-- clean them up-- and INSERT them into the restored US print, to create a more complete, "perfect" print?

Sometimes you just wind up shaking your head in dismay...

[profh0011]

THE SPECTRE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (1972)

A highly-fictionalized bio of Poe and "Lenore", who he loved and lost before marrying his cousin Virginia.  She suffers a bout of catelepsy, is buried alive, rescued, but has lost her mind, and winds up at an "advanced" mental hospital.  Unfortunately, the doctor running it is experimenting on his patients, and there's OTHER, even worse troubles going on behind his back!  It all leads to a horrific climax, which, apparently, has been heavily censored depending on which bad copy of this already low-budget independant film you manage to see.

With Robert Walker Jr., Cesar Romero & Carol Ohmart.

I taped this movie off a local channel back in the 80s.  It's always been a low-budget independant film that borders on home-made amateurish, but it did have some interesting ideas that could have been done better in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing.  I've read it was filmed in 1972 but not released until 1974, and, indeed, the copyright notice at the end reads 1972.

This is apparently currently available from several different small outfits that all specialize in rare, obscure, impossible-to-find films.  The IMDB claims it's 1 hr. 29 min.; the el cheapo DVD I have (with terrible picture & sound) is 1:26:25.  Someone posted it on Youtube with a run time of 1:22:37.  From the comments here, it seems like it may only be uncut on a French videotape.

Having just re-watched this tacky thing, I see the influences in here of "Alone" (read near the beginning), "The Premature Burial", "The System of Dr. Tarr And Prof. Feather" (an insane asylum where the inmates get out of control), "The Pit And The Pendulum" (water & snakes replacing heat & rats), "Witchfinder General" (the axe murder at the end), and "The Raven" (read near the end).

Lisa (Carol Ohmart) was Adam's former flame who married Dr. Grimaldi!  But somehow she went insane, while the halfwit lab assistant was in love with her and wanted her husband (and his boss) out of the way. I never noticed until today that Ohmart in this film has somewhat of a resemblence to the older Fran Drescher (as Fran looks now).

Earlier this week, I was just watching Robert Walker Jr. in THE TIME TUNNEL episode, "Billy The Kid"!  What a bastard he was in that.

[profh0011]

It's been several weeks since I completely polished off the entire AIP Poe series (including all the "extras" on the discs). So, after planning this for a few weeks, and with nothing else specifically on the schedule, I decided tonight was the perfect time to run the series AGAIN! This time, one film PER NIGHT, at a rate of 3 nights in a row per week. (What fun!) Starting off with...

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1960)

It's amazing how Richard Matheson's screenplay turned the characters & their relationships completely upside-down from what Poe wrote. In Poe's story, the narrator & Roderick are old friends; Roderick & Madeline are twins (and she's further along in her illness than he is); when she seems to die, she's put in the basement for 2 weeks as a PRECAUTION... but Roderick is such a pathetic deranged MESS, he's too TERRIFIED to speak when he realizes that she's still alive!

In Matheson's version, Philip & Madeline are engaged; he's never met Roderick; EVERY WORD out of Roderick's mouth reveals that, apart from whatever else is wrong with him, he's a CONTROL-FREAK NARCISSIST of the worst, sickest order; he DRIVES her into a catalyptic fit, then, even after he sees her hand move and KNOWS shes still alive, DELIBERATELY buries her ALIVE! Poe's Roderick may have been a sad victim; but Matheson's Rockerick is a genuinely EVIL VILLAIN.

In addition to Poe's story, I also see elements in here of his "Berenice", "The Domain Of Arnheim", as well as the films "BLACK NARCISSUS" (1947) and "REBECCA" (1940). According to the various audio commentaries, it seems all of Corman's POE films borrowed heavily from previous non-Poe movies for their style and plots. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on those other movies, perhaps next year, to eventually do "before and after" comparisons.

[profh0011]

TOWER OF LONDON (1962)

Now this is one REALLY SICK F*** of a movie. A seemingly "classy" period piece, yet the story is so twisted and violent and disturbing, I wound up really glad the Blu-Ray DIDN'T come with an audio commentary, as I can't see myself wanting to sit through this one again anytime soon.

In the 1950s, without doubt, Roger Corman was the best thing AIP had going for it, by a mile. Knowing this, on at least 3 occasions, Corman attempted to break away from Nicholson & Arkoff, and go out on his own. His first attempt, with THE PREMATURE BURIAL, ended up back at AIP when the 2 executive producers blackmailed his would-be business partner (and film lab) into signing over ownership of the film, or risk losing all of their future business.

Not long after, with his brother Gene, Corman formed his own small company, with the aim of doing smaller, B&W films for drive-ins (as AIP had done all through the 50s). But the smaller budgets and lack of big-name actors resulted in lesser profits, for the most part dooming the effort before it got too far.

One of those films was TOWER OF LONDON, a rather bizarre combination of William Shakespeare's "Richard III" and "Macbeth". Price plays the deformed and, frankly, COMPLETELY-INSANE member of the royal family, who, urged on by his wife, decides to MURDER everyone in his family who stands in the way of his becoming the next King of England. This includes his brother, the nanny of the rightful heir and his brother, his own wife (by accident!), both young boys themselves, a trusted aide and the court physician. As the story goes on, it just gets sicker and more perverse, and I found myself being reminded, more with each passing scene, of a deranged NARCISSISTIC home care client that until very recently, I'd worked for, for more than 4 years! Geez. I don't need to be reminded of him.

I've read about this film for decades, and it always tends to be dismissed as a pale remake of the 1939 Universal film of the same name, which starred Baril Rathbone as Richard III, Boris Karloff as his chief executioner, and, funny enough, a young Vincent Price as Richard's 1st victim! Despite it obviously being a remake, Wikipedia claims it is "not connected" to the 1939 film. WHAT? Then again, every film version of "PHANTOM OF THE OPERA" has virtually NOTHING in common with every other version of that story.

My one disappointment involved Price's main sidekick and henchman, played by Michael Pate. I've seen Pate in countless things, especially quite a few episodes of the Adam West BATMAN, where he was always playing villains' henchmen. This is probably the biggest role I've ever seen him have, and in some ways, he's more evil than Price, since Price is utterly INSANE... but Pate's character KNOWS what he's doing. At the climax, you have to look quick to see him get what's coming to him (run through with a sword during a huge battle). I was hoping for at least one nice close-up of his dying in agony, as he so much deserved.

While one might enjoy watching this and the 1939 film back-to-back for comparison, it struck me a really fitting double-bill might be this and Corman's THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964). Then again, considering its roots in Shakespeare... another fitting double-bill might be this with WEST SIDE STORY, which came out a year later! Shakespeare really knew how to write intricate, prolonged tragedies with bad endings.