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!

Süssmayr, Cooke, Cerha, and Serly

Sometimes, when someone dies and their life's work goes unfinished as a result, another person steps up to complete the job. Even if they're not quite as skillful as the original auteur, it's important to them that the job gets done.

In the case of these three films, we have not symphonies, but evil schemes that get interrupted -- only to be continued, some time later, by a newcomer's efforts.

(And if that seems like a weak theme -- well, it was either that or "All three films feature sexual assault, attempted or otherwise", and that theme's kind of a downer.)

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The Ghost Walks (1934)

Grade: B

After a streak of joyless flicks, it's a treat to watch an unapologetically goofy romp like The Ghost Walks, which -- its inclusion on this "horror" box set aside -- is really a farce with a dollop of mystery and a couple of "spooky" elements.

That said, Mill Creek's print of The Ghost Walks is no treat -- not in the audio domain, at least, as the extremely muffled sound renders much of the dialogue near-incomprehensible. Even after heavy filtering in VLC, there were many lines we simply couldn't make out at all.

We were all set to tell you to watch this copy at Archive.org instead, which has far better sound -- but unfortunately, it turns out that it's missing over three minutes from a key scene early in the film. The edit is non-obvious, but the cut material still has a significant impact on the coherence of the plot, and without it the basic conceit of The Ghost Walks makes significantly less sense.

As for what that conceit is, well...rather than spoil the film with a detailed plot summary, we'll merely say that The Ghost Walks -- like so many before it and since -- revolves around that well-worn device, a dark and stormy night.

This particular DASN opens with bigshot producer Herman Wood and his milquetoast assistant Homer Erskine (played by Richard Carle and Johnny Arthur, respectively). These two New Yorkers are being chauffeured through the storm by a young playwright (John Miljan) who wants Mr. Wood to hear a reading of his new play. But naturally, something goes wrong with the car...

...and, after some kvetching in the rain, the trio end up at a spooky old mansion occupied by a bizarre cast of characters, whose personal dramas and grievances quickly ensnare the visitors.

That said it's the crotchety old Wood and, especially, his neurotic assistant who steal the show throughout. Whether Homer Erskine is meant to be a gay character per se, or simply an effete and cowardly "cream-puff", his stormy relationship with Wood -- getting fired at one moment, sharing a bed the next -- is the core of the film's comedy.

In another film, Erskine's lack of the requisite manly virtues might make him a target of overt ridicule, but here he escapes without major harm or humiliation, and gets the lion's share of the film's zingers as well, e.g.:

"It's a union clock."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it strikes any old time."

Or:

"Say, I don't like these underground places."

"Well, you may as well get used to it -- you may spend a lot of time in one."

They don't read well in print, but his delivery makes them work.

However, Wood gets the film's best one-liner when he chokes on a cigar, gets slapped on the back by Erskine, and responds with irritation:

"What's the idea?"

"Why, you were choking terribly!"

(indignantly) "Well, can you do any better?"

Should we read anything beyond the obvious into Erskine's comment -- when offered dinner and a drink by his host -- that he likes "the cocktail part of the program"? Probably not.

But, hard not to raise an eyebrow when another character angrily tells Wood and Erskine that "There's something queer about you both. He winks at you and you wink at me. I don't like it!"

Make time for The Ghost Walks -- but if you can't make out the dialogue, switch to the Archive.org print for the first 17 minutes. Then cut over to Mill Creek from about 15:47 to 19:12, and then go back to Archive.org for the rest.

(Or we think so, at least, since the Mill Creek print runs 64:30 and the Archive.org print clocks in at 63:26. The latter has a longer opening and fewer skips, so that seems to account for the rest of the difference, but we haven't done a scene-for-scene comparison to see what else might be cut from either print.)

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The She-Beast (1966) 

Grade: C-

Truth be told, we still don't like Barbara Steele. That said, not only does she have very limited screentime in The She-Beast, but in her brief appearance she's used to her best and bitchiest effect, as a snobby newlywed whose husband Philip is a pompous ass of an Englishman (Ian Ogilvy).

For whatever reason, they've opted to take their honeymoon in, all together now:

Of course, the town where they stop for the night turns out to be under an old curse, thanks to an improperly handled witch-killing two centuries prior.

They're helpfully informed of this by none other than Count Van Helsing (John Karlsen), a déclassé Transylvanian nobleman who descends directly from you-know-who. He's more than happy to join them at dinner and order a bottle of Slivovitz on their tab, while boring a thoroughly uninterested Barbara Steele with his family history.

If you know Steele is only onscreen for about 20-30 minutes at the beginning of the film, and another few at the end, you can probably guess how the rest of this one plays out. But one redeeming feature of The She-Beast is its sense of humor, which it uses to constantly poke fun at the absurdities of life behind the Iron Curtain.

These are epitomized by their corrupt and piggish innkeeper, the aptly named Groper (Mel Welles). Early on, Groper gets the living crap beaten out of him by Philip for a Peeping Tom attempt gone disastrously wrong -- which is kind of a nice change from the usual victimization routine.

The thing is, Philip is just kind of a dick in general, and any satisfaction in seeing him pummel Groper into unconsciousness is diminished by his gratingly arrogant, ungrateful behavior toward Van Helsing. Having the protagonist be less than thoroughly likable is a nice twist, but The She-Beast belabors it enough so that Philip's petulant stupidity soon becomes infuriating.

But those irritations -- and a rather gratuitous attempted rape scene -- are alleviated somewhat by a couple interesting twists in the plot, and by the film's lampoons of Romanian life (right at the start of the Ceaușescu period, no less). These give The She-Beast a much-needed infusion of black comedy...

...even if they're not altogether subtle about it.

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Curse of the Headless Horseman  (1972) 

Objective Grade: F
Wavy Gravy Far-Out Grade: C

"It's almost never a good sign when a movie opens with a lengthy voice-over delivering exposition," we wrote recently, and that's no less true of Curse of the Headless Horseman.

Except, maybe, that it's an even worse sign when that VO is saturated in a delay effect that makes the speaker's words nearly incomprehensible. And then, it's paired with an image in which the color process is so clearly misaligned, it's impossible to imagine who could have looked at it and thought, "This is OK, this works, I've done a good job."

For example, feast your eyes on the image above, with bands of red, blue, and yellow appearing in places those colors have no business being, while the bottom of the frame transitions from a weird purple to a colorless gray.

Do you know what the people in that shot are doing? They're eating pizza, that's what.

All told, the first minutes of Curse of the Headless Horseman look as though they were filmed in B&W and then hand-tinted, one primary color at a time, by the lady who so nicely tidied up that fresco of Jesus some years back.

Perhaps it's Mill Creek's fault (hard to see how), but even once things calm down, we get some seriously weird color schemes in this film. In most shots, orange-reds and blues pop out with a brilliant, hyper-real intensity, while other hues are vastly muted by comparison. It's like watching a Tandy Color Computer game come to life.

Or look at the spectrum expressed in this shot. The lead actor is bounded by fields of dark green and purple, while his face looks as orange as an Oompa-Loompa's. What's happening here?

Other sites can give you a play-by-play of the events in Curse of the Headless Horseman; we won't bother. (If you've seen the excellent 1934 film Our Daily Bread, and throw in a couple episodes of Scooby-Doo, you've got the basic idea.) It hovers well past the threshold of incompetence in every way, with no real sense of pacing, thoroughly amateur acting, and a script that makes little sense.

Naturally, all that is also a big part of the film's charm -- though truthfully, despite our indulgent attitude toward it, we often found our attention drooping.

Like The She-Beast, this film has a beast on the loose, a pair of newlyweds as its (ostensible) protagonists...

...and an uncomfortable, extended scene of sexual assault, committed by a man whom another site aptly dubbed "the harmonica rapist", and made worse when he and his victim then become happily coupled: ugh. At least he eventually gets the crap beaten out of him too.

Another common trait with The She-Beast is the incongruous presence of nobility: check out the French "countess" (Ultra Violet) who abruptly shows up mid-film with her Superman lunchbox in tow, only to disappear with little explanation. She's sometimes listed as the star of the film, but Ultra Violet is barely onscreen for five minutes, if that. Billy Curtis's pop-up in Robot Pilot seems inevitable and organic when compared to this celebutante cameo.

Curse of the Headless Horseman is, let's be clear about this, an awful movie. But it's a moderately entertaining form of awful, far more engaging than the likes of Manos: The Hands of Fate, though not as rewarding as (say) Maniac.

If nothing else, its color choices and script decisions are so completely off-the-wall at times that -- despite the distinct lack of foxy in its ladies -- it's worth seeing at least once.