Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

A rare early color film shot with the two-color Technicolor process, Doctor X is a pre-Code horror/mystery/comedy/sci-fi good time. It doesn't take itself seriously but has plenty of atmosphere and dread and weirdness, and it's a wilder, rougher, and goofier film than most of what jack-of-all-trades director Michael Curtiz would make for the rest of his massively successful Hollywood career, which included Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, White Christmas, We're No Angels, King Creole (my favorite Elvis movie), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and more than 100 others stretching from 1912 to 1961, the year before his death.

Doctor X is about a series of murders plaguing the New York City area. Called the "Moon Killer Murders" by the press, this series of grisly slayings happens once each month on a full moon. The victims have very little in common with each other, but they are all strangled, mutilated with a medical scalpel, and partially cannibalized. Tough stuff for a 1932 film, but this is pre-Code, baby. Meanwhile, a wisecracking, prank-loving reporter named Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy, one of the first of the hard-partying Hollywood bad boys according to IMDB) is tracking the case for his newspaper, and he discovers that the police strongly suspect a medical researcher from Dr. Xavier's academy since the scalpel used in the slayings is only available there. (What? They have their own trademarked scalpel? Is this a real thing?) Dr. X (Lionel Atwill), wanting to avoid negative publicity about his academy, convinces the police to give him 48 hours to conduct his own research and catch the killer from his staff of four weirdos. He takes the esteemed researchers/lunatics to his rural Long Island home/lab to find the guilty party, also taking along his eccentric servants and his lovely daughter Joanne (Fay Wray, giving a couple of her trademarked super-screams and looking fabulous the whole time). Lee is snooping around the premises, and he and Joanne begin a love/hate romance with plenty of snappy, sassy back-and-forth dialogue in the great '30s tradition. They both have great screwball comedy timing and chemistry.

All this wacky business is first-class entertainment and the early Technicolor looks great, but the fun is far from over. The film takes a deeply bizarre turn in its final third, which I will only spoil a tiny bit by telling you that a character ecstatically shouts the phrase "Synthetic skin!" repeatedly. There's almost a proto-Eraserhead vibe to some of these shots. No wonder the studio was less than enamored with Doctor X and had some cold feet about releasing it. Things worked out great for everybody, though, and the film was a big box office hit and a critical success, with a few exceptions. I especially love this line from Time magazine's mixed review: "[Doctor X] is intended for avid patrons of synthetic horror rather than for normal cinemaddicts." Gettin' weird, Time.

In a close call, the color print of the film was considered lost for many years. The studios ditched the expensive two-color Technicolor process as the Great Depression dragged on, and they discarded most of the negative color prints in the late '40s, keeping only the black-and-white versions in a stupidly shortsighted move. The black-and-white print was the only one circulating in television airings and revival screenings for years until a print was found in the personal home collection of Warner Brothers executive Jack Warner upon his death in 1978. The UCLA film archive got the nitrate print and transferred it to safety film for exhibition and home video. I recommend Doctor X for any fans of classic horror and '30s cinema in general. It's a hell of a lot of fun.  

Blood of Ghastly Horror (Al Adamson, 1972)

Blood of Ghastly Horror manages to pull off the insanely difficult feat of being uniquely strange and boring at the same time. I can't really recommend this film, but it's one of a kind, even though it's technically two of a kind. I'll explain. The bulk of this film uses footage from two previous Al Adamson movies, the first released in the mid-1960s as Psycho a Go-Go. That movie was a crime thriller about a jewel heist gone bad. When it didn't make much money, Adamson decided to retool it as a horror film, shooting some additional scenes about mad scientists and brain transplants and releasing it in the late 1960s as The Fiend with the Electronic Brain. In 1972, he decided to combine elements from both of those films and add some voodoo zombies and homicide detectives to the mix because why the hell not, and Blood of Ghastly Horror was born.
Needless to say, the transitions aren't seamless. The characters in the '70s horror portion of the movie frequently explain how this part of the action is connected to the previously released footage, the image gets wavy while they talk, and then we get a lengthy flashback sequence from Psycho a Go-Go and/or The Fiend with the Electronic Brain. In the case of the latter retooling, we even get flashbacks within flashbacks.The three parts of the film blend awkwardly, and it's a little too obvious that this nutty-ass movie is actually three nutty-ass movies Frankensteined together.

So, what the hell is this thing even about? I'll make an attempt at a broad synopsis. Joe Corey is a Vietnam vet who has been severely psychologically damaged by the war. His doctor, Howard Vanard, has been experimenting with electronic brain simulators that can replace damaged parts of the brain and allow the patient to function normally again. He experiments on Corey without his consent, and the brain transplantation goes wrong. The doc accidentally erases Corey's empathy and judgment, and Corey becomes a murderer, a thief, a member of a crime syndicate, and a creep to women. He's part of a big jewel heist and some messed-up stuff that results from the robbery. Meanwhile, Corey's dad, a scientist who spent time studying voodoo, vows revenge on everyone who hurt his son. He does this by kidnapping people and turning them into his zombie slaves. 
I salute and honor insane ideas like this, but the results are mostly less than intriguing. Adamson occasionally stumbles into a cool shot or a suspenseful scene, but the majority of the film is stiff and labored, and a chase in the mountains goes on for an interminable length of time. His framing of shots is extremely weird, and actors are, seemingly at random, sometimes shown in extreme closeup with only a quarter of their face in the frame and sometimes presented more conventionally. This is also a film where violence against men is dealt with quickly, but the camera lingers when women are the victims, with only a few exceptions.

The cast of mostly unknowns features two well-known actors on the downward slide of fame. John Carradine plays Dr. Vanard, and former Disney star Tommy Kirk is one of the homicide detectives. Behind the camera, though, was a major talent paying his dues early in his career. Legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shot the Psycho a Go-Go portion of the film, and he went on to a pretty amazing career that lasted until a few years before his death in 2016. After a decade of work in low-budget obscurities, Zsigmond was the cinematographer for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand, Images, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, Scarecrow, Cinderella Liberty, The Sugarland Express, Obsession, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, some of The Last Waltz, The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, Blow Out, Real Genius, The Witches of Eastwick, The Crossing Guard, and two seasons of The Mindy Project.