NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

Wow. This movie…just wow. NIGHT OF THE DEMON is about this British sorcerer guy Dr. Julian Karswell, who starts off the movie by offing someone who threatens to expose his Satanic cult. Karswell had passed a small parchment with runes inscribed on it to the guy, and it disintegrated after 3 days. This seals the guy's fate and a huge demon materializes and kills him. Shortly after, a skeptic from the US of A shows up to prove Karswell a fraud, and Karswell doesn't take well to this. Karswell passes another rune-filled parchment to the American asshole (and hey, WAY TO GO in representing us over here, douchenozzle!), and a tense story of investigation sets itself into motion.

I don't want to say too much about this movie because it's just WAY TOO GOOD to spoil. It had me bouncing around the room the entire time. It's just that suspenseful and scary. It's not that much of a spoiler to say this, but the demon that does show up is a little awkward-looking in close-up, and the story goes that director Jacques Tourneur was VERY against it being shown on-screen, and that you should never really know if the demon was real or not. But man, when the demon materializes from out of nowhere, it scares the living hell out of me. I've got this thing about giant monsters – the thought of seeing them suddenly looming over the horizon freaks me out when I think about it too hard. Sometimes, riding in the car, I'll imagine Godzilla or something suddenly popping his head up from behind a mountain or something, and it seriously gives me the willies. And seeing this giant demon pull itself into existence on this plane just freaks me right out.

I can't recommend this movie more. It's just amazing. The acting is all top-notch, the atmosphere is heavy as can be, the script is really, really smart, and the ending packs a huge jolt. They don't make movies like this anymore, and I guess we just lucked out that they made this one THEN. Crazy, crazy, crazy good.

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

Okay, I’ve been wanting to see this for a while now. It’s never been available on DVD, and it’s hard to find on VHS. I guess the print that Universal had was incomplete, or in bad shape or something, because according to the Criterion Collection, they had to assemble this from several different sources to present it complete. You wouldn’t be able to tell it, though…it all looks great.

Anyway, here’s the situation: Edward Parker, a guy on his way to meet his fiancé, gets dumped from a cargo ship by the drunk asshat captain jerk, and he winds up being taken to the first port of call – the island of Dr. Moreau. When he gets there, he spots all of these weird-looking guys running around in the jungle, but can only catch a glimpse. Dr. Moreau introduces him to Lota, the only female on the island, and they hit it off even though he’s got a girlfriend already (who is getting pretty mad that Parker hasn’t shown up yet, has found out what happened, and is on her way to Moreau’s island). Parker finds out that Moreau has created the island’s natives by experimenting on animals shipped to the island by the cargo ship he was on earlier.

Parker keeps getting left alone with Lota, who is falling for him. But see, Moreau has created her from a panther, and wants to see if she’s capable of displaying human emotion and having human kids, so he’s trying to get Parker and her to mate. Eventually, Lota kisses Parker, and as they hug, Parker feels claws on his back – her claws. She’s growing panther hands back, and Parker freaks right the fuck out. He yells at Moreau at how disgusting his experiments are, and Moreau decides to “burn the animal out of her,” which sounds HORRIBLE. About this time, Parker’s fiancé shows up, and they plan on leaving. When Moreau finds this out, he orders one of the beast-men to kill the captain that brought Parker’s fiancé to the island. This breaks one of the laws that Moreau has laid down (“What is the law? Not to spill blood!”), and the beast-men decide to revolt, realizing that Moreau can die, too. In the revolt, Lota is killed and Parker and his fiancé escape as the natives take Moreau into his laboratory (the “House of Pain”) and proceed to rip him to shreds.

It’s taken me a while to put this review together, and it’s because it’s taken that long for me to put together the right words for it. For when it was made, this movie is REALLY disturbing. There’s a lot of implied stuff about surgery on the beast-men that Moreau does without anesthesia, a whole bestiality thing with Lota and Parker maybe eventually hooking up, Charles Laughton as Moreau enjoying playing with his whip a whole hell of a lot, and a lot of beast-men (led by Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law!!!) going around like they’re in total agony the whole time. This pushes things a lot more than FRANKENSTEIN did the same year, and wound up banned in a bunch of countries.

But here’s the thing that’s kept eating at me. There was something about the movie that I just couldn’t put my finger on that was bothering me. At first, I was just thinking that the movie was just so good at being a horror movie that it kept making me think about it. But after reading the essay that’s in the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of this, I think they put a finger on what it is…it’s that the movie is all about Black folks hooking up with White folks. It’s easy to see Moreau, in his white suit and carrying his whip, as a slave master, with a bunch of “savages” living in the area away from the estate, and with a select few serving him in his home. And he’s all curious from a Mad Scientist point of view to see what will happen when the “savage” woman (that he’s passing off as a “pure Polynesian”) mates with the new White guy on the island. And while I guess it’s good that they try to show that the “savages” deserve as much respect as anybody else (or at least that they don’t deserve to be cut open on operating tables while they’re still freaking AWAKE), they’re still not even human, but closer to animals. And when you add in this whole thing about how revolting it is that he’s experimenting with having a “savage” mate with a visiting White Guy, it just gets all kinds of creepy. I mean, Moreau wants Parker to have kids with Lota so he can see if they’re more “human” than Lota is, and as someone from an interracial marriage, I guess maybe I take it kind of personally.

It’s obvious that the movie is a classic among horror movies, because it does what it does REALLY WELL. And when I first saw it, it blew me away because it stuck with me for days. But the more and more I think about it, the more and more it bothers me. Dad keeps telling me that this was 1932 and that I should remember that things were a LOT different back then, but there’s so much about it that bothers me that I don’t think I can watch it again. I’d never say that nobody else should see it. I think it’s important to know how bad things used to be, at least as some kind of WARNING or something. And if some people can get over the really weird issues it seems to have and enjoy it as something that’s come from the views people might have had back then, then that’s great. There are a lot of things from back then that you have to look at like that (like DUMBO, or some old Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse cartoons). And some of that stuff I can even get past because it’s so ridiculous. But this one, over the past few days, has just gotten more and more under my skin.

I’ve had a lot of talks over the weekend with my dad about this. It’s really weird for him that he’d want to talk with me about a single movie for days, but he says that it’s important that we have these talks, and that if the movie has led to us talking about it, that it’s done something positive in the end. I guess that’s true. I just wish that we didn’t have to have these talks in the first place, you know? Dad says I should be optimistic, and that maybe one day we’ll all be living in a time where this kind of thing doesn’t matter any more, and we can just look at a movie like this as a reminder of a long time ago when people got all worked up about who was gonna be screwing who. If so, it’s taking its damn time getting here.

ZOMBIE (1979)

Lucio Fulci! I've been reading a lot about this guy, and I finally got around to watching some of his movies over the past couple of weeks. Probably his best-known is this one, though, so I thought I'd start with it right off the bat.

ZOMBIE was made to cash in on George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It was a HUGE success in Italy, where it was released as ZOMBI. So Fulci was enlisted to make a quick rip-off that would get released as if it was a sequel. For some reason, this kind of thing happened in Italy ALL THE TIME. They'd put out movies that were fake sequels to ALIEN, re-title movies that had nothing to do with other movies to make them seem like sequels, etc. I don't know how they could do it without getting their pants sued off, but there you are. Anyway, Fulci was known in Italy mainly for making mysteries and comedies, but I guess the producers thought he was stylish enough to pull off a straight-up horror movie. And they were ALL KINDS OF RIGHT.

Now, Romero's movies are mostly city-based, and it's never really clear what's brought the dead back to life (and in his movies, they're the unburied dead). So if George made movies that updated the zombie flick to modern urban times, Fulci's movie goes back to the original zombie myths. These zombies are brought back by a scientist in the tropics experimenting with voodoo rites, and they're not just dead folks who happened to be lying around the place. These are also the long-buried dead, like old Conquistadors and stuff.

It starts out (after a short opening on the island) with a ship washing into New York harbor. Cops come to check it out, and there's a zombie on board. One of the cops gets munched on and killed, and the other one shoots the zombie and he falls into the water. We find out that the boat belongs to the father of this woman in New York (so it's lucky that it sailed right into the city like it did), and she teams up with a local reporter and a seafaring couple (the wife scuba dives TOPLESS! YOWZA!) to find the tropical island and her father. Of course, they find the island right when everything's going to hell, and there's an ongoing slaughter for the rest of the movie. The zombie makeups are GREAT, and the gore flows like maple syrup on the pancakes that are our cast. There's an eye-poking scene that nearly made me throw up, and one of those twist ending things that all of these movies seem to have.

I loved this movie! It's kind of skimpy on the story, and it takes a little while to get really revved up, but you can't say no to a movie where a zombie fights a shark! It takes a crazy person to make a movie where that happens, and Fulci is a total madman.