The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)

Karl Freund was one of the greatest cinematographers in the first half-century of film. His directorial career was smaller and less satisfying to him, but those directing credits include two classic horror movies, The Mummy and Mad Love. Freund, born in Austria-Hungary in 1890, started working in film at age 15 as a projectionist. He was the camera operator for newsreels by age 17 and worked his way up to cinematography jobs at German studio UFA by his twenties, working on some of the greatest classics of early German cinema. He had the good sense to get the hell out of Germany in 1929, emigrating to the United States and working as both a cinematographer and director in Hollywood in the '30s. He quit directing after 1935's Mad Love to focus exclusively on cinematography, his profession until his retirement in the early '60s. He died in 1969. Freund's cinematography credits include The Golem, Dreyer's Michael, Murnau's The Last Laugh and Tartuffe, Lang's Metropolis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Browning's Dracula, A Guy Named Joe, The Thin Man Goes Home, Huston's Key Largo, and the I Love Lucy TV show.

Freund directed two obscure silent films in Germany and several shorts, but The Mummy was his first film as director to reach a large audience. It's a dreamy, slow burn of a horror film, relying more on atmosphere, tension, and implied violence than shock, and Freund's experience as cinematographer makes it look beautiful (credit also to the actual cinematographer, Charles Stumar). Zita Johann, one of the stars of the film, did not get along with Freund and repeatedly said he was incompetent, but that supposed incompetence is nowhere to be seen onscreen. Instead, we get subtle, controlled performances, striking images, elegant camera movement, and a lean, fat-free running time and structure, and we get to see controlling, selfish males and white colonizers (mostly) get their comeuppance.

The Mummy begins in the early '20s in Egypt, with an expedition from the British Museum finding (i.e. stealing) a mummy, some pottery and other artifacts, and a mysterious gold box with an even more mysterious scroll inside. Despite a warning to leave the items alone from a friend who is a British doctor living in Egypt, the head of the expedition, Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron), and his impatient younger colleague, Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), press on with their research. Whemple is a level-headed fellow, but when he leaves the tent, Ralph reads the scroll. The mummy (Boris Karloff) comes alive, takes the scroll, and busts a move out of there, mummy-style, leaving Ralph a cackling madman.

The action picks up 10 years later with a fresh expedition, led by Whemple's milquetoast dweeb colonizer of a son, Frank (David Manners). He's bummed about not finding anything good, since his fellow Brits have plundered almost everything for the museum, when a strange Egyptian man named Ardath Bey (Karloff again) who looks suspiciously like everyone's favorite mummy from a decade ago shows up unexpectedly and tells them to dig in a certain spot. They find the tomb of the Princess Ankh-es-en-amon, but Bey has made a deal with the Cairo Museum, which gets to put the treasures on display locally, to the consternation of dumbass Frank, who thinks the British Museum should get it because of their inherent supremacy over the world's artifacts. Fuck this guy. He doesn't get enough comeuppance in this film.

Into the mix comes Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), a half-Egyptian woman living in Cairo. She's a descendant of Ankh-es-en-amon on her mother's side. Ardath Bey/Im-ho-tep has put a spell on her and wants to resurrect his old love, the Princess, through Helen. Meanwhile, for reasons no one will ever understand, the stylish, witty, sharp, and beautiful Helen and milquetoast dweeb Frank have fallen in love (keeping with the classic Hollywood tradition of great women characters falling in love with boring nerds). Also, Papa Whemple and his doctor pal have figured out Ardath Bey/our resurrected mummy's evil plans, and Bey has figured out that they have figured out his evil plans. This causes many complications.

I'll leave the rest for you to discover. It involves an evil white cat (who rules), magic rings, magic pools, creepy staring, psychosexual centuries-long love triangles, male entitlement, western entitlement, fireplace document switcheroos, death, pithy one-liners, incredible Karloff closeups, fuckin' Frank (that whiny dork), inappropriate handling of archival material, and freaky museum behavior. This is another one of those classic '30s horror films that influenced so much of what was to come, and though it's light on the jump scares and creepy thrills, it has tons of atmosphere and memorable images. I liked it a lot.   

Brain of Blood (Al Adamson, 1971)

I had pretty low hopes for Brain of Blood since the previous Al Adamson film I'd seen was a bit of a slog. That movie, Blood of Ghastly Horror, proved that it was possible to be insane and dull at the same time. I admired Adamson's bizarre determination in Blood of Ghastly Horror to create a third movie with a brand-new plot out of two of his previous films, a crime thriller from the early '60s and a mad scientist horror movie from the late '60s, with new footage shot in the early '70s awkwardly tying them together. It was weird, but it was also mostly boring.

Fortunately, Brain of Blood is far more entertaining and rarely drags. It's silly, goofy, and full of plot holes and odd character motivations, but it's really fun. It's also the only film distributed and financed by Eddie Romero's Filipino production company to be shot in the United States (Topanga Canyon, to be specific).

Brain of Blood begins with a dying man in a hospital bed. That man is Amir (Reed Hadley, in his last film role), the leader of fictional Middle Eastern country Kalid. Amir is apparently universally beloved by his country's citizens, but his terminal cancer must be kept a secret because his death would damage the country's morale to such an extent that Kalid would descend into chaos. Seems plausible. Fortunately, Amir's half-Kalid, half-American physician Bob (Grant Williams), his loyal Kalid aide Mohammed (Zandor Vorkov), and his impossibly tall-haired, chain-smoking American fiancee Tracy (Regina Carrol, director Adamson's wife) have an arrangement with disgraced but brilliant American surgeon Dr. Trenton (Kent Taylor).

Shortly before Amir's body dies, Bob gives him a serum that will perfectly preserve his brain for hours after death. His body is then secretly flown to the U.S., where Dr. Trenton will put Amir's brain in a healthy, younger body and give him some plastic surgery so he looks like his old self. Brain swap and facelift complete, Amir will return to Kalid and keep everything smooth and dandy. Sounds easy, right? Wrong, sucker. Many complications, double-crosses, and intrigues occur, some involving Dr. Trenton's two assistants, an evil dwarf named Dorro (Angelo Rossitto) and an extremely large, simple-minded man with an acid-scarred face named Gor (John Bloom), a mysterious basement with two chained-up women, a hired killer, a car chase, a rooftop fistfight, an explosion, an implanted brain chip activated by a brain-ray, and lots of chain-smoking.

An aside about Angelo Rossitto: His acting career spanned from the silent era to the Hollywood blockbusters of the late '80s. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1908, Rossitto moved from the circus and vaudeville to the big screen, appearing in over 70 roles while simultaneously owning a newsstand in Hollywood for a steady income. He was the mascot of roller derby team the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, and he co-founded the Little People of America organization. His roles include Seven Footprints to Satan, Freaks, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hellzapoppin', Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Trip, Dr. Dolittle, Alex in Wonderland, Can't Stop the Music, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind and episodes of The Fugitive, Gunsmoke, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., H.R. Pufnstuf, Kung Fu, Baretta, The Rockford Files, The Incredible Hulk, Simon & Simon, and Amazing Stories. He died in 1991.

Back to Brain of Blood: Adamson keeps everything relatively coherent and moving along, a minor miracle if you've seen Blood of Ghastly Horror, and the action sequences are surprisingly gripping. Something new and weird seems to happen every five minutes, and the moments of inexplicable dialogue and human behavior are pretty funny. No one is ever going to mistake Brain of Blood for a good movie, but it's got a whole lot of weirdness and charm. I enjoyed it.

Director Al Adamson's life came to a bizarre and untimely end in 1995. By many accounts, Adamson was a fun-loving guy who knew exactly what kind of movies he was making and was an unlikely candidate for a violent death. Adamson hired a general contractor named Fred Fulford to oversee an extensive remodeling of his home in 1994, and Fulford had been living on the property while doing the work. Adamson eventually suspected Fulford of stealing from him and confronted him about it. The argument became heated and Fulford lost his temper, striking Adamson with a large object and killing him. Panicking, Fulford had two of his employees remove Adamson's Jacuzzi. He then dumped the body in the hole, covered it with cement, and fled. He was captured a few weeks later. Fulford was found guilty in 1999.