MANSION OF THE DAMNED

d. Michael Patacki (1975)

Somewhere there's a film about a respected surgeon /scientist who driven by an obsession for discovery, or in order to save a loved one, breaks his Hippocratic oath and leaves his ethics behind in order to conduct an illegal experiment / perform an illegal operation. It all works out, and the doctor spends the rest of their life making amends for their lapse. This is not that film.

When eye specialist Dr Chaney's beautiful young daughter is blinded in a car accident,  he and she are almost driven mad by grief, and he sets out to make good his mistake (he was driving). Strangely, he picks on his daughters boyfriend, a colleague of his from the local hospital where he works. It's a odd choice as his sudden disappearance is always going to raise questions. It works temporarily, but soon he is on the look out for fresh eyes. He's not very good at the random murder game, so he sets up pretend job interviews and fake house viewings - later he tries hitch-hikers, winos and, in the creepiest section, abducts a young girl and promises to take her to Disneyland (when she escapes and he is chased by two men, he captures them and uses them instead). None of this works, and his daughter, now horribly scarred by excessive surgery, is utterly miserable.

Worst of all, the doctor's victims are in a conveniently placed jail cell beneath the titular mansion, sleeping on mattresses and constantly screaming and groaning about their lack of eyes. I'm a pretty peaceful sort of person (most of the time) but it took me about ten seconds of wailing before I started wondering why he just didn't kill them all.

Slightly murky, dreamy, the film only has credibility because it stars Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame, formerly award winning stars between fifteen and twenty years past their prime. Oscar winning Grahame has little to do and, with an immobile top lip (caused by, ironically, too much surgery), has little she can do, although it's nice to see her (she died in 1981). Richard Basehart was a always a pretty good actor, slightly hammy and fruity, but of a tradition. Unfortunately, that tradition was no longer required in New Hollywood so he ended up making a hundred or so episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a show that started out inexpensive and unpretentious and ended up cheap and embarrassing. No wonder he was drunk for most of the latter part of his life.

Finally, it's worth noticing aliens star Lance Henrikson here in an early supporting role. His early life was fairly itinerant and his education was broken up to the extent that he didn't learn to read until he was thirty. I hope he at least got a few of the classics in before this script arrived.

Finally finally, given its obsession with sight loss, shouldn't this have perhaps been called Mansion of the Dimmed? Well, maybe, I don't suppose it matters now.

HITLER'S CHILDREN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

At first I wondered why, in 1943, US audiences were watching a film about the dangers of Nazism set in 1938, especially as America had already been at war with Germany for two years. Then I thought about the timing and realised that it was probably preparing them for D-Day: when there is sacrifice ahead, it's a good idea to remind people what it's all for.

In order to connect with audiences, the film uses a handsome boy and a pretty girl, a sort of Nazi Romeo and Juliet: he is a German born in America; she is an American born in Germany, and they love each other, despite their political differences. In the early days, it's picnics and sing-a-longs in the stereotypical hale and hearty way of the old Fatherland, all jolly rucksacks and strudel. When Hitler begins his conquests, however, things change. The boy joins the SS and the girl, because she has 'German blood' is sent to a re-education centre for lessons in National Socialism. 

Being a decent, freedom loving girl she doesn't take to the teachings of Herr Hitler one bit, of course, so is publicly whipped and scheduled for enforced sterilisation. The boy, belatedly realising that Nazism is as fucked up a philosophy as you can get, tries to save her, but is arrested. He has time to denounce Hitler at his trial before he and the girl are shot.

Heavy stuff, but then what else could it be? A light musical would have been completely inappropriate. Behind the fractured love story we occasionally get glimpses of other heinous policies: the rounding up of Jewish schoolchildren, no doubt destined for concentration camps; talk of the extermination of the physically and mentally impaired to further the bloodline of 'the master race'; the suggestion that it is the girl's duty to get pregnant by an approved Aryan at the soonest opportunity, no relationship required. The overall picture is of a sick, almost surreally inhuman society presided over by sadists who are either thugs or pseudo-intellectuals or an unsavoury combination of the two. 

Hitler's Children was an absolutely enormous box office success. Propaganda is always propaganda, of course, no matter which side it comes from, no matter how many facts (or lies) it contains. It's purpose is to create the collective frame of mind where it is okay to hate, to fight, to kill, to die - and this film, with its emphasis on the way the Nazis stamp down on personal expression and individual liberty, chimed absolutely with American audiences. They've always been very big on the old freedom thing in the US of A - for Americans, anyway.         

GIRLS IN PRISON

d. Edward L. Cahn (1956)

There’s not much to distinguish Girls In Prison as anything other than a very generic b-movie: a mass stabbing, perhaps, a slight allusion to lesbianism, an earthquake that facilitates an escape, a prison chaplain who is a bit too interested in one of the new inmates. Much of the film is just as you’d expect, and given the advanced ages of most of the cast, the definition of 'girls' is fairly loose, to say the least.

The best thing in it is Adele Jergens as Jenny, top dog and matriarch of the prison. Jenny is fairly genial most of the time, even likeable and kind, but is hard as nails when it comes down to tin tacks, a gun wielding, wavy peroxided, scarlet lipped force of nature. She’s absolutely gorgeous, even when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette (actually, especially when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette). The film would be almost insufferably dull without her.

After an hour and twenty minutes of molasses slow mayhem, the film climaxes in a bruising brawl and a gun fight. It’s a good way to end any drama, I find. After the dust has settled and the wonderful Jenny has gone the way of all pistol packing mama's, we end on a close up of a church steeple while some quasi-religious music plays, as if God has in some way been responsible for the restoring the balance of law and order. Rubbish. God was not responsible, although maybe he set off the earthquake to punish some other sinners in the general area. As for the rest, omniscient he may be, but micro management is not exactly his style. 

CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS

d. Bob Clark, 1972

Bob Clark directed a number of films that would fit perfectly here, not least the disturbing and hallucinatory Death Dream, and one of the best ever Sherlock Holmes films, Murder By Decree. At the end of the decade, he blotted his copybook by kick-starting the teen sex comedy genre with the execrable Porky’s but, hey, nobody is perfect, least of all you. 

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was Clark’s full directorial debut (he only co-directed She-Man: A Study of Fixation) and has a more than a whiff of a student production about it: it’s talky, quirky and democratic - everybody gets a monologue or a bit of business. Appropriately, his cast were drawn from his college friends, and the characters they play share their own real first names. They all give good performances with one exception, but as the actress in question was married to the director at the time he probably didn’t feel comfortable to ask her to stop rolling her eyes. 

The Children of the title are actually a troupe of hippy-ish actors, all aged somewhere between 18 and 35. They are led by Alan, an awful little popinjay of a man-child who, by virtue of paying their wages, belittles and humiliates his colleagues at every turn, presumably to make himself feel better about his own unlovely inconsequence. Alan adores the sound of his own voice, and uses litanies of big words as alliteratively as he can. He also likes a joke, as long as it’s at someone else’s expense: the worse his victims feel, the louder and longer he laughs. His latest put on is for the group to travel to an old cemetery on a small island with a Grimoire full of incantations that he claims will reanimate the dead. In pursuit of this, they lightheartedly desecrate graves, rob corpses and wage warfare with each other through passive aggressive wisecracks. 

Given their youth and groovy wardrobe, it’s all a bit like a bitterly amusing episode of Scooby Doo guest starring The Manson Family, something that I really do wish existed. When the dark spell unexpectedly works, however, and long dead mouldering corpses start to punch their way out of the dirt (hungry, of course, for fresh human flesh) it leads to a chaotic, bloody, atmospheric finale that sucks all of the comedy out of this comedy horror and leaves us with a sense of dread, especially when we see the shambling, insatiable corpses happily hopping onto the troupe’s boat and setting off for the mainland... The moral of the story: never, ever join an acting group. 

Just time to mention my favourite part of the film, its score. Played by Carl Zittrer on, I'm assuming, a car sized synthesiser, the music comes in big, fat slabs of atonal electronic noise, sounding at even its most melodic like someone hitting the keys of an organ with a mallet. It makes no attempt to do anything other than just creep us out and, as such, is excellent.    

THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED

d. Fred F. Sears

A dedicated scientist invents a machine that can forecast earthquakes just in time to predict that the world is about to be destroyed by a series of uncontrollable explosions. The cause is Element 112, a previously unknown type of rock that (rather like the stuff in Monolith Monsters, but in reverse) increases its mass when it dries out, then explodes with enormous force. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, or where all the stock footage came from, although a pretty young scientific intern has a theory: ‘it’s like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources’*.

An early-ish example of an eco-disaster film, The Night The World Exploded is cheap but charming, if slightly confusing (the disasters take place during the day for a start). Despite being just over an hour long, however, and being about exploding rocks and volcanoes and the end of the world, it does drag a little bit, not least in the scenes where we watch people descending rope ladders into the Carlsbad Caverns for about ten minutes.

* Later on, the chief scientist comes up with a theory: 'it's like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources'.