WEIRD WOMAN

d. Reginald Le Borg (1944)

Inner Sanctum was a long running radio show of the 1940s that trawled through the vibrant pulp paperback market of the time for macabre stories to frighten its listeners with. Incredibly successful, the show spawned a series of spin offs including books, a TV show and several films. Weird Woman is one of them.  

Based on a book by Fritz Leiber called Conjure Wife, the story takes place in a University where the usual snobbery, social climbing and back stabbing of the academic world is being supplemented by witchcraft, some white, some black, but mostly fake and malign in nature. 

At the centre of the story is the implacable Lon Chaney, Jr. Chaney is a brilliant academic and professional skeptic who has just returned from a trip to the South Seas with a pretty young wife, a woman who was raised by a primitive tribe governed by superstition and natural magic. In marrying her he has disappointed a number of smitten women, especially chief librarian Hilary Brooke, who determines to have her revenge on him and his new love, no matter how many suicides, murder attempts and rape accusations it leads to. 

Economic in everything but imagination, Weird Woman is a superb hubbub of activity, packing a huge amount into its short running time. Favourite scenes include a tribal ritual with a great exotica soundtrack; several sequences in which disembodied heads and other superimpositions spin wildly around the screen and, more generally, the slightly silly notion that lumpy old Lon might be cat nip to the ladies. 

One woman who is not giddied by Chaney’s charm and moustache is Elizabeth Russell, who plays the crazily ambitious wife of one of his academic rivals. A regular in Val Lewton films, Russell has the most extraordinary physiognomy, like a skull covered in a thin layer of wax. Her expressions are amazingly fluid, as if her skin is so thin that every electrical impulse from her brain ripples across her face. I’m not sure how she’d manage in a romantic comedy, but in horror she is unforgettable. 

After Weird Woman, Lieber’s story was subsequently remade twice: in 1961 as the rather good Night of the Eagle starring the superb Peter Wyngarde, and once in the eighties with Richard Benjamin, a production which I have no interest in whatsoever but mention for the sake of accuracy.

THE CYCLOPS

d. Bert I. Gordon (1957)

A group of pushy Americans looking for a lost pilot crash land in a mysterious Mexican valley. The trip has been organised by the pilot's girlfriend who, even after three years, can't accept that he is dead. On the plus side, the valley is filled with million of dollars of raw uranium; on the down side, it's inhabited by a  menagerie of enormous creatures, many times their normal size: lizards, insects, rats, eagles, snakes and, most memorably, a twenty five foot tall nappy wearing man beast with one eye, terrible teeth and a partially melted face. Is he friendly? Not so much. Could he conceivably hold the secret to the mystery of the missing man? I wonder... 

I particularly like the scenes of the Cyclops menacing people. Lacking depth perception, he rather struggles to grab them, so we're just left with a poorly back projected hairy hand jabbing pointlessly at the actors (at one point accidentally tearing away the backdrop). The cast, which includes Lon Chaney, Jr. as a loveable dirtbag, don't seem to quite know what they are reacting to and their blank, confused faces combine with poorly executed special effects to provide a very silly 64 minutes.

The Cyclops, who (of course, it's so obvious now!) turns out to be the missing pilot, ends up being speared in his remaining eye and left to die. It's rather cruel: he didn't ask to be marooned in that radiation choked valley and get mutated into a horrible giant, after all. His once devoted girlfriend, having quickly realised the drawbacks of being involved with an ugly, angry monster, is in the arms of another man before her massive ex-beau has even fallen over and died.    

Director, writer and producer Bert I. Gordon ('Mr. B.I.G') obviously liked the concept (and the make up) revisiting it in both The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and its sequel War Of The Colossal Beast (1958), although in these films the mutation is the result of plutonium bomb testing.    

THE MUMMY'S GHOST

d. Reginald Le Borg (1944)

‘If the Mummy didn’t make these tracks, I’ll eat ‘em’

It’s shit being a Mummy.  Dead, but not dead, wrapped in putrid rags that reek of your own decay. One eyed, one armed, one foot dragging awkwardly behind. You can’t speak, you can’t reason and, with no will of your own, you are wide open to become the shuffling slave of any unscrupulous person who knows the evocations and boils the right number of Tana leaves during a full moon.  Your heart, that putrefying organ, is filled with ancient spores and moss and dirt but, cruelly, still functions just well enough for you to continue to suffer the acute pain of a centuries dead lost love. 

And what do you do when you’re not needed to kill, to kidnap, to terrorise, to steal artefacts? Where do you go, what space do you inhabit? Do you live under a bridge, like a bandage wreathed troll? Or do you just sit in a shed or a cave or in the heart of the woods and wait? After all, waiting is second nature to you – actually, its first nature, the thing that you are most familiar with after thousands of years of stasis.  

Then, when you find that your beloved Princess Ananka has been reincarnated, how do you plight your troth? You lumber up to the poor girl and scare her into unconsciousness, terrify her to the extent that a grey streak spontaneously appears in her hair: she isn't pleased to see you, and that feeling of deathless love over the millennia is most definitely not mutual. 

So, you scoop up her inert body and drag her off to the river like so much laundry, pursued by an angry mob and a scrappy little dog who hates your dusty guts. As you disappear into the muddy water, dragging your (now inexplicably aged) reincarnated Princess with you, what do you think you’ll find down there? Peace? Contentment? Rest? These things are not available to you. They never will be. You'll be back.

It’s shit being a Mummy.