The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)

Happy Halloween, ghouls and freaks. This year, we have a seasonally appropriate Universal monster classic. I couldn't be happier that this blog's movie choice roulette landed on The Wolf Man on such an auspicious date. In addition to kicking off Halloween weekend, yesterday was also drizzly and overcast, which fit the film's Gothic, fog-drenched atmosphere to a tee, and I made a big pot of turkey chili for the occasion. It was a solid day-before-Halloween night. (Turkey Chili and the Wolf Man would be great nicknames for a couple of rowdy bikers, by the way. "Brothers, Turkey Chili and the Wolf Man are riding in from Durango. We're gonna need at least three more kegs and way more cocaine.")

The Wolf Man has long been considered a horror classic, but people who know it only by its reputation or pop-cultural influence may be surprised by the movie's understated approach. (To be fair, the fog is not understated. Those fog machines are cranked to the max, baby.) It's a movie that relies on mood, atmosphere, and quiet tragedy instead of jump scares, menace, and sensationalism. I'd seen parts of it on television as a kid, but this was my extremely belated first time watching it in its entirety, and I was completely absorbed by both its mesmeric style and the quality of the classic Hollywood filmmaking.

Much of the credit for The Wolf Man's success, aside from the solid cast, is the trio of unique talents guiding the behind-the-scenes creative decisions. Curt Siodmak, a science fiction and horror novelist and screenwriter (his other credits include the Boris Karloff films Black Friday and The Ape, the Jacques Tourneur classic I Walked with a Zombie, The Beast with Five Fingers, and the plethora of movies adapted from or inspired by his novel Donovan's Brain) and the younger brother of great film noir director Robert Siodmak (the Siodmaks were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany, Curt for England and Robert for France before both men made the move to Hollywood), wrote the screenplay, and George Waggner, who also made another excellent Lon Chaney Jr.-starring horror movie called Man Made Monster (reviewed on this blog last May) and was sometimes credited as "George waGGner" to combat the frequent misspelling of his last name, served as director. Most of cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine's previous experience was on B-movies, low-budget Poverty Row pictures (including 1933's Night of Terror, reviewed on this blog in 2020), and teen romance movies marketed to adolescents, but his beautiful work on The Wolf Man led to three films for Hitchcock (Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and Rope), several Hollywood melodramas and films noir, and Victor Fleming's version of Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman in the lead.

Lon Chaney Jr. gets a lot of grief for his lack of dynamism and charisma (especially compared to his man-of-a-thousand-faces father, who dominated the silent era's horror films, adventures, and crime thrillers, and any movie that just needed a really weird guy), but he has an everyman persona and a sadness in his eyes that work well in certain roles, particularly his two horror films for Waggner (aka waGGner). In The Wolf Man, he plays Larry Talbot, the estranged son of a wealthy Welsh family. Larry has lived in the United States for 18 years, apparently enough time to lose his Welsh accent and gain an aw-shucks U.S. cadence. His older brother (not a twin but apparently identical if his painted portrait above the fireplace is accurate) was recently killed in a hunting accident, inspiring Larry to return home, make amends with his father Sir John (Claude Rains), and prepare to take over the estate, which is a big deal to his dad but seems like a pretty easy be-a-rich-guy-and-let-the-servants-do-the-work kinda gig to me. His dad's buddies include police captain Paul Montford (Ralph Bellamy), a childhood classmate of Larry's, and village doctor Lloyd (Warren William).

After a typically understated UK father/son reconciliation, Larry fixes Sir John's telescope and gets an eyeful of the woman living above the antique store across the street, Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers). Gwen and her father Charles (J. M. Kerrigan) run the antique store, and the Conliffes are longtime friends of the Talbots. Larry wastes no time pursuing Gwen, who doesn't know who Larry is despite him looking exactly like his dead brother. Larry is mostly a sympathetic guy, but he hits on Gwen in an aggressively smarmy way, telling her about the earrings she was wearing when he saw her through the telescope and where she put them in her bedroom. She's understandably creeped out (but also a little intrigued) and mentions both her father and her fiancé Frank (Patric Knowles, playing a classic '40s milquetoast) to try to get him to simmer down.

Larry gives her some jive about being psychic instead of 'fessing up about the telescope, but he does buy a cane with a wolf's head carved into the handle, leading to much talk about the local werewolf legends. He tells her he'll pick her up at 8:00 so they can take a walk and get their fortunes read by the gypsies who have recently arrived for the annual carnival and whose caravan is parked on the outskirts of the village. Gwen tells him she's engaged and has no intention of meeting him.

When the witching hour (minus four) of 8:00 p.m. arrives, Gwen is waiting for Larry after all, but she's brought along a friend, Jenny Williams (Fay Helm). The trio walk through the fog-shrouded forest and discuss the local werewolf legends until they arrive at the caravan. Two of the gypsies prepared to tell fortunes are a mother and son, Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya, who makes the most of every second she's onscreen and is the movie's secret MVP) and Bela (Bela Lugosi, excellent in a small but memorable role). Gwen and Larry saunter off by themselves while Bela attempts to read Jenny's fortune. Bela sees something in the fortune that stops him cold, alarming Jenny. He then tells her to leave immediately and come back tomorrow. Jenny runs off but is attacked by a wolf. Larry runs to help her after hearing her screams, but he's bitten on the chest while bashing the wolf with his cane, setting up the events that bedevil the entire village for the rest of the film.

Part of what keeps this movie so fresh 85 years later is its human touch and its lack of hammy theatrics. The actors give emotional performances, but those emotions are relayed with adjustments in facial expression and body language instead of cranked-up melodrama. Feelings are suppressed or endured until they can no longer be suppressed or endured. 

Academic interpretations of the film have read it as an allegory for puberty, the ego and the id, sexual repression, patriarchal guilt, the betrayal of our bodies through illness or accident, and the fascist creep of Europe in the years leading to WWII. I can see how all those readings could be applied, and they only add to the experience, but I think the film endures mostly because of the magic combination of its style and atmosphere and its two simple human stories of the struggle with our conscience when our behavior diverges from our values and how we deal with our lives when bad shit happens outside of our control.

The Wolf Man is deserving of its classic status and a great pick for Halloween weekend. I'm glad I finally caught up with the whole shebang after piecemeal childhood viewings. It's a worthy member of the classic Hollywood, classic horror, and Universal monster canons, and it was a belated triumph for makeup effects artist Jack Pierce, who finally got to use the werewolf design he'd created for Universal's previous werewolf movie, 1935's Werewolf of London (an excellent and underrated film that gets overshadowed by this one and which I reviewed on this blog in October of 2022).  

 

Werewolf of London star Henry Hull vetoed Pierce's initial werewolf design because he said it made him too unrecognizable. Some people think Hull had an ulterior motive of avoiding the hours of makeup the design required, but the plot of that movie really did hinge on the other characters recognizing the werewolf as their former colleague, so who knows? Pierce finally got to use his full werewolf design on Lon Chaney Jr. seven years later, though Chaney probably wished he'd pulled a Hull, subsequently complaining about the time and discomfort in press interviews. (I like both designs, though the iconic 1941 version looks just a little more quaint to me than the 1935 Hull-approved look, and Hull's movements are a bit creepier than Chaney's amusing tip-toe wolf walk.)

Disconnected (Gorman Bechard, 1984)

Disconnected is a deeply eccentric slice of regional underground horror, made in Waterbury, Connecticut, by DIY filmmaker Gorman Bechard and a cast and crew of mostly local talent. It starts out as an offbeat hangout movie, turns into a slasher and a suspense thriller, and finally morphs into a semi-abstract arty depiction of a mental breakdown or torment by a malevolent entity (or both). Not everything is successful and a few scenes have poorly recorded sound, but it's got personality, atmosphere, humor, creepiness, power-pop jams, some striking shot compositions, and lots of local color, and it's probably the only film where someone is murdered to XTC's "Complicated Game."

The film opens with video store clerk and classic Hollywood film buff Alicia (Frances Raines, the great-step-niece of Claude Rains, who gets name-checked, and, yes, that's how they spell their names) arriving at the two-story home where she rents the top floor. A weird old man (William A. Roberts) is trying to get in. Alicia assumes the old man is looking for her twin sister Barbara Ann (also played by Raines) because a lot of men in town are looking for Barbara Ann, and she lets him inside. He does something weird to her telephone and disappears. Say what?

The strangeness of this scene and everyone's behavior in it aside, I really dig how Alicia decorates her top-floor pad (though the credit belongs to director Bechard, who was actually living there at the time). There are classic Hollywood posters everywhere (her top faves are Marilyn, Bogart, and Hitchcock), an antique clock, a hi-fi stereo (Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues at the front of the record pile), and all kinds of early 20th century kitsch, much of it also connected to movie people (lots of Groucho stuff), and the place gets excellent natural window lighting. I get a sweetly painful melancholic feeling thinking about the various pop-cult-decorated living spaces of friends and acquaintances in my pre-21st-century-tech/phone/social media college-town days, so when a movie really nails the look of one of those spots, it punches me right in the heart.

The movie quickly jumps from this oddball opening sequence to a hopping bar scene. Alicia, her boyfriend Mike (Carl Koch), Barbara Ann, and Barbara Ann's date for the night are catching up over drinks, though Alicia is a bit on edge because she suspects that Mike and Barbara Ann are having an affair. It's frustratingly hard to make out the dialogue in the noisy, crowded bar in this scene (the sound improves in most of the subsequent scenes), but my frustration turned to delight when the camera swept down the length of the bar, capturing little moments from the other patrons including a guy using magic tricks to impress the woman sitting next to him (she seemed to be into it), and when the scene shifted to the dance floor. Our characters and several extras start busting moves as only 1984 Caucasian Connecticut new-wavers can to the new-wavy power-pop jams of local band The Excerpts, playing a live gig in the bar.

Time for a digression about an Excerpts band member. Making his onscreen debut in Disconnected, 19-year-old Excerpts singer/guitarist Jon Brion would go on to incredible success in the years ahead. After the dissolution of his post-Excerpts power-pop band The Bats (not to be confused with the excellent New Zealand band The Bats), Brion moved to Boston, met Aimee Mann (they were a couple for several years), and became touring guitarist for 'Til Tuesday in that band's final years. Brion then moved to Los Angeles, founded short-lived band The Grays with ex-members of Jellyfish, became a go-to session musician and arranger for dozens of disparate artists, produced albums for Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Robyn Hitchcock, Of Montreal, Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe, Katy Perry, Mac Miller, Sky Ferreira, Best Coast, and pre-insanity Kanye West, had a wildly popular years-long weekly residency at Largo, and enjoyed a parallel career as a film composer. He was Paul Thomas Anderson's go-to composer prior to Jonny Greenwood, co-composing the score to Hard Eight with his ex-girlfriend Mann's husband Michael Penn, playing on Penn's Boogie Nights score and appearing in a small role, composing the scores for Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, and contributing a few leftover pieces from these earlier scores to One Battle After Another. His other film composing credits include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, Synecdoche, New York, Step Brothers, Lady Bird, and Pee-wee As Himself (with Penn). Digression complete.

Dance party concluded, Alicia gets into an argument with Mike in the car, where his denials about sleeping with Barbara Ann don't seem that believable. Alicia heads home, where she hears weird distorted sounds on her phone and a conversation between Mike and Barbara Ann about their affair. Is she imagining this? What is up with her phone? Meanwhile, young women are being raped, murdered, and mutilated all over the city. A fifth victim has been found, exasperating Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, hoagie-eating (or, in Waterbury parlance, grinder-eating) homicide detective Tremaglio (Carmine Capobianco), who can't catch a grinder break. His partner slaps him on the back when he's on the roof of a parking garage, causing him to drop his grinder on the street below. Later, on stakeout and eating a grinder in the car, his partner admonishes him for sitting on his ass and eating too many grinders, reminds him that the murdered women can never eat a grinder again, and tells him to leave his half-eaten grinder in the car despite Tremaglio's complaints that it will get cold. The man just wants to eat a hot grinder in peace while he brainstorms how to catch the killer.

At work the next day in her small, strip-mall video store, Alicia is admonished by a customer named Joey (the hilariously monikered Professor Morono, who plays a character named Joey the Creep in Bechard's subsequent feature Psychos in Love), who demands to know the names of the newest porn rentals and whether they're any good. When Alicia says she doesn't watch porn, Joey is flabbergasted, yells "fuck this shit!," and hits the road.

Just as flabbergasted by Joey's behavior is the only other man in the store, Franklin (Mark Walker). Franklin is a polite, soft-spoken, friendly, but deeply strange young man who has a crush on Alicia after seeing her in the bar. He complains about the lack of foreign and classic films in the store to Alicia's agreement, remarks on how many new movies they have, and says he doesn't own a VHS or Betamax machine but that he would rent movies here if he had one. He then asks her out. Alicia says she'd like to but has a boyfriend. Franklin takes this rejection well, offers to bring her lunch and a soda, and leaves his number in case she changes her mind. He then exits with his signature farewell catchphrase, repeated multiple times throughout the movie and filling me with joy and delight each time. When Franklin bids you adieu, he says, in his particular soft-spoken style, "okay, see ya bye" with the "see ya" and the "bye" pronounced so closely to each other that they sound like a single word ("seeyabye"). This never stops being funny, and I want to say it to everyone when I exit the premises.

Alicia eventually makes up her mind that Mike and her sister have been getting their bone on, so she calls Franklin to take him up on his offer of a date. Franklin is happy to hear from her, but is soft-spoken seeyabye Franklin also our killer? Oh shiiiit! Is this seeyabye forever for Alicia?

Events proceed in this direction until everything is cleanly but semi-tragically wrapped up by the film's halfway point. WTF? Or is it? Much of the rest of the film takes place in Alicia's top-floor pad, where she drinks her sorrows away in her underwear and is constantly tormented by her phone. Her mental state fractures and the film's style becomes claustrophobic and abstract, leading to a truly strange and baffling ending that I'll be chewing on for a while. The sound design becomes very important here, with the ringing of the phone, the ticking of the clock, and the bizarro demonic noises coming from the receiver amplified on the soundtrack. This is a wild swerve in direction from Bechard, and, while it's not as much fun as the film's first half and can even drag in places, it's a pretty daring move. I had to admire it.

Flawed as it is, Disconnected is an original and subversive twist on the slasher film, and the actors all have a refreshing non-Hollywood personality, delivery, and eccentricity. Raines gives both sisters completely different attitudes and physical presences, Walker makes Franklin such a fascinatingly kooky dude, and Capobianco really sells his grinder exasperation. We've all been there, even though I call them hoagies (and used to call them submarine sandwiches in my youth). I love the local Waterbury detail (the rental house, the video store, the bar/rock club, the neighborhoods, the city streets and buildings), and I like how Bechard gets so many memorable images on such a tiny budget. (I talked about the rest of Bechard's career and how he moved from low-budget horror movies to indie dramas to documentaries, including several docs about musicians, animal rescues, and pizza-making, in my post about Cemetery High a few years ago.) I really liked this movie, mostly. Okay, seeyabye.

The Doll Squad (Ted V. Mikels, 1973)

The Doll Squad, my third time to the Ted V. Mikels well after the disappointing Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (a title that promised way more than it could deliver) and the much more entertaining The Corpse Grinders (an accurate title), is my new favorite Mikels movie. If you share my '70s fetish, this movie is the equivalent of Quentin Tarantino walking into a room occupied by 150 barefoot women. You get '70s bars, restaurants, karate schools, offices, cars, boats, apartment buildings, secret island lairs, jumpsuits and other memorable outfits, hairdos, large clunky computers, modern art, martini pitchers, wigs, mustaches, interior design, carpeting, etc. You get to sigh eternally in the early '70s drive-in universe, a time before corporate slickification and predatory tech be-smoothed and de-textured and surveilled and packaged the world and put everything in quotes. The counterculture put up a valiant effort in the '80s and '90s against the forces of all-consuming texture removal and content delivery, but the 21st century has been a real vibe-killer with Big Tech and the digital revolution sucking out so much of the feeling. I wish I could live an eternal loop as a mid- to late-twentysomething in different major cities and college towns between the 1920s and September 10, 2001, a sort of benevolent aesthete hedonist temporal loop vampire, but that's sadly not the way anything works.

Why am I getting so heavy when talking about the freakin' Doll Squad? What's wrong with me? It's alright, it's just the permanent eternal struggle in my soul between my aesthetic love of the 20th century, my aesthetic dislike of most aspects of the 21st century (with loads of exceptions; I'm still as excited as I've ever been by music outside of the fetid swamp of contemporary manufactured pop and pop/country, and there are still many great new movies every year outside of the dead spaces of Hollywood, fake indie, and made-for-streaming), my constant working goal to live in the present, my disrespect of nostalgia, my hope for what technology can accomplish (especially medical advances), my burning hatred for the controllers of Big Tech and their bad faith uses of it, and my complicated reverence for the way things used to be before AI, smart phones, social media, influencers, reaction videos, ads blaring at me at gas pumps, etc., became the way of things. I got heavy again. Sorry, I'm just very heavy these days. I'm having a hard time existing in this world that shares none of my values and is actively hostile to them. But you're not here for a lecture about the Shitty Now (term coined by my friend Dan Schneider; not the Nickelodeon creep, a different Dan Schneider). You're here for The Doll Squad, man. Let's get into it.

I had a blast with this one. I feel sorry for anyone who can't get into an elite squad of ass-kicking babes (including Tura Satana) in eye-popping ensembles traveling to a heavily guarded island compound to save the world from Dear Dead Delilah's Michael Ansara. When Hollywood makes this kind of movie (or used to before everything had to be about superheroes and elves and shit), they present it with a certain ironic detachment. They wink at the audience. "We both know this is bullshit," the Hollywood machine says. They're afraid to commit to the sensibility or they don't understand it or they halfheartedly copy it or they think they understand the sensibility but slick it up with too much big-time showbiz. The drive-in/exploitation filmmaker already has the sensibility, was probably born with it, and presents the ridiculousness with a refreshingly direct and natural and personalized approach. Even the cheapest, most money-grubbing exploitation filmmaker can find authentic pockets of weirdness and delight in places Hollywood big shots don't even know where to look. To put it in wrestling terms, the Hollywood approach is Vince McMahon sports entertainment while the drive-in/exploitation approach is classic Southern territory rasslin'.

The Doll Squad begins with a United States senator named Stockwell (John Carter) watching live coverage of a rocket launch on his office television. This is the first launch in a new space exploration project spearheaded by the senator, though how this project differs from the usual NASA biz remains unexplained in the film. Stockwell is soon joined by CIA operative Victor Connelly (Anthony Eisley). The two men exchange small talk about the launch until something goes wrong. The TV screen strobes and a strange voice tells Stockwell that since he ignored an earlier demand, bad shit is about to go down. The rocket then explodes. Stockwell and Connelly urgently run to the "computer room" to analyze the data and the recording the quick-thinking Connelly grabbed of the strange voice. Why does a U.S. senator have an intelligence-agency-level high-tech (in '70s terms) computer room next to his office, and why does the window view of the presumably D.C.-located office look like Los Angeles? Embrace the mystery, mortals. Let the gods know the answers.

Connelly and Stockwell do some compute-box beep-boopin', and the computer spits out a suggestion. The fellas need to call the Doll Squad. Bang! Enter kick-ass opening credits sequence, and then back to the office, where Doll Squad leader Sabrina Kincaid and her amazing outfit and low-cut top can be debriefed on the rocket mishap, secret recording, and crazy TV shenanigan. The men tell her which two other Doll Squad members she needs to wrangle into the investigation. Seems like Sabrina should know who she needs from her own team. Nevertheless, Sabrina pays a visit to the women suggested by the dudes at their respective day jobs, a karate school and a medical research lab. Both secret Doll Squad members are security experts. Unfortunately, they should've been a little more proactive with their own security. Some classic '70s dirtbags kill both of them shortly after Sabrina visits them. When one of the dirtbags tries to kill her, she uses her flamethrower cigarette lighter to scorch half his face and escape. Every explosion in this movie is insanely cartoony and cheap, looking like a bedazzled word balloon, and I love each one with all my heart.

After hitting the gun range with the senator and the operative while wearing a form-fitting, midriff-baring ensemble, Sabrina shows the skeptical senator her suitcase full of Bond-style gadgets and tells them she needs to assemble the entire Doll Squad to take down the baddies. The senator, wowed by the gadgets, drops his skepticism and gives Sabrina two weeks, the same amount of time he's been given by the president to prevent the termination of his space project.

Sabrina collects her squad, including the legendary Tura Satana as Lavelle Sumara, and gets down to business. A Satana digression: I was lucky enough to see Satana and fellow Russ Meyer alumni Haji and Lori Williams in person at an Alamo Drafthouse-sponsored drive-in double feature at a speedway a few miles outside of Austin back in 2002. Organizationally, it was a bit of a shitshow, but Satana had no fear of getting out amongst the people and mingling with the crowd. When I was wandering the speedway before it got dark enough to screen the movies, I happened upon her holding court in front of a small crowd of fans and got to hear some stories about her brief romance with Elvis. "Holy shit, I'm five feet away from Tura Satana, and she's telling Elvis stories!" I remember thinking. Pretty cool, and despite the organizational chaos (including a ridiculously inadequate number of restroom facilities), I'm grateful for the experience, especially now that Satana and Haji are no longer with us.

Speaking of Elvis, former government agent and lover of Sabrina turned evil madman Eamon O'Reilly (Michael Ansara) is hatching evil plans from his swanky pad, which looks like it shared the same interior decorator as Graceland. He has an evil henchmen, Joseph (William Bagdad), and a slightly less evil but still somewhat evil girlfriend, Maria (Hee-Haw's Lisa Todd), to do his bidding. After his plans to destroy the Doll Squad go awry, Eamon heads to his secret island lair guarded by his own private army, where he mingles with an international cadre of baddies who have nefarious world-conquering plans. The Doll Squad, hip to the lair, put on their bikinis and charter a private boat to the island under the guise of going on a rock-collecting trip.

Off the boat and on the island, the squad members change into more cool outfits, split into two groups, and sneak close to the compound, with two of the members disposing of two of the private army through the ol' vodka dosed with liquid that makes you explode gag. Love that gag. Reunited once more, the Dolls change outfits yet again, this time into matching green jumpsuits for the full-on assault on the compound. Love the jumpsuits, love the compound assault.

While I wish we had a little more time on the city streets before the action shifted to the island, I was never bored. Some critics of the film think it's overlong and a bit draggy in this section, but I disagree. The performances remain enjoyable (though I wish Satana had more to do), the action remains intense, the explosions remain hilarious, the outfits remain incredible, and the splatter is H.G. Lewis-worthy. Corpse Grinders, you've been knocked down to number 2 on my Ted V. Mikels power rankings.

Speaking of Mikels, he lived a wild and free life until his death from colon cancer in 2016 at the age of 87. A semi-prolific director of independent exploitation films who sported a memorable waxed handlebar mustache and never left the house without his boar's-tooth necklace, Mikels was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to Eastern European immigrant parents. The family moved to Portland, Oregon when Mikels was nine, and he developed in interest in photography, theater, and film, as well as archery, horses, and stunt work. In his twenties, Mikels started a production company in Bend, Oregon, that produced educational films and short films from aspiring filmmakers. He also did some work as a stuntman and research consultant for Hollywood westerns shooting in Oregon, though he never achieved his dream of directing a Hollywood studio film.

Moving to Los Angeles in the '60s, Mikels directed a string of drive-in/grindhouse features until the early '80s, living in a home decorated like a castle (the interiors of which were frequently used as locations in his films, including The Doll Squad), in which he lived with as many as a dozen women at a time. Mikels became almost as well known for throwing raging parties as for directing exploitation movies. Moving to Las Vegas in the '80s and staying for the rest of his life, Mikels set up another castle-esque party mansion and directed another string of exploitation movies after a mid-'80s lull. Besides the movies I already mentioned in this post, Mikels' filmography includes Dr. Sex, Girl in Gold Boots, The Astro-Zombies, Ten Violent Women, Mission: Killfast, Paranormal Extremes: Text Messages from the Dead, and his only G-rated film, Heart of a Boy, the inspirational tale of an inspirational five-year-old who needs a heart transplant, causing the community to rally behind him inspirationally. I'm guessing that one won't make my Ted V. Mikels power rankings.

Spooks Run Wild (Phil Rosen, 1941)

Spooks Run Wild is a bad movie, a horror-comedy neither scary nor funny, a cheap production that, intentionally or not, saved money on film and lighting equipment by arranging the characters side by side in the majority of shots and letting some scenes play out in indiscernible darkness. Nevertheless, there's an endearing quality to the cheapness and incompetence, and I am never going to be mad about Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto doing their thing in a spooky mansion. Still, I can only recommend this one to the hardcore Lugosi-heads.

I also feel some affection for the movie because scenes from it appeared in Horrible Horror, a VHS compilation of b-movie sci-fi and horror clips and trailers from the '30s through the '60s hosted by Zacherley, "the Cool Ghoul," which I received as a Christmas gift in fifth or sixth grade and watched at least 800 times. I already talked about that VHS compilation in my King of the Zombies post in April. (I claimed to have watched it 37,000 times in that post, but I've gotta come clean. It's closer to 800.) I was never able to properly learn geometry because so many scenes from Horrible Horror took up permanent residence in my brain. There was simply no room to introduce any trapezoid knowledge without evicting the trailer for The Alligator Man, and I wasn't going to let that happen ("I'll kill you, alligator man! Just like I'd kill any four-legged gator!").

Spooks Run Wild brings together Bela Lugosi (bounced from Hollywood to the Poverty Row circuit when his drug and alcohol problems became a studio liability) and the wisecracking, streetwise East Side Kids, who may need an introduction in 2026. In 1935, a Broadway play called Dead End, about Depression-era New York City street kids getting a second chance in reform school, became a huge hit. Hollywood producers saw dollar signs and turned the play into a movie. The movie was a hit, too, and the cast of young men became a '30s Hollywood franchise called the Dead End Kids (after a two-film rebranding as the Crime School Kids), with the series of movies quickly evolving from gritty dramas to goofy comedies of misadventure. Some of the original Dead End Kids appeared in their own imitation group, the Little Tough Guys, who had a similar run of movies from the late '30s into the early '40s. In 1940, low-budget Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures got in on the action and created a copycat gang called the East Side Kids. Eventually, some of the Dead End Kids became East Side Kids after the Hollywood output slowed, and the trend continued in the low-budget world into the '50s, with the East Side Kids morphing into the Bowery Boys in the late '40s. By the time the last Bowery Boys movie hit theaters in the late '50s, the scoreboard tallied one Broadway play, 89 films, and three serials, not even including other copycat ensembles such as the Gas House Kids and the Harlem Tuff Kids. Yowzah!

In Spooks Run Wild, the East Side Kids play a group of underprivileged NYC teens (though the youngest of them looks to be in at least his mid-twenties) on their way to a character-building wilderness camp in upstate New York (filmed on Monogram's sets in Los Angeles), under the supervision of engaged couple Jeff Dixon (Dave O'Brien), a condescending pipe-smoking law student, and Linda Mason (Dorothy Short), a plucky can-do nurse. Linda's too good for milquetoast dweeb Jeff, but what can you do? (O'Brien and Short were a real-life married couple, and they also acted together in Reefer Madness.) Jeff and Linda are the only characters with run-of-the-mill names (no offense to the Jeffs and Lindas of the world), with the exception of East Sider Danny (Bobby Jordan). The rest of our East Side gang includes Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Glimpy (Huntz Hall), Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison, also a former Our Gang cast member), Peewee (David Gorcey, Leo's younger brother), and Skinny (Donald Haines).

When the bus driver transporting our characters stops in a small town near the camp to take a break and check the tires, the Kids play a prank on the driver, get yelled at by pipe-smokin' Jeff, and wander off to a soda counter, where they hit on the clerk Margie (Rosemary Portia) and hear a radio alert about a serial murderer on the run in the area. They brush it off, but the tough-guy act fails to convince.

Back at the camp and bedding down for the night, the Kids decide to sneak out and meet up with Margie. Their route will take them through a cemetery. Much of this will be too dark to see. It's like watching a radio play in certain scenes, I tell ya. Meanwhile, an odd man with the fantastic name of Nardo (Bela Lugosi) and his little person assistant Luigi (Angelo Rossitto) stop at a gas station for directions to an abandoned creepy mansion Nardo has inherited. The horror-obsessed gas station owner Lem Harvey (P.J. Kelly) knows he's looking at the murderer, but he plays it cool. He also recognizes his next customer, Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore), from his occult reading material. The doctor tells Lem to keep his identity secret because he's on Nardo's trail.

Back to our dimly lit late-night wanderings. When Peewee gets hit with buckshot by a spooked cemetery caretaker who's already witnessed Nardo and Luigi disappear in front of his eyes, the other Kids carry him to Nardo's spooky mansion for help. Spooky stuff that's not that spooky occurs. Comedy that's not that funny also occurs, but I do love the way Lugosi says "Helloooo" and "Gooodbyyyye" and the way a skull prop bounces off his head during a pratfall.

The movie picks up whenever Lugosi and Rossitto are onscreen, and Kelly and Morrison also get a few decent moments, but this is otherwise pretty generic stuff, mostly poorly done, though even the weakest 20th century movie increases in interest for me the deeper we descend into our 21st century big tech hell. I also got a laugh out of the lack of urgency Jeff and the local constable show for the missing fish-out-of-water East Side Kids and Linda (who went off to look for the gang when Jeff was more interested in smoking his pipe and uttering condescending dismissals of Linda's concern) while a twisted serial murderer is roaming the same stretch of countryside. These guys do not want to get out of their chairs.

Well, there you have it. Spooks Run Wild. It's a movie (barely), but there aren't many spooks, and they could have run a whole lot wilder. I'll leave you with some Nebraska talk. Almost everyone in the East Side Kids cast was a native New Yorker except for Morrison (from New Orleans) and Haines, who hailed from my home state of Nebraska. He was born in Seward County, but his family moved to southern California when he was eight in search of work. He became a successful child actor beginning in the silent era, and Spooks Run Wild was his final movie. Enlisting in the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Haines was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. Though he was only 23 when he died, Haines had at least 92 film credits. Film production workdays can be pretty nuts, but movie people in the '20s, '30, and '40s worked freakishly inhuman schedules.

Keeping the Nebraska connections flowing, it's time for some Angelo Rossitto talk. Rossitto, whose acting career stretched from the silent film The Beloved Rogue in 1927 to a 1987 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (he died in 1991), was born and raised in Omaha. Some notable credits in his lengthy acting career (he also owned a Hollywood newsstand to keep a steady income going between acting gigs) include Seven Footprints to Satan, Freaks, The Wizard of Oz (he was one of the Munchkins), Hellzapoppin', Samson and Delilah, The Baron of Arizona, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Trip, Brain of Blood (OK, that one may be notable only to me), The Other, a Rockford Files episode, the animated Lord of the Rings, The Dark, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the '70s and finally released in 2018), the front cover of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones album, and the back cover of Bob Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes. Another wild Nebraska-related fact about Rossitto is that his granddaughter is married to my preschool teacher's oldest son who moved from Nebraska to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor but, Seinfeld episode aside, ended up building a career as a propmaker for movies and TV shows. I did some benign Internet stalking to see what he was up to after reading his mom's obituary in my hometown paper (she was a great preschool teacher, by the way, and a very nice woman). It looks like he's retired from the film industry now and teaching jiujitsu in Hawaii. Some people know how to live.

Die Sister, Die! (Randall Hood, 1978)

Die Sister, Die! is a quiet (except for a couple of nutty dream sequences), character-based, psychological horror/thriller that may disappoint you if you need the walls to be painted red, but the strong performances, aesthetically pleasing locations, relaxed pace, and complex and morally ambiguous characters really worked for me. I had a good time with this one.

For such a straightforward little movie with a small cast, Die Sister, Die! had a difficult, drawn-out production. Filming began in 1972, but financial difficulties and the cancer diagnosis of director Randall Hood slowed things down. More filming took place in the mid-'70s (the cars in the movie are mostly '75 and '76 models), but Hood died, aged 48, in 1976 before any post-production work could be done. One of the film's three leads, Jack Ging, made it his mission to turn the unedited footage into a finished product, and the movie was finally completed and released in 1978. Clint Eastwood, a friend of Ging's, is rumored to have helped with the film's completion, but that rumor has been neither confirmed nor denied. Despite the production troubles and Hood's health problems, the movie is consistent in tone and performance and doesn't look like a stop/start affair.

The movie opens with the wealthy Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) attempting suicide in her very distinctive-looking home (the Piru Mansion, more on that location later). Her doctor, Thorne (Kent Smith, Atwater's real-life husband), and her brother, Edward (Jack Ging), save her, which inspires only hatred from Amanda toward Edward. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the siblings' enmity and the reasons for Amanda's multiple suicide attempts from an evasive Edward but fails. Dr. Thorne also fails to convince Edward to have his suicidal sister institutionalized, but Edward is open to the idea of paying for a live-in nurse.

A cocky Edward stops by a dive bar called Hank's to enlist the services of former nurse-turned-waitress Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower). Esther was a live-in nurse for an elderly millionaire whose family neglected him. Angry at his family and appreciative of Esther's help, the rich old man married Esther so she'd inherit his dough, but the family successfully stopped the will in court after the old man's death. The bad publicity forced Esther out of the nursing profession. Edward lets her know he knows all about her past and offers her the chance to make some big bucks. She's reluctant, but he leaves his card.

Esther shows up a few days later at Edward's office to get more information about the job. He gives it to her straight. He'll pay Esther a standard nurse's salary to look after Amanda and report back to him about whatever his sister tells her. There are some embarrassing family secrets he doesn't want the outside world to learn, you see. He then drops the bomb, though Esther already knows the score and is not surprised at what she's hearing. Edward tells her not to intervene when, not if, his sister attempts suicide again. Don't help her, don't save her, let her die. Once his sister is dead, Esther will get a $25,000 payment. She accepts the job.

Esther gets more of the family dirt from Amanda and the housekeeper, Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), once inside the mansion. The late Price patriarch, James Lendon (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Robert Emhardt), still staring haughtily and imposingly down at his family from a huge portrait on the wall, doted on spoiled youngest sibling Nell (Peg Shirley) and despised his other two children, Amanda and Edward, who despised James and Nell right back. After the old man's death from a heart attack, Nell disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. She even skipped the funeral. Not suspicious at all. Amanda inherited the mansion and gained control of the dispersal of funds, putting her brother Edward on a healthy but fixed income so he wouldn't blow the entire fortune. With Nell out of the picture, Amanda and Edward decided to despise each other, too, and Amanda became a depressive recluse, barely leaving the mansion.

This is where we're at when Esther meets Amanda. The two women don't trust each other, but a slowly growing oddball mutual admiration society eventually develops. Is Esther really going to help Edward let Amanda die, or is she going to form an alliance with Amanda? Maybe she'll double-cross both of them? What is Edward's real goal, and does he plan to do more than wait for Amanda to kill herself? Will he kill Esther, too? What really happened to Nell and James? We in the audience and pretty much every other character already know that Edward is a greedy and conniving guy who wants his sister dead, but we don't know what else he's up to, and Esther's and Amanda's motivations are also murky and unknowable. None of the characters trust each other, all of them have secrets, and the audience is never sure of anyone's motives or plans, other than Edward's obvious ones. I love these kinds of stories, and the cast members, made up of veteran actors with much theater, episodic television, and character actor and day player film experience, deliver naturalistic, understated performances that kept me invested.

The location shooting also contributes to the movie's flavor. The dive bar, Edward's office, a nearby Catholic church, a late-night diner, all these places are complementary to the film's tone, but the mansion itself is the star of the show. The Piru Mansion (also called the Newhall Mansion and the Cook Mansion) is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in the small town of Piru, California, about 48 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The crazily distinctive home, built in 1886 by a wealthy fundamentalist Christian businessman from Illinois attempting to create a second Garden of Eden, sold to two more wealthy families over the ensuing years, entirely rebuilt in 1982-3 after a devastating 1981 fire, and currently owned by a private investment company that rents it out for events, corporate retreats, and vacations, pops up frequently in movies and TV shows. Before Die Sister, Die!, my most recent sighting of the mansion was in the absolutely bonkers 1973 drive-in exploitation movie Pets, and it's also appeared in Desert Fury, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Terror at Red Wolf Inn, and episodes of Charlie's Angels, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Incredible Hulk, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote, Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Monk. A new Garden of Eden, indeed.

The hardcore horror nerds may not be wild about Die Sister, Die!, but I truly enjoyed its performances, '70s locations, morally dubious characters, and low-key charm. It's somewhere between a Columbo episode and a Tales from the Crypt morality play of comeuppance, and I like hanging out in that space.