Tales of canine bravery and wisdom

These next two films are, as far as we know, the only ones left in our backlog: one is a recent watch that we hadn't written up yet, and the other is a movie we skipped out of laziness.

Getting this unfinished business cleared up is pleasant enough, but it was even nicer to realize they also share a theme: in each, one of the most important characters is a dog.

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Beartooth (1978)

Grade: C+



This first film takes us out of Mill Creek territory and into the 2-DVD set 4 Movie Marathon: Grit 'N Perseverance, which we're hoping to review in full if we can get the discs successfully resurfaced (they're half-clean, half-trashed, so only two of the movies are currently watchable).

Anyway, this set was our source for 1978's Beartooth -- or, as the DVD case calls it, Beartooh:



In certain films, there's a moment early on -- maybe 20 minutes in, depending on the runtime -- when you realize something important about the movie you're watching, something that will shape your experience of the remainder of the film.  And that realization is: Nothing is going to happen in this movie.



Or, phrased more generously: This movie isn't about plot, but about character, atmosphere and a sense of place.



Now, in the case of Beartooth, that's not strictly true.  It has a plot (albeit one that could be summarized in two sentences with very little loss of information), and it even has peripeteia and anagnorisis.



But it also has long, long stretches where nothing is happening except some combination of: (a) beautiful Technicolor vistas of the American Rockies, (b) the strumming of the world's jangliest banjo, (c) stock footage of wildlife, and/or (d) Dub Taylor doing his chores while his dog Sugar keeps him company.



Your patience for this sort of thing, and your tolerance for sweet-natured stories of grizzled, lonely old mountain men who find lifesaving companionship in canine form, will heavily shape your enjoyment of Beartooth. We watched it while suspended thousands of feet in the air, in the last stage of a long and stressful transcontinental trip, and as K. said, "it was just what the doctor ordered."



Though there's almost no information on the Internet about Beartooth, it seems likely that it was intended as an educational film, or perhaps as a product to sell to schools and communities. At the very least it was produced by Educational Services Inc., and one can't help but notice that Dub Taylor's character, "old" C.J. McDonald (as he describes himself), never utters an oath any stronger than "Dadgum!"



And one more crucial point: the DVD cover features a promotional image of a snarling bear with razor-sharp teeth exposed, looking ready to kill. (Apparently, Amazon.com also uses the same image for its digital download/rental.) But if you come to Beartooth looking for pulse-pounding scenes of C.J. McDonald doing battle with a grizzly, you will be sorely disappointed: the only bears seen in Beartooth are part of stock footage montages.



It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which Beartooth is, in fact, the opposite of such a movie. Speaking solely in bear terms, it's far closer to Grizzly Man than Grizzly, but minus Werner Herzog.



Really, the closest archetype for Beartooth would be the evocative Canadian educational shorts they used to play on PBS on weekday mornings when you'd be home from school, sick in bed. If you have fond memories of those, you might like this, but horror fans should almost certainly steer clear.

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Embryo (1976)

Grade: B+



Our K. had seen this Rock Hudson vehicle before (which is why we skipped over it in our first pass through Nightmare Worlds), but only barely remembered it; our P. hadn't, and his expectations were totally confounded.



Not a monster movie starring some grotesquely deformed fetus with psychic powers (and room for a pony), it's instead a kind of variation on Flowers for Algernon, except this time Charly Gordon is smart, hot, and female.



And Algernon is a Doberman named Number One, and doesn't die. Plus he cleans up his messes.



Apparently Embryo has gotten poor reviews in some quarters, and some reviewers absolutely loathed the movie. But we found it totally engaging up until the last five minutes, when it finally degenerated into the kind of schlock we'd been expecting all along (and were pleasantly surprised not to have gotten).



We have to give a special shout-out to the dog that played Number One (sadly uncredited), whose obvious intelligence and calm dexterity impressed the hell out of us both. Good actor, too, with inquisitive eyes, a convincing head-tilt, and a terrifying growl: we wouldn't want to be bacon on a sawhorse when Number One got in a bad mood.



In fact, Number One was probably the best performance in the movie, so it's a crime that we can't praise him (or her? -- we didn't check) by name. If there isn't a canine version of the Screen Actors Guild, there surely should be!

The Umbrellahead Awards: 50 Horror Classics Division

Once more we've hit a milestone, as we've made it through the portion of our Horror Collection 250-pack that's essentially a copy of the 50 Horror Classics box set.  So, without further ado (and only three years and change after the first one), here's the second edition of the Umbrellahead Awards.

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Actual Best Movie Award:

Nominees:
The Amazing Mr. X
Carnival of Souls
Creature from the Haunted Sea
Little Shop of Horrors
The World Gone Mad

Winner:
The World Gone Mad

All five of these movies engaged us from start to finish, and we were seriously considering The Amazing Mr. X for the top spot -- but in a surprise upset, we opted to give high honors to this compelling tale of finance and fraud.

(If our decision is unduly influenced by The World Gone Mad's uncanny timeliness, well, we can live with that.)

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Actual Worst Movie Award:

Nominees:
Atom Age Vampire
Nightmare Castle
Phantom from 10,000 Leagues
The Screaming Skull
The Terror

Winner:
Atom Age Vampire

In this dire quintet, we have to single out Atom Age Vampire for its heady combination of false advertising, weaksauce exploitation, and content so dreary and unmemorable that we hardly remember seeing it.

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So-Bad-It's-Good Award:

Nominees:
The Beast of Yucca Flats
The Brain that Wouldn’t Die
The Indestructible Man
Maniac
Revolt of the Zombies

Winner:
Maniac

If Maniac can trump even the pleasure of watching the great Mazovia, that should give you an idea of how wonderfully insane, how startlingly graphic, how utterly WTF a film it is, and what a one-of-a-kind experience it offers the viewer. An absolute must-see.

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Ye Olde Filmes:

Nominees:
Bluebeard
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Nosferatu
The Phantom of the Opera

Winner:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

This battle was largely fought in musical terms: three of these movies are silent films with needle-drop soundtracks, and one (Bluebeard) is a talkie with a horribly overpresent score. That leaves The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which benefits immeasurably from the carefully crafted music which accompanies the film throughout.

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Worst Use of a Primate:

Nominees:
The Ape
The Gorilla
The Monster Maker
The Monster Walks

Winner:
The Monster Walks

If there's any recurring theme that's utterly worn out its welcome, it has to be the "ape in the basement" trope, and all four of these movies invoke it to their detriment. But The Monster Walks takes the prize for featuring a real chimpanzee that almost assuredly was abused and/or mentally ill, and for using the chimp to set up the film's not-so-subtly racist denouement.

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Most Ridiculous Beast Award:

Nominees:
Attack of the Giant Leeches
The Giant Gila Monster
The Killer Shrews
Monster from a Prehistoric Planet
Phantom from 10,000 Leagues

Winner:
The Killer Shrews

Dogs in rugs, people. Dogs in rugs.

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Battle of the Bélas:

Nominees:
Black Dragons
The Corpse Vanishes
The Gorilla
Invisible Ghost
One Body Too Many
White Zombie

Winner:
White Zombie

Of the six Béla Lugosi movies in this portion of the box, White Zombie certainly offers him the juiciest role, as the diabolical slavemaster Murder Legendre. A flawed but seminal film, White Zombie also gets the nod for its array of memorable visual and aural images.

(The mill scene -- with its wild soundtrack of grinding machinery like a tormented saxophone in its death throes -- sticks in P.'s mind.)

And speaking of zombies:

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The Zombie Chic Is So Last Week Award:

Nominees:
King of the Zombies
The Last Man on Earth
Night of the Living Dead
Revolt of the Zombies
White Zombie

Winner:
Revolt of the Zombies

The zombies are revolting! You'd probably expect Night of the Living Dead, but it gets disqualified since we haven't actually watched the Mill Creek copy (we caught it on public television over one Halloween instead).

King of the Zombies is too racist, Last Man on Earth too interminable, and we just did White Zombie, so that leaves...Mazovia.

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The "Fangs for the Memories" Award:

Nominees:
Atom Age Vampire
The Bat
Dead Men Walk
Nosferatu
The Vampire Bat

Winner:
The Bat

Nosferatu is probably a better capital-M movie, but we're feeling fond of this Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price vehicle. Heck, it even has a real bat in it.

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The "Who Can Kill A Child?" Award

Nominees:
Dementia 13
Last Woman on Earth
The Mad Monster
Tormented

Winner:
Last Woman on Earth

This is an easy one. Tormented chickens out just when the kid's about to get it, and Dementia 13 kills a kid in a flashback, while the title character in The Mad Monster also manages to include a little girl in his murderous forays.

However, Last Woman on Earth far exceeds both of these films by killing all the children, everywhere -- and refusing to make more, to boot. Who can top that?

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The Most Egregiously Not A Horror Movie Award:

Nominees:
Doomed to Die
The Fatal Hour
A Shriek in the Night
Swamp Women
The World Gone Mad

Winner:
The World Gone Mad

Much as we hate to double up, and much as we were grateful for the chance to see The World Gone Mad, including this crime-and-finance drama in a soi-disant "horror" box set is aggressively inappropriate.

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The Most Egregiously Not A Teenager Award:

Robert Reed was an adolescent once, but when Bloodlust was filmed, he was in his late twenties. By casting the future Mike Brady as a brave teen, we knew -- it was much more than a hunch -- that plausibility was on its way out the window.

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The Third-Act Letdown Award:

So much style, so much promise in Dementia 13's early stages. But when Coppola decided to kill off the most interesting (and hottest) character, it was all downhill from there.

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The A For Architecture Award:

Bravo to House on Haunted Hill for using the attractive and refreshingly modern Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Ennis House as the exterior for the titular abode. Who says a haunted house needs to be a pointy confusion of turrets, gables, and cupolas? (Too bad the interior set designers didn't get the memo...)

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The We-Didn't-Bother Award:

Since P. has never seen Metropolis, and since so much lost material has come to light over the past few years, we can't help but think we'd be doing this cinematic classic an injustice by watching the Mill Creek version. We'll hold out for a DVD of one of the restored prints.

Don't watch these, Prince

We like Mill Creek. Really, we do. But sometimes they put out a print that's just so damaged, hacked up, worn to bits, or umpteenth-generation that we have to warn our loyal readers to steer clear, because even the most indulgent and imaginative viewer can't compensate for what's been lost. And crucially, there are better copies of these movies out there -- in one case, you can get a free copy legally! -- so it clearly didn't have to be this way.

But verily, the sad hand of cheap-ass commerce has left its fingerprints all over this next pair. So if the question is "Should I watch the Mill Creek versions of these movies?", the answer is most assuredly "I don't think so."

(But maybe it'd help to have some Dunk-a-roos to snack on. Or Hulkaroos for that matter, if you're feeling especially Minnesotan.)

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The Ape Man (1943)

Objective Grade: D
Hairy Hungarian Bonus: C+
Poor Print Penalty: F



Inevitably there's a degree of pathos associated with seeing Béla Lugosi wasting his talents in a piece of silly dreck like The Ape Man. But unlike some of his later roles, the charismatic Hungarian still has enough physical presence to pull this one off -- which, paradoxically enough, makes it easier to laugh at the whole thing.



In fact, the makers of The Ape Man encourage us to laugh right from the start, and we're not merely talking about anachronistic double-entendres like "After today, you'll be shooting that one-eyed monster of yours for Uncle Sam." Maybe they wanted to hedge their bets, aware that the premise of The Ape Man was so risible, and Béla's makeup so ridiculous, that even schoolchildren might find the whole thing laughable.



What seals the deal: from the very beginning of the film, an enigmatic man lurks in almost every scene -- sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes as a participant. By the time we find out who this goofy, creepy, Ryan Stiles-esque figure is, it signifies that The Ape Man has, once and for all, abandoned all pretense of sincerity. (Meta was by no means an invention of the late 1990s, folks.)



We're assuming you don't need us to tell you that Béla's a scientist on the brink of insanity, or that a spunky female reporter is one of the protagonists, or that there's a gorilla in the basement. Such things, you understand, are de rigueur.



Why you shouldn't watch this print:
While the picture on this copy isn't too bad, the audio is positively, absolutely atrocious. It's terribly muffled, but even if you try to compensate with EQ, what's left is far too damaged to work with. As a result, much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, and we were lucky to understand 50% of what was said, even after multiple replays.



What to watch instead:
Look no further than the wonderful Archive.org, which has a downloadable copy of The Ape Man with much, much better sound quality.

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The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)

Grade: D+
Markdown for the Mangling of Motivation (and Milk): F

Poor Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen). He's nobility, he's filthy rich and he's handsome, but he just can't get over his late wife Evelyn. Part of the problem is that he has an odd approach to grieving: whenever he sees a certain kind of redhead, he has to have her...



...and then he has to kill her.

The title of this movie tells us that things will get even messier in the Evelyn department, and indeed they do. What's less clear is whether any of it makes any sense, and on second viewing the whole thing seems all the more creaky and indulgent (bordering on incoherent).

To distract us from the silliness of the narrative, we get an array of visual stimuli including not-so-sexy dancers, groovy hippie bands, and fleet foxes. But unlike some other films (e.g. Kiss Me Kill Me), The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave doesn't have enough style (or eye candy) to engross the viewer on that basis alone.

But does the Mill Creek copy give us sufficient basis to form a judgment? Read on for the answer.

Why you shouldn't watch this print:

OK, the image is perennially blurry and/or washed-out, and some of the nighttime scenes are tough to make out. That's to be expected, and if you can't tolerate VHS quality, you have no business buying Mill Creek boxsets. But a good 15-20 minutes have been edited out of this copy, mostly (we assume) to cut out nudity. 

However, the excised material wasn't just T&A, but also included crucial dialogue that explains Alan's murderous behavior, as well a key scene involving a missing glass of milk (in the edited version they allude to this, with no context whatsoever). With it intact, the film makes one hell of a lot more sense.

What to watch instead:

We're not going to link to it, but an unedited, full-length, widescreen copy of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is on YouTube. It's in Italian, but has an option for English-language subtitles, and looks light-years better than the Mill Creek copy, especially in the darker scenes. It made us say things like "Colors!" and "Contrast!", which are words we don't get to say much under the Umbrellahead umbrella.

Oddly, this post on IMDb made us expect an alternate ending, but either that person's imagining things or it's simply not in this version, because the ending was the same as the Mill Creek copy.

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As a side note, we've finally caught up with our backlog of reviews, which dated back to 2011 (!) when we resumed posting earlier this month.  We're planning to review one more movie we watched quite recently (a non-Mill Creek affair that mostly seems to have been forgotten by the Internet), and we'll also do a brief recap of the 50 Horror Classics subset that spanned from Carnival of Souls to Phantom from 10,000 Leagues.

Fake it 'til you make it

Both of these films put women in leadership positions, but with a catch: they have to pretend to be something they're not.

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Daughter of the Tong (1939)

Grade: D+



Evelyn Brent a.k.a. Grandma Edelstein strikes again! This time she's Carney, the "Chinese" leader of a criminal syndicate that attracts the scrutiny of the FBI (who think she's a man for some reason). An undercover agent (Grant Withers) attempts to infiltrate the organization, but quickly gets sidetracked when he crosses paths with a spunky female non-reporter (Dorothy Short) who, as it turns out, has her own business with the syndicate.



Daughter of the Tong has the basic outlines of a serviceable 1930s crime/gangster flick, and at 53 minutes long, it also has the virtue of brevity. But nothing really comes together as it should, and despite the movie's short length it manages to drag -- especially the tedious car chase near the end, which lasts about twice as long as it should.



In fact there's quite a bit of padding in Daughter of the Tong, e.g. stock footage of newspapers being printed, a meaningless vignette featuring a pinball game, or the slow text crawl after the opening credits that sings the praises of the FBI.



(From the way the film treats the FBI -- one dull-witted gangster character has never heard of them -- you'd think they were a brand-new organization. As it turns out, the dopey gangster's ignorance isn't wholly inconceivable: Bureau was originally founded in 1909, but only got its current name in 1935.  The more you know!)

Speaking of credits, Daughter of the Tong uses a technique we haven't seen too often: action shots of the lead actors on which their real names and character names are superimposed. No idea what the first movie to do this was, probably something in the silent era, but it's still a curveball.

Alas, those same credits point up the film's fundamental implausibility: Grandma Edelstein as a Chinese crime boss is about as plausible as Jackie Chan as a Jewish grandmother. (We'd pay to see that, actually.)



Winsome though Ms. Brent's quasi-Semitic* good looks may be, they work against her in this role. Sure, there's a weak attempt at Orientalizing her appearance, but the net result resembles a jaded clubber half-heartedly dressing up as Liz Taylor's Cleopatra for Halloween.

One character even refers to Carney as "slant-eyed", which manages to be both offensive and pathetic, as if the filmmakers were daring us to point out the flimsiness of their conceit. It's probably for the best that she doesn't venture a mush-mouthed "Ah so!" accent.

Come to think of it, neither do the actual Asians in the film. (Though mostly, they don't talk at all.)



Anyway, this isn't remotely a horror movie, so what's it even doing on here? Mill Creek, you simply have no shame. But if we didn't realize that by now, we'd be foolish indeed: Robot Pilot, anyone?

*(Ms. Brent married two Jewish men, looks like Lisa E's grandmother, and apparently more than a few people in Hollywood thought she was Jewish -- but according to her published biography, she wasn't. Again, the more you know!)

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The White Gorilla (1945)

Grade: F



This truly dreadful jungle flick gets about half of its running time by recycling footage from the 1927 silent serial Perils of the Jungle. Somehow this material is shoehorned into a wraparound story starring Ray "Crash" Corrigan as Steve Collins, a man pursued by a giant white gorilla (which he somehow also plays).

After being badly injured by the gorilla, Steve takes refuge at a trading post, and recounts the things he's seen along the way -- which, not coincidentally, are the events of Perils of the Jungle: narrow escapes from marauding lions, an encounter with a African tribe ruled by a white woman who earned their reverence by feigning insanity, and so on.



This conceit isn't in and of itself a bad idea, since the borrowed material is visually interesting and energetic. In the earlier stretches of the movie, the editing almost makes it plausible. (It helps that the difference in film stock is surprisingly small.)

But the whole thing comes crashing down once it hits you that Corrigan never actually interacts with any of the serial characters, or does anything to help save them from their (ahem) perils, but simply reports their actions as seen from his hiding place in the bushes...



...or in a tree...



...or in the underbrush.



The result is absurdly stilted -- hackneyed and predictable, like an old vaudeville routine ("Slowly I turned..."). And as K. notes, "It makes him come off as kind of a pussy too."

Even with all this, the movie saves its lowest point for the end, with a closing soliloquy on man's hubris in trying to claim the jungle for himself. It veritably drips with pompous insincerity.



So avoid this crap, unless you're desperate to watch two men in gorilla suits do battle.  (And if you are, well, there must be some footage out there of a coked-up Robin Williams arguing with his bathroom mirror.)

Something's in the water

Fishy, fishy in the brook, Daddy caught you on a hook.

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Dementia 13 (1963)

Grade: C+



Written and directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola (and produced by Roger Corman), this dark tale of murder and madness at an Irish castle has a promising first act and plenty of style, but ultimately falls victim to its own lack of substance.



The plot, briefly sketched, is thus: we have Louise Haloran -- played by a fetchingly evil Luana Anders -- a sociopathic golddigger who's married to a member of a rich Irish family. He dies in the opening scene, but since that would effectively disinherit her, she conceals the body and travels to the family's castle, where her husband's brothers and mother live.



Louise's plan seems to be to win the favor of the mother, who's haunted by the memory of her daughter who drowned as a child; there's also a hint that Louise might be planning to drive her mad. However, those plans are abruptly derailed...



Envisioned as a Psycho ripoff to make some easy money for Corman, Dementia 13 certainly shares a few elements with the Hitchcock film, including the ballsy step of (spoiler alert!) killing off its apparent protagonist early in the movie. And killing off Janet Leigh's character, Marion Crane, worked brilliantly for Psycho, but by trying to pull off the same gimmick, Dementia 13 puts itself in a double bind.



On the one hand, Louise Haloran's death doesn't have a fraction of the emotional freight that Marion Crane's murder did in Psycho, since Crane was a fundamentally good person who was trying to make amends for her bad behavior, whereas Louise is a malignant narcissist with no hint of a conscience. On the other hand, Louise is also the most interesting character in the movie by far, and we were looking forward to seeing her toxic manipulations of the other characters play out.



Instead, she gets axed (quite literally), and what's left is little more than 40 minutes of tortured brooding with an occasional murder thrown in.



Still, it's mediocre material in the hands of a brilliant director -- or one who became brilliant, anyway -- so the 75-odd minutes of Dementia 13's runtime don't have the same dreary effect as, say, The Last Man on Earth. But the meaningless plot, the one-note affect, and the relentless lack of Irish accents keep Dementia 13 squarely in the lower tier.

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The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955)

Grade: D

If you're jonesing for a monster movie with a smorgasbord of stupid clichés about radioactivity and meaningless nuclear jargon, look no further than The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues. This lousy effort stars Kent Taylor as a scientist who seems to have a knack for anticipating famous monikers, as evidenced by his real name (Ted Stevens) and the pseudonym he adopts early in the movie (Ted Baxter) when he's trying to work incognito.

Several bodies, charred and contaminated with radioactivity, have washed ashore, and Ted's trying to figure out why. His investigation leads him to a local college's marine biology department, where Professor King (Michael Whalen), a brilliant scientist, is conducting mysterious research that involves atoms 'n' stuff. Naturally, said scientist has a beautiful, young, single daughter (Cathy Downs) -- don't they all?

Unfortunately Ted's attempt at going undercover is about as effective as a water barrel (or the middle bush, or the West Midlands). Not only does the government agent assigned to the case quickly figure out who he is, but Ted fails to realize that when you're a prominent researcher within a very narrow field, there's a good chance your peers will recognize you...especially if you put your picture on the cover of your book (which Prof. King owns). Still, no one seems to mind Ted's deception.

Most of what ensues follows the usual schlocky routines. There's mumbo-jumbo about activating hydrogen isotopes and death rays, there's a forced romantic subplot between Ted and the daughter, and there's a monster that's basically just some guy in a silly costume à la Attack of the Giant Leeches. If you can't guess how this ends, right down to the vapid moral epilogue, then you haven't seen many of these movies.



A small saving grace is the professor's secretary, Wanda (Helen Stanton), a sad-eyed, sour-faced Debbie Downer of a woman who's in an amusingly abusive relationship with...well, pretty much everyone in the movie. Almost every word directed toward her is unkind or menacing, and it's not really clear why, but she certainly looks the part of the perennial doormat.

Anyway, there's no reason to watch The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, unless you have a thing for bullet bras, hilariously futile attempts to shoot day-for-night, and/or men who wear suits when they go boating.



But at least it's not excruciatingly dull, and people get burned up, blown up, and Britney'd.