Monster March: She-Wolf of London (1946)

When in doubt, the Universal Classic Monsters had a formula – “son of,” “daughter of,” or “bride of.” We’ve seen diminishing returns on that front, though occasionally shaking up the gender of the main monster has been grounds for cinematic gold. When I planned out Monster March, I assumed from the title that the last film on the docket would be more of that same sequel reinvention, that She-Wolf of London might as well be the story of Lorena Talbot or something like that. Imagine my surprise, then, to find out that She-Wolf of London is instead another example of something else the Universal Monsters often did well: false advertising.

Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is set to marry well-to-do barrister Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), but a rash of brutal murders have led her to suspect that she has fallen victim to the legendary Allenby curse of werewolfism. Her aunt Martha (Sara Haden) dismisses these ideas as superstition but all the same asks her to keep this notion a secret from Phyllis’s cousin Carol (Jan Wiley), who is herself betrothed to starving artist Dwight Severn (Martin Koslack). As Phyllis’s wedding approaches, Scotland Yard draws a tighter dragnet until inspectors are knocking on the Allenby front door.

 

I can’t talk about She-Wolf of London without talking about the ending, so if there’s any part of you that might one day want to watch it unspoiled, thanks for joining us for Monster March, and have a pleasant tomorrow. I’ll note, however, that the twist ending to She-Wolf isn’t exactly hard to deduce; within the 61-minute runtime, a semi-conscious audience member can probably crack it in twenty. For those of you sticking around, you’ve probably made the right choice because this film doesn’t actually belong in Monster March. You see, there is no werewolf in She-Wolf of London. In fact, were it not included in my “Wolf Man” DVD box set, I wouldn’t be reviewing it. I had gently complained throughout See-Thru Thursdays that Universal’s “Invisible Man” franchise was barely a franchise, but She-Wolf goes one step further, actively arguing against being enrolled in the nascent cinematic universe.

 

I had said a few weeks ago that there might be a very interesting version of The Wolf Man where the werewolf might merely be in Lawrence Talbot’s mind, and it’s as though the makers of She-Wolf heard me – though She-Wolf ends up pushing the other extreme by creating a narrative in which the werewolf is definitively a product of the imagination. The film Gaslight was released two years earlier, and I have a strong suspicion that screenwriters George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock had seen it. The twist that Phyllis is being gaslit by Aunt Martha is telegraphed pretty early on, especially when Martha explains to her daughter Carol all the misfortune that will befall the family if either of the impending marriages is allowed to transpire. And while the film tries to bait-and-switch you – first that Phyllis is the werewolf, then that Carol might be – Sara Haden plays Aunt Martha like the wicked stepmother in a Disney film. It’s a good thing the film is in black-and-white, because otherwise we’d see the technicolor glow of an enormous neon sign pointing “VILLAIN” at Martha.

 

It’s not that She-Wolf is badly made. I think, under any other circumstance, I’d have been more forgiving of its wolf-less plot. Certainly June Lockhart fits the bill for terrified protagonist; her wide-eyed pallor and fits of hysteria acquit her very well, especially for a filmgoer who only recognizes her as television moms on Lassie and Lost in Space. Once you notice, though, that the film is lacking in transformation scenes like the ones that let Jack Pierce work his magic on Lon Chaney Jr., you’re not long for solving the mystery. Still, one can’t help but wish Lockhart had gotten a better script, one that explains a bit more about the fabled Allenby curse or even why Phyllis has only just now gotten it into her head. There’s a brief nod toward Phyllis turning an ear to local superstition, though I wish the film had explored that angle less perfunctorily. There’s also some business about whether Aunt Martha is actually an Allenby or not, a matter that clogs up her first scene in the film before the question is brushed aside entirely.

 

Or perhaps it’s too much to ask that She-Wolf of London has a werewolf in it. I hate to sound like an entitled moviegoer, because I’ll settle for Dracula not meeting the other monsters in a “monster mash.” But after living and breathing monster movies for an entire month, I can’t say that I’m entirely thrilled to be duped into watching a movie without a werewolf, and I’m a little sorry to have wasted your time. But maybe this is a good reminder that, despite what Van Helsing says, there is no such thing as vampires. It’s charming to think there might be, but the real world is terrifying enough without werewolves. Perhaps that’s why She-Wolf of London has me so down – because it denied me the very escapism for which I created Monster March. Like Henry Frankenstein, my creation has grown beyond my control. And like Phyllis Allenby, I’ve been kept up into the long hours of the night, thinking about werewolves and other unreal creatures. They’re not real, and they don’t exist.

 

Then again, as Ernest Hemingway put it, and as the entire dreamscape of cinema suggests over and over again, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 

She-Wolf of London is not rated. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Written by George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring June Lockhart, Don Porter, Sara Haden, Eily Malyon, and Jan Wiley.

Monster March: House of Dracula (1945)

As the third monster mash in an ostensible trilogy with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, it’s hard for me to find a Marvel Cinematic Universe analogy to explain what House of Dracula contributes to the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. Instead, I find myself looking at House of Dracula like Return of the Jedi – a third installment that doesn’t really do anything wrong but neither does it quite excel. There are flashes of brilliance, but on the whole there’s nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) receives a strange visitor just before sunrise – Count Dracula (John Carradine), seeking a cure for his vampirism. While the doctor prepares a blood transfusion to cure the count, who is himself conspiring to consume the doctor’s assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), Dr. Edelmann takes on another patient – Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who believes the doctor can rid him of the curse of the werewolf. Meanwhile, in the caves beneath Dr. Edelmann’s castle lies the lifeless body of the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and soon it will take all of Dr. Edelmann’s strength to keep these creatures from tearing down his home.

 

My chief complaint about House of Dracula carries over from House of Frankenstein – the monsters never truly meet. After seeing Chaney and Lugosi on screen together for much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it’s a shame that Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster are kept at arm’s length from each other. Talbot meets the other two, but it’s a far cry from the elegant way that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought the same three monsters together into the same plot. 

 

Instead, what we get in House of Dracula is something akin to the setup for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein walk into a doctor’s office. The plot then becomes a revolving door; when Dracula leaves the office, Talbot enters, and their treatments continue in alternating sequence. I had hoped that there might be some larger string that ties all this together, some way that it all related to a larger plot by Count Dracula, but again the filmmakers seem set on putting the monsters on the same bill without ever featuring them on the same screen. 

 

It's another cash-grab, to be sure, but there seemed to be something more genuine about it in House of Frankenstein. Perhaps it was the legitimating presence of Boris Karloff, who felt like an appropriate thread to unify the whole piece. I hope it’s no slight to Onslow Stevens to say that he’s no Boris Karloff, but there is something a little disingenuous about bringing the whole cinematic universe back together through an actor making his franchise debut in the role. Stevens is perfectly serviceable, at times recalling particularly in his voice a B-movie Orson Welles, but for the most part we’re left wondering what’s so special about this doctor. For one, I’m still not sure what sort of reputation a doctor might have to suggest he could cure both vampirism and lycanthropy, but Karloff never invited that question. Karloff had a presence and a history, but Stevens only has half of one of those. One almost wishes, based on the way the film develops, Dr. Edelmann had instead been Dr. Jekyll – that’d resolve a few of the film’s problems straight away.

There’s the problem of overwhelming coincidence in the film – why is all of this happening now, in this doctor’s office – but there’s a larger problem of continuity, which the Universal Monsters movies have usually been so careful to avoid. For starters, if House of Frankenstein is any indication, at least two of these monsters should be dead. Now I’ll grant you, “dead” is a relative term for this crew, but House of Dracula very carefully and deliberately acknowledges the fate of the Frankenstein monster from House of Frankenstein while glossing over where that film left Dracula and the Wolf Man. The net effect, then, of disregarding continuity – especially at this late date in the franchise, when this is effectively the conclusion of the series before the spoof era begins – is the feeling that none of this matters much, that all of this happened before, and that it was better that time around. There’s something a little cynical about the “do it again but differently” approach in House of Dracula, something that makes me a little sad this is the way it all ended.

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t good material here. John Carradine acquits himself better as Dracula this time around, particularly in a scene where he seduces a nurse playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – it’s an archetypal image that I’m retroactively surprised didn’t originate with Lugosi. Dracula’s motivations might not make much sense in this film (he wants to be healed, until he doesn’t, and why he leaves his coffin in direct sunlight is anyone’s guess), but at least his presence dials into what the film needs, even if I’m still not convinced he’s the Count Dracula. Indeed, his presence looms over the whole film, as it does on the poster, such that you’re always waiting for Dracula to reenter the picture. That he doesn’t – and that the titular house isn’t even his – is to the film’s discredit.

 

In their respective roles, Chaney and Strange appear, after several movies of doing decent work, to be phoning it in. Chaney is trying, but there’s a weariness in his performance, an overly familiar attitude like slipping into a pair of shoes just before you know they’re about to give out. Just about the only new thing this film adds to Lawrence Talbot is a mustache, along with the unusual revelation that lycanthropy is just a case of pressure on the brain that can be alleviated by fractionally enlarging the skull. As hokey as that sounds, it’s the kind of preposterous balderdash that usually makes these films fun, but when the rest of the film doesn’t hold up, that kind of hokum gets the scrutiny it doesn’t deserve and can’t withstand. Strange, meanwhile, has two settings in this film – comatose and raging – and so there’s little to say beyond his inclusion feeling perfunctory. The film plainly doesn’t know what to do with the Monster; he was at least a vessel for Dr. Niemann’s revenge in House of Frankenstein, but here he’s little more than an action figure pulled out of storage.

 

So falls the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe – in a sense, the House of Dracula, the house that Dracula built back in 1931. We might see this as a case of “how the mighty have fallen,” but on another level we might see that House of Dracula is the moment when these creatures escape the bounds of their respective franchises and enter the level of myth. Unburdened by continuity, these monsters are now free to go wherever the next generation of creators will take them; recall that the Abbott and Costello films made no pretense about being true sequels. Rather, the monsters became mythic nightmares, haunting phantoms from a bygone era that operated not on the level of narrative continuity but as freeze-frame images – a swirling cape or a glinting fang, a lumbering giant, or a primal evolutionary throwback. Maybe that’s what the House of Dracula has been all along: not a literal castle in which the vampire resides, but a conceptual wheelhouse of metaphors and filmic illusions not unlike a waxwork house of horrors. We’ve been tenants in that house for the past month; now maybe it’s time to build our own additions and rewrite our own nightmares. 

House of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Edward T. Lowe. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens, Glenn Strange, and Jane Adams.  

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday – the final installment in Monster March – with She-Wolf of London (1945) starring June Lockhart.

Monster March: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Before I watched The Mummy’s Curse, the final mummy movie for Monster March, I feared that I would end up saying the same things I had said for each of the Karloff-less mummies: that it was the umpteenth remake of the same basic premise, stodgy and lumbering, uncharismatic and mildly xenophobic – in short, that I had seen all this before and hadn’t much liked it then. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that The Mummy’s Curse does some things I hadn’t yet seen in a Universal Monster movie, though that still doesn’t amount to a hearty recommendation.

Twenty-five years after The Mummy’s Ghost, chief excavator Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) is draining the local swamp when he is approached by two men from the Scripps Museum, James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Zandaab (Peter Coe), who have come to recover two mummies lost to the swamp ages ago. The murder of a worker suggests, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) has already risen, while a mysterious woman (Virginia Christine) from the swamps may be the resurrected Princess Ananka herself.

 

For the final film in the franchise, The Mummy’s Curse is a mixed bag. There is so much of what we have seen before – literally, in the case of replaying footage from The Mummy and The Mummy’s Hand (in which, yes, it is distracting to see Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler again). There’s a resurrection plot, those omnipresent tana leaves, a secret society led by a sinister foreigner in a fez; there’s an incredulous populace and a staggering body count. There’s even a damsel in distress carted away by Kharis right at the top of the third act, with such mechanical precision that you can almost set your watch by it. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse also continues the bizarre tradition of the retcon. I hadn’t made much about these in each preceding film, but since we’re at the end of the mummy road, it’s worth noting that every mummy film, excepting Karloff’s, has been a continuation of the same story. That story, however, has had its backstory revisited and rewritten, changing the motivations of Kharis and his connection to the Princess Ananka. Moreover, dead high priests return to life without a scratch, while mummies emerge from flames as though their bandages were made of asbestos. It’s also worth noting that the mummy films very deliberately explain lengthy gaps of time between installments, as with the aging of Tomb’s Stephen Banning (Dick Foran); if you followed the internal chronology of the films, Curse ought to be somewhere in the 1990s, not 1944.

 

The final continuity gaffe ends up being oddly central to The Mummy’s Curse. In The Mummy’s Ghost, Kharis and Ananka went into a swamp in upstate New York; in Curse, the swamp is somehow in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun territory. The film stops short of any voodoo subplot – though that could have been interesting to mix with Egyptian mysticism – but we do have characters explicitly named Cajun Joe and Tante Berthe. (If you want voodoo with your Universal Monsters, you’ll have to check out Son of Dracula.) This continuity error exists largely on the level of set dressing, so it’s a bit bewildering why it even happens, but it’s a clear and deliberate choice to relocate the story. 

 

In a way, though, I’ve neglected to make much ado about these continuity goofs because they’re part of the odd charm of the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe; you’d never recast Tony Stark or Luke Skywalker today (indeed, the crew of The Mandalorian bent over backwards not to), but these monster movies have always been a bit like planes built mid-flight, cobbled together with spare parts and scripts banged out over the course of a weekend. Even the early monster films like Dracula and Frankenstein were still working out the kinks of the talkies, actively struggling to transition from the stagey silent pictures into the slick productions of the 1940s. 

 

You could even make the argument, specious though it may be, that the Universal Monsters helped usher in the eras of sequels and remakes. (I say specious, because both had literary precedent, and even Sophocles had his Oedipus trilogy.) The Mummy franchise has been a little bit of both, at once continuing and revisiting the same basic story. But it’s also been pushing the boundaries of invention; for all their Son of and family tree games, the Universal Monsters have also played with gender in interesting ways. Dracula’s Daughter may have been a bust, but The Mummy’s Curse introduces us to the first female mummy. Sofia Boutella, eat your heart out: Virginia Christine is captivating as Princess Ananka, and the silent sequence in which she rises from the swamp and bathes away the mud and embalming is as captivating as anything the mummy movies have given us. Even her amnesiac performance, as she struggles to account for her memories of Kharis, is a fine angle for the fifth film to take. One almost wishes that Curse had spent more time on that dimension, because the Kharis stuff is not unlike the mummy himself – stale, slow, and long past its prime. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse is not rated. Directed by Leslie Goodwins. Written by Bernard Schubert, Leon Abrams, and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Dennis Moore, Kay Harding, Martin Kosleck, Virginia Christine, and Addison Richards. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with House of Dracula (1945) starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a film of lasts. It’s Abbott and Costello’s last film at Universal (and their penultimate film together), it’s the final mummy film in the Classic Monsters cycle, and it’s the last movie I’ve watched in reviewing Monster March. There is, for me, an unintentional sense of finality in this movie, which can only work in favor of the film; it also helps that this is, as Mummy Mondays have taught us, the second-best of the original mummy films.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (playing themselves, lest the credits fool you) overhear that the mummy Klaris (Eddie Parker) has been discovered – and with him the fabled treasure of Princess Ara. Abbott and Costello blunder their way into a murder investigation, the disappearance of a crucial amulet, and eventually the dig site itself as they try to dodge treasure seekers (Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara) and high priests (Richard Deacon) alike.

 

Where Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man felt tired and overlong, a collision of genres that didn’t play well together, Meet the Mummy is tight, energetic, and laser-focused on spoofing the Egyptian adventure genre. The plot is overfull, to be sure, particularly when it comes to gangs of avaricious conspirators (many of whom look perplexingly similar), but there’s a sense that Abbott and Costello don’t quite know what’s going on either, making it much easier to roll with the punches. 

 

This being Monster March, there is a surprising dearth of mummy action. There is a mummy, though it’s unclear whether Klaris is Kharis with a name change or an entirely different mummy defending a princess’s tomb. He’s not on screen very much, though, and he never leaves his tomb. His wrappings look a little more like striped pajamas, but there is something iconic about the way his nose is obscured by a bandage as he snarls and hisses at his prey. Where the other mummies looked a bit like they were wearing full-face masks or faces made of papier-mâché, this mummy finally looks as though there’s a rotting corpse under the bandages. It’s only a pity we don’t get to see more of him on screen – though as fast as Costello runs away from danger, a lumbering mummy stands no chance of catching him.

 

While we don’t have as much mummy as the title promises, the chemistry between Abbott and Costello is stronger than it was in Meet the Invisible Man. For one, they don’t have to work around the premise of being private detectives or boxers; those aren’t highbrow concepts, to be sure, but compare that to Meet Frankenstein, in which their occupation as delivery boys was only incidental to the plot and quickly disregarded. Here, they’re just two drifters who happen to bumble into the plot, fumble around it, and tumble headlong into the mummy’s tomb for the final act. It’s a perfect set-up for a monster movie send-up, especially continuing the cynic/believer dynamic from Meet Frankenstein. What’s more, their patter is back to form; in one hilarious sequence, they argue about the meaning of the word “pick” – “My pick is the shovel!” “My pick is the pick!” and so on. 

 

In another great moment, Abbott and Costello try to pawn a cursed medallion off on each other. It’s first a game of pickpocketing, then a back-and-forth burger swap with one burger containing the amulet as an ersatz topping. While these bits go exactly where you would expect, the cumulative effect of seeing the situation play out longer and longer, doubling down on confusion rather than trying to illuminate, is uproarious. Compounding the comedy, perhaps more than in the other two parody films, Lou Costello has a penchant for breaking the fourth wall with a well-timed stare. Sometimes he’s saying, “Look what I have to put up with,” while other times it’s an impish “Ain’t I a stinker?” Every time he does it, without fail, it’s good for a chuckle.

 

It’s a boon that Abbott and Costello are so engaging here, because the rest of the cast is comprised of human “wet paint” signs. As the treasure seekers, Marie Windsor and Michael Ansara are mostly lifeless; their only saving grace is that their accomplice is played by Dan Seymour, sporting the same fez he wore in Casablanca, where he played the doorman Abdul. I point this out as a good thing because any reminder of Casablanca automatically raises my estimations of the movie (see also Invisible Agent). Meanwhile, Richard Deacon plays the cult leader Semu like a somnambulant Miguel Ferrer. It’s hard to imagine anyone being intimidated by this lanky, balding, sentient monotone; say what you will about George Zucco, dying multiple times as the same character in the same franchise – at least he had presence. 

 

At the end of the day, though, the Universal Classic Monsters franchise has never thrived with strong supporting casts. You get by with a little help from your mummy, and this is the first time since Karloff that I’ve enjoyed a mummy movie. Abbott and Costello are back to form here, sniping at every Egyptian cliché and genre trope. Meet the Mummy does a lot without doing too much, and watching this as my thirtieth monster movie took Monster March out with a smile. But don’t you go anywhere – you’ve still got three more days to go!

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Lee Loeb and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara, Richard Deacon, and Eddie Parker. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Curse (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christie.

Monster March: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

As Monster March winds down, you’ve seen me start to get more nostalgic and reflective. We’ve still got a few days of reviews yet to go, but The Creature Walks Among Us represents the end of the road. From 1956, it’s the third installment in the Gill-Man trilogy, but more importantly it’s the final Universal Classic Monsters movie. (The gauntlet would more or less pass the following year to Hammer Horror, with 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein.) You might expect a robust cinematic universe to go out with a bang, but the truth is that The Creature Walks Among Us is, for a number of reasons, a very sad finale.

Abusive husband and scientist William Barton (Jeff Morrow) sets off with his wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden) in search of the Gill-Man (Don Megowan and Ricou Browning) after the creature’s escape from a Florida theme park. Against the protests of fellow scientist Tom Morgan (Rex Reason), Barton captures the Gill-Man and experiments on the creature, stripping away his gills and activating his dormant lungs to force him to breathe oxygen before interring him in a private zoo.

 

If The Creature Walks Among Us sounds bleak, it is. When it’s not cripplingly dull, which its first half interminably is, this Creature is horrifyingly depressing. The first two movies introduced an intriguing new monster to the Universal canon, a creature who could garner our attention whether he was stalked by humans or was gleefully eradicating them. Director Jack Arnold, who helmed the first two, managed to create a compelling atmosphere of tension and terror (even if Revenge of the Creature took its sweet time getting there). With John Sherwood at the wheel, however, there is no fear, no terror, despite the heavy lifting done by Henry Mancini’s blaring, shrieking score. There is only pity – abject pity – for the Gill-Man.

 

You’re probably thinking one of two things: either you acknowledge that a Universal Monsters movie always has some degree of sympathy for the monster, or you’re incredulous that one could feel any sympathy for an unthinking murderous beast. On the former count, you would be absolutely right. We’ve always already felt sympathetic toward Frankenstein’s monster as he struggles to find his place in the world, and we couldn’t help but empathize with the Wolf Man when he wrestled with his own darkest impulses. But other monsters have also been entirely heartless, especially the more monstrous they became – Dracula and the mummies, for example, bear little semblance to their own long-dead humanity. They’re entertaining to watch, but it’s hard to root for them beyond that popcorn factor.

 

How, then, does one end up feeling so compassionate toward the Gill-Man, serial killer of the sea? The Creature Walks Among Us spends much of its nearly 80 minutes visiting torment and torture upon the body of the Gill-Man, reducing him to a tragic victim of a litany of violence he cannot understand. Indeed, of all the cinematic subgenres the Universal Monsters can be said to have inspired, this Creature might well be an early forerunner of modern-day torture porn. (Heads-up that I’ll need to spoil the film to explain fully the true horrors in this film.) After stalking the Creature and spearing him with no less than three harpoons, the so-called scientists light him on fire, melting away his outer scales. While the Gill-Man lies in pain, Barton begins to play Mengele by surgically “enhancing” the creature, performing a tracheotomy and essentially rewriting the beast’s DNA to turn him into a land creature. This process, we’re told, likely breaks the creature’s mind, and he cannot understand why he can no longer breathe underwater. Then the horror continues when the creature is jailed in an ad hoc zoo, where he spends his time blankly staring at the sea just beyond his reach. He’s then framed for murder and electrocuted before he tears down the electric fence, kills the mad scientist, and wades into the sea, presumably to drown.

 

The whole film is fairly numbing in its brutality, particularly because the film takes great pains to remind us that the Gill-man is unable to speak or to reason, especially after sustaining significant brain damage to match his new physical scars. Unlike Karloff’s Monster, the Gill-Man has no capacity to learn, no way to understand why his every waking moment has become agony once the scientists trap him in a body he cannot use. It’s truly horrifying to watch, which may be the whole point, but there’s no ethical center to the film beyond Dr. Morgan’s halfhearted and unheeded pleas that all this is wrong. What’s more, no one in the film is particularly bothered by the fate of the Gill-Man, and even his one redemptive act is tossed aside in a brief epilogue in which the characters rationalize away the plot. (Then again, killing Dr. Barton to save his put-upon bride is a far cry from the horny fish monster we met in Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Again, if the film identified any of them as complicit, it’d be a compelling moral claim about who the true monsters were – a hallmark of the Universal canon. Instead, the film is only interested in the violence visited upon the Gill-Man’s body insofar as it makes him more monstrous, more gruesome to behold.

 

Nobody’s likeable, the monster is pitiable to the point of pathetic, and it’s such an overall dour proceeding that it’s hard to find anything to appreciate in The Creature Walks Among Us. There’s a very compelling message in here somewhere about man’s capacity for destruction and the way that we build cages to imprison the things we love; there’s even an ecological reading about environmental destruction buried somewhere in the ruined body of the Gill-Man. But the film is mired by its own squandered potential – another sad tradition of the Universal Classic Monsters, especially the sequels. What could be an opportunity for fresh horror and a fitting conclusion for a trilogy quickly becomes the cinematic equivalent of rubbernecking at roadkill.

The Creature Walks Among Us is not rated. Directed by John Sherwood. Written by Arthur A. Ross. Starring Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Don Megowan, and Ricou Browning.

Tune in tomorrow for Silly Sunday, with Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

Monster March: The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

While watching The Ghost of Frankenstein – the fourth Franken-film in the Universal Classic Monsters franchise – I was reminded of a line from Peter Pan: “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” As much as the Frankenstein films have pushed the narrative forward, more so than most of the Universal Monsters movies, The Ghost of Frankenstein is the first time that I’ve felt bored by the old familiar tropes; rather than continue to reinvent the monster wheel, Ghost of Frankenstein doubles down on what we’ve already seen.

Following the events of Son of Frankenstein, the village is gripped with fear that Frankenstein’s monster will return, and so they implore the mayor to destroy Castle Frankenstein. Ygor (Bela Lugosi), having miraculously survived the end of the last film, discovers that so too has the Monster (Lon Chaney Jr.), and the pair escape the castle in search of Henry Frankenstein’s other son, Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). With the Monster weakened, Ygor hopes Ludwig will restore his strength and threatens to expose the doctor’s lineage if he does not obey.

 

I’ve compared the recursive nature of Ghost of Frankenstein to the classic line from Peter Pan, but there’s also something to be said for the infomercial quality of the film, which seems to shout to its audience, “But wait, there’s more!” Both Ygor and the Monster met pretty definitive ends in Son of Frankenstein, but Ghost handwaves both of those in order to get the plot going. I’ll grant you that there’s a tolerable level of suspended disbelief in accepting that the Monster outlived his bath in molten sulfur, but even the characters in the film can’t believe that Ygor survived being shot multiple times. Ditto the existence of a secret, second son of Frankenstein; it’s the same gimmick as Son of Frankenstein, just flavored a little differently. 

 

All of which is to say that within ten minutes of Ghost of Frankenstein, I was overcome with a wave of déjà vu – and not in a good, “this is how the genre gets invented” way. Where it’s been fun over the course of Monster March to watch filmmakers figure out the nascent genre (and indeed, talkie motion pictures more generally), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the formula wasn’t invented so much as ossified over the course of the 1940s. Every creative decision in Ghost of Frankenstein seems to be borne out of expectation rather than invention, and the result is something that feels overly familiar. 

 

Consequently (or perhaps as a contributing factor), much of Ghost of Frankenstein is rather low-energy – which may come as a bit of a surprise because the film is arguably the loudest monster movie so far. From the opening frames, the score is banging and crashing, while the film is never a few seconds away from an all-out riot erupting. But all the performances lack the verve that had set the Franken-films apart; even Bela Lugosi seems restrained by the material, though he’s trying as hard as he can to make Ygor as weird as he was in Son of Frankenstein. (Still, no one lurks in a window like Lugosi.) As Ludwig Frankenstein, Sir Cedric Hardwicke is appropriately subdued if a bit too reliant on the stiff upper lip, the kind of performance that might best be described today as “slumming it.”

 

The big headline in Ghost of Frankenstein is that it’s the first Franken-film without Boris Karloff as The Monster, and Lon Chaney Jr. struggles to fill his oversized shoes. While Chaney was captivating as The Wolf Man, his Monster lacks Karloff’s surprising humanity, and his stumbling around the film suggests that his Monster is blind long before the third-act turn in which that affliction actually manifests. (I would have thrown up a spoiler warning, but it’s not even a plot detail that matters, and I would venture to say you’d be as surprised as I was to discover that wasn’t always already the case.) There’s only one moment when Chaney’s Monster is transcendently creepy, though it’s more the fault of the script than the performance. Amid so much kerfuffle about how to restore the Monster’s strength, the monster kidnaps a young girl (shades of the original Frankenstein) and pantomimes to Ludwig that he wants the girl’s brain put inside his head. It’s a moment of genuine horror and an astonishingly dark intimation, especially by 1942’s standards.

 

Of course, it never comes to pass, and the second act concludes with a bizarre half-chase in which the Monster shambles after Ludwig’s daughter as she shelters the youngling from his grasp. The third act then transforms into a shell game in which brains are shuffled about until one lands in the operating room with the anesthetized Monster. To say which brain ends up in the Monster would be a spoiler, so I’ll refrain – but even that moment plays less like the next evolution of the character and more like a sad reduction of the whole affair into a B-movie plot. I shouldn’t be questioning why a 1942 movie misunderstands how blood transfusions work if that movie is sufficiently engaging. I should instead be captivated, enthralled, perhaps even briefly horrified – but sadly The Ghost of Frankenstein lives up to its name, a sad and pale specter of greatness long dead, a mere apparition haunting the franchise. 

The Ghost of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by W. Scott Darling and Eric Taylor. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Bellamy, Lionel Atwill, and Evelyn Ankers.  

While we covered it last week for Wolf Man Wednesday, recall that the Frankenstein saga continues into Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Since this is the last Franken-Friday – and Deep Sea Saturdays concluded last week – all I can do is bid you welcome to Transylvania Tuesday, to see what happens when Frankenstein’s Monster enters the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Of all the Universal Classic Monsters, the Invisible Man franchise has often seemed like the franchise without a compass heading. Certainly over the course of five movies, we can say the protagonists all looked alike (or didn’t – but who can tell?), and there’s been a faint thread distantly connecting the films by way of the Griffin family tree. But if these films weren’t all bundled together in a DVD box set, would anyone consider this a franchise? In that sense, The Invisible Man’s Revenge is the logical next step in this increasingly disconnected series, but in all other senses, it’s the all-too-common “final fizzle” for these Universal Monsters.

Robert Griffin (Jon Hall) escapes from a mental institution and sets off in search of his old friend Sir Jasper Harrick (Lester Matthews), who left him to die while on African safari. While the now-mad Griffin lobbies for his share of the diamond mines Jasper discovered, Jasper and his wife Lady Irene (Gale Sondergaard) arrange for Griffin to be drugged and thrown in a river. He’s rescued by local swindler Herbert Higgins (Leon Errol) before falling in with Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine), something of a mad scientist whose newfound invisibility serum may prove to be Griffin’s ticket for revenge.

 

The Invisible Man was such a strong and auspicious beginning to the franchise, though Claude Rains making one and only one appearance should have been a good indicator that the series would never again reach those heights. Then we had a remake by way of a crime procedural, a slapstick comedy/feminist farce, and a war picture before we got to... whatever The Invisible Man’s Revenge is supposed to be. Is it a revenge tragedy, or is it a descent into madness? Is it your classic “mad scientist” story, or is it another physical comedy kneeslapper? The problem with Revenge is that it tries to be all of these and more, while succeeding at none of them. 

 

For starters, we’re more than a half-hour into the 77-minute runtime before any invisibility shenanigans start up, and before that we’re regaled with a lengthy shaggy-dog tale of diamond mines, legal rights, attempted murder, and African safaris. It is, in short, a set-up that would make The Count of Monte Cristo blush. If this were the tale of an invisible Edmond Dantes, I cannot tell you how there I would be for that movie – after all, that premise is everything I wanted The Invisible Man Returns to be. Instead, Revenge is a bizarre amalgamation of the revenge plot from Returns, the lighthearted dynamic of Invisible Woman, and the “serum makes you mad” premise of the original. Even the most amazing special effect – the use of makeup to render Griffin partially visible – is pilfered wholesale from Invisible Agent.

 

Historically, I’ve been in favor of these cut-and-paste franchise installments, in which the foregoing chapters are plundered to derive a kind of formula for the next film (see also You Only Live Twice and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales – both, like Revenge, the fifth film in their respective series). The difference in the case of Revenge, however, is one of consistent tone. Revenge never quite knows whether it wants to be horror, tragedy, or comedy; furthermore, the use of the invisibility effect is deployed in a similarly inconsistent manner. Revenge innovates in a few moments when Griffin uses water or milk to make his face partially visible – it’s a neat gag and plenty uncanny, though we’d seen something similar in Invisible Agent with the cold cream. But while these shots are properly unsettling, the film’s ostensible setpiece is outright slapstick comedy, with Griffin aiding Higgins in a round of barroom darts. Higgins and Griffin land bullseye after bullseye with the darts, but it’s wildly out of place in a film where a career criminal is aiding a madman to steal property from the couple who tried to murder him.

 

Just about the only thing in Revenge that works without reservation is the casting of John Carradine as Dr. Peter Drury. When Griffin first enters Drury’s lab, it’s as though he’s walking into another film altogether – and it’s the film I would much rather have seen. Carradine is wickedly hammy in the mad scientist role, and the idea of this daft eccentric living on the edge of town is precisely the kind of bent reality that the Universal Classic Monsters do best. Carradine would, as we saw yesterday, go on to play Dracula in some of the later Universal features, and it’s little wonder from this performance why the studio would hand over one of its headline creatures to Carradine, who ably dials into the valence Revenge needs to strike to succeed.

 

It’s a shame, then, that Revenge never quite lives up to Carradine’s performance, just as much as it’s disappointing that the franchise ends on this note. Then again, if an invisible protagonist stars in five films, and no one calls it a franchise, can it really be said to exist? You’d have to see it to believe it.

 

The Invisible Man’s Revenge is not rated. Directed by Ford Beebe. Written by Bertram Millhauser. Starring Jon Hall, Leon Errol, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard, and Lester Matthews. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Monster March: House of Frankenstein (1944)

If we continue the cinematic universe metaphor, House of Frankenstein is inarguably the Universal Monsters’ version of The Avengers. Although it’s a bit of false advertising – Dracula never actually meets Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man – House of Frankenstein is nevertheless surprisingly fun. The second “monster mash” movie and a direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein also finds a way to weave Count Dracula and Boris Karloff back into the mix. Though the plot is rickety and ramshackle, it’s an achievement all the same, the monster movie equivalent of simple and pure popcorn fun. 

Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish, doing his best Peter Lorre) escape from prison and vow to continue the experiments of the late Henry Frankenstein. Through a series of untoward events, Niemann comes into possession of the bones of Count Dracula (John Carradine), who he reanimates in his quest for revenge on his jailers. And on the road to Visaria, Niemann also finds the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who have their own demands on the not-so-good doctor.

 

House of Frankenstein is really two different movies, and both of them are pretty fun. For the first act of its 71 minutes, House gives us the Boris Karloff and Dracula reunion we never truly got to see, yet it’s not Karloff’s Monster meeting Lugosi’s Dracula. That, I suspect, would have been an absolute winner. Instead, Karloff is crowbarred into the film (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) as an unrelated mad scientist with Frankensteinian proclivities, yet there is a warming charm just to see Karloff included again. At 57, he hadn’t played the Monster in five years, so his very presence is almost a legitimating one, with Karloff as the elder statesman of the Universal Classic Monsters universe. Karloff has tons of fun as Dr. Niemann, and there’s a fiery impish glint in his eyes as he plots his next move.

 

As Dracula, however, John Carradine is a touch underwhelming. His performance is exceptionally hammy, with large bulging eyes and vamping – pun intended – posture. Where there was a subtle seductive charm about Lugosi’s Dracula, Carradine plays the magnetic allure like literal hypnosis, and his skeletal appearance is a far cry from Lugosi’s full-bodied menace. In short, it’s hard to accept that this is the Count Dracula, up to and including the continuity error that his bones are said to be resting in his coffin after we saw Countess Zaleska cremate his body in Dracula’s Daughter. (Perhaps, though, the filmmakers were already perfecting the art of the retcon – which, in the case of Dracula’s Daughter, suits me just fine.)

 

Continuing the grand recast is Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s monster. There’s a moment in Ed Wood when Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) opines, “You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein?! It’s all make-up and grunting – mmrrrghh!” It’s a reductive comparison, one which the real Lugosi may or may not have believed, especially given that Lugosi had himself played the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We know, however, that Karloff did so much more with the character in his three films, proving that he had left unfillably big shoes (in more ways than one). On the spectrum, Strange acquits himself better than Lon Chaney Jr. did, and the editors of House don’t cut his bulky feet out from under him as they did Lugosi. However, the fact remains that Strange isn’t given much to do beyond looking imposing, but he gets a few shining moments when he accesses the Monster’s twin childlike senses of wonder and terror at a world he cannot comprehend.

 

Finally, Lon Chaney Jr. is back as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, and every time I say a negative thing about Chaney in another monster role, he reminds just how reliably good he is as Talbot. From the moment Talbot thaws out of the ice, Chaney elevates the movie, giving another deeply human embodiment to a character that could just as easily have been a lame caricature of an idea. Although his plotline is largely a retread of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – Talbot feels guilty about his lycanthropic curse and wants to die – Chaney brings his trademark pathos to the role, especially in scenes with the Roma girl Ilonka (played with winsome charm by Elena Verdugo), who is herself encumbered by the question of whether she should help relieve the sympathetic Talbot of his burden.

 

All of this comes to a crescendo in an increasingly dramatic climax that includes electrocution, horse-whipping, and defenestration before the most abrupt ending I can recall seeing since White Heat. It’s the sort of ending that desperately leaves you wanting more, and indeed I was left fairly frothing at the mouth aching for more from House of Frankenstein – more Karloff, more monsters, more/any Lugosi, more of the characters bumping into each other. But it wasn’t a question of starvation; my desire for more was akin to hitting the bottom of the popcorn bucket and wanting a refill. Sure, it’s a campy cash-grab, and certainly it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it tastes good and leaves you wanting more. Isn’t that the most we can ask of the Universal Classic Monsters?

 

House of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Curt Siodmak and Edward T. Lowe. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Glenn Strange, and Elena Verdugo.

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) starring Jon Hall.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, it’s She-Wolf of London (1946), starring June Lockhart. For the continuing saga of Lawrence Talbot, though, join us next Tuesday for House of Dracula (1945).

Monster March: Son of Dracula (1943)

A few months before Monster March – perhaps even the dark and stormy night that this month-long marathon first came to mind – I found myself watching Svengoolie. If you’ve never seen Svengoolie, it’s a Chicago-based program that airs horror and science-fiction movies, often of (shall we say) the less critically favored variety, with jokes and zingers thrown in the commercial breaks. It’s all in good cornball fun, and a majority of the films probably benefit from some gentle ribbing. I had hoped that such would be the case for Son of Dracula, but the truth is that Svengoolie’s lame puns did their level best to save Son of Dracula – in isolation, it’s a dreadful bore, maybe the worst of the Universal Classic Monsters thus far.

When a train pulls into a New Orleans station, all anyone can talk about is who’s not aboard – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.), late of Hungary. Plantation heiress and voodoo dabbler Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) awaits the arrival of her foreign beau, spurning her American sweetheart Frank Stanley (Robert Paige). Once Alucard arrives, he and Katherine are swiftly married, but Frank protests; a scuffle breaks out, and Frank opens fire on Alucard, only for the bullets to pass through the count and strike Katherine. But is Katherine actually dying? Or is she already among the undead?

 

Let me set the stage a bit. I prefer to watch these movies late at night, with all the lights out – it really sets a spooky mood. I try to imagine what it must have been like to see these movies in their initial releases, as the horror genre and the very notion of a shared cinematic universe were evolving before the audience’s eyes. (And unlike our themed sequence of Monster March, I’ve been watching them in release order.) Usually these films have surprised me in one way or another, be it in establishing genre canon or in entertaining me more than I anticipated. With Son of Dracula, we have a first – it’s the first time I very nearly fell asleep during a Universal Monster movie. It was a genuine struggle to jolt myself out of a stupor even as the credits rolled. Son of Dracula is boring, boring, boring.

 

In terms of plot, Son of Dracula is largely confounding, and the parts that make sense don’t entertain in the slightest. For one, I’m still unsure if Count Alucard is the son of Dracula or if he’s Dracula himself. Unlike many Universal Monster movies, there’s no nods to continuity with previous films, nary a mention of Lugosi’s vampire or of Countess Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter. Just about the only thing we know is that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards – and we know this because it’s explicitly explained on screen twice, almost as though writers Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor wanted us to know just how clever they are. It’s also unclear why Alucard has chosen Louisiana as his next stomping grounds; it’s implied that his Hungarian neighborhood has gone to pot, suggesting that this film might as well have been Dracula Moves to the Suburbs. Or it could be that he just happens to have found the dumbest woman in the world, who just happens to be set to inherit a plantation of her own. (Though why Dracula would trade a castle for a swampland plantation, I’ve no idea.) Then again, Katherine Caldwell is merely using Alucard to gain immortality for herself – which is in itself heroically unwise.

 

It would be unfair for me to single out Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as terrible, because in truth nearly every performance is lamentable. As the headliner, though, Chaney leaves much to be desired. He was so terrific as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, but every ounce of charisma in that performance is entirely absent from Count Alucard. If Chaney is attempting to do a Transylvanian accent, it isn’t working; instead, his dialogue comes off as stilted, stiff, and unnatural (and not in a good way, like Lugosi managed). It’s as though he’s trying to read cue cards phonetically for an audience that doesn’t quite understand English. Moreover, his presence lacks any semblance of menace; he is, in short, terrifically dull.

 

As I said, though, the rest of the cast fails to rise above Chaney’s soporific turn. Louise Allbritton is practically sleepwalking through the film as Katherine Caldwell; you’d think a southern belle with a voodoo fetish might be a cause for some intrigue, but her delivery is lackluster and her motivations are frankly ludicrous. As her sister, Evelyn Ankers is equally disappointing. She had such fine chemistry with Chaney in The Wolf Man, but here she’s largely forgettable; indeed, I’m struggling to remember why she’s in the plot at all. Meanwhile, Robert Paige plays Frank like a Dollar Tree Gomer Pyle, again without the kooky voice, and he becomes unhinged so quickly in the film that you can’t help but wonder if he’d been mad the whole time. The only performance that’s mildly engaging is J. Edward Bromberg as Professor Lazlo, though only because he’s playing a watered-down Van Helsing – and Bromberg is no Edward Van Sloan.

 

Very little about Son of Dracula rises above the level of a B-movie, which actually makes it a perfect fit for Svengoolie. The acting is hammy, the script is ramshackle, and the whole film is borderline unwatchable because of the nonstop pipe organ soundtrack that seems to be straight out of a Firesign Theater parody of itself. But you’ve got to hand it to Son of Dracula, if only for being the first film to depict Dracula/Alucard transforming into a bat on screen. The effects are more clever than a bad 1943 movie has any right to possess, and so I won’t spoil how the effect is done (though you’ll know right away when you see it done).

 

It was Thumper’s father who wisely instructed the little rabbit in Bambi that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” and so it may surprise you that I do have something nice to say about Son of Dracula: the ending is so well-constructed that I wish the rest of the film lived up to it. In the moment when Alucard discovers that Frank has set fire to his coffin, Chaney really comes alive, and his portrayal of the desperate and furious Count is handily the best acting in the film. The purely visual storytelling that follows – with no expository dialogue to hold the audience’s hand – ends up giving us easily the most downbeat ending of the Universal Monsters canon. Maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude at play, because it’s darkly gratifying to see things end so horribly for every character in the film, but I also have to admit that director Robert Siodmak stages a truly compelling conclusion to a film that neither earns nor deserves it.

 

Son of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Written by Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Louise Allbritton, Robert Paige, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with House of Frankenstein (1944) starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, enter freely and of your own will into the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange. If you need your vampire fix sooner, though, join us tomorrow for House of Frankenstein (1944).

Monster March: The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

There is no ghost in The Mummy’s Ghost. There is a swamp, a dog, and of course a mummy, but there’s no ghost, which might tell you everything you need to know about this movie. I know I said the exact same thing last week about The Mummy’s Tomb, but if the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to derive a new story, neither should I write an entirely new review. In Ghost, there is a major plotline involving reincarnation, which seems particularly apt for a demi-remake that’s so familiar you’ll feel an acute sense of déjà vu. 

Yousef Bey (John Carradine) has come to New England in search of the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.), believed to have been destroyed during the events of The Mummy’s Tomb. As high priest, Yousef Bey has been tasked with bringing Kharis and the mummified remains of Princess Ananka back to Egypt. Meanwhile, local college boy Tom Hervey (Robert Lowery) is baffled by his Egyptian girlfriend Amina (Ramsay Ames), especially the mystery of why she fainted outside the home of the mummy’s latest victim...

 

The Mummy’s Ghost was filmed over the course of only one week, and I have to say it shows. Ghost is full of narrative dead-ends and plot holes, beginning from the very first reel. If you remember The Mummy’s Tomb (and I won’t fault you if you don’t), it starts with George Zucco as Andoheb recapping Kharis’s backstory while passing on the mantle of high priest before his death; The Mummy’s Ghost begins with exactly the same sequence, right down to Zucco reprising his role. Like Hyman Roth, it seems, Andoheb has been dying of the bullet wounds from The Mummy’s Hand for the last twenty years. (If you’re having trouble telling your Hand from your Tomb from your Ghost, don’t be alarmed – these titles don’t relate to the plot in any way and might as well be interchangeable. Next week’s Curse doesn’t quite help matters.)

 

As I’m watching these movies, I’m starting to wonder whether I actually like mummy movies or whether I only like the 1999 Mummy. I certainly don’t like this mummy movie, which feels as though I’ve seen it four or five times this month. Surely there must be more one can do with a mummy film than this, in which a priest pursues a mummy that acts like a serial killer until carting off the female lead in his withered arms. There’s also only so many times you can retread the plotline where an incredulous town doubts the existence of a mummy, despite several residents having been menaced by this very mummy in the past. At least this time they don’t try to light the mummy on fire – because that hasn’t worked in the last few movies – though the climax set in the swamp ends up having the same net effect.

 

The chief problem with Ghost, as with most of the Universal Mummy films, is that Kharis is not exactly a charismatic screen presence. In a cinematic universe populated by the likes of Karloff and Lugosi, even Lon Chaney Jr. has done better work as the Wolf Man. Behind his plaster face and bandaged limbs, Kharis is little more than a mindless brute, always acting at the behest of someone else. The script certainly tries its best to make him menacing, but it’s a strain on the audience’s credulity to suppose that no one can escape the grasp of the mummy, unless Kharis gives off some sort of stupefying aura that stuns his victims into immobility before he shambles near enough to strangle them with his one good arm.

 

In The Mummy’s Tomb, it fell to Turhan Bey to give an entertaining performance as Kharis’s caretaker, the high priest Mehemet Bey. In Ghost, it’s John Carradine, who’s practically bathing in a river of ham as Yousef Bey. (Any relation? If this were the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Beys would surely have their own show on Disney+.) Don’t get me wrong, Carradine is borderline hypnotic, but Egyptian he’s not, and that’s an incredible distraction, as is the fact that his abrupt third-act heel-turn is precisely the same “twist” that every foregoing mummy movie has pulled at exactly the same moment in the story.

 

Look, there’s a certain amount of formula to be expected from the Universal Classic Monsters. Dracula is always going to stalk and bite his victims, Frankenstein’s monster is always going to be born out of some misguided experiment, and the Wolf Man is constantly running from the moon and his own id. But for whatever reason, the seams of the formula really show on the mummy films, with almost predictable precision. Never mind the fact that the mummy films, more so than the other franchises, feel compelled to begin with a recap that effectively spoils the movie because the franchise’s obsession with reincarnation and the undead often means that there’s a cyclical nature to events, recurring and recurring as the tragic doomed Egyptians live out a vicious yet familiar recursion. All of this will happen at least once more, I’m quite sure, in The Mummy’s Curse, and I have a feeling I’ll be able to rerun this review next week, too, changing the names to protect the innocent – or, if none are found, the dull.

 

The Mummy’s Ghost is not rated. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Written by Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher, and Brenda Weisberg. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Ramsay Ames, Barton MacLane, George Zucco, and Robert Lowery. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with Son of Dracula (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Mummy Monday, we’ll “wrap” things up with The Mummy’s Curse (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christine. But for bonus mummy shenanigans, stop by for Silly Sunday, when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.