The Human Monster aka The Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Here's a weird one. The Human Monster has an atypical, complicated story, a quietly relaxed pace, a wealth of strange details, strong performances, and a dry British sense of humor. It's a little too laidback to pack a real punch (except for a few moments in the final scenes), but I liked its party-of-one eccentricity.

A UK production with a couple of borrowed Hollywood actors, the film is set in London and begins with Scotland Yard detectives investigating a series of mysterious deaths. Single men with no families are turning up dead in the Thames. There are no visible signs of foul play, so suicide is the most likely explanation, but that doesn't sit well with head detective on the case, Larry Holt (Hugh Williams), who is being trailed on the job by a visiting detective from Chicago, Lt. Patrick O'Reilly (Edmon Ryan). There's a running gag throughout the film about how much Americans love guns versus their more sophisticated British counterparts in law enforcement and crime. The U.S. never really changes, does it?

The investigation leads to the office of a former doctor turned insurance agent named Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi). Some of the dead men in the Thames had life insurance policies with Orloff's office. Orloff has records of the beneficiaries of the policies and shows them to the detectives, but the dude is played by Bela Lugosi. You know he's up to some shit, especially when you see him hypnotize people with his eyes. The man has a lot going on.

Orloff, despite being a disgraced doctor who left the profession for the insurance biz under a cloud of scandal, is allowed to be a doctor on call for a home for the blind, run by a blind minister named John Dearborn who looks a lot like Lugosi in sunglasses and a wig (the Dearborn voice is dubbed by another actor named O.B. Clarence). I repeat, the man has a lot going on. Dearborn's and Orloff's assistant at the school, Jake (Wilfred Walter), is a hulkingly enormous blind man with pointy ears and a row of misshapen teeth who groans and grunts a lot.

It's no surprise that Orloff becomes the main suspect in the deaths, especially after the autopsy of the freshest Thames dead man, Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), reveals the water in his lungs as tap water, not Thames water, and his life insurance policy was set up through Orloff's office. 

The audience by this point has already seen Stuart's fate and Orloff's extreme irritation when he finds out Stuart has a daughter living in New York who is about to return to London. The daughter, Diana (Greta Gynt), is enlisted in Scotland Yard's plan to take Orloff down upon her arrival, and she gets a job as a secretary at the home for the blind.

There's an unhurried pace to The Human Monster (except for the final third) that may annoy the nonstop action or nothing crowd, but I enjoy a good slow burn. I like movies that hang out instead of just slamming through plot points, and this movie still gets the job done in 76 minutes. Walter Summers is not enough of a distinctive filmmaker to lift this movie to the heights of '30s horror (a decade packed with classics), but he does a decent job with the material, especially when the craziness revs up in the finale.

Williams and Ryan are fine as the London/Chicago odd couple, who, of course, have a friendly rivalry but respect each other's methods, but Lugosi, Gynt, and Walter are the MVPs of the film. Lugosi gets to play around with a lot of different physical and personality traits, Gynt makes a great undercover agent and damsel in distress (she does an excellent horrified face), and Walter is both frightening and sympathetic, even while buried under makeup, wig, and prosthetics. I also really enjoyed Julie Suedo's small supporting performance as Orloff's secretary. She gives a great nothing-in-this-life-impresses-me look.

I don't have much spiel this time around. This is a solid little movie, and I give it a mild recommendation, especially if you're a Lugosi fan. 

Curse II: The Bite (Federico Prosperi, 1989)

One of my favorite little grifts in the world of b-movie/exploitation/horror film distribution is the sequel that has nothing to do with the original film. A common practice in the days of regional drive-in and grindhouse distribution when a particular film could be packaged and repackaged under dozens of different titles, the almost-ruse continued into the VHS-era '80s and '90s. My favorite example of this is the 1972 Spanish horror film Tombs of the Blind Dead, in which the zombie-ghosts of some long-dead Knights Templar waste some Eurotrash hotties who get off a train in the wrong damn place. The movie was repackaged in some drive-in markets as a Planet of the Apes sequel, with a new prologue explaining that the knights were actually the ghosts of the apes from the first Apes movie. If I remember correctly, a threatened lawsuit quickly dropped that print from circulation.

That was a guerilla move (wordplay, get it?), but many of these non-sequel sequels are, legally, too legit to quit. The Italian production company behind the 1987 American horror film The Curse and that film's Egyptian producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis, had a new horror movie ready to go called The Bite. The Curse flopped in theaters but was doing very well in the home video market, so Assonitis and the production company decided to slap the Curse name on The Bite, despite the first film concerning an extra-terrestrial meteor/pile-of-goo hybrid landing in a Tennessee farmer's field and infecting the rural area's food and water supply, turning people who ingested enough of that supply into bloodthirsty zombies, and the second film concerning mutant snakes in the New Mexico desert. Both films are about the havoc that ensues when something gets in your body that shouldn't be there, but the similarities pretty much end there.

The sole directing credit of Federico Prosperi (under his Americanized pseudonym Fred Goodwin), who also co-wrote and co-produced, Curse II begins with a young couple, Lisa (The Stepfather's Jill Schoelen) and Clark (J. Eddie Peck, the only actor to play recurring characters on Dallas and Dynasty in the same season), on a road trip to California. They are just about to cross New Mexico, and they ask the redneck attendant at a gas station to give them the best route to Albuquerque. Clark disagrees with the attendant's circuitous four-hour route and wants to take the quicker and more direct shot that cuts the drive time in half, but the attendant strongly warns against it and says there's a 100-mile stretch with no human being in sight. Clark takes the short cut, which is bad news for him but great news for us, the horror movie viewers.

The couple's silver jeep gets a flat tire in that desolate stretch of desert highway, which gives Lisa plenty of time to describe her goofy dream/story about interacting with dinosaurs and gaze lovingly at Clark while he attaches the spare. She also almost gets bit by a snake but Clark shoots it before it reaches her. The character of Lisa is pretty silly in this first stretch of film, which annoyed my wife a bit more than it annoyed me. I find Jill Schoelen charming and cute, and I like her distinctive voice, which has a raspy grit combined with a honey sweetness, so her annoying character was easy for me to forgive, but she fortunately gets to drop her character's goofy quirks and lack of independence once the gnarly shit starts happening.

Spare attached, Lisa and Clark get back on the road. Lisa pulls out the acoustic guitar to play some light folk-pop, and the vibes are mellow until they hit a stretch of highway filled with snakes. Oh shiiiiiit! Clark runs over hundreds of the damn things, covering the sides of the jeep with blood. They stop at a desolate little gas station, where the shotgun-wielding, paranoid attendant (Al Fann) reluctantly patches their tire and gives them more gas for a massively inflated fee. He also warns Clark that the desert animals have all gone crazy from nuclear testing, especially the snakes, who killed his beloved dog. While Clark is using the bathroom, he hears the supposedly dead dog. Before he can take a gander, the attendant puts his gun in Clark's face and tells him to hit the bricks. We then see this snake-bitten dog, which has somehow transformed into a giant dog-snake hybrid. Oh shiiiiit!

Deciding they've had enough road-tripping in Snakeville for one day, the couple stop at a small-town motel run by George (legendary character actor Sydney Lassick, who is not in this movie enough). As they're unloading the jeep, a stowaway snake bites Clark. A little girl sees the snake slither away and points it out to everyone, and a motel guest named Harry (M*A*S*H*'s Jamie Farr), who we think is a doctor, gives Clark the antivenom. When Clark thanks the good doc, Harry replies, "A doctor? I'm not a doctor. I'm a traveling salesman from Brooklyn working the Dust Bowl, so it's my business to know from snakes," which makes no sense but everyone rolls with it instead of taking Clark to a real doctor.

After yet another snake encounter in their motel room, which Lisa dispatches with her acoustic guitar, Lisa and Clark get the fuck outta there without notifying motel staff that there's a huge fucking dead bloody snake in the bed. When Harry sees the dead snake, he flips that he gave Clark the wrong antidote. That antidote was for the everyday run-of-the-mill snake slithering away from the jeep. This snake is one of those freaky mutant desert snakes. What if that was the snake that bit Clark?

Hey, guess what? It was. Clark and Lisa continue the trek through New Mexico on the way to California, while the mutant snake venom and the incorrect antivenom interact in Clark's system, eventually turning his hand into a friggin' snake head. What the fuuuuck? Meanwhile, Harry takes off in search of the couple so he can give Clark the correct antivenom and save his own ass from liability and prison, assisted by his CB trucker friends Big Flo (Marianne Muellerleile), Death Wish (Jose Garcia), and Beef (Tiny Wells).

We're only about thirty minutes into the movie at this point, and even more insanity follows involving tough guys at a country music bar, a doctor who gives some insanely detailed exposition after a cursory look at Clark's hand, a corrupt redneck sheriff played by Bo Svenson, fundamentalist Christian Scandinavians, a mud pit, more crazy snake hands, giant snakes, miniature snakes, snakes coming at you every which way, and a legitimately funny dick joke.

I love when movies take an insane premise and commit to it, and this movie is aided and abetted in that insanity by the special effects prowess of Screaming Mad George, one of the visionary weirdo geniuses of splatter, mutation, slime, and flesh. He doesn't get to go quite as wild as he did on his masterpiece Society, but he gets to do some pretty strange stuff within the confines of the small budget. Screaming Mad's other notable credits include Poltergeist II, Big Trouble in Little China, Predator, Don't Panic, Spaceballs, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and 4, Bride of Re-Animator, Freaked, Necronomicon, Jack Frost, and an *NSYNC video. 

Curse II is a wildly enjoyable, nutty, stupid, ridiculous, and surprisingly well-made film. It's a lot more fun than the much bleaker Curse and just as weird. A snake head for a hand? It makes no sense, and I love that. It's a bit odd that Prosperi never directed a movie before or since Curse II, since it has such an effective visual style. Whatever ridiculous inconsistencies and incoherencies in the screenplay, the movie itself always looks pretty good. If you're a fellow connoisseur of the nutty b-movie, I think you'll enjoy this. Where else are you gonna see Jamie Farr, a trucker named Beef, and a guy with a snake head for a hand in the same flick? You don't even need to catch up with The Curse part one.