Saturday Night Horror: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

Director:  Joseph Green
Cast:  Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniels, Adele Lamont, Bonnie Sharie, Paula Maurice. Eddie Carmel

Welcome to another edition of Saturday Night Horror at the Psycho Ward!  This week, we're skipping to Disc 6, Side A for this popular early 60s horror classic.

THE PLOT:  Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is a doctor working under his father's shadow.  Like every mad scientist we've ever seen at the movies, he is convinced that he can bring the dead back to life by giving them the body of someone else and injecting a special serum into them so that their blood and everything else will cooperate with their new body.

When his fiancee, Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) dies in a car accident, Bill is overjoyed to find that she has been decapitated.  He doesn't realize that he's probably the only person in the world that would have that reaction to a decapitation.  He takes her head back to the lab (evil laugh goes here) and connects it to all these tubes, and then goes on a mission to find a woman with the perfect body.  While he's doing this, the monster in the closet (Eddie Carmel), at the command of Jan's head, kills Kurt, the loveable assistant who pushed Jan's buttons a bit too much, by ripping his arm off.  Poor Kurt.  He was my favorite. :(

After searching in a few places, he finally finds what he's looking for in Doris, an old friend.  He takes her back to his home, drugs her, and begins to experiment on her.  Jan, who now hates Bill because of what he plans to do to her, speaks up and says that she doesn't want a new body.  Bill reacts in the only way he knows how:  by doing the same thing he's done the entire movie and treating her like a three-year-old and taping her mouth shut. 

Bill makes the same mistake that Kurt made and stands in front of the open hatch of the monster's closet.  The monster grabs him in a headlock and finally gets the door open.  We finally get to see the monster, who has a cone-like head and an eye on his forehead.  Its skin is horribly wrinkled.  I screamed.  The thing sets the lab on fire and carries Doris to safety, so in the end you have to cheer for the monster, you know?

THE REVIEW:  This film is quite graphic, not just sexually, but it does have an intense amount of blood when Kurt is murdered.  The thing you have to remember is that by the 60s, the Hayes Code was easing up a bit and by 1969, there were films with sex scenes.  Granted, there are no sex scenes in this film, but the sexual content does make its presence known.

This film is also known as The Head That Wouldn't Die, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.  Going into this film, I thought it was going to be a sci-fi thriller, 50s-style, with a mutant brain.  Jan does mention that her brain is connected with the monster in the closet's brain, but we don't physically see a brain.

When I heard "monster in the closet," I immediately thought of Karloff's Frankenstein monster.  It's a mad scientist film, remember?

All in all, this film was a good scare and there is something about mad scientist films that makes them never get old.  3.5 out of 5 stars.

Full movie below:

Saturday Night Horror: Maniac (1934)

Director:  Dwain Esper
Cast:  Bill Woods, Horace B. Carpenter

Now that I have my horror classics collection, I decided to make something new.  Welcome to Saturday Night Horror at the Psycho Ward!  So I decided not to watch all 50 movies from Disc 1 through Disc 12 in order and I decided to jump around a bit.  Tonight I went to Disc 5, Side A for this 1934 B horror/exploitation film.

THE PLOT (from our friends at Wikipedia): 
Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) is a former vaudeville impersonator who is working as the lab assistant to Dr. Meirschultz (Horace Carpenter) a mad scientist attempting to bring the dead back to life. When Don kills Meirschultz, he attempts to hide his crime by "becoming" the doctor, taking over his work, dressing like him, wearing his beard, and slowly going insane.

The "doctor" treats a mental patient, Buckley (Ted Edwards), but accidentally injects him with adrenaline, which causes him to go into violent fits. Buckley's wife (Phyllis Diller) discovers the body of the real doctor, and blackmails Don into turning her husband into a zombie. The ersatz doctor turns the tables on her by manipulating her into fighting with his estranged wife (Thea Ramsey), a former showgirl. When the cat-breeding neighbor Goof (played by an unknown actor) sees what's going on, he calls the police, who stop the fight and, following the sound of Satan the cat, find the body of the real doctor hidden behind a brick wall.

THE REVIEW:  This movie was most likely made before the implementation of the Hayes Code, hence its alternate title, Sex Maniac, and the amount of skin we see from the women in the film.  The movie certainly didn't seem like 51 minutes.  It seemed like 20.  Nothing about it was genuinely scary, and the acting in the beginning was overdone.  It was a fun little mad scientist ride, but it has absolutely nothing on Colin Clive and Dwight Frye in the '31 Frankenstein.  I give it 2.5 stars out of 5.



 
Full movie:

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Director:  Herk Harvey
Cast:  Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison

So yesterday I went on a little (?) shopping spree for Singin' In the Rain (1952 - review coming soon).  Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target must have colds or something, because I couldn't find it anywhere (don't worry, Donald!  You and I will be together soon!),

Anyways, while browsing in Best Buy for SITR, I stumbled across a horror classics collection that I had passed up for a sandwich last year (I was hungry, sue me).  Naturally, I had to get it (it has 50 films on it, for crying out loud, and two Dwight Frye films), and the first film I watched was Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls.

THE PLOT:  Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) and her friends get into a drag race with some guys (it's 1962, give them a break).  During the race, the girls' car crashes into a river.  Mary mysteriously survives the crash and travels to Salt Lake City to start her career as a church organist.  While driving, she passes an old pavilion that she learns used to be a carnival and a dance hall.  Driving further, she encounters a character she calls "The Man" (director Herk Harvey), a ghastly man in a suit and tie that looks a hell of a lot like Heath Ledger as The Joker.                

Mary makes it to town and meets her landlady, Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist).  And for some odd reason, horror filmmakers feel like there has to be a type of love story, so they make Mary meet her love interest, John Linden (Sidney Berger), though she doesn't seem to be that interested in him.  I'm not going to talk about that because horror movie =/= romantic comedy.

So anyways, Mary becomes obsessed with the pavilion and The Man and the other ghouls begin to appear more often.  One night as she is practicing the organ in the church, her music goes from hymns to a strange, demonic melody.  Her hands and feet move slowly and caress the piano as she envisions a hoard of ghouls emerging from the water to waltz to her music.  As The Man reaches out for her, the minister (Art Ellison) seizes her hands and tells her that her music is sacrilege.  Before you ask, I doubt he's a Mormon.

Mary keeps experiencing the strange events.  Those bratty ghouls even go so far as to distort the space-time continuum, making Mary experience a world where she is unseen and unheard by anyone else.  The final time she goes back to the pavilion, she experiences herself as a ghoul waltzing with The Man.  At the end, the ghouls continue cornering her, eventually chasing her out of the pavilion, in probably the most humorous chase scene ever.  Nothing is funnier than seeing ghouls running halfheartedly after a mortal.

Anyway, the ghouls track her down and spirit her away (means you get carried off somewhere by magic) and Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt, the shrink that was trying to help her), the minister and the police cannot figure out what happened to her.

The final scene of the film shows Mary's body in the car with her friends being pulled out of the river.  All three girls are dead.  Oooooooo.  The End.

THE REVIEW:  Every horror movie has a cliche horror plot.  In this case, it's the cliche plot about the scary, old abandoned place that everyone tells you not to go to but something keeps dragging you back.  Sometimes the confusion of events in a horror movie makes it a good film.  In this case, it does.  It wasn't as scary as I wanted and would have liked, and that love story was not needed.  I surprisingly found myself a fan of the ghouls' makeup, even though, as I mentioned, most of them looked like Heath Ledger as The Joker.  3.5 stars out of 5.  Good independent B&W early 60's horror.  

Silent Sunday Edition: The Vanishing American (1925)

Director:  George B. Seitz
Cast:  Richard Dix, Lois Wilson, Noah Beery

Welcome to another Silent Sunday at The Psycho Ward!  This week's silent is a historical drama based on Zane Grey's 1925 novel of the same name.

PLOT:  Typical movie about Native Americans (no, we do not call them Indians anymore.  Sorry!).  It begins with the clans known as "Basket Weavers" and then the cliff dwellers, which we know to be the Anasazi.  It then shows the Spanish conquest of the natives in 1540 and the introduction of horses.  Next, it fast-forwards three hundred years and shows Kit Carson's betrayal of the Native Americans to the US Army.  Fast-forwarding to World War I, the Native Americans become soldiers in the war against Germany.

The film basically centers around Nophaie, the Warrior (Richard Dix.  In the beginning of the film we learn that Nophaie is a title given to the strongest man in the tribe), and his fight to gain freedom for his people.  He has helpers along the way too; a schoolteacher named Marian Warner (Lois Wilson), and Bart Wilson (Bert Woodruff) who at the end of the film becomes the new agent.  Booker (Noah Beery) is the stereotypical white man against the Native American civilization.

THE REVIEW:  The big difference between this film and D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is that while both films are made from an American perspective, The Vanishing American favors the underdog, in this case, the Native Americans.  In the beginning, I was a bit worried because they were being portrayed as savages, helpless against the Spanish conquest, but then the cue cards came up describing the whites as "monsters," and while that was appalling, it was very thoughtful and wise of director George Seitz to acknowledge how the Native Americans felt about their white attackers.  And I am a history kinda person, so I enjoyed this film.  4 out of 5 stars.