Category Archives: horror

We Can’t All Be Bela Lugosi

Posted on August 14, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Saturday night I continued my quest for cheesy horror with a double feature starring George Zucco. I had never heard of him, but the DVD box describes him as “marvelously theatrical,” and Leonard Maltin says he “effortlessly steals the show” in our second feature (Leonard Maltin’s 2011 Movie Guide, Signet, 2010). Who am I to argue with Leonard Maltin?

I don’t know that I need to give my usual spoiler alert, because I’m not sure I followed either movie with any accuracy. Our copies were so bad most of the dialog was difficult to understand, especially since we had two fans running. I do love a horror movie on a hot summer night.

In Dead Men Walk (1943), Zucca plays a dual role of a good twin and a bad twin, both doctors (actors just love to play dual roles and/or writers and directors just love identical twins; I may have to write a whole blog post on the phenomenon). The evil twin is dead as the movie begins, but that’s OK, because, as the they tell us in the title, dead men walk. There is a creepy prologue of a disembodied head double exposured over flame telling us… I’m not sure what. That was some of the dialogue I missed.

As the movie progresses, we learn that the good twin killed the evil twin. I personally could have used a little more information on this plot point. Good twin says it was self-defense. Evil twin says it was an ill-fated attempt to save the daughter/niece (that is, daughter of evil, niece of good).

Oh, and let’s talk about that niece for a minute. Of course, there is usually a beautiful young woman in these things, most often in deadly peril at some point. She must be sweet and vulnerable. Any additional personality is strictly optional. Come to think of it, that can be true for movie males, too, only without the sweet and vulnerable parts. The niece is mainly concerned with her young man, also a doctor. She seems completely unaware of her father’s nefarious activities and, I must point out, not particularly grief-stricken at his passing, although that may have been the fault of the lousy print. I mean, I didn’t hear everything she said. What I did hear, they didn’t give her the snappiest dialogue. I sure wish this movie had had an intrepid girl reporter, but that’s beside the point.

Bad Brother’s funeral is disrupted by a crazy old lady (no, not me) saying it is a desecration to have such an evil one in the church. She’s been nuts ever since her granddaughter was brutally murdered. Any guesses who was responsible? Well, you’re going to have to guess, because we never find out anything else about that subplot. I was grateful I heard that much.

Soon Big Brother returns, making all kinds of threats. Not surprisingly, only Good Brother gets to see him. I suppose with more budget they could have made a trippy movie where you find out at the end they are BOTH THE SAME PERSON. No such subtlety for this flick, which was really fine with me, because those trippy ones make my head hurt.

Bad Brother is a kind of a vampire. He intends to turn his daughter into one, too, but apparently this takes a lot of bites. At night she has mysterious dreams. By day she appears to be wasting away from an unknown disease. At one point her young man insists she be given a blood transfusion. She at once is better, which clues in nobody but the audience that vampires are at work. Oh, and crazy old lady, who brings her a crucifix, which helps. I’ll never understand why people in vampire movies don’t set up a perimeter of crucifixes all around the house and sleep well at night.

Zucca does a pretty good job playing two parts. I did remark at one point, thought, that it was the most professorial-looking vampire I had ever seen. That was just a cute remark, though, because he managed to be scary as well. And, after all, we can’t all be Bela Lugosi.

Things get interesting when the excitable townspeople begin to believe that Good Brother is in fact the murderer. It gets scary as events reach their dramatic conclusion. I shan’t tell you what that is, because I don’t warn you against watching this movie. In fact, if you do watch it, perhaps you could clue me in on a few of the plot points I missed due to my bad sound system. Did the niece know of her father’s evil nature? What all did that disembodied head say during the introduction? What was Bad Brother’s henchman’s name?

As usual, my review is becoming longer than the silly movie. This one runs 65 minutes, giving us plenty of time for our second feature, which I will talk about tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Screaming Cheese

Posted on July 31, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert: I intend to give away all major plot points in the movie The Screaming Skull. Oh, and at least one in Gaslight.

I don’t know that the warning was necessary, especially for The Screaming Skull. I mean, you pretty much see it coming. As for Gaslight, if you have not seen it, go watch it to see how it’s done. Then come back and read this post, and/or watch The Screaming Skull, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Where was I? Ah yes, popping in a cheesy movie, because after yesterday’s post I didn’t think I should go for a Middle-aged Musings Monday. Also, the Snapped episodes were all re-runs we have seen many times. Once again we pulled out the 50 Horror Classics DVD set I gave Steven for his birthday. I gotta say, I meant it as a present for him, but it’s really a present for me. Look at all the fun blog posts I’ve gotten to write out of it!

Steven thought we had seen The Screaming Skull (1958) before. I remembered that we had, but it was on an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. So I said we could now watch it without the robot heads (if you don’t get the robot heads reference, I urge you to check out MST 3000; episodes are available on DVD).

As the movie begins, a man brings his new wife to the estate of his dead wife. It is a beautiful estate with peacocks on the lawn and extensive gardens. The gardens are important, because they are maintained by a half-wit gardener who may or may not be aware that the first wife is dead.

The house itself is kind of eerie. There’s no furniture, because the dead wife got rid of it, saying she and the husband would buy all new and make it their own home. But she died before they made it to Raymour and Flanagan. There is a portrait of the dead wife in which she looks a little wild eyed. She was good friends with the gardener, we find out. He is the son of her (dead) parents’ (dead) gardener, and they were brought up almost as brother and sister.

The gardener is creepy, but the new wife wants to make friends. She suggests they take flowers to the dead wife’s grave, which, not surprisingly, is also creepy. The gravestone has a face carved in it, presumably of the dead wife, although I could detect no similarity between it and the portrait. Difference between two mediums, I suppose.

We also find out how the wife died. Apparently she was running in a rain storm, slipped on a leaf, hit her head, fell in the pond and drowned. Ah, with no witnesses. The base of her skull was crushed. Maybe I’ve seen too many episodes of Forensic Files, but that sounded suspicious to me. Actually, it sounded as if it was supposed to sound suspicious and was extremely heavy handed about it. I do hate a heavy handed plot point.

At this point I said to Steven (who was remembering the movie better than I did), “Oh, are they going to do a Gaslight thing and have the husband make the wife think she’s crazy?”

Big nod from Steven. He loves Gaslight, a truly well-done thriller. It’s not one I want to pop in very often, though, because I get too upset on Ingrid Bergman’s behalf.

It takes a long time for the skulls to show up, and the build-up is more boring than atmospheric (despite the creepy house, portrait, gardener and gravestone). We hear that the new wife had some mental problems due probably to the tragic deaths of her parents. I did not catch all of that back story, though, because I went out to the kitchen to make myself a snack (vanilla yoghurt with fresh blackberries and strawberries from the Ilion Farmer’s Market) (just to inject a little local color).

I think I missed one or two skulls, too, and I did not hear any of them screaming. Steven told me the skulls at the end screamed. Silly me, I thought that was the husband, getting his comeuppance at last (I really like that word comeuppance).

Looking back over what I’ve written, I see that I keep referring to skulls, plural, while the movie is call The Screaming Skull, singular. It appeared to me that there was more than one skull. On the other hand, there were never two skulls in the same shot, so maybe it was just one skull that got around.

I’m not sure if we were supposed to suspect the husband or the gardener right away. In a romance novel, the husband would have looked all kinds of suspicious and it would have ended up being the gardener or possibly the reverend and/or his wife. Or else the gardener would have been more gorgeous and more suspicious, and new wife would have ended up with him. I used to read a considerable number of romance novels.

The Screaming Skull clocks in at 68 minutes, which is probably the best thing you can say about it. Do I recommend you watch it? Let’s just say, if you want to see a good movie, watch Gaslight. If you want to impersonate a robot head, seek out The Screaming Skull.

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Blood, But Not Bloody Cheesy

Posted on July 16, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Saturday night I took a break from both cheesy horror movies and Mohawk Valley adventures by popping in Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.

Steven gave me Dracula as a present some time ago. I was reminded of it while looking over previous posts. So I have written about it, but not much about it, so I thought I could get away with at least a short post about it. It is, in fact, my only option, because it has been too damn hot to do anything else and I really don’t feel like writing yet another post about Why I Can’t Write A Post Today (but I will probably feel like it tomorrow when I go back to work. Just warning you). I will also mention that, although I own this movie, I think yesterday’s was only my second viewing of the movie in its entirety. I had forgotten a lot.

Black and white photography is perfect for this movie. I suppose that was merely making a virtue out of necessity in 1931, but I enjoyed it. The entire look of the movie is eerie, like a foreboding grey sky just before a storm. I hadn’t been looking at the movie very long before I grabbed the TV Journal and made the note: There is nothing cheesy about this movie.

The scene where we first see the vampires is scary. And a little gross, because there are rats. I hate rats. Renfield has just arrived at Count Dracula’s castle and has no idea he has been hired by a vampire, the warnings of the villagers having made no impression on him. One line I was particularly waiting for was when Dracula says, “I never drink… wine.” I remember Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi saying it in Ed Wood, one of my all-time favorite movies.

Dracula is very atmospheric. In fact, I’m afraid there is more atmosphere than action, which was a little disappointing to me, but I got over it, because the atmosphere was so well done. I’ve spoken about horror movies that manage to be unsettling with only noises, camera angles and acting. This one uses mostly acting and cinematography.

Slow as the action seemed to me, you had to pay attention or you missed a few plot points. Steven had to tell me Renfield had got bit (in my defense, I was knitting and probably had my eyes off the screen). I also thought some things were kind of glossed over, like the entire crew perishing on the voyage to England. There is a deliciously creepy shot of the shadow of the dead captain tied to the wheel. A few lines of dialogues from onlookers and a newspaper clipping explain.

The creepiest shot in the picture was a newly insane Renfield looking up the stairs. Ooh, he’s creepy.

The movie is not very informative about vampire lore. I would have had a hard time keeping up, but I remembered what I had learned in Lost Boys, a fun vampire romp from the ’80s. I was a little surprised when I realized who Dr. Van Helsing was. I had thought he was supposed to look more like Hugh Jackman. Oh, I know, I’m just being silly. I had to say it.

I greatly enjoyed my second viewing of Dracula. I highly recommend it to lovers of old movies, non-cheesy horror movies, and vampires.

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Tormented Movie Viewing

Posted on July 12, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

I continued my quest for cheesy entertainment with Tormented (1960), starring nobody you’ve ever heard of. I guess I should say nobody I’ve ever heard of. I don’t know who you may have heard of.

The movie doesn’t waste any time on back story, but from the first scene we gather that this jazz pianist had an affair with the singer in his band but dumped her for another woman. Later on, when we meet the fiance, we find she is the daughter of a rich man, but there is no indication that the pianist is a gold-digger. More likely he just follows the usual movie guy propensity for preferring the softer, more insipid choice.

The dumped singer’s name is Vi, which caused some confusion in the opening credits when Steven thought there was a character named Six (you know, roman numerals, VI). Vi meets a tragic end off the top of an old, abandoned lighthouse which the pianist apparently frequents. He is racked with guilt or perhaps worry that her dead body will wash up on the shore.

It is a perfect set-up for a psychological thriller: is there really a ghost or is his guilt making him see things that aren’t there? Unfortunately, the movie makers did not have anything that subtle in mind. This is definitely a ghost story and a pretty cheap one at that.

One could take the charitable view that special effects were not very advanced in 1960; it was hard to do a ghost story without that there CGI. I say hogwash. They just weren’t trying very hard. I point to The Haunting made in 1963 (NOT the ridiculous re-make), which manages to be extremely unsettling using noises, camera angles and acting. I don’t say this in a carping tone of voice, though, because the bad special effects gave us the best laugh of the evening. At one point, Vi’s disembodied head appears, taunting the pianist. In desperation, he grabs it, and instead of a double-exposure would-be creepy thing, it looks like a wig form from the make-up department. Vi keeps talking even after her voice is muffled when he wraps a piece of cloth around it.

There are a couple of good effects. Early on the pianist and his fiance are walking in the sand and a third pair of footprints appears alongside them. Later, some flowers wilt as an unseen Vi walks by them. By that time, though, I was still laughing about the wig form and had lost any inclination to feel unsettled.

The supporting cast is pretty ridiculous. The fiance has a kid sister who probably had a great stage mother to get a part in a movie. She is there so that a child can be in danger. A blind realtor shows up bearing flowers which she puts in a vase with no water. She’s there to tell the story of another ghost who, alas, never shows up. The fiance’s rich father is on hand to disapprove of her marriage to a jazz pianist. That was my biggest disappointment with the movie: with a jazz pianist as the main character, I had hoped to hear a lot more jazz music.

On the whole, it was enjoyable as a bad movie. And perfectly usable as a blog post. Today I’m off on more Mohawk Valley adventures, so it is quite possible that my Friday Post will not be Lame as usual. Stay tuned.

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It Was No House of Wax

Posted on July 4, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Last night I took a break from my Boilermaker obsession to watch a cheesy horror movie from Steven’s DVD collection of 50 Horror Classics. We picked The Monster Maker (1944). I had been disappointed by the lack of monsters in the last Horror Classic we viewed, so I thought I would be safe choosing one with “monster” right in the title.

The real monsters, unfortunately, were the makers of the movie, passing off this dull piece of bologna as a thriller. I suppose you’ll have that in a collection of 50 movies priced to sell.

I had great hopes for it when I read the plot summary in one of Steven’s movie books: a mad scientist injects a piano player with some stuff that makes him a giant, particularly his hands. That reminded me of Mad Love, in which Peter Lorre fixes up a pianist with a new pair of hands that just happened to have come from a knife-wielding assassin.

In Mad Love, Lorre is obsessively in love with the pianist’s wife. In The Monster Maker, the evil doctor wants the pianist’s daughter, who looks exactly like the doctor’s dead wife. Have you ever seen anybody look EXACTLY like somebody else? I never have, but it seems to happen in movies all the time. The most notable case of the phenomenon is House of Wax (1953, starring Vincent Price), in which the evil sculptor finds a whole bunch of people who just happen to look exactly like the figures in his former wax museum.

So I basically sat through The Monster Maker comparing it unfavorably to other old horror movies. The monster, when he finally shows up, is pretty scary looking, but he doesn’t threaten anybody I liked, so where’s the suspense there? There is a scary scene involving a gorilla and the evil doctor’s doormat assistant. I won’t say more, in case you ever watch the movie.

When we first meet the evil doctor, he’s scary right off the bat, in a psycho, stalker sort of way. When he meets the beautiful girl who looks like his dead wife, he kisses her hand and gives her the scary eyeballs a la Bela Lugosi. He uses the eyeballs to better effect on his hapless assistant, who he is apparently in the habit of hypnotizing. I wish they had made more of the doctor’s back story. Maybe an extended flashback, which they had plenty of time for, because the movie clocked in at 64 minutes.

Then again, the movie was dull enough at 64 minutes. The back story sounded compelling with the assistant and doctor telling it to each other; there’s no saying they wouldn’t have messed it up trying to dramatize it. I wouldn’t say the movie was a complete waste of time, but if you happen to catch it, you won’t feel bad running out to the kitchen to get a snack, which both Steven and I did.

It is fun to write reviews of dull movies, though. I look forward to the next one. We saw a title of Vampire Bat that looked good. Stay tuned.

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The Movie Should Have Been Invisible

Posted on May 25, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

I don’t know that I’m technically qualified to review my latest cheesy horror viewing. I did not fall asleep this time. I left the room to check my Facebook notifications. I can’t even pretend I was expecting something important; I was just bored. Steven told me I didn’t miss much, but still.

On the other hand, I write a silly blog. It’s not like I’m influencing voters for the Academy Awards. And if I was trying to influence them, well, that’s on them to remain unbiased. My conscience is clear.

It might perhaps be a good idea to insert a spoiler alert here. I will soon give away such plot points as I could discern from this timewaster. I normally hate to give things away and am often at great pains not to, so as not to spoil anybody’s viewing pleasure. But I’m telling you, don’t watch this movie. It’s dull. If you really think you might want to see this movie and you like to be surprised… well I doubt you will be surprised anyways. So read my review or don’t. Watch the movie or don’t (Don’t!). My conscience is clear.

The Invisible Ghost (1941) stars Bela Lugosi, which should be a selling point. I suppose I ought to know better (but I’ve mentioned before how I almost never do what I ought to do). The movie begins creepily enough, with Bela having a formal dinner with a wife who is not there (the cliche there being that a lot of guys would like that set up) (misogynist bastards). Next we hear something about some murders that are happening, although it seemed to me that nobody was getting too exercised about it.

Then we see the missing wife. Some servant is hiding her until she feels better after the accident. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I was quickly losing track of this movie. I think the wife tried to leave her husband but met with an accident that affected her mind. You know that childlike state that movie crazy people often have. She has it.

Finally we get to see a murder. Bela gets to do his scary eyes and, as is often the case in movies of this era, it isn’t clear exactly how he kills his victims. He lifts up a cloak to just underneath his scary eyes. I suppose the director told him to be Dracula-like. Ah, typecasting at its Hollywood finest. And for anyone who thought revealing Bela as the killer was too big of a spoiler, come on! We’re watching a Bela Lugosi movie! Did you think he wouldn’t kill anybody?

It was shortly after this that I left the room and missed all the plot developments, if any. Just to obviate any need for any of you to sit through this garbage, I’ll tell you that at the end, the wife dies and Bela is arrested for all the murders.

I never found out why the murders were committed in the first place. I suppose in movie fashion it was something about him going crazy because his wife left him. Don’t worry, Steven! I’ll never leave you and thus induce you to commit scary eye murders. So once again, my conscience is clear.

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Not a Sleeper Hit

Posted on May 16, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

I mentioned yesterday that I fell asleep during the cheesy horror movie meant for a blog post this week. Let’s see if I can write a post’s worth based on what I stayed awake for.

We picked Atom Age Vampire (1960) merely because it was on the first disc in our set of 50 Horror Classics. I had suggested we watch the first movie, but it turned out to be one we have on another set (that set also includes The Brain That Wouldn’t Die — my favorite!). The vampire movie was number two. In more ways than one, as it turns out, if you know what I mean (that joke was stolen from another favorite movie, Murder By Death)(I’ll explain it later; it’s disgusting).

Atomic stuff was very big in the ’50s and ’60s. A studio executive in the wonderful movie Ed Wood expresses interest in Bride of the Atom for that reason. Combine it with vampires and what’s not to like?

Well, I didn’t see any vampires as I know them. A guy starts killing beautiful girls to take… something from their bodies (a gland, I think, so you dirty-minded readers can stop snickering). I guess that’s kind of like sucking their blood. Nobody is feeding on what he takes; he’s using it to restore beauty to a blonde deformed in a car wreck. She was ready to kill herself, so I guess you could say her beauty was her life’s blood. To be even more metaphorical, I suppose you could say the killer is feeding his obsession with the girl. I am unlikely to say any such thing.

It takes a long time to get to the killing of beautiful girls part. First we have to meet the deformed blonde, before she gets deformed. She is an exotic dancer (I think; they never show her actually working) in love with a sailor who objects to her profession (how unreasonable considering that is probably how he met her). He leaves and that’s why she wrecks the car, which deforms her face.

Then we meet the killer before he is a killer. I guess you could call him a mad scientist, but I refer to him as the Bad Doctor in my notes in the TV Journal. He’s developing this serum to restore blah blah. Who pays attention to the technical stuff in these movies? (Oh, you probably do.) I was more interested in the assistant so in love with the Bad Doctor that she deforms herself (only her arm; she’s not entirely stupid) so he can test the serum on her. This does not make him fall in love with her (some of us girls never learn), so she goes to recruit the now deformed blond as a guinea pig (because she is somewhat stupid).

In a scene that was probably tacked on after they decided to add “Atom Age” to the title, we learn that Bad Doctor was in Hiroshima, where he learned blah blah. I told you I didn’t pay attention to the technical details.

The killings start because the serum, like a magic spell in a fairy tale, works but does not last. Soon the Bad Doctor starts turning into a hideous beast before he kills. I never saw a vampire that looked like that, not even Nosferatu, and he was pretty gruesome. I bet they added “Vampire” to the title, too.

Actually, Steven learned from one of his movie books, Video Movie Guide 2002 (Ballantine Books, New York, 2001), that the movie is a “badly dubbed Italian” film. We didn’t need them to tell us the film was badly dubbed, but I thought it was French, because the names include Jeanette and Pierre. I bet the original title was something quite different that translated oddly.

I fell asleep before the dramatic conclusion, so I couldn’t spoil the ending for you even if I wanted to (and of course I don’t). One other point of interest is that I could swear the staircase in one scene is the same one used in the Vincent Price/Agnes Moorehead movie we watched a few weeks ago (and reviewed in this space).

As a final note, I will share the joke I referenced earlier from Murder By Death.

Lionel Twain: I’m Number One!

Sam Diamond: To me you look more like number two, know what I mean?

Nora Charles: What does he mean, Miss Skeffington?

Tess Skeffington: I’ll tell you later. It’s disgusting.

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A Shriek on the Screen

Posted on April 21, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Here is another post on a Horror Classic which turned out to be less cheesy than anticipated. To recapitulate for readers who just tuned in: 50 Horror Classics is a DVD set I gave my husband Steven, and we have been enjoying some pretty cheesy old movies. So naturally I’ve been blogging about them. Yesterday I did a post on one that was less cheesy than others. Likewise the one I’m going to talk about today.

A Shriek in the Night (1933) stars Ginger Rogers, who famously did everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels (just had to throw that in). This is apparently one of her first movies, and, alas, she does not dance.

The movie starts right out with a shriek. I was a little worried the movie was over already. I mean, hello, there’s the shriek, now what? But there are more shrieks as we go along. Not too many, though. After all, it’s not a ’70s slasher flick.

A man has jumped or been thrown from a penthouse balcony (hmmm… which do you suppose it is?). When we meet Ginger Rogers, she is being questioned by a cop, because she is secretary to the dead guy. Such an attractive live-in secretary raises some officers’ eyebrows, but she assures them there is a dumb, utterly respectable maid to chaperone. The maid, the cop decides, may be respectable but is certainly dumb. She was my favorite character. She added some comic relief and a few shrieks, but they came later. My other favorite character was a hapless cop who couldn’t seem to do anything right.

We soon discover that Ginger is really an intrepid girl reporter. I was glad to hear that. I love intrepid girl reporters, like Fay Wray in The Mystery of the Wax Museum (see post back in, I think January). Ginger is perhaps not as intrepid as Fay and she doesn’t crack as wise, but she helps unravel the mystery. Ginger butts heads with a brash boy reporter, who seems to want to both scoop and marry her. The plot thickens with another shriek and another murder.

It seems the victims all receive a card with a snake and the words, “You will hear it.” What they will hear is the hissing of the steam pipe. I bet the writers rubbed their palms together when they came up with that one. Imagine watching a scary movie where the steam pipe hisses before the murderer strikes, then going home and hearing your steam heat whistle. Do people still heat their houses with whistley steam pipes? I’ve never heard it, with or without a murder.

The movie is fairly scary and suspenseful. And the solution to the mystery holds up. At least, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night saying, “Wait a minute!” Well, maybe one thing. I’m not clear on how Ginger Rogers escaped the deadly peril she inevitably found herself in. Oh, I saw the cops and boyfriend rush in, but the bad guy had already lit the incinerator. Where was she that she didn’t burn up or die of smoke inhalation?

Oh dear, now I’ve gone and revealed the climax. At least I didn’t say who the bad guy was or how Ginger ended up in the incinerator. And I’m sure nobody really thought the main girl would succumb to the deadly peril, so you can’t really ding me on revealing that she was rescued.

It was a fun watch. It held my interest, which some of the cheesier movies in the collection have not. I’ll let you know how I enjoy the next one. After all, the weekend’s coming.

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Batty Movie

Posted on April 20, 2012 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert: I may give away too many plot points, so if you thought you might like to see The Bat from 1959 and you like to be surprised, you might want to skip this post till after you see the movie (that’s probably a run-on sentence).

I’ve had so much fun writing about cheesy horror movies that I asked Steven could we watch some more last weekend. He graciously agreed. I was a little disappointed in the cheese quality of our selections. I mean, they weren’t bad (although I do enjoy the irony of being disappointed that a movie is good). However, looking back at the truck sized plot holes in our first movie, I thought it was worth a post.

The Bat stars Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead. Now, Price has done some majorly cheesy movies, but I think the lowest Moorehead ever stooped was television (and who didn’t love Endora?). Although I may be wrong about that. I’ll have to look in Video Hound for a list of her movies. They used to make a lot more movies than they do these days, so the potential for cheese was greater.

But getting on to the movie. Moorehead plays a crime writer who has rented a mansion which may or may not be haunted. Right away you know you’re in for some excitement, because what fictional crime writer doesn’t encounter an actual murder? None that I know of.

Agnes’ lady maid and constant companion (I know it’s more proper to refer to her as Moorehead, but I feel it is friendlier to call her Agnes). Where was I? Oh yes, the companion right away warns Agnes about this mysterious killer known as The Bat. The Bat apparently rips people’s throats out with a claw. I did not know that was how a bat could kill somebody. I thought movie bats sucked people’s blood, but I guess that’s just vampire movies.

Anyways, this is plot hole number one, which I did not realize till much later when I started pondering What Really Happened (and that’s what makes a good movie plot hole: it’s not till much later on when you go, “Wait a minute!”). Here we have the murderer mentioned early on (as you should have in a murder mystery), but with no motive ascribed. Later on, when we get to the murders this movie is concerned with, there is a very definite motive, namely a million dollars (or is it two?) embezzled from the bank (actually the thief says he “embezzled” the money, but I think it was stolen and he was stepping way up in class). So when the Bat supposedly started killing, his motive for the later killings (the ones we see) hadn’t even happened yet.

But this actually might not be a plot hole. I don’t quite understand what went on. It’s quite possible that The Bat did not do all the killings, or even that The Bat wasn’t The Bat, or that there was no Bat, or maybe the Bat even randomly killed some people earlier in case he needed to establish a cover story. There are actual bats, by the way. The lady maid is threatened by one slipped through the transom, and Vincent Price, who is a doctor, is seen messing around with some in a scientific fashion.

We also encounter some typical old movie female behavior. There’s a mysterious stranger in the house the police can’t find him. We’re in the bedroom with the door locked and the transom kind of sort of blocked. Let’s try to get some sleep! Oh and the perennial, I just heard a noise! I’ll go investigate, you wait here. Never mind that my friend in the other room has a gun and I only have a flashlight (why didn’t that bitch give me the gun? is a question never asked).

The movie is pretty absorbing. It is definitely suspenseful and even scary in parts. It isn’t till afterwards that you realize that it does not make a whole lot of sense.

Looking back over this write up, I don’t think I’ve really done justice to how much the movie really doesn’t make sense. On the brighter side, it hasn’t been nearly the spoiler I alerted you about in the first paragraph. So go ahead and watch the movie. Tell me what you think.

And if anybody really does not want to watch the movie and really would like a plot summary, let me know that too. It’ll give me a subject for a whole nother blog post (oh, I know “whole nother” is not proper English. I can be cheesy too, can’t I?).

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