Family matters

As we approach year's end, we here at The Umbrellahead Review can't help but sympathize with all those poor souls who struggle with discord and strife in their households over the holiday season. Even in today's consumer-centric world, a happy family surely isn't something you can buy in a store or order at a restaurant, and it can be a difficult journey indeed to restore domestic tranquility to a troubled home.

And so, too, the protagonists of these movies, all three of whom find themselves at odds with their fathers (or fathers-in-law). Can a non-Oedipal solution be found to bring peace and harmony to the unhappy home?

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Vulcan, Son of Jupiter (1962)
(aka Vulcan, figlio di Giove)

Objective Grade: D-
Bouncy-Bouncy and/or Beefcake Bonus: B+



Pity poor Vulcan (Iloosh Khoshabe, here billed under the amazing pseudonym of "Rod Flash Ilush"). All he wants to do is make weapons and armor in his smithy and be left alone, but the other gods have different plans.

Most pressingly, they need to find a husband for Venus (Annie Gorassini), an attention-seeking troublemaker whose pastimes include making out with good-looking guys, flaunting her assets in public, and hanging out with Nicole Richie.



The two best candidates are Vulcan and hotheaded Mars (Roger Browne), but the latter is far more smitten with Venus's charms. Mars jealously picks a fight with Vulcan in his smithy, as a consequence of which -- "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- they're both temporarily banished to Earth.



This is fine with Mars, who schemes to depose Jupiter with the aid of King Milos of Thrace (Ugo Sabetta). They plan to build a Tower of Babel-like structure to reach the gods in their heavens, and hopefully get to whip some slaves along the way.



For Vulcan it's rather more inconvenient. On arrival he's wakened from unconsciousness by a group of Neptune's nymphs, but all are soon captured by an armada of dentally 'n' mentally challenged lizard-men.



These outcasts, cursed by the gods, relish the chance to get some revenge by imprisoning and torturing Vulcan. However, help comes in the form of the reluctant Geo (Salvatore Furnari), whom the nymphs are able to sneak out in a bundle of hay.



Once free, Geo blows a conch shell to summon a Triton, who drags him to the undersea kingdom of Neptune (Omero Gargano), kicking and screaming the whole time -- which is pretty much how Geo spends 90% of the film, at that.



Help is soon sent, and once the lizard-men are dispatched, everyone goes to visit Neptune, where Mercury brings news of Mars's plans. Vulcan vows to stop him, but not before enjoying a sexy, sexy dance from nymph Aetna (Bella Cortez), whose pendulous assets would put many Holsteins to shame.


("Pit bulls are just so misunderstood, you know?")

Meanwhile, Venus is bored with all this talk of war, and yearns for the simple life -- that is, the one where everyone constantly pays attention to her, despite the fact that she does nothing worthwhile at all. So she finds her own ways to cause trouble.

("Aetna knows what she did, and that's all I'm ever going to say about it.")

You can probably guess the rest: swordfights, impassioned speeches of love, bouncing bazoombas, cornball dialogue, and alas, the bald guy gets it.

Not the bald guy!

Of course it's all utterly, wonderfully ridiculous, with poor acting, gloriously misguided dubbing (an unequivocal plus in a film like this), and fight scene choreography that's akin to assisted cartwheel practice in grade-school gym class. There's plenty of firm and/or jiggling flesh on display if you like that sort of thing -- even middle-aged dwarf-flesh, offering a welcome opportunity for those curious souls who don't want to clutter up their browser search history. And while Mill Creek's print is far from pristine, with washed-out colors that vary wildly even within a single shot (and a perennial red line on the right-hand edge of the frame), it's still more than watchable. 

So why not let Vulcan, Son of Jupiter be your companion for one of these lonely nights? It may not feed your head, but if someone denies the entertainment value in such a spectacle, we'll raise our heads in indignation and shout: "It's not right!" 

("Well, I'm trying to get up that great big hill of hope.")

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The Man with Two Lives (1942)

Grade: C-



Sometimes men wear tuxedos and bow ties. These are usually good men, like Philip Bennett (Edward Norris), one of two sons of wealthy Hobart Bennett (Frederick Burton), and his brother Reg (Tom Seidel), who bears a vague resemblance to Anna Paquin.



Other good men in The Man with Two Lives include family friend Dr. Richard Clark (Edward Keane), who's in the midst of conducting a series of highly successful experiments in reviving the organs of dead animals. He has big plans to start human trials, and conveniently, there's a convicted murderer due for execution that very night...at midnight. (Haven't you ever seen The Indestructible Man, bud?)



And then there's Professor Toller (Hugh Sothern), a buzzkill who keeps hinting that these experiments might be meddling with God's domain, and is particularly fond of talking about the transmigration of souls.



Well, there's an engagement party, a shocking turn of events, an unexpected tragedy, and a few suspenseful shots of a clock. Always a bad sign, that one.



Bottom line, Philip wakes up, and now he's wearing a necktie. And a hat. This can't be good.



"Surely," he says to himself, "I need some outside help on this." He seeks out Marcia Gay Harden, but since she hasn't been born yet, instinct directs him to Sporady's, a magical Irish bar that has a roughly 68% chance of existing on any given night.



Here he finds the next best option, Helen Lengel (Marlo Dwyer), a local specialist in funny hats with a heart of gold.


(I mean, she has the heart of gold, since you can't really wear a gold-hearted hat without hurting your neck.)

She suggests that he return home and consult his fiancée, Louise (Eleanor Lawson), and even provides a funny hat for her on the house. The results aren't good, however.



Having enraged his father, he returns to Sporady's (which luckily happens to exist) and barges in on a roomful of gangsters in a desperate attempt to find a new foster father. They're sympathetic, but deeply uncomfortable with both the form and content of his request, and encourage him to find other ways to resolve the situation.



Ultimately Philip and his dad come to terms when they discover that Reg is deeply in love with his fiancée. Together, as father and son, they beat the younger brother to death, affording them a much-needed opportunity to reconnect -- and conveniently simplifying the wedding plans, since Louise didn't have a good candidate for maid of honor.

In the closing scenes, local policeman Lt. Bradley (Addison Richards), a compulsive eater, is discovered in the final stages of consuming the couple's entire wedding cake. "We never should have trusted that necktie-wearing bastard," says the ensemble in unison, before promptly descending upon the hapless cop. After asphyxiating him on the remaining cake and severing his man-parts, they throw his body into the Seine, in a beautifully choreographed scene set to the strains of the Moonlight Sonata.



If you're wondering how all this could've passed the Hays Code, never fear, disaster is averted: at the last minute, we learn that practically everything since the engagement party was all a dream.

So all the asphyxiating, hat-wearing, and sibling-beating? None of that was true, none of it happened. And if you feel cheated, well, so did we -- but hopefully it was entertaining while it lasted.

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Scared to Death (1947)

Objective Grade: F
Hungarian Hue Honorarium: D



This, friends, is the protagonist of Scared to Death, one Laura Van Ee (Molly Lamont). She spends most of the film with rage, fear, and contempt etched on her face, fulminating with hatred of her husband and father-in-law (and they're none too fond of her either), with whom she lives in a spooky old house -- and whom she suspects of wanting to kill her.

But when we first see her, she looks more like this:



No spoiler, that, since it's how the film starts: with Ms. Van Ee on a slab in the morgue, and two coroners about to go to work on her.

As they prepare to undertake (!) their gruesome necessities, they note that "one hates to perform an autopsy on a beautiful girl", leaving us to wonder whether they're lamenting the death of someone attractive -- always more tragic than when ugly people get snuffed, as is well-known -- or whether they're simply sad to spoil an aesthetically pleasing object which would otherwise offer intriguing possibilities.



Either way, it's probably the only genuinely creepy bit in the film. But before they start carvin', they pause once more to speculate about her final moments:

"And yet...one often wonders: what could have caused the last thought that was cut off by death?"



Well, Scared to Death is here to tell us. Thanks to the magic of corpse narration, the whole film is recounted from Mrs. Van Ee's point of view, more or less, tracing her descent into paranoia as her mysterious persecutor draws the noose tighter and tighter.



While this is a clever gambit in principle (put your pants back on, Nacho), in practice it means that, every 10 minutes or so, the film is suddenly interrupted by the following sequence:

• a still shot of the corpse that fades in, underscored by "woo-woo" spooky music that amounts to a wordless vocalise and a couple of augmented chords;
• Molly Lamont delivers a line or two in voiceover, usually meaningless expository filler in the White Gorilla "As I watched..." vein;
• and the shot fades back out, accompanied by the same musical cue.

We don't know how this was received in 1947, but nowadays it reads as a dead ringer for a loading screen from a 1990s CDROM game. Just add a progress bar, a few two-color icons, and a bonus preview for Wand of Gamelon, and you're there.



These cornball tactics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Scared to Death's problems, as many factors sink it beyond all hope of redemption. Despite a few vague signs of greater ambition, the plot is incoherent, full of red herrings and loose ends, and generally feels like it was being made up as the filming went along. Characters' motivations are unclear, their behavior often makes no sense, and none are remotely sympathetic. And the final twist, revealing the culprit at last, amounts to a cheap trick that doesn't even play fair.



Then you've got Nat Pendleton as Bill "Bull" Raymond, a disgraced cop turned private investigator who inserts himself into proceedings in hopes of redemption. The relentless "comic" patter of this bumbling idiot is like nails on a chalkboard, and it's hard to imagine any of his one-liners eliciting anything but a groan and a sad shake of the head, even in 1947.



The film's one saving grace is Béla Lugosi as Professor Leonide, an enigmatic mesmerist and cousin of the elder Van Ee (George Zucco). In the midst of all this domestic turmoil, he arrives unexpectedly in the company of his diminutive manservant Indigo (Angelo Rossitto), though his visit isn't exactly welcome.



Lugosi's performance is exactly what you'd expect, but allows for a bit more range and playfulness than most of the pseudo-Drac dreck he slogged through in the last decades of his career. Genteel, urbane, but unequivocally dangerous, he easily steals every scene he's in.



And, as every review on the Internet notes, this movie is your only chance to see Lugosi in color. At least in Mill Creek's print, the film uses a funky, not-quite-right palette that initially made us suspect it was one of Ted Turner's misguided colorization efforts. But nope, it's every inch the real thing.


("Really, you met Milton Berle?")

But let's be clear, Scared to Death is an utterly regrettable movie with absolutely nothing else to offer save Béla's presence. If seeing him is enough to please you, by all means; otherwise, steer very clear of this abrasive, half-assed trainwreck.


(Nice tie, too.)

Now you see it, now you don't

Or, really, the other way around.

(Including this entry, which was written in October but is only making its way to you now...waiting this whole time in our draft box, out of sight.)

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The Phantom of Soho (1964)

Grade: C



Seamy and stabby, this Teutonic tale of maritime mayhem and razor-edged revenge is really more of a police procedural than a horror movie. And there's a dash of FPS in there, too.



A string of murders in Soho, or the mit Sauerkraut version thereof, attracts the attention of Scotland Yard's finest. It would seem in everyone's best interest to crack the case, and the local underworld certainly doesn't welcome the police attention...

...but no one's eager to talk.



The elusive perpetrator -- from whom the film takes its title -- is a cipher to all but a few, who begin to suspect that a crime they committed long ago has come back to haunt them.



The case also piques the curiosity of Clarinda Smith (Barbara Rütting), an author who specializes in lurid crime novels. The spunky Ms. Smith soon takes a personal interest in the proceedings, aiming to penetrate to the heart of these foul deeds -- as fodder for her next book, naturally.

It doesn't hurt that she's a very close friend of the head of Scotland Yard (Hans Söhnker), though neither he nor his appointed investigator, Chief Inspector Hugh Patton (Dieter Borsche), are too happy about her preternatural ability to keep one step ahead of them -- and everyone else.



Whoever put together the English-language script had some fun with it, as the dialogue is uncommonly tight for a dubbed film; no doubt it helped that The Phantom of Soho is based on a book.

And if you like to see older gentlemen hit on attractive, half-naked 1960s chicks? Well, it's got that too, though their wares will only occupy about half of your screen thanks to Mill Creek's bizarro pseudo-letterboxing.



But ultimately this Crimi is little more than a glorified Agatha Christie story. There's little to complain about, but little that sticks in the mind afterward. And unlike Christie, here the plot isn't convincing enough to pull off that pleasant suspension of belief that makes a good mystery.

So instead, it's mainly a matter of pointy things. And also knives.

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The Sound of Horror (1966)

Grade: D+



We'd say "A group of treasure hunters gets more than they bargained for", but treasure hunters don't really bargain, do they? I mean, the idea is to find treasure, not to somehow transact for it. You don't make a proposition to the chest, unless you're P.'s high school social studies teacher (who made many such propositions, silently at least).



Anyway, we're in "Greece", there's a bit of pick-axing and dynamiting, and before you know it our merry band of bargain-hunters is under siege from an invisible foe. If this makes it sound a bit like Predator, well, kind of -- but with less Arnold and more dance scenes.



A bit of judicious editing would've done The Sound of Horror a world of good, if by "world" one means "significant, but insufficient for salvation". The cast is OK, the concept reasonable, but the movie has an almost suicidal compulsion to bring itself to a screeching halt every 10 minutes or so, with long scenes and extended shots that do nothing to advance the narrative. Examples include:

• a lengthy, static shot of an empty cavern, during which absolutely nothing happens as far as we could tell (unless something got lost in the crop from widescreen);
• an extended soliloquy on one character's affection for his car;
• the aforementioned dance scenes, which at least have a bit of eye candy going on if you're into that sort of thing (we're meh about it);
• and a lovely sequence, set in the kitchen, wherein the gang's superstitious maidservant fetches water and makes coffee.

Riveting stuff.



When the movie permits itself to (ahem) move, it occasionally rises to the level of "mildly engaging schlock", but it's a little too dumb and muddled to really come off, and drops promising plot threads with little fanfare: we were expecting a Monster from a Prehistoric Planet angle, or maybe a Night of the Living Dead standoff, but instead we get a nonsensical mix of hunkerin' down and foolin' around.

Plus the characters are interchangeable, the score is sub-Bartókian rambling that frequently crosses the line from homage to plagiarism, and the special effects...aren't.



But of course, that can be part of the charm: "NO EAT I", sayeth the (mildly damaged) Pumpernickel Loaf of Doom. Alas, you can't mindmeld through a fireplace poker, and besides, isn't it time to go gluten-free? Everyone's throwing out their white flour lately.

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Speaking of bodies completely drained of blood, we also caught a couple of Tod Browning flicks on TCM, namely: The Mark of the Vampire, a Dracula clone with Béla Lugosi, clever special effects, and a surprise twist that essentially ruins the movie; and The Devil-Doll, a silly tale of pseudoscience and revenge in France, with Lionel Barrymore as Mrs. Doubtfire.

No DVR = no screenshots, but we'd give 'em both a shiny D+, given the modest entertainment -- and copious opportunities for weary groaning -- they provided.

Body Part Problems (Part 2)

Two in one week? Amazing!

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The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1959/1962)

Grade: D+

As the curtain rises on this campy, turgid exploitation flick (which was finished in '59 but took three years to find a distributor), we hear a quivering woman's voice pleading "Let me die...let me die!..."

But the title refuses:


(No! That's German for "The brain that wouldn't, the.")

Within moments we're transported to an operating room, where a patient lies dying while Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers aka Herb Evers), a brash young physician, is having a battle of wills with his conservative, safety-first father (Bruce Brighton).  When the patient expires on the operating table, the elder Dr. Cortner relinquishes command, giving Bill a chance to put his bold new ideas into practice:


("I'm going to make panko-crusted brains with a fruit candy gastrique and a bitter melon salad.")

Dr. Bill revives the patient, with the help of a little bit of electricity and a hearty dose of chutzpah.  Nonetheless, he earns a stern lecture from Dad for his arrogance in treating medicine like a game, experimenting on people, indulging in reckless transplants (hint hint!), and a laundry list of other behaviors designed to set up the younger Dr. Cortner as the epitome of the post-Frankenstein physician.


(Dr. Bill gets the Henry Rush treatment.)

After a few Oedipal minutes, Bill's fiancée Jan (Virginia Leith) injects herself into the conversation.  We learn of their plan to spend a quiet weekend at the Cortners' country house, prompting the elder Cortner to exclaim how "you're always sneaking off up there...the place gives me the creeps -- I should have sold it when your mother died."

The younger Cortner immediately gets uptight --"You can't sell that place!" -- and then backpedals: "Well, I mean, it's nice to get away from the city, I can work without anyone snooping around."  Subtle stuff!


(This picture summarizes the family dynamic pretty well: consternation, adoration, self-admiration.)

Shortly thereafter, Bill gets news that he's urgently needed at the country place because, according to his assistant Kurt (Leslie Daniels), "something terrible has happened".  So they hit the road, and Bill puts the pedal to the proverbial, ignoring numerous and ominous warning signs (in the most literal sense of the phrase).


(Aaaaaaaaand.) (With apologies to Sir Paul.)

The predictable accident happens, and Bill is thrown clear.  He staggers back over to the burning car, and with a look of horror on his face, sees Jan still trapped inside.  Her hand is raised, then drops out of the frame...it seems all is lost...but wait, what did Bill just wrap in his jacket?


("You were in a car crash, and you lost your..." With apologies to, uh, Member Ringo.)

Well, whatever that parcel is, he proceeds to sprint home with it tucked under his arm, prompting an extended scene with no dialogue that resembles nothing so much as a grotesque touchdown run.


(Remember not to spike it when you reach the end zone.)

And well, you've probably guessed what happens next, in the basement laboratory:


(Also sprach Frau Leith: "Think of the money...think of the money...")

"What's done is done, and what I've done is right," says Bill, despite the scruples of his assistant Kurt -- who, we soon learn, has himself been one of Bill's experimental transplant subjects, with less than successful results:

(Too soon to make a Dick Clark joke here?)

The "terrible" event in Kurt's message turns out to be an unspecified experiment, now locked in a closet, and which has apparently turned into something too horrible to show onscreen...yet.

Meanwhile, Jan (who's still unconscious) can only live as a severed head for around 48 hours, so Bill goes out in search of a donor body.  Cue some sexy, sexy sax music as Bill heads into a sleazy club, surveys the goods on display, and soon ends up backstage with the star attraction, an "exotic" dancer who may or may not also be a prostitute:


("I need to save my fiancée, but while I'm at it, how 'bout some VD?")

However, folks tend to notice when a high-class guy like Bill comes into a cheap joint, and our sexy, sexy dancer has a rival who's equally interested:


(Pining for the mesa, perhaps?)

The rival's arrival ruins everything since Bill doesn't want to leave any witnesses, so he takes off, and a ridiculous catfight ensues:


(Indeed a fight, though in still shots it looks more like the prelude to a kiss we don't especially want to see.)

Just to make sure we get the message, in what may be one of the greatest cutaways in cinematic history, at the end of the fight the filmmakers insert a shot of two painted cats, with an overdubbed "Meow!"  Seriously.

Right around now, Jan wakes up and -- despite not having any lungs -- begins to soliloquize.  Apparently the process has somehow transformed Jan, as on the one hand she's consumed with hate, furious at Bill for keeping her alive in this horrible state, while on the other she seems to have developed some sort of nascent psychic power.

After Jan speaks with the creature in the closet for a while (who communicates back with dull thumps), Kurt returns.  Their stilted conversation has Jan offering up plenty of stagy, overbaked lines:

"Like all quantities, horror has its ultimate, and I am that!" and

"He may produce results he didn't ask for...results more terrible than your arm of relative beauty."

This is the basic template for The Brain That Wouldn't Die: 33% preachy soliloquizing, 33% sexy sax with soft-pedal smut, and 33% suspenseful string tremolos with occasional gore.  (The remaining 1% owns the rest of the movie, via several holding corporations in the Cayman Islands.)

Since two-thirds of that formula involves little or no dialogue, you can't really call the movie "talky".  But it sure does start to drag, especially when Bill goes out for his second and third attempts at finding Jan a body.  Cue the sexy sax, of course.


("I've got kind of a third-rate Paul Newman thing going on here, you know?")

After leering at female pedestrians for a while, he bumps into a woman he knows...


("...and with a little work, I think you could be the spitting image of Marie Antoinette.")

...who, no joke, invites him to a "Best Body" beauty contest that just happens to be going on.  How serendipitous!


(More sexy ladies. Ever notice how older movies often cast women with widely-spaced eyes for trashier roles? Is there some ethnic subtext there?)

It becomes clear that Bill's main priorities for finding Jan a new body can be summarized by the 20th and 1st letters of the alphabet.  You'd think he'd be in the right place for that already, but when Bill's lady friend notes that one of the contestants has the "second-nicest body I've ever seen", it piques his curiosity enough to leave so as to track down #1, a former figure model whom they both knew in school: Doris Powell.

Doris (played by Adele Lamont) has become a semi-recluse since an unspecified accident, but still poses for creepy, overenthusiastic men in order to pay the bills:


(The male gaze in its most vigorous throes.)

When approached by Bill, Doris is prickly at best, proclaiming in the finest Dworkinian manner that "I still hate all men!"  And it's hard to really blame her since, it turns out, her "accident" was actually an attack by a jealous boyfriend that left one side of her face badly scarred:


(Her secret shame, revealed. She's still the best-looking broad in the movie, though.)

"Am I so appealing to you now? Doesn't it make you sick?" she asks bitterly.  But Bill insists he's not on the make, reminding her that he's a doctor (and his father a plastic surgeon, which makes the opening scene seem a bit strange since plastic surgeons aren't usually first-line trauma doctors), and offering his help.  She's cynical about her chances for treatment, but he talks persuasively about recent advancements in the field and whatnot...and before you know it, she's agreed to come to the country house that night for a consult.

And then we hit the head (of Jan) again, who's coaching the unseen beast to kill Kurt.  We don't mind too much, since Kurt seems to be the focal point for most of the movie's stultifying soliloquies.


(Soon your self-justifying speeches will end.)

Carnage ensues in the basement lab, which Bill discovers after ensconcing Doris in the upstairs living room.  But he's not too fazed, and pours himself and Doris a drink.


(By now the viewer needs one of these too.)

But he puts a little something extra in Doris's glass, just as she's learned to trust again (alas, the irony).  She remains conscious for long enough to realize she's been drugged, but at least Bill doesn't tell her why.


(Yep, he slipped you a mickey. But hey, at least it's not The Human Centipede, right?)

Before long, Doris is on the operating table, and Bill is ready to start the procedure to graft Jan's head onto her body.  Bill makes a vague attempt at sustaining the pretense of doing this out of love for Jan, but when she warns him that he "must be stopped", he summarily tapes her mouth shut so that it won't disrupt his concentration for the procedure.


(Insert trenchant commentary on gender dynamics here.)

But hell hath no fury like a psychic, decapitated woman with tape over her mouth (as Aaron Burr learned to his great chagrin), and soon the unseen is seen and onscreen:


("No, Brady P. is my cousin, but I get that a lot.")

So what do we do with The Brain That Wouldn't Die?  These days it's not titillating enough to titillate, not horrifying enough to horrify, and certainly not scintillating enough to scintillate.  And of course, the concept and execution are too stupid to support any nascent hopes of passing it off as a black comedy, despite one or two feints in that direction.

But with a few surprises and a few memorable moments, one could do worse than The Brain That Wouldn't Die for idle, trashy entertainment.  And there's always this:


(This one shot, and its accompanying sound effect, justify the entirety of human cinema.)

(Well, almost.)