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 MASK

d. Julian Roffman (1961)

Psychiatrist Allen Barnes has a patient who has stolen an ancient tribal mask from an University archive. It’s a chilling, horrible artefact, a crystalline skull with beady eyes and a hinged lantern jaw with jagged teeth, the sort of thing that looks like it should be encrusted in blood. The young man has become addicted to putting on the mask and experiencing an altered state, a sort of parallel dimension full of danger and horror. When he removes the mask, he feels the overwhelming urge to kill*.

Falling apart, the young man commits suicide, first posting the mask to Dr Barnes. Barnes, a rationalist and seeker of truth, cannot resist the temptation to put the mask on himself. What happens next is a form of Hell, as the psychiatrist sees the same terrible visions as his patient, undergoes the same ordeal, feels the same urges – and, almost instantly, begins to go completely insane.

A tremendous, supremely leftfield film, The Mask is good throughout but superlative in its four surreal 3D sequences. These nightmarish scenes have an extraordinary primal power: savage, pagan, occult, violent, disturbing and discombobulating. I've watched them with the glasses on and off and, actually, prefer the blurred reds and blues of the unprocessed image. The scenes are accompanied by the swoops and bleeps of an analogue electronic score and are absolutely outstanding, perhaps the best use of 3D ever.

On the film’s release, the audience were given a ‘magic, mystic mask’, a shaped set of 3D glasses. When a voice from the screen demanded ‘Put the mask on, NOW!’ they would don the glasses and enter the warped fantasy at the same time as the increasingly frazzled hero. My God, how I wish I’d been there.

* So many psychotronic films hinge on ‘the urge to kill’ that, in real life, the human race should technically have all been murdered long ago.  

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE

d. Spencer Gordon Bennett (1959)

For a long while The Atomic Submarine goes around in circles as we watch the bickering crew of the state of the art USS Sharkfish scour the Arctic Ocean looking for the cause of a series of maritime disasters. When their quarry is revealed as a flying saucer, however, things start to gather pace, culminating in a small group of sailors boarding the alien craft and establishing contact with its pilot. Most of the men end up dead, horribly burned by a heat ray or crushed between automatic doors, but 'Reef' Holloway (Arthur Franz) survives, establishing a psychic link with the invader, a hideous creature who resembles a clump of seaweed with tentacles and has one enormous, all seeing eye. This unprecedented close encounter of the third kind prompts the following exchange:

Alien: We meet face to face.

Holloway: That’s a face?

Alien: Point of view is everything.   

The alien snottily explains via telekinesis that his race want to colonise the Earth and need human specimens to experiment on, and Holloway's life has been spared so that he can be vivisected. Holloway has other ideas, of course.

Holloway: To navigate, won’t you have to see your way?  

Alien: Obviously.

(Holloway pulls out a Very pistol and shoots the alien, blowing out its eyeball)

Holloway: Could be rough!

The triumphant submariner then makes his escape as his blinded foe throws his fronds around in agony, viscous gunk glooping from its brand new hole. The previously rather smug alien has learned an important lesson about human beings: never under estimate their survival instinct, or their capacity to cause pain. It’s a short period of reflection, though, as the UFO is almost immediately destroyed by a ground to air missile: job done, Earth saved. For now.

Please note: this is not a proper submarine film, so do not expect any popping rivets, sweaty faces or corpses and oil being jettisoned to the surface to fool enemy battle ships. I'm still quite miffed about that, actually.

THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN

d. Ron Ormond (1977)

I'm a tolerant person. I don't mind what other people do as long as it enhances their lives and doesn't fuck others over. I've never had a religion, and never missed the absence, but I am fascinated with the mechanics of belief and, particularly, the mechanism by which it is delivered. 

The Believers Heaven is pure propaganda, overseen by the director, Ron Ormond, a fringe film maker and writer who turned to God after surviving a plane crash, and Estus W. Pirkle, a fire and brimstone preacher with steel hair, stone eyes, an unwavering voice, an immobile face, and rigid ideals. Pirkle has two modes: angry and furious. He reserves his greatest ire for us, the viewer, staring at us down the camera, confronting and challenging us, baiting us about how we’re never going to get into his heaven with the sort of shitty attitudes he knows we possess.  

Pirkle talks without interruption and without discernible respiration. He is clearly learned in the sense of having read The Bible enough times to recite large chunks of it, but this does not wisdom make. In fact, it’s genuinely hard to get any sense of what he's actually saying, apart from a list of the various precious stones and other minerals that Heaven’s walls are apparently made of. 

Pirkle’s monologue is intercut with interviews with other ‘experts’, all cut from the same sack cloth, and all with the strange habit of darting out their tongue to lick their bottom lips like some sort of pontificating toad, presumably a trick of the preacher trade. These talking heads are further supplemented by DIY historical pageant recreations featuring tea towel head scarfs and a multitude of stick on beards. The acting is abysmal but then the material they have to work with is terrible – The Bible may hold all the answers, but it’s scant on detail and very poor on dialogue.

To bring it up to date, the film uses news footage of a recent earthquake in 'Central America' spliced with fake re-enactments of the disaster that are both in poor taste and very badly done. To give an example, there is a seemingly interminable shot of a burial trench filled with blacked / browned up corpses, one of which winces when another body is dropped onto her legs.

The overall message of this mad melange is that the afterlife is only available to the saved and, as Jesus could be back at any minute and the Rapture takes no prisoners, you’d better be saved or get saved right now. It's not enough to live a blameless life spent helping others, by the way, and it’s not enough to just believe, no matter how fervently, and to quietly worship in your own way – you must be saved, presumably by Estus W. Pirkle, and you have to tell everyone or it doesn’t count. 

The consequences of not doing so are laid out in merciless detail: you will join the liars, cheaters, criminals, Jews and Buddhists (!) in Hell, a place which resembles a burning landfill site populated by people with sad, dirty faces wandering around moaning about how utterly miserable and wrong they are and how they should have listened while they were still alive. Oh, and this goes on forever.

The film is fun for a while in a stiff, arch, totally ridiculous way, but the oxen cart wheels finally come off when it introduces a 32 inch tall woman who is lifted onto a table and sings with almost unbearable sincerity about how she will be whole in the afterlife and won’t need a wheelchair anymore, and three badly burned teenagers, looking utterly broken, who sing half-heartedly while clutching a hymn book in their melted, fingerless hands. Unsurprisingly, this breaks the campy spell immediately and permanently and only serves to underline what a terrible confidence trick it all is.

MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. 

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.

TEENAGE DOLL

d. Roger Corman (1957) 

I was going to start by saying what a strange little film this is but, of course, everything on here is a strange little film, that's sort of the point. So, instead, I will say that Teenage Doll is singular, odd, unusual, unsettling, whatever other synonyms I can dredge up to try and convey the fact that the film contains five minutes of plot and sixty five minutes of social commentary, and manages to be both as camp as a row of tents and depressing as hell. 

The story starts with the back door of a restaurant opening and a man throwing a bowl of dirty water out into the yard. He doesn't realise it, but the waste water splashes over the body of a young girl lying in an ignominious heap, dead as straw. We never see her face, just her blond, curled hair and a flash of thigh through a torn skirt. She was a member of teen girl gang the Black Widows (there's one in every city), and the rest of the gang are pretty sure that she was murdered by a nice middle class girl called Barbara Bonney. The motive: they were both in love with the same boy, the leader of a gang called The Vandals. The Black Widows decide to track Barbara down, and the rest of the film details their search. 

Teenage delinquency is described as a disease at the beginning of the film, and we are shown both the symptoms and the cause. We go to each of the Black Widows’ homes and see a little of the upbringings that have shaped their young minds, the circumstances that the girls are running from or rebelling against. 

Leader Helen's Dad is a lazy drunk with a penchant for prostitutes; Janet has a baby sister who takes up all her mother's time, and cop Dad is too busy fighting crime to notice that his daughter is a criminal; Eva's immigrant family are working and arguing themselves to early graves to make ends meet; May is so stifled by her dead end life and non-existent prospects that she no longer cares about anything but mindless kicks. In the most disturbing vignette, we go to the filthy shack where Lori lives. There, in the dark, is her five year old sister, chewing on a cardboard box because she is hungry. Lori gives her a packet of stale crackers and leaves, pausing only to switch the light off again. It's extraordinarily grim. 

Then there's Barbara, the pretty, polite girl with a nice house and a nice family who has just killed a love rival and is covered in her blood. Her home life is more subtly rendered, but no less horrible: a repressed, passive aggressive father, so distant that he might as well not be there; a mentally disturbed mother who wears her hair in pig tails and is stuck in the past, still obsessed with her own bad boy, a criminal she loved who died twenty years ago. 

All of this psychodrama builds to a meeting of the gangs and a rumble in a scrap yard, before the climax proper in which Barbara has to decide whether to leave everything, including her identity, behind, to turn herself in and potentially face the gas chamber, or to go out fighting, torn apart by the Black Widows. I won't reveal what she chooses to do, but her fate breaks up the gang. Those sad, mixed up girls who still have a chance opt to go home and stay there; the hopeless, angry ones go for a late beer and to plot more mayhem. 

 A quick word on Roger Corman. Simultaneously admired and despised for his quick, cheap, brazen exploitative films, I think he's an occasionally great director who gets a bad rap, even now. A sniffy article about him in The New Yorker last year was titled 'Surface, Not Depth'. They clearly haven't seen Teenage Doll, a film where all the characters are drowning. I'll come back to Roger. To be honest, this really wouldn't be much of a psychotronic film blog if I didn't.

TERRIFIED

d. Lew Landers (1963)

Pretty teenager Marge hasn't had much luck of late: her father was murdered by an unknown assailant; her mother was killed in a mysterious car crash, and her older brother was turned into a 'dribbling oyster' by a man in a black silk mask who threw him screaming into a grave at the local ghost town and then filled it with wet concrete until the boy's mind snapped at the prospect of being simultaneously drowned and buried alive. 

What Marge doesn't know is that the kinky killer is a man who is horribly fixated on her, and is systematically eliminating the people she loves in order to facilitate possessing her. This is also bad news for the two callow youths* who are wooing her, one of whom ends up being tormented and tortured and, yes, terrified to death.

It's pretty sick, especially at the climax when the unmasked killer says he first noticed Marge when she was ten years old, then whispers excitedly about her 'bare little feet' and 'torn dress' and promises to look after her always as she lies rigid with fear in his arms. At this point, my skin crawled off and hid behind the sofa.  

Terrified examines the notion of the cheerful small town where everything is gingham and gee willikers on the surface but, underneath, is sick and corrupt and rotten and dirty. It's a particularly American obsession: King's Row, Peyton Place and Twin Peaks all attest to that. America has a tragic, terrible history: a vast, wild, deadly landscape colonised by force, seeded by sacrifice, watered by blood, built on death. 

If the English are always bemoaning the fact that life used to be better, that the best of our country has come and gone, then perhaps the American psyche works in reverse, and the people are haunted by a folk memory of when things were infinitely worse. Is it any wonder that they are scared of what's out there in the dark?**

*  Technically only one callow youth: the other one is thirty three and looks every month of it, especially as he is painted, coloured and styled like a cheap whore in order to try and look 18.

**  According to the FBI, between 35 and 50 active serial killers at any one time, for a start.