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horror film fests in SF in June

here I'll post a few of my reviews from the Karloff festival. SPOILERS throughout.

Karloff in Bava's The Wurdalak (1963)

Great colors and lighting, very moody & atmospheric with cobwebs and fog and castles and woods. Apt rendition of the vampire tale within the family, of fratricidal terrorism, featuring spooky makeup and a couple of bona fide gory moments.

This 40 minute segment of Bava's horror omnibus Black Sabbath features Karloff as the baron patriarch of a feudal mansion who returns to his family after having gone out to hunt an Arab vampire.

He brings the head back, but not before the 5 day deadline he gave his sons & daughters upon which to kill him as vampire should he return. What follows is clever & creepy as everyone dancers around the issue and Karloff, a leering corpse bent on blood, gets what he wants.

A couple of scenes seem possibly to be where Stephen King & Tobe Hooper drew inspiration for the terrible floating child vampires of Salem's Lot's windows


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Karloff's "The Old Dark House" (1932)

"The Old Dark House" (1932) was Karloff's first movie after Frankenstein, and he was top billed for it, including a disclaimer before the credits that assures the audience that it really is Karloff under the makeup. But it was kind of misleading to top bill Karloff because his mute-psycho scarface drunken butler role is limited to a few key scenes in an ensemble cast. The film has a lot of little typical fast talking B-genre comedy & drama bits too, which maybe isnt the sheer horror Karloff fans wanted.

The story is an archtypical one of travellers caught out on a dark & stormy night who seek refuge in a gloomy mansion where things are off kilter in almost every way, like a game of Clue. The travelers are urbanites out of place in the remote, odd circumstances. the scary secret of the mansion is progressively hinted at but when you finally see at the very end isn't really that scary, more anticlimactic. I could see how people would have felt ripped off with this follow up, but it is entertaining in its own way to be sure. The special effects at the beginning when the people are driving through floods and avalanches, before they find the mansion, and the shots of the mansion as they approach, are moody and impressive.
 
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Karloff's "The Black Room" (1935)

This story (from a Hungarian legend) concerns a noble family into which a pair of twin brothers is born in the late 18th century-- a terrible omen for, the patriarch says, the family was founded when one of twin brothers murdered the other, and legend portends that so too will the family end, with the murder of the twin in the Black Room of the castle. To thwart the prophecy, the Black Room is bricked off and later, at the death of the patriarch, one of the twins leaves the country altogether.

So the stage is set for the return of good twin Karloff to meet his nefarious brother Karloff in the Black Room (1935), an early 19-th century period piece that uses loads of hokey theatrical camera staging and conspicuous placement of objects in the foreground to allow Karloff to play his own brother to a variety of stand -ins. However in several striking shots Karloff actually acts against himself thanks to pioneering special effects work.

It's very amusing to see Karloff play the jekle/hydish; the good brother is a simpering twit, the bad is the very personage of deviously evil east european mountain tepes-scented overlord, who only invited his brother back to castle because he had tormented the townspeople to breaking point and needed to assume his naive brother's identity! Meaning that Karloff plays 3 roles in this movie: his own twin brothers, plus one impersonating the other!

The pre-industrial lidded pit in the opaque hidden black room, into which the evil family patriarchs have cast their enemies for untold generations, is framed in a few particularly terrifying shots from the bottom up, so that you can just see the head of the person peering over-- as if you the viewer are laying there broken in the pile of corpses-- awesome. When Karloff's good brother ends up at the bottom of it-- in seeming opposition to the prophecy-- you can only figure he deserves it for being so unbelievably gullible.

Later, I could have told that evil Karloff he better toss Lassie down the well-- what a dumbass! of course that damn dog was going to find him out & expose him! And who was he kidding that he was going to be able to pretend his right arm was paralyzed for the rest of his life? But that's part of the genius here, portraying that criminal mind which in desperations born of standing in front of corpses in alcoves in the night psychotically believes it is going to get away with it.

all in all a great horror Karloff twist that feels a little bit Poe and a little bit Dumas
 
The Lost Patrol (1934) & The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) are rare precode racially honkified Boris Karloff features. The Balboa owner/usher explained it was one of only 2 known 35mm prints extant (on loan from Harvard for the festival) of John Ford's Lost Patrol.

Lost Patrol concerns WWI soldiers on horseback in the desert. It opens with the leftenent being sniped off by wily Arabs-- taking the mission details to the grave with him, says his replacement, who has no idea where they are or what they were doing or where they should go. After wandering in the desert thirstily they come upon an actual palm tree oasis (actually Arizona) with an ancient Arab dwelling and refreshing well. That night the new boss puts the Kid on point with the Old Colonel to guard the horses. Bad move-- next morning the Kids dead, the Colonels barely breathing, and all the horses are gone. They send Short Guy up one of the palm trees to try to get a look around and he's promptly picked off. They draw straws and send 2 guys out to try to find the brigade on foot. Meanwhile the whole time Boris Karloff is a religious nutcase who, under the circumstances becomes extremely fanatical, hamboning it up as dudes continue to be picked off by those wily Arabs who swarm like flies and disappear in the sand. Very Alamo Bravo Precinct 13.

At night they see 2 horses coming full speed and they shoot them down-- the 2 guys they sent out earlier it turns out, captured by Arabs & tortured.

Then a British biplane swoops over and notices them, but lands nearby and the dude gets out wearing his scarf asking about jolly old teatime and gets wasted immediately by the unseen Arabs.

Last dudes left tie up Karloff cause he's gone bug eatin mad. Then they debate tryin to fly the plane which neither of them knows how to do. So instead they sneak out and steal the machine gun off the plane and light the plane on fire. Karloff escapes, dresses like Jesus, carrying a cross and everything, walking out into the desert, which for no good reason the one dude tries to stop him and they both get wasted, leaving just the one dude left. That dude starts doing all kinds of Rambo Scarface poses with the machine gun, but then digs his own grave and gets in it with his guns. Some Arabs sneak over the dune and he watches them from his grave. He lets a few more come on over the rise. Then he wastes them all with the airplane gun! Even when one last Arab sneaks up on him and tries to quick draw him, he gets him. And then the brigade shows up finally, having seen the airplane fire.

Mask Of Fu Manchu was even worse, a very pre-Dr Phibes ish version of "coolie madman" aspiring to Kim Jong Illishness by seeking Ghengis Kahns grave & magic sword & mask. Somehow, whitey found the grave first, so Fu Manchu (Karloff with enormous moustache and accent) kidnaps and tortures and tricks them one by one to get the power. John Carpenter shows here again (Big Trouble), especially the wild lightning FX and big white girl sacraficial ending. But even JC didn't have Kurt Russell use a nuclear looking death ray (13 years before Hiroshima) on the assembled hundreds of Mongol Lords!
 
Karloff & Lugosi in The Raven (1935)

Supposedly, big-star Karloff hated working on this low-budget penny dreadful production-- when one of the underling co-stars came on set first day & asked Karloff where the bathroom was, he told him "this whole set is a toilet!" But absurd & illogical as it may be, it's Shakespeare compared to modern re-approximations of its archtypical boobytrapped house of horrors schtick. This movie was a revelation to me as plainly the inspiration for numerous Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, & Mel Brooks routines.

SPOILERS

Lugosi is the retired, genius Doctor--let's call him, Dracula--who the Judge turns to when his dancer daughter is left in a coma after a car wreck and none of the other Docs--including her fiancee--can save her. The Judge has to make a personal call on Dracula to plea for him to come out of retirement & take the case, and appeals to Drac's ego by telling him how he is the only one who can do the job. Drac does save the girl, but falls in love with her too, especially when she thanks him by performing a ballet based on Poe's The Raven, which Dracula is fascinated by Poe and even has a secret collection of Poe-inspired torture devices in his hidden basement behind the revolving-library-panel.

The Judge tells Drac to cool out on his girl & Drac flips a lid about it. He takes in a fugitive killer (Karloff) who wants plastic surgery to make a getaway, but tricks him by instead making him very Frankenstein hideous. Drac then tells Frank he'll make him pretty again if he helps him exact revenge against those who have thwarted his amorous desires. Hilarity ensues as Dracula lures the Judge, his daughter & fiancee, & assorted supporting cast to his mansion for a weekend of fun involving lightning, crashing trees, secret trapdoors, drugs, and of course, Poe-inspired tortures. Dracula meets his in end in a scene later stolen by George Lucas for the Death Star trash compactor, but not before mortally wounding Frankenstein, who saved the day because of his own love at first sight for the Judge's daughter.

A fine smorgasboard of lurid classic camp. I would have called it Dracula vs. Frankenstein in Poe's House of Horrors, though.
 
Boris Karloff in Howard Hawk's The Criminal Code (1931)

This fine prison noir was Boris Karloff's big break in Hollywood. He got the job after the producers saw him playing the character in a stage adaptation, and though his role is minor, it is critical to the plot and he resolved to show the movie bosses what he could do with it. Indeed his turn as menacing prisoner bent on revenge rivals an equally star turn by Walter Huston (patriarch grandfather of Angelica et. al., perhaps best remembered opposite bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre) as DA/prison warden.

Karloff did impress with his singleminded sense of purpose, and in his way turned out to be the hero. Months later, he became world famous "overnight" as FRANKENSTEIN.
 
Karloff's The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

Karloff in misunderstood-scientist mode as a doctor who tests his new artifical heart machine on a willing med student. Unfortunately, the Doc's nurse is also the med student's girlfriend and she is not happy that he will be "medically killed" before being revived with the mechanical dingus-- so she runs off and gets the cops, who stop Karloff's experiment before he can revive the student!

Karloff is then tried & convicted of murder and hanged. But, he has cleverly arranged for his assistant to claim his body and bring him back to life using his new methods!

Once revived, Karloff goes about exacting his revenge on all who have done him wrong, culminating in another "Old Dark House"/"Raven" ish finale with assorted jurors & prosecutors trapped in a house rigged to kill them all one by one in various exciting ways.

A neat movie that is way ahead of its time in terms of what we are doing these days with donor organs and the like!
 
Filming The Ghoul (1933) was Karloff's first trip back to England since coming to the New World to make his fortune. He was being sent back to star in the first British Talkie Horror movie as the big American Frankenstein star, before doing Bride of Frankenstein. But Star is too strong a word because Karloff is really only in the beginning and end of the movie.

The cinematographer on this movie was the same guy who did Nosferatu and it shows, but I agree with criticisms of the first-time director's pacing. The story is slightly too clever in its attempt to evoke noir mystery plotting, although the ensemble hip fast talking cast is good old days enough. Lots of characters with character. A real thrill a minute all the way to the archtypical big explosion ending.

Karloff is most effective in the beginning as the dying Egyptologist with plans for immortality. His conniving clubfoot manservant is also a treat to watch. Later, risen from the dead, Karloff's makeup (German FX) is not so great--cheifly sporting a dangerous unibrow-- and he doesn't seem to know what he is doing, or we don't know what's going on-- is he full of deadly powers now? is he a mindless zombie? is he going to strangle people, like the wolfman? By the end of it we're fully fu-manchu territory-- the "priest" 's trick, oh brother.

Favorite Line: when the heiress' flatmate chances upon Karloff's taxidermy: "What a pretty pussy. Oh no! It's stuffed!"
 
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