The Cat and the Canary (Elliott Nugent, 1939)

I've posted reviews of horror movies (and the occasional splattery action movie, western, sci-fi movie, suspense thriller, and underground/gross-out comedy) on this site since 2007, but this week we have a first — a Bob Hope movie. No, I'm not talking about Fancy Pants, friends. I'm talking about the fourth filmed adaptation of the hit horror/comedy play The Cat and the Canary. I reviewed the first adaptation, from German Expressionist master Paul Leni, back in 2016. Check it out here.

Hollywood pro Elliott Nugent closely follows Leni's template, and both movies are well-paced and successful at keeping the horror and comedy elements from stepping on each other. Nugent is a craftsman where Leni was an artist with vision, and the former's Expressionist style has been replaced with a slicker classic Hollywood look, but both visual approaches work well with the material.

Otherwise following the story closely (though changing most of the character's names), Nugent's version makes a couple of big changes to Leni's film and the play. The setting has been moved from a large Gothic castle in New York near the Hudson River to a hidden old mansion in the Louisiana bayou near New Orleans. The film also reduces the time between the death of Cyrus West and the reading of his will from twenty years to ten. This makes a bit more sense, considering most of the relatives are so young.

To recap the story, eccentric millionaire Cyrus West lived a life of family-avoiding isolation in the bayou, sharing the home with his housekeeper Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard) and her black cat. His will, drawn by his attorney Crosby (George Zucco), stipulates that his living relatives must journey to his bayou home on the tenth anniversary of his death to hear the reading. Miss Lu is allowed to remain in the home for that decade.

On that auspicious date, the mostly distant relatives make the trek by Native American-guided canoe through the alligator-filled swamp. The survivors include elderly Aunt Susan (Elizabeth Patterson), middle-aged Cicily (Nydia Westman), and four young people, the hotheaded Fred (John Beal), the unctuous Charlie (Douglass Montgomery), the lovely Joyce (Paulette Goddard), and theater actor and radio star Wally (Bob Hope). I'm very unclear about bloodlines and who's related to who (and how), especially because all three young men want to get with Joyce. Charlie even used to date her and wants to get back together, which enrages Fred, who was already pissed off from the jump. Fred and Charlie are both suspicious of Wally, but Wally has the edge on both of them by simply not being a creep. Aren't you all related to each other? What gives? (The silent film did a much better job of noting how distantly removed the relations were.)

Guests assembled, Crosby opens the first of two envelopes (three, if you count the hidden envelope later in the film). Joyce inherits the entire fortune, but there's a catch. She must stay alive and maintain her sanity for thirty days, or the fortune and estate go to a different relative, concealed in the second envelope. A few of the others point out the incentive this gives them to kill Joyce or attempt to make her insane.

In the midst of all this hubbub, someone fires shots outside. The mysterious armed man comes to the door and announces himself as a guard at the nearby mental institution. A violent inmate has escaped. Nicknamed The Cat, this escapee is a murderer with shaggy hair and long gnarled fingers with long fingernails who crawls like a cat when he's about to attack. (His fellow prisoners really need more imagination when coming up with nicknames.) He's been spotted near the mansion. Meanwhile, Miss Lu is lurking about, acting strangely, and delivering cryptic pronouncements. The stage is set for mirth, murder, mayhem, family drama, and comic hijinks.

Hope, Patterson, and Westman deliver the comic relief in between the drama and the scares (there's a running gag where Westman stops screaming if you put a finger under her nose). I've never been a big Bob Hope fan, but I am a big Albert Brooks fan, and I was delighted to see some seeds of Brooks' delivery and timing in what Hope does in this film. Nothing here is knee-slappingly funny, but the humor is brisk and pleasant and doesn't wear out its welcome, and Hope and Goddard have real chemistry (so much so that they were teamed up for another horror/comedy, The Ghost Breakers, the following year).

The horror elements are handled effectively. Even though I knew most of what was coming, having seen the 1927 film, I was still excited by the dark twists and turns and their execution. Nugent captures an atmosphere of real dread, despite all the comedic biz, and the finale is genuinely creepy.

I don't have a lot of fancy-pants analysis to deliver this time. This is a solid Hollywood movie, well-made and skillfully performed, and I had a good time. It had been long enough since my viewing of the silent version that I was able to kick back and relax into this one without it feeling repetitive. I give this version three cats and two and a half canaries. Nugent is no Paul Leni, but he knows how to make a quality movie.

The Curse of the Screaming Dead aka Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (Tony Malanowski, 1982)

Described by Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman as one of the five worst films Troma ever distributed, The Curse of the Screaming Dead is so inept that it turns into accidental surrealist art. Day turns to night and back to day in the middle of a single short scene (sometimes, one character is shrouded in darkness while talking to another character in bright daylight), a camper van is perfectly level and still though it's supposedly driving uphill, women change into bikinis on a hunting trip in the woods because "it's too hot" (despite the men all wearing jackets in the visible fall weather) but then immediately change back into clothes because they "can't bare their bodies in the woods," every person in a conversation is filmed separately in a different location even though they are supposed to be in the same camper/stretch of woods/graveyard, actors are shot in the center of the frame in bright lighting surrounded by darkness, dialogue bounces back and forth between mundane realism and inexplicable nonsense, the two policeman who show up in the final third of the film are decades past beat cop retirement age, the sound effects can only be described as experimental ASMR, and, despite much profanity, one character responds in anger to another character with "you goofy bozo!" This may also be the only film where a zombie attack is instigated by the theft of a diary.

Yeah, stretches of this movie are boring and dimly lit, and none of the whiny, irritable characters seem like they'd be much fun to hang out with, but I can't completely resist its DIY strangeness. This is a bad movie, but it's bad in its own uniquely fascinating way.

The Curse of the Screaming Dead aka Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (hereafter shortened to Curse so I don't have to keep typing all that) begins with three longhaired party animals chugging beers and getting into arguments in their camper van while "driving" (more accurately, sitting in place) through rural Maryland on their way to a hunting trip. Supposedly in the back of the camper, three women are having a conversation in what appears to be three different kitchens. At no point in this conversation were any of the women in the same physical space. Two of the women are sisters, and the younger sister is blind, which is a major topic of conversation in the film (sample dialogue: "She may be blind, but she knows a raw deal when she sees one"), though it doesn't end up making much narrative difference, other than the blind woman being able to hear better than the rest of the gang. She's the first one to think something bad is about to go down.

As mentioned previously, the women change into bikinis for no apparent reason and just as abruptly change back into street clothes. The dudes discuss locations for the hunt and decide to try a new spot because they've been using the old spot so often that "the deer even know what kind of beer we drink." They set up camp in the new spot and find an old Civil War-era cemetery and dilapidated church. 

Mel, the mouthiest of the dudes and a kleptomaniac (though he's ashamed of himself for stealing), finds an old trunk in the church with a Confederate flag and a Rebel army captain's diary. Mel swipes the diary to read in the tent after the hunting's done. Kiyomi, the blind woman, warns against taking anything from the spot. She says her and her sister Lin's grandmother survived the bombing of Hiroshima and warned her that the dead don't care about any of their earthly possessions but are fiercely protective of their pain. (Surprisingly, the movie doesn't go for any cheap Asian jokes at the expense of the Japanese-American sisters, which is miles ahead of what Hollywood was doing with Asian characters in the '80s.)

Guess what? The captain's diary was the record of the soldiers' pain, and the soldiers want it back. The cemetery and church were the site of their deaths at the hands of the Union army after the Virginians were pushed into the Maryland woods, surrounded, and tortured. The Confederate ghouls come out of the grave and start zombieing it up, attacking our heroes, who fight back with fireworks and hunting rifles. Of particular use is Mel's illegal exploding bullets, which really do a number on the Dixieland zombies. This whole business could have been avoided if the zombies were able to just ask for the diary back instead of groaning softly and, per one of the titles, occasionally screaming.

We get another inexplicable time jump to the next afternoon, and a couple of elderly cops show up. The cops said the cemetery and church are pet projects for the governor (odd, since they are in such disarray), and he's hopping mad after all the bodies were dug up and stolen the night before. Our six heroes tell the cops about the zombie Confederates, but one of the cops won't give up on his theory that some sick joker stole all the corpses, strung them up in the trees, and made them dance to freak out the hunters. He explains this theory at least three times, probably more, but this is the kind of movie that destroys your short-term memory if you watch too much of it. He's very clear that, in his opinion, one single man was able to dig up every corpse in a cemetery and string these corpses up in trees to make them dance. He's adamant about the dancing.

His theory is eventually disproven by the return of the zombies. This leads us to more scenes of the zombies' weird groaning and an extended scene of them eating human guts, with much bizarre ASMR sound design foregrounding much lethargic slurping, chewing, lipsmacking, and more chewing. It goes on for what seems like the length of an average '80s sitcom, sans commercials.

Eventually, the gang makes it to an abandoned house, and a classic zombie denouement/diary return ensues. Some survive, some die, all of them say weird shit while doing it. If any of what I've written here strikes your fancy, this whole movie is on YouTube, but I can think of at least eight more things you'd rather be doing. Until next time, chums.