Kongo and Cats

KONGO-MGM-1932-Don’t miss this whacked, pre-code remake of the Chaney/Browning silent film WEST OF ZANZIBAR! Walter Huston is Deadlegs Flint, the ruthless crippled white “god” who uses superstition and violence to rule over his jungle domain. Flint lives for only one thing. The day he can have his revenge on the man (C. Henry Gordon) who stole his wife and maimed him.



As part of his plan he degrades the girl (Virginia Gregg in a great performance) he believes is his enemy’s daughter. Her savior turns out to be a doctor turned drug addict (Conrad Nagel)! You can probably guess what happens.



KONGO is full of racist dialogue, manic acting and strange situations that are alluded to more than shown. Lupe Velez, Forrester Harvey and Mitchell Lewis play the lost souls under Flint’s thrall. Look for Ming The Merciless himself Charles Middleton in a small un-billed role.



Director William Cowen creates some wild scenes involving jungle ritual burning. He directed a Hollywood version of Oliver Twist the next year!



And believe it or not Huston is even more twisted than Chaney was!



Screenwriter Leon Gordon worked on FREAKS for Tod Browning the same year!


















CAT GIRL-Anglo Amalgamated-1957 -This is a pretty neglected CAT PEOPLE inspired English production featuring the underrated Barbara Shelley as a newly married woman who goes back to her childhood home to inherit her weird uncle’s estate. Unk has a pet leopard and a roomful of stuffed felines. However, he warns her that part of his inheritance is his curse.

It’s never actually explained how the curse came about or why exactly her family is cursed but it seems that she kinda does a mind meld with the pet leopard and she can make it kill people. She starts with her philandering husband. A psychiatrist (who she’s in love with) tries to convince her it’s all in her mind. In one scene while she’s confined to a rubber room she imagines herself to be a cat that looks like a human size mouse from "Zoobilee Zoo" or something! She then goes after the shrink’s wife. Shelley is great in the title role but the rest of the cast is pretty bland.

Director Alfred Shaughnessy later wrote THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW. American screenwriter Lou Rusoff wrote THE SHE CREATURE, DAY THE WORLD ENDED, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD and other AIP movies. Thanks for reading!

Nobody Doesn't Like Christopher Lee!

The cable station that I really like a lot is TCM. They show tons of movies from all different eras. Good movies, bad movies, silents, you name it. The guy who hosts most of them, I think Robert Osborne is his name, usually has his facts right too. (Not always but usually...)



One Halloween TCM showed two unusual horror movies. Actually they showed them starting at around 2 am on Nov. 1st but what can ya do? On Halloween they showed stuff like POLTERGEIST but anyway these two movies they showed were quite interesting...







The first was HORROR CASTLE from 1963, a full color Italian production which concerned a newlywed couple's vacation in the husband's ancestral home. The wife Mary (Rossana Podesta from Robert Wise's HELEN OF TROY) is convinced that the long dead "Punisher", an Inquisition like torturer is back and killing innocent villagers. Her all too suspiciously acting husband tells her it's all a dream. A local doctor thinks otherwise and an old FBI agent (?) hangs around the castle too. Meanwhile, the scarred manservant Erich (a dour looking Christopher Lee) lurks in the halls. The real murderer turns out to be the sadistic skull faced father of the groom who was deformed by The Nazis after participating in the failed assassination of Hitler!



This movie is ok but it kind of goes no where after it's revealed that "The Punisher" is in fact flesh and blood and not a ghost or hallucination.

FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND magazine use to show stills from this movie all the time and it did occasionally play on TV in a cut version but the print TCM showed was a nice newly restored version despite the fact that it retains the original English dubbing (someone else is doing Lee's voice) and credits where prolific director Antonio Margheriti is listed as Anthony Dawson.

Lee made THE WHIP AND THE BODY (called WHAT in the US) for Mario Bava the same year. The next year he would make another film that TCM showed...


CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1964)-is another Italian production that features Mr. Lee as Count Drago, the sullen owner of a creepy castle who also happens to be be a taxidermist! (You know where this is leading...) He invites a medieval performing troupe to do their show for him. Several deaths follow. You can guess the rest as any good horror fan will tell you taxidermy and old castles with innocent victims in them do not mix! One performer is accident-ally hanged and another gets an arrow shot in the eye.

Donald Sutherland is also featured as a stupid military policeman! (He's pretty funny and also plays the role of an old hag although someone else dubs the voice!) The standout plot twist is that the dwarf member of the troupe saves the day (although he doesn't get the girl) which was quite unusual in '60's horror when dwarfs were still portrayed as evil or fools.

1964 was a busy year for Chris Lee who also starred in THE VAMPIRE'S CRYPT, THE DEVIL SHIP PIRATES and THE GORGON.

He and Sutherland were re-united the next year in Hammer Films' DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS. Future director Michael Reeves was an un-credited assistant director and writer.




Mr. Lee Today

The Black Cat

THE BLACK CAT-1968-Cool Japanese ghost story! Two women are raped and killed by roving samurai. They come back to take revenge as cat ghosts (called “Bakeneko”) that drink blood. A successful warrior is sent to destroy them but comes to realize that “the ghost vampires” are actually his mother and wife! Excellent eerie work from director Kaneto Shindo.


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Nam Fu

ATTACK FORCE 'NAM-Similar to Chuck Norris' POW series, David Carradine is Col. Cooper who leads a group of GIs back to Vietnam to rescue POWs right before the Paris Peace Accord is signed. Mako plays a camp leader who takes Cooper prisoner but then wants a deal where Cooper will take him to Hanoi as his prisoner but he's really after some hidden gold.

It's cheaply made but has lots of action and also features Steve Jones as an army Lieutenant.

The DVD version I saw had a picture of Carradine from the original Kung-Fu series on the front and they back had credits for another movie!

Carradine and Mako were in Kung-Fu reunion TV movie the same year.

ATTACK FORCE played in theaters as BEHIND ENEMY LINES.

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Happy Easter Triple Play!

PEEPING TOM-1960-A quiet German guy (Carl Boehm) works with a film crew and takes photographs and his own films in his spare time. Unfortunately most of the films are POV shots of him killing women with a tripod like dagger. Other films in his collection show his scientist father used him as an experiment. A female tenant (Anna Massey) befriends him but her blind mother is suspicious.

This is a great unique thriller from director Michael Powell. It also features Moira Sheara (also in Powell’s THE RED SHOES), Esmond Knight and Pamela Green.







SISTERS!-1973-This cult film is Brian DePalma’s first horror outing. It was downhill from there!

Margot Kidder plays French Canadian model separated from her Siamese twin sister who seems to be a psychotic killer. After appearing on a game show called “Peeping Tom” she spends the night with a contestant (while her weird looking husband hangs around outside). The contestant winds up stabbed to death. A local reporter (Jennifer Salt) witnesses the murder but can’t get the police to believe her. The whole thing is very predictable and some of the dialogue is pretty dumb. Also Kidder talks with a French accent that eventually becomes quite annoying.

DePalma hadn’t yet mastered the “ripping off” of Hitchcock but he used other sources (like Thomas Tryon’s THE OTHER and maybe DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT). Also with Charles Durning, William Finley, Barnard Hughes, Dolph Sweet and Olympia Dukakis. DePalma made PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE next.


ONE MILLION B.C.-1940-This Hal Roach produced prehistoric story tells the tale of two cave tribes, Except for some opening intro scenes there is no distinguishable dialogue. The cave tribes’ minimal speech is mostly grunts and hand gestures. QUEST FOR FIRE used the same device 40 years later.

Victor Mature stars as the egotistical Tumak who is banished from his tribe by his father/leader (Lon Chaney Jr.) who rules with an iron hand. Tumak wanders around and eventually meets Loana (Carole Landis) and The Shell Tribe who are less aggressive and like to share things. They fall in love and he takes her back to his people. The special effects are very good and the scenes of real lizards fighting each other in miniature sets were re-used in countless later low budget movies.

The opening sequence features former silent screen star Conrad Nagel relating the story to some travelers but after we meet the prehistoric folk the story never goes back to him.

Lead caveman Victor Mature was one of the worst actors ever to become a star. And he never denied it. Here he was still a contract player but he’d attain stardom six years later in John Ford’s MY DARLIN’ CELMENTINE.

Co-star Carole Landis should have become a star to but languished in B-movies most of her career and committed suicide at age 29 in 1948.

As the head of Tumak’s tribe Lon Chaney Jr. really throws himself into the role. He’d caused a stir just a year before with his poignant portrayal of Lenny, doomed rabbit loving strongman in the movie version of John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN. A year later his life would be forever changed with the lead in a little horror movie called THE WOLF MAN!

Both Hal Roach Sr. & Jr. are the credited directors. Is this the only time and father and son co-directed a film?

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After The Trip...

PSYCH-OUT-1968-A year after THE TRIP Jack Nicolson re-teamed with Bruce Dern and Susan Strasberg to star in this psychedelic peace and love drug movie for director Richard Rush (made between HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (also with Nicolson) and THE SAVAGE SEVEN).

Strasberg is Jenny a deaf runaway looking for her brother (Bruce Dern) in Haigt-Ashbury. She gets help from level headed hippie Stoney (Nicolson) and his two pals (Adam Roarke; also in the aforementioned two Rush movies and Max Julien, 5 years before THE MACK) who are also in a rock band.

While looking for her brother (nicknamed The Seeker) they ran afoul of a gang led by John “Bud” Cardos and Gary Kent (they were also part of the crew) and have a fight in a junkyard. Dean Stockwell is the philosophical stoner with a headband. Director Henry Jaglom is a gallery owner who freaks out and imagines his hand is rotting. Nicolson is pretty funny but Strasberg’s bad trip on STP is the highlight. TV producer Garry Marshall is a cop in the opening scene and Sky Saxon, The Seeds and The Strawberry Alarm Clock perform.

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Back After A Hiatus

SLITHER-2006-In this stupid comedy gore movie Michael Rooker is a bald red neck who turns into a slimy ALIEN/THE THING like creature with tentacles. He terrorizes a hick town and he turns one woman into a giant egg and she gives birth to a million slimy DEADLY SPAWN like slugs. They jump down residents throats and up their asses like in NIGHT OF THE CREEPS and then some of the dead come back to life as zombies.

It has some good SFX but it seems to rip off something from nearly every 80’s horror film especially Brian Yuzna’s SOCIETY. Gregg Henry is the foul mouthed asshole mayor. Nathan Fillion (from the short lived FIREFLY TV show) and Elizabeth Banks (Betty Brant in SPIDER-MAN) are the stars.

Writer/director James Gunn wrote both SCOOBY-DOO movies and did work for Troma which explains Lloyd Kaufman’s cameo as a drunk. Made in Canada.



THE BLACKBIRD-1926-In the Limehouse district of London, a daring thief The Blackbird (the great Lon Chaney) pulls a series of robberies.

When not plotting crimes he disguises himself as The Bishop, the misshapen proprietor of a rescue mission. Another thief West End Bertie (Owen Moore) becomes his rival not only for some stolen diamonds but also for the affections of dance hall singer Fifi Lorraine (Renee Adoree) in this MGM production directed by Tod Browning.

Chaney livens up the somewhat mundane story with his two characterizations but on the whole it’s the weakest (and least successful) of the Chaney/Browning collaborations (at least that I’ve seen. LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is a lost film!).

The same year Chaney made another film for director Browning THE ROAD TO MANDALAY as well as the highly successful TELL IT TO THE MARINES.

Co-star Moore was a popular leading man (and singer) in his day who’s career dropped off when talkies emerged. He died of a heart attack in 1939 at 52. Lead actress Adoree came from the French stage. She’d become a star the year before in THE BIG PARADE opposite John Gilbert. She co-starred with Chaney in a later film MR.WU. Sadly like many other silent stars she died young (age 37) of tuberculosis.

Thanks for reading!