Black Friday (Arthur Lubin, 1940)

Black Friday is an oddball buried treasure that combines mad scientist brain transplantation hokum with the Jekyll-and-Hyde story and hardboiled film noir, starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi in an atypical part, and Stanley Ridges in a dual role that really lets him flaunt his acting chops. If you can roll with the absurd premise, it's a great time.

Black Friday begins almost identically to the last Boris Karloff movie I reviewed for this site, Before I Hang. This made my heart sink a little. Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff, in kindly doctor who took things too far mode), is about to be executed by electric chair (gallows in the previous film). He accepts his fate but hands his written notes to a journalist representing the only newspaper Sovac deemed fair to him and encourages him to spread his story and get someone to carry on his research. (This plea was delivered as a prepared statement at the sentencing hearing in the previous film.) "Here we go again," I thought. This would be the third Karloff movie in a row for me where he plays a kindly old medical scientist whose research obsessions get him in trouble. I liked those previous movies, but I was ready for something different.

Fortunately, in flashbacks as the journalist reads Sovac's notes, we learn that Sovac is not so kindly after all. He's a manipulative man in the driver's seat of his own ruthless obsessions who can easily set his humanity aside in the name of research. We also get two much more interesting interweaving stories and not a single scene taking place in a test tube-filled laboratory. Hallelujah.

In the small college town of New Castle, Dr. Sovac is best friends with his daughter's English literature professor George Kingsley (Ridges). It's unclear whether this is the New Castle in New York, a small town 36 miles from Manhattan that was once the home of former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley (though it has no college) or the New Castle in Delaware, a small city 125 miles from Manhattan that is the birthplace and possible current home of former UFO guitarist Vinnie Moore. The Delaware New Castle has colleges in and near the city. The mystery will never be solved (unless I missed a line of dialogue), but we do know our characters live and work in a town called New Castle that is reasonably close to Manhattan.

Dr. Sovac, his daughter Jean (Anne Gwynne, the grandmother of Chris Pine, the mother of character actor Gwynne Gilford, and the mother-in-law of Robert Pine, the sergeant on CHiPs), and Prof. Kingsley's wife Margaret (Virginia Brissac) take Kingsley out to dinner to celebrate his upcoming interview for a position at a larger and more prestigious school. Our gang makes a brief pit stop for Kingsley to run an errand before the meal, but Kingsley is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught in the middle of a car chase and shootout between New York gangster Red Cannon and his former cronies, led by Eric Marnay (Lugosi). When Cannon is shot, he plows his automobile into the building Kingsley is standing in front of, gravely injuring the professor.

Back at the hospital, Sovac gets a dark idea. He's already been successfully transplanting animal brains in secret (possibly the reason he lost his job at a major university and ended up in New Castle), why not transplant part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain into the damaged part of dying buddy Kingsley's brain? The ol' partial brain switcheroo (a favorite plot of co-screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who would later write the novel Donovan's Brain, which was adapted for the screen three times) works, Cannon dies, and Kingsley makes a miraculous recovery. No one is the wiser but Dr. Sovac.

Before his surgically assisted death, Cannon revealed that his gang was after him because he hid half a million dollars of loot somewhere in New York City and didn't cut them in on it. Sovac hatches a wild plan. If he can somehow bring out the dormant aspects of Cannon's personality in Kingsley's hybrid brain, he can find out where the money is hidden, steal it, and use it to fund his brain transplantation research. He lies about needing to attend a meeting in New York about some local hospital business and talks Kingsley into going with him and leaving Margaret at home. He says it will be good for Kingsley's convalescence and give Margaret a break. The mild-mannered Kingsley warms up to the idea after initially rejecting New York as too loud and noisy. He likes to read, teach, and study English lit away from the hubbub of city life, but he decides New York may be just what he needs after all.

Once in Manhattan, Cannon's old memories start to come back to Kingsley, partially engineered by Sovac. After a shock to the system while attending Cannon's favorite nightclub, seeing a performance by the gangster's girlfriend, nightclub singer Sunny (Anne Nagel), and spotting a member of Cannon's former crew, Kingsley gets a pounding headache and extreme fatigue. Back at the hotel, he wakes up and is transformed into Cannon (complete with his gray hair turning dark, the only part of this science I have a hard time believing). Cannon takes the brain and body switcheroo pretty well, especially since he can no longer be recognized by the police or his former friends turned enemies. He starts bumping off his gang one by one, reconnecting with a mystified Sunny, and heading for a showdown with Marnay (though Lugosi and Karloff only share one scene and aren't even on screen at the same time in that one), while occasionally turning back into kindly old Kingsley. Events grow even more complicated, with Sovac cranking up his manipulations and Cannon/Kingsley's Jekyll and Hyde act making a mess of both men's lives.

The hair color change is silly, but Stanley Ridges otherwise convincingly takes full advantage of the opportunity to physically inhabit two completely different men in the same body. Karloff was originally hired to play the part but decided he'd be more comfortable and effective playing Sovac. Lugosi, originally hired to play Sovac, was moved to the smaller supporting role of Marnay (though he kept his second billing) after the producers thought a seasoned American character actor would be more suitable for the Kingsley/Cannon part.

He has less screen time than the other two men, but Lugosi acquits himself nicely playing a gangster. It's an unusual role for him, and he nails it. Lugosi is mostly remembered today for Dracula and his later declining years of addiction and financial struggles while appearing in the Ed Wood movies (which are much better than their reputation as kitschy trash) and Martin Landau's portrayal of him in this period in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood, but I think he's still underrated as a physical performer. He finds a particular and distinct way of carrying himself and moving his body in each character he plays (even in his worst films), and the way he occupies the physical space as a gangster here is a Lugosi I'd never seen before.

Directed by jack-of-all-genres journeyman filmmaker Arthur Lubin, most famous for the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Francis the talking mule movies (though my non-Black Friday favorite is Rhubarb, a screwball comedy about an orange cat named Rhubarb who inherits a professional baseball team and a sizable fortune after his eccentric millionaire owner dies), Black Friday was one of six feature films Lubin directed in 1940 (the Hollywood studio system work schedule was beyond insane). The other five included two mysteries, a gangster movie, a crime thriller, and a musical. Black Friday has all of that (yes, even a musical number) plus some mad scientist horror. The disparate elements work on their own and as part of the whole. I haven't seen anything quite like it, I had a great time watching it, and I recommend it to fans of Karloff, Lugosi, '40s noir, and the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Deathstalker (James Sbardellati, 1983)

Distributed and executive produced by Roger Corman, Deathstalker was one of the earliest movies in the '80s sword and sorcery craze, which began shortly after the release of 1982's Conan the Barbarian (or in some enterprising b-movie hustlers' cases, shortly before) and continued for most of the rest of the decade. These movies are a bit like the slasher movie in that they all contain the same basic elements, but each filmmaker, screenwriter, and cast (and the setting) injects each one with its own distinct flavor (or lack thereof in the worst ones).

Like Conan, Deathstalker has a muscled-up beefcake barbarian with a special sword, an evil usurper of a throne possessed with magical powers, a ragtag group of dudes who join the beefcake on his quest, a sexy blonde romantic partner of the beefcake who's also good with a sword, swordfights, fistfights, blood and guts, monsters, and multiple naked breasts and oiled-up pecs. Unlike Conan, Deathstalker was made for about 36 dollars but makes up for it by surpassing Conan's breast count by about 638. There's a bare breast in about every third shot. The edited-for-TV version must've been 23 minutes long. Despite Deathstalker's low budget, Corman turned pennies into gold by using existing studio sets in Argentina and a crew of experienced locals.

So, Deathstalker. It's goofy and it's dumb, the kind of goofy and dumb a 10-year-old boy in 1983 would have dreamed up if you'd asked him what he'd like to see in a sword and sorcery movie, which is the kind of goofy and dumb I can get behind. A lot of these Conan knockoffs run out of gas after the halfway point, but Deathstalker never repeats itself and never stops changing things up, whether it makes a damn bit of sense or not, and like I often say, making sense is overrated. (Have I often said that? It feels like I have.)

"Hold up there, tough guy," you're saying to me, which is a little patronizing, but I'll allow it. "Weren't you complaining about the sexual violence in Death Wish II in your last post? How come you're giving Deathstalker a pass?" Good question. Deathstalker contains attempted rapes, and here I was writing about it like it was a feelgood romp. This may be hypocritical, but Death Wish II's rape and attempted rape scenes linger on the woman's distress, portray the mostly black and Latino perpetrators as animals, seem like they're included because the director has a fetish for sexual violence, and have a hollow ugliness that made me feel bad. Deathstalker is a cartoonish goof that takes place in the rape-and-pillage era of barbarians where everything is transactional and everyone's humanity has been scraped away, and every attempted assault is almost immediately interrupted by an oiled-up hunk saving the woman and getting into a swordfight with the perpetrator. Nothing is lingered on or completed. The scenes are pretexts for other things to happen. My take may be hypocritical, but Deathstalker is not serious about anything it's presenting.

Deathstalker is about, um, Deathstalker (Rick Hill, Georgia Tech and Canadian Football League running back turned chisel-jawed b-movie actor turned motivational speaker), an amoral barbarian swordsman riding his horse through the landscape, stealing to survive, killing other barbarians with his sword when they give him the business, making sweet love to random scantily clad ladies, and looking out for number one. A deposed king asks him to be a hero and take care of the usurper of the throne, the evil magician Munkar (Bernard Erhard), a bald guy with a serpentine creature tattooed on his dome and a Chihuahua-sized pet monster named Howard who eats eyeballs and fingers. Munkar not only has stolen the throne, he's stolen the king's daughter Codille (Playboy Playmate and Hollywood Square Barbi Benton). Deathstalker tells the old man to take a hike and that heroes are fools. Sick burn, Deathstalker.

Something tells me Deathstalker and Munkar are going to battle it out anyway. That something is a someone, an old witch who seems to be old friends with Deathstalker. We don't get the back story. This is a Roger Corman movie. There's no time for that. While hanging in the witch's hut after saving a maiden from some of Munkar's goons, Deathstalker learns from the witch that Munkar has a special amulet and a special chalice that are helping him hold onto power, but he needs the special sword to complete the trilogy of important objects and control the world. Intrigued, Deathstalker decides to take on Munkar and snag the trilogy for himself. Oh yeah, that sword is in a nearby cave.

Deathstalker wedges his oiled-up pecs, biceps, and glutes into the cave and meets its inhabitant, a smart-mouthed troll who used to be a man but has been living in the cave eating roaches and rats for 30 years after Munkar hit him with a spell. A giant appears out of nowhere with the sword, but Deathstalker easily takes it and chases him off. Deathstalker turns into a little boy, leads the troll out of the cave, and turns back into an oiled-up beefcake, and the cave troll turns into a middle-aged man, Salmaron (Augusto Larreta) who makes a lot of funny sounds over the course of the film. He's like the Conan version of Mr. Bean. The transformation has also turned his American accent Argentinean.

The duo pick up a couple friends on the way to Munkar's castle, another oiled-up hunk named Oghris (Richard Brooker, who played Jason in Friday the 13th 3) who is entering Munkar's battle-to-the-death tournament where the winner will be declared his heir (I'm sure Munkar has no ulterior motives and will honor the results) and a sword-wielding babe named Kaira (Lana Clarkson), who wears the wild outfit of a black cape and no top, letting her breasts hang out in the evening breeze among her new male friends. She's wearing a barbarian-era metal-studded bra/bikini-style top once they hit the castle, though we never learn where she acquired it.

It's nonstop action, cheesecake, beefcake, wizardry, boobs, butts, legs, pecs, biceps, sword impalings, pratfalls, and classic good times from here on out, and we all learn a little something about how power corrupts at the end. The tournament competitors are all humans except for one giant dude with a pig-face (played by an Argentinean pro wrestler) (though my favorite of the tournament fighters is a scrawny guy with an enormous amount of pizzazz who gets smushed with a giant mallet but really gives it the ol' razzle-dazzle before that), one of Munkar's lackeys gets gender-swapped with Barbi Benton, a former friend turns traitor, and, I'm seeing double here, 30 Munkars appear in the final showdown (or maybe just eight). My favorite line of dialogue: when Oghris is strapped to a torture device that is painfully stretching him, Munkar says to him, "I trust you are comfortable," and Oghris replies, in a mildly irritated tone, "I am not!" This movie is so stupid, and I'm glad I watched it for a second time.