The Corpse Grinders (Ted V. Mikels, 1971)

Happy new year. Let's ring it in with The Corpse Grinders. My last run-in with the impressively mustachioed b-movie director Ted V. Mikels was 1973's marvelously titled Blood Orgy of the She-Devils. Unfortunately, that title promised way more than it delivered, and the film was extremely light on blood, orgies, and she-devils, though its highlights included one of the wildest ensembles ever worn to a picnic (the penultimate pic in my 2018 review). The Corpse Grinders is a much more honest title. This film delivers on the corpse grinding, my friends.

With a screenplay cowritten by Joe Cranston, working actor (mostly in TV and theater) and the father of Bryan Cranston (seriously!), and fellow b-movie legend Arch Hall Sr., the writer/director/producer of 1962's Eegah! (tagline: "the crazed love of a prehistoric giant for a ravishing teen-age girl!"), starring Arch Hall Jr. and future Bond villain Richard Kiel, The Corpse Grinders is nutty as hell. The movie's bonkers premise is not even remotely plausible, but Mikels carries on anyway with much enthusiasm, which is how it should be.

What is that insane premise? The Lotus Cat Food Company, an independent factory producing high-end cat food (the factory consists of a tiny office and one industrial grinder in the basement; besides the two owners, the staff consists of a bug-eyed elderly alcoholic and a one-legged deaf-mute woman who one of the owners converses with in sign language that does not resemble any known sign language on planet Earth), runs into some money trouble when their wealthy investor mysteriously "disappears." The owners, Landau (Sanford Mitchell, who eerily resembles David Geffen) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), decide to cut costs by grinding up corpses and turning the ground-up corpse meat into cat food. What could go wrong?

The corpses are stolen from the cemetery by an ill-tempered man named Caleb (Warren Ball), who is fueled in his work by beef jerky delivered to him by his insane wife Cleo (Ann Noble). Cleo carries around a doll she believes is a real child and is constantly making terrible-looking soup. Landau promises to pay Caleb later, but he keeps delaying payment. Note to self: don't rob graves without receiving the cash first.

The corpse grinding initially pays off. Cats love the taste of human meat, and the company is making bank. (I really don't understand how this factory makes money considering that their setup allows for maybe thirty cans of cat food production a week, tops, but we are not here to ask questions of The Corpse Grinders. The Corpse Grinders asks questions of us.)

Unfortunately, once cats taste people-flesh, they crave it forever. If they're hungry and no can of Lotus Cat Food is nearby, they attack humans. This gets the attention of surgeon Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney), who is attacked by the cat of his nurse and girlfriend Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly), who strangely keeps her cat at the hospital. Does the health department know about this? Howard and Angie begin to suspect that Lotus Cat Food is full of human meat and start to snoop around the factory, sometimes during their hospital shifts. What the hell is going on at that hospital? Meanwhile, a mysterious man with a mustache spies on everyone.

While the doctor and the nurse conduct their covert investigation, cats keep attacking their owners, including the secretary at the food adulteration registry, who leaves work early to turn on a soap opera, strip down to her underwear, and chug a beer. This is my kind of woman. Sadly, she feeds her Siamese cat Lotus Cat Food. I hope she pulls through.

This is a low, low, low budget movie with only a handful of locations, but it has a charming weirdness, and every actor in it has an interesting face. Cassavetes regular Vincent Barbi even shows up. It's compelling and kooky in all the ways Blood Orgy of the She-Devils wasn't. Mikels claimed The Corpse Grinders was the most memorable movie the Boomer generation ever saw (is The Corpse Grinders to blame for melting Boomers' brains?). He also said Corpse Grinders was the only profitable movie he ever directed. I don't judge a movie by its financial success or failure, but I'm happy that something as weird and goofy as this thing made some bank.

   

Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987)

My Creepshow post a few weeks back began with warm reminiscences of my love for the movie and its power to transport me to an idyllic childhood state every time I see it. I also watched Creepshow 2 as a kid, but the sequel, arriving five years after the first installment (what are they, freakin' Avatar over here?) and with a diminished budget, fewer stories, and a less exciting cast, does not repeat the magic, despite the involvement of George A. Romero, Stephen King, Tom Savini, and Michael Gornick, the cinematographer on the first film who moves into the director's chair here. Creepshow 2 just doesn't work, man. The vibes are off. (I let Hippie Johnny write those last two sentences.)

Adapting three short stories by King (who also appears in a cameo in the final segment), Romero's screenplay is several notches below his usual high standards and feels like it was contractually tossed off in an afternoon. Savini was a makeup effects consultant on the film and also appears in the opening and closing wraparound segments under heavy prosthetics as The Creep, the motormouthed new host (taking over from the silent, much cooler looking Creep in the first film).

The Creep is the first tipoff that this Creepshow is not going to live up to its predecessor. Besides the Savini-starring live-action moments, the introductory segments are sloppily animated, sub-Crypt Keeper energy-sucks boringly voiced by Joe Silver. Silver was an enjoyable character and voice actor with a boomingly deep voice who memorably appeared in two of David Cronenberg's '70s films, so I'm going to blame Gornick's direction and the writing of either Romero or Lucille Fletcher (who did some revisions of Romero's screenplay) for the lackluster delivery. It's like hearing an accountant deliver several weak horror puns in between figuring out a client's tax write-offs.

Tone poorly established, we move into the first segment, "Old Chief Wood'nhead." A badly dated case of white people depicting Native people, the segment spends way too much time on the aw-shucks small-town goodness of Ray Spruce (George Kennedy, probably the biggest name in the cast ca. 1987), who runs a general store in a dying town with his wife, Martha (Dorothy Lamour in her final role). Ray spends his days touching up the war paint on his wooden Indian, delivering folksy homilies about the goodness in people, and doing good deeds for the Native people who make up the bulk of the population. When something bad happens to Ray and Martha, the wooden Indian comes alive and gets revenge. Most of the indigenous characters are played by indigenous people, but, for some reason, Irish-American Holt McCallany (in one of his earliest roles) plays Sam Whitemoon in brownface. In 1987. Come on now. On the plus side, the kills are pretty sweet, and Bruce Alan Miller's production design really stands out, especially the inside of the general store and the trailer home of Fatso Gribbens (the '80s-mandated overweight sidekick who is always eating snacks).

The second segment, "The Raft," is thin soup but a slight improvement. Four 29-year-old teenagers (two boy-men and two girl-women), decide to celebrate a break from school by driving to a hard-to-find private lake in chilly fall weather, swimming out to a raft in the middle of the lake, and then just hanging out on the raft being cold for some reason. Excellent plan. (As someone who grew up in a small town in the Midwest, I find this teenage plan semi-plausible. I spent too many miserable days and nights doing "fun" things in stupidly cold temperatures that would have actually been fun had we waited for spring and summer.) This plan has a problem even bigger than the temperature. The lake has a damn human-eating blob floating in it. Oh shiiiiiiittttt! 

Again, we get some sweet kills, and it's reasonably entertaining dumb fun, but one of the male characters pretty much molests one of the sleeping female characters for no narrative reason other than to have the camera focus on some naked breasts. I'm no puritan, but this scene feels gross.

Weird celeb factoid: One of the actors in this segment, soap opera veteran Paul Satterfield, is the son of Rita Coolidge's sister Priscilla. His biological father was a Nashville firefighter who was killed on the job. His mother later married and divorced Booker T. Jones of Booker T. & The MG's and 60 Minutes anchor Ed Bradley but was tragically murdered in 2014 by her fourth husband Michael Seibert, who then killed himself.

Awkward transition to segment three, "The Hitchhiker." This is probably the strongest of the three segments, with Lois Chiles playing Annie Lansing, the wife of a wealthy attorney. Annie is having an affair and loses track of time while having sex with her lover. Unable to think of a valid excuse to give her husband, she hauls ass home and accidentally hits and kills a hitchhiker (Tom Wright). She flees the scene, but the hitchhiker keeps reappearing in an increasingly more mangled state. Chiles, a successful model and actress in the '60s and '70s who mostly played small roles and TV guest appearances after that (her career suffered when she quit acting for three years to help care for one of her brothers, who was dying of lymphoma; ain't Hollywood great?), carries this segment. She has a relaxed, natural delivery and presence that give this simple story a bit more weight than the other two segments.

Gornick, a longtime Romero collaborator and the cinematographer on five Romero films (Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Knightriders, Creepshow, and Day of the Dead), has a disappointingly flat visual style in Creepshow 2 (though a few moments come alive in each segment) and it remains his only feature as director, though he also directed episodes of Tales from the Darkside and Monsters. He appears to have left show business behind for a real estate career in the mid-'90s.

Like its predecessor, Creepshow 2 was meant to have five stories, but the two most ambitious segments were dropped when the budget was slashed. Considering how the rest of it turned out, that was probably a blessing. One of the dropped segments eventually made it to the screen as a part of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, but the other, set in a bowling alley, never happened.

   

Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936)

A major influence on Anne Rice's vampire novels as well as a canonical work of queer horror (the excellent Shudder documentary miniseries Queer for Fear covers it at length), Dracula's Daughter is in the top tier of '30s Universal horror movies despite having a generally subdued tone and almost no special effects (we never see our vampires turn into vampires) and confining most of the horror off-screen. The film does so much with suggestion, atmosphere, performance, movement, and dialogue (and smoke machines) that I didn't really miss any of the bells and whistles (though I wish we could have seen Drac's daughter show some vampire fangs). If you're receptive to it, the film will give your imagination plenty of room to run wild.

Set in London and filmed on Universal's Hollywood sets, Dracula's Daughter opens with two policemen stumbling across a dead body. An elderly man (Edward Van Sloan) appears out of the shadows, telling the police that his name is Von Helsing (weirdly changed from Van Helsing even though he's the only actor reprising his role from Dracula) and that the body is a bug-eating man named Renfield. He also tells them there is another dead body nearby and that he killed that body. It was no man, though; it was a vampire. The dead bloodsucker, with a stake through his heart, is, of course, Count Dracula.

The inexperienced local policemen think the old man's a murdering kook and call in Scotland Yard. While guarding the bodies and awaiting Scotland Yard's arrival, the most easily scared of the two policemen encounters a late-night visitor, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden). After she's denied visitation, she hypnotizes the hapless cop with help from a mysterious jeweled ring, steals Dracula's body, and burns the remains on a pyre in a fog-shrouded country cemetery.

Marya is, of course, Dracula's daughter. She has the same curse of vampirism, but, unlike her pops, she hasn't fully embraced it. She's tortured by it but can't resist giving in to its urges. She's enabled in her vampiric lifestyle by her oddball assistant Sandor (Irving Pichel). (Pichel had parallel careers as an actor and director. Horror fans will probably know him best from his debut directorial film The Most Dangerous Game, co-directed with Ernest B. Schoedsack, who co-directed King Kong with Merian C. Cooper. Heeeyyyy, that's a lotta co-directin' ovah heah!) We're not quite sure what Sandor's deal is at this point in the film, but the relationship will become clearer by the film's end.

Interestingly, Sandor is instructed to procure young women as victims for Marya through a ruse that they will pose as subjects for Marya's paintings, but when Marya is seen on the hunt for herself, she chooses male victims. There's a real internal struggle here not just between whether to be a vampire or not, but also between who will get the fangs.

Back in Van Helsing land, the old doc is trying to convince Scotland Yard that vampires exist and he's not a cold-blooded killer, so he asks former student turned prominent psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to help him out. Garth doesn't believe the vampire story, but he's a big fan of Van Von Helsing, so he's willing to help.

Meanwhile, Countess Marya believes Garth is just the man to stop her vampiric urges and turn her into a "normal" woman, so she enlists him as her psychiatrist, much to the chagrin of both Sandor and Garth's secretary/personal assistant Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who is not-so-secretly in love with Garth and also not afraid to give him the business. Kruger is a much more interesting actor and his character has more personality than a lot of the milquetoast dud romantic male leads in '30s horror, but he's not particularly erotically charismatic or handsome, so it's still a mystery why both Janet and Marya are so drawn to him other than for narrative requirements. The real sparks in the movie are between the women characters.

The gay subtext is pretty obvious, though much of it may have still sailed over my head if I hadn't watched Queer for Fear. It leaps from subtext to text, however, in the tense, beautifully filmed scenes between Marya and a young victim named Lili (Nan Grey). The sexual tension in these scenes is almost a visible character in the room, and the facial expressions and movements of the actors captured by the camera are unmistakably filled with desire, lust, and the nervousness and fear that exist alongside desire.

Lambert Hillyer, who was surprisingly primarily a director of westerns (of his hundreds of films and television episodes, only two are horror), has a natural touch for the material, and he does so much with closeups, shadow, and suggestion. I wish he'd directed more horror, but he loved his westerns. He's also the first director to put Batman on the big screen, directing a Batman serial in 1943. If Hillyer was an odd but ultimately successful choice for director, the screenwriters, Garrett Fort and John L. Balderston, were horror veterans, co-writing the screenplays for Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein. Fort also worked on The Devil-Doll, while Balderston's other horror credits include The Mummy, Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bride of Frankenstein, Mark of the Vampire, Mad Love, and The Mummy's Hand.

If you want some classic vampire bat flying, fang-baring, neck-biting, blood-trickling, garlic-recoiling action, you will be disappointed in Dracula's Daughter (though there is a scene set in Transylvania where we get to hang out in Dracula's castle), but if you're open to an atmospheric, slow-burn, character-based, woman-centric approach to vampirism, it's a damn good movie. And it's pretty effectively creepy. I liked it a lot.