The Crime of Doctor Crespi (John H. Auer, 1935)

The story of a surgeon driven to terrible things by ego, jealousy, and unrequited love, The Crime of Doctor Crespi turns its low budget, limited locations, and relatively simple plot into a dark, dryly funny, and visually compelling little movie with a take on the mad scientist that feels fresher and more modern than many of its '30s contemporaries. Erich von Stroheim deserves much of the credit for his performance in the title role, but director John H. Auer ain't chopped liver.

Dr. Andre Crespi (Stroheim) runs a hospital and is its chief surgeon. He's not an easy man to work for, and his mercurial temper can go from zero to one hundred in an instant, but he gets results. He's brilliant, though he seems to spend roughly 70% of his time in his office leisurely smoking cigarettes (at least fifteen minutes of this movie is Stroheim smoking; if  you're a Stroheim fan, you know that's a good thing), experimenting with mysterious liquids in tubes and beakers, gazing at or thumping the skull of the display skeleton of a baby, brooding, taking shots from the liquor bottle in his cabinet, and laughing to himself about a joke we're not in on. He seems weirdly pleased when he reads a newspaper account of a fellow doctor being seriously injured in a car accident.

The injured doctor, Stephen Ross (John Bohn), was a former surgeon at Crespi's hospital, and Crespi served as a mentor to the younger man. Ross married petroleum heiress Estelle (Harriet Russell) and moved on to bigger and better things in the world of medicine. Crespi was also in love with Estelle (though it's hard to imagine him loving anyone) and asked Ross to step aside. Ross clearly refused, so Crespi concocted a years-long revenge plan. This accident is just what he needs to put that plan in motion, and after a performative refusal to save Ross's life when Estelle calls to request him as surgeon, he eventually relents after she begs him in person. Will those strange liquids in the beakers and tubes have anything to do with the plan? Probably not. Just kidding. Spoiler alert: yes.

Things get wild and woolly, and Crespi's dark plot proceeds as planned. The only spanner in the works, as they say across the pond, is Dr. Thomas (Dwight Frye), a young surgeon at Crespi's hospital. Thomas has his suspicions about Crespi, and the recent vicious tongue lashing he received from the old doc for a minor infraction makes him even more determined to take that sucker down. This may be the only performance I've seen from Dwight Frye where he's not going apeshit the entire time. Frye was the go-to actor in '30s horror if the villain needed an insane sidekick or henchman or the town needed a lunatic, but he plays Thomas as the average Joe he is, though he does get to turn on a little of the amped Frye juice in the film's final stretch.

Erich von Stroheim is hilarious as Crespi. He plays him as a man who commits both evil deeds and complicated surgeries with a calm, quiet confidence and a tiny, mischievous spring in his step but who completely loses his shit when any of his employees exhibit even the smallest bit of unprofessional behavior or when a tiny hitch appears in his careful planning. He punctuates his statements and expresses his inner moods with the way he blows out his cigarette smoke, and he has a sadistic little gleam in his eye. Von Stroheim is probably most familiar to contemporary audiences for his role in Sunset Blvd. He was also one of the great directors of the silent and early sound era, and his complex and visually stunning films include Greed, Foolish Wives, The Merry Widow, and Queen Kelly.

Director John H. Auer is not the cinematic stylist or towering artist Stroheim was, but in his own rough and ready way, he packs a visual punch, from the kinetic opening driving scene to the unsettling shots of the hospital corridors to the powerful closeups to the oddball Andy Milligan-esque (years before Andy Milligan) organization of visual space to the weirdly jarring changes in composition from shot to reverse shot. Auer's camera movements are not that graceful, and many of the striking visual moments are preceded or followed by perfunctory ones, but he does a lot of compelling things within the frame. Auer, born in Budapest, was a child actor in Europe who became a businessman after aging out, but he missed the movies and moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a director. After a failed first attempt to land directing gigs in Hollywood, he worked in the Mexican film industry, and the successful movies he made there got him work at Republic back in Hollywood, where he cranked out musicals, crime thrillers, and war movies for the next two decades.

The Crime of Doctor Crespi has been criticized for being a little slow, but I didn't mind its relaxed pace and (until the final third) its relative lack of action. Stroheim is always compellingly watchable, and the supporting actors get nice little character moments or funny bits. Auer is also not afraid to get dark and weird, with oddly lyrical images jumping out between the sillier or more routine moments. I don't think this one's a big crowd-pleaser, but if you like Stroheim, tales of revenge and comeuppance, movies that claim to be adapted from Edgar Allan Poe stories but really aren't (I can't believe how often this happened, from the silent era all the way to the 1990s), and '30s B-movies, give it a whirl.

Child's Play 2 (John Lafia, 1990)

Possibly the least Chicago movie ever set in Chicago (other than a shot of a Windy City train track, the entire movie was filmed in southern California and mostly looks it), Child's Play 2 is otherwise a pretty solid sequel with a delightfully grisly final sequence and a character actor smorgasbord of a cast. Yeah, it's a little thin storywise compared to its predecessor, and the animatronic effects are cranked up to such an extent that Chucky gives off serious uncanny valley vibes, but Child's Play 2 retains the first film's sense of humor, unflagging pace, and fun.

Didn't Chucky get burned to a crisp at the end of the first movie, you ask (or were asking in 1990)? Why, yes, he did, but the charred corpse of the possessed Chucky doll is back in the hands of the Play Pals corporation, who decide to scrape all the burned gunk off and reassemble the doll by hand to show the nervous stockholders that it's just a freakin' doll and not some kind of supernatural killing machine, which, of course, unintentionally brings Chucky back to life since his soul is still trapped in the doll. Believe science, people. The Chicago Police Department has decided to stick with the regular doll story, too. The coverup makes Karen Barclay look crazy, so she's been institutionalized, and her son, Andy (Alex Vincent, reprising his role from the first movie), has been placed in foster care. Catherine Hicks, who played Karen, does not appear in this movie. We only learn about her fate through exposition delivered by the other characters. She was on set for most of the shoot, however. She fell in love with special effects man Kevin Yagher on the set of the first movie and was between projects while this one was being filmed, so she decided to hang out with her new husband and his effects crew while they worked. Hicks and Yagher are still married and have a daughter.

Going back to the coverup angle, I appreciate the movie beginning right from the jump with the idea that corporations and police departments are always going to cover their own asses instead of doing the right thing. Too many movies put forth the idea that once the truth comes out, people and institutions will respect that truth. Yeah, right.

Back to Andy. He's in a foster home run by Grace Poole (Grace Zabriskie) and is about to be fostered by a couple named Joanne and Phil Simpson, played by Jenny Agutter and Gerrit Graham. Damn, that is a lot of cult movie star power in one room. These might be the most square characters Zabriskie, Agutter, and Graham have ever played, but they do get to insert a few quirks, and I always enjoy watching all three of them. The Simpsons have taken in a lot of foster kids over the years, but Phil is hesitant about Andy's mental state, though Joanne immediately takes to him. The only other foster child currently staying at the Simpsons' comfortable but frighteningly pink and antique-filled home is tough teenage girl Kyle (Christine Elise), who is a bit standoffish at first but quickly bonds with Andy.

Meanwhile, the newly refurbished Chucky finds out where Andy's staying and tracks him down. He needs to get his soul in the kid's body so he's not trapped in a doll for the rest of whatever the natural lifespan of a deceased killer brought back to life through voodoo and stuck in a doll is (56 years? 20? 300?). I actually felt a little pity for Chucky this time (the voice of Brad Dourif). He's a terrible guy, but imagine being stuck in a doll's body. The franchise would use the human-soul-inside-a-doll story origins to explore gender fluidity and trans issues in later installments, but the queer text of Child's Play is still pretty hidden in the subtext in these first few movies.

Once Chucky makes it to Andy's foster parents' home, the movie turns into a cat-and-mouse chase for most of the second half, moving from the Simpson household back to Grace Poole's foster home to the streets of Chi-california-cago to the Play Pals factory assembly line as Andy and Kyle pummel and get pummeled by Chucky. Cat-and-mouse can be horrendously dull if done poorly, but things are kept brisk and wild and entertaining here. Our boy Chucky really goes through it in the finale, inspiring even more pity despite his murderous behavior. The practical effects work of Yagher and his team gets a nice showcase in this factory scene.

Vincent and Elise have good chemistry as foster kids, and, as an audience member, I really bought into their camaraderie and Kyle's growing affection and big-sister/mentor role toward Andy. I also thought the movie did a good job depicting Andy trying to adjust to a home environment he didn't grow up in and never getting the understanding he needed from Phil until it was too late. It never gets too heavy-handed, and there's a nicely understated naturalism to the performances that you may not expect from a killer doll movie.

Don Mancini, creator of the franchise, is back as screenwriter in part two. As I mentioned when reviewing Child's Play, Mancini has written or co-written every installment in the series and directed three of them, and he's the showrunner for the recent TV series. The only Child's Play release he wasn't involved with was the mediocre 2019 remake. John Lafia, co-writer of the first movie, takes over for Tom Holland as director. He's not quite as visually skilled as Holland, but he acquits himself nicely. Lafia is the guy who came up with the name Chucky when he and Holland revised Mancini's original script. Sadly, Lafia, who lived with depression for most of his life, committed suicide last year at the age of 63. A fascinating guy, Lafia was a part of the Los Angeles underground rock scene in the early and mid-'80s, releasing several albums on small indie labels, before his film career took off. In addition to his music and film work, Lafia was a poet, a director of live action video games, a proponent and creator of interactive VR technology, and a television director, and he'd returned to making music full-time in the last several years before his death.

Child's Play 3 followed just ten months later (it was rushed into production after this movie was a big hit) but is set eight years after Child's Play 2. Since 2 was set in the present, does this make Child's Play 3 a science fiction movie?