Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Filmmaker Victor Fleming had a landmark 1939, with sole directorial credit on both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. The truth is a bit more complicated, and both films had troubled productions with multiple directors. Here's the abbreviated, but not that abbreviated, history: Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy fired original director Richard Thorpe a few weeks into filming after deciding that Thorpe was moving too quickly and carelessly and getting lousy performances. LeRoy replaced Thorpe with George Cukor, a much stronger filmmaker, but as soon as Cukor got things rolling on Oz, the studio moved him to Gone with the Wind, which he'd already agreed to direct and which was now finally ready to shoot after many delays. Fleming replaced Cukor but followed Cukor's blueprint. Cukor clashed creatively with producer/studio executive David O. Selznick and star Clark Gable (though in Gable's case, it was also homophobic discomfort with Cukor's homosexuality) on the Gone with the Wind set, and despite intense lobbying from pro-Cukor stars Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, Selznick fired Cukor and replaced him with, you guessed it, Victor Fleming. Fleming had finished the color sequences in Oz, but most of the black-and-white Kansas-set scenes still needed to be shot, so another great filmmaker, King Vidor, took over and directed what would become the first third of Oz. Fleming, handling the bulk of Oz and Wind back-to-back, crashed out from exhaustion, and yet another director, Sam Wood, took over for three weeks of filming before Fleming came back to take Gone with the Wind over the finish line. It's incredible that both films were even semi-competent with all the behind-the-scenes musical chairs, but the fact that they became enduring cultural landmarks is miraculous (though I'm a much bigger fan of The Wizard of Oz; I find Gone with the Wind historically fascinating but morally noxious and aesthetically overstuffed).

Fleming wisely took 1940 off, but he eventually followed up his 1939 double whammy with his second Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation (after 1934's Treasure Island), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Though I prefer John S. Robertson's 1920 silent version with John Barrymore and, especially, Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 pre-Code version with Fredric March (one of the great American movies, in my opinion) (an additional shoutout to Hammer's excellent 1971 gender-bending take, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde), Fleming's approach to the material yields some impressive results and maintains the overwhelming darkness of its predecessors, despite having to water a few things down due to Hays Code restrictions. These early Jekyll and Hyde movies are far bleaker and more intense and overtly sexual than many contemporaneous horror films and appear to be speaking to a primarily adult audience.

Spencer Tracy in the title role(s) may seem on paper like more of a commercial choice than an artistic one. That's not a slam on Tracy as an actor, who was mostly excellent, but he specialized in light, sophisticated comedies and as righteous crusaders of justice in heavy dramas, and it's hard to picture him going full Hyde. He pulls it off in a major way, though, and his Jekyll/Hyde is strengthened by the moral ambiguities flavoring his portrayal. The point of his research is trying to separate the good and evil that share space inside all of us. His Jekyll is not a cartoonishly aw-shucks embodiment of goodness contrasting with the monstrous Hyde but is instead a flawed but mostly decent human being whose serious weaknesses become the bedrock of Hyde's personality.

Tracy's Jekyll is a successful young doctor on the rise who cares about the people in his life and is deeply in love with his fiancée Beatrix (Lana Turner), but he's also a bit obsessive about his crackpot research and loves to shock the high society normies with a bit of the ol' proto-Ricky Gervais "Oh, am I offending you? How cheeky and daring of me!" He also has some trouble hiding his lust, and his PDA moments with Beatrix scandalize Beatrix's father Sir Charles (Donald Crisp) despite his protestations often beginning with the phrase, "I'm more broadminded than most, but... ." When Jekyll and his best friend and colleague Dr. John Lanyon (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) rescue a woman, Ivy (Ingrid Bergman), from an attacker, Jekyll basks in the glow of her flirtations, insists he can handle escorting the woman to her apartment alone, lets her hit on him for an extended period of time before letting on that he's a doctor and needs to return home, and reciprocates her kiss before his disapproving friend returns and convinces him to skedaddle.

Ingrid Bergman's performance has been criticized because of her not particularly convincing attempt at a Cockney accent, which often slips back into her natural Swedish cadence, but I think her overall performance is so good, the less than stellar accent is pretty easy to overlook, especially since she mostly abandons it after her initial few scenes. She does so much with her facial expressions and her emotional delivery, and the camera loves her, so I would argue that her performance here is underrated. 

Lana Turner is also great in what could have been a boring, thankless, stand-by-your-man performance. Her character has a less interesting lifestyle than Ivy's, cinematically speaking, but Turner gives Beatrix real life. She also does so much with her facial expressions, and, again, the camera loves her. She injects a stock character with real personality and flavor, and her and Tracy have good chemistry. She's a good girl devoted to her father, her future husband, the community, and the church, but she also gets to display some reciprocal lust for her fiancé and delivers solid emotional pain when Jekyll starts acting in ways she can't understand. These are not milquetoast sexless characters driven by plot machinations. They convince you they're living it.

Fleming also spices things up with some nutty dream/fantasy seizure-visions Jekyll experiences as he's turning into Hyde that somehow got past the Hays Code enforcers. They may have been a little too strange for the imagination-deficient censors to know what they were looking at, including Jekyll floating above Ivy and Beatrix while the women are in cleavage-baring tops, Jekyll atop a carriage whipping two horses who turn into the bare-shouldered women, and a giant champagne bottle with Ivy's head as the cork, which pops off as champagne spews into the air. Code standards forced Fleming to change Ivy's profession from sex worker to barmaid, and there's a lot less skin than in the Mamoulian version, but these expressionist fantasy sequences somehow squeaked through.

Fleming's two most famous movies as director are producer-driven for-hire projects that had a strong visual design already in place when Fleming came aboard, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shows off what he was capable of when he had more control. (I love The Wizard of Oz, but it's not particularly representative of Fleming's overall body of work.) Fleming is great with atmosphere and mood, and he excels at emotionally intimate scenes between two or three characters. You really feel Hyde's mistreatment of Ivy here (often to an uncomfortable degree) and the spark between Jekyll and Beatrix, and that intimate scale reflects my two lust-filled pre-Code Fleming favorites, Bombshell and Red Dust, the first a screwball comedy and the latter a brutal, offbeat melodrama, both starring Jean Harlow. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (Fritz Lang's Fury and Cukor's The Women and Gaslight) does wonders with light and darkness, and is equally strong with interior and exterior scenes and closeups and long shots, and filmmaker and cinematographer complement each other's work here.

A few of the transformation scenes haven't aged well (though they still look better than the vast majority of visually dead, untactile, revoltingly empty 21st century digital effects) and the movie runs a bit long, but this is otherwise a strong interpretation of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sure, there are several others I'd put ahead of it, especially the 1931 version, but that's just a testament to how many good and great Jekyll and Hyde movies we have. This one is a worthy effort and still somewhat undervalued.

The Demons (Jesús "Jess" Franco, 1973)

Prolific Spanish exploitation director Jess Franco is in full horndog mode in The Demons, his 1973 French-Portuguese Satanic nunsploitation witch-curse lesbian softcore sexploitation 17th century period piece revenge epic, available in multiple hacked and slashed and panned and scanned versions on VHS, DVD, and whatever surviving prints are floating around. I'm not sure what version my wife and I watched last night on a semi-bootleg DVD copy, but I assume it was the full enchilada pasted together from the various cuts, as the running time was a full two hours, the scope compositions were presented in the correct aspect ratio, and the spoken (and unspoken) languages jumped, seemingly at random, from English to French to Spanish to German to telepathy (the characters were sometimes silently looking at each other as the subtitles churned out unspoken dialogue).

Franco has a sizable cult following, but I'm a bit of a skeptic. I find him too sloppy and repetitive (and zoom-lens happy) to fully embrace, even as his lurid, pulpy b-movies with arty aspirations read on paper like my kind of thing. It's fitting that the Franco movie I do really like out of the handful I've seen, Marquis de Sade's Justine, is considered boring and unrepresentative by the hardcore Franco-heads. I'm not a hater, though. I can always find something to enjoy in Franco, and since The Demons is a '70s Euro-horror with witch curses, sexy nuns, and enthusiastic blasphemy, it kept me happily entertained when it wasn't testing my patience (admittedly a 50/50 split).

The Demons opens with a witch being tortured and then burned at the stake on the orders of Lord Justice Jeffries (Cihangir Ghaffari, a Russian-born Iranian who became a Turkish movie star and then an international character actor and producer whose best-known credits on this side of the tracks are Shaft's Big Score!, Bloodsport, and Abel Ferrara's Fear City). The witch curses everyone watching and says her daughters will get revenge. Jeffries laughs this off because he thinks the old crone was childless, but his witch-torturing accomplice Lady De Winter (Karin Field) is unsettled and urges a search for the offspring. Jeffries relents. Lady De Winter is married to Lord Malcolm De Winter (Howard Vernon), a kindly, absentminded type who just wants to look through his telescope, so she's been making time with another witchfinder, Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dalbés), who gets off on witch torture almost as much as her. He also whips her nude body while she confesses to witchcraft. This is all just a warmup for Lady De Winter, however, who's really into the ladies.

I'm a little fuzzy on how Lady De Winter and Renfield get there, but they somehow receive enough information to check out a pair of sisters, Kathleen (Anne Libert) and Margaret (Carmen Yazalde), who were abandoned and taken in by a convent. The convent is run by Mother Rosalinda (Doris Thomas), a stern taskmaster who nevertheless wears a lot of makeup for a nun and is barely concealing her powerful horniness for her charges. Rosalinda recently got an eyeful of a nude Kathleen writhing in confusing, somewhat aimless ecstasy on her bed in a dream state, which caused her to do some nude, aimless, and confusing bed writhing of her own that same night. There is so much confusing nude bed writhing in this movie, complete with many artless and often out-of-focus zooms in on the butts and pubic hair of the women. Franco may be one of the only filmmakers who can make you mutter to yourself, "Can you please stop showing us this beautiful naked woman and get back to the movie? I'm bored."

Margaret plays by the convent's rules, but Kathleen yearns for worldly pleasures, which allows the devil to get a foothold in her dreams. After a pervathon interrogation from Lady De Winter and Renfield in which Lady De Winter checks to see if the women are still virgins, Kathleen is taken to Lord Justice Jeffries for an inquisition and torture sesh when the Lady's invasive check shows a loss of virginity. Kathleen is then tortured in a variety of nude ways to the arousal of Lady De Winter and Renfield, who both secretly fall in love with her. Their lust is not as secret, however, and the pair start making out in front of everyone after watching some torture. This is the kind of thing that happens when you neglect your wife for a telescope, Lord De Winter. Kathleen enchants nearly every man and woman who lay eyes on her, and she is soon freed by Lord De Winter during a five-minute break from his telescope, causing big problems for everyone.

Meanwhile, Margaret, despondent over her sister's absence, is visited by the spirit or vision or physical embodiment of her long-lost mother, fresh from hell, who fills her in on the revenge plot. Her mother then sends one of Satan's minions to take the younger woman's virginity and switch her allegiances from God to Satan. The sex is apparently good enough to make her change teams, though it looks as unerotic and baffling as most other Franco sex scenes, and soon Margaret is a full-on emissary of hell. 

Her first order of business is having some baffling, unerotic sex with Mother Rosalinda and then hitting the road for Lord Justice Jeffries' place to put the demonic smack down on Jeffries, Lady De Winter, and Renfield for roasting her mom. Will there be time to sex up Lady De Winter first? You bet your ass. Key word: ass. (Lady De Winter doesn't recognize Margaret out of her convent wear until she sees her naked ass.) She's also been delivered a stunning superpower. When she feels like it, she can transform a living person into a cheap Halloween decoration-looking plastic skeleton just by giving that person a smooch on the lips. Nice.

The sisters go on separate journeys, new characters are introduced, and their paths cross again. There are many artless zooms, plodding scenes, hilarious performances, and baffling events along the way. Some of it is boring, some of it is a good time. Sometimes Franco accidentally captures a beautiful or visually powerful image. Sometimes he just zooms in on an out-of-focus partial butt cheek or some pubes for a weirdly long time. These are the kind of things you put up with if you're a Franco fan. The closing moments are pretty satisfying, though. I'll give him that.

So, The Demons. It's an intermittently satisfying lesser melange of Ken Russell's The Devils, Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, Franco's own Justine (including a similar interlude with a painter), and any random '70s adult film, but you'll never confuse it for any other filmmaker's work, so here's to you, Jess, you dirty old weirdo. They don't make 'em like that anymore. 

Demons (Lamberto Bava, 1985)

Demons, in addition to being a classic of '80s splatter and one of my favorite movies about watching movies in a theater (alongside Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn, Bigas Luna's Anguish, and Joe Dante's Matinee; I have a separate canon for favorite movie theater scenes in movies otherwise not taking place in a theater, movies about making movies, movies about projecting movies, movies about watching movies/hanging out at a drive-in, and movies about watching movies on video or TV; Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to Black is a special case that works for most of these categories), is also a collaboration between several major figures in late 20th century Italian horror cinema. It may be easier to name who didn't work on it, but I'll give a brief(??) rundown.

Director Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary horror filmmaker Mario Bava, previously directed Macabre and A Blade in the Dark (reviewed on this site years ago) and followed Demons with You'll Die at Midnight, Delirium, and, of course, Demons 2. Bava's producer was another legendary horror filmmaker, Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre, and the list goes on), and Bava cowrote the screenplay with Argento, Dardano Sacchetti (whose other writing credits include The Cat O' Nine Tails, Twitch of the Death Nerve, Shock, Zombie, Inferno, City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, A Blade in the Dark, and Demons 2), and Franco Ferrini (co-writer of Once Upon a Time in America, Phenomena, Demons 2, Opera, The Church, and Trauma). The music was composed by Claudio Simonetti of Goblin, suppliers of the memorable Suspiria and Dawn of the Dead scores. Simonetti also supplied non-Goblin scores for and/or performed as a musician on multiple Argento films. (Besides Simonetti's music, Demons is jam-packed with synth-pop and metal songs, plus a semi-obscure Rick Springfield tune and Billy Idol's "White Wedding." It should be a mess, but, for Demons, it works.) Bava favorite Gianlorenzo Battaglia handled the stunning cinematography and came back for the sequel (his wildest credit is probably the underwater camera operator on Altman's Popeye).

Did I say this would be brief? The cast includes Nicoletta Elmi, iconic creepy child star of so many '70s Euro-horror cult classics in one of her rare adult roles (she quit acting in the late '80s to become a speech therapist), future Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi, Fiore Argento, daughter of Dario and half-sister of Asia, the striking cult movie legend Geretta Giancarlo aka Geretta Geretta (who shares my birthday along with Harry Dean Stanton, Woody Guthrie, and Ingmar Bergman), Bobby Rhodes, who was brought back for Demons 2 to play a completely different character because he's just that cool, and several actors who aren't horror veterans but look so damn interesting that you'll think you've seen them in other things. I could keep going with the special effects and production design teams, but you have Internet access, so I'll stop here.

Originally intending to make a three-story anthology film, Bava grew so obsessed with Demons that he dropped the other two stories, and I'm so glad he did. There's not much story to Demons, but it's a visual feast of light, shadow, color, neon, architecture, blood, slime, guts, and gore. As beautiful as it is disgusting, Demons never puts something on the screen to move the plot along. Every image is lovingly and carefully framed, photographed, and arranged for maximum visual impact. This is one of those movies that has a mysteriously seductive indefinable atmosphere, a voodoo of location, a palpable presence. It's got that feel. Much like the funk, you can't fake the feel. You've got it or you don't. Demons has it.

Like many great Italian horror movies, Demons doesn't even take place in Italy. The movie opens with college student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) riding the Berlin U-Bahn to meet up with her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo). While on the subway platform, Cheryl is followed by a creepy guy with a metal mask covering half his face (Soavi). Her terror dissipates when she realizes Metal Face is handing out free passes to an unnamed movie at the Metropol theater. Bava used the actual Metropol for much of the film, though some interiors were filmed on studio sets in Rome when they really needed to tear shit up and cover shit in goop.

A famous venue in West Berlin that has lived many lives, the Metropol began life as the New Theatre in 1905, a live theater space with a separate concert hall on the top floor. The live theater was turned into a movie theater in 1911, and the concert hall became an operetta in 1914. That top-floor operetta was destroyed in WWII, but the facade and movie theater survived with some repair. The building was renamed the Metropol in 1951, and in 1977, it stopped showing movies and became a disco and live music venue. After the music venue closed in 2000, a porn director turned it into a short-lived sex club called the KitKat Club, someone else turned it into a short-lived upscale nightclub called the Goya in 2005, and yet another owner ran it as a less upscale nightclub until 2014, when the movement of the West Berlin nightlife scene to a different part of the city killed it off. The building rose from the grave in 2019, reopening as the Metropol for live music and events. Besides Demons, the Metropol's other major film appearance was in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire as the venue where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Crime & The City Solution perform.

Architecture history digression over. Back to the movie. Cheryl convinces Kathy to skip class and go to the Metropol with her. Kathy is kind of whiny about it and hopes it won't be a horror movie but is ultimately convinced. When they arrive, the women are stymied by a Coke machine eating their money, but a couple of young Italian Zack Morris and AC Slater types, George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), save the day. Coke acquired, the women warm up to these chivalrous preppies on the make and don't put up a fuss when the fellas sit next to them. Our other patrons include a no-nonsense pimp named Tony (Rhodes) and two of his stable, Rosemary (Geretta) and Carmen (Fabiola Toledo), a milquetoast young couple, Hannah (Argento) and Tommy (Guido Baldi), hot-tempered middle-aged jerk Frank (Stelio Candelli) and his meek wife Ruth (Nicole Tessier), an insanely cool-looking elderly blind man named Werner (Alex Serra), his caregiver niece Liz (Sally Day), and Liz's secret lover (Claudio Spadaro), and (gestures vaguely) the rest.

Our other important characters are ticket taker and usher Ingrid (Elmi), who also looks insanely cool and retains the mesmerizing screen presence she exhibited as a creepy kid, and a car full of drugged-up street punks who snort cocaine through a straw in a Coke can and break into the theater while on the run from the cops at the worst possible time, causing the demon pandemonium to expand from the theater to the streets. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The theater lobby, in addition to normal theater lobby items like movie posters, for some reason also contains a motorcycle on a pedestal. Hanging from the bike are a katana and a creepy mask. You know, normal movie theater shit. Rosemary is a sassy party type who plays by her own rules (she smokes in the theater even after Ingrid tells her to put out her cigarette), so she immediately picks up the mask and puts it on, though a sharp edge cuts her on the cheek after she takes it off.

Everyone takes their seats and the movie begins. Oh shit, Kathy. It's a horror movie. The film-within-the-film (directed by Soavi) is a competent bit of young people exploring ancient graves biz that looks decent enough to keep the crowd's attention but isn't good enough to steal any thunder from the actual movie called Demons that we are currently watching. When a character finds a creepy mask that looks just like the mask in the lobby, puts it on, and cuts his face in the same spot as Rosemary, Rosemary and Carmen get a little wigged out. The no-nonsense Tony has no time for this nonsense and tells them so. When Rosemary's cheek starts bleeding again, she heads to the bathroom to wash it off and apply some pressure, but of course she turns into a damn demon and our demon pandemonium begins.

The rest of the movie is a battle to the death between theatergoers and demons. It's exciting, violent, splattery as hell, visually thrilling, and logically incoherent. I'm a lover of movies that eschew the conventions and rules of logical storytelling and everyday life, and I almost always prefer the part of the movie where we don't yet have an explanation to the part of the movie that gives us the explanation. Demons never explains. We never find out why the demons exist, what their end goal is, why they picked the theater, who booked the movie, why that guy has a part-metal face (or even who the hell he is), why Ingrid seemed to be in on the conspiracy until she didn't, (BRIEF SPOILER) why a damn helicopter falls through the roof (END OF SPOILER), or how any of this came into being. I love that. Some people find that a weakness. I find it a strength. Each movie make its own rules. There are plenty of movies that make logical narrative sense. We also need some that don't. It makes the world go round, baby. It's real freedom.

I love this movie. I love it so much. (I also like the sequel, though I miss the movie theater setting, but I'll get into that in a later post.) It's dark and funny and beautiful and intense and goofy and brutal and a lovely tribute to the theatrical experience and a great place to point your eyeballs. Yeah, the storytelling's a little thin, but this is a movie about the creation of images. Too much storytelling only gets in the way.

The Devil Bat (Jean Yarbrough, 1940)

Consider it a premonition of what's to come in The Devil Bat that the director's last name is misspelled as "Yarborough" in the opening credits. A non-classic of "ehhh, that's good enough" cinema, The Devil Bat is a lazy, mediocre, mostly inoffensive B picture with a couple of things going for it — Bela Lugosi and an unusual story. Sure, we've seen revenge-obsessed mad scientists with secret labs full of liquids in tubes and electrical volts many times before, but this may be the only movie where the mad scientist, Dr. Paul Carruthers (Lugosi), attempts to kill the entire families of the two corporate fat cats he works for by massively increasing the size of bats, creating aftershaves and perfumes with a scent that turns the now-giant bats murderous, tricking the family members into trying out the aftershaves and perfumes, and then setting the big-ass bats loose in the night to do some neck chomping. Inefficient and unique!

Dr. Carruthers is the chief (and seemingly only) chemist for a multi-million dollar corporation in a small town near Chicago that manufactures a variety of household items, particularly perfumes and shaving products. Carruthers' bosses, Henry Morton (Guy Usher) and Martin Heath (Edmund Mortimer, but listed as Edward Mortimer in the credits), got filthy rich off Carruthers' inventions, but poor Doc Carruthers took a $10,000 lump sum and future employment instead of partnering up as one of the co-owners. He's regretted that move ever since and thinks Morton and Heath should make it right. They're fat cats, so of course they won't. Carruthers has no other choice than to kill every single Morton and Heath with giant bats and rigged perfume. You'd do the same thing. Admit it.

We kick things off with Carruthers in his secret lab turning a normal-sized bat into a big ol' boy. The bats just hang there limp in most scenes, looking like the stuffed props they are. When bat movement is needed, the film jarringly cuts to an extreme closeup on a real bat's face. Carruthers' lab has a non-secret room where he does his corporate work and three secret rooms with three secret doors for his bat biz, but Carruthers keeps all three doors open when he's working. The lax security protocol with this Carruthers guy, I tells ya. One of the film's few pleasures is Lugosi sporting his fun goggles and grinning while peeking through the window of the third secret lab where he blasts the bats with volts until they embiggen. He has fun and so do we.

Carruthers is interrupted in the middle of his important bat work by a telephone call from Morton and Heath, inviting him to a party. He brushes them off but then says he'll attend when they hint that the occasion is the engagement announcement of Heath's daughter Mary (Suzanne Kaaren) and Morton's son Don (Gene O'Donnell). He then completely ghosts the party anyway. Carruthers is a world-class hater, and I respect his game. The real reason for the party is to present Carruthers with a $5,000 bonus check for all his fine work. The fat cats think he'll go crazy for the check, but Carruthers treats it like the slap in the face it is. Since Carruthers no-shows the party, Heath sends one of his sons, Tommy or Roy (doesn't matter), to Carruthers' place with the check. Carruthers gets Tommy or Roy to slather on some of the new aftershave, and soon Tommy or Roy is dead from a giant bat attack. A few scenes later, the other brother gets killed by a bat, too.

Remember that fake engagement announcement? Don tells Mary they should get engaged for real, but Mary tells him she only thinks of him as a brother. Don then disappears from the rest of the movie. I can't remember if this scene takes place before or after any of the murders, but no one seems that broken up about losing two members of the family in one week. These Heaths recover quickly from tragedy.

My guess about this weird scene and the absence of Don thereafter is that Don was killed by bats, too, but the movie cut it for time and then shoehorned in this odd quick scene about Don getting dumped to cover his absence. The problem is that every character except Lugosi and a newspaper editor played by Arthur Q. Bryan is a total snooze, so we would've never missed Don anyway. Don being a bat victim may also explain the wild inconsistencies in the death toll of the many newspaper headlines the film shows. After the two Heath sons are killed, the newspapers on display list the number of bat victims as two, three, four, and two again. In the rest of the movie, further newspaper headlines jump back and forth between two and three.

Our final important(?) characters are a Chicago reporter, Johnny Layton (Dave O'Brien), and a photojournalist, One-Shot McGuire (Donald Kerr), covering the Heath murders. O'Brien shows a lot of pizzazz in his first scene but immediately loses that pizzazz when he encounters the other boring characters. The only entertaining thing about the subsequent scenes is that the town's police chief immediately takes a liking to the big city reporters and tells them secret details of the case. He immediately loves these guys. We're in opposite land here. He even lets them do their own investigations, and by the end of the movie, the reporters are ordering him around.

If you're a hardcore Lugosi fan, this is worth a watch, but just barely. Other than Lugosi, the exasperated newspaper editor, the hilarious sounds the giant bats make when they launch into the night (the only appropriate description I can think of is "party screams"), and the scene where a bat goes flying out of a car trunk, this is mostly a dud. I realize I spent most of this review snarkily rehashing the plot, but there's not much else to talk about.

Demon Queen (Donald Farmer, 1987)

We're back this week with another slice of regional DIY insanity, this time from the prolific master(?) of shot-on-video straight-to-video weirdness, Donald Farmer, the small-town Kansas native who has been cranking out his own inimitable brand of mostly horror indies since the late '80s after several 8mm shorts in the '70s. Farmer at various points has made movies in or near the Los Angeles and Miami areas, and I believe he's presently based somewhere in Tennessee. He's still at it, and his post-pandemic credits include Catnado (tag line: "It's like Sharknado, but with cats"), Debbie Does Demons, and Bigfoot Exorcist.

Demon Queen is Farmer's second feature (if a 54-minute movie with a five-minute closing credit sequence can be called a feature), following Cannibal Hookers, reviewed on this site in 2020. Demon Queen doesn't have the pizzazz of Cannibal Hookers, and at no point would you ever confuse it for anything resembling a good movie, but Farmer's brand of do-it-yourself confident incompetence is highly amusing to me. This guy shot this stuff on video with a mostly amateur cast and crew and somehow got it distributed and into video stores. I love that.

Demon Queen begins with a drunk out-of-towner bringing a mysterious woman named Lucinda (Mary Fanaro) to his dimly lit, cheap motel room somewhere on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale or Miami. They have sex, but Lucinda follows up the sexy times by biting open the man's chest, removing his heart, rubbing the heart on her breasts (featuring a two-minute breast closeup), and chewing on the heart. 

The next day, Lucinda wanders past a small-time coke dealer getting his ass kicked by his two suppliers for being late in his payments. Lucinda chomps down on the neck of one of the suppliers while the other one runs off. (By the way, the supplier who gets chomped gets one of my favorite credits in the opening sequence: "Featuring Clif Dance as Bone." Is "Cliff" spelled with a second f in the closing credits? You bet your ass.)

The coke dealer, Jesse (Dennis Stewart), is mesmerized by Lucinda and appreciative of her intervention in the beatdown. When he offers her a favor, she asks if she can crash at his place. He enthusiastically agrees, much to the annoyance of his coked-up girlfriend Wendy (Patti Valliere). Lucinda proceeds to get on Wendy's nerves, bedazzle Jesse, and chew on the chests and necks of dudes all over the southeast Florida region. 

Some of these dudes die, but most of them reanimate as demonic zombies who go on neck- and chest-chewing sprees of their own, mostly targeting women. Lucinda also appears to Jesse in bizarre and lengthy dream sequences, which should scare him off, but he's under her erotic spell.

We also get several semi-nonsensical video store scenes, shot at the now-closed Fantasy House Records and Video in the suburbs of Nashville, where the clerk tries to get people to rent the most violent movies possible. A woman in a short skirt looking for Meryl Streep movies leaves in disgust, only to get her neck chomped by one of the demon zombies. Otherwise, no one in the video store scenes ever crosses paths with the rest of our Florida-based cast. It's insane and hilarious how much filler is in this 54-minute movie.

The cheap shot-on-video look is, for me, the most compelling aspect of the movie. It's slightly above camcorder-level in quality, and the places Farmer films haven't been prettied up by set and production designers or cinematographers' filters. This is an accurate document of a slice of southeast Florida (and a Nashville video store) in the mid-1980s. This is what the motels, apartments, shopping malls, and office buildings looked like. This kind of thing is so fascinating to me.

But what about the movie, you ask? Well, it's mostly trash, but enjoyable trash if you, like me, are delighted by amateurish idiosyncratic acting, semi-incoherent narratives, DIY special effects, and the creative urge to make something and see it through to the end. Demon Queen is no great shakes and isn't even as much fun as Cannibal Hookers, but I will always have time for this kind of thing.