The Black Cat (Albert S. Rogell, 1941)

One of the approximately 680 movies (most of them pretty good) called The Black Cat that claim to be based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story while having nothing whatsoever to do with Poe besides a black cat showing up at some point (I've reviewed at least two and possibly three on this site; our late, great tortoiseshell cat Fern was absorbed by Fulci's 1981 version), 1941's The Black Cat is also one of the approximately 680 movies about a group of shady characters stuck inside an old dark house during a storm and one of the approximately 680 movies about a group of untrustworthy relatives and their associates gathered together to hear the reading of a will, with murder and conspiracy following. Are there hidden passages in this old dark house? You bet your ass.

This Black Cat gives you the enjoyable familiar standards, but, like You'll Find Out (reviewed here last month), it also breathes some fresh weird life into the old formulas, particularly in the first half, and features a stacked cast including Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, a young Alan Ladd, a young-ish Broderick Crawford (this is the only film I've seen where Crawford sprints, jumps, and rolls around in mud, which would be unimaginable even ten years later), and my personal favorite, Gale Sondergaard, who steals the movie from absolutely everybody, even the black cat.

The gold-digging relatives of Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus) have converged on her Gothic cat-filled mansion upon the news that the elderly Henrietta is at death's door. Once arrived, they can barely hide their extreme annoyance that the old lady appears to have made a full recovery. Henrietta decides to read her will to them anyway from her wheelchair, two kittens on her lap, since they're all assembled. Everyone finds out how much of the estate and its fortune will be distributed their way, but the best part of the will is interrupted by the arrival of realtor A. Gilmore Smith (Crawford) and his absent-minded comic-relief associate Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert), an antiques appraiser.

Gilmore was a neighborhood kid who used to hang out at the mansion until he was banished as a teen for throwing rocks at the cats (he's also highly allergic to them). He's also harbored a lifelong crush on Henrietta's granddaughter Elaine (Anne Gwynne), the only Winslow with a conscience. Gilmore has been working out a secret deal with Montague Hartley (Rathbone), the husband of Henrietta's niece Myrna (Gladys Cooper), to sell the estate once Henrietta dies, but finding the old lady as strong as an ox, he pitches the sale to her. She refuses, but lets Gilmore know she likes his moxy.

The rest of our prominent characters are Henrietta's other granddaughter, Margaret Gordon (Claire Dodd), who is having an affair with Montague, Myrna's hotheaded son Richard (Ladd), Henrietta's nephew Stanley Borden (John Eldredge), who would be called a failson on social media if he were a man of today, the mansion's gardener/handyman Eduardo Vidos (Lugosi), and the mansion's housekeeper Abigail Doone (Sondergaard) (more on her later).

Back to the best part of the will. Because of the timing of Gilmore and Penny's arrival, only a few of the assembled know the will's final stipulation. (But which few?) Abigail remains in the mansion and takes care of the cats until her death. Then, and only then, will the rest of the will go into effect. The shady business starts almost immediately after this scene, as does a massive thunderstorm that washes out the nearby roads. 

An attempt to poison Henrietta's milk accidentally kills one of the cats. Henrietta takes it to the property's cat crematory and mausoleum where her own ashes will be displayed along with her deceased pets (her cats are so much cooler than her stupid relatives), but something shady goes down there, too. Meanwhile, a black cat (the only kind of cat Henrietta does not love and is superstitiously afraid of) has begun wandering the property and following people who end up in a world of trouble. From then on, it's hidden passages, conspiracies, attempted murders, red herrings, cat hijinks, Mr. Penny hijinks, and family intrigue. Everyone is suspicious; everyone is a potential victim. All of this is a bad time for the characters and a good time for the viewer.

Though the actors are just fine in their roles, they all pale in comparison to Sondergaard. Doing an even more enjoyable spin on her black-clad Gothic housekeeper character from 1939's The Cat and the Canary, Sondergaard's portrayal of Abigail is the clear highlight of an already enjoyable movie. She hates Henrietta's family and takes great pleasure in letting them know it. She has some spooky, witchy qualities, and her motives are mysterious. Sondergaard gives her character so much energy, humor, style, and sensuality, and she's a constant pleasure to watch. I'm a big fan.

The oddball character building of the first half gets a bit lost in the second half's more conventional old dark house mystery, but the whole thing really zips by, and the crisp black and white cinematography is a real pleasure to look at. I give this one a solid recommendation. If you like Gail Sondergaard, cats, old dark houses, and dysfunctional families, you're probably going to have a good time with this one.

Demented (Arthur Jeffreys, 1980)

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Deep Space (Fred Olen Ray, 1988)

It's been too long since I reviewed a Fred Olen Ray movie on this site. Ray, one of the most prolific b-movie directors ever, has a career stretching from 1978's The Brain Leeches to next year's 100 Dates in Dallas, which is in post-production now. Ray has also managed to stay afloat despite the declining b-movie ecosystem (this sad world of disappearing drive-ins and grindhouses and video stores and hollowed-out cable channels) by cranking out Christmas TV movies. If you search the archives of this site, you'll find posts about Ray's movies The Alien Dead, Biohazard, Armed Response, and Alienator, each one more entertaining than it had any right to be.

Deep Space, despite its title, takes place right here on earth and stars two of the great big-headed, square-jawed character actors, Charles Napier (The Blues Brothers, Miami Blues, Maniac Cop 2, The Grifters, Original Gangstas, and numerous films for Jonathan Demme and Russ Meyer) and Bo Svenson (the Walking Tall sequels, North Dallas Forty, Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker, Heartbreak Ridge, Curse II: The Bite, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and both Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds). It's a little more subdued and mildly less insane than most Ray films of the period, but I enjoyed its relaxed pace and smorgasbord of character actors.

In the (as mentioned above) misleadingly titled Deep Space, Ray combines the buddy-cop action movie with the monster-running-amok movie. The monster here is an alien creature (with a design heavily indebted to the Alien movies) that has been captured by the U.S. government (along with a few of its offspring) and sequestered in a capsule floating in space. The top-secret program is studying the application of using the creature as a weapon of war, but a major control-room snafu has sent its capsule hurtling toward earth. My favorite line of dialogue in this control room snafu scene? "Awww crap."

Meanwhile, a pair of L.A. detectives who play by their own rules but get results, Ian McLemore (Napier) and Jerry Merris (Barney Miller's Ron Glass), get in a shootout with some punks who are trying to steal some Halloween masks from a warehouse (including a green two-faced mask I owned as a kid). In classic '80s style, the shootout ends with dead punks, an exploding car, Merris saying "trick or fuckin' treat," and an exasperated captain, Robertson (Svenson), who takes their guns (of course) but lets them keep their badges (say what?). (I love a later scene where Merris asks if they should treat the captain better. When McLemore asks why, Merris says, "We're always mouthing off to him and doing whatever the hell we want.")

While our detectives are knee-deep in this hoopla, the alien capsule crash lands in the countryside near the city, witnessed only by an alcoholic hobo and two teens whose make-out plans are ruined by a flat tire. Soon, all their plans are ruined by the alien emerging from its giant roach egg cocoon, wrapping them in its projectile tentacles, and pulling them into its teeth-filled maw, crunching them to death. Robertson sends his wisecracking but results-getting detectives to the scene to check it out. The place is already swarming with emergency professionals, so, after checking things out and not getting any answers that make sense, our detectives who play by their own rules steal the egg cocoon things containing the younger offspring and take them to their respective houses. Why? That's just the kind of dudes they are.

The rest of the movie consists of the alien kicking asses all over the city, the detectives trying to stop it, and government agents trying to stop the alien and the detectives while keeping the whole thing secret. Instead of the wall-to-wall action you'd expect, Ray takes his time and gives you plenty of character moments and atmosphere. As people my age attempting young-people speak would say, it's more of a vibes-based movie, though Ray also includes multiple scenes of action and alien mayhem, including a scene involving a chainsaw. The point I'm awkwardly trying to make is that Ray emphasizes the quiet moments and the interactions between and personalities of his characters just as much as he emphasizes the b-movie craziness.

Some of these other characters include policewoman Carla Sandbourn (Humanoids from the Deep's Ann Turkel), whom McLemore seduces by playing bagpipes (McLemore: "that's the first time that ever worked"); scientist Forsythe (James Booth, whose extensive credits include five episodes of Twin Peaks as Norma's criminal dad), the head of the scientific part of the top-secret government program; General Randolph (Norman Burton, whose credits include Fade to Black, Mausoleum, Crimes of Passion, and Bloodsport), the military head of that program; The Howling's Elisabeth Brooks as the mother of one of the crunched teens; and several Roger Corman vets.

I also want to make special note of two other characters. Catwoman herself, Julie Newmar, plays Lady Elaine, a psychic who keeps trying to warn McLemore about the space monster. Ray must've had Newmar for only a day because she's never in the same room as any of the other characters, all her scenes take place in her home, and these scenes mostly consist of her calling the police station or the detectives at their homes.

We also get the late, great Fox Harris in one of his memorable weirdo roles as Professor Whately, an entomologist friend of McLemore's. Harris gets only one scene, but he tears it up. (I love this exchange between McLemore and Whately after the detective shows the professor the roach egg thing — McLemore: "This thing is not from our planet." Whately: "Something extraterrestrial?" McLemore: "No, it's from space.") Harris was a favorite of both Ray and Alex Cox. Cox featured him in Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, and Walker, and Fox's other Fred Olen Ray movies were Armed Response, Evil Spawn, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Warlords, Terminal Force, and Alienator. Harris also appeared in Forbidden World, Wim Wenders' Hammett, the Neil Young/Dean Stockwell/Devo collaboration Human Highway, My Favorite Year with Peter O'Toole, Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, Dr. Caligari, and a Teri Garr TV special on Cinemax called Flapjack Floozie.

Now that I've bored you with credits, I'm going to keep talking about them. If you've seen any footage of Deep Space on a washed-out, panned-and-scanned VHS, the movie looks like dogshit, but in the properly restored version I watched last night, you can see the care put into it by cinematographer Gary Graver, a man who led a triple life. Graver was a friend, artistic collaborator, and tireless champion of Orson Welles in the last third of the man's life and career, and the cinematographer on many unfinished Welles projects and some real gems that saw the light of the day (in one case belatedly) like F for Fake, Filming "Othello", and The Other Side of the Wind. A passionate believer in Welles' projects, Graver poured a lot of his own money into Welles' work, using the proceeds from his other two parallel movie careers as cinematographer and director in the worlds of the drive-in/grindhouse/b-movie circuit for filmmaker/producers like Ray and Roger Corman and in the porn film industry. It's partially why so many of the movies he worked on look so great, especially compared to other cinematographers in those lesser-respected industries. I'm someone who loves art films and drive-in movies, and I don't think the latter get enough respect, so I'm a big fan of Graver's career in its totality. (He also worked on the camera crews of A Woman under the Influence and Enter the Dragon.) (A further digression: the old cliché about Welles never living up to his potential after Citizen Kane is such bullshit. If you're talking about power, success, and Hollywood clout, sure, but if you're talking artistic worth, Welles never lost it. Every movie of his is worth seeing, and many of them are every bit as good as Citizen Kane. His unfinished projects were the result of misfortune, economics, an industry that had partially turned its back on him, and his own outsized ambitions, not because of any artistic failure or erratic behavior.)

Back to Deep Space. It's not that deep and 99 percent of it does not take place in space, but it's a lot of fun if you like character actors, b-movie approaches to sci-fi/horror/action, and the fine art of bagpipe seduction. My letterboxd mutuals are not as enamored of Deep Space as I am, but maybe I'm just too sophisticated. Does your preferred Alien ripoff teach you the fine art of bagpipe seduction? I think not.

You'll Find Out (David Butler, 1940)

By 1940, movies about a group of people trapped in an old dark house while a nefarious plan to dispatch one or several of them to gain an inheritance or continue a lucrative grift were a dime a dozen (or 30 dimes a dozen, to use 1940's average movie ticket price), but You'll Find Out manages to inject some pep in the step of the creaky old story by giving it the ol' showbiz razzle dazzle. We're talking horror, comedy, musical numbers, a dog with a man's haircut, and an exciting cast full of weirdos. The couple at the story's center are a pair of milquetoast snoozes, but it doesn't really matter because everything else going on around them is so much fun. I had a great time with this now-obscure oddity.

The second of director David Butler's three movies featuring conductor/bandleader Kay Kyser and his big band, You'll Find Out opens with Kyser and his band, the Kollege of Musical Knowledge, recording their then-popular weekly radio show in front of a live New York audience. The show was a mixture of musical numbers, comedy skits, and quizzes, and we see much of this show (with actors Jeff Corey and Mary Bovard playing themselves) interspersed with comedic vignettes of people in the city listening to it (a cab driver, an old guy in a tenement apartment, a mother taking care of a toddler). It's fascinating stuff if you're interested in showbiz and radio history.

The show's producer, Chuck Deems (Dennis O'Keefe), is feeling good. His high society fiancée, Janis Bellacrest (Helen Parrish), is back in town after three years away at finishing school (barf), and the couple can now get married. The Bellacrests are one of the 400, the list of New York Gilded Age high society families (double barf). Unfortunately, the movie is not about the brutal slaughter of these 400 fat cat bloodsucking parasite dynasties. It's the evening before Janis's 21st birthday, and she's throwing a shindig at the spooky Bellacrest mansion in the nearby countryside after the radio show finishes up, with Kyser and his band supplying the entertainment. Chuck and Janis are a total bore, but they're merely the excuse to get most of our large ensemble to the old dark house.

On the street outside the radio studio, a car nearly rams into Janis. It's the third near-fatal accident for her this week, so she finally recognizes a pattern and lets Chuck know. He does what most men in these movies do after a woman tells them some shit is going down. He says it's all in her imagination, and she needs to relax. Everyone shakes off the near-smushing of Janis, and Kyser's tour bus delivers the whole party-bound gang to the spooky mansion, which is only accessible by a single bridge.

The mansion is even spookier on the inside. Janis's late father collected all kinds of ghoulish artifacts and deadly weapons of murder (a poison blow-dart gun is given special prominence), and the place is jam-packed with them. (Unfortunately, we get some casual racism here about African art objects and the Bellacrest patriarch being murdered by a "savage" while "collecting" said artifacts. Fortunately, it's a pretty minor part of the film.) When Janis's aunt Margo (Alma Kruger) makes an appearance, the old woman seems whacked out of her gourd and pulls Kyser aside to tell him the dead have been speaking to her. We also meet the family attorney, Spencer Mainwaring (Boris Karloff), who is now a prominent judge. Mainwaring lays it on like he's a nice guy, but Kyser gets bad vibes.

After the initial meet-and-greet and assignment of overnight rooms, the party gets hopping when a busload of high society young women arrive. Janis promises the ladies that a second busload of top college men, handpicked by her, will be appearing soon in response to their queries about the party's lack of beefcake (the mostly male musicians give each other the "what are we, chopped liver?" look), but a sudden storm and its attendant lightning take out the bridge before the fellas can make it to the party. A brief blackout follows, and another failed attempt on Janis's life ensues, noticed only by Kyser, who sees the blow dart stuck in the wall. When he tries to show Chuck, the dart is gone.

Power restored, the big band decides to cheer up the young women with a live performance from the ballroom. More musical numbers follow, including a showcase for the only woman in the group, Ginny Simms, and a goofy novelty number spotlighting the band's comic relief, Ish Kabibble (real name Merwyn Bogue), who seems like the prototype for Jim Carrey's hairstyle and comedic personality in Dumb and Dumber. Kabibble has a cute dog with the same haircut. Kabibble was a comedy star and cornet player for Kyser and a few other bandleaders in the '30s and '40s, but his comedic approach was polarizing. On an episode of All in the Family, Maude mentions in disgust that Archie Bunker is a big fan. I wish Kabibble no ill will, but I thought the dog had better comic timing. He was pretty good on the cornet, though.

After the band finishes their three-song set, with a break before the third song (1976 Ramones gigs were longer), Aunt Margo decides to hold a seance, facilitated by her personal guru and spirit guide Prince Saliano (Bela Lugosi). Saliano's seances are like Iron Maiden concerts compared to your usual crystal ball on a card table biz. We get two giant electricity-conducting metal balls on posts, floating objects, Saliano going into a trance, and the floating disembodied faces of people from the other side, speaking in a weird synthesized robo-voice, achieved through the use of early talk box, the Sonovox, which had been invented the previous year. (The Sonovox is also an integral part of the Kyser band's closing musical number, exchanging vocals with Simms.)

Our final major character arrives shortly before the seance, a professor named Karl Fenninger (Peter Lorre), invited by Janis to debunk or confirm Saliano's spiritualist schtick. Fenninger loves to smoke cigarettes while wearing a look of bemused disdain for his fellow human beings. (Personality-defining line of dialogue, delivered quietly to himself: "Why do I have to waste my time outwitting morons?") Even if this movie were a dud, it would've been worth watching just to see Lorre, Lugosi, and Karloff occupying the same space. I love these guys. This is surprisingly Lorre's only movie with Lugosi, by the way.

For the rest of the running time, we get double crosses, homicide attempts, hidden passageways, catacombs, slapstick, and more music. As someone who has had to expensively endure weeks of major plumbing work under my house (our '60s-built cast-iron pipes finally hit the end of their road), I'd really like to know how long it took to create these hidden passageways in the house and how much it cost. Most of it is a lot of fun (though the novelty song "The Bad Humor Man" commits sins against music and comedy); all of it is silly.

Butler, a silent film actor turned workaholic filmmaker-for-hire of studio B pictures who closed out his career by directing 50+ episodes of Leave It to Beaver and the Bobby Vee/Jackie DeShannon teenybopper movie C'mon, Let's Live a Little, handles the chaos of the film's huge cast and its multiple genres with skill. The movie never loses control or gets bogged down, and it remains lively and engaging throughout its running time. The dullsville couple at the center could have sunk this thing if they were the main focus, but, thankfully, the movie spends a lot more time with the band and the trio of charismatic villains. This movie should be better known. How many other horror/comedy/musicals starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre are there? That's right, none.

DeepStar Six (Sean S. Cunningham, 1989)

There must have been something in the water in late-'80s Hollywood that caused so many filmmakers to make movies about something in the water. The 1989 release schedule was crammed up the wazoo with movies about deep ocean crews encountering something unusual under the sea. (Speaking of under the sea, The Little Mermaid was also released in 1989.) On the big-budget side, James Cameron followed up his mega-hit Aliens with The Abyss, a story about a SEAL team encountering aliens in the depths of the Cayman Trough, released in August of '89. In April, ultra-low-budget king Roger Corman retooled an unfilmed 1982 screenplay to cash in on the fad with Lords of the Deep, about aliens attacking an underwater colony of humans. (Hilarious fact about that movie: future award-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski was on the second unit crew and was fired because his footage looked too good, making the rest of the film look even worse by comparison, though they did eventually use portions of it.) In March, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone director George P. Cosmatos got in on the undersea action with his mid-budget Leviathan, the story of a deep-sea mining crew battling a giant monster in the Adriatic Sea.

Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham shrewdly (some may say cynically) realized how many of these movies were on the '89 release schedule and hatched a plan to deliver a low-budget (in Hollywood terms) but professional sea monster movie as quickly as possible to beat them all into theaters. He succeeded, and DeepStar Six premiered on January 13, 1989, to mostly negative reviews and mediocre box office. (To continue this deep-sea circle jerk, DeepStar Six screenwriter Lewis Abernathy would later snag an acting role in Abyss director Cameron's Titanic.) It's far from an original piece of work and hits a lot of the familiar beats and grooves of the crew-on-a-mission movies, but seen through a 2025 lens, DeepStar Six is a solid and entertaining action/sci-fi/horror movie of modest budget like they used to make 'em before everything had to be green-screen world-building Best Buy-lighting-looking eleventy billion dollar horseshit. Is mainstream Hollywood filmmaking so washed up that mediocre films from the '80s now look like shining gems? Possibly. (Just so you don't think I'm an old man yelling at a cloud, I do think dozens of great movies are still being made every year, but very few of them within the Hollywood system or the major independents.)

DeepStar Six takes place on an experimental undersea facility run by the U.S. navy with a crew made up of navy personnel and civilian contractors. The facility serves two purposes for the navy: a place to test underwater colonization and a location to construct a storage area for nuclear missiles. The current crew is finishing up the last week of a six-month assignment that was supposed to be just four months. Some of them are handling the extended duration better than others, but no one is going nutzo yet. I would like to call the crew a ragtag collection of misfits so crazy they just might work, but, alas, each one is a highly skilled professional with a specific duty, played by a slew of recognizable working actors, the most famous probably being Miguel Ferrer. "Hey, it's that person from that thing," you'll say before checking IMDb.

Those people from those things include head submarine pilot McBride (B.J. and the Bear and My Two Dads' Greg Evigan), Navy SEAL Joyce Collins (Nancy Everhard, of much episodic TV), facility captain Laidlaw (Hill Street Blues' Taurean Blacque), mechanic Snyder (Twin Peaks' Ferrer), marine biologist Scarpelli (Fame's Nia Peeples), submarine co-pilot Richardson (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle's Matt McCoy; he also played Lloyd Braun on Seinfeld), doctor Diane Norris (St. Elsewhere and Ferris Bueller's Day Off's Cindy Pickett), head of the nuclear missile project Van Gelder (The Gods Must Be Crazy's Marius Weyers), geologist Burciaga (Being There and the Raimi Spider-Man movies' Elya Baskin), and two more submarine pilots who control the smaller exploration pods, Hodges (Riptide's Thom Bray, sporting a bizarre and possibly fake beard) and Osborne (Friday the 13th's Ronn Carroll).

This is a well-oiled, competent crew, but a few cracks are showing. Snyder is stressed, anxious, and fed up with being below the surface for so long, and Van Gelder, under tight deadline pressure to finish the missile storage platform by the end of the week, has become a raging prick. In other unprofessional moves, McBride and Collins are hooking up, and so are Scarpelli and Richardson. Despite two couples onboard, DeepStar Six goes light on DeepStar Sex. Even the shower scene is shot from the neck up. It's a soft R rating.

Speaking of the soft R rating, the women in the cast, with the mild exception of a bit of cheesecake stuff from Peeples in the early scenes, are given a refreshingly equal footing with the men. They are just as competent, efficient, intelligent, and capable, and not in a condescending, backslapping, sisters are doing it for themselves way. No big deal is made out of this. No special attention is called to it. It's just the way things are. A bit surprising for 1988/89. 

Back to the movie. When a large cavern is discovered under the proposed missile platform site, Van Gelder rebuffs both Burciaga's requests to run some safety tests and Scarpelli's urgently delivered pleas to study the cavern's marine life and build the platform somewhere else. (Why are they just now building the platform in the last week, and why didn't they know the cavern was there until now?) Van Gelder wants to build his damn missile platform, and since he's in charge of that part of the job, everyone else has to like it or lump it. His plan? Collapse the cavern with explosives and build the damn platform right where the navy wants it, damn it.

As you can probably guess, this depth charge plan goes awry when a sea beast emerges from the cavern ready to fuck shit up. The rest of the movie contains desperate attempts by the crew to repair the damaged equipment, fend off the sea monster (a sort of giant crab version of the predator from Predator), and return to the ocean's surface. Few will survive. If a character reminisces about how much they love their family or the double cheeseburger at their favorite hometown greasy spoon or the smell of the mountain air on the porch of their New Hampshire farmhouse, you know that character is not long for this world.

Yeah, this structure is overly familiar, but the cast plays it seriously and has good chemistry, both the repair/rescue and monster attack scenes are tension-filled nail-biters, and the whole thing is pleasant to look at, with a nice mix of slick professionalism and low-budget handmade craftsmanship. Most of the practical special effects look pretty good, but the cheapier, cheesier stuff is pretty charming, too. I'll take that over the dead digital sameness of the modern Hollywood product any day.

I love the retro-futurist quality of practical effect sci-fi, where the imagined future and the time-stamped year of the film's shooting are fused together. DeepStar Six imagines a future years ahead of ours that also looks exactly like 1988, and I love that. Hollywood movies, even bad ones, used to be time capsules. I don't even know what the hell anything is anymore. Some cloud-storage noplace located everywhere and nowhere. The 21st century has made me a crabby little bitch, but I like texture and goop (not the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop). I just wasn't made for these times.