TV Frankenstein

TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN-1958-This is the pilot for a series co-produced by Hammer Films and Columbia Pictures. German born actor Anton Diffring is Baron Frankenstein trying to create life in his laboratory. A dying artist (familiar TV actor Richard Bull) and his wife (Helen Wescott) want the Baron to help save his life but he refuses. When the artist dies Frankenstein steals his brain and uses it in his monster (stuntman-actor Don Megowan, in make-up resembling Universal's except he has no neck bolts).

When the monster awakes after his latest transplant he turns on the his creator and goes after his former wife. He dies by falling into an open grave after seeing his reflection. It's only 28 mins. long so it moves pretty fast but it's well done and an interesting look at an early TV horror tale. Ludwig Stossel and Peter Brocco are also in it. 

Hammer head honcho Michael Carrerras is listed as producer (TOF was made in between the first two Hammer Frankenstein movies). Director Curt Siodmak (who worked on several films in Universal's original Frankenstein series) does manage to give it a certain "classic" feel despite time and budget drawbacks. Siodmak also directed several episodes of the mysterious 13 DEMON STREET see:http://moviemeltdown.blogspot.com/2009/07/lon-is-messing-with-devil.html . It was written by Henry Kutter and his wife CL Moore, who later became successful Sci-Fi/fantasy authors. 

One story goes that the pilot never went anywhere because the two studios (I've also read Screen Gems not Columbia was the other studio) disagreed on the future of the series.

Thanks for reading (and Thanks again to my pal Tony for getting me this !)

"Water Can Flow Or It Can Crash. Be Water, My Friend." - Bruce Lee

I AM BRUCE LEE-2011-This documentary produced by Spike TV is pretty good but would have been better without the likes of UFC president Dana White (UFC was airing on Spike at the time) who declares Lee created mixed martial arts and celebrities like Mickey Rourke (listed as actor/boxer) and Ed O'Neill (listed as actor/martial artist) telling us why Lee was so great.

 UFC fighter Stephan Bonnar tells how he kicked his brothers' asses and other fighters like Jon Jones and Chung Le pontificate too. Even former boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini (billed as World Boxing Champion) has his say. Kobe Bryant and some dancers reflect on Lee having been the Hong Kong Cha-Cha champion of 1957 and he's compared to Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X! Of course Dan Inosanto, Lee's widow Linda and his daughter Shannon help keep things on track with their insights into his life, his philosophy and the development of his own martial arts style Jeet Kune Do. His stint as Kato of course is talked about and it was nice to see actor/stuntman Judo Gene LeBell be interviewed. But why no interviews with other people who worked with him like Chuck Norris and John Saxon? 

This is biography features a lot of the very interesting black and white interview he did with in 1971 but there's too many celebrities talking trash and too much UFC promoting.

Thanks for reading!

 

No Funny Animated Animals!

2012: ICE AGE-2011-The Asylum strikes again! A giant glacier threatens North America! Maine is wiped out! 

A scientist (Patrick Laborteaux), his wife (Julie McCullough) and their son (Nick AfanasIev) try to reunite with their daughter(Katie Wilson) who's in NYC. People freeze instantly and in the tradition of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS) famous landmarks are destroyed. The family trio winds up flying a Cessna through a twister. Meanwhile the daughter and her boyfriend walk to New Jersey. The government plants bombs but they don't seem to work. The stupid climax involves The Statue of Liberty. 

The acting, SFX and script are all sub-par in this disaster of a disaster movie! 

As of this writing 2012: ICE AGE is the only film directed by Travis Fort. (Keep praying!)

Thanks for reading!

The Horror! The Daughter of Horror!

DEMENTIA/DAUGHTER OF HORROR-1955-”Come with me into the tormented haunted half lit night of the insane. This is my world. Let me lead you into it. Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad”. 

So says the unnamed narrator of this weird low budget quickie (this version runs 55 mins.) that seems to have inspiration from both German expressionism and Ed Wood! It features no spoken dialogue, only narration (dementedly provided by Johnny Carson's future late night sidekick Ed McMahon!)

An insane woman called The Gamin (we know she's insane because the narrator says so) wakes up in bed fully clothed. She goes to a dresser draw, pulls out a stiletto and smiles. After encountering a child and seeing a wife beater arrested in the hall of her apartment she buys a newspaper from a smiling dwarf (who else but Angelo Rossitto?) with the headline: “Mysterious Stabbing”. The look on her face seems to say she knows all about it already. She walks down a dark alley and when a street drunk harasses her a police detective (Ben Roseman) viciously beats the drunk with a blackjack while she laughs insanely. Then she encounters a well dressed sleaze with a pencil thin mustache who tries to put the moves on her. After buying a flower from a haunted looking flower lady the detective introduces her to The Rich Man (Bruno Ve Sota). The Rich Man takes her to dinner, then a bar and finally a nightclub (the police detective is also hanging out there) where The Rich Man stares  obsessively at a dancer. This all goes on with no dialogue what so ever. Only music and a few sound effects! The mysterious narrator then returns while the pair are driving in The Rich Man's car to inform us that The Gamin is going to have a flashback about her parents. And what a flashback! 

It takes place in a graveyard! Here we learn how her abusive drunken father (who looks like the police detective) murdered her slutty mother after he finds a cigar in an ashtray (apparently dad doesn't smoke) and then she stabs her father to death! We also meet a hooded figure in a suit with a lantern who calls himself (?) "the demon who possesses your soul". He has the voice of the narrator so now we know who's relating the whole thing...

Later she and the Rich Man go to his apartment (the detective is watching them the whole time). He plays the piano and she fixes him a drink but he's more interested in the meal his butler brings him. After nourishment it's time for hanky-panky. But our heroine will have none of it. When he tries to kiss her she stabs him and pushes him out a window. His butler doesn't seem bothered. He just laughs. She runs away but then realizes when she stabbed the Rich Man he grabbed a pendant she was wearing around her neck. Fortunately, she happens to run right into his dead body with the pendant still clutched in his hand! Despite the corpse being surrounded by "the ghouls of insanity" she gets the medallion back but only after cutting off the hand that holds it. She runs away again but the police detective is following her. She escapes him and ditches the severed hand in the flower lady's basket. 

When she is finally trapped in an alley, she is saved by the sleazy guy with the pencil thin mustache who takes her into a night club he owns. He magically dresses her in a gown while Shorty Rogers and His Giants play on stage. She goes out to meet the denizens of the club who are either passed out drunk or jiving spasmodically. Comedian Shelly Bergman (perhaps the only one still alive associated with the production...?) appears briefly as a very frantic one. The Gamin gets into the groove and joins the band on stage. Then the police detective shows up and displays some handcuffs. Once again her madness takes over and everyone in the club accuses her. The Rich Man (minus his hand) even shows up to mock her! Everyone crowds in on her with clutching hands and bizarre close-ups and flashbacks occur. Suddenly she wakes up in bed. Was it only a dream? She opens the dresser draw and there is her pendant wrapped in a severed hand and it's alive!

For years the only thing I knew about DOH is the clutching hand scene which is being shown on screen in the movie theater (the marquee also says BRIDE OF THE MONSTER is showing) in THE BLOB. It's really a weirdly avant garde film noir that's saved by it's short running time. The images presented are strange and must have taken many an audience in the 50's by surprise. 

I read a number of stories about credited director John Parker the most persistent being that he didn't actually exist and featured player Bruno Ve Sota actually made DAUGHTER OF HORROR. But more recent research seems to say that Parker was real and wrote and produced it while Ve Sota "probably" directed it. 

Lead Actress Adrienne Barrett may have been Parker's secretary. IMDB says she made only one more movie THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...31 years later! But since that movie is an Australian production I wonder if it's the same actress? A lot can happen in 31 years I guess. Jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers was a very well known musician and later became a composer and arranger. He even arranged Ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith's first solo album in 1967. Ve Sota (who's real life wife Jebbie plays the flower girl) appeared in low budget movies and TV. He is the credited director on 3 films including the much maligned but great THE BRAIN EATERS! 

Whew! Thanks for reading (if you read this far!)!

I Just Wanted To Say a Few Words About William Beaudine.

What do movies like THE SPARROW, a silent film starring Mary Pickford, THE OLD FASHIONED WAY with WC Fields, THE APE MAN with Bela Lugosi, SPOOK BUSTERS with The Bowery Boys and THE CHINESE RING with Roland Winters as Charlie Chan all have in common?

Well, they were all directed by William Beaudine, perhaps the most prolific Hollywood director of all time.

Beaudine, from NYC, made his directorial debut in 1915 with a short called ALMOST A KING. Prior to this he had been assistant director to DW Griffin on BIRTH OF A NATION and INTOLERANCE. He made his first full length feature around 1922 and when the era of sound started he'd already had a considerable amount of work under his belt. He found jobs at many of the major studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros.). While shooting a Mack Sennett short he used the pseudonym William Crowley. One story says he did this because he was contractually bound to different studio. Another story says it was because he was "blacklisted" after a clash  with a studio head at Columbia Pictures.

From 1934-1937 he was in England (along with Allan Dwan) making films. It's been said that when he returned to the US he had trouble getting back in with the major studios and so began his work on "Poverty Row" as the 1940's saw Beaudine work almost exclusively for Monogram and Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC) churning out things like the aforementioned THE APE MAN and VOODOO MAN (also with Geo. Zucco and John Carradine), PROFESSOR CREEPS with Mantan Moreland, The East Side Kids series (later reborn as The Bowery Boys), FACE OF MARBLE, LEAVE IT TO THE IRISH and BLACK MARKET BABIES.

In 1945 he directed the notorious "birth of a baby" film MOM AND DAD for Kroger Babb. The Internet Movie Database has this to say about MOM AND DAD in Beaudine's biography: "Some cinema historians say that "Mom and Dad" may well have been, on a return-on-investment basis, the most profitable film in history, grossing as much as $100 million. Babb later recounted that each one of his investors got back $63,000 for each $1,000 invested in the film. In a pre-"Kinsey Report" world filled with ignorance and misinformation--deliberate and otherwise--about biology and sex, "Mom, and Dad" filled a void and turned a handsome profit while doing so (it was playing at drive-ins in the South and Midwest at least until 1977, long after the sexual revolution of the "Swinging Sixties", so potent was the "birth of a baby" come-on to the rural audiences for whom it was made). "Mom and Dad" was likely the top-grossing picture of 1947. The film was so heavily promoted that "Time" magazine commented that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life." Until the advent of The Blair Witch Project (1999), many film historians regarded "Mom and Dad" as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history."

Far more notorious for me would be a little project he made in 1952 called BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA where old Bela as a mad scientist must contend with Martin and Lewis impersonators Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo!

By the late '50's Television was in full swing and intruding in nearly every home in America.

Somehow William Beaudine managed to hop on the band wagon and direct TV programs as well, mostly for Walt Disney but he also did episodes of CIRCUS BOY (with future Monkee Mickey Dolenz), BROKEN ARROW, NAKED CITY and RIN TIN TIN. His last two features of course were the double bill of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA and JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.

Beaudine finally did retire in the late '60's and died at age 78 in 1970.

This is just more of an overview of Beaudine's career but it was the best I could come up with in a short time. So watch THE APE MAN tonight and raise a glass to William Beaudine!




 

It's Really His Granddaughter

JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER-1966-A Mexican village lives in fear of the notorious experiments being carried out in a mysterious mansion. It seems Maria (Narda Onyx), the stuck up, power mad, grand-daughter of Dr. Frankenstein is continuing his legacy of monster making, assisted by her cowardly brother (familiar TV actor Steven Geray). 

Meanwhile a bare knuckles fighter named Hank (Cal Boulder) and his partner the famous outlaw Jesse James (James Lupton) team up with “The Wild Bunch” to steal $500,000 from a bank. For some reason the gang leader's drunken brother betrays them to the Marshall (Jim Davis) forcing Hank and Jesse to seek refuge in the Castle of Frankenstein's offspring. Maria decides Hank would be a great subject for her experiments. They want to give him some kind of brain transplant and the tri-color army helmets Maria and Hank wear during part of the process are hysterical! While this goes on Jesse takes time to romance Juanita (Estelita Rodriguez), a local who helps at the lab. 

Hank becomes a hulking zombie with stitch marks around his forehead who is re-named Igor! For a short time he does Maria's bidding but he turns against her in the end. The acting in this one (especially by Onyx as Maria) is far more campy than in BTKVD.

This was the last film made by veteran director William Beaudine who's career started in silent films! He's no stranger to this blog. I figure he deserves his own entry so I'll do that next time! 

Some interesting bits about some of the players: 

Estelita Rodriguez began her career at age 14 in Republic Pictures westerns including several with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. She also had a role in Howard Hawks' RIO BRAVO and was married and divorced from actor Grant Withers. JJMF'sD was her last film. She died at 37 in 1966 of undisclosed causes. (Some say it was influenza..)

Narda Onyx was born in Estonia and was appearing on many TV shows (including a re-occurring role on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES)  prior to JJM'sFD which is one of her few movies roles. She's also in 1962's HITLER with Richard Basehart in the lead, playing Eva Braun's sister. She died in 1991 at 59.

Cal Bolder was an ex-patrolman who was in some other TV shows and later retired and wrote books. He died at 75 in 2005.

John Lupton was a successful stage actor and star of the TV western BROKEN ARROW. He died at 65 in 1993 of an undisclosed disease...

As for the title..well..Abbott & Costello didn't go to Mars either...

Thanks for reading!

The Wild Weird West

BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA-1967-Vampirism in the old west. The legendary count (a very skinny John Carradine) set his sights and fangs on early settlers and American Indians. After killing off passengers on a stagecoach, Drac assumes the identity of James Underhill and takes over the Double B Bar ranch where he takes a liking to his “niece” Betty (Melinda Plowman). Fortunately her fiance is Billy The Kid (Chuck Courtenay). The Count flies around like a bat and whenever he's ready to bite someone a red light engulfs his face. He says things like: “You clumsy idiot” and “How dare you interfere!”. After he kills a squaw, Indians go on the warpath. Virginia Christine plays Eva, a superstitious Swedish woman who tries to convince Billy Uncle James is really King of the Vampires. Bing Russell is stupid jealous ranch hand who aids Drac and Richard Reeves is a bartender. Harry Carey Jr. is also in it as is his real life mother Olivia. The atmospheric finale takes place in an old mine where Dracula plans to make Betty his un-dead companion. This is the penultimate feature length film for veteran director William "One Shot" Beaudine. For more on him and his last film credit, see the next entry!

Thanks for reading!