Super-Sleuth (Benjamin Stoloff, 1937)

Super-Sleuth is a charmingly silly horror-comedy (heavy on the comedy) that may be one of the earliest movies about the movie business. Most of the showbiz-themed movies in the earliest decades of film take place in the world of the theater, but Super-Sleuth's characters are Hollywood actors, studio publicists, and directors, and much of the film's action takes place on movie sets, on location, and in the offices of Apex Pictures, the fictional Hollywood studio employing most of our characters.

Jack Oakie (John Goodman's character's favorite actor in Barton Fink) plays Willard Martin, the self-absorbed star of a series of popular private eye films. His multiple public comments making fun of the police for being unable to catch The Poison Pen (an author of several poison pen letters threatening bodily harm to local citizens) and his boasts of knowing more than the police due to his experience playing a private eye have caused a bit of a PR crisis for Apex, exasperating studio publicist/Martin's on-off romantic partner Mary Strand (Ann Sothern) and enraging the LAPD. Instead of being conciliatory, Willard doubles down on his sick cop burns. I really enjoyed this aspect of the film. It warms my heart to see police get the business.

Willard claims he'll solve The Poison Pen crimes instead of the cops, unwittingly making himself a target of the criminal mastermind. The movie never makes it clear why the entire city is trying to find a guy who writes mean letters and why it's making front page headlines. I'm going to assume the criminal is also killing the people who receive the letters. Otherwise, it makes no sense, but I have a soft spot in my heart for nonsense. We do know he's definitely trying to kill Willard, since we see him take direct aim at the star with a pretty sweet umbrella-gun (the center of the open umbrella is the scope, the handle is the trigger), barely missing his target.

Willard spends the rest of the film avoiding murder attempts, trying to solve the crimes, shooting his latest private eye movie, alternately placating and infuriating the cops, trying to mediate a romantic triangle between an actress and two actors (one established, one working as an extra), amusing and exasperating Mary, and polishing and straightening his portraits and billboards. He's a busy guy. 

Super-Sleuth is often described as a mystery, but the movie reveals the identity of The Poison Pen in the first third. Let's just say a creepy professor and expert on crime named Herman (Eduardo Ciannelli) who advises Willard on his private eye movies and lives in a weird wax museum of historical crime and punishment may possibly be the guy. You may be up to something if you've turned your home into a wax museum of the macabre, is all I'm saying.

Compared to the classics of the period, Super-Sleuth is a minor achievement, but it's a solid, well-made, funny, entertaining movie, and the umbrella-gun is the bee's knees. I loved the behind-the-scenes-of-filmmaking aspects, too, with the location shoot for the film-within-a-film's police chase being especially great. We get to see the preparations, the planning, the direction, the action, and the mayhem that ensues when The Poison Pen starts shooting at the actors for real as they're shooting at each other with blanks. Very cool scene.

The only thing marring Super-Sleuth is some '30s-era racism with the character of Warts (Willie Best), Willard's personal assistant. Willie Best was often saddled with the stereotypical black servant character, afraid of everything. His character is a bit more developed in this movie and gets some decent lines and a few zingers, but he still has to do the fraidy-cat schtick forced on so many black actors of the era.

If you're a fan of movies about the movies, '30s Hollywood, and umbrella-guns, check out Super-Sleuth. I had a good time with it.

Curse of the Blue Lights (John Henry Johnson, 1988)

Time to bounce from the last post's professional, star-studded, Hollywood production values to a lovable little micro-indie shot in rural Colorado near Pueblo. Curse of the Blue Lights is a regional oddity, made by a mixture of amateurs, professionals, and aspiring professionals. The acting is awkward but enjoyable and the sound quality is rough, but the special effects are pretty good for the budget, the director has a decent ability to frame shots, and the story is pretty damn weird. The small town let's-put-on-a-show vibes are strong here, and I find that endearing.

John Henry Johnson was obsessed with film and photography from a young age and grew up with a local showbiz father, Buddy Johnson, who played in a band called the Colorado Rangers and hosted local and regional radio and TV shows in Colorado from the 1940s to the '60s. The younger Johnson made his own amateur short films, worked as a cameraman for local television, did PA, crew, and cinematography work on regional commercials and educational and industrial films, and helped out with PA and crew work on Hollywood TV and film productions shooting in Colorado. After directing a couple of hour-long shorts about Damon Runyon and Zebulon Pike (one of which was narrated by Burgess Meredith), he decided to make a horror film for his feature debut, using several Pueblo-area urban legends as the basis of his story.

I give Johnson credit for not churning out another generic slasher film, but I'm not sure anyone knows just what the hell Curse of the Blue Lights is about in any comprehensive way. Part of this confusion is no doubt caused by the poor sound, which renders one supporting character mostly incomprehensible, and the prosthetics, which make it impossible for the actors wearing them to enunciate. Part of it is the wild plot, which blends a handful of urban legends to chaotic effect. Fortunately, most of our characters are clearly understood. Hey, it's low-budget filmmaking. Roll with it.

The film begins with a farmer working his crops on a sunny summer day. He spots something strange, stops his tractor, and checks it out. It's the mutilated body of a dog, covered in weird goo. While he's pondering this goo, the farmer is blindsided by a creep who has crawled inside his scarecrow. The scarecrow man shows no mercy. Ka-blammo, Johnson is coming in hot!

We jump to the night time. A group of early-twentysomethings are cruising the back roads, heading to an area called Blue Lights, a make-out spot for young couples and a great place for grease monkey burnouts to show each other their souped-up muscle cars. The spot is named after the mysterious blue lights frequently observed there, and the area is a hotbed of local folklore involving mysterious murders, alien visitations, and the preserved body of a prehistoric figure named the Muldoon Man.

Urban legend digression time. Blue Lights is a real Pueblo teen make-out spot, and there have been several reports of mysterious blue lights in the area. The Muldoon Man was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Cardiff Giant hoaxer George Hull, P.T. Barnum, and W.A. Conant, and a few other accomplices, in the 1870s. The multi-state grift involved New Yorker Hull creating a prehistoric man out of rock, bone, plaster, blood, and meat and baking it in a kiln in Pennsylvania. He shipped it by train to Colorado Springs, where ex-Barnum employee Conant picked it up and buried it near Pueblo in an area known for its fossils. Barnum, then living in Denver, arrived with his "experts" to verify ol' Muldoon, named after Greco-Roman wrestling champion and soon to be one of the earliest pro wrestling stars William Muldoon. Muldoon Man toured the country, from Colorado back to New York, until one of the grift's Big Apple investors spilled the beans to the newspapers after suspecting he wasn't going to get paid. Digression over.

Our make-out couples and hot-rod burnouts see some blue lights and decide to follow them, armed with flashlights and a gun. The lights lead them to a partially buried Muldoon-like figure and an engraved stone amulet (everyone in the movie calls it a disc), which they steal. They decide they need a pickup to excavate Muldoon but are busted for speeding on their way back to town. They tell the cop the Muldoon story, and he goes back with them to check it out. Hey, guess what? Muldoon is gone. The cop gets pissed and gives the driver a speeding ticket.

Our intrepid youthful heroes briefly bemoan the ticket before they carry on investigating, following the tracks of the missing Muldoon to a cemetery and into a crypt, which leads them to an underground tunnel connected to the basement of a nearby mansion, where some ancient damn ghouls are melting bodies, including the farmer's, into a goo that they are feeding through a pipe into the Muldoon Man's mouth. There's a lot going on in that sentence. Once they get the disc back and Muldoon inhales enough goo, the prophecy will be fulfilled. This prophecy involves Muldoon somehow destroying every human so evil will reign. I don't know if these ghouls have looked into what humans have been up to for most of their existence, but, ghoul buddies, evil already reigns. You don't need ancient discs and elaborate goo pipes. The work is done, dudes.

Anyway, one of our ragtag group of young folks sneezes, the ghouls see him, and the chase is on. Will they eliminate our heroes one by one, regain the disc, and reanimate the Muldoon Man? I won't reveal that, but I will tell you that the movie also involves zombies, a witch, magic mirrors, fencing, cute '80s outfits, cinema's slowest sword fight, nitroglycerine explosions, possession, and a vintage '80s Colorado bedroom, decorated with posters of Bruce Lee, Spock, several different beer brands, bikini babes, and the ski resort at Keystone, and a stop sign with "WAR" spray painted on it. You know that bedroom is in the basement. (As a Midwesterner who has lived in Austin, TX, for 23 years, I miss partying in basements next to posters like these.)

Curse of the Blue Lights is a goofy little movie, and I enjoyed it, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the regional indie. Most of the people who worked on this film were nonprofessional friends and locals who never worked on another movie, but cast member Tom Massmann did make a go of it in the industry, acting and producing on shorts and indies and working as a stuntman on some pretty big TV shows. Special effects artist Mark Sisson also went on to a successful career, moving to Hollywood after Blue Lights and working on the fourth and fifth Nightmare on Elm Street movies, as well as C.H.U.D. II, Beastmaster II, The Resurrected, Windtalkers, Gettysburg, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The film also benefited from having Michael Spatola as a makeup consultant. I'm not sure who had the connections to Spatola, who had already been working in the industry for several years, but Spatola's CV includes The Return of the Living Dead I and II, House, Tremors, Alien Nation, Edward Scissorhands, Bride of Re-Animator, Predator 2, Stargate, Leviathan, Terminator 2, Iron Man 3, and several episodes of Tales from the Crypt. He currently runs a makeup and effects school in Hollywood.

After Blue Lights, Johnson moved to Los Angeles for four years, writing scripts and trying to get some directing work, but after hitting too many brick walls, he moved back to Colorado and embraced his other passion, fine art photography. He's worked steadily as a photographer and photography teacher ever since and has written a few books about photography and the life and career of his dad.