The Monster Walks (Frank R. Strayer, 1932)

In a few recent posts, I've commented on the early 1930s being a golden age for the horror film. The Monster Walks is a horror film from the early 1930s, but no one is ever going to mistake it for being part of a golden age of anything. It is a cheap, clunky, stiff, visually unremarkable, lifelessly written product that is fortunately only about an hour long. It has some historical curiosity value, but its flaws are even more apparent when compared to contemporaries like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, and the list goes on.

Borrowing most of its plot from The Cat and the Canary, as well as the same actor, Martha Mattox, playing the slightly sinister housekeeper/caretaker, The Monster Walks begins after the death of Dr. Earlton, a medical researcher who lived with his invalid brother Robert, his housekeeper Emma "Tanty" Krug and her son Hanns, and an ape that was a former research subject turned pet. Dr. Earlton's daughter Ruth, her fiance Dr. Ted Clayton, and their driver Exodus (Willie Best, known in the early '30s as Sleep 'n' Eat, and a pioneering black actor, comedian, and musician who was mostly relegated to Stepin Fetchit-type roles that are pretty cringeworthy to sit through today) make it through a storm to arrive at the Earlton estate for the reading of the will by Dr. Earlton's lawyer Herbert Wilkes.

Long story short, Ruth inherits the bulk of the estate, secretly angering Robert, Tanty, and Hanns, and sinister shenanigans go on the rest of the night. Lives are threatened, lives are ended, ape arms appear in mysterious holes in walls, midnight violin playing occurs, the racism and sexism of white America is on full display, mysteries are solved, the damn ape is in its cage for the whole movie (no ape rampage, WTF?), and slightly more than an hour goes by. Ho hum.

Every character is dull as dirt except for the Krugs and Exodus, and Dr. Ted, our ostensible hero, is a patronizingly sexist ass to his fiancee (though she is soooo boring), an angry racist to Exodus, and a milquetoast dud to everyone else.

I don't have much to say about this movie. It ain't that great, and not much happens. Watch The Cat and the Canary instead. There's no ape, but there's so much more of everything else that makes a movie good.

The Brain (Ed Hunt, 1988)

I ended up on YouTube while searching the physical and/or streaming availability of The Brain, where, in addition to the two accounts that uploaded the entire film, there was a short clip. The clip's description used the words "incredibly cheesy" and "deranged." Having now seen The Brain, I don't have a clue which clip was used in the YouTube video, since "incredibly cheesy" and "deranged" apply to roughly 97 percent of the film. Even when the filmmakers run out of ideas in the last thirty minutes and start padding the running time and reusing shots, they create the world's most hilariously boring car chase, involving sensible speeds and two of the least emotive state troopers in cinema history.

The Brain is weird as hell, even when it's trying to be normal. Everything in this movie is nuts, including the placement of newspaper kiosks. None of the characters do anything that makes logical sense, the plot holes are large enough to swallow small countries whole, there seems to be one policeman in the entire city, the monster is of indeterminate and fluctuating size, and the enormous mental health research facility/television studio/psychology practice has only one orderly. I am not the kind of man who sees any of this as a negative. The Brain is an insanely stupid movie, but it's got style, humor, moxie, multiple decapitations, teenage shenanigans, surprisingly decent special effects, Re-Animator's David Gale, a top-notch exasperated hair flip, and the Toronto suburbs standing in for an American small town.

The Brain takes place in a seemingly average '80s town, but this town is also headquarters for a large, sinister compound housing the aforementioned practice, research facility, and TV studio of famous psychologist Dr. Anthony Blakely (Gale), who specializes in troubled teens. Blakely hosts the popular local show Independent Thinking, which is about to go national, writes books, and treats patients, but this is all a front for his real work. The research facility portion of the compound is home to a giant monster brain that plans world domination. Blakely is the monster brain's facilitator and human face. (Or is he human?) His TV show brainwashes the viewer into following the brain's instructions, which can include murder and extreme hallucinations. Wait until this shit goes national, and then global.

For reasons never explained, the brain eventually grows a face with teeth and sometimes eats people. Assisting Blakely's assistance of the brain is evil orderly Verna (George Buza) and research assistant Janet (Cynthia Preston). Janet is there mostly just to take off her top and get munched by the brain.

Things get complicated when teenage bad boy Jim Majelewski (Tom Bresnahan) gets in trouble at his high school for messing up the plumbing with a sodium bomb. The principal, or maybe the counselor, who knows, convinces Jim's parents to send him to Dr. Blakely's practice or the school won't let him graduate. Jim reluctantly agrees but pulls off a classic super glue prank on the way out. You're incorrigible, Majelewski!

Things heat up when Jim and Dr. Blakely cross paths. Will this teenage bad boy turn into the hero we need? Will Jim's girlfriend Vivian go all the way or will she make him wait until they're in college? Will we ever figure out how big the brain actually is? Will we find out how Jim cuts his own handcuffs off later in the film? Will Independent Thinking go nationwide? Will there be more sodium-related incidents? Will the cheerleaders ever get those burgers and fries they ordered? Some of these questions will be answered.

One of the many terrible things about the present is that nobody makes movies like The Brain anymore. Not that there are any other movies like The Brain, but you know what I mean.

Bloodthirsty Butchers (Andy Milligan, 1970)

Andy Milligan films are their own weird trip. They don't look, move, or operate like the movies made by other human beings. They exist in their own weird space, hovering near amateurism, genius, insanity, boredom, exploitation, deeply felt emotion, misanthropic distance, absurdity, cliche, romantic yearning, intentional and unintentional comedy, and hackwork without putting a foot anywhere solid. He's the cinematic equivalent of the Four Corners Monument, permanently in multiple states.

Bloodthirsty Butchers is Milligan's terminally strange take on the Sweeney Todd story, filmed during his prolific London period. You know the gist of what happens if you're familiar with Sweeney Todd, but the way it happens is something else entirely. Milligan's shot compositions are extraordinarily odd and could be misinterpreted as incompetent or inexperienced, but he has an honest, disruptive aesthetic meant to disorient the viewer. He deliberately flips conventions, keeping speaking characters offscreen while focusing on the person listening, composing his shots so the rule of thirds is almost always violated, pointing the camera at the backs of people's heads, abruptly cutting to a quiet scene in the middle of intense action, framing his actors so part of their faces are cut off, cutting to an angle from the opposite side of the room just when you're getting your visual bearings.

Milligan's framing of the action and elliptical editing appear to be asking his audience, "Is this what you really want, you weirdos? Why are you trying to enjoy this?" Sound quality is inconsistent as well, with some dialogue crystal-clear and other lines blown out or muffled. This is less distracting in a Milligan film than it would be in your average Hollywood product. 

Blood and The Body Beneath, the other two Milligan films I've seen, were a bit more fun and dragged a little less, but that's almost beside the point in the Milliganverse. Rules, expectations, and conventional aesthetics must be discarded, and, besides, Bloodthirsty Butchers is not without its pleasures, especially its campy gore, oddball dialogue, freeze-frame prank ending, and general good-natured misanthropy. 

I don't know how many more ways I can say that Andy Milligan films only look like Andy Milligan films and that you need to see at least one if you're interested in independent, horror, queer, protopunk, cult, and/or '70s cinema. I've been working long, crazy hours lately, and I'm tired, so I will bid you adieu until next week. I don't know if this review made any sense.