The Smiling Ghost (Lewis Seiler, 1941)

The Smiling Ghost is both a charming and silly little movie with some excellent comedic zingers and another peek into the disturbed and contradictory psyche of the average white American. A horror-comedy-mystery-romance about an aw-shucks cornpone goodie-two-shoes living beyond his means and his black valet who are taken advantage of by a decadent wealthy family in an attempt to end a murderous ghost curse afflicting a string of fiancés of the family's granddaughter, the movie accurately depicts the wealthy as selfish, demented, careless, exploitative, cold, drunk, and/or living in their own little bubble. However, its treatment of the sole black character is racist and stereotypical, using him as a wide-eyed, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering, fast-running cowardly comic relief figure who's saddled with a subplot about an elderly member of the wealthy family wanting to collect and shrink the valet's head because he doesn't yet have a "Negroid" in his collection.

Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) is a recent college graduate and aspiring engineer in an unnamed big city, though he's the kindhearted but naive small-town rube type. He's sort of like a composite of every character on Leave It to Beaver except Eddie Haskell. Despite his intense devotion to the study of engineering, he's unemployed and hiding out in his office/apartment with his pet cat, dodging the group of bill collectors who have amassed outside his door, waiting for him to step outside. Lucky's loyal valet Clarence (Willie Best), despite not having been paid for several months, continues to help Lucky by delivering provisions and correspondence through the window awning.

Lucky finally gets to leave his abode when he's summoned to a job interview at the office of the wealthy Bentley family's attorney. Grandmother Bentley (Helen Westley) wants to hire a handsome and strong young man who's willing to do "anything legal" for a mysterious purpose. Lucky says he's their man, but the old woman puts him through the paces, barking orders at him, telling him his haircut "was an inside job," looking him up and down, and making him turn around and walk back and forth like a movie producer auditioning an aspiring actress for the casting couch. After some negotiations about retaining the valet services of Clarence, Lucky gets the job, which consists of a month's work pretending to be the fiancé of Bentley's granddaughter, the heiress Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), and staying at the Bentley family mansion a few hours from the city. He will be paid $1,000 for his trouble, which gets you a half a loaf of bread in our current Trumpconomy but is nearly $23,000 in 2026 bucks. Lucky doesn't bother to ask why the family needs someone to pretend to be Elinor's fiancé because he's a city version of a hick from the sticks and he's just happy to get some cash.

After a comedic misunderstanding at the train station leaves Lucky worse for wear, he meets Elinor and newspaper reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), who covers the Bentley family as part of her beat. Elinor breaks Lil's camera and tells Lil to send her the bill, but Lucky apologizes and attempts to answer the reporter's questions before Elinor shuts it down. Lil takes an immediate romantic liking to Lucky, but he's too simple to realize it.

Elinor's private car delivers our gang to the Bentley mansion, where Lucky meets the rest of the family. Besides Grandmother Bentley, the only family member who's in on the ruse besides Elinor, the mansion's dwellers include Elinor's aunt Rose Fairchild (Lee Patrick), an acid-tongued seen-it-all type who is quick with a dryly withering putdown and jealous of Elinor, uncle Hilton Fairchild (Roland Drew), a cold man who immediately loses interest in Lucky when he finds out Lucky doesn't have experience owning and shooting guns, cousin Tennant Bentley (Richard Ainley), an alcoholic and nasty drunk, and great-uncle Ames Bentley (Charles Halton), a demented old freak obsessed with his collection of shrunken heads. To quote a Mr. Show sketch, what a collection of assholes. Helping Clarence in his valet duties is no-nonsense butler Norton (Alan Hale). Hale's son, Alan Hale Jr., played the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Confusing Hale Sr. for Hale Jr., I spent the whole movie thinking, "My God, this is the oldest-looking twentysomething I've ever seen." In my defense, the Hales look very much alike and I'm a dumber man than I used to be.

Why would a rich and attractive young woman like Elinor need her grandmother to pay someone to pretend to be her fiancé? Lucky may not be curious about such things, or anything not related to engineering (Elinor: "What kind of a kiss do you prefer?" Lucky: "You mean there's more than one kind?"), but after he switches rooms with Tennant and someone attempts to murder Tennant in the night, he gets the inside dope from Lil, who's sneaking around outside the mansion trying to get a scoop. Lucky was so engrossed in the study of engineering that he failed to follow the hot local news, but Elinor's family fortune isn't the only thing bringing her local fame. She's known in the press as the Kiss of Death Girl because fiancé numero uno, Johnny Eggleston, drowned. Fiancé two, Paul Myron (David Bruce), is still alive but living in an iron lung after getting his chest crushed in a car accident he claims was caused by a creepy smiling ghost. Apparently, Elinor dropped Paul like a hot potato once he was disabled. The third time was not the charm for fiancé three, Alan Winters, who died after a cobra bit him on the 18th floor of a Boston hotel. Classic 18th floor Boston shit, am I right?

Lucky is the expendable bait, hired to lure the killer, possibly entrap him, and see if Lucky will be, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, the fourth time around. When Lucky hears this inside dope (that would have been outside dope if he'd read the damn papers), he decides he's going back to (unnamed) city, he do believe he's had enough. But ain't it just like Lucky's blues, Elinor tells him she's fallen in love with him for real, and he doesn't think twice, it's alright. He decides to stick around and give this thing a shot, but will he be knockin' on heaven's door before he can even cash that thousand-dollar check? It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. Oh mercy.

All kinds of shit goes down after this, including attempted murders, midnight crypt explorations, midnight weddings, love triangles, creepy smiling ghosts, iron lung bitterness, quality wisecracks, casual racism, hidden passageways, secret caverns, surprise twists, and more. I'm halfway shocked we didn't get a guy in a gorilla suit.

So, The Smiling Ghost. Willie Best is a talented performer, but he's stuck with another dumb racist part despite getting a few good comedic lines, though he and Morris have a genuine rapport. The rest of the movie holds up a lot better. It's hardly a classic, but the one-liners are funny, the killer is creepy, and the cast is charming and has good chemistry. I can't say this is a must-watch, but it's a fascinating curio of early '40s Hollywood.

   

 

Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990)

In my Die Hard post last month, I urged all of us to get past the question of whether Die Hard is or is not a Christmas movie (it is and it isn't) and asked people to instead consider whether Die Hard is a slasher movie and, by extension, whether action movies are slasher movie subgenres in which the action hero is a version of both the slasher movie killer and final girl. Let's see how these questions apply to Die Hard 2.

Die Hard 2, like its predecessor, takes place during the Christmas season, and, also like its predecessor, was released in theaters in the summer (July 4, 1990), but Die Hard 2 looks a lot Christmas-ier than Die Hard. The setting changes from a skyscraper office party in sunny Los Angeles to Dulles Airport in snowy Washington, D.C., during a blizzard. The airport is covered in Christmas decorations, the luggage carousel is full of wrapped gifts, everyone wears winter clothing, eggnog is mentioned, and one of the action sequences involves a snowmobile chase. It's a freakin' winter wonderland over here. The Christmas spirit permeates Die Hard 2. On the other hand, most of the plot has nothing to do with Christmas, other than the holiday season making the airport and flight schedules busier. They could've done this same story on Thanksgiving or spring break or at any airport in any city that was hosting the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

My conclusion: Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie, and Die Hard 2 is not a Christmas movie. Embrace the contradiction. You accept that this movie takes place at Dulles in D.C. even though it was filmed at various airports, military bases, and studio sets in Colorado, Michigan, and California. You accept that the terrorists shutting down the airport's communication system leaves the planes in the air helpless even though they could get information from hundreds of other nearby radio signals. You accept that John McClane faces a crazy madcap terrorist Christmas season showdown for the second time in two years in two completely different cities. Give that same leap of faith to a Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie but is a Christmas movie but isn't a Christmas movie. Do it.

Admittedly, my slasher movie hypothesis is pretty shaky when it comes to Die Hard 2, despite John McClane (Bruce Willis) stabbing one of the baddies through the eye with an icicle and (accidentally) crushing another one. McClane does a hell of a lot less skulking around in this one, he gets a lot more help, and most of the villains are dispatched en masse in gun battles and explosions. Not very slasher-y, am I right? My larger point stands, but Die Hard 2 is not a shining example of action movie as bizarro-world slasher.

It is a shining example of the big-budget '80s/'90s Hollywood action movie. Despite repeating the first film's formula with a much stupider terrorist plot, the sequel is almost as fun. The action scenes are legitimately suspenseful and exciting, the returning actors retain their chemistry and charm, and director Renny Harlin (taking over for the first and third installment's John McTiernan, who was busy making The Hunt for Red October) has a real gift for handling big scenes in large locations with hundreds of individual moving parts. (I also love the scenes in all the weird airport nooks and crannies us passengers never get to see.) Especially in the hustling, bustling airport scenes, Harlin shows masterful skill at gracefully controlling a busy, chaotic visual space. It's thrilling stuff, enhanced by the shots of the empty, still expanse of the darkened runways after the landings are delayed.

Alan Rickman and his crew of Eurotrash hair-metal muscleheads are sorely missed, replaced in this installment with a gang of character-acting heavy hitters who don't get enough personality-defining moments, except for William Sadler's naked martial arts workout while watching the news. You know a guy's a coldblooded psycho in an '80s or early '90s movie when you get a scene of him exercising in the nude. While Die Hard's villains were thieves with vague ties to Communist revolutionaries, Die Harder's bad boys are an anti-Commie far-right ex-military militia planning to save their newly arrested anti-Commie drug lord boss from the plane transporting him to Dulles. Ah, Hollywood, always having it both ways.

Leading the operation is Stuart (the aforementioned Sadler, of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Trespass, various Tales from the Crypt movies and TV episodes, and The Shawshank Redemption fame), and his crew includes Don Harvey (The Untouchables), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), and a blink twice and you'll miss him John Leguizamo. '60s and '70s spaghetti western and giallo star Franco Nero, who's worked with almost everyone from Fassbinder to Tarantino, plays the drug kingpin Esperanza. The returning cast besides Willis includes Bonnie Bedelia (this time given a much better role with zippier dialogue despite being stuck on a plane), William Atherton (also stuck on the plane) and Sheila McCarthy (their journalist characters are both working in D.C. now in one of many plausible coincidences), and, in a cameo, Reginald VelJohnson. What about Argyle, man? Joining the cast as McClane's allies, foils, secret enemies, or eventual allies are Dennis Franz, John Amos, Art Evans, Fred Thompson, and Tom Bower. This is a solid group of character actors who have been in a dizzying array of high-quality (and low-quality) projects, and they get a lot more to do than Sadler and his boys.

Sadly, Die Hard 2 really drops the ball in the zinger department. John McClane in the first movie was loaded with action-movie quips that hit the sweet spot between dad-joke stupidity and screenwriter cleverness, and Willis knew how to deliver the goods. The quips in Die Hard 2 are so lame, tired, try-hard, and dumb-bad (as opposed to dumb-good) that even Willis can't get some of them over. Not even the return of "yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker" can save it. The best McClane dialogue is the simplest. When he launches himself out of an ejector seat into mid-air as a plane explodes underneath him, he drops a well-timed, humorously delivered "oh shiiiiittt." When "oh, shit" is your funniest quip, a dialogue punch-up is sorely needed. It's a minor complaint overall, but a missed opportunity to capture more of the first movie's flavor.

Die Hard 2 was director Harlin's first big Hollywood job and second hit. After making short films and TV commercials in his native Finland, he moved to the U.S. and debuted with low-budget action thriller Born American, followed by low-budget horror movie Prison (reviewed on this site many years ago) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. His other credits include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (starring the insane lineup of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Wayne Newton, Gilbert Gottfried, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, Vince Neil, David Patrick Kelly, Ed O'Neill, Robert Englund, Sheila E, Pamela Adlon, Kurt Loder, and Tone Loc), Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight with his then-wife Geena Davis, Deep Blue Sea, 12 Rounds (with John Cena), and The Strangers trilogy. 

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.