Beat them drums

While Mill Creek now sells a 200-movie box called Tales of Terror, they used to sell a completely different 50-pack of the same name. That older Tales of Terror 50-pack was then incorporated, unchanged, into their Horror Collection 250-pack -- aka our ten-year project completed at the end of 2018.

However, as we've previously noted, an even older version of Tales of Terror had a few interesting movies that were later cut from the set, including a Tod Slaughter film we still haven't seen.

So we sat down to watch two of those films, with no other plan in mind, only to discover they had a huge theme in common. To quote Ice-T, poet of our time:

Way down in New Orleans, yeah
I met this old lady...

If you know what follows that incipit, you know what's coming. And -- wouldn't you know it? -- the first of these movies isn't just set in the Pelican State, it is the Pelican State.

---

Drums O' Voodoo (1934)

[aka Louisiana, aka She Devil] 

Grade: D-

Well, when we see the Sack emblem, we know a few things about the film to come: it'll be short, and it won't be very good but will at least be interesting.

That pretty well sums up Drums O' Voodoo, a morality play in the figurative sense, and just about the literal one as well: it was adapted from a stage work, Louisiana, by one J. Augustus Smith, and with a lead antagonist named "Tom Catt" it's clear the brushstrokes will be broad in this one.

Smith also plays the preacher Amos Berry, also known as (sigh) Elder Berry. His checkered past becomes leverage for Mr. Catt in the latter's quest to bang nubile niece Myrtle (Edna Barr) --

-- and since Myrtle's already started jookin' in those jook joints, the danger is clear and present. The power of Christ can't compel Tom Catt to back off, but maybe something else can do it? You remember how things ended for Ice-T, don't you?

Thus enters Aunt Hagar (Laura Bowman, whom we know from Son of Ingagi), whose sonorous voice and foreboding manner -- "Leave everything to me...and the vooooo-dooooo" -- make it clear that this is a woman not to be trifled with. Does trifling ensue? You betcha!

Another blog, Atom Mudman's A-List, has already covered Drums O' Voodoo with both greater depth and greater sympathy than we can offer, so no need to rehash his good work.

Though Drums is certainly unusual in many ways (some of which Mr. Mudman details), we unfortunately found most of it excruciating, give or take. As a poorly-preserved document of a poorly-adapted screenplay, what we have here can't really be characterized as "cinematography", but more the equivalent of setting up the camcorder at the back of the auditorium to capture those precious moments of your kid as Tree #3. 

When you put that together with amateurish acting, a cornball script, and a print in absolutely trash condition, there's not much left. However there's some documentary interest in seeing and, especially, hearing scenes of black American religious life in the early 1930s.

That part is kind of neat and ought to be known to scholars -- and since apparently Drums O' Voodoo was included in the 2017 UCLA Festival of Preservation (under the She Devil title), maybe there's a copy out there that actually looks decent and includes an intact ending. (This one sure doesn't -- shortly after the film's climax, it unceremoniously Poochies back to its home planet.)

And hey, Laura Bowman does get a few good lines at the expense of Tom Catt, observing that he's "not as human as the alligator, or gilly monster, 'cause even they don't tackle the females when they ain't willin'!"

Preach, Aunt Hagar, in your witchy way, and with your one facial expression.

And speaking of gila monsters:

---

I Eat Your Skin (1971, filmed 1964)

[aka Zombies, aka Voodoo Blood Bath, etc.]

Grade: F

Right away we note: yes, after the film sat on the shelf for 7 years, it was retitled I Eat Your Skin so that it could play on a double-bill with I Drink Your Blood. Fine.

But the new title technically isn't deceptive, as some have claimed, since there is a skin-eating...condition...that plagues some of the characters in this film.

OK, with that out of the way? Gosh, this movie sucks. Yes, regional filmmaking; yes, seven years on the shelf; yes, all of those things. But this film isn't fun in the way that The Giant Gila Monster or Teenagers from Outer Space is fun, nor in the way that Miami Connection or Troll 2 is fun.

It's just a stupider, slower, duller version of a half-dozen movies we've seen already -- akin to Teenage Zombies or The Horrors of Spider Island, but not even as good as those. (And yet Mill Creek felt compelled to retain it on the Chilling Classics box set: the world wonders.)

I Eat Your Skin tries to be funny, isn't; tries to be sexy, isn't; tries to be scary, isn't. This movie just isn't. It has an overarching lack of is-ness, you might say, except in the sense communicated by sentences like:

• Watching this movie is exactly what I don't want to be doing right now.
• This film is a dispiriting waste of time and celluloid.
• Experiencing these 80 minutes is as titillating as a Dixie cup half-full of wet sand.

Oh, I Eat Your Skin successfully "is" at least one other thing: disconcertingly racist even for a 1964 film, leaving one to wonder how it came off in 1971.

In this film the black people are the bad people, full stop, while the zombified oafs that lumber around the island are uncomfortably reminiscent of the freakish giants in The Lost City. The whole thing is just icky.

Watching Mill Creek boxes could easily give the impression that the early 1960s were an awful time for film: smutty and smirking, grotesque and heavy-handed, trashy yet still bound by prior norms and shortcomings, and subjecting viewers to a constant bombardment of sub-Mancini big-band "jazz" clichés.

I Eat Your Skin does little to undermine that impression. It's the kind of film that pushes screeching people into pools and thinks that's funny -- 

-- or sets the action in a place called "Voodoo Island" and thinks it's engaging in effective storytelling.

It's got trombones, and tremolo guitars, and mad scientists, and voodoo ceremonies, and nothing we wanted. We rued its beginning and welcomed its end. We hope you appreciate our sacrifice in watching it.

Put our service to the test

Though neither of these films is a Mill Creek joint, we initially took an interest in them because of their connection to the Horror Collection 250-pack. One features an actress we first met in the earliest days of our site, while the other is ostensibly a sequel to one of our favorite movies on the box.

However, we didn't foresee that they'd share something else: protagonists who find themselves in the crosshairs of that most terrifying of locations --

--that most bone-chilling of phrases --

-- that limitless vein of potential awkwardnesses and unwanted socializations:

"You can stay in our guest room."

---

The Three Weird Sisters (1948)

Grade: C+

Ah, Nova Pilbeam. Even if your name weren't so unusual, we'd certainly remember you from your star turn in Counterblast, not to mention your strong resemblance to a former colleague of ours (at least in that colleague's younger days: you wouldn't recognize 'em now).

And speaking of younger days, it's not clear whether this or Counterblast was Pilbeam's last film role -- though she did make one BBC appearance in 1951 before packing it in for good -- but after a successful career as a child actress, and a reasonable career as a young adult, that was that.

She lived to age 95 -- when we wrote our Counterblast review, she was still alive! -- but was, from all reports, not interested in discussing the past. (Makes sense when your name is "new".)

Anyway, Ms. Pilbeam is Claire (no relation to Emily) Prentiss, a secretary who accompanies her obstreperous boss Owen Morgan-Vaughan (Raymond Lovell) to a Welsh mining village, Cwmglas, where his (ahem) three weird sisters await his arrival at the family home.

(Technically they're his weird half-sisters, but that wouldn't have the same ring, now would it?)

One is blind, one deaf, and one has some combination of bad nerves and severe arthritis, resulting in a strange symbiotic interdependency between the three.

In the film's opening Cwmglas suffers a catastrophic collapse in which several residents die, and survivors opine on the will of God and the suffering of the proletariat.

While hard to follow on first viewing, a quick review of Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (which also told us how to spell "Cwmglas") makes the details clear. The Morgan-Vaughans are the local muckety-mucks who made their fortune via the mines, while their cheapskate refusal to fill up unused mineshafts beneath the village caused, or at least contributed to, the collapse.

For a while, The Three Weird Sisters is poised on a knife-edge of ambiguity: is Owen just a callous bastard who selfishly wants to wash his hands of all responsibility toward the village? (Given that Owen gets a rock flung at him upon arrival, some of the townspeople clearly hold the affirmative.)

Or is Cwmglas -- the name of which sounds like a "worst of Reddit" thread in the making -- just a decrepit symbol of the corrupt, hopeless old ways? A decaying relic that's undeserving of life support and overdue for destruction? Merely a vessel for a "spent force", one might say?

With Dylan Thomas on board, some sophistication (moral and otherwise) is to be expected. Ultimately, though, the lines are drawn by the participants' willingness to sacrifice innocent Claire in the crossfire -- and given that one of the sisters describes her as "that horrible painted young woman", one need not be exceedingly wise to infer who the baddies are.

So what does that leave us? Suspense, atmosphere, intrigue, and barbed dialogue, we suppose, none of which are extraordinary but all of which are at least serviceable. And we get faces, if one likes faces (as we do), ranging from Ms. Pilbeam's ever-popular visage --

-- to the sisters, especially Gertrude (Nancy Price), whose forbidding countenance somehow intrinsically evokes those stony, mirthless parts of Britain where God's name is perpetually on everyone's lips and yet the old pagan powers feel close at hand.

Or there's this preacher (Hugh Pryse) in his ridiculous middle-aged makeup:

And we get amusing vignettes, as when we find the thersitical Mabli (Hugh Griffith) reciting Marxist dogma to, well, dogs:

Structurally speaking, The Three Weird Sisters is a film-you've-seen-before -- if you understand what we mean -- and offers no great innovation or dramatic uncertainty. So your appreciation of it will likely depend on your affinity for the Welsh coat of paint it's received, and/or your fondness for Dylan Thomas, Welsh terriers, Nova Pilbeam, or handsome older women.

(No judgment, you do you.)

---

Devil Bat's Daughter (1946)

Grade: D+

When you expect a film to be a complete piece of crap, it sure is a pleasant surprise when it's not. That's not to say Devil Bat's Daughter even comes close to its predecessor, The Devil Bat, the consensus favorite among Béla Lugosi's Poverty Row efforts (and we agree that it holds up).

We can't help but be curious why Devil Bat's Daughter was even made. Was a five-year-old film really enough of a success to call for a sequel? That is: if this was a cynical cash-in, what exactly was there to cash in upon in the first place?

In any event, Devil Bat's Daughter has little to do with the earlier film, though we can't quite call it an "in-name-only" sequel. Instead it runs along similar lines to Shock, with a traumatized young woman, Nina (Rosemary La Planche), guided through recovery by the authoritarian Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), who may not have her best interests at heart.

We're not sure whether having a patient living in your home was considered a ridiculous violation of professional boundaries in 1946, though from our vantage point 75 years later, it seems absurd. But living in Dr. Morris's home brings Nina into contact with his saintly wife Ellen (Molly Lamont) and stepson Ted (John James), and guess which one of them falls in love with her?

...no, this is 1946, try again. Though we will say that Ms. Lamont, who hasn't necessarily lit up our screen in movies like Scared to Death and Jungle Girl, evinces a degree of angular classical beauty in this film --

-- while, by contrast, Ms. La Planche's past as a Miss America merely underscores how tastes have changed.

But better either of them than John James, who unfortunately evokes the irritating Jerry Lester -- plus a dash of Mickey Rooney, a sprinkling of Tim Allen, a dusting of John Heard. Those old-young faces are a tough sell.

If one acknowledges that the major plot points of Devil Bat's Daughter are foreseeable, there are a few things that deviate from the expected path. One of them is the body count, or more accurately, the body-count-to-emotional-consequence ratio, which is unexpectedly brutal. Not a film for dog lovers, this, though we're always glad to see a movie go for the jugular.

On the other hand, Devil Bat's Daughter commits an absolutely monstrous act of retconning that, under normal circumstances, should be unforgivable. So instead, we'll forgive it by allowing ourselves to pretend that the literal meaning of the revelation -- which would utterly destroy both this movie and the previous one -- is untrue, and that the character who announces it is mistaken. And frankly, the movie still works if you assume that.

Still, while our initial impulse was to give this one a C-minus, it really needs to be penalized for that misstep. Otherwise, we were shocked to find that we enjoyed Devil Bat's Daughter. It's a predictable and flawed film, but manages to entertain nonetheless -- if you have very low standards, as we seem to these days.