Breath, advocate, food cake

If you're confused by this post's theme, then go to hell -- since that's where all three of these films can be found, at least in the genitive case.

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Devil's Partner (1958/1961)

Grade: C-

For a film that opens with an old man sacrificing a goat and selling his soul to Satan, there's something awfully coy about Devil's Partner. For example, why does he draw a hexagon, rather than the usual pentagram? Why is the term of the agreement two years?

And why does the Devil apparently sign under the name "Jezzer Hora"? Is that his MC name or something?

It's never really clear what either party is getting out of this arrangement. In his new guise as "Nick Richards", Jenson's actions seem haphazard and self-serving, and it's hard to see how managing a gas station in Furnace Flats, NM (pop. 1505) will serve an infernal agenda. He doesn't work to corrupt anyone's soul or cause widespread mayhem; he just wants to win a pretty girl's heart, keep people from sniffing around his origins, and make devilish references to his true nature.

From all appearances, the scriptwriters simply couldn't decide whether the Richards character should be the Devil in Jenson's newly rejuvenated body, or just a mean old man who uses his second lease on life to try to screw his neighbor's daughter. He clearly has some demonic powers, but -- like a cat hoarder's interactions with the outside world -- they mostly seem to revolve around animal control.

At one point he says outright "Well, I'm really the Devil," but none of his other actions corroborate that. And if Jenson/Richards is merely an aide to Asmodeus, this still seems like a pretty terrible business arrangement for the Evil One.

Without a coherent plot, Devil's Partner is left to depend on the charisma of its lead -- which, in truth, is considerable: Ed Nelson has a brooding, smirking intensity that makes it easy to believe he'd both attract and unsettle the residents of Furnace Flats.

But a movie needs more than charisma and a handful of effective set-pieces to succeed, and ultimately Devil's Partner is undone by its reluctance to commit to a clear vision of its own plot. One can only guess that the screenwriters were afraid of alienating Bible Belt audiences by explicitly using Satan as a protagonist, and so hedged their bets, substituting hexagons for pentagrams and "Jezzer Hora" for "Beelzy Bubba".

If you're willing to sacrifice goats in your film, though, why settle for half-measures?

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The Devil's Daughter [aka Pocomania] (1939)

Grade: C-

If it's a "SACK" attraction, you know it must be good, right?

But sadly, The Devil's Daughter really isn't a good film. Stiffly acted and scripted, and saddled with a hackneyed plot about love triangles, sibling rivalry, and obeah, it's a movie whose theatrical merits wouldn't pass muster at a regional summer stock production. To give it a free pass for these things, simply because it has an all-black cast, would strike us as condescending at best.

That said, The Devil's Daughter has multiple saving graces -- namely that it's short (clocking in at well under an hour), entertaining, and full of engaging imagery and sounds.

(These things are hardly a given: soon enough in the Umbrellahead Review, we'll see an example of an early African-American film with none of those redeeming qualities.)

It's by no means an unpleasant film to watch, and the corny performances are, if anything, a source of amusement.

The one actor who comes off well here is Hamtree Harrington, an experienced vaudevillian who serves as the film's comic relief. He's broad, but relatively polished, and it's interesting to see how a character of this type is portrayed in a film intended for black audiences.

It also doesn't hurt that his love interest, Elvira (Willa Mae Lane), is kinda foxy -- certainly more so than the two female leads, anyway. (The male leads aren't any great shakes either.)

Ms. Lane also acquits herself well in the acting department, but doesn't appear to have had any other roles; too bad.

The Devil's Daughter is no masterpiece, but it's no Chloe, Love is Calling You either. With appropriately modest expectations, it's worth experiencing both as a time capsule and as 50 minutes of light entertainment. Believe us, it could be much worse -- and it'll help you remember "obeah" during those tight Boggle matches.

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The Devil's Messenger (1961)

Grade: D

At this stage of his career, it's hard not to feel faintly embarrassed for Lon Chaney, Jr., no matter what role he's in. Still, playing the Lord of the Underworld would seem a perfect fit for the veteran actor -- but turns out to be an unexpected bit of miscasting.

With Rolodex in hand and smiles aplenty, LCJ's Satan is neither saturnine nor diabolical. Instead, he comes off more like a kindly uncle, or at worst, like the washed-up alcoholic who holds court daily at your local bar, telling tall tales of his past, ever-genial but clearly beyond redemption.

...and hey, that's pretty much what he was. Zing!

Anyway, Chaney's role in The Devil's Messenger is simply to provide a framing story for three episodes of a Swedish TV series, 13 Demon Street, a horror anthology that seems to have basically been Der Tvilight Zøn in all but name. It's a recycle job, in other words, like Alien Zone and other "movies" we've seen through the years.

And the frame is pretty horrific in its stupidity, revolving around a young suicide named "Satanya" (no, we're not kidding) who delivers cursed objects to unsuspecting Earthlings, somehow justifying the set's title. Even by our steadily lowering standards, it's stupid and half-assed. 

Fortunately 13 Demon Street seems to have been a serviceable if uninspired affair, and the three featured stories are no worse than a third-rate episode of Rod Serling's brainchild.

The first, involving a brutish photographer with a guilty conscience, is probably the least rewarding of the bunch, since the plot is utterly predictable and the protagonist impossible to care about.

The second segment, telling the tale of a scientist who falls in love with a woman preserved in glacial ice, is actually dumber. But at least we were distracted by trying to figure out who the lead actor reminded us of, beyond a vague hint of Abe Vigoda. (Maybe it was just the Pakistani guy that P. went to college with?)

It was no strain to "place" the protagonist of the next story, though, given his striking resemblance to René Auberjonois (of Benson and Deep Space Nine fame) -- maybe with a dash of Bashar al-Assad thrown in there too.

This third and final tale was by far the best, depicting the inexorable meeting of a man haunted by a recurring dream and a fortuneteller who serenely conveys the will of fate. Predictable, but capably acted and directed, its plot and story arc wouldn't have been at all out of place on TZ, though the last five minutes dragged a bit.

Unfortunately, this segment is also the only one that gets shoehorned back into the framing story, squandering whatever goodwill it had earned. It turns out that our protagonist is also Satanya's ex-boyfriend, and so when he dies...yeah, it's stupid.

Never fear, though, as the Lord of the Files [sic!] comes through with a last-minute turn to the bizarre: Satanya's next mission is to deliver a formula that will allow humanity to build a 500-megaton nuclear weapon! I see we're ramping things up a bit, Mr. Lucifer -- that's 10 times larger than the biggest detonation in history. 

Gratuitously super-sized nukes aside, The Devil's Messenger has no real attraction beyond the unexpected competency of its third act. The audio quality of Mill Creek's print is quite horrific, by the way, with the kind of distortion that sounds more like a bad connection than an overmodulated signal.

Oh, and at one point, this happened:

Admittedly, it was only for a split second, but still: way to go, Mill Creek Quality Control! (That's a phrase right up there with "The Lance Armstrong Sportsmanship Award" and "The Buddy Rich School of Diplomacy".)

If you're trapped in ice for thousands of years with nothing else to do, you can watch The Devil's Messenger, I suppose. Just don't blame us if, thanks to propinquity, you end up getting a crush on the glacier girl. And hey, you could do worse: we hear she's a real doll.

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.