The Body Shop aka Doctor Gore (J.G. Patterson Jr., 1972)

The Body Shop, retitled Doctor Gore in 1973 (Dr. Gore became my primary care physician after Dr. Butcher stopped accepting my employer's insurance), is a prime example of regional DIY '70s exploitation weirdness. Every scene is either hilariously nuts or boring as shit, nothing in between. If you can make it through those inert stretches and you share my love of underground regional wackiness, you'll have at least half of a great time.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based exploitation filmmaker J.G. Patterson Jr., born as (if IMDb isn't telling tales out of school) Jr Junius Gustavious Patterson and also known as Pat Patterson (not the pro wrestler/wrestling executive) and Don Brandon, was a jack-of-all-trades and clearly master-of-none drive-in/grindhouse Renaissance man and protégé of Florida-based exploitation king Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red) (all three reviewed on this site). In Patterson's relatively short life (he died of melanoma in 1975 at the age of 45), he had a hand in many low-budget exploitation movies in almost as many roles (director, producer, writer, actor, makeup artist, special effects artist, assistant director, production manager).

Patterson's showbiz career started in the late '50s, when he hosted local Charlotte television's late-night horror show Shock Theater as the Mad Daddy. This is not to be confused with Cleveland's late-night TV horror show Shock Theater, which was hosted by Ernie Anderson (Paul Thomas Anderson's dad) as Ghoulardi. To make things even more confusing, one of Cleveland's most popular rock radio DJs at the time, Pete Myers, also went by the name Mad Daddy and had a brief and unsuccessful run of his own as a late-night TV horror host a few years before Ghoulardi hit the scene to much greater success. (Myers would go on to radio stints in San Diego and New York City before committing suicide in 1968 at age 40, though some people think it was a murder. I'm digressing now.)

At some point after Shock Theater's demise, Patterson befriended Herschell Gordon Lewis and learned the ropes of exploitation filmmaking as assistant director on Moonshine Mountain, Lewis's personal assistant on She-Devils on Wheels, Just for the Hell of It, and How to Make a Doll, and assistant producer on The Gruesome Twosome. Through his association with Lewis, he met other indie exploitation filmmakers and helped them out, too, acting in and producing Albert T. Viola's Southernsploitation Preacherman, editing and producing Frederick R. Friedel's Axe (aka California Axe Massacre aka Lisa, Lisa) (reviewed on this site), and doing makeup effects for William Girdler's Three on a Meathook. The ill-fated Girdler, probably the most talented of everyone mentioned so far, cranked out a dizzying array of drive-in/grindhouse movies while still in his twenties, including Abby, 'Sheba, Baby', Grizzly, Day of the Animals (probably the only movie in which a shirtless Leslie Nielsen gets into a fistfight with a grizzly bear), and The Manitou before dying in a helicopter crash in the Philippines at the age of 30 while scouting locations for his next film.

Patterson kicked off his own short-lived directing career with The Body Shop, a low-rent Bride of Frankenstein-ish tale of a mad scientist creating his ideal woman from the body parts of multiple women and reanimating the results in his lab. Patterson plays the lead role, Dr. Don Brandon, under the name Don Brandon, or, as the opening credits bill him, "America's No. 1 Magician: Don Brandon," which is hilarious for all kinds of reasons, a few prominent ones being Patterson aka Brandon was not a magician and does not play one in this movie (though he does hypnotize some of his victims), a small supporting character in the movie is a magician, and Don Brandon was the real name of a well-known magician (billed as Brandon the Magician) who was halfway through his career when this movie was made.

The movie begins with a wistful Dr. Brandon gazing into a lake, listening to a DJ on a transistor radio announce the death of his beauty queen socialite wife in a plane crash before segueing into weepy country ballad "A Heart Dies Every Minute" by local band Bill Hicks (not the comedian) and the Rainbows. Hicks and the Rainbows perform the song live in its entirety in a nightclub scene near the halfway point. (Speaking of music in The Body Shop, the film's score was composed by the aforementioned Girdler and is a creepy variation on "My Favorite Things" with new lyrics.) After the funeral, feminist icon Dr. Brandon gets to work assembling the perfect woman, one even more beautiful than his late wife, to become his lifelong companion. He's aided in his mad scientist lab by his hunchbacked assistant Greg (Roy Mehaffey) who cannot speak, communicating through grunts, moans, and various other mouth sounds.

The first half of the film mostly takes place in the lab and involves test runs of the equipment, deliveries of a woman in a crate (the doctor to the enormously hunchbacked Greg when delivery men knock on the door with the crate: "Put your coat on so they don't know you're a hunchback"), and various women drugged or hypnotized by Dr. Brandon because he likes their arms, legs, hands, torsos, etc. As the doctor explains to Greg, "Hands on a woman are most important. It's the delicate feminine hand that brings out the true femininity." I'm always saying this. The doc then gruesomely removes the desired body part, Greg puts it in frozen storage, and the rest of the body is dissolved in an acid bath. An attempt to reanimate a whole, intact dead woman by covering her in tin foil, taping the foil down with Scotch tape, and then blasting her with the mad science equipment for a ridiculously extended stretch of time ends in failure and the acid bath, but by the time the assembled ideal woman is ready to be zapped with the science, Dr. Brandon has upgraded to a glass and metal tube.

Occasionally, the doctor gets out of the lab to hypnotize attractive young women at the country music and live magic nightclub, the beach, or an office's reception desk and bring them back to the lab for body part extractions and acid baths. At the nightclub entrance, he's hit on by an attractive, age-appropriate woman who was a friend of his wife's. He brushes her off and makes a disgusted grimace and exhaled sigh of relief when she goes inside. I don't mean to be rude, but the good doc should look at himself in the mirror. He's in his early forties and looks 62 (this may have something to do with the chain smoking and lack of hydration that was the style of the time), sports a ridiculous combover, has an aggressively large head and crazy eyes, and has the charisma of Pat Sajak on Quaaludes, and he has the audacity to reject attractive women and/or most of their body parts? This guy just might be #problematic.

Anyway, physically ideal woman (Jenny Driggers, former Miss Pro Am Dragway at the Rockingham, NC, Dragway) assembled, the doc and Greg zap some more science into her, and it works. She's alive! She's alive! The doc names her Anitra and tells Greg he will never gaze upon her again, with punishment of death. The only man she will ever see from now on is Dr. Brandon so that he can mold her into the perfect companion. We hear his thoughts in voice-over as he hypnotizes her. He wipes her past memories ("she won't even remember how to drink a glass of water") and re-educates her to cater to his every whim. They have a few laughs, he tells her how to drink water (for a guy who looks like he never drinks water, he's sure obsessed with the stuff), she finally understands that he's the man and she's the woman after some madcap misunderstandings, he introduces her to sex, they have sun-dappled good times in the woods near the lake, and the future is golden.

Unfortunately for Dr. Brandon, he makes some bonehead plays. Anitra easily wanders into the lab unsupervised and hugs Greg ("you're a man!"), which is bad news for Greg. Then, the doc decides to run some errands even though a water heater is being delivered, leaving Anitra on the couch in a bikini reading Hot Stuff magazine (I'm a subscriber but only for the articles). The delivery driver gets an eyeful of Anitra, she tells him he's a man (his response: "Boy, you sure ain't!"), and he invites her to his truck, leading to our exciting (?) denouement.

I live for this kind of trash, but there are long stretches where not much is happening or too much is happening or the same thing happens for way too long. If you're a fan of regional DIY lunacy, you've probably developed a solid strain of immunity and can handle it. The freakishly nutty scenes and time-capsule local color moments are the reward. If your main jam is the Marvel Cinematic Universe or middlebrow Oscarbait or prestige TV, this ain't gonna light you on fire, but the worst of the worst of these movies is worth more than 100 Avengers movies to me. Each one is such a reflection of the flawed and unique human person who made it and the local flavor of the area where it was filmed and has its own weird energy even when the goal is to make a quick, cheap buck. Part of that local flavor includes the Overlook Castle, a famous mountaintop mansion in Asheville. The castle is the exterior location of the lab, and Patterson somehow got permission to do some filming inside the mansion, making excellent use of the large picture windows.

Despite creating the occasional memorable scene or image, Patterson was the filmmaking equivalent of a carny grifter and was not a man for retakes or too much attention to detail. In one of the final scenes, the clapperboard is fully visible. He needed the dialogue and didn't have a replacement shot, so he just left it in. Accidentally meta, brother. In a hilarious scene, a good ol' boy Southern patrolman knocks on the door. Even though the scene takes place at night, every shot of the patrolman is in blinding daylight. The conversation proceeds as follows: "What the heck is goin' on in here? You boys makin' 'shine?" "No, officer, I'm a doctor." "OK, sorry to bother ya." I love it. Patterson directed two more movies after The Body Shop, the last one hitting theaters a year after his death. The followup, Boots and the Preacher, a crime thriller about a murder at a radio station, was presumed lost for years until Vinegar Syndrome got their hands on an elusive print, restored it, and released it on Blu-Ray last year. His final film, The Electric Chair, is an eccentric courtroom drama.

I'll leave the last word to whichever genius created the copy for The Body Shop's local poster when the movie played the Tryon Hills Shopping Center in Raleigh: "(picture of a blonde bikini babe who does not appear in the movie) She's the monster in 'The Body Shop' and it's X rated! You won't believe how they make her! It is gorrific. . . .  That is why it's rated X. Filmed entirely in North Carolina! Maybe one of her parts came from your street."

The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

Probably the only courtroom drama/film noir/mad scientist sci-fi/ape-running-amok horror movie/revenge thriller, The Monster and the Girl is a wild surprise, a schizophrenically genre-switching, narratively berserk, but tonally consistent little gem with strong performances, great character actor faces, and real feeling. It's definitely shooting to the top of my ape-running-amok list, and not just because it was withdrawn from theaters in Milwaukee by the city's film commission (for its depiction of "white slavery" and its implied criticism of the justice system).

The Monster and the Girl begins, after a fog-drenched, expressionist intro directed straight at the audience, in a courtroom, where Scot Webster (Phillip Terry) is being tried for the  murder of a man in a downtown hotel. (The movie never mentions what city we're in, but the sets look an awful lot like a Hollywoodized version of Manhattan.) Scot maintains his innocence but has no proof or witnesses, he's hesitant to say much of anything about why he was in the hotel or what he was up to, and he was discovered kneeling over the dead man and holding the gun. Scot's sister Susan (Ellen Drew) shows up and demands to be heard as a witness, much to everyone's surprise. The judge allows it despite the defense attorney's objections. Meanwhile, the camera picks out several shady characters sitting in the courtroom who take great interest in the case and keep sending not-so-subtle signals to each other.

The film's first half alternates the courtroom drama with flashback sequences tied to Scot's and Susan's testimonies, which tell a darkly tragic crime story in classic film noir style with classic film noir faces. Those faces belong to actors who are not top-of-marquee names, but if you're a classic Hollywood fan, you've seen them do excellent work in lots of memorable roles. Besides the aforementioned Drew (Preston Sturges' Christmas in July, Sam Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, and Andre de Toth's Man in the Saddle) and Terry (Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and Robert Wise's Born to Kill), we get Joseph Calleia (W.S. Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, Allan Dwan's The Gorilla, Heisler's The Glass Key, Charles Vidor's Gilda, Douglas Sirk's Lured, Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood, and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Marc Lawrence (Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire, William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, John Huston's Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, John Hayes' Dream No Evil, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, Jim McBride's The Big Easy, Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action), Gerald Mohr (Vidor's Gilda, William Wyler's Detective Story, Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper, and Jerry Lewis' The Family Jewels), George Zucco (Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Elliott Nugent's The Cat and the Canary, Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand, Sirk's Lured, and Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate), and Rod Cameron (Sturges' Christmas in July, Edward Ludwig's The Gun Hawk, and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie). Sorry, I went credits-crazy there.

Back to the flashbacks. Scot and Susan are very close (it's implied that their parents are long gone and that they took care of each other), but while Scot is happy in the small town working at the post office and playing organ in the church, Susan has bigger dreams that only the Big City can fulfill. Bored and stifled in the small town, she gets her big brother's blessing to strike out on her own. In the movie's only bit of (restrained) moralizing, Susan finds out the city is no place for a young, single woman. She struggles to find work, and, after meeting a seemingly kind man named Larry Reed (Robert Paige) at the unemployment office, falling in love, and quickly getting married, she wakes up to a living nightmare. The relationship and marriage ceremony were both scams, designed to trap her (and presumably plenty of other naive young women on their own) in the permanent servitude of a gangster/sex-trafficker pimp (that part is heavily implied but never spelled out in any dialogue because it's post-Code Hollywood) named W. S. Bruhl (Paul Lukas) and his henchmen Deacon (Calleia), Sleeper (Lawrence), Munn (Mohr), and fake husband Larry. These guys all have such menacing, character-filled faces.

When Scot finds out what happened to his sister, he hits the big city looking for revenge. The gangsters frame him for murder, corrupt district attorney McMasters (Onslow Stevens) prosecutes him, and the possibly tampered-with jury convicts, despite Susan's testimony. Scot is sentenced to death. Susan is devastated and hopeless. The only person who believes her and Scot is newspaper reporter Sam Daniels (Cameron).

This is where the movie turns on a dime and gets crazy as hell. An eccentric scientist, Dr. Parry (Zucco), visits Scot on Death Row and asks him if he can use his brain after he's executed. A defeated Scot laughs crazily and gives him permission. After the execution, Parry takes the freshly deceased Scot to his lab and transplants the brain into the body of an ape. You know, for science. Ape-Scot busts out of the lab, hits the streets, and begins a program of retribution against the gangster and his crew, beginning with the corrupt DA and ending with the jerk who pretended to fall in love with his sister. Along the way, he also re-befriends his and his sister's beloved dog Skipper, who recognizes the Scot-soul inside the ape and assists Scot in evading the police like some kind of revenge-loving Lassie. I love to see an ape with a human brain and a cute dog teaming up to kill gangster-pimps and avenge the honor of a woman wronged. This is cinema, baby. (Oddly, the last 1940s movie I reviewed on this site, Man Made Monster, also involved a cute dog recognizing his old buddy in monster form and rekindling the bond.)

If you've followed this site for any length of time, you've probably read one of my reviews about an ape-running-amok movie. This was a major craze in the '20s and early '30s, but the genre never quite died out completely. Usually, the movie involves a caged ape getting loose and tearing shit up or a guy in a gorilla suit killing people or scaring people off as part of some kind of money grift or inheritance scam. Most of these movies are not that great, and some of the gorilla suits are pretty damn unconvincing (though I hold a special place in my heart for cheap fx).

The Monster and the Girl, on the other hand, spends half the movie delivering a gripping courtroom drama and a classic film noir before throwing in the crazy mad scientist brain swap-eroo and ape rampage. You really care about these characters, you're hooked on the proceedings, and you can't wait to see these gangster/trafficker creeps get smushed. The ape-with-human-brain is a real character you're invested in, not just some goofball jumping around in a costume. And boy howdy, this production spent money on its ape suit, I tell you what. This thing looks convincing and has a real presence and a range of motion in the eyes and facial features.

Director Stuart Heisler was a film editor for many years before making the jump to directing, and you can see his understanding of structure, build, and juxtaposition in The Monster and the Girl. This could have easily been a schlocky b-movie lazily slapped together (which, let's be honest, I probably would have enjoyed), but so much care has been applied to putting this thing together, and everyone in front of and behind the camera is doing high quality work. It's such an odd movie, attempting such an odd thing, and it works ridiculously well. I loved it.

Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

It's time we all moved on from the age-old question, "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" For the record, I reject the question's enforced binary. If you celebrate Christmas, any movie you watch on Christmas could be a Christmas movie. More specifically, Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve and the soundtrack is jam-packed with Christmas songs, but it was released in theaters in the summer of '88, it takes place in sunshiny, snow-free (and curiously empty of much Christmas decoration) Los Angeles, and the vast majority of the plot mechanics have nothing to do with Christmas. My answer: Die Hard is the Schrodinger's cat of action movies. It's a Christmas movie, and it isn't a Christmas movie. I'm not copping out with my answer. I'm subverting the dominant paradigm of what Christmas is and what it isn't, son. It's always Christmas. It's never Christmas. Grow up.

I propose a new question. Is Die Hard a slasher movie, and, by extension, are most action movies slasher movie subgenres? Think about how many action movies (like slasher movies) involve an aggrieved fella skulking around in elevator shafts, bushes, closets, etc., picking off his enemies one-by-one. Action movies are reverse slasher movies, where the baddies are the ones meeting their gruesome ends courtesy of an everyman hero. The action hero is also the testosterone-flipped equivalent of the slasher movie's final girl, a regular person pushed into heroics through circumstances beyond that person's control. Okay, maybe it's a stretch, but think about it. The slasher movie and the action movie are at least cousins.

"But why are you writing about Die Hard on a horror movie blog?" I hear some of you asking. Hey, simmer down and reread the first two paragraphs, buddy. If you're new to the site, allow me to digress and go over the history of why I've been doing this for so long. Nearly 20 damn years ago, I found a very cheap used copy of a book written by the Fangoria magazine staff called Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen. Growing up, I was a horror-obsessed kid who could not get enough of the stuff. I was a big movie fan in general, but horror got the most of my attention by a huge margin. By the time I got to college, I'd massively expanded my cinematic interests, and horror was just something I'd dip into occasionally. I became just as obsessed with classic Hollywood, indies, world cinema, comedies, westerns, cult and underground films, drive-in exploitation movies, experimental film, art films, '70s New Hollywood, and on and on. You can get that side of me in my other movie blog, Almost Not Crazy, at moviebot.blogspot.com.

Picking up the Fangoria book in my late twenties gave me the urge to reconnect with my childhood and early teenage horror fandom, and I thought it would be fun to watch all 101 movies and write about them on a separate blog. This was back in the day when people wrote and read blogs, before tech oligarchs turbofucked every aspect of our lives and before social media turned the beautifully varied Internet into the barely functioning, AI-poisoned, three-app social media hellhole it is today. To my surprise, my rough-drafty, fun little horror project drew a decent readership, and when the Fangoria project ended, I decided to keep the site going. A reader suggested a similar list from Rue Morgue magazine, and I finished that one, too. When that project ended, I bought three books, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror, which is chronological (alphabetical by year), and The Official Splatter Film Guide Vols. I and II, which are alphabetical. I alternate movies from each book. My readership is much smaller now, but I can't be stopped. I should be stopped, but that's another story.

Long stories slightly shorter, this is how we get to Die Hard. While the Overlook Film Encyclopedia sticks to horror (though its parameters for horror are pretty expansive), the Splatter Film Guide covers any movie it considers a splatter movie. Horror gets the majority of entries, but the roughly 20 percent of nonhorror splatter films in the two volumes include action movies, westerns, gross-out comedies, crime thrillers, and underground cult movies. I have no problem with this.

Speaking of horror, Die Hard was director John McTiernan's third feature, following two films that could definitely fit within the parameters of horror. His debut, Nomads, was an anthropologist versus supernatural nomadic demons horror-thriller with some major flaws (including Pierce Brosnan's French accent) but great atmosphere and ambition. The movie was a box office flop and received mixed but mostly negative reviews (I reviewed it back in 2009 and thought it was pretty damn interesting despite its weaknesses), but Arnold Schwarzenegger loved it and asked McTiernan to direct Predator, the hit sci-fi/action/horror movie with the most gubernatorial cast ever assembled (future California governor Schwarzenegger, future Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and future candidate for Kentucky governor Sonny Landham; the predator's nephew later became the governor of the jungle biome of Yautja Prime). Predator's massive success led to McTiernan getting an even bigger budget and larger canvas for his third time in charge.

I won't waste anyone's time with a plot description of Die Hard. We've all either seen it or absorbed it through pop culture osmosis. It's probably (alongside Lethal Weapon) the quintessential Hollywood action movie of the late '80s-mid '90s era, expanding and one-upping what came before it while setting up a template and audience expectations for what would follow. Bruce Willis, in the role that turned him from TV star to movie star, is a charming, sarcastic presence who is much more relatable as an everyman than the superhuman muscleheads, martial arts virtuosos, and mentally disturbed Bronson-style vengeance-seekers dominating the then-contemporary action landscape. The much-missed Alan Rickman makes a great villain with a great villain name (Hans Gruber), but, again, his sarcastic humor and greed-based motivation make him a much more human presence than many of his contemporaries. His crew of accomplices and underlings are pretty damn entertaining, too, despite the movie not letting you get to know many of them in any detail. You can play a fun game with yourself and whoever you're watching Die Hard with by deciding who the baddies look like. I spotted Eurotrash Jeffrey Dahmer, Evil Huey Lewis, and at least one of each member of "Final Countdown" hair-metal hitmakers Europe. "Oh man, Bruce just shot Evil Joey Tempest!"

We also get charming (yes, I keep using the word charming, but, this is a charming fuckin' movie) performances from Reginald VelJohnson as a policeman who gets caught up in the chaos, De'voreaux White as the go-getting young limo driver Argyle (Wanna feel old? White is 60 now. Fuckin' Argyle is fuckin' 60??? Fuuuuuuuuuck!), and Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush as goofball FBI agents (both named Johnson) who think they're unbelievable badasses, and quintessentially smarmy performances from Paul Gleason as an arrogant police lieutenant (in a variation on his arrogant vice principal character in The Breakfast Club), William Atherton as an unethical TV news reporter, and Hart Bochner as a coked-up corporate sleaze. Sure, these are all familiar movie types, but there's genuine pleasure in seeing the old standbys done well.

For all its pop-culture and cable TV ubiquity, Die Hard still feels fresh and vital. It's smart where it needs to be smart and stupid where it needs to be stupid. The action sequences remain thrilling and white-knuckle suspenseful, most of the jokes still land, and McTiernan has such a great feel for both the big and small moments, complex action set-pieces, and atmosphere. And through it all, John McClane is there in the shadows, sneaking around in elevator shafts, stairwells, empty floors under construction, rooftops, and darkened corridors, uttering Krueger-esque quips like "yippee ki-yay, motherfucker," waiting to dole out blood-soaked revenge on his next victim. Sorry, just bringing it back to the slasher thing.

McTiernan has done a lot of good work in a filmography full of enormous hits and big flops, though strange personal events killed his Hollywood career in the mid-2000s. He followed Die Hard with another big action hit, The Hunt for Red October, and the less successful romance/adventure Medicine Man, but he flopped hard with the hugely ambitious meta-commentary on blockbusters Last Action Hero, a movie I find fascinating and underrated despite, and sometimes because of, its flaws. He rebounded with two more big hits, third Die Hard movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance and a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, but hit a rough patch with three movies that didn't do so well, Viking action/fantasy The 13th Warrior (which has since gained a decent cult following), a remake of Rollerball, and the military mystery-thriller Basic, which reunited John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson and is purported to have an absurd number of twist endings, though I haven't seen it.

That trio of flops didn't help McTiernan in Hollywood when he got into some serious legal trouble for allegedly hiring a private investigator to tap the phones of one of the Rollerball producers he had been fighting with about the film's creative direction (hilarious, fuck producers) and also allegedly tapping his ex-wife's phone during their divorce proceedings (yikes on that one). The full story is convoluted as hell, but that's the simplified version. He was sentenced to a year in prison in 2014 for perjury and making false statements to the FBI. He served roughly half the sentence in a white-collar prison and the other half on house arrest at his ranch in Wyoming. He later declared bankruptcy. Blackballed in Hollywood, his filmography since Basic consists of a few short films advertising video games and an unreleased documentary about his legal trouble that attributes it to a conspiracy leading all the way up to Karl Rove (it sometimes leaks to YouTube), but he told a crowd at a retrospective of his work last year that he has four films he's ready to shoot if and when he can get financing, including a science fiction movie, a western, and a love story. Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker, to all, and to all a good night.

Zombie Holocaust aka Doctor Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980)

Zombie Holocaust, titled Doctor Butcher M.D. upon initial theatrical and home video release in the United States (Dr. Butcher was my primary care physician until he stopped accepting my employer's insurance), was filmed simultaneously with another Italian horror flick, Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Both films share sets and some actors and crew, and both begin in New York City before moving to a remote island (a fictional Caribbean island in Zombie and Indonesia's Maluku Islands in Zombie Holocaust, though Lazio, Italy, mostly stands in for both; Fulci also filmed in the Dominican Republic and Mexico). Fulci's film is the only one of the two that features a zombie fighting a shark, but Girolami gives us zombies and cannibals and a mad scientist. Take that, Fulci.

The movie opens in a New York hospital morgue. Some weirdo in a trench coat sneaks in at night and saws off the hand of a corpse. In what will be an unexplained Zombie Holocaust trend, bodies don't appear to have any bones. A budget thing? "We only have money for guts and blood. You want bones? Go to Hollywood." The next day, when a doctor who is listed as Dr. Drydock on IMDb, Dr. Dreylock on Wikipedia, and Dr. Drake in the dubbed English dialogue of the version I watched (Walter Patriarca) and his morgue assistant/aspiring anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (the stunning Alexandra Delli Colli) prepare to cut into the cadaver's stomach for a class of medical students, the absent hand is immediately noticed, despite Dr. Three-Names downplaying it. A couple of smartasses crack wise about the missing hand, infuriating the doctor, who kicks the students out and cancels class for the day.

The doc is disturbed. Several corpses have been mysteriously robbed of body parts in recent weeks, but Dr. Whatever won't call the cops despite Lori's insistence because he doesn't want his hospital's reputation damaged. This leads to a classic bit of conversation between the doc and his assistant. Dr. Maybe-Drake: "We must have a psychopathic deviant in the hospital.… Something like this would make sense in a society of primitive savages, but today in New York City?" Lori: "But Dr. Drake, do you really think we're that much different than the savages?"

Events escalate from corpse-robbing to murder, with a strange symbol left on the bodies that anthropology nut Lori recognizes as a ritual symbol on one of the Maluku Islands. Despite the doctor covering things up, a journalist named Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) hears the rumors and barges into Lori's apartment for a scoop. Lori doesn't like her pushy style or the fact that she interrupted her gratuitous nudity moment (relax, pervs, we get several more nude scenes later) and gives her the brush-off. Back at the hospital, an orderly from (you guessed it) the Maluku Islands, is caught eating a patient's heart. He leaps to his death by smashing through a window. We get a great shot here of his stand-in dummy falling several stories to the sidewalk below and landing with such impact that the dummy's arm breaks off. They leave this scene in the movie, though when the camera returns to the orderly's body, his arm is once again intact. I love it. When the arm of the dummy falls off, you gotta keep it in the movie. It just looks too cool.

Lori finally convinces Dr. Three-Names to call the police. Two men show up who I assumed were NYPD detectives. They ask a lot of questions about the victims and the orderly, and Lori gives them the Maluku Islands scoop and introduces them to an anthropology professor she assists when she's not assisting in the morgue.

When Lori goes back home, she hears someone in her apartment, and her Maluku Islands dagger is missing. Fortunately, one of the two NYPD detectives (or so I thought) happens to be knocking on her door, and he searches the apartment. He doesn't find the intruder, but he sees the empty case where the dagger was. Then he says, "We should call the police." What the fuck? I thought youse guys were the police. What gives? I'll tell ya what gives. The two dudes who show up in trench coats and start investigating the crimes right after the hospital workers call the police are not detectives. They're anthropologists! This is the kind of shit that happens all the time in Zombie Holocaust. And I have no problem with it. I thrive on this kind of nonsense. It gives me life.

The two anthropologists are Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch, not the Echo and the Bunnymen singer) and his assistant George Harper (Peter O'Neal). The two men plan an expedition to the Maluku Islands and invite Lori along for even more assistance. She's reluctant because she lived there as a child and doesn't want to spoil her fond memories. What? Why is she only bringing this up now? And why was she living there? We never find out. She finally relents but is irritated to discover that annoying journalist Susan is also on the trip because she's George's girlfriend and thinks this story will put her on the map.

One of Peter's old buddies, a former New York doctor and medical researcher named Obrero (Donald O'Brien), now lives on one of the Maluku Islands and hosts our quartet. He gives them directions to the island connected to the New York corpse-robbing but warns them to be careful because the natives don't like outsiders. His assistant (so many assistants in this thing) Molotto (professional wrestler-turned-actor Dakar) takes them out on the boat the next day, until Peter realizes Molotto is deliberately steering them to the wrong island. He makes Molotto change course against his will. Big mistake, dawg.

Dr. Obrero was deliberately deceiving his old buddy to keep him away from the island and its secrets (and Dr. Obrero's), but now that Peter's found the island, friendship is just another word. Our gang has to fend off the island's cannibalistic natives, bloodthirsty zombies (who are mostly your basic run-of-the-mill zombies except for the cool didgeridoo-esque sounds they make), and Dr. Obrero himself and his really fucked-up laboratory. Interestingly, the cannibals are filmed like Romero's Night of the Living Dead ghouls (several shots are ripped off wholesale) more than the zombies. We also get some pagan rituals involving body painting and a stone altar with a silhouette indention carved into it. We don't know what any of this means or why it causes certain events at the film's conclusion, but it does give Lori another excuse to get naked.

I enjoyed the absurdist New York chunk of the movie more than the standard-issue mad scientist, zombie, and racist cannibalism biz, but Girolami keeps things moving and is not afraid of piling on the blood and gore, Delli Colli has a mesmerizing movie face, and the dubbed English dialogue is a source of joy for me. There is always something beautifully off-kilter and hilariously strange about the way English-language rhythms, sentence logic, and slang get mildly scrambled in translation in mid-'60s-early '90s dubbed Italian horror, and it's one of the many reasons those films are so pleasurable, even a less-than-stellar example like Zombie Holocaust.

Man Made Monster (George Waggner, 1941)

Man Made Monster, the grammatically challenged absence of a hyphen in the title making it read like a sentence delivered by Dr. Frankenstein if he also spoke like his creation, is a fairly standard-issue early-'40s mad-scientist movie, but it's a likable one with a cute dog and a hilariously psychedelic goofball special effect, and the hourlong running time doesn't overstay its welcome. Lon Chaney Jr. doesn't have his dad's charisma or screen presence, but his everyman persona nicely fits the bill here.

The movie opens with a bus crashing into a transmission tower after sliding off the road during a terrible rainstorm. Everyone onboard is electrocuted, but one passenger, Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney Jr.), miraculously survives. Dan is a carny grifter who performs as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man, doing an act he describes as consisting of "yokel shockers" to "fool the peasants." Most of the act is a staged performance, but he does use real electricity for part of it. After reading about the accident, doctor and scientific researcher John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds) visits Dan in the hospital and leaves his card. Dr. Lawrence suspects that Dan has built up an immunity to electrical shock after years of working with electricity, hence his surviving the accident, and wants to conduct more research.

A now-unemployed Dan visits Dr. Lawrence's mansion/research laboratory after his release from the hospital. The mansion's occupants also include Dr. Lawrence's niece June (Black Friday's Anne Nagel), cook/butler/servant Wong (Chester Gan, referred to in the closing credits as "Chinese Boy" despite having a character name and being 33 years of age at the time), Corky the dog (playing himself), and Dr. Lawrence's scientific research partner Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). (A newspaper reporter played by Frank Albertson also becomes an important character.) 

Dynamo Dan's nice-guy demeanor immediately endears him to Dr. Lawrence, June, and especially Corky, and he agrees to temporarily move in for room, board, meals, and salary as a research subject for Drs. Lawrence and Rigas. He will be administered low-level doses of electricity, and the doctors will study his blood samples, reflexes, etc. The fact that Dr. Rigas dreams of creating a race of electrified supermen is a source of conflict between the two researchers, but Dr. Lawrence is not as alarmed by it as he should be, especially considering the research they're working on with Dan.

While Dr. Lawrence is out of town at a convention, Dr. Rigas amps up the juice and administers far more electricity to Dan than is ethically kosher. The easygoing nice guy who loved playing with Corky and chatting with June is now a shell of a man, withdrawn, listless, and depressed, and hooked on the electricity like a junkie. Not only is he addicted to the juice, he's also now under the command and control of Dr. Rigas. After the final treatment, Dan is lit up like a Christmas tree, an electrified halo of light surrounding his entire body. It looks crazy as hell. Dr. Rigas gives him a rubber suit to conserve the electricity, which looks even crazier.

When Dr. Lawrence returns from the conference and sees what's happened to Dan, he's not too happy, though, to be honest, he should've seen this coming. You can't let a guy who wants to create an army of electrified supermen live in your mansion and work in your lab, no matter how tight of bros you are. When Dr. Rigas realizes he's never going to convince his colleague that this electrified superman biz is a major breakthrough in the electrified sciences, he decides to set Dan loose on Dr. Lawrence. It doesn't end well for anybody, and Dan ends up on Death Row. You can guess what happens when they put him in the electric chair. We're talking an electrified rampage, eventually leading back to Dr. Rigas.

Perhaps the funniest part of the movie is the lack of mention of Dan's glowing electrified body halo when a sea of reporters, prison employees, and detectives call their various bosses. They just mention that Dan's on the loose and is at such-and-such location. NO ONE, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, thinks to say, "The guy you're looking for is glowing and electrified." I'd be leading with that shit. It's like if Godzilla were loose and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I called the authorities and told them some dude in a Hawaiian shirt is trashing the town without ever mentioning that he's a giant fucking lizard.

Besides the novelty of a glowing Lon Chaney Jr., Man Made Monster is a typical hubris-of-man mad scientist movie that hits the usual beats, but it's skillfully photographed and edited, the narrative is concise and entertaining, and the cast is solid (including the dog). The bond between Dan and Corky the dog is also delivered with more pathos and less cutesiness than you'd expect. The Rigas and Dan roles were originally intended for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, respectively, but I'm actually a little relieved it didn't happen, despite my Lugosi and Karloff fandom. We'd seen both men in these kinds of roles multiple times by 1941, and though Chaney is a far less exciting actor than Karloff, he makes a better everyman (and probably looks a lot more natural playing with a dog), and I'm always happy to see Lionel Atwill.

Director George Waggner (who must have been so irritated by people leaving out the second "g" in his last name that he insisted on being credited as "George waGGner" for a few years in the late '30s and for a longer period in the mid-'50s to late '60s) may not have set the world on fire with Man Made Monster (it wasn't a flop but wasn't a big hit, either), but it paved the way for his most famous film (also starring Lon Chaney Jr.), The Wolf Man, later that year. 

Waggner was a born-and-raised New Yorker and WWI veteran who dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor in the silent era. He landed a handful of roles but decided he liked being on the other side of the screen better and spent the remainder of his career as a screenwriter, director, and songwriter of musical numbers in a time when even the non-musical features frequently included an original song or two. Though The Wolf Man is his best-known movie, he specialized in westerns and spent the last decade of his career directing television, with Code 3, 77 Sunset Strip, and the Adam West Batman being his most frequent employers.