Man Made Monster (George Waggner, 1941)

Man Made Monster, the grammatically challenged absence of a hyphen in the title making it read like a sentence delivered by Dr. Frankenstein if he also spoke like his creation, is a fairly standard-issue early-'40s mad-scientist movie, but it's a likable one with a cute dog and a hilariously psychedelic goofball special effect, and the hourlong running time doesn't overstay its welcome. Lon Chaney Jr. doesn't have his dad's charisma or screen presence, but his everyman persona nicely fits the bill here.

The movie opens with a bus crashing into a transmission tower after sliding off the road during a terrible rainstorm. Everyone onboard is electrocuted, but one passenger, Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney Jr.), miraculously survives. Dan is a carny grifter who performs as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man, doing an act he describes as consisting of "yokel shockers" to "fool the peasants." Most of the act is a staged performance, but he does use real electricity for part of it. After reading about the accident, doctor and scientific researcher John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds) visits Dan in the hospital and leaves his card. Dr. Lawrence suspects that Dan has built up an immunity to electrical shock after years of working with electricity, hence his surviving the accident, and wants to conduct more research.

A now-unemployed Dan visits Dr. Lawrence's mansion/research laboratory after his release from the hospital. The mansion's occupants also include Dr. Lawrence's niece June (Black Friday's Anne Nagel), cook/butler/servant Wong (Chester Gan, referred to in the closing credits as "Chinese Boy" despite having a character name and being 33 years of age at the time), Corky the dog (playing himself), and Dr. Lawrence's scientific research partner Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). (A newspaper reporter played by Frank Albertson also becomes an important character.) 

Dynamo Dan's nice-guy demeanor immediately endears him to Dr. Lawrence, June, and especially Corky, and he agrees to temporarily move in for room, board, meals, and salary as a research subject for Drs. Lawrence and Rigas. He will be administered low-level doses of electricity, and the doctors will study his blood samples, reflexes, etc. The fact that Dr. Rigas dreams of creating a race of electrified supermen is a source of conflict between the two researchers, but Dr. Lawrence is not as alarmed by it as he should be, especially considering the research they're working on with Dan.

While Dr. Lawrence is out of town at a convention, Dr. Rigas amps up the juice and administers far more electricity to Dan than is ethically kosher. The easygoing nice guy who loved playing with Corky and chatting with June is now a shell of a man, withdrawn, listless, and depressed, and hooked on the electricity like a junkie. Not only is he addicted to the juice, he's also now under the command and control of Dr. Rigas. After the final treatment, Dan is lit up like a Christmas tree, an electrified halo of light surrounding his entire body. It looks crazy as hell. Dr. Rigas gives him a rubber suit to conserve the electricity, which looks even crazier.

When Dr. Lawrence returns from the conference and sees what's happened to Dan, he's not too happy, though, to be honest, he should've seen this coming. You can't let a guy who wants to create an army of electrified supermen live in your mansion and work in your lab, no matter how tight of bros you are. When Dr. Rigas realizes he's never going to convince his colleague that this electrified superman biz is a major breakthrough in the electrified sciences, he decides to set Dan loose on Dr. Lawrence. It doesn't end well for anybody, and Dan ends up on Death Row. You can guess what happens when they put him in the electric chair. We're talking an electrified rampage, eventually leading back to Dr. Rigas.

Perhaps the funniest part of the movie is the lack of mention of Dan's glowing electrified body halo when a sea of reporters, prison employees, and detectives call their various bosses. They just mention that Dan's on the loose and is at such-and-such location. NO ONE, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, thinks to say, "The guy you're looking for is glowing and electrified." I'd be leading with that shit. It's like if Godzilla were loose and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I called the authorities and told them some dude in a Hawaiian shirt is trashing the town without ever mentioning that he's a giant fucking lizard.

Besides the novelty of a glowing Lon Chaney Jr., Man Made Monster is a typical hubris-of-man mad scientist movie that hits the usual beats, but it's skillfully photographed and edited, the narrative is concise and entertaining, and the cast is solid (including the dog). The bond between Dan and Corky the dog is also delivered with more pathos and less cutesiness than you'd expect. The Rigas and Dan roles were originally intended for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, respectively, but I'm actually a little relieved it didn't happen, despite my Lugosi and Karloff fandom. We'd seen both men in these kinds of roles multiple times by 1941, and though Chaney is a far less exciting actor than Karloff, he makes a better everyman (and probably looks a lot more natural playing with a dog), and I'm always happy to see Lionel Atwill.

Director George Waggner (who must have been so irritated by people leaving out the second "g" in his last name that he insisted on being credited as "George waGGner" for a few years in the late '30s and for a longer period in the mid-'50s to late '60s) may not have set the world on fire with Man Made Monster (it wasn't a flop but wasn't a big hit, either), but it paved the way for his most famous film (also starring Lon Chaney Jr.), The Wolf Man, later that year. 

Waggner was a born-and-raised New Yorker and WWI veteran who dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor in the silent era. He landed a handful of roles but decided he liked being on the other side of the screen better and spent the remainder of his career as a screenwriter, director, and songwriter of musical numbers in a time when even the non-musical features frequently included an original song or two. Though The Wolf Man is his best-known movie, he specialized in westerns and spent the last decade of his career directing television, with Code 3, 77 Sunset Strip, and the Adam West Batman being his most frequent employers.

  

Devil's Nightmare (Jean Brismée, 1971)

Like the movie in my previous post (The Devil's Wedding Night), Devil's Nightmare is another slice of early '70s sex- and violence-filled European castle weirdness with a possessive devil in the title (the two films even shared a triple bill with In the Devil's Garden on their initial U.S. release), and I am, as the 40-year-old teens on social media say, here for it. Unlike The Devil's Wedding Night, which was about vampires, the devil actually shows up in the Belgian/Italian coproduction Devil's Nightmare, alongside a busload of wacky tourists, a succubus, and a cursed old Nazi general/baron-turned-alchemist and his butler. We're talking the perfect ingredients for one crazy night, my friends.

In an unusual move for a sexy Satanic '70s castlesploitation flick, Devil's Nightmare opens with black-and-white footage of the bombing of Berlin in 1945. The B&W continues in a pre-credits flashback sequence in which Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais, whose other credits include Rififi, Le Plaisir, Fever Mounts at El Pao, and The Longest Day), also a Nazi general, nervously awaits the birth of his firstborn child during the bombing. His wife is not doing well, despite being attended to by a nurse (Frédérique Hender). She dies in childbirth but the baby is born healthy, though the Baron is extremely dismayed that the newborn is a daughter and not a son. We suspect this isn't just standard-issue misogyny from the worried and knowing looks the Baron and his butler Hans (Maurice de Groote) keep giving each other. Hans ushers the nurse to the basement for shelter, which gives the Baron the opportunity to quickly christen his daughter before killing her with a big-ass knife. We find out why later.

Kablammo! A creepy castle appears in vivid color and the opening credits roll. A strange and exciting scene that has little to do with the plot (love when this happens) ensues, though we do learn that the Baron and Hans are living in a castle in the Belgian countryside and they don't want the castle to be photographed.

Cue the tour bus. A small, ragtag group of Euro-misfits on a tour of the castles of Belgium runs into some trouble when the usual country road leading to the next castle is closed, but we'll circle back to that. I want to introduce our tourists first. Mason (Lucien Raimbourg) is a sour-tempered elderly man who frequently smokes a pipe and always complains. Mason is hilariously pissed off about everything all the time, and his lines being dubbed in English by someone clearly much younger than him makes him even funnier. Alvin Sorel (Jacques Monseau) is a Catholic seminary student soon to become a priest. He's already wearing the collar. Alvin is a devoutly religious young man, but he's also overly confident about his devoutness and priestly skills, and he's a little too proud of how great he is at playing chess. Nancy (Colette Emmanuelle) is an unhappily married wealthy woman who fiendishly craves even more wealth, and her husband Howard (Lorenzo Terzon) is an unfaithful playboy who can't stop pursuing every woman in his eyesight. Corinne (Ivana Novak) is a bisexual seductress who has her sights on both Howard and Regine (Shirley Corrigan), a blonde bombshell in hot pants who is passively receptive to the sexual attention but is mostly super into lounging in bed, napping, taking long relaxing baths, and sleeping. Finally, our tour bus driver Ducha (Christian Maillet) is a hardcore glutton who never stops eating and drinking wine. His bedside reading is a cookbook, his suitcase contains several smoked meats and cheeses, and he even tears into a chicken (or possibly turkey) leg while driving. I mean, he goes to town on the damn thing.

Back to the road closure. Ducha pauses his poultry bite to slam on the brakes, angering Mason, who gives him the business. The passengers see a bald, thin figure with long teeth in the woods, tending to a fire and grinning creepily. (This thin man is the wonderfully named Daniel Emilfork, a character acting legend who was the go-to guy in European cinema from 1955 until 2006 when anyone needed a bald, thin creepy guy with weird teeth and a magnetic screen presence.) Ducha rolls down his window and asks the creepily grinning man how to get around the blocked road. The man tells them to turn around, head back toward the village, and take a right at a different castle. This castle is not part of the tour, but the owners will provide shelter for the night until the road is reopened. They take the weird guy's advice, which is bad for them but great for us.

After some mishaps involving a falling stone gargoyle face, a large frog, and inappropriate flirting with a hot pants babe in front of your spouse, the gang enters the castle, meets Hans and the castle's unfriendly cook, and is shown into their rooms. Each room has something weird going on (I'm not just talking about the late-'60s/early-'70s-as-fuck wallpaper and carpeting), and Hans is more than happy to tell the sordid history of who died in that room, what year the death occurred, and how it happened. This scares Regine enough that she requests to share a room. Corinne hornily offers hers. Cue some '70s softcore Euro-sex between one of the horniest women in Belgium and one of the laziest.

The Baron makes his appearance at dinnertime and talks about his alchemist lab in the basement and the centuries-old curse on his family. You know, the usual small talk. The alchemist lab talk gets greedy Nancy all hot and bothered, and she asks for a tour after dinner. The woman has a fever and the only prescription is more gold. (Devil's Nightmare takes it as a given that you can turn lead into gold. Just roll with it.)

Dinner is rolling along swimmingly when there is an unexpected knock on the door. The cook answers, recognizes the visitor, Lisa (Erika Blanc), with horror, and refuses to let her in. Hans butts in, overrides the cook (I'd credit the actress but I can't find her in the listed credits online), and tells Lisa she can come in and stay in the remaining spare bedroom. She joins the gang mid-meal in some atypical dinnerwear, a very revealing dress with a large oval cutout from the bottom of her breasts to just below her navel. She sits next to the seminarian and starts flirting. Could this be a succubus? Or just a really weird sexy lady?

Erika Blanc (real name Enrica Bianchi Colombatto), who plays Lisa, is a strikingly memorable Italian actress with a slew of credits during the golden age of the European exploitation/genre/b-movie era, appearing in dozens of Italian horror films, spaghetti westerns, non-porn erotica, and crime thrillers (many of which have incredible English-language titles), including Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill!, Django Shoots First, Vengeance Is My Forgiveness, Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, A Man for Emmanuelle, Sartana's Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, Stay Away from Trinity... When He Comes to Eldorado, Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, and The Naked Doorwoman, just to name a few.

Once almost every character is in place at the castle (Satan shows up later but you may have already met him), the movie really kicks it up a notch. The succubus lures each tourist with his or her own deadly sin in genuinely creepy scenes that owe much of their effectiveness to Blanc's incredible performance, some top-notch freaky-ass makeup from makeup artists Nancy Beaudoux and Duilio Giustini (the movie's secret weapon), and the atmospherically spooky score from Morricone and Rota protégé Alessandro Alessandroni (also an expert whistler, Alessandroni is the guy whistling on many of the Morricone scores for Sergio Leone's westerns).

I had a blast with this movie. It's soaking in '70s Italian and Belgian atmosphere, the locations are perfect, the cast is excellent with tons of screen presence, it's sexy, it's scary, it's funny, the music's great, and there are no dead spots. Something interesting is happening in every scene, and the images have maximum impact, especially the closeups. I had even more fun with this one than I had with The Devil's Wedding Night.

Oddly enough, this is director Jean Brismée's only feature. I wish he'd made more. Primarily a screenwriter, Brismée's only other directing credits are educational short films about mathematics, science, and film history. He also cofounded a film school in Brussels whose graduates include several prominent international filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors, and he wrote a book about Belgian cinema in 1995. He died in 2024.