The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, 1940)

This week, we're taking a one-movie respite from Death Wish, Deathstalker, and Boris Karloff to go on a convoluted excursion with a reunited Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, teamed together for a second time in a horror-comedy after the success of 1939's The Cat and the Canary, reviewed on this site in 2023.

I've never been a Bob Hope superfan, and neither of these horror-comedies are particularly hilarious, but Hope's dry deadpan style, which is mostly free of the mugging and overperformance that can occur when a comedian is dropped into a horror movie, works well with the material, and he has a nice, breezy chemistry with Paulette Goddard, who has a lot more oomph and pizzazz than your standard damsel in distress. Both movies make up for their lack of knee-slapping hilarity with plenty of visual atmosphere, a cast that plays the material straight without too much winking at the audience, and well-constructed but off-kilter narratives that never drag.

The Ghost Breakers opens in a fancy Manhattan hotel room during a fierce lightning storm. Mary Carter (Goddard), an heiress, has recently inherited a mansion and adjoining plantation in Cuba from a distant relative and is preparing to take a late-night ship to check out the property in person, despite repeated warnings that she will die if she spends the night there from diplomat Havez (Pedro de Cordoba), solicitor Parada (Paul Lukas), and a mystery man played by a young Anthony Quinn. Mary has moxie and will not be deterred by terrifying rumors. 

Meanwhile, popular radio host Lawrence "Larry" Lawrence (Bob Hope) (middle name also Lawrence) ("my parents had no imagination") returns to Manhattan with his personal assistant Alex (Willie Best) after a multi-city tour shortly before his latest broadcast. Larry's show presents the hot gossip about gangsters and the criminal underworld, with insider info from his informer Raspy Kelly (Tom Dugan), who indeed has an extremely raspy voice. After his show, Larry is summoned to the same hotel and floor as Mary by gangster Frenchy Duval (Paul Fix), who is not very happy with tonight's gossip. Alex gives Larry his gun, just in case. Pandemonium ensues.

The film's opening scenes take such a twisty, byzantine route not just to get the characters inside the haunted house in Cuba but also to even get them on the boat taking them there that I was baffled but consistently amused by how the hell we were all going to get to the second half of the movie. I like when movies aren't afraid to zigzag with their narratives, and I didn't mind spending time in any of the film's main locations (the hotel, the ship, a Havana nightclub, and the haunted mansion).

Once inside the mansion, the movie continues its eclectic streak, throwing zombies, ghosts, mysterious echoes, hidden passageways, and nefarious schemers up to no good into the mix. The actors handle this material in understated and naturalistic fashion, which works better for me than the usual hooting, hollering, and screaming.

My heart sank a little when I saw Willie Best's name in the cast. Best had a great reputation as an actor on the stage, but his filmography is full of the racist, stereotypical roles black actors were forced to take in this era if they wanted a Hollywood career. There are two or three racist jokes delivered by Lawrence at Alex's expense, and one scene where Best has to give the big-eyed, teeth-chattering routine when he's scared, but for the most part, his character here is a three-dimensional intelligent guy making most of his own decisions. He's mostly part of the team. It gives you a glimpse of what could have been if Best hadn't been stuck in driver, servant, unemployed layabout, and racist comic relief roles. His '30s films in particular are extremely hard to watch. 

I don't want to give this film too much credit since there are still racist moments here (Virginia Brissac has a small brownface role in addition to the handful of racist jokes at Best's expense), but this is a more well-rounded character for Best than he usually got in the movies. Unlike some of Best's other roles, nothing here feels mean-spirited or degrading, just ignorant and embarrassing, and Best gets to put a lot more of his personality into the character than he usually got the chance to do on film.

Aside from those few moments that haven't aged well (though what era in this perpetually racist country ever has?), The Ghost Breakers is an offbeat and entertaining slice of classic Hollywood. Director George Marshall skillfully and successfully handles the blend of genres and the twisting narrative with a steady hand. Marshall was one of those jack-of-all-trades journeymen filmmakers who worked in multiple genres in both the silent and sound film eras, made several industrial films about improving your golf game in the early days of sound, and closed out his career in the early 1970s in television. 

Unlike today where you succeed in Hollywood by having a famous and/or wealthy parent or a hit podcast or YouTube channel, Marshall was a mechanic, newspaper reporter, and lumberjack before getting work as a movie extra. He moved on to stunt work in westerns and then larger acting roles. He didn't enjoy acting but grew fascinated by the guys working behind the scenes, so he switched his focus to screenwriting and directing. Bring back the lumberjack to filmmaker career track.

Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (Jim Wynorski, 1987)

The week began with my wife in the emergency room and continued with the lawless fascist cretins running the country destroying due process and ignoring court orders, so I really needed the 85-minute dose of undiluted stupidity and fun that was Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans.

The first Deathstalker was a Roger Corman-produced Conan the Barbarian rip-off that had a reasonable b-movie sense of humor about itself but mostly played things straight. The sequel is a defiantly silly parody of the first movie and sword-and-sorcery fantasy in general, directed by Chopping Mall's Jim Wynorski (a b-movie legend whose career stretches from 1984's The Lost Empire to last year's DinoGator), with Chopping Mall's John Terlesky taking over as Deathstalker and Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle (my wife: "You know that if an actress is named Monique Gabrielle you're going to see her boobs") in a dual role as deposed princess Reena the Seer and her evil doppelganger Princess Evie, the latter conjured by evil sorcerer and usurper of the throne Jarek (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' John LaZar) ("This is my happening and it freaks me out!"). This is a fine example of HYBC (Hell Yeah Brother Cinema) because when you see it, you say, "Hell yeah, brother!" (That's a Mid-Atlantic-era Ron Bass "brother" and not a Hulk Hogan "brother." Hulk Hogan sucks.)

Like the first film and most other sword-and-sorcery movies, Deathstalker II contains a beefcake hero, sword battles, epic quests, black magic, a deposed court, a formidable but cowardly villain who has stolen the throne, lots of bare skin, horseback riding, and unappetizing stews eaten in huts. Unlike those movies, this one also has zombies, a bar open 24 hours, a pro wrestling match between our hero and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling star Queen Kong, more one-liners than a Naked Gun movie, a 100 percent increase in the first movie's number of pig-men from one to two, and a hero who looks like he just got back from organizing a frat kegger instead of living in an ancient mythical era.

Terlesky, who is now a successful television director, is the epitome of the chisel-chinned, smirking '80s prep-school jock and could not look more mid-1980s if he tried. His casting lets you know right away that Wynorski is not playing it straight. Terlesky even keeps his '80s hairstyle, looking more like an asshole in a John Hughes movie than Conan on a budget. He leans into his '80s dudeness and plays the part as a wisecracking party guy in it for the babes and the glory who can rise to the heroic occasion when circumstances call for it. Most of his one-liners aren't particularly hilarious, but the quantity of them is funny. It's the dad-joke ratio. The numbers are what's important. Resistance is futile. 

His romantic interest/mythic quest partner Gabrielle is legitimately funny in her dual good/evil roles. Most of these Playboy and Penthouse sex bomb pictorial stars turned actors have a wooden presence onscreen when required to do anything besides being sexy, but Gabrielle has a natural goofiness, silliness, and warmth that work perfectly for this movie. 

Weirdly, John LaZar, who gave one of the great unhinged performances in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as Z-Man, is relatively subdued here as the evil sorcerer, but you totally buy him being an evil sorcerer anyway, especially if you're familiar with his Z-Man work. Still, I wanted LaZar to go wilder in this. (Also, his doppelganger magic potion subplot is inexplicably dropped in the final third.)

The movie opens with Deathstalker fighting some masked swordsmen in a castle and occasionally taking five to kiss a woman we never see again. After a narrow escape from Jarek's feminine counterpart Sultana (Toni Naples), Deathstalker leaps out of a castle window onto a horse and rides away. Sultana leans out the window and says, "I'll have my revenge, and Deathstalker, too!" Bam! The opening credit title card hits. Hell yeah, brother.

Deathstalker stumbles across more masked castle guards giving Reena the business on his way to the 24-hour bar, Abud's, and decides to intervene. He lets them know that he's not completely opposed to manhandling women if they deserve it, but he doesn't like what they're doing to this woman. (Has Deathstalker gone woke?) He beats up the guards, except for the last one, who runs away with the great line, "Leave me alone, I don't even know these guys." 

Finally making his way to Abud's, Deathstalker has somehow picked up two babes on the quick jaunt over and is ready for some beer drinking, hand over candle tomfoolery, and an eventual threesome in a room upstairs. He gets cockblocked by a massive bar fight and rides away with Reena, who followed him into the bar and talks her way onto his horse. She takes him to her hut and reads his fortune while feeding him unappetizing stew. She says he will become famous and wealthy if he undergoes a brutal quest to defeat Jarek. Deathstalker loves the wealthy part and starts the quest immediately. Reena tags along, not revealing that she used to be the princess. Something tells me these two kids are going to earn a grudging respect for each other and maybe, just maybe, fall in love.

What follows is 70-plus minutes of nonstop action, horniness, wisecracks, and insanity that should entertain anyone who is not made of stone. Our heroes fight Sultana's henchmen and their exploding arrows, zombies in a graveyard, a wall of moving spikes in a mausoleum, a sexy Amazon tribe and their queen (Maria Socas) who inexplicably have a wrestling ring and force Deathstalker to wrestle Gorgo (Dee Booher aka Queen Kong) to the death and who also inexplicably break the match into rounds like it's boxing (the Amazons later become allies), unwanted marriage proposals, steaming hot water tubs, swinging axes, castle guards, Princess Evie (who can eat men's souls after booty calls and turn their bodies into weird masks that hang on her headboard), Sultana, and Jarek.

Deathstalker II works as both a low-budget sword-and-sorcery movie and a low-budget comedy. These Conan knock-offs are usually relatively entertaining, but a lot of them take themselves so seriously. Wynorski foregrounds the humor that is already inherent in scantily clad beefcakes and buxom babes fighting magical weirdos and mythical beasts with swords while also keeping all the stuff you like from the more straightforward fantasy epics. This is also probably the only sword-and-sorcery movie that ends with a blooper reel. I had a great time and was never bored.

Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner, 1985)

If the first Death Wish was a downbeat '70s New Hollywood spin on masturbatory right-wing vigilante fantasies that at least paid lip service to moral ambiguity and Death Wish II was the ultra-sleazy grindhouse version, Death Wish 3 (Roman numerals be gone) goes full '80s over-the-top live-action cartoon absurdity. It's the most ridiculous Death Wish and the most fun (though Winner of course manages to shoehorn in a minute of rape content anyway), and parts of it even feel like a Troma movie. This is hilariously nutty, hilariously stupid stuff.

Charles Bronson is back in Death Wish 3 as the most cursed human being to ever walk the earth, Paul Kersey, pacifist architect turned gun-toting vigilante. In the first film, Kersey hits the 1974 New York City streets killing a rainbow coalition of street trash after his wife and daughter are assaulted and his wife is murdered. He moves to Chicago at the end of the first film, but by the time Death Wish II hits screens in '82, Kersey is in Los Angeles, trying to put the past behind him until some multicultural street punks rape and murder his daughter and his beloved housekeeper/chef (well, technically, his daughter jumps out of a window to her death to avoid more torture, but potato/potahto). The Kersey killing spree resumes, and this time it's bicoastal. By the time II ends, his girlfriend dumps him after discovering his vigilante ways (lifesaving move on her part), so poor Paul is alone again, naturally.

In Death Wish 3, Kersey is back in New York City (though half the movie was filmed in London for financial reasons) to visit an old friend. Like everyone who builds a relationship with Kersey, his buddy is attacked and killed by street punks. The once-vibrant working-class Brooklyn neighborhood where Kersey's friend lived is now in disarray, with only a handful of apartment buildings and small businesses left unabandoned after a vicious street gang takes over the five-block area. The elderly and young people who can't afford to move remain; everyone else splits.

Kersey has a terrible first day back in New York, walking in to his friend's apartment to witness the last few minutes of his life and then getting arrested when the cops show up because they immediately assume he's the killer. Surprisingly for a right-wing fantasy, this movie portrays the cops as stupid, corrupt, lazy, ineffective, and violent flouters of constitutional rights, but this is more about bolstering the film's macho vigilante agenda of a bureaucracy-free gun-toting land of instant street justice than it is about genuine criticism of policing in America. The main problem, the movie repeatedly hammers home, is that New York's gun laws are too strict.

The cops take Kersey to the station and start whaling on him. The chief, Richard Shriker (veteran character actor Ed Lauter), comes in, tells the other cops to scram, lets Kersey know that Shriker knows about his vigilante ways from a decade previously, and calls Kersey "dude" multiple times. Ed Lauter repeatedly calling Charles Bronson "dude" is what I go to the movies for. Kersey denies being Kersey so Shriker starts roughing him up, but Kersey punches him right in the balls. Boo-yah! Shriker throws Kersey in a packed holding cell with a bunch of New York City maniacs and specifically tells the other cops to disregard all of Kersey's constitutional rights.

In the holding cell, Kersey tries to keep his head down and mind his own business, but the dude's a magnet for street punks. He gets in several scraps and comes out on top, but a weird dude with a reverse mohawk singles him out. Despite a five-on-one imbalance, Kersey nails Reverse Mohawk with one hell of a punch. Before the weirdo can retaliate, he makes bail and leaves the cell, telling Kersey he'll kill an old lady that night in his honor and gives him the neighborhood address of his home turf. Guess what? That's the Brooklyn neighborhood of Kersey's buddy.

After Shriker cools down and his balls recover from the Kersey knuckle sandwich, he makes Kersey an offer. He'll let him out of jail and leave him alone if he resumes his vigilantism, fucks up the street punks, and throws the department a bone in the form of a few high-profile arrests once in a while. This is Kersey's dream. His favorite hobby is fucking up street punks who have killed his loved ones, so he happily agrees. As he's being released, a public defender, Kathryn Davis (Deborah Raffin), tells Kersey she'll represent him if he wants to sue for having his rights violated. Kersey tells her thanks, but no thanks, which somehow makes her fall in love with him at first sight. They'll have some good times later, which means she's fuckin' doomed. If this was Death Wish II, she'd be raped for 10 minutes and killed, but since this is Death Wish 3, she's knocked out while waiting in the passenger seat of a car and pushed into oncoming traffic, where the car hits another car, causing both cars to explode.

Kersey returns to the apartment building of his dead friend, where he quickly befriends his buddy's neighbor, Bennett (Martin Balsam). Stay away, Bennett. This guy is cursed. (Bennett surprisingly survives the film, but he does end up in the hospital and his small business explodes.) Bennett introduces Kersey to the rest of the neighbors, and everyone loves him, especially an elderly Jewish couple, a young Puerto Rican couple (the wife is played by non-Puerto Rican future Star Trek: The Next Generation star Marina Sirtis, who said about Winner after his death, "I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I hope that he will rot in hell for all eternity"), and a young black kid who appears to be the only child in the entire neighborhood, except in one crazy scene I'll mention later. These characters are an insurance policy against the racism charges leveled at the Death Wish franchise, a franchise that loves to have its cake and eat it, too (diversity is scary and bad but also good, cops are bad when enforcing laws but good when letting good people take laws into their own hands, vigilantism is morally ambiguous and will cost you but is also extremely great, rape is bad but extended rape scenes are awesome, etc.).

Kersey promptly moves into his dead friend's apartment since the rent is paid through the month, which is enough time for him to teach this ragtag group of solid citizens to come together and take out the trash ... the street trash. This plan will ultimately succeed, but several of them will die, lose loved ones, get injured, and/or have their businesses explode. This will mostly be wildly entertaining.

Remember that reverse mohawk freak from a couple paragraphs ago? He's the gang leader, Manny Fraker (Gavan O'Herlihy). The punky/new wave-looking gang is too large to get much of the individual treatment of the previous films (and is even larger when Manny calls in reinforcements for the final showdown), but a few stand out, including Angel (Tony Spiridakis), The Cuban (Ricco Ross), and, everyone's favorite, The Giggler (Kirk Taylor), who has a habit of giggling as he runs during his frequent purse snatchings. In the accidental tradition of a member of the gang getting much more famous a few years later (Jeff Goldblum in part one, Laurence Fishburne in part two), one of Manny's thugs is Hermosa, played by Alex Winter two years before The Lost Boys and three years before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. This tradition will continue in Death Wish 4 with Danny Trejo.

The rest of the movie is Chuck Bronson hilariously massacring street punks with increasingly large weaponry (regular pistol, Wildey hunting pistol, Korean War-era military machine gun, missile launcher), the gang retaliating, and Kersey going bigger and bigger. The final third of the movie is a comically over-the-top battle between Kersey, Shriker, and the neighborhood citizens against Manny's gang and several allied gangs, including more punky new wavers, Rastas, bearded bikers, indescribable maniacs, denim aficionados, and a gang who looks like they just clocked out of an insurance office. Several buildings explode, Looney Tunes-style booby traps deliver a comical beatdown to several gang members, at least 30 guys and their stunt dummies fall off roofs and fire escapes (Winner saved money by getting a lot of the actors to do their own stunts; there were some injuries and hard feelings), TV news helicopters deliver the play-by-play, and you can probably guess who gets incinerated by a missile launcher along with the entire wall of an apartment building.

The third installment in this ridiculous series is highly enjoyable trash. Again, I can't defend this slop politically, but I laughed harder and more consistently at Death Wish 3 than I have at any Hollywood comedy of the last I don't know how many years. "They killed The Gigglah, man!" (I'm also dealing with some pretty intense stuff in my personal life and my work life, and, of course, the general state of the country and the world right now is a nightmare, so I'm really punchy, but I still think this movie would have delighted the animal part of my brain no matter what was happening.) I enjoyed it when I watched it on TV as a kid, but I think it thrilled me even more watching it as a weary, middle-aged man. What other movie would present one of its most disturbing and serious moments with a group of extras doing the robot and other breakdancing moves in the background? What other movie (besides a Troma movie) would show a group of heretofore unseen children dancing in the street in celebration after a street punk is shot to death? What other movie would show us Martin Balsam wielding a machine gun?

Sometimes I grow exasperated at the idiocy in this world, but without it, we'd never have Death Wish 3, so maybe that idiocy isn't all bad. Speaking of idiocy, I'll leave you with a fun fact. Jimmy Page is once again credited with composing the film's score, but he had zero to do with this movie. Winner just reused bits of Page's score for Death Wish II along with some outtakes (without asking Page or informing him) and slapped his name on the credits. The very 1985 trebly synth, sax, and drum machine opening and closing music was composed by Mike Moran.

"They killed The Gigglah, man!"

Black Friday (Arthur Lubin, 1940)

Black Friday is an oddball buried treasure that combines mad scientist brain transplantation hokum with the Jekyll-and-Hyde story and hardboiled film noir, starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi in an atypical part, and Stanley Ridges in a dual role that really lets him flaunt his acting chops. If you can roll with the absurd premise, it's a great time.

Black Friday begins almost identically to the last Boris Karloff movie I reviewed for this site, Before I Hang. This made my heart sink a little. Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff, in kindly doctor who took things too far mode), is about to be executed by electric chair (gallows in the previous film). He accepts his fate but hands his written notes to a journalist representing the only newspaper Sovac deemed fair to him and encourages him to spread his story and get someone to carry on his research. (This plea was delivered as a prepared statement at the sentencing hearing in the previous film.) "Here we go again," I thought. This would be the third Karloff movie in a row for me where he plays a kindly old medical scientist whose research obsessions get him in trouble. I liked those previous movies, but I was ready for something different.

Fortunately, in flashbacks as the journalist reads Sovac's notes, we learn that Sovac is not so kindly after all. He's a manipulative man in the driver's seat of his own ruthless obsessions who can easily set his humanity aside in the name of research. We also get two much more interesting interweaving stories and not a single scene taking place in a test tube-filled laboratory. Hallelujah.

In the small college town of New Castle, Dr. Sovac is best friends with his daughter's English literature professor George Kingsley (Ridges). It's unclear whether this is the New Castle in New York, a small town 36 miles from Manhattan that was once the home of former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley (though it has no college) or the New Castle in Delaware, a small city 125 miles from Manhattan that is the birthplace and possible current home of former UFO guitarist Vinnie Moore. The Delaware New Castle has colleges in and near the city. The mystery will never be solved (unless I missed a line of dialogue), but we do know our characters live and work in a town called New Castle that is reasonably close to Manhattan.

Dr. Sovac, his daughter Jean (Anne Gwynne, the grandmother of Chris Pine, the mother of character actor Gwynne Gilford, and the mother-in-law of Robert Pine, the sergeant on CHiPs), and Prof. Kingsley's wife Margaret (Virginia Brissac) take Kingsley out to dinner to celebrate his upcoming interview for a position at a larger and more prestigious school. Our gang makes a brief pit stop for Kingsley to run an errand before the meal, but Kingsley is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught in the middle of a car chase and shootout between New York gangster Red Cannon and his former cronies, led by Eric Marnay (Lugosi). When Cannon is shot, he plows his automobile into the building Kingsley is standing in front of, gravely injuring the professor.

Back at the hospital, Sovac gets a dark idea. He's already been successfully transplanting animal brains in secret (possibly the reason he lost his job at a major university and ended up in New Castle), why not transplant part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain into the damaged part of dying buddy Kingsley's brain? The ol' partial brain switcheroo (a favorite plot of co-screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who would later write the novel Donovan's Brain, which was adapted for the screen three times) works, Cannon dies, and Kingsley makes a miraculous recovery. No one is the wiser but Dr. Sovac.

Before his surgically assisted death, Cannon revealed that his gang was after him because he hid half a million dollars of loot somewhere in New York City and didn't cut them in on it. Sovac hatches a wild plan. If he can somehow bring out the dormant aspects of Cannon's personality in Kingsley's hybrid brain, he can find out where the money is hidden, steal it, and use it to fund his brain transplantation research. He lies about needing to attend a meeting in New York about some local hospital business and talks Kingsley into going with him and leaving Margaret at home. He says it will be good for Kingsley's convalescence and give Margaret a break. The mild-mannered Kingsley warms up to the idea after initially rejecting New York as too loud and noisy. He likes to read, teach, and study English lit away from the hubbub of city life, but he decides New York may be just what he needs after all.

Once in Manhattan, Cannon's old memories start to come back to Kingsley, partially engineered by Sovac. After a shock to the system while attending Cannon's favorite nightclub, seeing a performance by the gangster's girlfriend, nightclub singer Sunny (Anne Nagel), and spotting a member of Cannon's former crew, Kingsley gets a pounding headache and extreme fatigue. Back at the hotel, he wakes up and is transformed into Cannon (complete with his gray hair turning dark, the only part of this science I have a hard time believing). Cannon takes the brain and body switcheroo pretty well, especially since he can no longer be recognized by the police or his former friends turned enemies. He starts bumping off his gang one by one, reconnecting with a mystified Sunny, and heading for a showdown with Marnay (though Lugosi and Karloff only share one scene and aren't even on screen at the same time in that one), while occasionally turning back into kindly old Kingsley. Events grow even more complicated, with Sovac cranking up his manipulations and Cannon/Kingsley's Jekyll and Hyde act making a mess of both men's lives.

The hair color change is silly, but Stanley Ridges otherwise convincingly takes full advantage of the opportunity to physically inhabit two completely different men in the same body. Karloff was originally hired to play the part but decided he'd be more comfortable and effective playing Sovac. Lugosi, originally hired to play Sovac, was moved to the smaller supporting role of Marnay (though he kept his second billing) after the producers thought a seasoned American character actor would be more suitable for the Kingsley/Cannon part.

He has less screen time than the other two men, but Lugosi acquits himself nicely playing a gangster. It's an unusual role for him, and he nails it. Lugosi is mostly remembered today for Dracula and his later declining years of addiction and financial struggles while appearing in the Ed Wood movies (which are much better than their reputation as kitschy trash) and Martin Landau's portrayal of him in this period in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood, but I think he's still underrated as a physical performer. He finds a particular and distinct way of carrying himself and moving his body in each character he plays (even in his worst films), and the way he occupies the physical space as a gangster here is a Lugosi I'd never seen before.

Directed by jack-of-all-genres journeyman filmmaker Arthur Lubin, most famous for the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Francis the talking mule movies (though my non-Black Friday favorite is Rhubarb, a screwball comedy about an orange cat named Rhubarb who inherits a professional baseball team and a sizable fortune after his eccentric millionaire owner dies), Black Friday was one of six feature films Lubin directed in 1940 (the Hollywood studio system work schedule was beyond insane). The other five included two mysteries, a gangster movie, a crime thriller, and a musical. Black Friday has all of that (yes, even a musical number) plus some mad scientist horror. The disparate elements work on their own and as part of the whole. I haven't seen anything quite like it, I had a great time watching it, and I recommend it to fans of Karloff, Lugosi, '40s noir, and the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Deathstalker (James Sbardellati, 1983)

Distributed and executive produced by Roger Corman, Deathstalker was one of the earliest movies in the '80s sword and sorcery craze, which began shortly after the release of 1982's Conan the Barbarian (or in some enterprising b-movie hustlers' cases, shortly before) and continued for most of the rest of the decade. These movies are a bit like the slasher movie in that they all contain the same basic elements, but each filmmaker, screenwriter, and cast (and the setting) injects each one with its own distinct flavor (or lack thereof in the worst ones).

Like Conan, Deathstalker has a muscled-up beefcake barbarian with a special sword, an evil usurper of a throne possessed with magical powers, a ragtag group of dudes who join the beefcake on his quest, a sexy blonde romantic partner of the beefcake who's also good with a sword, swordfights, fistfights, blood and guts, monsters, and multiple naked breasts and oiled-up pecs. Unlike Conan, Deathstalker was made for about 36 dollars but makes up for it by surpassing Conan's breast count by about 638. There's a bare breast in about every third shot. The edited-for-TV version must've been 23 minutes long. Despite Deathstalker's low budget, Corman turned pennies into gold by using existing studio sets in Argentina and a crew of experienced locals.

So, Deathstalker. It's goofy and it's dumb, the kind of goofy and dumb a 10-year-old boy in 1983 would have dreamed up if you'd asked him what he'd like to see in a sword and sorcery movie, which is the kind of goofy and dumb I can get behind. A lot of these Conan knockoffs run out of gas after the halfway point, but Deathstalker never repeats itself and never stops changing things up, whether it makes a damn bit of sense or not, and like I often say, making sense is overrated. (Have I often said that? It feels like I have.)

"Hold up there, tough guy," you're saying to me, which is a little patronizing, but I'll allow it. "Weren't you complaining about the sexual violence in Death Wish II in your last post? How come you're giving Deathstalker a pass?" Good question. Deathstalker contains attempted rapes, and here I was writing about it like it was a feelgood romp. This may be hypocritical, but Death Wish II's rape and attempted rape scenes linger on the woman's distress, portray the mostly black and Latino perpetrators as animals, seem like they're included because the director has a fetish for sexual violence, and have a hollow ugliness that made me feel bad. Deathstalker is a cartoonish goof that takes place in the rape-and-pillage era of barbarians where everything is transactional and everyone's humanity has been scraped away, and every attempted assault is almost immediately interrupted by an oiled-up hunk saving the woman and getting into a swordfight with the perpetrator. Nothing is lingered on or completed. The scenes are pretexts for other things to happen. My take may be hypocritical, but Deathstalker is not serious about anything it's presenting.

Deathstalker is about, um, Deathstalker (Rick Hill, Georgia Tech and Canadian Football League running back turned chisel-jawed b-movie actor turned motivational speaker), an amoral barbarian swordsman riding his horse through the landscape, stealing to survive, killing other barbarians with his sword when they give him the business, making sweet love to random scantily clad ladies, and looking out for number one. A deposed king asks him to be a hero and take care of the usurper of the throne, the evil magician Munkar (Bernard Erhard), a bald guy with a serpentine creature tattooed on his dome and a Chihuahua-sized pet monster named Howard who eats eyeballs and fingers. Munkar not only has stolen the throne, he's stolen the king's daughter Codille (Playboy Playmate and Hollywood Square Barbi Benton). Deathstalker tells the old man to take a hike and that heroes are fools. Sick burn, Deathstalker.

Something tells me Deathstalker and Munkar are going to battle it out anyway. That something is a someone, an old witch who seems to be old friends with Deathstalker. We don't get the back story. This is a Roger Corman movie. There's no time for that. While hanging in the witch's hut after saving a maiden from some of Munkar's goons, Deathstalker learns from the witch that Munkar has a special amulet and a special chalice that are helping him hold onto power, but he needs the special sword to complete the trilogy of important objects and control the world. Intrigued, Deathstalker decides to take on Munkar and snag the trilogy for himself. Oh yeah, that sword is in a nearby cave.

Deathstalker wedges his oiled-up pecs, biceps, and glutes into the cave and meets its inhabitant, a smart-mouthed troll who used to be a man but has been living in the cave eating roaches and rats for 30 years after Munkar hit him with a spell. A giant appears out of nowhere with the sword, but Deathstalker easily takes it and chases him off. Deathstalker turns into a little boy, leads the troll out of the cave, and turns back into an oiled-up beefcake, and the cave troll turns into a middle-aged man, Salmaron (Augusto Larreta) who makes a lot of funny sounds over the course of the film. He's like the Conan version of Mr. Bean. The transformation has also turned his American accent Argentinean.

The duo pick up a couple friends on the way to Munkar's castle, another oiled-up hunk named Oghris (Richard Brooker, who played Jason in Friday the 13th 3) who is entering Munkar's battle-to-the-death tournament where the winner will be declared his heir (I'm sure Munkar has no ulterior motives and will honor the results) and a sword-wielding babe named Kaira (Lana Clarkson), who wears the wild outfit of a black cape and no top, letting her breasts hang out in the evening breeze among her new male friends. She's wearing a barbarian-era metal-studded bra/bikini-style top once they hit the castle, though we never learn where she acquired it.

It's nonstop action, cheesecake, beefcake, wizardry, boobs, butts, legs, pecs, biceps, sword impalings, pratfalls, and classic good times from here on out, and we all learn a little something about how power corrupts at the end. The tournament competitors are all humans except for one giant dude with a pig-face (played by an Argentinean pro wrestler) (though my favorite of the tournament fighters is a scrawny guy with an enormous amount of pizzazz who gets smushed with a giant mallet but really gives it the ol' razzle-dazzle before that), one of Munkar's lackeys gets gender-swapped with Barbi Benton, a former friend turns traitor, and, I'm seeing double here, 30 Munkars appear in the final showdown (or maybe just eight). My favorite line of dialogue: when Oghris is strapped to a torture device that is painfully stretching him, Munkar says to him, "I trust you are comfortable," and Oghris replies, in a mildly irritated tone, "I am not!" This movie is so stupid, and I'm glad I watched it for a second time.