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!

Unanswered questions

We seem to have a habit lately of posting right before major holidays, so why not continue the pattern?

Unfortunately none of these four films have any particular relevance to Thanksgiving -- no turkeys, no cranberry sauce, not even a flagrantly stuffed bra -- but they do share a common thread: all of them end by breaking the fourth wall, with a question left unanswered.

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The Night America Trembled (1957)

Grade: C-

Edward R. Murrow, his cue cards, and his trusty cigarette can't fix the core issue that plagues The Night America Trembled -- which is, of course, that it's based on bullshit: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast in 1939 did not, in fact, inspire mass panic and disorder. A handful of foolish people got foolish, maybe, but we're talking numbers in the teens, not thousands.

(Now Ecuador, that's a different story.)

Still, however the urban legend got started, it's been a persistent little cuss. In 1975, The Night America Trembled was evidently remade as the TV movie The Night That Panicked America, showing that two decades of "progress" hadn't dampened Hollywood's willingness to found their productions on falsehoods (or offer up old wine in new bottles).

Meanwhile, that "fake radio news broadcast that got everybody scared" has continued to pop up, unchallenged, in otherwise-clever films like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, though one hopes (no doubt in vain) that the Snopes era will put an end to the Welles-Wells panic myth.

Anyway, the whole thing is about what you'd expect from a 1950s TV movie: men, microphones, modest amounts of mayhem.

And -- perhaps surprisingly -- a makeout session from soon-to-be-married teenyboppers, in an era when Lucy and Ricky were still sleeping in separate beds.

For most viewers, half the fun of The Night America Trembled will be spotting future stars like Ed Asner and Warren Beatty in small supporting roles. For us, as always, it was trying to get unflattering screenshots of the principals.

The print that Mill Creek used is reasonably clear, but a faint overlay of some ghostly image is perceptible throughout. Double exposure? Interference during the transfer? Recycled videotape? Who knows -- we can't capture it in screenshots, but whenever the camera moves it's quite visible. 

Either way, at least The Night America Trembled is pleasantly short, clocking in at well under an hour. As for the unanswered question, it's found in Murrow's closing words to us, the audience:

"Twenty years ago, the concept of an alien race was novel to us, hence alarming. Today, we realize that Mars is very near -- closer, perhaps, in time than we imagined. There is every reason to believe that long before the Martians come to us, we will go to them. I wonder if we'll panic them as they did us, on The Night America Trembled?"

Indeed, Eddie, my boy. Indeed.

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The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

Grade: B-

In making our way through the Mill Creek 250-pack, we've certainly seen some terrible prints, and overall The Amazing Transparent Man is far from the worst. But its first few minutes are surely among the most flagrantly damaged we've seen -- not in the "scratched and spliced print" sense, but in the "something went seriously wrong with this transfer" sense.

Dark areas of the image are filled with analog and digital artifacts, the picture itself has a sandblasted, wrecked quality, and the net result bears an unfortunate resemblance to late 1990s streaming video protocols.

All told, we'd imagine most non-completists took one look at the opening and bailed. And that's a shame, since what we have here is a tightly-constructed, punchy little B-picture that amply demonstrates that you don't need an hour of runtime to tell a complete story.

With a title like The Amazing Transparent Man, it's hardly a spoiler to give the basic outlines of the plot: master safecracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) gets sprung from prison by bad girl Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman), who spirits him away to a safe house in the boonies.

Now, Laura didn't just do this out of the goodness of her heart. She's in league with Maj. Paul Krenner (James Griffith), a treasonous criminal mastermind who wants Faust to steal nuclear material to further his clever schemes.

And how is Joey supposed to do that, given that (a) the material is under armed guard and (b) as a wanted fugitive, he'll be instantly recognized by just about anyone who sees him?

Enter Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an "eminent nu-cu-lar scientist" (but not a balloonist) with piercing blue eyes, a Holocaust-haunted past, and -- oh yeah -- the ability to make small animals invisible, via exposure to just the right sort of radiation. (You know, the fancy kind.)

And who's to be the guinea pig for the first human trial?

You can probably guess most of the rest (hint: Dr. Ulof isn't helping Maj. Krenner of his own free will). But what sets The Amazing Transparent Man apart isn't the novelty of its plot, but the quick pace and strong momentum that it sustains throughout its 57 minutes.

Between the tight time constraints and tight budget, there really isn't room to screw around, and the movie's brisk professionalism -- light on exposition, heavy on schemes and counterschemes -- is refreshing.

The characters in The Amazing Transparent Man also spend a surprising amount of time assaulting one another, with nearly every member of the cast receiving at least one nasty blow to the head.

Small wonder, then, that they're constantly brandishing guns -- that is, when they're not angrily telling each other to "lay off the giggle water": if drinking alcohol is incompatible with their schemes, why do they have so much of it around?

Of course, any "invisible man" film lives or dies by the effectiveness of its special effects, and for a low-budget movie, The Amazing Transparent Man delivers quite well on that front -- especially the scenes where Faust partially reappears, which manage to be both vaguely comic and kinda cool.

But the film certainly isn't flawless. There are minor stupidities in the exposition, but those are to be expected; more damaging, though, is the miscasting of James Griffith, whose stage presence is evocative of, say, Don Knotts, rather than the saturnine, dangerous menace the role ought to have.

Still, it's worth sticking with The Amazing Transparent Man, if only to reach the final scene, in which Dr. Ulof delivers a peroration upon the dangers of powerful technology falling into enemy hands -- "It's a serious problem" -- only to interrupt himself and, unexpectedly, turn to the audience:

"What would you do?" he asks -- and the film fades to black and ends just like that.

(And personally? I'd check the shipping forecast.)

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Twister's Revenge (1986)

Objective Grade: who cares
All Aboard for Fun Time Grade: A-

So Twister's Revenge -- which has naught whatsoever to do with tornadoes, in case you're wondering -- brings the following to the table:

• Twister, a sentient monster truck that talks;
• Dave, a wisecracking cowboy hero (Dean West);
• and Sherry, a brilliant, wealthy, sexy damsel in distress (Meredith Orr).

(Well, she starts out as a damsel, but becomes a married woman about 17 minutes in.)

Sounds like a murderer's row of leads, right? But in this wonderfully stupid, sprawlingly ridiculous Bill Rebane feature, none of those elements gets the spotlight.

Instead, the center of our attention, and our sympathies, is right here:

Fact is, these three goofballs -- ostensibly the villains -- are really the protagonists of Twister's Revenge. We never really know why, in the face of repeated, humiliating disasters, they're so determined to pull off a heist at the expense of the happy couple. But like Wile E. Coyote, they just keep trying and trying.

Truth be told, the whole movie is like a Looney Tunes cartoon writ large --

-- but one in which it appears that any idea that passed through the makers' heads, no matter how random or outlandish, was kept in. For instance, how about we spend several minutes of screentime on a New Wave group at a dive bar --

-- but have them be fronted by three writhing, dancing girls, including a pointedly plus-size lead?

Sure, why not? And why not have some people bopping in gas masks for no reason? We've got gas masks, might as well use 'em!

Hey, did you say you could get a tank? Then I guess we'll have a tank!

And wait, there's a parade going on? Let's put that in too!

This gloriously half-assed approach to filmmaking -- not worrying whether anything is good or bad, but merely plowing ahead with enthusiasm and conviction, using whatever resources are at hand -- is one of those things not everyone can embrace. And that's fine! We gather that quite a few people find Twister's Revenge an excruciating experience, but not us: we've enjoyed everything we've seen by Rebane so far, and this perhaps most of all.

If any one actor deserves credit for the infectious charm of Twister's Revenge, it's R. Richardson Luka as Bear, a good-natured, rubber-faced lummox who seems devoid of malice, but still agreeably goes along with his friends' plans. There's something intrinsically likeable about him, and surely without Bear the movie wouldn't be remotely as fun.

We took a break from the 250-pack to watch Twister's Revenge on Mill Creek's Drive-In Movie Classics 50-pack. Unfortunately long stretches of Mill Creek's transfer suffer from weird audio dropouts that sound a bit like a CD struggling to track properly. It's not intolerable, and thankfully the sound doesn't drift out of sync, but it's a shame that an otherwise OK transfer is marred by this annoying defect.

As for the film's unanswered question, well, this is a bit of a stretch. But the above woman in the yellow dress -- Bear's main squeeze -- is terror-struck when Twister attacks her home (and outhouse) in an effort to seek revenge for Sherry's abduction.

So naturally, she runs...and runs...and runs, all to the tune of a silent-era-style piano accompaniment (which is sped up, as is the footage, with obvious and perhaps tasteless comic intent). She runs through fields, meadows, parking lots, and even makes a pit stop at Arby's:

And for the movie's very last shot, instead of showing us the happy protagonists, a triumphant Twister, or even Bear, we get this hapless woman sprinting through Wisconsin snow in the dead of winter, still only barely clothed:

That's right -- even though Twister's gotten his titular revenge and everything's been set to rights, she's still running. The poor thing.

And hence, the unanswered question: did she ever stop?

("Some say she's still running to this day," intoned the camp counselor.)

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Grave of the Vampire (1972)

Grade: C-

No one is apt to accuse Grave of the Vampire of being an unmemorable film. In fact it's one of the few on this box set that we can truthfully say has had a handful of genuinely disturbing images -- though it wasn't the 7+ onscreen murders (some of them quite brutal), but rather the film's penchant for blood play, that had us twitching in our seats.

And the screenshot above, of blood dripping on an infant's face (in case you hoped it was just cranberry sauce)? That tasty treat, we'll have you know, comes courtesy of Mom, who just wants to feed her sweet baby James as best she can. Mmm, Thanksgiving.

However, memorable imagery can't rescue Grave of the Vampire from an unexpected, disastrous left turn -- whether the result of budgetary limitations, or simply misguided ambitions, we don't know. But after spending nearly half its running time in the late 1930s, the movie suddenly drops a ton of voiceover exposition on us, and teleports forward three decades' time --

-- whereupon little James Eastman is now a strapping full-grown man, played by William Smith, who manages to look remarkably ill-at-ease in nearly every one of his scenes.

Now, if the cause of his discomfort were overtly spelled out -- say, if he were Native American (as he sort of appears to be) in a WASP environment, or clearly marked as working-class at an affluent college -- then we might have an interesting fish-out-of-water subtext going on.

But instead, he just seems incredibly, weirdly uncomfortable with the whole thing, for reasons only known to Mr. Smith and his otherwise-storied career.

Of course, it's always weird to begin with, going to night school...

...but it's doubly weird when you're planning to kill your professor (Michael Pataki). And he's a vampire. And a rapist. And, uh, your dad -- he's that too. That's right, your dad is Professor Rapist Vampire, Ph.D.

For some reason, Eastman doesn't fast-track his patricidal ambitions, but seems content to hover around until a sufficient threshold of murders has been reached. Meanwhile father and son are both attracted to Anne (Lynn Peters, in her last film role), an "instructor in English literature", who to the film's credit is an approximately age-appropriate pairing for both of them (i.e. not a 21-year-old ingenue).

The first and second acts of Grave of the Vampire feel spliced together from two completely different films, but we held out some hope that the third act would, somehow, bring its narrative arc to a convincing conclusion.

No such luck, as the movie's concluding minutes feel just as uncertain and cobbled-together as the rest of it. Characters are brutally murdered, and their friends seem wholly unfazed; the protagonist continues to hang out with his dad for no discernible purpose; and when things finally erupt into overt violence, while we were pleased to see some eye-gouging (always an underutilized resource), there's still no sense of rhyme or reason to any of it.

That said, we'd love to be able to show you the movie's penultimate shot, as it's another memorable (and absurd) image that epitomizes our theme of breaking the fourth wall. But, it'd also be one hell of a spoiler. So, sorry, kids, you'll have to watch this one for yourselves.

We will, however, show you the haunting question that follows that shot, and concludes the film:

Uh, okay. Shades of "Tabled, this motion is" -- or, perhaps more appropriately, "Break me a fucking give."