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.

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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:

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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.

Paging Dr. Cuddy

No bonus points for guessing the theme: someone at Mill Creek no doubt felt very clever when they noted all three of these films' titles have Hugh Laurie in a genitive construction, and so grouped them together on a single DVD side (Disc 48, Side B, if you're keeping count).

That DVD side also represents a milestone, since it marks the end of Night Screams -- or at least the Horror Collection 250-pack's incorporation thereof -- which means we only have one subset left to review, 50 Sci-Fi Classics.

(Of course, a good 25% of those "sci-fi classics" are actually peplum, but we'll cross that bridge...)

Anyway, on to the Houses!

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House of Danger (1934)

Grade: C+

In a nutshell, House of Danger is basically House Dark the at Crimes -- that is, Crimes at the Dark House in reverse.

Instead of an evil-minded, mustachioed impersonator seeking to usurp the place of a man he murdered while working thousands of miles from home, we have a benevolent, mustachioed impersonator (Onslow Stevens) desperately trying to avoid usurping the place of the man whose life he saved (James Bush).

And it's not as if House of Danger is coy about any of this; as another reviewer points out, this is a crime story, not a mystery story. But House of Danger is also a romance, as -- unlike The False Sir Percival Glyde -- the false Ralph Nelson most certainly inspires the passion of Sylvia (Janet Chandler), the woman who's been waiting for "him" ever since they made a half-serious promise of engagement a decade ago.

Now, this requires some serious suspension of disbelief, since Onslow Stevens and James Bush don't resemble one another to any meaningful degree. Here's Stevens:

And here's Bush:

So it's hard enough to believe that Sylvia is fooled, let alone all of Nelson's family and friends. But to the film's credit, one person immediately smells a rat:

As Mr. Weatherby, Nelson's uncle (by marriage) and attorney, Howard Lang is one of the film's jewels. Clever and droll, he reminds us a tiny bit of the intrepid Captain McVeigh from City of Missing Girls, though Lang never has occasion to be as spry as H.B. Warner. But he gets off a few good one-liners of the I-guess-you-had-to-be-there variety, as when the two leading men inevitably bicker over Sylvia and he intervenes:

"Well, why not let the girl decide what she wants to do? She will anyway! Bet you hadn't thought of that."

When paired with a chagrined look on both men's faces and a perfectly timed fade to black, it got a big chuckle from us. (Shades of Vernon, Florida too.)

The crime in House of Danger is offscreen, and is also the engine that sets the plot in motion: Nelson's father recently fell off a cliff, and Mr. Weatherby thinks it was murder. Again, it's not as if there's any doubt about who did it; the question is just how to prove it.

There's a certain amount of cleverness in how this unfolds, but the ensuing narrative isn't exactly taut with suspense -- and the ultimate resolution turns out to be something of a deus ex machina.

You may have detected a whiff of stock footage in a couple of these screenshots, and that's one of House of Danger's flaws, though a very minor one. More jarring is the set-piece in which Sylvia serenades a gathering, with strange, dubbed contralto vocals and obviously-pantomimed piano playing that make the sequence teeter dangerously into the realm of the ridiculous. Perhaps we ought to praise the scene for its modest realism, but since Ms. Chandler is already treading in DT territory as it is, it's too big a risk.

Still, House of Danger is -- by our steadily-lowering standards -- a likable little film that neither insults our intelligence nor wastes our time. Tightly plotted and thoughtfully directed, it's two minutes longer than the next movie in this post, yet seemed to go by twice as fast. It's just a pity the image is so dark and unstable, leaving some scenes almost unintelligible, while others teeter on the edge.

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House of Mystery (1934)

Grade: F

Graze through reviews of House of Mystery and you'll find the usual stock lines: "Fans of the old dark house genre will certainly enjoy this one" says one reviewer, while another dubs it a "definite recommendation for all Poverty Row fans", and a third opines that "the screenplay is rather good". We just need someone to call it a "fun romp" and it'd make for a complete set of received opinions.

All this reminds us of our observation a few entries back -- that many people watching 1930s movies don't actually seem to see the actual movie in front of them, but instead the signifier that it represents: old-dark-house-ness, or old-timey-ness, or (less charitably) when-men-were-men-and-minorities-were-servants-ness. Whatever it is.

You see, House of Mystery is utter garbage -- a loveless, mirthless exercise in the laziest sort of filmmaking. It's cynical enough to pull the worst kind of bait-and-switch, opening with a pair of scenes in an Indian dive bar and temple that lead us to believe we're in for a "Hindoo" adventure. And to be fair, these sequences, whatever their flaws, are not unatmospheric.

But the script endeavors to lie, to tease the viewer. (See what I didn't not do there?)

For, after the first 10 minutes, House of Mystery reveals itself to be the worst sort of old dark house movie -- with thick servings of talky exposition, thoroughly unlikable characters devoid of humanity, pointless hints at backstory that never get fulfilled, and "comic" relief that leaves us staring at the screen in shell-shocked dismay, wondering how something so joyless and empty ever got made.

Oh, and it's got gorillas.

The most aggravating thing about House of Mystery is probably its tone-deaf stupidity, particularly when it comes to other cultures. Look, we're hardly the sort of people to be quick on the trigger with Tumblr denunciations, but would it have killed them to find out the name of the Hindu goddess of death isn't pronounced "Kay-lie" -- as though Elmer Fudd, having just completed his speech therapy class, decided to buy some lube and overcorrected?

Worst of all is the séance scene that repeatedly invokes the spirit of...Pocahontas. No, we're not kidding! Strangely the offensive absurdity and over-the-top stupidity of this seems to have escaped almost everyone who's written about House of Mystery, with the only exception being the one reviewer who writes:

"Pocahontas? The Native American princess? Well, apparently one type of “Indian” is the same as the other back in the 1930s."

(Unfortunately that reviewer's credibility is a bit shot by his next sentence -- "Yet, silly as it sounds, the picture is complex and suspenseful". Err....)

And wait, holy shit, is that the exact same crystal ball from the screenshot we linked earlier? Too funny.

Anyway, you'd really have to stretch to find something to enjoy in House of Mystery. We suppose the cinematography isn't too bad, with a couple nice shots here and there; shame this print looks so much better than House of Danger, though a few early sections are ripped to shreds with little cuts.

And as the ill-used dancer/servant Chanda, Joyzelle Joyner does what she can with a thankless part. If her heaving shoulders and flashing eyes are more indicative of "acting" than acting, well...at least she's trying.

Otherwise, though -- wait, did we mention it's got gorillas? Two gorillas, for reals.

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The House of Secrets (1936)

Grade: C

When it comes to this Anglo-American tale of conspiracy and hidden treasure, full enjoyment probably depends on one's ability to tolerate that creakiest of plot devices, the remarkable coincidence.

Two big coincidences feature in The House of Secrets, and it's quite upfront about the first. When toothy traveler Barry Wilding (Leslie Fenton) rescues a beautiful woman (Muriel Evans) from an awkward situation on a boat, she's appreciative but pointedly refuses to give her name before she departs, leaving him lovelorn and at a loss.

So isn't it remarkable --

-- that she turns out to be Julie Kenmore, a tenant in the spooky old English house he's just inherited? What a curious incident!

But this appears to have been standard practice for the author of the source material, Sydney Horler, who's unfamiliar to us but from all reports was a "nasty little man", racist and anti-Semitic and generally unpleasant.

(By the way, that link claims that Wilding rescued Kenmore from a "masher", but that's not quite true -- close attention to the dialogue reveals the man's interest had something to do with drugs.)

The House of Secrets uses another trope we recently encountered in The Midnight Warning -- namely, the close friend of the protagonist who also happens to be ace detective Tom Starr (Sidney Blackmer).

This kind of thing can be disastrous for a story -- the equivalent of dropping a Level 10 ranger into your entry-level D&D campaign -- but to its credit, The House of Secrets mostly keeps Starr out of the action, leaving Wilding to unpack things on his own.

It's hard to say much more about The House of Secrets without spoiling it, though quite frankly the basic outlines of the plot are pretty obvious before long: with early references to drugs, the sound of maniacal laughter, and portentous warnings from every corner about how Wilding can't possibly be allowed to know what's going on in the house he just inherited and really ought to sell it posthaste? Not too hard to put the basics together.

For most of its 70-minute running time, The House of Secrets is remarkably brisk -- so much so that at some point we looked at each other and were astonished by just how much had happened over the course of the movie: the film felt long in a good way, i.e. from its own cohesion and propulsion. OK, perhaps it has one too many IWGIHs, but the margin of excess is slim.

However, by the 45-50 minute mark, our destination had become obvious enough that other characters' endless evasions and deferrals started to get irritating: yes, we know all will be made clear in the final scene, but maybe it's better to put some pieces in place first, so it's more satisfying when those last few are snapped in.

We also can't claim the ultimate conclusion really grabbed us. Once again, we could tell a Midnight Warning-style denouement was more or less inevitable -- was there a vogue at one time for "So now you see, we had our reasons" plots? -- but everything's a bit too pat, with one-time adversaries turned newfound friends with no time to catch our breath. Can you really make fast friends with someone who recently held you at gunpoint?

Well, The Phantom thought so, and I guess The House of Secrets does too: must have been a 1930s thing.

Anyway, The House of Secrets is a fine way to wind up the Night Screams set -- not least because it actually has some night-time screaming, which is always nice. (It also has a fuzzy, VHS-dubbed print that makes some of the darker scenes more or less inscrutable in their details, but such is Mill Creek life.)

By the standards of this box, it's an above-average suspense tale that kept us more or less engaged throughout its running time -- even if our laughs at the end owed more to resigned incredulity than to real satisfaction.

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And to our pleasure and astonishment, that brings us to the end of Night Screams. 12 months ago it seemed inconceivable that we'd ever work through our backlog, whereas now we're spoiled for choice:

Do we immediately continue on to 50 Sci-Fi Classics? (From which we've already reviewed 5-6 movies anyway, mind.)

Or take a detour into one of our other, shorter box sets, like Grit 'n' Perseverance from whence our beloved Beartooh [sic] hailed?

Or wrap up some unfinished business from the Nightmare Worlds subset that begins the 250-pack, and with which this whole project started out -- in more ways than one?

Dunno. But first we have an awards ceremony to convene!