You won't get there for free

Going slightly out of order, we present to you two films about people who venture into the jungle to find a missing person -- but end up bumping into quite a (all together now) savage girl along the way.

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Queen of the Amazons (1947)

Grade: D

Where shall we seek the headquarters of the titular Queen of the Amazons? Certainly not Brazil, or else she'd be queen of the Amazon singular, right?

And, it seems, not Detroit either. (No word on whether the Hartz Mountains are still in contention.)

No, it seems that when you're on an expedition that will ultimately lead you to the Queen, your first stop is...

...India? OK, that makes sense in a chaturaṅga kind of way, I suppose.

In any event, it's here that our protagonist, Jean Preston (Patricia Morison), begins the search for her missing fiancé, Greg. She's accompanied by Greg's father Colonel Jones (John Miljan), an absent-minded entomologist (Wilson Benge), and a petulant rando who practically has FRIENDZONED tattooed on his forehead ("Keith Richards (I)", as IMDb calls him).

Cue about five minutes' worth of meaningful glances, shady characters, and menacing silhouettes.

Meanwhile the situation in Akbar is tense, and getting tenser. As voiceover narration from Miljan solemnly intones, "There's an undercurrent of hatred for their present ruler, in spite of the fact that they've done everything to quiet them...there's a revolution in the offing."

Heck, they're not even appeased by the spectacle of an elephant tug-of-war -- "like baseball or football in our country", claims the narration, made retroactively prescient by PED scandals of recent decades (don't tell us those mahouts didn't slip a little extra something to Jumbo before the big match).

Ultimately a hot tip from an Indian woman and her husband reveals the truth: Greg has departed for Africa. Now, some sources claim the real-life Amazons were from modern-day Libya, so that makes sense, right? We're on our way to the Queen!

And since the natives are getting, uh, restlesser, it's a good time to get out of Akbar. (Which apparently isn't in India but, eh, whatever.)

If you're expecting camels, kufiyas, and caravanserais, though...

It's never really clear where Queen of the Amazons would have us think we are, beyond "Africa" -- which is what they keep calling their destination, as though one needs no more precision than to name the second-largest continent in the world. The village where they arrive is called Kybo, but contrary to IMDb's "goofs" page, we don't think the filmmakers had an obscure Australian outpost in mind: it's probably just a made-up name, meant to stand in for some place in East Africa.

And the natives are "upset" here too!

Anyway, there's a guy who "hates women" (Robert Lowery), and a "white goddess" dreaded by the natives (Amira Moustafa), and an ivory-smuggling plot and a mysterious saboteur and a bit of cleverness involving feet and footwear --

-- and there's sexism addressed via markmanship (markswomanship?), and racism, and target practice, and monkeys -- 

-- and obvious stock footage, and silly fight scenes, and Queen of the Amazons is a silly movie. The end.

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Kong Island (1948)
(aka King of Kong Island)

Grade: D-

...though on the other hand, things can get a lot sillier. And, speaking of East Africa:

Kong Island opens with a clever gambit, as a holdup job turns deadly when one of the three robbers decides it'd be easier to just shoot everyone -- including his co-conspirators. As the only robber who objected to the massacre (before getting gunned down himself) lies in the sun, gravely wounded, the opening credits roll...

...and we abruptly cut to a four-minute scene of a microchip being implanted into a gorilla.

For this we get no explanation before cutting away again to a humid-looking villa in Nairobi, where we discover that the "good" robber Burt (Brad Harris) has indeed survived what Theodore (Aldo Cicconi) calls "that little accident of yours".

Turns out he's a gun-for-hire who just can't seem to stay away from Africa -- once again, invoking the whole continent! -- because "There's no work for us mercenaries right now." At least we know we're in Kenya, and soon enough we hear about "your mad doctor friend" Albert (Marc Lawrence), who Burt is aiming to find.

So some major plot threads seem to be coming together: Burt's revenge, plus Theodore's jealousy about the relationship Burt once had with his wife Ursula (Adriana Alben), and whatever this business is with the gorillas.

Like Queen of the Amazons, we get early gunplay from a female lead -- in this case Theodore's daughter Diana (Ursula Davis). She's all growed up now and would clearly like to boink the buff Burt, though her brother Robert (Mark Farran) isn't so thrilled about the idea.

And once again like Queen of the Amazons, our manly mercenary ends up getting drafted into leading an expedition. In fact Kong Island feels in many ways like a throwback to the "darkest Africa" movies of the 1930s and '40s. Sure, there are nightclub scenes with 1960s go-go/lounge music, and some comically awkward dancing from Harris --

-- who also gets off a good one-liner that'd never have made it past the Hays Code censors:

Ursula: "There's a guy who's been eyeing you. He's been watching you for a long time."

Burt: "Thanks, Ursula. Too bad -- he's not my type."

Once the gang goes on their expedition, though, we're soon thrust straight into the same sort of complicated-rescue plot we saw in Queen of the Amazons. At least the makers of Kong Island seem to have filmed some of their own nature shots, since it's impossible to imagine anyone paying for stock footage as ridiculously jittery and bumpy as this.

Soon comes a parade of corny tropes from a long-past era: the skittish natives afraid of a "taboo" area of the jungle; the beast on the loose -- which, given that surgery sequence, gets you no points for guessing what it is.

And then there's this:

Yes, once again we have that character beloved of schlockmeisters past: the wild white woman (Esmeralda Barros) who can communicate with jungle animals, yet has a mysterious aptitude for tasteful makeup and dental hygiene. She also, inevitably, has a certain affinity for our protagonist.

It's about at this point that we realized Kong Island was completely bananas -- an incoherently meandering, weirdly anachronistic product of filmmakers who seem to take trash films like Jungle Man, The White Gorilla, and The Savage Girl as their point of departure. It's as if you took a couple of Italian kids whose exclusive cinematic diet was watching B-movies set in sub-Saharan Africa on UHF stations, and then gave them carte blanche to script and direct a film.

The problem is that Kong Island's ambitions -- and its stylistic decisions -- get in the way of what little fun is to be had. There are too many subplots and peripeteias, too many minor characters not worth caring about, and the movie has a nasty, gritty edge (including an implied marital rape scene) that keeps it from earning that term beloved of lazy reviewers, the "enjoyable romp".

Add to that the clumsy, stupid denouement, and the verdict's in: Kong Island may be bananas, but by the end it's an overripe Cavendish -- and who wants that?

Well, some people do, apparently.

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!