The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Poverty Row director Edgar G. Ulmer's only major Hollywood studio production (he was blacklisted from the big leagues shortly afterward for having an affair with a woman who was married to the nephew of Universal kingpin Carl Laemmle), The Black Cat is one of the all-time horror classics and one of the strangest films to be a massive box office hit. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen many years ago during one of the Paramount Theatre's summer classic film series in Austin, TX, and I loved it just as much on the small screen last night.

The film's enduring cult status (it has been embraced by queer audiences in recent years) can be attributed to the high quality of work from its many talented contributors and its knack for functioning as both a darkly humorous piece of camp and a creepy tale of simmering dread. Ulmer received belated recognition as a major filmmaker from critics and scholars beginning in the late '50s, but recognition or not and decent budget or not, he knew how to make a good movie. In The Black Cat, he had the full resources of a Hollywood studio behind him, and rather than getting swallowed up by the machine, he bent it toward his own personal vision.

The film's stars are Boris Karloff (credited only as "Karloff" here, suitable for his character's diva status) and Bela Lugosi at the top of their games playing characters that work both with and against type, in their first pairing. The gorgeous black and white cinematography comes from John J. Mescall, who would go on to shoot The Bride of Frankenstein the following year. Screenwriter Peter Ruric was a pulp novelist who led a wild and tragic pulp-novel-esque personal life of his own. His screenplay has the economy, atmosphere, action, and unpredictable weirdness of the best pulp fiction (the Edgar Allan Poe source material that loosely inspired the film is barely used; Poe is surely the writer to have the most screen adaptations that have the least to do with his work). The incredible Gothic meets Art Deco studio sets and the characters' costumes were designed and overseen by director Ulmer in tribute to German architect Hans Poelzig. Additional tribute was paid by Karloff's character's name, Hjalmar Poelzig.

The film begins with relatively milquetoast newlyweds Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners and Julie Bishop) on a train in Hungary, celebrating their honeymoon. Their private compartment has accidentally been double-booked, and they are joined on the last leg of their trip by Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), a polite but intense man who says he's on his way to visit an old friend, though the way he says it makes you picture the world's largest air quotes around "friend." Werdegast is a WWI veteran who has recently been released from a prison camp in Siberia, so his intensity is somewhat understandable. 

The Alisons share a coach with Vitus and his deeply weird servant Thamal (Harry Cording) once their train reaches its destination, but when the coach wrecks in heavy rain and Joan suffers a minor injury, Vitus and Thamal take the Alisons to the Gothic/Art Deco mansion of the mysterious "friend" to recuperate. They are met at the door by another deeply weird servant, The Majordomo (Egon Brecher), and eventually meet the weirdest dude in the whole damn movie, famous architect and designer/owner of the weird house, Poelzig (Karloff).

Poelzig, also a WWI vet, was responsible for Vitus's Siberian imprisonment and may be responsible for kidnapping the man's wife and daughter. Vitus has been tracking Poelzig's movements around the world for the last few years and has finally caught up with him for hangouts and revenge. The two men seem to get off on their rivalry and are fascinated and amused by each other with an almost sexual fervor despite their mutual loathing. Add Poelzig's proto-goth/glam androgynous style, his interest in women as aesthetic objects to be preserved and collected rather than pursued romantically, and Vitus's mortal fear of cats ("afraid of pussy"), and the latter two character traits as examples of crypto-misogny signifying closeted homosexuality in early Hollywood films (I stole the last few examples from academic essays I skimmed online), and you can see how the film has been interpreted through a queer lens in recent years.

In the course of an always compelling 65-minute running time, Poelzig attempts to keep the Alisons trapped in his house so he can use Joan in a Satanic ritual and then add her to his collection, Vitus attempts to execute his elaborate revenge plan, Vitus and Poelzig play chess, many nooks and crannies of the amazing house are explored, and much excellent dialogue and many great facial expressions ensue. I particularly enjoy a bit of dialogue (especially Lugosi's delivery) when Poelzig and Vitus attempt to explain to Peter the reasons for Vitus's extreme cat phobia:

Peter: That sounds like superstitious baloney to me.

Vitus (very seriously and intensely): Superstitious? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not. 

Ulmer's films have a real sense of movement, atmosphere, and location and are full of memorable shots. The Black Cat is one of his best.

Despite getting the boot from Hollywood so soon because of his extra-marital shenanigans with the relatives of powerful people, Ulmer kept working, making some of the most exciting low-budget B-movies of the '30s and '40s in a variety of genres, and, immediately following his Hollywood blacklist, a string of independent Yiddish-language musicals, comedies, and melodramas for Jewish immigrant audiences. My Ulmer recommendations besides The Black Cat: Yiddish musical The Singing Blacksmith, noir classic Detour, offbeat period piece melodrama The Strange Woman, rags-to-riches noir/melodrama hybrid Ruthless (Ulmer's Citizen Kane), sci-fi freakout The Man from Planet X, and, if you can deal with the racist but then-prevalent industry practice of casting white people as Mexicans, the melancholy western The Naked Dawn.

Cannibal Hookers (Donald Farmer, 1987)

Last night, I put on some stylish yet casual evening wear, poured a glass of red wine, stoked the fireplace, settled in to my favorite chair, and watched Cannibal Hookers. (Full disclosure: the wine was boxed, I do not have a fireplace, and my evening wear was not stylish.) Cannibal Hookers is either the first or second feature-length cinematic masterpiece (depending on whether the 54-minute Demon Queen counts as a feature) from low-budget L.A. horror auteur Donald Farmer. Farmer is still at it, and his most recent release is a 2019 remake of Cannibal Hookers. He was preparing to shoot Debbie Does Demons when the pandemic hit. 

This was my first exposure to the singular, demented world of Farmer, and I enjoyed the ride, even the parts that made little to no sense (those parts make up most of the running time). Cannibal Hookers is the timeless story of a coven of cannibalistic sex workers who live in a run-down, mostly empty castle-mansion on the outskirts of Hollywood with a dimwitted, cannibalistic brute named Lobo (Gary J. Levinson). Lobo does the heavy lifting and chores and all the crap the hookers don't want to do while they pick up johns and bring them back to the weird mansion and drink their blood and eat their hearts and fingers and various other body parts, with Lobo getting the leftovers.

Meanwhile, a couple of college girls who are ready to party, Hilary (Amy Waddell) and Deedee (Annette Munro), are pledging Los Angeles' most notorious sorority, Zama Gata Bata (yes, that's how they spell it), which, because of the film's budget, appears to have only one existing member, Stephanie (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling's Sheila Best). For some reason, Hilary and Deedee think joining this sorority with one member is their only chance to party even though they live in Los Angeles. Hilary also has to contend with her anti-sorority mother (Hack-O-Lantern's Katina Garner), who calls the sorority the sleaziest organization in the city and who urges Hilary to hang out with the classy rich people at the country club they are exclusive members of instead. This dialogue is a bit weird, because Hilary and her mother live in a modest, working-class apartment, but I did enjoy Hilary's response to her mother: "I don't want to hang out with assholes, Mom."

For the sorority initiation, Hilary and Deedee have to pretend to be hookers for one night on Sunset Boulevard, pick up one john each, and take the men to an address Stephanie gives them. Unbeknownst to the pledges, the address is the location of the cannibal hookers' weird-ass mansion, which Stephanie sends them to because she thinks it's one of your standard, non-cannibal houses of ill repute. Hilary and Deedee also have to avoid Hilary's boyfriend of one week, Bruce (Tommy Carrano) and his boys Darrell (Donald Trimborn) and Dwight (Matt Borlenghi), or Hilary will have to explain that they can't go out on Saturday night because she has to be a hooker for a day. Bruce and the bros are, due to budgetary reasons, the only members of their frat. Something tells me everyone is going to cross paths before this crazy damn weekend is over.

My description of the plot has done a disservice to the magic and wonder inherent in Donald Farmer's signature writing and directing style. The movie is shot on what looks like an expensive camcorder, the acting is some of the worst you will ever see (though absolutely charming in its terribleness), the narrative follows its own weird rhythm, the whole thing plays like a porn film with the sex scenes removed (and was in fact distributed on video by an adult film company), one of the closing scenes is repeated twice for what appears to be a technical error that was simply left in the finished product, and so many narrative loose ends are left hanging by the comically abrupt ending. We also never quite understand whether the cannibal hookers are Satanists, vampires, zombies, or run-of-the-mill cannibals, or whether the whole thing is caused by a virus. There is a lot of evidence supporting and disproving every scenario.

This movie is an inept blast, a fascinating time capsule of a sliver of 1987 Los Angeles life, and a goldmine of hilarious dialogue. (For example: two detectives are staking out the city's nightlife to try to catch the cannibal killers, and the dumb cop says, after seeing some ladies of the night: "Why are they dressed like that? Must be the new fashions." Exasperated cop says: "They're hookers, you dick!")

As I mentioned earlier, Farmer is still making movies. Born in 1956 in the small city of Pittsburg, Kansas, Farmer has been cranking out the zero-budget horror in Los Angeles since the '80s. Some of his other titles include Scream Dream (the story of a witch who gets fired from the rock band she's in, so she puts a curse on her replacement), Vampire Cop, Space Kid, An Erotic Vampire in Paris, Dorm of the Dead, and Shark Exorcist (the story of a demonic nun who talks the devil into possessing a great white shark). God bless this man.

Cathy's Curse (Eddy Matalon, 1977)

Oh hell yeah. Cathy's Curse is a big, fat slice of '70s Canadian weirdness that cannot be denied. Or understood. I don't know if this is a good film or a bad one, if it makes sense or if it doesn't, if anyone in it can act or if they can't. None of this matters. Cathy's Curse exists in its own weird universe. It makes its own rules. It breaks its own rules. In a titanically shitty week (my cat Fern died, my depression came roaring back, all the other terrible things that have been happening kept happening, etc.), this movie was just what I needed to take me out of Earth One and place me in Earth Two (the alternate universe where I can only assume this film was written, filmed, and released before finding some kind of doorway into our timeline and also existing here).

Cathy's Curse was the first of two Canadian horror films from director and co-writer Eddy Matalon, a Frenchman who, like many fellow directors of bonkers cult horror movies, has had a pretty unique career. Matalon made his feature debut in France with The Mad Dog, a 1966 crime thriller. He spent several years after that making music videos for Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot and then directed another crime thriller starring Jane Birkin. I'm not entirely sure what was going on in Matalon's life or career that caused his abrupt swerve into adult films, but he spent the next several years making French porn under the name Jack Angel. After his porn phase, he went to Montreal and made Cathy's Curse. The following year, he made his second Canadian horror film (though it was set in New York City), Blackout, co-produced by Ivan Reitman. He moved back to France after his Canadian horror years and made another crime thriller, two comedies, and a crime thriller/comedy hybrid, the France/Canada/UK co-production Sweet Killing, with F. Murray Abraham, Leslie Hope, and Michael Ironside. He's still alive but hasn't made a film since 1993.

Cathy's Curse begins with a mustachioed man driving frantically to his large Montreal home and rushing up the stairs to berate his young daughter about where his wife has gone. The daughter, holding a weird doll, tells her dad and his mustache that his wife has left him and taken their son with her. What is the daughter, chopped liver? Or maybe she's evil and that's why Mom skedaddled with her brother and not her? Like many other questions raised by Cathy's Curse, there will be no answer. (Frankly, I kinda like having nothing explained by a horror movie. It always takes me out of the movie when a character is like, "This amulet is cursed and must be brought to your mother's grave at midnight on November 12th, struck by lightning, and buried, or all your neighbors will become zombies." Leave me a little mystery, people.) Pops gets furious, tells his daughter that her mom is an evil bitch like all women, and yanks her into the car to go chase after mom and brother. A white rabbit runs into the road, Dad swerves and wrecks the car, the whole damn car bursts into flames, and Dad and daughter die. People, this shit happens before the opening credits even roll.

Many years later, the brother is grown up with a family of his own and has inherited the house, though he hasn't stepped inside it since his mother yanked him out of it, oh, so many years ago. We never hear anything else about the mother, why she left, why she didn't take his sister, if she's alive or dead. Not a damn thing. Anyway, the brother, George Gimble (Alan Scarfe) and his wife Vivian (Beverly Murray) and daughter Cathy (Randi Allen) decide to make a fresh start and move into the house after some family trauma. Vivian has been in a mental institution after delivering a stillborn baby and having a nervous breakdown, and she's still in a pretty fragile state. There's some awkward exposition explaining all this. Anyway, George introduces his family to the housekeeper Mary (Dorothy Davis) and the alcoholic handyman Paul (Roy Witham) who are still taking care of the house and who both live nearby, and he also gets overly excited about the figurine of a nude woman that's still in the house. "My first love," George exclaims. There's also a weirdo elderly medium who lives in the neighborhood (Mary Morter), who drops by frequently.

Cathy is the same age as George's sister when she died, and she finds the sister's old creepy doll when she explores the attic. The sister has already been sending Cathy some psychic messages and guiding her to move the bed sheets with her mind before Cathy even steps foot in the house, but now that she has the doll, shit can stop being polite and start getting real. The movie can never decide if the sister is inhabiting a killer doll, possessing Cathy, or haunting the entire house, and I, for one, do not give a damn. We get a little of columns A, B, and C, and we get it in ways that are a hell of a lot weirder than any of your average killer doll, possession, and haunted house movies.

The rest of the movie boils down to much weird shit happening in a big, old Gothic house with some classic '70s wallpaper. Both Scarfe and Murray share extremely strange approaches to inhabiting their characters, but these approaches are wildly different from each other. Scarfe gives George the Jon Lovitz SNL "Acting!" approach, while Murray seems to be channeling her line readings from some source in the Great Beyond that has never seen a single movie, TV show, or play. Randi Allen, in her only film role, is fantastic as Cathy, though, and she really hooks into the creepy, sadistic behavior forced upon her by her aunt's spirit. She seems like she's having a blast playing evil, and any child who revels in performing demonic characters is a child who has been raised right.

Matalon has a great, unconventional eye and ear for set decoration, eye-popping images, light, performance, and sound design, though his narrative structure, overseeing of editing choices, direction of actors, and storytelling are mighty unorthodox. It's a good-looking movie, but it's also weirdly amateurish and/or just plain odd in certain moments. I find this mixture of sense and nonsense, form and chaos, pretty endearing and exciting to watch. It's the kind of movie where you don't find out what George does for a living until the final third, where the parents let a lecherous, elderly drunk babysit their daughter, where no explanations for any of the supernatural occurrences are ever offered, where Cathy sometimes makes characters hallucinate rotting food, rats, snakes, and tarantulas for no apparent reason, where a detective investigates a suspicious death and tests out some theories that seem like they're setting the stage for later scenes but who then promptly disappears from the rest of the movie. I really think more movies should be this nuts. The world makes no sense. Why should art and entertainment?

You can find Cathy's Curse streaming and on Blu-ray in a really nice-looking print, and I recommend you check it out if you enjoy horror, Canada, the 1970s, incomprehensible weirdness, bizarre acting choices, genuine creepiness, some laughs, or a combination of any of these things. It's Cathy's world, we're just visiting.

The Vampire Bat (Frank R. Strayer, 1933)

Trump lost! Fuck yeah! And now, The Vampire Bat.

I wrote about another Frank Strayer movie on this site a few years ago, the unremarkable and relatively dull The Monster Walks, which was a rare early '30s pre-Code horror snooze. The Vampire Bat is just as creaky and visually clumsy (except for a few poetic shots), but it's a lot more fun. Part of that fun can be attributed to its weirdly complicated story and short running time, but most of what makes The Vampire Bat so enjoyable is its stacked cast of character actor greats. They add a lot of juice to the proceedings and keep things lively.

In the current century, most Hollywood movies are two-and-a-half to three hours long and often part of a trilogy or universe or series of trilogies, but the stories just seem to be that old "let's get the gang back together and save the universe" jive, over and over again. Pre-Code Hollywood movies, on the other hand, often have deliriously complicated plots while getting the job done in 60-90 minutes. We live in remarkably unimaginative times for mainstream art and entertainment even as the universe hurls insanity at the human race like the mean kids in PE hurling a dodgeball. Early '30s Hollywood was crazier and more imaginative, yet also more compact and efficient. I would love to see a return to lean, mean, 60-90-minute genre films with wild stories and great character roles in Hollywood if and when the pandemic ends. Anyway ...

The Vampire Bat is set in a small German village and was filmed on the leftover sets from a couple of James Whale masterpieces (the exteriors of Frankenstein and the interiors of The Old Dark House), which was a cheap way to make this low-budget film look like an expensive production. Strayer also snagged some top-flight actors who were between scheduled projects and available for a quick shoot, including Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, who had appeared together in Doctor X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum, both of which I've written about on this site.

The film begins with a spooky nighttime walk sequence featuring several bats (this village is full of bats), followed by a late-night meeting of concerned village fathers. Someone or something is murdering the villagers and draining their blood. The burgermeister and his cronies think it's probably a werewolf, a vampire, or maybe just a vampire bat. The skeptical police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) says (I'm paraphrasing here) vampire bats are not indigenous to Germany and vampires and werewolves are not real, you old dumb bastards. He thinks the village is dealing with a psycho killer. Meanwhile, a mentally damaged young man, Herman Gleib (Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in Browning's Dracula and also appeared in both of James Whale's Frankenstein movies), wanders the village at night, has been seen with many of the murder victims prior to their deaths, and loves to keep a menagerie of bats as pets. That's enough evidence for the burgermeister and his pals to condemn the guy as a vampire. 

Inspector Karl is dating Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray), a lab assistant to the village doctor/scientist Otto Von Niemann (Lionel Atwill), and she lives in Otto's castle with her hypochondriac aunt Gussie Schnappmann (Maude Eburne) and a housekeeper and servant. As the murders keep stacking up, Karl consults with Otto on the case and hesitantly comes around to the possibility that vampires are real. Some twists and turns follow, things eventually get wrapped up, and a couple of nonsensical plot strands remain untied. There is also a mysterious scientific experiment that becomes important a little past the halfway point, which dials up the already potent weirdness. 

Strayer is too awkward a visual stylist for The Vampire Bat to be one of my favorite '30s horror films, but the chance to see Melvyn Douglas, Dwight Frye, Fay Wray, and Lionel Atwill together is a blast, though Wray's character is a little subdued here. I'd like to see what James Whale or Tod Browning would have done with the material. Nevertheless, The Vampire Bat is a solid 65 minutes of horror fun. 

Trump will not be president in a few months! Huzzah! 

Cameron's Closet (Armand Mastroianni, 1988)

Cameron's Closet, a decent little horror-fantasy with good performances and an unusual story, has an odd tone that may have kept it in obscurity. The movie at its heart is family-friendly horror, one of those gateway PG or PG-13 horror films suitable for, and about, kids but with enough menace and bite to please the grownups. However, Cameron's Closet goes full-on R-rated splatter horror with the death sequences, and the movie is full of decapitations, burning out of eyeballs, slashings, and deliberate falls from great heights. This weird mixture of a movie may be a little soft for hardcore horror freaks and too intense for kids, but I think it's worth checking out, and the strong cast sells the mystical hokum while grounding the rest of the story in believable human behavior.

I was a little worried in the opening moments, when Scott Curtis as Cameron speaks in that kind of stilted, overly cutesy child actor voice that makes most child actors so hard to watch, but he turns in a naturalistic, real-kid performance in the rest of the movie. That opening scene, narrated by Cameron's father Owen Lansing (Tab Hunter), lets us know right away that Cameron has telekinetic abilities and psychic premonitions and can manifest things with his mind. Owen is a scientist studying that kind of thing with his colleague, professor Ben Majors (Chuck McCann). The research seems to be going great until we enter the present moment. Cameron is at his home, playing with his toys in his large bedroom closet, but Owen is downstairs, looking sweaty and nervous. He calls Ben, who is also sweaty and nervous (and drunk and wearing an extremely lived-in bathrobe). Ben tells him to destroy the research, do that thing they talked about doing, and then leave him alone forever. As Owen pulls out a huge cleaver and goes to his son's bedroom, that thing they talked about doing becomes horribly clear. As usual with Ben and Owen, though, making plans and carrying them out successfully are two very different things.

As a result of events I won't spoil, Cameron is sent to live with his mother, the loving but sometimes irresponsible Dory (Kim Lankford). Unfortunately for Cameron, Dory's dipshit, freeloading, wannabe actor boyfriend Bob (Gary Hudson) has also moved in with Dory. Bob sucks, and he and Cameron constantly butt heads. Cameron has another large bedroom closet at Dory's place, and whatever weirdness was happening in the closet at his dad's home has followed him to his mother's. Things come to a head with Bob in ways I also won't spoil, and two people enter Cameron's life who become surrogate parental figures for the troubled, scared little boy: detective Sam Talliaferro (Cotter Smith, who I eventually recognized as a cast member from two of my favorite recent TV shows, Mindhunter and The Americans; his dark black hair in this earlier role threw me off at first) and psychologist Nora Haley (Thirtysomething's Mel Harris). Most of these characters come together to help Cameron, who has inadvertently caused all this crazy drama by accidentally summoning a demon. Oh shiiiiiiit! 

That demon has been designed by Carlo Rambaldi, the late special effects artist and creature designer whose credits include E.T., the sex monster in Zulawski's Possession, several Bava and Argento movies, Paul Morrissey's Dracula and Frankenstein movies for Warhol, the '76 King Kong, Alien (assisting Giger with the design of the creature's head), Conan the Destroyer, and David Lynch's Dune. He's clearly working with a much smaller budget on Cameron's Closet, and the demon is less impressive than the aforementioned creations, but he makes it work as the kind of thing a kid would dream up based on an idol in his father's possession. 

Director Armand Mastroianni (no relation to Marcello) directed several horror movies and horror TV shows in the '80s before focusing almost exclusively on television since the early '90s (with the exception of, uh, The Celestine Prophecy, the 2006 movie adaptation of the bestseller that annoying people used to tell you to read before they all got Da Vinci Code fever). His first film, the 1980 slasher He Knows You're Alone, was also the first film for Tom Hanks. His TV credits include Tales from the Darkside, Friday the 13th: The Series, Nightmare Cafe, and, uh, Touched by an Angel, and a couple dozen TV movies and miniseries. 

Cameron's Closet has more of a mainstream late '80s-early '90s TV look than a cinematic feel, but Mastroianni grabs the occasional striking image and paces the film well. The characters feel like real people, which may have something to do with the screenwriter Gary Brandner adapting his own novel and has a lot to do with actors like Smith and Harris who know how to avoid overplaying their parts. My wife made the excellent points that the Dory character got to retain her human flaws of drinking too much, being a little irresponsible, and having shitty taste in boyfriends while also being portrayed as a loving mother who comes through when it counts without being punished or blamed by the filmmakers for those flaws. The character of Nora also retains her professionalism and competence throughout, and though there is a mutual attraction between her and Sam, Nora never compromises her position as Sam's psychologist by acting on those feelings, even though most movies with a psychologist character (especially in this era) tend to show that character sleeping with a patient because the generic rules of moviedom demand that the male and female leads sleep together. It's nice to see the avoidance of cliches.

My verdict: Cameron's Closet isn't bad. Yeah, that's not a glowing rave, but it's got a good cast, an offbeat plot, and some sweet demon kills. Give it a whirl if you're looking for some under-the-radar '80s horror.

Cassandra (Colin Eggleston, 1987)

For the first time since my Blue Monkey review, I dipped back into the analog world of VHS for the otherwise hard-to-find obscure Australian horror/thriller Cassandra. Watching a VHS tape on my still-functioning VCR is my boring version of Proust's madeleine. The last remaining video store in my city of Austin just bit the dust a few weeks ago (I Luv Video RIP), and though I still watch a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays (and still get discs from Netflix in the mail), streaming has taken over as the primary way I watch movies, which makes me kinda sad. Streaming has been great for late-night whims and convenience and adventurous viewing, but I miss physical media and the experience of being in an independent/mom-and-pop video store. 

Taking this remarkably well-preserved VHS tape out of its cover and watching it on my VCR last night gave me a warm feeling, calling back the many glorious hours of watching movies (especially horror movies) on videotape rentals with friends or by myself on weekends, summer afternoons, and late summer nights from the later elementary school years all the way through college. It was one of the few times in life where I was in the right moment of technological and cultural history at the right age. I don't know what my aesthetic would have been if I had been raised in the corporate algorithm/permanently online/context-free organized streaming chaos of the present moment, where every human is both permanent consumer and brand and where we all tunnel into our own lonely algorithm-nudged niches that rarely overlap with any real outside-of-computer-or-phone community.

Speaking of isolation, Cassandra begins with an isolated little house in the Australian desert. A young woman commits suicide, urged on by a freaky little boy. ("Do it," he frog-croaks while wearing a malevolent grin.) Then, the house becomes engulfed in flames. A woman named Cassandra (Tessa Humphries) wakes up in a panic. This was all a dream, though a recurring one she has been having every day for several weeks. Maybe it's not a dream, she thinks. Maybe Cassandra is calling up something she observed when she was too young to carry the memory. Her parents, fashion photographer Stephen (Shane Briant, an actor with the most intense eyebrows since Milo O'Shea) and fashion designer Helen (Briony Behets), assure her she's just having nightmares but whistle a very different tune when Cassandra's out of earshot. They're extremely worried about these dreams and have several huge secrets wrapped up in them.

Meanwhile, Stephen hires a mysterious, slightly creepy new assistant, Graham (Tim Burns), and carries on an affair with one of his models, Sally (Natalie McCurry), which Cassandra soon finds out about at her parents' beach house. (Sally's poses during her photo shoots, set to quintessentially '80s nonsense pop filler by a band named Wa Wa Nee, are very, very funny, possibly unintentionally so.) Cassandra's dreams become more vividly detailed, and since her parents remain evasive, she confides in a friend, bartender Robert (Lee James). Throwing a match on this extremely flammable family drama is a deranged killer, who begins slashing up people in the family's inner circle and leaving weird messages on the walls about Cock Robin.

Cassandra has a pretty complicated plot for a slasher movie, and a few hazy or nonsensical details point to even more plot that has been trimmed from the final edit. The film can be silly and overly melodramatic, but director Colin Eggleston has a decent visual style, Humphries is good in the title role, and there are many genuine shocks and creepy moments and the Australian desert is always a great location for unsettling events. Cassandra is no classic, but it's a genuinely enjoyable horror movie with some inspired scenes and entertaining '80s silliness. I also need to point out that the cinematographer's name is Garry Wapshott. Incredible.

Cassandra was director Eggleston's final feature film (he also made a TV movie in '87 before retiring). He mostly worked in Australian television, but he directed a handful of horror films as well as the softcore sex comedy Fantasm Comes Again and the sci-fi movie Sky Pirates. His most well-known horror movie is Long Weekend, considered one of the best examples of the when-animals-and-nature-attack subgenre. I haven't caught up to that one yet. Until next time, get out your VCRs. 

   

Supernatural (Victor Halperin, 1933)

Following the financial success of director Victor Halperin's White Zombie, a low-budget horror classic, the major studios came calling. Paramount signed Halperin to a lucrative contract, and his next horror film had the full resources of Hollywood behind it. He paid it forward by hiring most of the same crew that worked on White Zombie, and though Supernatural is a slicker, more mainstream film, Halperin fills it with oddball character details, moments of eccentric humor, and some pretty amazing sets. Supernatural is a solid, enjoyable, offbeat '30s horror film.

Though it doesn't show up onscreen, the movie had a troubled production. Halperin and star Carole Lombard didn't get along. Lombard felt she was miscast and that her natural comedic skills weren't being used, making for tense working conditions and frequent arguments with Halperin. That wasn't the only problem. The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 briefly halted production mid-shoot and caused cast and crew to flee the set in fear. The film's theatrical release was less than ideal, too. Supernatural was a box office disappointment and got mixed reviews.

Watching it 87 years after all the behind-the-scenes drama, I think Lombard was too hard on herself and Halperin. Though she overdoes the cocked-eyebrow thing a bit and is a little dialed down compared to her usual work in comedies, she's very good in the part, which requires her to take on the personalities of two different characters in the same body. There are fine turns as well from Vivienne Osborne, Alan Dinehart, Beryl Mercer, and William Farnum, and Halperin makes the whole thing look great. Randolph Scott is a bit dull as the milquetoast boyfriend (a character type that is oddly in most horror films of this era). He would become a great character actor and star of westerns once his face got a bit more lived-in, but he played a lot of generic handsome guys in his early years in the biz.

Supernatural has an enjoyably convoluted plot for being only 65 minutes long. Serial murderer Ruth Rogen (Osborne) is about to be executed (only the fourth woman to ever face the electric chair, according to headlines in the film's exciting opening montage sequence) for strangling three of her lovers with her extra-strong hands (she is later seen crushing a tin cup in one hand like it's made of paper). I particularly loved the newspaper article that read: "Ruth Rogen yesterday confessed she killed each of her three lovers after a riotous orgy in her sensuous Greenwich Village apartment." Turned in to police by her current lover, Paul Bavian (Dinehart), a con artist/phony spiritualist, Rogen is pissed. Bavian doesn't even have the guts to visit her in prison.

Enter Dr. Carl Houston (H.B. Warner), a psychologist/psychic/scientist (the kind of character who only exists in movies). He believes the spiritual essence of a powerful, unusual criminal can possess and influence impressionable fellow humans, leading to most copycat crimes. The prison warden agrees to let him experiment on the body of Rogen shortly after her execution in an attempt to both prove this phenomenon exists and to prevent it from occurring with Rogen's spirit. Rogen reluctantly agrees, and signs Houston's waiver.

Meanwhile, beautiful millionaire heiress Roma Courtney (Lombard) is grieving the loss of her twin brother John, killed in a mysterious accident. Phony baloney spiritualist Bavian contacts Roma and claims her brother is trying to get a message to her. Bavian has an elaborate grift planned to get some bucks out of Roma by implicating the executor of her and her brother's estate, Nicky Hammond (Farnum), in John's death, and Roma is sad enough to get caught up in the grift. Dr. Houston is a family friend of the Courtneys, and when a distraught Roma and her boyfriend Grant Wilson (Scott), run to Houston's apartment/lab to get some advice after a session with Bavian, they stumble upon the experiment. Rogen's spirit possesses Roma, causing even more pandemonium than we've already experienced so far.

Whew, that's a complicated story. Lombard gets to play the high melodrama of the grieving heiress and the smart, fiery, and murder-happy Rogen once she's possessed, and Halperin gives her some great moments alone with the camera and the sumptuous sets. Dinehart and Osborne also get great moments to revel in the actions of their morally dubious characters. I also want to salute Mercer in her small role as Bavian's alcoholic landlord. There's a great scene involving cockroaches in her sink and a large bottle of vodka that is just one of many neat little offbeat character details Halperin adds to the otherwise slick Hollywood veneer.

Set in New York City, Supernatural was filmed on Hollywood studio sets, and the expressive artifice of these gorgeously designed faux apartments, mansions, storefronts, laboratories, jail cells, offices, and city streets enhances and complements the strangeness of the story. Supernatural may not be one of the enduring classics of '30s horror, but it's a damn good little movie.