Unheimliche Geschichten (Richard Oswald, 1932)

Happy soon-to-be Halloween. Our Halloween week movie this year is an obscure German horror film from Richard Oswald, director of the extremely odd mandrake root supernatural drama Alraune (previously reviewed on this site). Unheimliche Geschichten, also released under the titles The Living Dead, Eerie Tales, A Mysterious Affair, Unholy Tales, Tales of the Uncanny, and, strangely, Five Sinister Stories (I thought Germans were good at math), is a creepy, funny, and very weird adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories ("The Black Cat" and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether") and the Robert Louis Stevenson story "The Suicide Club." Instead of presenting these short stories separately, the script by director Oswald, Heinz Goldberg, and Jeno Szatmari turns them into episodic events in a single narrative happening to two main characters, the mad scientist Morder (Paul Wegener, co-director and star of The Golem) and the journalist/newspaper editor determined to bring him down while writing the front page version, Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen).

Intended by director Oswald as an affectionate parody of German Expressionism, Unheimliche Geschichten is not a silly horror-comedy, instead preferring its humor dark and twisted. At less than 90 minutes, the pacing is brisk, yet the stories don't feel rushed (though I wouldn't have minded a bit more of "The Black Cat"). Oswald is a visually imaginative filmmaker, and his sets sometimes look like doll's-house miniatures, but his visceral approach to character and action keeps the frame from being overly fussy. This is a wild, good-looking movie.

The film begins with Briggs and his fiancee, an actress, driving hurriedly to the theater so she can make her curtain call. He hears a woman screaming from a nearby home and tells his fiancee to go on without him. There might be a front-page story here (a running gag throughout the movie is Briggs getting himself into dangerous situations to get a story, which as editor he always puts on the front page, even snatching a story away from another journalist on his staff). What Briggs overheard was the events in the Poe tale "The Black Cat." Mad scientist Morder murders his wife in a rage after her black cat knocks over one of his experiments.

Long story short, Morder escapes the clutches of the police and Briggs, who gives chase on his own. Morder and our intrepid journalist end up fighting it out in a bizarro wax museum with motorized exhibits before they both end up in an insane asylum, where the events of the other Poe story take place. Morder escapes again. The final third takes place five years later, where a hot tip from a reader leads Briggs to a mysterious house with no doors where our fugitive Morder is running the suicide club from the Stevenson story. A dark and twisted final showdown begins. As you can see, a whole lot of stuff happens in this movie in a compressed period of time. Oswald keeps it exciting, spooky, funny, and weird. (By the way, Paulsen as Briggs has one of the loudest, fullest yells of any actor I've ever heard, and his many yelling moments in this film get funnier and funnier.)

As enjoyable as the film is, its stories of hidden evil coincided with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the lives of the filmmakers and actors were about to change drastically. Director Oswald, a Jewish man, fled Germany for the United States in 1938, moving back after the war after failing to land much Hollywood work. Paul Wegener, though most famous for Jewish horror film The Golem, was not Jewish and became a favorite actor of the Nazi regime. He remained in Germany and acted in many Nazi propaganda films and stage productions, though he secretly funneled much of his salary to the resistance and helped hide Jewish friends. After the war, he put much effort into charities that helped poor Berliners but died from heart problems in 1948. Actress Maria Koppenhofer (who memorably plays a singing insane asylum patient) stayed in Germany and was also a popular actress with the Nazis. Koppenhofer's ex-husband was Jewish, and she spent much of her earnings throughout the war hiding her daughter in the countryside.

Harald Paulsen, a dancer-turned-actor and co-lead of this film as journalist Briggs, had a considerably more dishonorable trajectory. Lotte Lenya was quoted as saying that Paulsen "was vain, even for an actor." More devoted to his successful stage and screen career than any conscience he may have had, Paulsen acted in some of the most virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda films throughout the '30s and '40s and shamefully continued to star in popular German films well into the '50s. 

Brothers in Arms (George Jay Bloom III, 1988)

A solid entry in the post-Deliverance murderous hillbillies in the woods vs. city boys sub-genre, Brothers in Arms sees a charismatic religious fanatic who left society for the mountains of Wyoming and his four crazed hillbilly "sons" attempt to murder UK rockers Dire Straits. Sorry, I meant local hunting guide Dallas (Charles Grant) and his younger brother, big city banker Joey (Todd Allen), not Dire Straits. (Variations on this dad joke will continue throughout the review, for which I refuse to apologize.) By the way, we find out that Dallas and Joey grew up in Houston. His name is Dallas, and he grew up in Houston. That's like living in Lubbock and naming your kid El Paso. Also, Charles Grant, the actor who plays Dallas, was a regular on the TV show Dallas. You can't make this stuff up. I used the word Dallas so much in this opening paragraph that the word now looks strange to me. Dallas.
Brothers in Arms begins with local hunting guide (and Dallas' best friend and business partner) Cody (Shannon Norfleet) running afoul of the religious fanatic and his creepy sons in the mountains and getting crucified. Cody's disappearance is bad news both professionally and personally for Dallas, who has searched the mountains for him in vain. He invites his estranged brother Joey to Wyoming for a mountain hunting vacation to begin the healing and to bring Joey in as an investor in the business. Dallas also has an ulterior motive. He suspects foul play in Cody's disappearance and wants to go deeper into the mountains than he's ever gone to find the truth, and, if necessary, seek revenge. Dallas, an ultra-macho man in the Rambo vein, doesn't tell Joey, who is much less toxic in his masculinity, this part of the plan. To Joey, this trip is a walk of life. To Dallas, it may be a walk of death.

The brothers start to forget old wounds and bond again when Joey takes a spill down the mountain in the middle of doing his Elvis impression, cutting his knee. While he hangs back at the tent to dress his minor wound, Dallas decides to hunt them up some dinner. When Joey hears some rustling in the woods, he tackles what he thinks is his brother, but turns out to be Stevie (Dedee Pfeiffer, sister of Michelle, though she's probably sick of being referred to that way). Before he can apologize for his blunder, two creepy hillbilly sons begin terrorizing them. They kidnapped Stevie a month ago, but she escaped. The hillbillies attempt to rape both Stevie and Joey and then try to force Joey to rape Stevie (really not into this scene), but Dallas shows up in the nick of time, killing one of the creeps in self-defense. He's blocked by Joey from murdering the other creep in cold blood. That creep gets away, and human hunting season begins.
Patriarch of the mountain weirdos, Father (Jack Starrett, director of such B-movie classics as Cleopatra Jones and Race with the Devil), rounds up his surviving creepy sons (including Mitch Pileggi, regular on The X-Files and Sons of Anarchy, as Caleb) to get revenge on the brothers and get Stevie back so they can continue the family line. Turns out, having an all-male creep camp in the mountains is not a sustainable plan for creating future generations. Father, a former federal agent who left society to live out his weird fundamentalist Christian-revenge murder philosophy in the mountains, considers his cabin Eden and any stranger to these parts an enemy against God (Stevie was kidnapped in town from a parking lot for procreation purposes). In his neck of the woods, you get your religion for nothing and your murder for free. 

Though this movie has a generically Hollywood and specifically 1980s all-things-to-all-people philosophical incoherence (it condemns toxic masculinity while celebrating the lone-wolf badass, it depicts the horror of rape while also dragging out its two near-rape scenes for the creepers in the audience, it's both anti- and pro-violent revenge, and it celebrates rugged self-reliance while acknowledging that people need to work together to make any progress), it's a pretty decent little horror/thriller. The actors are all solid, the pace never drags, the mountain creeps are mountain creepy, the jokes are reasonably funny, a Reaganite/proto-Trumpist blowhard gets some excellent comeuppance, and the suspense is skillfully drawn out. As a Deliverance ripoff, it's a solid B.
Brothers in Arms is George Jay Bloom III's only feature film credit as director, and it's hardly a visual marvel. The film looks like a competent '80s TV movie, but at least you won't be annoyed by someone trying to be arty who has no sensibility for it. Bloom has a small but very eccentric list of showbiz credits. Besides this film, he directed an episode of the short-lived MTV series New Monkees (and was an assistant director on another episode), a straight-to-VHS comedic short film starring Dick Van Patten called Dirty Tennis, a TV special about the Three Stooges hosted by Leslie Nielsen, and a Stranger Things VR video game. He was also the visual effects supervisor on a miniseries about Pope John Paul II.