White Zombie (1932)

"I'm too old to go all the way with you!"

Oh dear. I was all set to watch Brighton Rock with Richard Attenborough but, due to a disappointing lack of subtitles on behalf of Amazon Prime, I thought I'd watch this instead. Not my best decision; it's a plodding, dull, poorly shot melodrama that may only last 70 minutes but feels much, much longer. Not very good, to put it mildly, and you can sort of see the slide in Bela Lugosi's career starting here, in a performance that is just repeating Dracula.

Still, bad film though this is, it remains an interesting cultural artifact and not only because it was the name of Rob Zombie's band for a few years before he found himself having far more success with his solo career and sacked the band. It's set, like the later I Walked with a Zombie, in Haiti and sees the zombie entirely through the prism of Haitian voodoo legend. Even the title of the film suggests it was widely seen as a Haitian or, at most, West African thing. The zombie at this point owes very little to the post-Night of the Living Dead concept; here it is implied to be the result of a drug that mimics death, allowing the voodoo baddie to "resurrect" the body as his docile servant. No biting or brain munching here. Indeed, zombies are said to be worked for long hours in plantations and sugar factories, and it's impossible not to see this, in the Caribbean of all places, in the context of slavery. This isn't the apocalypse; it's abuse of workers' rights.

None of that makes this film worth seeing, though. You have been warned!

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

"You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!""

Oh my. I watched in goggle-eyed amazement as Teenagers from Outer Space unfolded before me, but Plan 9 from Outer Space is a completely different order of magnitude in its badness. Teenagers from Outer Space had terrible acting and special effects and was generally rubbish, and the plot may have been awful but, well, it had a plot. And it seemed to manage the task of basic storytelling quite well. This film, though… it's hard to find the words. But I'm going to have to because, well, that's sort of the point of these reviews.

Let's start with Bela Lugosi. As everybody knows, the footage of him was shot several years previously before he rather conveniently dies, and had to be padded out with scenes of Ed Wood's wife's chiropodist, who was much, much taller, pretending to be him, rather obviously covering his face. It's worse than it sounds, though. The footage of Lugosi that we get it just the same few scenes repeated, and obviously not shot with this film in mind. The other two zombies (the Inspector and Vampira) walk and act like zombies, with arms outstretched, while Lugosi walks like, well, Dracula. It just looks awful. Especially as the film is padded out with so many scenes of Lugosi walking around looking vaguely menacing.

And then there's the plot, such as it is. The aliens' plans make no sense whatsoever. They're supposed to be incredibly powerful, and far more advanced than ourselves, but they worry about a handful of zombies being spotted, and one of them almost suffers death by zombie because their ray gun thingy fails to work. Also, they foolishly invite a bunch of Earthlings on to their flying saucer for a bit of a chinwag. Duuuuh! And the whole point of their scheme is to somehow stop humanity from developing to the point where they will be able to harness the power of sunlight to make a bomb which with destroy the universe. Or possibly just the Solar System. The script is rather unclear on this point. The alien plan appears to mainly involve shouting insults at these armed and warlike Earthlings and, er, telling them about this weapon they don't want them to develop. Er, good plan.

Yes, that really is it, although there are a lot of shockingly bad scenes of stupid humans talking stupidly to one another while the narrator spouts vaguely melodramatic exposition at us. The narration goes beyond cheesiness into a whole other dimension, but we expect that. Much less expected are Vampira, a sort of proto-Goth in 1959, and the alien "ruler" (and why do all alien planets in 1950s sci-fi B-movies just call their leaders "the ruler?"), played by John Breckinridge, scion of one of America's most aristocratic families and with a deeply Brahmin accent to prove it. He's as camp as a row of tents and, according to Wikipedia, went around being openly as gay as a window in the early decades of the twentieth century, which must have taken guts; he seems to have been quite a character. And aside from Vampira he's the only person in the film with any charisma whatsoever.

The special effects are not bad, considering, although I had to raise an eyebrow at the line which described one as being shaped "like a cigar". Er, no it isn't. And if it was, it wouldn't be a flying saucer, would it? And the Hollywood locations look quite good. But otherwise, well… this is car crash cinema. You feel dirty, voyeuristic and twisted, but you can't take your eyes off the screen.

The Wolf Man (1941)

“All astronomers are amateurs. When it comes to the heavens, there's only one professional.”

It’s very obvious that this was made about ten years after the Universal horrors I’ve seen so far- it’s so much slicker and pacier, and of course the cars and the fashions are very different, especially Evelyn Ankers’ very 1940s hairdo. One thing is very odd, though; this story is set in Britain, and appears to be in the present day (1941). So why is there no indication of there being a war on?

The whole thing looks great, with plenty of misty, stylised forest scenes, and it runs along at a decent pace, but I’m not sure about the wolf make-up- it looks a bit generic and half-arsed to me. It certainly doesn’t make Lon Chaney Jr look anything like a wolf, just like a hairy bloke with sharp teeth. I have to admit, though, that the set-piece transformation scene, with its foot fetish, is very well-shot, as is the whole movie. Visually, the whole movie is strong enough to survive a bit of lacklustre make-up.

Chaney is superb as the nice-but-dim Larry Talbot, but to put the focus on a character like that- simple, honest and straightforward- seems a little odd in the context of what the film seems to be about. We’re told, blatantly enough and often enough for the word “subtext” to be thoroughly inappropriate, that lycanthropy here is a metaphor for the “duality” of human nature between good, evil, and the shades of grey that lie in-between. Except that none of this applies to Larry, a simple soul who appears to be carrying no mental baggage and whose only character flaw is to unwittingly flirt with a woman who’s engaged.

Claude Rains is also great as Sir John, a superficially jovial and caring father whose great flaw lies in his snobbery, and his obsession with his family name. Larry, to him, is important not as a beloved son but as someone who will ensure another generation of Talbots. He’s not as nice as he seems, and in the end it’s appropriate that it should be him who kills his son. The fact that Larry calls his father “Sir” should probably tell us that this isn’t really as cosy a father / son relationship as it appears.

And then there are the gypsies. They are presented with all the casual racism that might be expected, with a dig at their allegedly “pagan” religious practices, and generally treated as an exotic “other”. Bela Lugosi gets an arse-clenchingly embarrassing cameo as the imaginatively named “Bela the Gypsy” because, of course, it’s perfectly normal for a British gypsy to have a Hungarian name.

The plot’s a bit par for the course and rather blah blah, but there are a couple of rather interesting scenes early on, after Larry uses the telescope to spy on the villagers and things start to go all Rear Window. Not only does he use the telescope to perv on Gwen through her bedroom window, but he later admits that to her! And I can’t understand how she can not be freaked out by this weird stalker chatting her up in the shop and pretty much forcing her to go on a date with him. I can’t understand how Larry is not immediately arrested for the murder of Bela the Gypsy, either, but I’m beginning to notice that the police not suspecting the hero of an obvious crime is something of a trope when it comes to old horror films.

The film has style, I suppose, and noticeably so when compared to some earlier Universal horrors, but ultimately it’s style over substance.

Dracula (1931)

“Listen to them: children of the night! What music they make!”

I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It’s slow, stilted, and awkward- a far cry from the style and humour of Universal’s own Frankenstein from the same year. Still, there’s a significant redeeming feature in Bela Lugosi, who is simply fantastic.

The opening scenes are well done, building up the suspense and giving us the context before we meet Dracula. The first line is spoken by Carl Laemmle’s daughter Carla, who is still alive and will be 102 this month, but we then move to a lot of ominous mutterings by local peasants towards Renfield. Interestingly, the setting seems to be firmly established as Transylvania, with all the signs in Hungarian, rather than the vague Mittel-European setting of the later Hammers.

There’s a certain style to the lighting of Lugosi’s face at some points, I suppose, but the direction is strangely lacklustre. Lugosi aside, the performances are not too good, either. The initial scenes with Renfield (conflated here with Jonathan Harker) at Castle Dracula only work to the extent they do because of Lugosi’s performance, although I like the presence of the various animals. I’m not sure there are too many armadillos in Transylvania, though.

The scene soon shifts to England, and becomes oddly and claustrophobically studio-bound for the rest of the film. Dracula is seen to carry out a few murders, but there are rather too many scenes of him politely conversing to Mina, “John” Harker and Van Helsing to be plausible, in spite of the fact that Van Helsing has his measure from the start. All the working-class characters speak a kind of absurd Dick Van Dyke cockney, too, and keep pronouncing the word “crazy” in a most peculiar fashion.

The plot proceeds in a way which owes rather more to the novel than the later Hammer film would. Lucy doesn’t have much screen time before abruptly dying, though, and the plot thread of her killing lots of people as a “woman in white” seems to just trail off. The rest of the film consists of Dracula gradually drinking Mina’s blood at night while she spends her days being patronised by the men who surround her. The sexual subtext is barely there at all, except for Mina’s scenes with John towards the end of the film.

Interestingly, the tropes of vampirism are rather different from those we know. Wolfsbane is used instead of garlic, and Dracula is able to turn, off-screen, into (unseen) wolves as well as ridiculously unconvincing bats. He presents very little sense of threat, though, for all his charisma, giving no indication of violence or strength in his interaction with the characters.

The film just ends with no real dramatic tension; Van Helsing simply stakes Dracula, with no confrontation of any kind beforehand. The whole thing simply falls flat, with no flair, dramatic tension, narrative clarity or humour. My overall impression was disappointment, although my expectations had not been high. Still, at least I can now say I’ve seen it.