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.

 

Caligula -- The Untold Story (Joe D'Amato, 1982)

Just when I thought I was done with Caligula movies, they pull me back in. This low-budget Italian take on the Caligula story, also known as Caligula 2, Caligula 2 -- The Untold Story, The Emperor Caligula: The Untold Story, Emperor Caligula: The Garden of Taboo, Decadencia, and Caligula 3, gives the material the low-rent approach it deserves but is unfortunately grindingly boring. With a running time of two hours and five minutes (on the cut of the film I watched on DVD; there are longer and shorter versions in other formats and releases), this Caligula is shorter than the 1979 epic (aka Guccione's Folly) by thirty or forty minutes but felt days longer. Like its more famous predecessor, it will make you tire of looking at naked people, with an approach to nudity more clinical than erotic. 

Back in the days of yore known as February of this year, I reviewed a perversely enjoyable D'Amato horror film called Beyond the Darkness. I liked that movie, and it gave me some hope D'Amato's take on Caligula wouldn't be a joyless slog. However, D'Amato directed 196 films between 1972 and 1999 (the year of his death, in which, despite declining health, he managed to direct five movies), and the odds he made at least a handful of terrible ones are pretty good. D'Amato was also a cinematographer on 170 films (he shot three the year of his death), a cameraman on 72 films, a writer on 47 films, a producer on 29 films, an actor in 15 films, an assistant director on six films, an editor on six films, a crew member on four films, and a location manager on a measly two films. I find this completely insane. Some of them were porno films, sure, which are quick and cheap, but that's still a staggering number of projects.

D'Amato had almost as many pseudonyms as film credits (in fact, D'Amato is a pseudonym, though it's the name most of his films are currently credited to; his birth name is Aristide Massaccesi), and Caligula is credited to one of his duller alter egos, David Hills. I wonder if that was the name he attached to the turkeys. If that's the case, I encourage you to do the opposite of one of Iron Maiden's greatest songs and run from the Hills. (I refuse to apologize for this dad joke. I don't have any kids, so you people will have to hear it.) Some of his more exciting noms de plume include Hugo Clevers, Raf de Palma, Dirk Frey, Igor Horwess, Una Pierre, Chana Lee Sun, and the amazing Arizona Massachuset.

You might have noticed that we are four paragraphs in, and I haven't even talked about the movie yet. Yeah, it's that bad. This Caligula covers a lot of the same territory as the Malcolm McDowell Caligula, with an orgy scene that's even longer, duller, and more explicit. What makes this film different, besides the much lower budget? Not much. Caligula's incestuous relationship with his sister is dispensed with in opening narration (it was a major part of the '79 Caligula), and a fictional relationship with a woman named Miriam (Black Emanuelle's Laura Gemser) is emphasized instead. She hatches an elaborate revenge plot to kill Caligula for what he's done to her best friend but instead falls in love with him because their sex life is so great. In this version, Caligula is haunted by a recurring dream of a man in armor killing him with an arrow on a sandy beach. And David Brandon's portrayal of Caligula is a lot more down-to-earth (and therefore, less fun) than McDowell's. McDowell played Caligula as a cross between a walking erect penis, a boyish imp, a '70s rock star on tour, and a homicidal lunatic. Brandon plays the mad emperor as a run-of-the-mill power-hungry dictator and self-absorbed politician with a sadistic streak and a conscience nagging at him for the damage he's caused. It's a more human way of looking at how Caligula did what he did, and Brandon gives a decent performance, but it's not that exciting. Oh yeah, you also see a woman jack off a horse. That didn't make it into the '79 version.

At its core, this film is a very boring historical epic on the cheap with occasional moments of splatter and gore, lots of nudity and sex scenes, and an orgy scene that turns the movie into a full-on hardcore porn film for about 30 minutes. I'm just not a porn guy. Looking at naked people is fun, but the clinical onslaught of body parts just makes me numb and bored after a few minutes. I like pizza, but I don't want to eat 30 pizzas in a row, you know what I'm saying?

An aside about orgies. In both the '79 Caligula and this one, a fully clothed juggler walks in and starts juggling away during the orgy. I turned to my wife during the interminable scene and asked her if she thought orgies still included jugglers. We started laughing imagining a 2010s orgy in a generic suburban house with a guy performing a juggling routine (oranges, maybe) amidst a room full of strangers engaged in group sex. Orgy people, leave a comment if you've ever seen a juggler at one of these wing-dings.

That's about it for Caligula -- The Untold Story. I wish it had remained untold. One of the alternate titles for this bad boy should be Caligula: Snoozefest. Sorry, D'Amato/Hills/Clevers/de Palma/Frey/Horwess/Pierre/Sun/Massachuset. In the immortal words of American Idol judge Randy Jackson, "yeah, that's gonna be a no for me, dawg."