Telephone secrets, telephone spies

"Can you hear me? Or am I talking to myself?" - Chris Squire (RIP)

In these two killer films from Poverty Row, the folks availing themselves of Ma Bell's services surely aren't talking via satellite (or Verizon), but can still hear each other just fine.

Little do they know, though, that an eavesdropping third party is listening in close to get the information right.

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I Killed That Man (1941)

Grade: C+

Anyone who's seen enough Poverty Row crime flicks has seen the devices of I Killed That Man a dozen times over already, like the spunky female reporter (Joan Woodbury) who just so happens to be dating the A.D.A. (Roger Phillips).

Or the opening sequence that depicts the final moments of a condemned man before his execution...

...until he decides to admit that he is indeed guilty (yay, justice system!), but also had a secret partner in crime -- all revealed in a long speech that, for dramatic effect, saves the identity of his collaborator for last. And what's that? Why, it's a blowgun dart that kills him instantly, just as he's about to name names!

So next we get one of those "Nobody leaves this room!" numbers, which results in a whole lot of nekkid middle-aged men (mostly implied, so no luck if you're into that sort of thing). At least they get it out of the way upfront, vs. the absurd formal contortions we saw in Midnight Phantom.

I Killed That Man also does the "the culprit can't possibly be this guy, so of course it's this guy" bit that a New York Times reviewer skewered so well in A Shot in the Dark. TVTropes calls that sort of thing "hanging a lampshade on it", but for a murder mystery it's not such a wise idea.

Around now, you're probably wondering: "So, why the C+?" Well, it's amazing how much a brisk pace, a couple of clever set-pieces, and some good one-liners can do to salvage even the most familiar plot. And that certainly applies to I Killed That Man, which somehow manages to entertain throughout its 70 minutes.

For instance, when the gentlemen are putting their clothes back on post-inspection, we get this exchange:

Reed: "Never have I been so humiliated."

Lanning: "Felt kinda foolish myself. I guess I'll have to go on a diet."

Reed (bitterly): "So I noticed."

It doesn't really come off in print, but it's a sick burn in execution.

Returning to the subject of this post, we get a bumper crop of telephone-related plot points, including mysterious numbers, ice cream sodas, and a seldom-seen 3-way split-screen shot.

Is I Killed That Man a must-watch? Hardly. But it's one of those films that pops its head above the sea of Poverty Row mediocrity, rewarding the persistent viewer who wades through this stuff in hopes of turning up a hidden gem -- or, in the present context, simply something that's competent and entertaining. And that's exactly what we have here, so let's not press our luck by demanding more than that.

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The Invisible Killer (1939)

Grade: D

Mill Creek's print of The Invisible Killer has one of the lousiest and most muffled soundtracks of any film on this boxset -- not to mention a series of nasty cuts and splices near its midpoint. Half the time we struggled to make out what was being said, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker for us: after all, we liked The Ghost Walks.

What is damn near a dealbreaker, though, is this lady right here, Ms. Sue Walker:

Played by Grace Bradley, she's a relentlessly self-interested, Machiavellian journalist who goes well past "spunky" to the point that we nearly had to introduce a "nasty female reporter" tag. There's nothing wrong with amoral characters, of course, but Walker is so irritating and pointlessly difficult, we found ourselves wishing her love interest Lt. Jerry Brown (Roland Drew) would finally make good on his repeated threat to wring her neck.

It seriously detracts from a movie that isn't so hot to begin with. Maybe it's telling that so many sources seem to misunderstand the plot of The Invisible Killer, from the Mill Creek blurb saying "an eager female reporter...ends up partnering with a homicide detective assigned to the case" (misleading) to the IMDb claim that "a fiendish killer uses sound waves to commit his murders" (flat-out wrong).

What is the means of murder? Well, that would be blabbing.

The first two-thirds of The Invisible Killer drag like hell, in part because of the perennial 1930s "too many indistinguishable white guys in hats" problem. The presence of a secondary female character, attractive socialite Gloria Cunningham (Jean Brooks), does help a bit by allowing us to triangulate the identities of the IWGIH relative to her.

Ms. Cunningham is also the fiancée of the D.A., Richard Sutton (Crane Whitley), who's trying to rein in a wave of gambling-related crime...

...so it's very embarrassing when she's nearly caught up in an investigation: only Ms. Walker's forbearance keeps her from ending up on page one.

Worse yet is the fate of her father (Boyd Irwin), who fights on the side of right and justice, but discovers to his chagrin that he owns multiple properties used as gambling dens -- and once your hands are dirtied, it can be very hard to get clean.

Anyway, you can probably imagine much of the rest, but The Invisible Killer throws some weird curveballs. For example, there's Sutton's valet Worcester (David Oliver), a drunkard who spends his downtime slowly typing broadsides against "The Evils of Alcohol". We spend such a shockingly long time watching Worcester and his two-fingered technique that (we assume) he must be intended to serve as a key component of the film's comic relief -- or, perhaps, as a sardonic commentary on the hypocrisy of reformers.

But his scenes are so cut to ribbons by bad splices, and his typescript so hard to read in this print, that whatever impact the scene is meant to have is replaced instead by ennui and confusion.

Which, now that we think about it, is a pretty good description of what it's like to watch The Invisible Killer -- at least in its Mill Creek iteration.

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.

New Year's resolution: the quick 'n' dirty solution

Short reviews offered up by inveterate procrastinators.

The Cold Room (1984)

Grade: C/C+

The Petulant Teenager's guide to surviving 1980s East Berlin: smoken der weed, getten der German-chick haircut, and treaten der Dad's girlfriend with open contempt. If you're thinking "Wait, that should be in the accusative case!", she does that too, mindmelding with her 1940s counterpart to reveal a hidden Nazi narrative in the eponymous chilly chamber. Unfortunately, Nancy Drew blood, but everyone who matters lives, except Yehudi and the Blowfish. Nice premise, mediocre protagonist.

Robot Monster (1953)

Objective Grade: F
Bubbly Grade: A

Awww, just go read this guy's review. Especially the part about how it's "easily the most relentlessly bleak and hopeless sci-fi movie of the 1950’s." Heck, they even kill off the kiddies!

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

Grade: B

We were blindsided by this off-the-wall Roger Corman spoof, in which Cubans, mobsters, and monsters collide with comic effect. It even has its very own song. LOL? IDK, but we enjoyed it.

Nightmare Castle (1965)

Grade: D-

Since we don't want to have sex with Barbara Steele, we were unmoved by this dull, predictable take on Gaslight.

The Screaming Skull (1958)

Grade: D-

Since we don't want to have sex with a screaming skull, we were unmoved by this dull, predictable take on Gaslight.


Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

Objective Grade: F
Adam's Apple Bonus Grade: C

In our attempts to write about this movie (which boasts an impressive roster of B-players, and a score that Ed Wood famously reused), we keep coming back to the...handsome...image of Tandra Quinn as Tarantella. The world is full of strange, strange things.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Grade: B+

"I was astonished to see her in Utah, for I had an appointment with her tonight in Kansas." Or vice versa.

Atom Age Vampire (1960)

Grade: F

"I don't wanna live no more! I gotta boot-fa-chay!"
"Hey, boot-fa-chay! You wanna come to my house, we give-a you nice fa-chay?"
"OK, we do-a dis."

(later)

"Hey, I wanna my sweet little boot-fa-chay!"
"You canna have her."
"But I gotta!"
"OK. Me anna this udda lady, we die now. Also, Hiroshima."
"Is OK."

Set the controls for the heart of the daughter

Three overdue quickies united in romantic pursuit by remote control:

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Night Fright

Objective grade: D
Camp value bonus: C-

Ludicrous extraterrestrial monster vs. John Agar (whom we remember fondly from Zontar) as upstanding sheriff. Eventually, the beast loses, thanks to a clever ruse involving explosives and a RealDoll. In the meantime, "teenagers" frolic, make out, get killed. You'll remember the absurd dance scenes, night vistas lit by headlights, and John Agar givin' those kids what for; you'll forget the rest. Which is fine, really.

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Robot Pilot (aka Emergency Landing)

Grade: C+

Hey, Goofus: what'll win the heart of that bratty rich bitch? Kidnapping, imprisonment, and a new invention that lets you manoeuvre aeroplanes by wire? Yes, that's right, and as a bonus, your pal gets some too. (Gallant's spending the night alone with the Sears catalog: sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing, or vice versa.) Basically a silly early '40s romantic comedy (the Mill Creek folks apparently didn't buy Webster's, nor the "H" volume of Encyclopedia Britannica), and your enjoyment of this is predicated on your enjoyment of that. But it ends on a high note, thanks to the best (ahem) "little person" cameo ever.

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Frozen Alive (aka Der Fall X701)

Grade: B+

Human cryogenics, in both senses, and so this film's focus on character development and relationship dynamics is a pleasant surprise. Of course plot takes over eventually, but that's true of Greek tragedies as well, right? And -- others may disagree on this -- we actually cared about what happened to these people and their interesting faces, which is a welcome change too. Still, there must have been something keeping this from scoring in the A range, unless it's just the memory of P.'s credulous friend who came back from American Beauty saying "Dude, I just saw the greatest movie ever": who wants to be that guy? (The Academy, apparen'ly.)

Persistent images: gun safety violations, expatriate academics who stonewall for a good cause, and an unexpected explosion of Africanisms that took us by surprise.