A Rose for Natalie Perrey (1929-2012)

We are now already nearly four months into 2012 and much of my past year has been spent in deep contemplation of -- one might say in communion with -- the late Jean Rollin. In the course of studying, enjoying and empathizing with his films, I have come to a better appreciation of the fact that his films, however personal they were, were not simply the work of one man, but of a special group of people who were somehow consecrated to his dreams, who encircled him like the participants in a great séànce and helped conjure his fantasies into being on celluloid.

Foremost among these remarkable people was the lovely lady pictured at the left, Natalie Perrey, who passed away sometime today of undisclosed causes, just one month after her 83rd birthday. The news reached me like a ripple in the pond of communication: I was informed by her friend Daniel Gouyette, who had known and adored Natalie since they worked together on DRACULA'S FIANCÉE (1999); he received the news from titles designer Jean-Noël Delamarre, a ripple nearer the center, who had worked on films with her even before Rollin entered their mutual picture, since the short film BARTLEBY (1970). He was "Nat"'s companion for many years.

Writing about Rollin has pulled me closer into the orbits of these people, close enough that I can feel a sense of personal loss. Thanks to Daniel, Natalie and I were able to exchange little salutations of mutual appreciation, like this sweet photo of the two of them, which Daniel sent after they read my Rollin essay for the booklet included with the first round of Redemption Blu-rays. (Look closely and you will see in Daniel's hand Natalie's keepsake of Rollin, the Iron Rose itself.) Or the photo further down, which shows Natalie and Daniel posing with the then-current issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG. These were dear to receive then, and they are all the more precious now.

Daniel and I spoke on the telephone last week and he finished our long talk by urging me to come to Paris "while it's still here -- not while you're still here," he clarified, "but while this Paris is still here." I knew what he meant and, already, much too suddenly, that Paris is no more. A diminished Paris now stands in its place because this lady is gone. I am not just speaking of someone who worked on some horror movies, but of a great facilitator of the art of her time, someone who was a member of the French Resistance at the age of 12, someone who spent the two weeks prior to her last birthday in a hospital because she was mugged and fought back. As Daniel told me while relaying the incomprehensible news of her passing, "She fought against injustices all her life. She was so different from the people who were just hanging around... She was special." He also stresses to me that she wasn't to be mourned; she wouldn't want that. So I am thinking of all the news she has to share with Jean.

Daniel's interviews with Natalie can be found on the Redemption Blu-rays of THE NUDE VAMPIRE, THE IRON ROSE and LIPS OF BLOOD, and she will be back with more stories to tell in the next batch.

Natalie began working in films in the late 1960s, after raising a family. (The French actress Cyrille Gaudin, who played the title role in DRACULA'S FIANCÉE under the name Cyrille Isté, is her daughter.) She started out as a costumer on Jean-Pierre Bastid's Hallucinations Sadiques (1969), moved up to script supervisor on Bastid's short BARTLEBY and then served as a production assistant on Rollin's THE NUDE VAMPIRE, in the course of which she was recruited to act. An attractive woman of 40, she was asked to play a little old woman in the film's penultimate scene, and was somehow able to then inhabit a role she would still be playing in Rollin's La Nuit des Horloges almost a half-century later. She worked with many different directors -- Bastid of course, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-François Davy, Pierre Unia, Gérard Vernier, Claude Mulot and others -- but her devotion to Rollin was unique.

She was a production assistant on THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, then she advanced to script supervisor and assistant director on many other films while also playing important, typically maternal roles. She is the woman who lays flowers on the grave of the two lovers in THE IRON ROSE, the protagonist's mother in LIPS OF BLOOD, the mother in NIGHT OF THE HUNTED, the schoolteacher in THE TWO VAMPIRE ORPHANS, the sorceress in DRACULA'S FIANCÉE, and she is one of the principal characters in La Nuit des Horloges, serving as a kind of pallbearer for Rollin himself. The IMDb lists 21 different acting roles under her name, and it is by no means a complete list. And in addition to playing these roles, she was assisting with costumes, securing locations, organizing the shoots, distracting graveyard attendants with bottles of wine. She was the perfect example of the kind of person who seldom receives acknowledgement from writers and historians, but without whom the movies could not exist -- because dreamers can't do much of anything by themselves. Those of us who love Rollin's films feel indebted to him, but he surely felt indebted to her. She was the backbone and sometimes the very sinew of his filmography.

Natalie's most visible accomplishments were not necessarily her most notable. She also had two original screenplays produced, both erotic in nature: Rollin's FLY ME THE FRENCH WAY with Joëlle Coeur, and Didier Philippe Gérard's s Les Hôstesses du sexe with Karine Gambier. In 1977, she became a film editor with Jean-Pierre Mocky's Le roi des bricoleurs and she continued to work in this capacity until her final editorial job in 2007.

What Natalie Perrey's passing brings to mind is that what was true of the places in Rollin's films at the time he made them -- that they belonged to the past, being torn down in some cases almost as soon as he filmed them -- is becoming true of the people and faces in them. To think of Natalie speaking to camera about the absent director in La Nuit des Horloges will doubtless become doubly poignant now that she shares his mysterious absence. With her death, Rollin's life's work takes its intended next step away from the status of fantasy toward becoming not so indistinguishable from the former realities that reside in our memory. Like a bubble within a bubble, or as Edgar Allan Poe described it, while writing about a beach we might now call "Rollinesque"...

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

In order of their appearance, the above photographs are the copyrighted property of Grégory Pons, Véronique D. Travers, Véronique D. Travers and Daniel Gouyette, and appear here with their kind permission.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #167

For more details and select preview pages, visit our Coming Soon page here.

VW Rondo Nominated Articles Now Online for Free Viewing!

To all those who are voting for the 2011 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards...

We'd like to encourage you to vote for VIDEO WATCHDOG's nominees in the Best Article, Best Interview and Best Cover categories. To help you make a more informed judgment, we are making our nominees visible online until the Rondo voting ends, at 12:00am midnight on April 1. You can find links to the pertinent pieces by following this link.

The articles are presented the way they look in the magazine, only one page at a time, and should be readable on all computers, iPads, Kindles, etc. without the use of Flash.

If you've already voted, bear in mind that you are allowed to reconsider your votes in any category until the close of voting. These special links will remain available till the voting ends, so enjoy... and feel free to spread the word.

Remembering David Jones (1945-2012)

This picture of actor/musician David Jones and I -- "my two favorite guys" -- was taken by Donna backstage at the Monkees concert here at Cincinnati's Aronoff Center last June 25. The news of his passing this morning hit me very personally because I've always known that I might someday have to break this news to Donna, who's loved him since 1966. She's hurting, of course, but she is taking it well and feeling fortunate for all the times we were able to meet him. She didn't expect that he, the youngest of the group and seemingly the one in most robust health (he was a horseman who rode every opportunity he had), would be the first of the Monkees to go.

We first met at a 1994 performance of GREASE in which he appeared with Brooke Shields and Sally Struthers; I pointed him out to Donna, talking with some audience members near the stage before the show began, and I watched her go down and have her long dreamed-of moment with him. I saw her speak to him, get his attention, and she said something to him that made him step forward and envelop her in his arms like it was absolutely the right thing he needed to hear at that moment. Then he walked her back up the aisle to our seats -- "you walked me down the aisle, and he walked me up the aisle" she likes to say -- and we met and he gave Donna a pre-signed photo he carried in his breast pocket and said he hoped we would enjoy the show. We did.

Since then we've met again several times, and Donna interviewed him by telephone for THE CINCINNATI POST, a dream assignment offered to her by our friends Wayne and Jan Perry. As Donna told me, a sudden heart attack was the best way for him to go -- he went in his sleep, suffered no inconveniences of old age nor long debilitating illnesses, and he continued performing and meeting his public right up to the end. I know that he had remarried to Jessica, a very young Cuban flamenco dancer, just a few years ago; he'd written and published his autobiography; he had seen his back catalogue of music with The Monkees reissued in impressively thorough and annotated sets from Rhino (thank you, Andrew Sandoval); and he was working toward a dream of building a combination theater and memorabilia museum in his adopted home town of Beavertown, PA.

Davy was incontestably the heart and soul of The Monkees, though one might argue that Micky had the more versatile voice, that Peter was the best musician, or that Mike the best songwriter. He's the one they can't do Monkees reunions without. No one is saying this yet, because it's hard enough just to lose him, but I suspect that David's passing will mean probably the end of The Monkees as well. Mike's not going back on the road in that format, and Peter and Micky as a performing duo would seem like bookends without a book. Of course, they'll all continue to play Monkees songs live, as will young and old garage bands all over the world.

There are several pics I've taken of Donna over the years with her beloved idol, including the one below, but the one I've posted above is the only one of the two of us together. We gave him a copy of our HEAD coverage on that occasion, and he signed my copy of Rhino's magnificent HEAD box set. In my experience, David -- as he referred to himself and as was his prefered billing -- was a very nice man, the most generous of all the Monkees to his fans, always the last man standing there to sign autographs. God bless him for always going that extra mile, and for making my little wife's spirit soar for all these years.

Franco's Muse: Lina Romay (1954-2012)

Tragic news has emerged today from Spain, where actor Antonio Mayans -- her co-star in dozens of films -- formally announced the February 15 death of Lina Romay, the actress and filmmaker best-known as the wife and longtime creative partner of Spanish director Jesús "Jess" Franco. A cancer victim, she was only 57 years old.

Born Rosa María Almirall Martínez in June 1954, Lina Romay -- renamed after the retired former singer with Xavier Cugat's band, who died a couple of years ago -- entered the world of cinema in a brief appearance in Jess Franco's film THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN (1972) as a gypsy girl, which appears in only the Spanish variant of the picture. She came to Franco's attention as the art student girlfriend of his stills photographer Ramón Ardid, but it soon became apparent to both Jess and Lina that they were personally and creatively inseparable. Their attraction ended Franco's marriage to his script girl Nicole Guettard, who disappeared from his filmography circa 1974, returned briefly circa 1980, and died in 1996. For Franco's part, having found it difficult to reassemble himself following the 1970 accidental death of his most promising actress Soledad Miranda, he claimed to sense a reincarnation of Soledad in Lina, and she -- who never met her predecessor -- claimed to sense her presence watching over them at times, as if from within.

Her first starring role for Franco was 1973's FEMALE VAMPIRE, which exists in no fewer than three distinct variants: mainstream, erotic and hardcore. A self-proclaimed exhibitionist, Lina had no problem with performing hardcore straight or lesbian acts onscreen, and she was adamant offscreen that these were things she did in character, not as herself. The IMDb lists 118 different films to her credit, but this is hardly a complete accounting. Her filmography swells to a still larger number if we take into account the variants that exist of numerous Franco films; she also worked on rare occasions for other directors, including Carlos Aured, Erwin C. Dietrich and Andreas Bethmann. During the 1980s period when she and Franco were earning their incomes from pornographic films, she sometimes worked under the secondary pseudonyms Candy (or Candice) Coster and Lulu Laverne, accepting directorial credit for some of them.

No other woman gave quite as much of herself to the fantastic cinema as Lina Romay. The sprawling filmography of Jess Franco can be divided, unevenly and much in her favor, between the films he made Before Lina and With Lina; she became so synonymous with his work, as its focus and behind-the-scenes facilitator, that an After Lina period seems frankly unimaginable. As Franco's muse, Lina inspired as many as 150 or more films, and in many of them she withheld nothing of herself from his voracious camera -- body or soul. Theirs was an ideal meeting of exhibitionist and voyeur, both giving generously to one another in one of cinema's most provocative love stories. As the years passed, Lina changed and her body changed, but it never mattered to Franco, who continued to star her and film her as if she were the most desirable woman on earth. This is not to say that Franco's adoration of her was blind; on the contrary, Lina became a skilled actress under his tutelage, acquitting herself admirably not only as vampire women and nymphomaniacs, but in roles requiring the deft touch of a light comedienne. She could carry a film without dialogue; she could be funny, tragic, insanely desirable, shocking, even embarrassing in ways that left one admiring her bravery. On the two occasions when she ended a film by screaming -- LORNA... THE EXORCIST (1974) and MACUMBA SEXUAL (1980) -- she showed she could chill the blood like no one else, on the strength of her performance alone.

In Brian Horrorwitz's ANTENA CRIMINAL, a documentary about the filming of BLIND TARGET (2000, one of their lesser pictures), a candid illustration of their 40-year union emerges as Franco loses his temper when a scene continually goes wrong. He scolds a young actress and upsets himself to the point where he had to leave the set and sit down for a smoke in another room. Horrorwitz's camera holds on his attempt to recompose himself, and we see Lina find him, lean into him and stroke his head calmingly. It is the most privileged glimpse of their private selves we have, unless we count Lina's unbilled presence on the evening in February 2009 when Franco's career was rewarded with the Goya Award. During this presentation, Lina wheeled her husband onstage to generous applause, held his microphone as he accepted the honor, and bowed to kiss his head. The moment becomes even more poignant if we realize that, though they had been lovers and collaborators for 35 years, on the evening of this life achievement recognition they were technically newlyweds.

I never met Lina, but I always imagined we would meet someday. It is unthinkable to me that Jess, now in his early 80s, has survived her. On the occasions I've written to him, it was Lina who responded to me on his behalf, and she was always very sweet and appreciative. I last heard from her on April 28 of last year, when she and Jess responded to my enthusiastic VIDEO WATCHDOG review of Mondo Macabro's LORNA... THE EXORCIST: "Dear Tim, We are very much touched by your opinion of Lorna. Not a lot of people understood the film ("another Jess Franco sex film"). Thank you. Take care, Jess & Lina."

Those who admire the work of Jess Franco cannot help but become deeply involved in it, which means that, in the course of our exploration, we end up seeing more of Lina than we see of any other actress -- seeing more of her, and seeing more OF her -- so the news of her premature death strikes us in an uncommonly personal place. As the incarnate center of a filmography I take very personally, I had and will always have a great affection for her. Anything I have ever heard or learned about her -- including the only extensive interview she ever granted, to Kevin Collins for his booklet THE LINA ROMAY FILE: THE INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF AN EXHIBITIONIST -- only confirmed what her work onscreen led me to suspect. I remember Kevin telling me that, at the time he recorded the interview, he asked Lina to sign something and she responded "Me?" She had starred in at least 100 films and no one before Kevin had ever asked Lina Romay for her autograph. This changed as she and Jess subsequently flew to different points around the world, including America, to make various convention appearances.

Jess Franco and Lina Romay were more than a team; they were an indivisible creative force for roughly 40 years. My heart goes out to my favorite living director at this time of most terrible loss -- to him, to me, to us, to cinema.

VIDEO WATCHDOG Nominated for 8 Rondo Awards!

The ballots for the 10th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards were made public tonight, and we're proud to announce that VIDEO WATCHDOG and its contributors have been nominated for eight (8) Rondo Awards in five (5) different categories this year! Our nominations are...

Best Magazine of 2011

Best Article:

• 'The Green Slime Are Coming! The Green Slime Are Here!' by Bill Cooke, VIDEO WATCHDOG #162. An 'old school' Watchdog comparison of the film's U.S. and Japanese versions.

• 'Scouting the Singularity,' by Thomas A. Foster, VIDEO WATCHDOG #165. How dreams of a tech leap forward for mankind has been supplanted by films of apocalyptic hysteria.

Best Interview:

• Tanya Constantine: 'My Father, Eddie Constantine,' by Tim Lucas, VIDEO WATCHDOG #163. A daughter reveals the man behind Lemmy Caution in this wide-ranging talk.

• Mimsy Farmer: 'The Mimsy Farmer Experience,' by Mark F. Berry. VIDEO WATCHDOG #162. Extensive talk with star of dragstrip films, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and more.
• June Lockhart: 'On She-Wolf of London,' by Tom Weaver, VIDEO WATCHDOG #160. Actress looks back on one of her earliest roles with laughter and some chagrin.
Best Cover:

• VIDEO WATCHDOG 163 by Charlie Largent

Best Blog of 2011:

• Video WatchBlog   Scaled back, but Tim Lucas' musings are still worth the wait.

To see the lists of other nominees and to cast your vote by e-mail, including write-in votes for some of the most coveted categories, visit the Rondo Awards webpage here.

Anthony Fremont's Last Laugh

I'm not listing the episodic television I watch on my new Pause. Rewind. Obsess. blog, but I just finished enjoying my latest viewing of the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode "It's A Good Life" from Season 3, followed by a listen to Bill Mumy's fun commentary. I think it's the very best (and subtlest) of Rod Serling's many tyrant-themed TZ episodes, and I was especially pleased to be reminded of the brilliant end credits image, which Mumy himself failed to mention or notice. It's a shot of the much-mentioned cornfield we never see in the episode itself, which ends the program on the chilling note that, no matter how much we may have liked meeting little Anthony Fremont, he must have decided he didn't care for us very much... and wished us all away.

A New Year, A New Blog

Seeing that my screening diary, conceived as a new discipline, was coinciding with the arrival of a new year, it makes sense to me to spin it off as a new blog. Therefore, just a short time ago, I launched my newest project on Blogger, entitled PAUSE. REWIND. OBSESS. It's my new online screening diary.

Mind you, I'm not abandoning Video WatchBlog, just adding to it; anything I'm inspired to publish online outside the scope of the screening diary will appear here, as usual. I hope you will enjoy it and, if you do, please continue to support VIDEO WATCHDOG and its many fine products.

Happy New Year!

Screening Diary: Wolfie and Roughie

CAPERUCITA Y PULGARCITO CONTRO LOS MONSTRUOS ("Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb vs. the Monsters"): This is the original Spanish version of the film later imported to the US by K. Gordon Murray Productions as LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS, available for the first time with English subtitles. Following other LRRH sequels, this is both sequel to LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD and 1957's TOM THUMB, as it finds Wolfie (from LRRH) and the Ogre (from TT) imprisoned in the castle of the Witch Queen by their fellow monsters for turning good. (We see them taken to a torture chamber where their feet are tickled.) Red and a slingshot-happy Tom Thumb (restored to full size by the Morning Fairy, which brings out a latent macho swagger), along with lovable Stinky Skunk and a pet dog, coincidentally rescue them when they must go to the Witch's castle to undo the haunting of their village's local water source, which has turned all their townsfolk into monkeys! In addition to the green-skinned Queen out of SNOW WHITE via THE WIZARD OF OZ, the monsters include a Hurricane Fairy (like the one seen in Ptushko's THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON), Two-In-One (half-man, half-monster like the Manster), a robot called "the Alien", Mr. Vampire (dressed in a Carradine-like top hat and cape, with Christopher Lee fangs), Frankenstino, and a pinheaded Boogie Man (amusingly subtitled as "the bugger man"). Stinky actually combats one monster by bending over and gassing him from his posterior, and Tom sings a song boasting that he's so tiny, "even with a magnifying glass, you could not find my hiney." Not unlike a weird conflation of Bert Gordon's THE MAGIC SWORD and THE BOY AND THE PIRATES, with songs. The entertainment value speaks for itself. Viewed on DVD.

THE PICK-UP: Sloppily-made but ambitious and attention-grabbing, this obscure 1968 roughie from R. L. (Lee) Frost first aroused fan interest when an exciting, hard-hitting trailer was included on one of Something Weird's TWISTED SEX trailer compilations. It was considered lost till one last-known surviving print was discovered, with hard Danish subtitles, in an overseas film vault. Two pick-up men are driving over a million dollars in protection money from Vegas to a mob rep in LA, but plead car trouble in order to take in a motel party with two attractive ladies picked up along the way, raising concerns at both ends of their itinerary. A bad idea turns worse when the women handcuff them and abscond with the dough, but are they in it for themselves, or are they working for someone else? The mostly handheld B&W photography is unconcerned with composition, but there are occasional arty touches like cuts to still-photo montages during the more violent moments. The dialogue is no more than you'd expect, the acting barely acceptable, but the sleazy paperback plot is pleasingly elaborate and stocked with twists and plenty of back-stabbing characters, so it plays similarly to Bava's BAY OF BLOOD; even the silly finale is not tonally unlike the surprise postscript of Bava's film. This was anonymously co-produced by David L. Friedman, who actually plays a pivotal role and seems to enjoy his long career's only bed scene with a naked lady. The library cues scoring the film are well-chosen and amount to a distinctive, edgy score. Pretty much the missing link between the 1960s roughies and the more ambitious crime sleaze epitomized by the GINGER films of the early 1970s. Viewed on Something Weird DVD-R.

Last Night's Screening

ENTER THE VOID: I'm coming to this 2009 film a bit too belatedly, I feel; it's now very hard, if not impossible, to think of it as anything but a counterbalance to Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE. Though akin to toxic eye candy with its increasingly fluorescent necrotic imagery of a gargantuan toy Tokyo, I liked this film to the same extent I found Malick's alternately boring and aggravating, though the void of its title is less indicative of the void of death than of the void of a life devoid of substance and exposure to nature. It's a painful film to watch, but its use of rhyming images is exceptional in its depiction of how events imprint us psychologically; I was particularly impressed when one scene of Paz de la Huerta cutting up vegetables in the kitchen was used a second time to show how something secondary and previously unnoted within that moment had also left its own imprint on the observer. On the other hand, Hitchcock's ROPE-learned maxim that scenes must be cut to become cinema still holds water; it's the cuts or dissolves from one image to another that give this story its meaning. Otherwise, the death motifs and the plays on its title are preposterously foregrounded and the film wastes entirely too much time floating through walls and bouncing from one building to another for the sake of sustaining the main character and POV's spectral fluidity. In one of those intervals, I found myself wondering how this film would have looked had it been made about a late 19th century farmer. All of them died too. Viewed on Netflix.

What I'm Watching

Though I assume many working critics do, I've never personally kept a list of the films I watch. The FILM COMMENT column about "The Last 10 Films I Saw" always bewilders me: how do they know? do they keep a list? do they just make this stuff up? But it occurs to me now that the information might be useful to me at a later date, as when compiling year's best lists and such, but. I am also tempted to make this resolve because it is the time of year to make resolutions and, frankly, because I need the discipline.

In the time I've become more casual -- indeed, lax -- about this blog, the muscle I formerly used to maintain it has grown flabby and it has begun to affect my approach to writing adversely in other ways. I think it's necessary to embrace a minor commitment like this, if only to make it that much easier to embrace more significant writing commitments. The muscle needs to be ready and prepared. So I'll not only list the films but add some comments about them as well.

I caught a bug over the holidays and am still recovering. Yesterday I didn't feel like doing much other than watching movies, so I actually watched five.

CEREMONY: The first feature written and directed by Max Winkler, the son of actor Henry Winkler, this is a moderately surprising retread of one of the perennial chick flick situations: a former boyfriend crashes the wedding of the girl he never forgot, determined to win her back. In this case, the bride is the formidable Uma Thurman, both taller and older than leading man Michael Angarano. Character is usually the saving grace of such films, and this has some memorable ones and some clever dialogue, but mostly it has the courage to go somewhere other than where the genre has taught us to expect. I liked supporting actress Brooke Bloom particularly, and was impressed by the taste of whoever selected the source music. Viewed randomly on cable.

ONE NIGHT IN THE TROPICS: Abbott & Costello's first feature casts them under their real names as amiable wise guys serving as backup to reformed gangster William Frawley. Their routines seem a bit forceably shoe-horned into a story derived from LOVE INSURANCE, one of the rare non-Charlie Chan novels written by Ohio native Earl Derr Biggers. Top-billed Allan Jones and Nancy Kelly sing, none too memorably, and THE MUMMY'S HAND's Peggy Moran has a number too, which shows singing to be not particularly her forté. Kept daydreaming throughout about how Scorsese might have worked with Costello, given the chance, because he seemed to me like a more docile Joe Pesci in this. Was surprised to discover that the "Sir Walter Raleigh" coat-over-the-puddle gag from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was stolen from here. Viewed on Universal DVD.

BUCK PRIVATES: Abbott & Costello were the best-reviewed aspect of ONE NIGHT IN THE TROPICS, so they top-lined their second feature and first real movie vehicle. They play two sidewalk tie-selling hustlers who are chased by street cop Nat Pendelton into a movie theater that's doubling as a recruitment center, ushering them into the Army. A much better movie than their first, given additional zest by the Andrews Sisters (who melodicize their way through several numbers, including their signature tune "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy") and some impressively rubber-legged boogie-woogie dancers. Making the Army look like Heaven on earth, with free cigarettes and doughnuts and pretty WACs offering their phone numbers, this became Universal's biggest money-maker to date, which explains why some of its gags were subsequently quoted in Warner Bros. cartoons like "To Duck Or Not To Duck," which reprised some of the boxing gags. Viewed on Universal DVD.

THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY: I've long wanted to see this supposedly influential Paramount release, based on a best-selling real life account of a hypnotist who successfully regressed a friend's wife to a past life in Ireland. Louis Heyward hosts the film in the manner of a TV or radio show, but as the hypnotist rather than himself, walking from a bare set area onto a furnished set to answer a ringing phone that propels the plot into motion. SHADOW OF A DOUBT's Teresa Wright, deliberately muted and deprived of closeups in her early scenes, becomes the unexpected center of attention as the sessions begin. THE THING'S Kenneth Tobey plays her husband. Scripted and directed by Noel Langley (one of the screenwriters of THE WIZARD OF OZ), this is an intriguing experiment in docudrama filmmaking, and one of the earliest screen investigations into untapped areas of the mind; it's most significant success is that it manages to hold one's interest without action, relying almost entirely on Q&A dialogue derived from the original recordings. Viewed on Netflix.

LIMITLESS: I'd not heard of this one before, but I found the premise hard to resist: a blocked writer uses an experimental drug that makes the brain's entire capacity available to the user, allowing him to write a first novel in only four days before sending him off in constant search of newer, more challenging, eventually deadlier frontiers. Bradley Cooper makes a believable protagonist and Robert DeNiro lends third act gravitas as a business tycoon who elicits Cooper's aid in facilitating a corporate merger that would make him a man of unparalleled power and influence. Teeming with interesting, well-cast secondary characters and unexpected snaring incident, it's also refreshing in that it remains true to what's conceptually exhilarating about the drug, teasing the possibility of a dark outcome without finally submitting to it. Directed by Neil Burger, whose THE ILLUSIONIST I admired. Watching this, I was reminded at times of such disparate films as BRAINSTORM, STRANGE DAYS and OLDBOY. Worth seeing. Viewed on Netflix.

My Return to the NaschyCast!

Now available for your listening pleasure is my return visit to Troy Guinn & Rod Barnett's Paul NaschyCast, which you can download from the link at the bottom of Rod's intro here. We recorded our two-hour conversation at the hush-hush Wonderfest reunion last month and discussed (among other films) Carlos Aured's HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB, Javier Aguirre's HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE and Jacinto Molina's THE BEAST AND THE MAGIC SWORD, while also managing to touch on other filmmakers as diverse as Jess Franco and Eric Rohmer. My views on these films were sometimes at odds with my hosts' opinions, so this led to some debate and discussion I believe you'll find interesting.

Remembering Richard Gordon (1925-2011)

Bela Lugosi with Richard Gordon (left) and Alex Gordon (right), the origins of Monster Kid fandom.

The first film I ever reviewed professionally was HORROR ON SNAPE ISLAND (1971), now better known as TOWER OF EVIL, a Richard Gordon production. When I attended my first convention, FanEx in 1991, Richard Gordon -- to my immense surprise and delight -- was the first friend I made. I bumped into him in the lobby, we started talking about that early CINEFANTASTIQUE review, about our earlier telephone contact when I was seeking to license clips from his films for a documentary that never got made, about his director friend Antony Balch (who fascinated me because of his connection to William S. Burroughs), and the serendipitous fact that the first book I ever published, the "Video Times" paperback YOUR GUIDE TO MOVIE CLASSICS ON TAPES AND DISC in 1985, had been co-written with none other than his older brother, Alex Gordon. Alex and I never met, but we collaborated through the mail.

I had to break off our conversation, engrossing and friendly and exciting as it was, because I needed to help Donna set up Video Watchdog's dealer's room table, but Dick (as he prefered to be addressed), beaming with friendly engagement, happily followed along and we continued talking as he perused issues of the magazine -- to which he promptly subscribed. I haven't done an actual head count, and don't really want to, but I strongly suspect that, in the decade-plus that followed, Dick Gordon wrote more letters to VIDEO WATCHDOG than any other reader. And, except for a couple such letters that may have fallen prey to my sometimes-less-than-professional filing system, every one was published. And proudly so.

One of the many reviewing duties presently in front of me is Tom Weaver's recent book THE HORROR HITS OF RICHARD GORDON, which now turns bittersweet. I am grateful to Tom for compiling that book in time for Dick to see it, but even moreso for being the friend to him that geography and my own disparate ambitions did not allow me to be, keeping him occupied and feeling appreciated and involved in life and film for as long as he did. I once wrote in an editorial what Dick's friendship to me, to Donna and our magazine meant to me, and I fortunately have Tom's memory, written to me, of reading that editorial to Dick and how it moved him and how he asked Tom to read it to him a second time. Thanks to Tom's sharing of that story, I felt a very real connection to Dick that transcended our first and only physical meeting twenty years ago. That's a very sweet memory and, of all the people I've known in this business over the years, it's hard to think of another memory concerning them that's as sweet in quite the same way. When he suffered a grievous personal loss a few years ago, I picked up the phone to share my condolences and we spoke as though no time had passed. I'm a bit of a mystic, and when I think of how this was possible, after nearly twenty years, and all the other criss-crossing that took place in our lives prior to our actual meeting, well, it gives one pause... to wonder, and to appreciate.

As Tom told me earlier today after relating this sad news, when I referred to Dick as the first Monster Kid, "That would be his older brother Alex, but Monster Kid Membership Card #0002 ain't too shabby." Indeed not. In observing Dick's passing, it is less his films that come to my mind and heart than this connection to the origins of Monster Kiddom I was privileged to have by sort of knowing and working with both of the Brothers Gordon. Their earlier example, so bold and enterprising, made it feel less strange and more respectable to do what I do, to love what I love, to be who I am -- and to be doing in middle age what I've been doing since I was a teenager. I am still trying to emulate them to the extent of actually breaking into the business of making films.

He passed away in hospital this afternoon at the age of 85. How serendipitous, how he would have loved knowing, that his last night on Earth would be Hallowe'en!

He'll be missed.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #165

For a fuller listing of contents and select preview pages, click "Coming Soon" on the Video Watchdog website's main page!

A Bad Week for Beloved Character Actors

Charles Napier (April 12, 1936 - October 5, 2011), the jut-jawed, horse-toothed, all-man actor who starred in numerous Russ Meyer pictures, was featured in several Jonathan Demme films, appeared in the classic STAR TREK episode "The Way to Eden" and, along the way, provided the roars for Lou Ferrigno's THE INCREDIBLE HULK. He was 75.

David Hess (September 19, 1942 - October 8, 2011), actor and musician responsible for writing Pat Boone's "Speedy Gonzales" (under the name David Dante) and for scaring the hell out of 1970s audiences with his uncomfortably real portrayals of psychopaths in Wes Craven's THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, Ruggero Deodato's THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE PARK and other thrillers. In his last film SMASH CUT (2009), he acted alongside Sasha Grey, Michael Berryman, Herschell Gordon Lewis and THE WIZARD OF GORE's Ray Sager, playing a horror film director in the recursive gore flick hommage. He and Charles Napier acted together in Deodato's BODY COUNT (1987), starring VIDEO WATCHDOG interview subject Mimsy Farmer. He was 69.

Additionally -- or should I say "subtractively" -- this past week also claimed the lives of onar Films founder Bill Barounis, actress/novelist Diane Cilento (THE WICKER MAN), actor George Baker (THE CURSE OF THE FLY, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE), Pentangle founder/folk guitarist Bert Jansch, pianist Roger Williams (who had hit singles with the themes from AUTUMN LEAVES and BORN FREE in the mid-'50s and '60s) and, of course, Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs.

R.I.P. Bill Barounis of Onar Films

It has just come to my attention that Bill Barounis, the man responsible for the small but important DVD label Onar Films, passed away earlier today.

I was not aware of it, but Bill was reportedly diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of years ago; the last update on his website mentions a stroke and being wheelchair-bound. But it is to Bill's single-minded (and often single-handed) determination and devotion to Turkish cinema that a handful of fascinating oddities, considered too outré for wider release, found their way to DVD in subtitled and extremely limited editions.

VIDEO WATCHDOG reviewed a number of Onar Films' titles in the past -- Ramsey Campbell, John Charles and David Kalat all took particular interest in the field Bill was so individually mining. I don't know if anyone else is in place to fulfill new or outstanding orders at Onar, but you might want to head over to their website, click on "Contact Us" and submit a query about the availability of their remaining titles -- or perhaps just a heartfelt message of thanks. In his own way, Bill Barounis was one of the video industry's visionaries... and obviously, he loved movies more than most.

As a reminder of his enterprising spirit, here's a link to an interview conducted with Bill a few years ago when Onar was just beginning. This photo of Bill was first published at enlejemordersertilbage.blogspot.com and we hope his friends there won't mind its use here.

Unmasking THE WAX MASK

I'm presently on a long overdue Gaston Leroux kick, acquiring and reading as many of his novels as appeared in English translation as I can find. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is wonderful in ways that have yet to be filmed, but there is much more to him and his contribution to the horror genre than just that. In fact, in an impressive two-part article published in the final two issues of MIDI-MINUIT FANTASTIQUE (issues 23 and 24, 1970), none other than Jean Rollin wrote in depth about horror cinema's immense debt to Leroux's literary imagination -- a debt that, among English speaking horror fans, remains largely unpaid.

All films about intelligent apes who learn to kill can be traced back to his novel BALAOO (even the 1932 MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE contains ideas that didn't originate with Poe), Roger Corman's THE HAUNTED PALACE is based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" but that story was itself indebted to Leroux's darkly comic THE MAN WITH THE BLACK FEATHER (also translated as THE DOUBLE LIFE), and of course every unmasking scene from THE FLY to PSYCHO to MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM owes something to PHANTOM, and so on.

Speaking of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, I've often wondered about the real literary basis, if any, for Sergio Stivaletti's film M.D.C. MASCHERA DI CERA (THE WAX MASK, 1997), which articles sometimes link to a Gaston Leroux novel called "THE WAX MUSEUM" or "MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM" depending on your reporter... but no such novel exists, and no screen credit was ultimately given. In the course of my collecting, I've now discovered that a short story exists, entitled "The Waxwork Museum," which was collected in translation in a 1980 story compendium called THE GASTON LEROUX BEDSIDE COMPANION, edited by Peter Haining. A foreword acknowledges that the translation by Alexander Peters first appeared in FANTASY BOOK in 1969, but no original French publication date is given. It very likely appeared in the 1910s-1920s, possibly prior to Paul Leni's classic silent picture WAXWORKS (1924).

Of related interest: in Leroux's THE MAN WITH THE BLACK FEATHER (aka THE DOUBLE LIFE OF THEOPHRASTE LONGUET), there is a chapter bearing the title "The Wax Mask"... but it has nothing to do with the story of the film.

Someone Should Dig Up THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK

Last night I watched a beautiful copy of Riccardo Freda's L'orribile segreto dal Dott. Hichcock ("The Horrible Secret of Doctor Hichcock," US: THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK, 1962) which is available as a Cinemageddon download. Though the film is presently available as an authorized Italian DVD release on the Movietime label, it has never had an English-friendly DVD release since its only US appearance as a VHS tape on the Republic Home Video label. Various people within the industry have explained the title's elusiveness to me with reports that its present licensors are demanding an unrealistic amount for it.

Whatever they're asking, I say it's worth it. Freda, of course, launched Italian horror with I vampiri (THE DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT, 1957, co-directed by Mario Bava), and they later collaborated again on Caltiki il mostro immortale (CALTIKI THE IMMORTAL MONSTER, 1959). HICHCOCK -- a deliberate misspelling so as not to step on Alfred's copyrighted and trademarked name and image -- stands as Freda's most defining solo outing in a genre he did not hold particularly dear. Consciously made in the image of a Roger Corman Poe picture, it is like a Poe picture adapted to grand opera, full of romantic swooning, melodramatic flourish and the icy dread of premature burial. But why the film has remained so entrenched in the popular imagination is that it deals, or appears to, with the verboten subject of necrophilia.

While watching HICHCOCK again, for the first time in a truly stellar-looking and complete presentation, I had some realizations about it and began to take notes. Rather than write something new and finished about the picture, I thought I would simply share my thoughts here.
1. The main titles encompass one of the most brilliantly inspired moments in the history of horror cinema. Halfway through the plain text-on-black main titles, they stop and the screen goes black. We think they've ended as we await the fade-in, but then the darkness is pierced by a woman's shriek! We've already been worked to a lather by Roman Vlad's appassionata nero score, so the shriek literally permits the overexcited music to release its tensions. Translation: It's an orgasm. A beat or two after the shriek ends, the main titles resume, as does Vlad's score, now sounding appropriately more subdued. I think it's horror's most brilliant main titles conceit since that fist jumped up to punch through the final glass matte credit in MGM's MAD LOVE (1935). Let's not draw any analogies to the fact that production designer Franco Fumagalli (THE GODFATHER III, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) had his name unfortunately Anglicized to "Frank Smokecocks."

2. "His Lust Was A Candle That Burned Brightest In The Shadow of the Grave!" explained the film's advertising campaign. Dr. Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is indeed a necrophile, but as I paid close attention to the story, I realized that he doesn't really have sex with corpses. He fondles and strokes and caresses the bodies of dead women gurneyed through his ward at the University Hospital, but he always takes his stoked desires home to be properly received by his all-too-willing wife, Margaret (Maria Teresa Vianello). Bernard has developed an experimental anaesthetic, Sonneryl, to put Margaret in a more enforcedly passive state prior to their ritualized lovemaking. Unfortunately, Bernard keeps the Sonneryl in a cabinet next to an identical bottle labelled Poison.

3. Overexcited one evening by a particularly voluptuous cadaver that jiggles under the sheet as its gurney goes over a bump on the hospital floor, Bernard races home and overeagerly grabs the wrong bottle -- we think -- and injects his wife, who appears to die as a result. In fact, it later transpires that he simply overdosed her with the dark, frothing liquid (which looks like, and probably was, root beer or something comparable), resulting in a premature burial from which she was rescued by the Hichcocks' cat-stroking housekeeper and enabler, Martha (Harriet White Medin).

3. Martha's character only makes sense if we realize that she harbors lesbian desires of her own for Margaret. (Did I say "cat-stroking"?) She is obviously more devoted to Margaret than to Bernard, whom she always greets with a dutiful weariness bordering on contempt; in the first scene of his homecoming, we first see Martha signalling Margaret of his return, while wearing and projecting a knowing expression about what is impending. We sense her implicit involvement in these secret Victorian revels, but what's in it for her? Perhaps what's in it for her is availing herself of her Master's docile leftovers.

4. When Margaret "dies," Bernard returns to his home after 10 years with a new bride, Cynthia (Barbara Steele). Dialogue reveals that he met her abroad as one of his patients, who was recovering from a traumatic shock. Of course, he was doing likewise and it is inferred that his supposedly mortal error brought about a sudden end to his old habits... but. Screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi has said that, when this film ran a week behind schedule, Freda covered himself by tearing a 12-page chunk of exposition out of the script that was never filmed. The only hole in the narrative I can find would detail Hichcock's own traumatized response to Margaret's death and his meeting with Cynthia. Gastaldi doesn't remember what failed to go before the cameras, but I'd like to think the missing exposition would show Hichcock struggling to remain immune to the charms of the corpses he saw during his retreat, and then introduce Cynthia as Bernard's patient. It wouldn't be necessary to detail their courtship; all the viewer would need is a scene of Cynthia, high-strung and overwrought, fainting in his consultation room and abandoning her young and conscious form to his covetous clutches. This would be enough to reactive Bernard's suppressed passions and make him want to legalize his possession of her.

5. One senses that Cynthia's marriage to Bernard is rooted in mutual psychological dependency rather than love or passion. Once he brings her back to his home in London and returns to the University Hospital, she soon notes to his colleague Dr. Kurt Lowe (Silvana Tranquilli, an unfortunately dull leading man) that he's become nervous and strange -- meaning the old work-related temptations are rattling him once again. Cynthia nevertheless remains safe with him, only becoming truly endangered after the point when he secures the moment of privacy at the hospital to undrape a woman's corpse and drink in the sight of its nakedness, submissiveness, and pliability.

6. There is a very creepy moment of delirium where Cynthia awakens, paralyzed and revolted, her eyelashes snarling as Raymond Durgnat once said they did, on the bier in Bernard's necrosanctum. She sees him leering near her feet, his face swelling and glowing red -- a remarkable and perhaps unique use of inflatable bladder effects in Italian makeup effects, at least at this moment in time. As bizarre as the scene is, it's greatest stroke of genius may be that it adds (unexplained) a woman's hand, clenched as if in rigor mortis, rising up behind him to drape itself companionably over his shoulder. The lack of explanation makes the moment all the more unsettling. Who is this? we wonder, and we later realize that Cynthia's subconscious was forecasting the story's truth and outcome. Steele's close-ups in this film are particularly ravishing and give the film the glorious production value of Gainsborough paintings. I'm sure she was not paid anywhere near what it was worth for her to be who she was.

7. Speaking of paintings, the clarity of the print I consulted exposed to me, for the first time, the overall shoddiness of a matte painting depicting the façade of Hichcock's villa. I imagine much of it was cropped offscreen in the earlier home video copies I'd seen. Freda himself started out as an art critic and liked to dabble in painting; it would not surprise me if this piece were his work -- it could even be a detailed colored pencil sketch, from the look of it. It's first seen as Cynthia first arrives at the villa by coach; there's a cutaway to the façade, framed by some foregrounded flora like a young tree branch, some fronds, and (literally) a potted plant -- this sort of foregrounding was an authentication trick Freda had picked up from working with Mario Bava. We later see the same matte painting during a storm (where a lightning flash causes a flat reflection of the foregrounded branch on the house's supposedly uneven surface, spoiling an already cheap illusion) and during heavy rain (with overly large hose dribbles foregrounded with the rest).

8. The climax of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977) owes everything to the climax of this film, which is another fiery inferno overseen by a hate-maddened harridan. There is a moment when Cynthia pulls back a curtain to reveal the supposedly dead Margaret standing there, looking monstrous under her veil -- a premonitory shudder of Mater Suspiriorum without a doubt. It should also be mentioned that a quality print with restored color reveals a proto-SUSPIRIA use of Technicolor in play throughout. Decades before M. Night Shayamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE (1999), cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi inserted a red gel splash somewhere onscreen immediately prior to each horrific moment.

9. The image which the film's US distributor used for the film's poster art shows Cynthia hanging upside-down as her deranged husband poises a scalpel at her neck. The point of this image always eluded me till this viewing, but in the dialogue, Bernard clearly (albeit hurriedly) states that he intends to restore his first wife's grave-spoiled beauty with the blood of his second, younger wife. The cutting of the scene suggests that a censor, somewhere, may have demanded the removal of various shots showing Cynthia being jabbed and cut, because there is blood clearly collecting in a large white bowl placed beneath her -- a kind of proto-TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE image, if you think about it.

10. I've always known that Robert Flemyng gave his all to this unlikely project, but to see his performance in perfect clarity reveals a wealth of little nuances to cherish -- particularly in all the business he gets to do when he first goes home after a day at the hospital. We see him go to his front door, observe that his wife is entertaining at a dinner party, and gaze ruefully through a window at the gathering. This establishes his covert nature. Then he proceeds to a secreted cellar entrance, where he follows a private stairwell past his wife's company, which further establishes him as cold and antisocial. As Martha signals Margaret that he's home, that it's time to send her friends and admirers away, Bernard goes into his den, tosses back a bracing drink or two, and then clutches the key to his private necrosanctum with the jaunty, privileged air of a Victorian clubman. He is especially good when exposed to the cadavers, observing them with careful gestures and awed hushes of adoration, his fear and desire fused... and his performance reaches its fever pitch when he first realizes that Margaret may not be dead, that she may still be alive or at least available to his desires, which must be the single most operatic sequence in Italian horror.

THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK was the subject of a Making Of verbal history, compiled by the late Alan Y. Upchurch and myself, which appeared in VIDEO WATCHDOG #49. Unfortunately that issue is now out-of-print, but for those of you who have it, it's a piece worth rereading, just as the film itself continues to reward repeat visitation. One of the great Italian horror films, THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK would surely reward the effort any video company made to dig it up.

Notes on John Carpenter's THE WARD

THE WARD, John Carpenter's first feature in a decade (since GHOSTS OF MARS, 2001), carries his name above the title as always, but actually finds him relinquishing much of his usual control. He didn't write this film, nor did he score it, so while it does resort time and again to a familiar bag of tricks (unexpected intrusions in the foreground, periphery of the scope frame or in the depth of field), it does shows him working, admirably, outside his comfort zone and achieving his most invigorating work since 1988's THEY LIVE.

The script by brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen attends the commitment of Kristen (Amber Heard) to a mental hospital following her apprehension at the scene of a house she's burned down. Installed in the experimental psych program of Dr. Stringer (MAD MEN's Jared Harris), she is surrounded there by some fairly predictable patient types (Danielle Panabaker as a beautiful scheming narcissist, Mamie Gummer as a plain hostile lesbian, Laura-Leigh as a toy-hugging child-woman, and Lyndsy Fonseca as the first to go), Kristen becomes alert to a vicious ghost (Mika Boorem) haunting her hospital ward. If the script isn't particularly ground-breaking in terms of dialogue or characterization, it keeps the viewer guessing right up to its nicely surprising explanation of events -- which, in a funny way, makes the audience feel as mentally ill as anyone onscreen -- and its traditional approach is a big part of its appeal. The story is set in 1966, when the laws governing the treatment of mental patients were more lax than they are today, making this particular story possible; in keeping with its era, cursing is kept to a minimum and the visual storytelling largely eschews CGI and staccato AVID-style editing to return to what might be called the classic principals of genre technique.

Aside from my unreserved admiration for THE THING (1982), my amusement with THEY LIVE and his sluggishly amiable Hawks pastiche ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), my adamant if inexplicable fascination with PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), and my healthy respect for the atmosphere in THE FOG (1980), I've never really bought into Carpenter as a "master of horror." He's always been more of an able technician than an auteur. That said, what horror films have become over the past decade has done a lot to alienate me from the genre, so I found THE WARD consistently entertaining because it plays like a master lesson in how to use today's technological advantages (it was shot digitally, then transfered to three-perf 35mm) hand-in-hand with those tried-and-true techniques which form the very essence of cinematic experience. One could define such techniques as those which distinguish film from television -- or, worse still, films that look and play like television, as has increasingly become the norm. This is not a film about sensation, it's about story-telling. It's not about shocking one's sensibilities, it's about surprising them. It's not about doing most of the job digitally in post, it's about being prepared on the set.

It's an interesting paradox. While I wouldn't place THE WARD above, say, HALLOWEEN (1978) as an example of Carpenter's work, HALLOWEEN has never convinced me of Carpenter's mastery of the genre, but in a strange way, THE WARD does.

THE WARD is available from Arc Entertainment on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as digital download.

"Pass The Marmalade": Jimmy Sangster (1927-2011)

Lurking in the periphery of my 1994 novel THROAT SPROCKETS is a fetching young secretary named Colleen Sangster. She was my little tribute to a special breed of snarling, enticing female anima -- personified by the likes of Valerie Gaunt, Carol Marsh, Andrée Melly and Barbara Shelley -- found in the work of a humble, workaday screenwriter whose filmic universe had become part of my own creative bedrock.

Jimmy Sangster, who died this morning at the age of 83, tempts summation in comic book lingo: you could say he was the Stan Lee of Silver Age horror, the writer responsible for THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) and DRACULA (US: HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958), both directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer Film Productions, Ltd. -- the two films which turned the tide of horror cinema in the mid-1950s and made it a commercial genre once again after a near-decade of failing returns.

Sangster wasn't a quippy writer like Stan Lee, but he similarly revitalized a classic form of storytelling that was, at the time, becoming ossified as the motion picture medium progressed into widescreen and Technicolor. What he brought to vampire films alone is immeasurable, and he achieved what he did in part by returning to the classic texts of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. Under his byline, Hammer's Frankenstein films (including THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1959) became the chronicle of Baron Victor Frankenstein, and his creations reflected his own blind spots, his own narcissism. Also under his byline, Hammer's Dracula films (including THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, 1960, and DRACULA - PRINCE OF DARKNESS, 1965) kept the Count himself largely offscreen, but were as imbued with his malign aura as the original novel. Most importantly, however, Sangster took us deeper into the concepts those authors gave us. In (HORROR OF) DRACULA, when Jonathan Harker discovers the mark of a vampire on his own throat, self-consciousness enters the genre: What is vampirism, when it is transfered to our protagonist and narrator?

John Van Eyssen adds an existential dimension to Jonathan Harker in HORROR OF DRACULA.

We also see Professor Van Helsing graduating in DRACULA from academic knowledge of vampirism to becoming its active adversary; he is not always ahead of the game, he is sometimes taken by surprise, and in BRIDES is even victimized and left to save his own soul. His Baron Frankenstein is a brilliant autodidact and visionary, an elitist maverick, whose blue-blooded sense of privilege often proves the downfall of the higher purpose for which he spills so much common red blood.

After his first screenwriting credit (Joseph Losey's A MAN ON THE BEACH, 1955), Sangster's list of screenplay credentials form an impressive overview of Britain's contribution to fantastic cinema over four decades: X - THE UNKNOWN (1956), BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE (1958), THE MUMMY (1959), THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH (1959), THE HELLFIRE CLUB (1959), JACK THE RIPPER (1960), THE TERROR OF THE TONGS (1960), TASTE OF FEAR (aka SCREAM OF FEAR, 1961), THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER (1961), MANIAC (1963), PARANOIAC (1963), HYSTERIA (1964), THE DEVIL-SHIP PIRATES (1964), THE NANNY (1965, his personal favorite), the Bulldog Drummond adventure DEADLIER THAN THE MALE (1967), THE ANNIVERSARY (1967), CRESCENDO (1970), Curtis Harrington's WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE ROO? (1971), FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1971), THE LEGACY (1979) and John Huston's only foray into the genre, PHOBIA (1980). He also directed two Hammer films during their early '70s transitional period, the darkly comic HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970) and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971). He also wrote several espionage novels, numerous teleplays and series scripts (including some for KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER and WONDER WOMAN), and two self-effacing volumes of autobiography, the awkwardly titled DO YOU WANT IT GOOD OR TUESDAY? (1997) and INSIDE HAMMER (2001).

Joe Dante once observed that Warner Bros' advertising tag "THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN Will Haunt You Forever!" proved truer for a generation of filmgoers than their publicity department could ever have anticipated. Who could forget the Baron (Peter Cushing), supposedly bent on creating life, coldbloodedly sending his servant girl (Valerie Gaunt) to her doom at the hands of his Creature (Christopher Lee) -- because he has impregnated her? Or its glimpses of disembodied body parts -- the cinema's first in full color -- with one particularly gruesome moment dissolving to the breakfast table and the Baron's tension-shattering request "Pass the marmalade"?

Or Jonathan Harker's (John Van Eyssen's) foolhardy mistake in (HORROR OF) DRACULA when he opts to stake the vampire bride (Valerie Gaunt) who bit him before destroying Dracula himself (Christopher Lee)? Or its classic final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing (which Peter Cushing improved on-set by suggesting his hero run along a tabletop and tear down a curtain to let in lethal sunlight)?

Few scenes in 1950s horror are as shocking as the high society soirée in THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN where Karl (Michael Gwynn), his misshapenness returning (and worsening to cannibalistic tendencies) after a failed cured by the Baron (Peter Cushing), crashes through the glass doors of the event AND the anonymity of the respected "Dr. Stein" in a plea for help. Likewise, few scenes of the period are as uplifting as the finale in which the Baron's associate, Dr. Hans Kleve (Francis Mathews), must use the skill he has acquired from the Baron to save his life, when his charity ward patients, learning his real identity, turn on his kindness and tear him to bits.

Andree Melly doesn't stay dead in THE BRIDES OF DRACULA.

Perhaps no other vampire film mines quite so much fresh and inventive territory as THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, a Sangster script subsequently revised by two other writers, Peter Bryan and Edward Percey. In the absence of Christopher Lee, one of Dracula's disciples, Baron Meinster (David Peel) is kept imprisoned in his chateau by his doting mother (Martita Hunt), who lures young women there to feed his appetites, and perhaps to impose a kind of heterosexuality on an existence that was destroyed by socializing with men of loose morals. Here, the Baron -- once freed -- not only vampirizes his own mother, who then consents to her own destruction, but the Baron's old nanny (Freda Jackson) comes unhinged and marauds as a madly cackling midwife to the Undead, lying on the ground and helping to "birth" new vampires from their burial grounds. Here, even Van Helsing is bitten, and in an unforgettable demonstration of righteous resolve, he purifies his own neck wound with a red-hot poker and douses it with Holy water.

Sangster wrote DRACULA - PRINCE OF DARKNESS under some duress, hid behind a pseudonym ("John Sansom") to write it, and claimed he never saw it... and yet the first half of the film is enthralling, with the startling means of Dracula's resurrection and Barbara Shelley's effective transition from prim Victorian vacationer with a schedule to keep to a snarling, libido-liberated vampire bride among its many recommendations.

Ralph Bates and David Prowse in HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN.

Sangster's films as a director were, by his own admission, less than satisfying. He loved making HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, calling it the happiest six weeks of his career, but he felt the result was "so lighthearted, its feet didn't touch the ground." He blamed producer interference for eroding his confidence on the set of LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, which he did not bother to supervise in its cutting or post-production. Both films, hobbled by a cheapness that no longer had Hammer's once-ingenious art director Bernard Robinson to disguise it, nevertheless have their moments and some likewise unforgettable images -- for example, Countess Carmilla Karnstein (Yutte Stensgaard), sitting erect and topless in her coffin, a victim's blood staining her bare breasts, or the young Baron (Ralph Bates) activating a severed hand with electricity so that it offers the old two-pronged salute.

"As a writer, I delivered my finished script and then went on to something new," he wrote in his autobiography. "Around six months later the picture would hit the screen. By then I'd forgotten I'd even written it."

Fortunately for the rest of us, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN will haunt us forever.

"No, Mr. Bond - I Expect You To Die!"

The pictures accompanying the recent reports about Gérard Dépardieu peeing on the plane confirm that he is finally ripe to play Auric Goldfinger. No thanks necessary, just send me my 10 per cent.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #164

Click here for a sneak peek at our next issue, which streets August 30!

Preview: SANDS OF THE KALAHARI (1965)

Coming from Olive Films (SD and Blu-ray) on August 2 is SANDS OF THE KALAHARI, a Sixties adventure film whose title is still occasionally invoked with awe by Baby Boomer matinee-goers. Now that I've finally caught up with it, I wish I'd had the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen back in the days when I had fewer movies under my belt. Not because the movie is predictable -- on the contrary, I found it quite engrossing -- but what I've learned about human nature over the years, simply by living, made some of the film's plot twists and human insights less of a surprise now than they would have been then.

Based on a novel by William Mulvihill, the set-up is familiar: a motley group of travelers inconvenienced by a cancelled flight are persuaded to charter an independent plane to their African destination rather than wait, only to have it collide with a cloud of locusts over the Kalahari desert, stranding them with only enough water to support a single man for half a day.

For its time, the images of the plane's windshield wipers and engines clotting and smearing with locust glop must have been startlingly graphic, and they're still fairly disgusting; yet it's a far more natural and cinematic reason for crashing the plane than the usual explanations such stories give. The passengers include pilot Nigel Davenport, big game hunter Stuart Whitman, doctor Theodore Bikel, German retired soldier Harry Andrews, co-producer Stanley Baker as an injured and introspective mining engineer, and Susannah York as an attractive young divorcée.

The film was directed by Cy (Cyril) Endfield, beloved among genre fans for directing for the classic Ray Harryhausen opus, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), itself a story of survival in the wake of an air crash, and it was the sixth of his collaborations with co-producer Stanley Baker, the most famous of which was ZULU (1964). Endfield also scripted the film from Mulvihill's novel, and he does a fine job of balancing outbursts of energy with stretches of contemplation and repose, during which the story's psychological knots slowly and effectively tighten.

Fairly soon after the crash, Whitman strips off his shirt and grabs his rifle to become the Alpha Male of the survivors, refusing to wait for the long-toothed baboons surrounding their campsite to make the first attack. His is a remarkably physical and robust performance, very likely a career-best, and his characterization is aided by Endfield's scripting, which is careful to give the motivations for this increasingly dangerous and twisted character a sound basis in logic.

Much of the film's psychological complexity orbits around the presence of York, whose perspiring blonde presence causes other animal instincts to flare among the men. (Endfield insists we think of her character in sexual terms from the beginning, practically introducing her from behind as she takes a shower.) The avuncular Bikel presumes to tacitly advise this young woman to remain sexually impartial for the sake of everyone's survival, but the men surrounding her have other ideas. Davenport's character asserts his primacy as the Captain of his passengers with an attempted rape of York. In one of the strangest twists of the film, Davenport gives up in his attempt because the tearful York submits too easily ("I'll do anything, just don't hurt me!"), which alienates him. Aware that Baker has observed him at what he tried to do, a somewhat embarrassed Davenport volunteers to cross the open desert with as much water as he can carry, in search of rescue.

Interestingly, in the second attempt on York's virtue, by Whitman, he also gives up before completing his conquest because he feels that she is seducing him, which the hunter in him doesn't like. One try later, they do get together -- not out of any real affection or even liking for one another, but because she is his prey and he embodies her best chance of protection.

Stanley Baker, being mostly cave-bound and brooding into crackling fires ("This is what men used to do before television," Bikel notes), doesn't challenge either of these virile competitors for York's hand, as it were. In his own way, he loathes the same weakness in her that the other men have seen, but he sees it from another perspective and experiences it in his own unique way. As Whitman goes off the rails and begins killing the other males to preserve for himself a greater share of dwindling rations, Baker discovers the hard way that York's need to claim the fittest for her own outbids all morality and any responsibility to the others. One imagines Mulvihill's novel might offer more background about her character to help underpin the decisions she makes; in context, the lack of such background and contrast unfortunately suggest her selfish choices as archetypically female.

Handsomely photographed by Edwin Hillier (THE VALLEY OF GWANGI) in rocky desert locations settings that now aptly recall PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SANDS OF THE KALAHARI is presented here anamorphically in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The standard disc version I screened looks good on the home screen, despite some visible limitations related to age which may be somewhat bolstered by the Blu-ray. One fault that Blu-ray can't correct is that Olive Films' transfer neglects to add day-for-night tinting to a couple of broad daylight sequences clearly tagged by the dialogue for taking place at night.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #163

Our next issue -- sporting a beautiful piece of original art by the inimitable Charlie Largent -- features Part 1 of my Eddie Constantine/Lemmy Caution retrospective (with input from his son Lemmy Constantine), an in-depth interview with Eddie's daughter and collaborator Tanya Constantine, Stephen R. Bissette's VW return with an appreciative essay about the 1967 horror feature THE FROZEN DEAD, and my DVD Spotlight on Bob Rafelson's Monkees film HEAD (which approaches it as part of a narrative arc begun with two earlier Jack Nicholson films, THE TERROR and THE TRIP).

You can now flip through the entire issue, and read selected pages, by simply visiting our website and clicking on the Coming Soon option!

On sale July 5!