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.

Death Wish II (Michael Winner, 1982)

When people say there are no guilty pleasures, I appreciate the sentiment behind that position but respectfully disagree. I'm not talking about the embarrassment and shame you feel when a favorite artist or entertainer or a piece of art or entertainment that you enjoy is deemed uncool by your peer group or someone whose taste you admire. Those of us consumed by the world of film, music, literature, art, pop culture, and counterculture tend to have strong opinions and aesthetics and can be unnecessarily harsh when debating those opinions and subscribing to those aesthetics, but if you're not a passive consumer, you deserve to enjoy what you enjoy without guilt, shame, or embarrassment. What you enjoy should still be open to fair criticism, but you shouldn't have to hang your head in shame for getting something worthwhile out of it.

No, the guilty pleasures I'm talking about are the ones in which those feelings of embarrassment and shame are truly deserved. I'm talking about those cursed objects you enjoy that you know, deep in your soul, deep in your heart, deep in your gut, are total trash. When I watched a few seasons of Married at First Sight, I didn't feel good about it, and I was right to feel that way. GUILTY! When I watched every Saw movie, I could have been doing anything else with my time and it would have been an improvement. GUILTY!! When I watched Maury Povich's and Jerry Springer's talk shows, I was not communing with the godhead. GUILTY!!!

Sitting near the top of my guilty pleasure pile is the vigilante vs. street punks revenge-killer movie, a staple of the 1970s and '80s in which a usually white, usually male private citizen living a decent life is driven to murder by a multicultural gang of lawless street maniacs who have murdered (and sometimes raped) the citizen's family or favorite neighborhood shopkeeper. These movies, excepting the few that are skillfully ambiguous and complex like Ms. 45, are mostly indefensible from a moral, political, and aesthetic standpoint (or at least from the morals, politics, and aesthetics that I hold). Be afraid, these movies say. Be afraid of black people, Latino people, punk rockers, young people. Be afraid of cities. These guys all want to rape your wives and daughters. They want to rob you. They want to kill you all. And they're everywhere in the city. Every city. Afraid now? OK, now it's time to get mad and get revenge. I know you're too much of a coward to be a vigilante, but you can take your fears and your anger and let Charles Bronson (or a Charles Bronson type) be your fantasy surrogate. Feeling better now? OK, time to vote for guys who want to do something about it!

You can trace elements of the current political shit soup United States residents are swimming in back to 1974's Death Wish, the granddaddy of the late 20th century vigilante movie. That movie's success, leading to scores of imitations, tributes, and sequels, became an important dream-text for the right-wing male, and its influence lives on in the still-prevalent conservative fantasy/fear of cities as crime-ridden hellholes in need of red-blooded, gun-slinging macho justice free of bureaucratic red tape and soft-on-crime liberal governance despite the fact that violent crime has dramatically decreased in nearly every major American city since the early '90s. Even when the crime rate was much higher in the '70s and '80s, the reality was far from the nonstop free-for-all of lawless violence these movies grossly exaggerated. I regularly get a laugh from right-wing grifters and their gullible followers depicting the downtown of my city of residence, Austin, Texas, as a nightmarish no-man's-land controlled by gangs of violent homeless people. Most of the homeless people are not violent, and most of them are homeless because of your policies, motherfuckers. I'm there regularly and it's still no crime-ridden hellhole despite social media posts to the contrary. Is this also happening in your city? Thank Death Wish.

And yet. And yet, I still love these damn movies. Every time I caught a vigilante movie on TV as a kid, it felt like Christmas morning. They were so exciting! Every gang had its own crazy thing going on, with wild fashions and hairstyles and weapons. One villain was exciting enough, but five (or more) villains terrorizing neighborhoods? That shit rocked! These movies had grit and atmosphere, and their settings presented a shadow world of depravity, insanity, and debauchery. I was hooked. As a small-town kid who was simultaneously afraid of the big bad outside world and impatient to take part in it, I was both seduced and repelled by the seedy vibrancy of night-time city life as depicted in these films.

After seeing all the success the original film's imitators were cashing in on, the major independent production company Cannon Films bought the Death Wish rights and decided to crank out some sequels. Cannon was a wild company that specialized in both lowbrow and highbrow good times, making dozens of drive-in/exploitation/b-movies, soft-core sex movies, ninja movies, Chuck Norris action movies, and Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, as well as bankrolling movies by Jean-Luc Godard (King Lear), Andrei Konchalovsky (Shy People and Runaway Train), Jerry Schatzberg (Street Smart), and John Cassavetes (Love Streams). We need a Cannon Films of the 2020s, and, no, I'm not talking about A24, you weird young people who love brands.

Getting Charles Bronson back on board as Paul Kersey was the beginning of a repeat of the original's ingredients. Michael Winner, director of the first film, came back for round two at Bronson's insistence, replacing Cannon exec Menahem Golan, who coproduced. Continuing the tradition of having an extremely talented but unlikely musician scoring the film, Jimmy Page wrote the music for this round of death wishing, following in the footsteps of the first film's composer, Herbie Hancock. The first film's New York City location has been swapped for Los Angeles, but both cities are swarming with crime. Robin Sherwood takes over the role of Paul's daughter Carol from Kathleen Tolan but has an equally rough go of it from the street punks. Continuing the accidental tradition of one of the street punks becoming a big star later, Laurence Fishburne is one of their number (Jeff Goldblum was one of the bad guys in the first film).

Seven years after the dark events of part one, architect Paul Kersey (Bronson) has moved from New York to Los Angeles. He's living a happy life again. He's a success at work, has a news radio reporter girlfriend, Geri (Jill Ireland, Bronson's real-life wife, whose levelheaded anti-vigilante personality serves here to give the film some plausible deniability that it's just pro-vigilante propaganda), and a personal chef and housekeeper named Rosario (Silvana Gallardo), and he's still close with his daughter Carol (Sherwood), though she has remained mute since the first film's attack and has only recently begun saying a few words with the help of a therapist. Taking Geri and Carol out for some ice cream, Kersey walks by a gang of street weirdos who target him for a mugging. The silly-named gang is made up of the shaved-eyebrow/buzzcut with long hair in the back/Jesus-loving psycho Stomper (Kevyn Major Howard), Cutter (Fishburne, in peak new wave style), Jiver (Stuart K. Robinson), the oddly monikered Punkcut (E. Lamont Johnson), who does not have a punk cut but does otherwise dress somewhat punkily, and the hulking Nirvana (Thomas F. Duffy). (These names have much more flavor than the street punks in the first movie, who are billed as Freak 1, Freak 2, and Spraycan). Odd trivia fact: the two actors in the evil gang who are now deceased, Howard and Johnson, both died on Valentine's Day, Johnson in 1984 from AIDS and Howard just last week from a respiratory illness.

After Kersey gets his wallet lifted by the punks, ruining his ice cream plans, he chases them down and nabs one of them, Jiver, who catches a classic Chuck Bronson ass-kicking. Vowing revenge, the gang drive to the address on Kersey's wallet in their creepy van. Kersey is out with Carol, but, in a horrible and degrading scene, Rosario is gang-raped and killed. When Kersey and Carol return home, the gang knocks Kersey out and kidnaps Carol. The controversial rape scene was considerably censored for theatrical release but has been restored on recent video and streaming copies. I hate it. Winner seems to be getting his jollies from the scene, which goes on for an interminable length, with the camera leering at Gallardo's nude body and the faces of the men getting off on her torture and Winner directing her to crawl on all fours down the hallway before collapsing.

Winner claims he was just trying to show the horrendous reality of rape as a crime without any sugarcoating, but the film seems to take a sadistic glee in her suffering and vulnerability. I'm not alone. The film's original cinematographer quit in disgust before the scene was shot, the screenwriter says there were no rapes in his screenplay and that Winner added them "to get his rocks off," Bronson said the scene made him sick when he saw the finished film, Fishburne says he hated acting in the scene and thought it was too much, and Gallardo herself, who otherwise has kinder things to say about Winner than a lot of his collaborators and detractors, felt he took things too far and that the production's still photographer kept taking pictures of her while she was nude after Winner had said cut and before she could be covered up. I'm no prude or lover of censorship, but I hate rape scenes that serve no purpose other than showing that a character is a bad person or allowing filmmakers and audiences to get off on seeing a woman being assaulted.

I was down on Death Wish II during this scene and a shorter scene with an assault on the kidnapped Carol shortly afterward, though her death scene is pretty spectacular (it was also censored in the theatrical release). It's not enough to save the movie, but the rest of Death Wish II is considerably more interesting as a time capsule of skid row Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Of course, Kersey gets revenge on the gang one-by-one, and he rents a room in a downtown flophouse to surveil the night life until he nabs his prey. I like this chunk of the movie, as stupid and regressive as it is, because it's got a lot of visual grit and flavor, with plenty of local color from the location shooting and the extras and bit players. Vincent Gardenia even reprises his role as Det. Frank Ochoa in this portion of the film, sent from New York to LA on NYPD's suspicion that Kersey is at it again. He's always a fun guy to watch, even when he's returning to the well in a cash-grab sequel.

What else can I say? If you've seen one of these movies, you know the drill. Death Wish II has a lot of ugliness in its soul and is much more narratively clumsy than the first movie, which, politics aside, is a well-made piece of entertainment, but I can't deny its satisfying early '80s time-capsule pull or the shameful fact that I like regressive vigilante exploitation movies. I can't help it. I just wish they hadn't influenced decades of crime policy and sensationalist media propaganda.

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.