DEATH PROMISE

d. Robert Warmflash (1977) 

When I was at junior school, about a thousand years ago, once a week our teacher Mr. Crockett would let us perform a play of our own devising on a rotational basis. In my group - boys only, of course, because girls were horrible  - we never really put much effort in, either blatantly ripping off something we’d seen on telly or coming up with some nonsense about robot teachers or someone setting fire to the school. When inspiration ran completely dry, we often just improvised, returning again and again to the twin preoccupations of pre-pubescent boys: fighting and friendship. These 'plays' involved kung fu, sword fights, stabbings, stranglings, shootings, wrestling, boxing and a huge amount of male bonding: hand shaking, back patting, affectionate arm punching. The high five hadn't caught on in the UK at the time, and the fist bump was still under development. It was an amateurish, childish vision of what it meant to be a grown up man: violence, camaraderie, heroism, cuddling, no women. And that, dear reader, is what Death Promise reminded me of.  

Two tough New York guys, one white, one black, one short, one tall, neither in any kind of employment, spend their days jogging in matching track suits and training – hard – at the martial arts club. To show that they are friends, they touch each other constantly. When ruthless developers try to evict them from their apartment building, using a variety of nefarious means (turning off the utilities, starting a fire, infesting the building with rats) the guys find any number of arses to kick, somewhatr exacerbating the problem and culminating in the murder of the short white guy’s father. Eaten up by grief, hungry for revenge, he flies off to an exotic dojo where he becomes so disciplined that he can catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks. Shit hot and invincible, he returns to the Big Apple to kill those dirty scumbag landlords one by one: by bow and arrow, by poison, by putting a bag of angry, hungry rats on someone’s head.

Each time he crosses a name off the list he and his tall, black friend nod sagely, clasp hands and look into each other’s eyes for just a beat too long. It's very funny, not because it’s homoerotic but because it absolutely isn't.   

Somewhat stilted in terms of drama, the film only really comes to life during the fight sequences,  although luckily these take up about 75% of the films running time. The last half hour is literally just one big battle, eventually descending into hysterical madness as angry men scream wildly and uncontrollably at each other, tearing off their tight shirts to kick and punch the shit out of each other really slowly. It ends with a dummy representing the main villain being thrown off a roof, and it’s not a good dummy either - which is great. Highly recommended!  

DEATH BY INVITATION

d. Ken Friedman (1971)

If you’re looking for pace and excitement, then this film is not for you. Languid to the point of being in a stupor, the story concerns a reincarnated witch, Lise (Shelby Levington, excellent), who, three hundred years after her execution in Salem, is able to wreak her revenge on the descendants of her chief persecutor in modern day Staten Island.

Lise is attractive, intelligent, nonchalant, cool and sexy as hell. She starts by insinuating herself into the family as a trusted friend, before callously killing the family’s teenage son, and suspending his dismembered corpse in a plastic bag in a cupboard. She then decapitates their teenage daughter and ‘helps’ their six year old girl fall down the stairs to her death. All the while she wears black and pulls sympathetic faces, supporting the family through their grief as she plans her next diabolical move, building up to taking out the patriarch, a bumptious, arrogant drunk who just happens to look exactly like the man who killed her all those centuries ago.

Lise is not really a witch by deed: she doesn’t cast any spells or hop about in the nude invoking the goat of Mendes or Gaia or whoever or whatever witches invoke. In fact, there is no evidence that she ever sticks a pin in anything. Lise is a witch by character, full of strength, resolve, defiance. Her mission is about revenge, pure and simple, executed with strength and cold, relentless intent.

Right at the beginning of the film, Lise tells the nerdy, doomed teenage son a long story about a primitive tribe where women were the leaders and the hunters and the men merely acolytes and hand servants. When the women were challenged by an alpha male, they pursued him through the woods and, when they caught up with the upstart, tore him apart with their hands and teeth for his impudence. It’s a mesmerising monologue, performed well, and lets us know that she can’t stop, won’t stop in her mission, despite the fact that, with the exception of the father, who is a real piece of work, the rest of her victims seem ordinary, totally harmless, certainly undeserving of death and misery and loss on the scale inflicted upon them. Their niceness is irrelevant, however, Lise wants her pound of flesh, and isn’t bothered about how she balances the scales.

A slow but quietly immersive film, reeking of comedown and 1971, that only loses points towards the end by having Lise fall for a guy who bullies her into loving him and thus diminishes her powers and her will to kill. As if.

CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

Noted endocrinologist John Carradine has made the familiar transition from dedicated scientist to unhinged maniac. He steals a friendly gorilla from a circus and implants it with the glands of his nurse, who made the mistake of suggesting that he was probably working too hard. The result, somewhat improbably, is a beautiful, exotic looking woman who he names Paula Dupree (she's played by Acquanetta, 'the Venezualan Volcano', actually born in Wyoming).

Because he's mad and drunk on his own cleverness, the doctor takes his creation back to the circus, where it becomes clear that Paula has a miraculous power over animals: they are shit scared of her. She is immediately enlisted as an assistant to the big cat tamer, her main role being to stand outside the cage in a spangly outfit just looking intently at the lions and tigers*. Occasionally, if they become unruly, she will look harder, perhaps arching an eyebrow. It's nice work if you can get it, though, presumably, there isn't a massive amount of demand for that sort of talent.

Falling in love with the big cat tamer sends powerful emotions coursing through her reconfigured body, however, breaking her new glands and unleashing her inner gorilla. By the time she is shot by an over zealous cop (nothing much changes in America) she has fully reverted to her old, hairy animal self, but there is a moment roughly halfway between her initial retro-transformation from human lady to ape woman to gorilla in which she is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

* These scenes feature Clyde Beatty, the world famous animal trainer. It is amazing to watch him face down a dozen snarling big cats, but his methods leave a lot to be desired. There is also a lot of footage of lions and tigers fighting each other, an incredible but unedifying spectacle. 

DAUGHTER OF DR JEKYLL

d. Edgar G. Ulmer (1957)

As you might expect from the title, this is a silly sort of film, albeit one that seems to wilfully muddle horror mythology simply for the sake of it. It's also a film that is occasionally hard to watch, as the interiors and exteriors are so unevenly matched in terms of quality and visibility that they might as well be from completely different productions.

When a young woman turns 21, she inherits a large country estate and the truth about her lineage: she is the daughter of the notorious Dr. Henry Jekyll. Despite the fact that she was born several years before he started the experiments that would transform him into Mr. Hyde, she is frightened that his 'condition' might be hereditary, concerns that her guardian is rather poor at assuaging: 'Well, there's absolutely no proof that it is - and absolutely no proof that it isn't'. The condition in question, by the way, is Lycanthropy. Yes, sod Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll was, it seems, a werewolf. Don't worry, though, the local villagers know what to do to stop a 'blood sucking' werewolf. That's right, you bang a stake through its heart*. 

Despite being under sedation and locked in her room, every night Ms. Jekyll has feverish dreams of herself as a saturnine, feral figure, emerging from the family crypt to kill. When she wakes up she is in her own bed, but covered in blood and mud to find that, invariably, another female servant has been murdered on her way back home to the village. 

The set up of these murders is less than meticulous, and it is soon apparent that it is physically impossible for Ms. Jekyll to have committed them. All we're seemingly left with is the prospect of a Scooby Doo big reveal type ending - which, happily, doesn't quite happen, as there is one more left handed twist of the cinematic pepper pot which, along with a superbly eerie theremin score,  just about redeems the whole thing.

Staking werewolves, though? Come on.  

* As a lifelong horror enthusiast, this actually hurt my feelings.