Before I Hang (Nick Grindé, 1940)

A slow-burning creeper of a movie, Before I Hang takes a quiet, methodical approach to the building of its horror (half the movie is just old guys talking about science or bureaucratic matters in a prison or aging), but that horror is presented in genuinely menacing and unsettling style, thanks to the skills of lead actor Boris Karloff and the ability of veteran b-movie director Nick Grindé to get some visual impact from a few studio sets.

The film opens with a courtroom scene. Dr. John Garth (Karloff) has been found guilty of murder and is at his sentencing hearing. He's an unlikely killer. For years, Garth has been working on a serum to dramatically slow, or eliminate entirely, the aging process. An elderly man in terrible pain agreed to test the serum, but Garth was unable to make it work. In agony, the patient begged Garth to kill him. Garth relented, in an early instance of assisted suicide, and was arrested and tried for murder. Garth explains himself in a statement before the judge, accepts his fate, and urges the medical establishment to continue his research. He's sentenced to execution by hanging in exactly one month. (What is this? Texas?) (Don't yell at me, I live in Texas.)

His daughter, Martha (Evelyn Keyes), is distraught, but she vows to fight for a stay of execution alongside Garth's assistant, Dr. Paul Ames (Bruce Bennett), a classic old-timey goodie-two-shoes snooze who has an extremely anemic and chemistry-free semi-romantic attachment to Martha. Every '30s and '40s horror movie requires one milquetoast ultra-Caucasian bore. It's the law. Usually, a vivacious and charismatic woman gets stuck with the snooze for a romantic partner, but Keyes is pretty milquetoast herself here. I've seen her do much more exciting work in some film noir classics, and her personal life was full of nonstop flings with charismatic and famous men, but she's overshadowed here by most of her outfits in a nothing part that requires her to be concerned, supportive, admiring, or unconscious after fainting from fear, depending on the scene.

Once in prison, Garth is approached by the sympathetic warden, Thompson (Ben Taggart), and a crusading colleague, Dr. Ralph Howard (Edward Van Sloan). Thompson makes Garth an offer. He can't stop his execution, but he can let Garth and Howard set up a lab in the prison and work on perfecting the serum in the three weeks left in Garth's life. Garth agrees, and whaddaya know, the dudes think they've got the serum working within that allotted time, but they need to test it on a human. The serum requires blood for its mixture, and Garth persuades Howard to use some blood from a freshly executed three-time murderer. He gets Howard to inject him with the killer-blood mixture on that last day of his life. After Garth is executed by hanging, the plan is that Howard will do the autopsy and see if the serum worked at de-aging the now deceased Garth. Howard will then carry on Garth's work with boring Ames.

Guess what? Garth's sentence is commuted to life in prison by the governor after a last-minute phone call. Garth is already looking, feeling, and medically proving to be a man twenty years younger, but he's got that murderer blood in his veins. He's going to get that bloodlust soon, unbeknownst to him and the other people unlucky enough to be part of his life. 

After some wild events lead to a pardon from the governor, Garth is a free man, hoping to test the serum out on his geezer buddies, but the evil blood in him has plans of its own. Karloff is great in this part. He convinces as the elderly, kindly, determined old doctor, makes a few minor adjustments to show us that the doctor now has the energy of a middle-aged man, and does a lot of great shit with just a few facial expressions to become a menacing presence. A more hammy actor would have torpedoed this movie or turned it into kitsch, but Karloff gently guides it. He makes the implausible plausible and human, and the scenes where the killer's essence has taken control of him are genuinely creepy.

Nick Grindé was never a household name or considered one of the greats, but he was an experienced b-movie director, and he makes Before I Hang look good even though most of the movie is old guys talking in rooms. It's lit and shot in classic Hollywood style, and Grindé and his cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline make excellent use of shadows and light. I especially love the shot of Garth appearing outside the door of his pianist friend Victor (Pedro de Cordoba) late at night. (Speaking of pianists, a scene where Victor plays piano during a small gathering at Garth's home goes on for a hilariously long time, even though the movie is only 62 minutes long. Pour a drink, here's four minutes of piano playing.)

Before I Hang is a relatively minor film in the horror pantheon and is not one of Karloff's better known movies, but I admire its quiet approach and think most of it is pretty effective. The horror scenes are legitimately unsettling, and there's something that just works in stories about a good person infected with evil if the right people play those parts. If you like your horror on the quieter and more slowly menacing side, I recommend this one.

Savage Harbor aka Death Feud (Carl Monson, 1987)

Mitchum. Stallone. Christopher Mitchum and Frank Stallone, that is, together at last as merchant seamen who get themselves entangled in a feud with an evil pimp and his henchmen after Frank Stallone's Joe falls in love with one of the pimp's ladies of the evening who has fled the lifestyle. The couple's meet-cute closely follows one of the most insane, physics-defying shootouts in cinema history. What follows may be well-worn territory, plot-wise, but the delivery of that plot is one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Savage Harbor is a classic of accidental surrealism and an example of one of my favorite cinematic happenings — a deeply weird movie that thinks it's being conventional made by demented freaks who think they're normal dudes.

Here are just a few examples of what I mean by accidental surrealism. In one scene with Mitchum and Stallone walking away from the docks after a stretch at sea, the actors' exchange of conversational dialogue appears on the soundtrack, but their lips aren't moving. In another scene at the dive bar hangout of our main characters, Mitchum is seen at the bar drinking a beer, but the patron next to him abruptly changes into a completely different person mid-scene. Both extras stare directly into the camera. In the film's opening scenes, Christmas decorations appear and idle chat about the Christmas season occurs. After a title card reading "SIX MONTHS LATER," it's still the Christmas season. Christmas never ends in San Pedro, apparently. (Has anyone asked Mike Watt if this is true?) In a scene on the evil pimp's boat, he's reading a book. Otherwise portrayed as a meathead creep who would never pick up any reading material unless it had nude ladies or get-rich-quick schemes in it, he closes the book when his henchmen arrive and remarks to them shortly before tossing the hardback tome their way: "Aristotle. Good reading. The man had a fine mind." As I said in the preceding paragraph, we also get some physics-defying action scenes. Men are standing up straight when they get shot but are somehow propelled forward long distances as if being shot from a cannon. In one scene, an inflatable life raft on a sandy beach explodes for no discernible reason. I love this shit.

The evil pimp, Harry (Anthony Caruso), opens proceedings on the California coast. He pulls up in his limo, smoking a cigar, and exits the vehicle but remains close to it. Several anonymous henchmen are stationed nearby. We'll get to know two of these henchmen, assistant evil pimp and number two man on the totem pole Slim (Gary Wood) and burly giggling freakazoid Hank (b-movie legend Patrick Wright), later. One of Harry's stable, a heroin-addicted mini-skirted British babe named Anne (the late Karen Mayo-Chandler, a model turned b-movie actor and one-time girlfriend of Jack Nicholson who described Nicholson as "a non-stop sex machine"), eventually exits the limo as well. This motley crew is waiting at the coast for a delivery of Chinese sex workers purchased by Harry. A life raft containing the women and a few evil dudes who negotiated the deal is soon spotted nearing the coast. For some reason, the raft flips over in the water. Some of the henchmen attempt to help but notice that the women are white, not Chinese. This is some kind of weird sabotage. But why? We'll never know, but we do get that deeply insane physics-defying shootout because of the ol' Chinese-to-American switcheroo. This scene is hilarious, exciting, stupid, and completely nuts.

Anne uses the shootout as an opportunity to escape Harry's clutches. She flees to a nearby highway and hitchhikes with a lecherous creep who keeps leering at her mini-skirted gams like they're a t-bone steak. When they get back to the city, he pounces on her. Joe (Frank Stallone, who looks a lot like his famous brother except with 74% less charisma) happens to be walking by and rescues her from the creep. After she thanks him, they stare at each other blankly and expressionlessly for what seems like a minute in what I think the filmmaker is trying to portray as love at first sight, but these two have less than zero chemistry. (I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but Mayo-Chandler was not a very good actor, at least in this movie.) Joe asks Anne if she likes avocados. We then get a montage of romantic moments between the two that defies the laws of time and space. Have hours gone by? Days? Weeks? Months? Yes. The only clue to the jumping chronology is that Anne wears several different mini-skirts. The two kiss like no humans have ever kissed before. I mean that sentence literally. I'm not saying they were passion-filled lovers kissing their brains out. I'm saying Frank Stallone and/or his character Joe and Karen Mayo-Chandler and/or her character Anne kiss each other like they are alien beings wearing human suits from a planet where kissing does not exist. Someone told them vaguely what kissing was, and they are experimenting with that limited knowledge trial-and-error-style. You have never seen two people kiss like this. You have never kissed like this, no matter how inept your first kiss.

The kissing is wild, but things get exponentially weirder when they have a make-out session in a grassy field on pillows placed directly on the ground. These pillows look too new and nice to be tossed onto the ground, but these two are maniacs. Anne does this kind of half-hearted rubbing and clawing thing on Joe's chest hair, like a drugged cat trying to figure out how to use a scratching post. They do some more weird kissing and weird loud moaning, and then they dry-hump on the nice pillows in the open field. What the hell is going on?

Meanwhile, Joe's best buddy and fellow merchant seamen Bill (Christopher Mitchum, who looks exactly like his famous dad except with 99% less charisma and an impressive blonde mullet) is embarking on a little romance of his own with the sole exotic dancer at the merchant seamen dive bar Tradewinds, Roxey (Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday on The Addams Family TV show!!!). Roxey wears pasties with Santa Claus heads on them and is still wearing them while enjoying breakfast with Bill hours, days, or possibly weeks later. Time is pretty fluid in Savage Harbor.

Joe and Anne decide to embark on a lifetime of weird kissing as husband and wife once Joe finishes his next stretch at sea. He and Bill leave at Christmastime and return six months later at Christmastime, but, sadly, while the boys are at sea, Slim and Hank kidnap Anne and return her to Harry, who gets her back on heroin and back to turning tricks. She has a weird surrealist drug nightmare where she's staring into a mirror in the desert. Her bra falls off and her bearded, angry father looks on disapprovingly. The mirror shatters. This is the only intentional surrealism in the film.

A devastated Joe embarks on a quest to find Anne. Bill tries to get him to forget her. "To me, a broad's a broad," he tells his buddy, but we know he's lying because he's fallen for his Santa-pasties Addams Family gal, whether he wants to admit it or not. Joe enlists the reluctant help of sex worker Jenny (Greta Blackburn, probably the best actor of the bunch) who knows where Anne is but is putting her life in danger by giving Joe info, especially because abusive creep Slim is sweet on her. When Harry finds out Joe is after Anne, he sends his boys to put the kibosh on a weird-kisser reunion. Bill gets in on the action after Joe is roughed up by a double team assault. Asses get kicked, people go flying in the wrong direction after getting shot, and lots of weird hell breaks loose. An important character is forgotten and is probably ambiguously dead. The Aristotle book never reappears. Avocados and avocado farms are mentioned several times. A weird sex party is ruined by gunplay. Many incredible death scenes occur. Some unfortunate '80s-style homophobia is trotted out by the heroes and the villains regarding the character of Harold (played by director Carl Monson), a gay hotel desk clerk who provides a pipeline of info to Harry and Slim, though Monson plays him with a lot of spirit and pizzazz, which further proves my theory that the 1980s was simultaneously one of the most homophobic and one of the gayest decades, sometimes in the same package.

Savage Harbor was Monson's first film after a long break from the movie business and his last film ever. He died of heart failure a year later. He made a string of b-movies in the 1970s, beginning with Blood Legacy aka Legacy of Blood aka Will to Die, reviewed on this site in 2018. That movie was about an eccentric family tearing each other apart for their late father's inheritance money. It had less visual oomph and dragged a lot more than Savage Harbor, but it was chock-full of bizarre characters and accidental surrealism, too, particularly in the case of a large foil-wrapped ham that keeps getting taken out and put away by the characters. So much attention is spent on this ham, but I don't think it ever pays off in any way. Hilarious. Monson's other directing credits include the evil bikers vs. sexy babes The Takers, a sexed-up ripoff of/homage to The Little Shop of Horrors called Please Don't Eat My Mother! (IMDb plot description: "a middle-aged man buys a plant with a sexy voice that develops a craving for insects, frogs, dogs, and humans"), G-rated family adventure movie Never Look Back, drag-queen serial killer movie A Scream in the Streets, and some uncredited work on the porno Tarzan parody Tarz and Jane and Cheeta aka Ping Pong (IMDb plot description: "when his penis is bitten off by a crocodile, Tarz turns to the magical powers of the Wango-Wango tribe for help").

Monson did not get along with Mitchum during the shooting of Savage Harbor. The two reportedly had several heated arguments on set, and Monson nailed Mitchum with an incredible zinger after one of them. "You only hired me because of my name," Mitchum yelled. "No, I only hired you because of your father's name," Monson yelled back. I'm not sure if this is an apocryphal tale or it actually happened, but I'm going to keep believing it. Mitchum has had a strange trajectory. Starting out with bit parts in his dad's movies, he moved on to several big-budget Hollywood westerns with John Wayne before getting trapped in the b-movie/exploitation world (a world I wouldn't mind being trapped in) for the remainder of his career. Starting in the '90s, he decided to repeatedly lose local, state, and national elections as a Republican candidate in a heavily Democratic area while taking the occasional acting gig.

Savage Harbor is proof that a movie can be terrible and wonderful at the same time. Stallone and Mitchum just seem to be there, some actors give committed but terrible performances, and some of the cast really deliver the goods, especially Blackburn, but there's an exciting sense that this movie is inventing itself from moment to moment, which a lot of the best and best-worst drive-in/exploitation/b-movies share with art films. That's part of the reason why I love both b-movies and art films and why I don't have a lot of interest in modern big-budget Hollywood stuff, which just feels so dead compared to even a ridiculous piece of nonsense like Savage Harbor. This movie is alive and crackling with energy and inventive weirdness. It's also a piece of shit. But it's also awesome. All these things can be true, and this excites me very much. 

Death Warmed Up (David Blyth, 1984)

Death Warmed Up, a splatter-punk new wave sci-fi/horror oddity from New Zealand, is possibly the most incoherent movie I've ever seen. Not a second of this thing makes sense. The characters' motivations, goals, decisions, and behaviors, with a few exceptions, are completely baffling. You usually know what is happening, but you almost never know why. This is mostly alright with me. I like to get nuts.

Like so many of the Australian and New Zealand exploitation movies of the era, Death Warmed Up has style, propulsive energy, offbeat humor, extreme violence, and an aggressive yet graceful approach to camera movement. The filmmakers are clearly dealing with a small budget and some shots are reused several times in the same scene, but, for the most part, the images are executed with ingenuity and skill. This is a visually memorable movie, even if the narrative is just throwing anything and everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.

So, what the hell is this movie about anyway? The writer or writers of the Wikipedia plot synopsis did an admirable job of making Death Warmed Up sound like a normal sci-fi/horror movie with a conventional narrative, but they really just sane-washed an insane experience in the same way the mainstream media convert Trump's speeches and statements into conventional policyspeak instead of accurately depicting the barrage of non-sequiturs, tangents, threats, and gobbledygook. I'm going to try to untangle the narrative while also relaying some of the insanity, though that's a semi-impossible task.

We begin with a young man, Michael (Michael Hurst), intensely jogging through the New Zealand landscape. He eventually jogs his way to a hospital, where he inexplicably smashes his way through groups of doctors, orderlies, nurses, and visitors despite there being much room in the large hospital to simply go around them. He makes his way into an elevator where he calls out for his father, a surgeon/medical researcher at the hospital. The elevator opens onto a mostly isolated floor, and Michael peers through some blinds that are inexplicably on the outside of a lab window while an equally inexplicable neon light blinks off and on.

Inside that lab, Michael's father Dr. Tucker (David Weatherley) is arguing with his research partner/full-blown mad scientist Dr. Howell (Gary Day) about mellowing out on the mad scientist biz. Dr. Howell responds by choking Dr. Tucker, presumably to death, and giving some kind of intense telepathic look to Michael. Michael runs away, but when he turns a corner, Dr. Howell is there (this is the only instance of Dr. Howell seemingly being able to teleport to locations). The evil doc tells him to clean his sweaty body and pushes him into a shower, where we see Michael scrub himself and gaze up at the shower head with an open mouth in a weirdly sexual way. Dr. Howell reappears and spends a long time gazing at Michael's muscular buttocks before jabbing said buttocks with a needle containing a mystery liquid (we never learn its contents). He then drives a dazed Michael to Michael's house.

Inside the house, Michael's very much alive and not at the hospital (what the fuck?) father is in his large bedroom watching a television interview with Dr. Howell, where the crazed doc says a lot of menacing, mad scientist nonsense on national television. Inexplicably, both docs are receiving a scientific award at a banquet that night. Dr. Tucker's wife Netty (Tina Grenville) appears in sexy lingerie and tries to make Dr. Tucker horny. Horny for sex. Too bad Dr. Tucker is too obsessed with his mad scientist research partner to stop talking about it and sex his lady down. She keeps trying, and they have weird partially clothed semi-sex, in which the good doc remains in his awards suit. Michael shows up. His mom puts a robe on. Michael blows both his parents away with a shotgun and is dumped in a really weird insane asylum. We're not even fifteen minutes into this thing.

Seven years later. Michael is released from the insane asylum. Dr. Howell has left mainstream New Zealand society behind for a really weird island where he runs a clinic called Trans Cranial Applications. The mad doc is attempting to make humans immortal by giving them splattery brain surgeries, assisted by sexy new wave nurses wearing masks that don't seem up to code and orderlies/hired muscle who have no qualms about breaking the law or breaking heads, if the island indeed has any laws. His surgeries may not have created immortality, but they have created a bunch of mutant-zombies and non-zombie dudes with mutations, including Tex Munro (veteran character actor Bruno Lawrence) and Spider (David Letch). Letch gives some incredible line reads as Spider, especially his oft-repeated, "I'll get you! I'll get you aaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllll!"

Michael decides to go to the really weird island and get his revenge on Howell for brainwashing him into blowing away his doctor dad and sexy mom. That makes sense narratively, but Michael has inexplicably brought his girlfriend Sandy (Margaret Umbers), best friend Lucas (William Upjohn), and Lucas' girlfriend Jeannie (Norelle Scott) to the really weird and extremely dangerous island for a little beach rest and beach relaxation before the doctor-killing and mutant-fighting shenanigans. Even more inexplicably, Jeannie has no idea about the revenge plan, Lucas may or may not know, and Sandy does know. My hot take: Michael loves drama.

They take a ferry to the island while wearing bathing suits and beachwear. Jeannie and Lucas even have sex in their car despite the ferry driver and the other vehicle on the ferry having a clear view of the action, but they're fit and attractive people so maybe they don't mind giving the ferry a show. (There's a lot of weird sex-related business in this movie.) Unfortunately for our two young couples, that other car is a Trans Cranial Application truck occupied by Spider and some other freaky mutant-man. Tex Munro is on the ferry, too, for some reason. When Lucas takes a whiz on the truck (hilarious but why?), the mutants get out and have a fistfight with Lucas and Michael. The mutants take most of the beating and vow painful revenge on our four heroes.

When we finally get to the island, we learn that a little town has sprung up around the clinic. Unfortunately, this is where we get a racist comic relief scene with actor/comedian Jonathan Hardy in brownface as shopkeeper Ranji Gandhi. Fortunately, this character never appears again. After taking in some of the town, our four heroes hit the beach for swimming and sunbathing before heading to a country house near the town that Michael somehow knows about even though some earlier dialogue referred to a hotel. The property is located near a maze of underground tunnels. Our gang goes into the tunnels, the boys get separated from the girls, mutants on motorcycles go after them, and all hell breaks loose for the remainder of the film.

My synopsis allows for some of the insanity Wikipedia leaves out, but rest assured, my description is still much more normal than the actual movie. This is some weird, weird shit. Is it a good movie? That question has no meaning here. You either roll with Death Warmed Up or you get left behind. It's not a top shelf Antipodean classic like Dead End Drive-In, but it looks cool (except for a couple overly dim scenes), you will not be able to guess what will happen next at any given moment, and it's completely berserk from beginning to end. Shitcan the racist scene and improve the lighting in the dim scenes, and you'd really have something here. Have what exactly, I really can't tell you, but you'd have something.

Director David Blyth has had an odd career. Co-writing Death Warmed Up with Michael Heath (who co-wrote the incredible and far more coherent 1982 horror film Next of Kin), the project was his third feature as director after the punk and bondage-themed sci-fi/fantasy Angel Mine and, in a real curveball, A Woman of Good Character, a costume drama about a servant girl in the 19th century. He followed Death Warmed Up with two vampire movies, Red Blooded American Girl and My Grandpa Is a Vampire (starring The Munsters' Al Lewis) and several Mighty Morphin Power Rangers-related projects. Recent films include David Blyth's Damn Laser Vampires, Ghost Bride, and Night Freaks, the latter a pandemic-filmed mockumentary about alien abduction.