THE INVISIBLE MAN *Expanded review 27/11/2023* (1933)

“We’ve got a terrible responsibility. He’s mad and he’s invisible”.

This hugely enjoyable, James Whale-directed classic, a personal favourite of mine, kick-started another Universal horror franchise to join Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy. But despite such parentage, its birth was a tortuous one. 

James Curtis's' excellent biography: 'James Whale: A New World of Gods And Monsters summed it up: 'The gestation of The Invisible Man was the lengthiest and most convoluted of all of James Whale's films. It involved four directors, nine writers, six treatments,and ten separate screenplays'  - all before the creatives realised that the key to success was to return to H.G. Wells' original 1897 novel.

The finished version has an essentially simple plot: scientist ingests dangerous chemical, turning him invisible and increasingly into megalomaniac instability. He goes on the run and causes homicidal mayhem until the police capture him. Yet along the way, all sorts of goodies are layered in to the mix – a masterful multi-dimensional turn from Claude Rains, characterful supporting performances and confident direction, a cracking final script featuring oddball humour, Whale's own mischievous dialogue input, and ground-breaking special effects. It’s no surprise that it became the studio’s biggest hit since Frankenstein (1931).

H.G. Wells had previously been dissatisfied with what he regarded as a dumbing-down by Universal in their cinematic telling of his The Island of Dr Moreau in 1932's The Island of Lost Souls – (reviewed earlier). The studio’s crafty intention had been simply to buy the property in order to license its name and that of Wells for marketing purposes, disregard the plot and invent a totally new one. But this time when Wells sold the film rights to them, he insisted on script approval in the contract. He was astounded at the various screenplays Universal commissioned that branched off at such variance with his story – notable writers who took a crack at it included John Huston, Preston Sturges and a six-page treatment by Whale himself. 

In the film's protracted development, even Whale's involvement was subject to change. He was announced as director as soon as filming had ended on Frankenstein in 1931 and stayed attached until he was offered The Road Back, the sequel to the silent masterpiece All Quiet On The Western Front, the prestige value of which was too good to resist. This left The Invisible Man temporarily in the hands of Robert Florey, the director who'd emerged from a troubled history on Frankenstein to direct The Murders In The Rue Morgue. Such was the the poor reception for the latter movie that after allowing Florey to collaborate on a screenplay with Garrett Fort (as they'd done on Frankenstein) studio head Carl Laemmle Jr fired him. Wells exercised his right to reject that script as well as three involving John L. Balderston who had done such great work adapting Dracula and Frankenstein. 

By the time Preston Sturges came on board, Universal's now-established horror star Boris Karloff was settled as the lead. Sturges' plot was highly politicised, making him the avenging tool of a Russian chemistry professor, Dr Sarkov who renders Karloff invisible in order to murder the Bolsheviks who had killed Sarkov's family. Sturges was proud of the script he called 'an excellent hair-raiser", yet Laemmle nixed this too, not wanting to repeat the mistake with The Old Dark House of sidelining Karloff's new prominence into a supporting role.

Several more people took a crack at the project including James Whale in a six-page treatment, before novelist John Weld took what was literally a novel approach. He went back to the source book and produced a treatment of what he noted was a "simple story". Knowing that Wells thought highly of his novel, Weld cannily guessed he would readily approve of something so faithful. At last the progress of The Invisible Man was partially visible. The baton ultimately passed to the illustrious R.C. Sherriff. Although Whale persuaded his long-time writer friend from Journey’s End to cleave fairly close to the original. a significant influence in the film’s eventual darker tone than the novel was possibly due to the studio’s purchase of Philip Wylie’s book The Murderer Invisible whose title character goes on a killing spree in the service of ultimate deranged power. This motivated the director to commit to a similar bold edge in his work.

Over time, there were actually a number of significant changes to the author’s plot.  The 1890’s setting of the novel was brought up to date, contemporary to 1933. Also, Wells’s characterisation of Dr Jack Griffin was enigmatic, having no real background detail, whereas in the film as played by Claude Rains, he is given associate relationships to conflict with as well as a love interest (Gloria Stuart) who instead of being a formula concession actually adds an extra dimension of sympathy for him. One crucial improvement is in the matter of Griffin’s insanity.  For the movie version, in his back story he was emotionally stable but rendered mad as a side-effect of the Monocaine drug. In the novel, he is already a power-mad lunatic, meaning he loses a vital character arc of somewhere interesting to go. (This is the same problem suffered between the book and film of The Shining only in reverse, where Kubrick’s film showed us Jack Nicholson’s central character as clearly verging on nuts before they even arrive at the demonic Overlook Hotel).

I’m in danger of getting ahead of myself here with plot highlights. There are plenty though, spread throughout the film - right from its confident, attention-grabbing opening. The mysterious figure of Rains, his head totally swathed in bandages and topped with goggles, tramps his way through the snow to the amusingly generic ‘country village’ pub, the Lion’s Head. He enters, triggering that beloved horror movie cliché of the tavern’s locals brought to a stand-still by his entrance. (To be fair though, who can blame them in this case?). He gives terse instructions for a room and a private sitting-room to the land-lady, a vivid battle-axe turn by Whale favourite Una O’ Connor, and immediately sets the regulars’ tongues wagging with his reclusive eccentricity.

Incidentally, the first line of the film would make a great pub-quiz question - a gossiping regular asks his friend: “Did you hear about Mrs Mason’s little Willie?”

Soon, Griffin’s thwarted need for experimenting secrecy turns to wrath and he ejects the mild-mannered landlord (Forrester Harvey) down the stairs for trying to evict him. When the village bobby shows up, Griffin goads him before unwinding his bandage to reveal there is nothing underneath – and with insane mocking laughter away he goes on the run, unstoppable. The landlord is nursed in a rare moment of tenderness by his Wicked Witch of the Yeast wife, prompting one of many little gems of off-kilter comedy as he groans “Ah shaddap” at her incessant yapping.

The elaborate special effects work in The Invisible Man led by John P. Fulton (with John J. Mescall and Frank D. Williams) is truly remarkable for its time. Fulton originally wanted to become a director but realised his forte was in transformative and in this case hard to detect invisibility FX with an amazing side-line in miniatures. He would win two Academy Awards for his fine work. To suggest Griffin’s bodily invisibility under full clothing as he moved around, wires were used to suspend his garments. For the more difficult illusion of revealing nothing under removed bandaging, Rains was cloaked entirely in a black velvet suit against a background of the same material; this shot was then combined with a matte shot of the same scene without Rains.  The filming was arduous for the actor – especially due to the disorienting claustrophobia of his head needing to be smothered so completely. However, the result was highly-sophisticated for the period and must have astounded audiences. Remember, cinema was still a relatively young medium and much of the trickery was made up as its artists went along. Only a moment where Griffin in pyjamas sits in a chair is slightly marred by noticeable outlining shimmering around his body. The levitation of beer glasses and other props and the climactic depiction of snow tracks are the most impressive of all. On top of these, there are the other superb models used in the spectacular vehicle stunt sequences we will come to later.

Many felt the effects work in the film was the main ingredient in its success, but James Whale’s care ensured that all the elements combined to create a terrific horror film. The supporting performances vie for attention - with memorable Ealing comedy turns from the pub locals with their 1930s Cockney ‘Orl roit, I’ll gow’ accents (albeit in a Surrey village). Whale lovingly crafted the population in these scenes, allowing his working-class childhood in England's Black Country area of Dudley to inform the local colour on screen. 

Various police officers through the ranks prove arresting as well if you'll pardon the pun. We have the bobby who registers his shock at Griffin’s vanishing act with “’E’s all eaten away!” (a movie debut for E.E. Clive, a Burgomaster for Whale in Bride of Frankenstein) and then the refreshingly resourceful confidence of Dudley Digges’ Chief Detective. He becomes the victim of another relishable comic moment from one of his own men. After a commanding manhunt speech, reminiscent of Tommy Lee Jones’ famous ‘hen-house, out-house’ thoroughness in The Fugitive, his authority is slyly undermined by a watching PC’s faint approval: “Oh, I see. Pretty good”.

The eagle-eyed will spot a brief, welcome cameo from Dwight Frye as a bespectacled journalist. By now, he had become fatally typecast as creepy henchmen as a result of playing Renfield in Dracula and Fritz for Whale’s Frankenstein. Here, he gets a chance to exude his high energy through a relatively normal role, pestering the police with suggestions for trapping Griffin.

Whale expertly plays R.C. Sherriff’s humorous dialogue against the horror, shrewdly balancing between them instead of only hitting notes of unrelieved seriousness.  Not that he was afraid of going for dark comedy even from the mouth of his malevolent lead. Whale even added some dark, twisted pay-off lines for Griffin dubbed in by Rains in post-production. 

This brings us to the director's superb taste in casting Claude Rains to lead the film. Boris Karloff and the project parted ways earlier over an alleged refusal by the studio to match his requested fee. Whale wanted Colin Clive who would certainly have had Griffin's tortured megalomania well within his wheelhouse, but Clive was homesick for England after shooting two more film in Hollywood after his fabulous dual success in Journey's End and Frankenstein. In Rudy Behlmer’s documentary Now You See Him: The Invisible Man Revealed, Rains' daughter Jessica tells how Rains, coming from a prestigious exclusively stage background, had filmed a screen test that almost scuppered his film career before it began. This was for the RKO film A Bill Of Divorcement the previous year and his overly demonstrative theatrical expression had no real previous screen experience to temper it for the more subtle camera. Whale however viewed the test and immediately knew he was The Invisible Man by virtue of his remarkable voice. (During filming, the director supported Rains' lack of movie skills further: after the actor told him he'd only seen about six films in his life, Whale urged him to use his use his plentiful downtime during the shoot to see three films a day to better understand the process.)

In TCM Classic Movies’ short Tribute to Claude Rains narrated by Richard Chamberlain, he described Rains’ voice evocatively as a mixture of ‘honey and gravel’. Jack Griffin would not be half so potent a character but for the versatility of Rains’ vocal feeling fed through the otherwise restrictive mask of the character.  He was capable of character range across the spectrum from portraying cold, clinical evil through to touchingly sympathetic characters – sometimes unexpectedly so as with The Invisible Man. In a career spanning five decades, Rains was a sought-after and highly-respected talent, his credits including some of the most famous films of his era such as Casablanca (1942), Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As we saw in the story of Charles Laughton who was taught by him at RADA, he was also a much-appreciated mentor to other actors. This was likely a passing forward of the kind influence of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree who’d paid for him as a student to erase his cockney accent with the elocution lessons that freed up his wonderful voice. This was an enormous aid to Rains, born into awful poverty which had claimed the lives of all but two of the twelve children in his family. The cultivating of the marvellous raw material of his voice into cultured sophistication allowed him to portray roles beyond the normal limitations of subservient working-class parts. In turn, he inspired illustrious names such as Laurence Oliver and John Gielgud.

Rain’s multi-faceted Jack Griffin in The Invisible Man is a joy. He goes ‘up to eleven’ in his super-villain declaration “Suddenly I realised the power I held – the power to rule – to make the world grovel at my feet!”, mischievously (and camply) teases his enemies with a high-pitched girly giggle as he runs rings around them, hits full-throttle, gleeful evil in cold-blooded murder and even finds shades of softer poignancy in his scenes with his lover Flora. He confesses to her with beguiling tenderness that his monomaniac pushing of the human potential envelope was because otherwise “I had nothing to offer you, Flora”.

Although Rains is largely unseen in the film, the actor certainly knew how to make his presence felt. According to James Curtis's biography, he tended toward repeated sneaky attempts at upstaging his fellow cast members by backing Una O'Connor and Gloria Stuart off-camera to emphasise him in shot more. Fortunately, both Stuart and Whale had the theatre backgrounds to always catch him out.

In terms of overall tone, another welcome difference created in Whale’s movie versus Wells' novel is the harder edge supplied by Griffin’s unbridled, merciless wave of murder, firstly on a grand scale as he diverts the signals to send a train splendidly crashing off the rails - then the personal vendetta of killing former colleague Dr Kemp instead of his life being saved as in the novel. Griffin gleefully sends him over the cliff in his car to a fiery death in a high-pitched vengeful cackle. Who wants a crazed villain to just make a threat when we can see him carry it out like this? Griffin releases the brake on the car, so too did Whale in allowing his protagonist’s maniacal vengeance gloriously unfettered freedom – a quality he had been forced to curb at times in Frankenstein. There is even a darkly funny quality to how Griffin savours the path his betrayer’s vehicle will take, savouring each step: “…Then you’ll have a big thrill for a hundred yards or so till you hit a boulder”. The flaming car stunt that plummets down the hill is another great John P Fulton effects show-piece to go with the train sequence, sealing his reputation as a master craftsman of thrilling movie illusions.

Readers of my serialised reviews will know that even at the height of a tidal wave of praise I’m not above drawing attention to the unfortunate things washed-up as well. William Harrigan’s Kemp is largely a wooden performance, enlivened only by the voltage put through him when his character’s life is in danger. Gloria Stuart as Flora, although a crucial humanising force to underpin Griffin’s rampage, tends to hit the same plaintive quavering note in her lines that is distractingly irritating. Listen out for the radio newsreader who is also worth a mention, his disembodied breaking-news bulletins are amusingly reminiscent of Criswell the crackpot psychic from Plan 9 from Outer Space in their melodrama.

Finally, Griffin is caught after his movement in a shed’s hay-bales tips off a local farmer as to his location. This is a cue for a climactic bravura touch of FX magic showing the invisible footprints and Griffin’s fallen bodily impression in the snow after being shot. At his bed-side, we are treated to the calm after the storm, which pleasingly doesn’t feel like a tacked-on happy ending (something else Whale had no choice but to film for Henry Frankenstein). Griffin asks for Flora and her forgiveness before dying, and we at last see his head materialise, morphing from a skull into the handsome visage of Claude Rains, his berserk rage now soothed into eternal peace.

Having invested a total of 22 months in protracted development and filming, Universal needed a sizeable hit out of The Invisible Man and this is exactly what appeared. Its place in their Hall of Fame is summed up well by the Hollywood Reporter review of the time who called it "...a legitimate offspring of the family that produced Frankenstein and Dracula, but a lusty healthy willing to laugh youngster who can stand on his own two feet".

The Invisible Man inspired a number of sequels by the studio featuring Vincent Price, John Barrymore, John Carradine and Abbott and Costello. A 1970s TV series starred David McCallum - and much later the more violent, adult reworking, Hollow Man (2000) directed by Paul Verhoeven. and recently Leigh Whannell's highly effective female victim-centred remake starring Elisabeth Moss . Let’s not forget though, as with Frankenstein it was James Whale who midwifed the happy birth of a legendary horror film series…

DR BLACK, MR HYDE (1976)

“Just what do you mean by ‘somewhat experimental’?

‘Blaxploitation’ was essentially exploitation cinema but specifically ‘commercially-minded films of the ‘70s for a black audience’. In the era of Nixon and Watergate, the civil rights struggle of the 1960s had still left black people disempowered in the real world - yet on screen between 1971-1976 there was a ground-breaking new sub-genre of films featuring black representatives who won battles, effected change and were bursting with charismatic confidence. They kicked ass, looked good and were underscored by super-cool soundtracks. They portrayed aspects of the black experience but with the politics almost wholly removed for maximum box-office - hence the exploitation label rather than 'Black Cinema'. This would always be a controversial move, laying it open to accusations of degradation instead of cultural advancement.

The acceptance of African-American actors in Hollywood lead roles had taken an appallingly long time for a progressive society. After decades of relegation as utility ‘negro’ servants and other offensive, slow ‘Yassir’ drawling comic sterotypes, change was a long time coming. In the late ‘60s Sidney Poitier emerged as a black leading man without a trace of tokenism in the Virgil Tibbs films beginning with the terrific In the Heat of the Night. It wasn’t until 1969 though that Jim Brown became the first black actor on-screen to play a love-scene with a Caucasian woman (Racquel Welch) in 100 Rifles.  The success of the film at last convinced studios that there was an audience for empowered black characters in movies.

As much as it arguably exploited their heritage for white studio bosses, Blaxploitation also made money and created opportunities for black actors, film-makers and spread its fan-base to a wider audience, even more so in the decades since. Blaxploitation was no different to regular exploitation cinema; it took advantage of big box-office crazes from other genres. Urban crime flicks were supplemented by the new fashion for Bruce Lee’s imported kung-fu and Hammer horror with varying success. If it was popular, it was incorporated and no idea was too outlandish if the public queued for it. ‘Black Hollywood’ as it could be labelled briefly was driven by trends not agit-prop politics, just like the mainstream.

After Blaxploitation’s varying success with the Blacula films and then the embarrassingly poor Blackenstein, the director of Blacula, William Crain, along with Dimension Pictures gave audiences a transmutation of another Universal icon in Dr Black, Mr Hyde. It’s fitting that the studio chose the Jekyll and Hyde story as the resulting film has the split-personality of many from the genre - movies that earnestly want to represent the black community as a weapon of some integrity amidst the crowd-pleasing, whilst simultaneously shooting itself in the foot. Whilst its tone suggests a knowing humour, time and again characters are drawn with positive attributes and then the script delivers a face-palming error of representation that undoes the good intentions.

Dr Black, Mr Hyde overall has relatively decent production values, not that you’d know it from the beginning. Dr Pride (black pride? – a hint at the political conscience attempted) played by Bernie Casey spends most of his work-time at a hospital staffed apparently by just two orderlies, two nurses and only him as the MD on duty. Casey had a long career on screen following eight years in NFL American football, appearing in all genres from Guns of the Magnificent Seven, roles for Scorsese and John Landis (Boxcar Bertha and Spies like Us), to TV sci-fi in Deep Space Nine, to name but a few.

Pride starts off either weighed down by the ennui of unfulfilled life, or it’s Casey’s possible resignation about the woeful material in the opening visitor tour scene. Certainly the character is making the best of things as he moonlights part-time, sharing his skills for free at the local Free Clinic and Thrift Shop - although his prostitute friend Linda (Marie O’Henry) feels he is not being true to his people: “The only time you’re around black people is when you’re down here clearing your conscience”. To be fair, Pride probably deserves this for two reasons. Firstly, the poor girl is unnecessarily topless in the scene where all he needs to perform is a stethoscope check on her breathing from the back and a cursory inexplicable jiggle of her pelvis. (The producers’ crass bid for populism warps Malcolm X’s call to mobilisation into ‘tits by any means necessary’).  Secondly, he’s just insulted her by stating the obvious about her own work: “Obviously, prostitution’s not the healthiest job to have”. Linda tries to dignify being a hooker as a self-empowered choice rather than lowering herself to be someone’s minimum-wage toilet cleaner. This is meant as an admirable moment of social realism, but any sympathy for sex workers is poorly represented later when one of her prostitute friends decries the slow week as being bad for business and because “I’m horny too” - as though that’s another reason why she would resort to it.

Privately, the not-exactly-good doctor is less of a saint than his altruistic slumming suggests. He’s been testing a secret serum on lab animals that turns their fur pigmentation white; however it also turns them into savage beasts. Knowing the limitations of his rats and guinea-pigs, he decides he must upgrade to “A human factor”. No prizes for guessing where there’s a plentiful supply of those nearby. It isn’t long before a female patient is wheeled in sans next of kin and before you can say Hippocratic Oath, he’s injected her with the drug. Soon she develops the albino skin, pale eyes and whitened hair reminiscent of Rosalind Cash in The Omega Man, who by pure coincidence plays Pride’s colleague Dr Billie Worth here. The impatient patient attacks a nurse before changing back into normal human appearance.

Incidentally, the prosthetic make-up in the film is by effects maestro Stan Winston of Terminator, Jurassic Park and Aliens fame. Clearly, he also helped those less fortunate than himself.

Pride’s conscience thus far doesn’t bother him, despite Billie’s appeals. “I don’t know where I’m going to get another patient” he ponders, staring off into the distance in a meaningful poised close-up like a bad soap-opera. Eventually, he opts to get high on his own stash and subjects himself to the serum. As the effect kicks in, he writhes in agony, or seemingly indigestion, and rises up to reveal the same facial changes as his human guinea-pig. With the added heavy Neanderthal brow, the combined result on him is reminiscent of Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk of two years later. This is a Hyde with a difference though. Rather than simply being Pride’s bestial altar-ego, added to his primitive super-strength and rage he retains his civilised self’s articulacy and displays a nifty line in flamboyant martial arts – complete with Bruce Lee-style cawing.

Pride/Hyde gets to flex his newly-acquired skills on a trio of street pimps, not the last time in the film we see examples of this (by now dated?) caricature of entrepreneurialism. Meanwhile, inside the Moonlight Lounge club another posturer by the name of Silky parades his top-hat and cane stereotype. He’s fooling no-one though. Underneath his Mack preening, he’s a snivelling inadequate who gets his ass kicked not only by a threatening mobster, but literally so by one of his own girls. Enter the doctor, who proceeds to beat up all the thugs in the bar before transforming back just in time in the parking lot to avoid being identified.

The writer, Lawrence Woolner (who later went on to co-found New World Pictures with Roger Corman) feels the need to reinforce Pride’s virtuous credentials by showing him slipping money to a hard-up mother in the hospital who cannot afford to pay for her son’s drugs. Maybe he’s trying to pay off his latent conscience because it still doesn’t inhibit him in an argument with Billie from continuing his experiments and a vendetta against the pimping fraternity. We soon discover from a date with Linda why Pride makes such a personal crusade of erasing these ghetto lowlifes and why he has such an interest in her welfare. His alcoholic mother struggled to raise him whilst working as a cleaner to the rich, often leaving him in the care of hookers. This is Bernie Casey’s best scene in the film, a poignant confessional that has him tearing up as he recalls running to the neighbours as a boy after she collapsed.

Back at Pride’s home, he then renders the evening even more of a downer by heavily suggesting she also inject the drug. When she refuses, there is a disturbing tone to his “What if I insist?” He shoots up first, which makes her understandably less than reassured by his sudden bleached appearance and berserk anger management issues. She flees the scene with him in hot pursuit - cue ‘70s wah-wah jive on the sound-track

The finding of a hooker’s body the next day livens things up by ushering in the detective duo of O’Connor and Jackson, played by Milt Kogan and Ji-Tu Cumbuka. In real-life, Kogan was a trained MD, known for his cop namesake in the long-running TV sitcom Barney Miller. The 6’ 5” Cumbuka built up an impressive resume, mainly of TV work from a challenged upbringing without the support of a Baptist minister father who preached that acting was ‘the devil’s work’. His Detective Jackson is presented as a sharply-dressed man of self-respect in the black community, and yet his vocabulary veers from highly-sophisticated words such as ‘insalubrious’ to rough bursts of ebonics. Discovering the corpse, he tells Kogan:  “Somebody has put some shit in the game, know what I mean?” His partner is as perplexed as us. In the office, after taking some heat on the ‘phone he slams down the receiver with a street-hustler’s “Jive-ass sucker!”.

Back on those streets, Silky the crap pimp still hasn’t got the message that he’s not cut out for this line of work. Replacing Linda with a white pro prompts a brief girl-on-girl cat-fight: “Who you callin’ bitch, ho?” before Pride turns up and uses kung-fu and a car to effect a career change by running over his new employee and ramming Silky with it.

To try to balance the vicarious thrill of seeing our vigilante ‘hero’ sweeping the scum away, we see a brief split-personality inner struggle in front of his bathroom mirror a’la Smeagol/Gollum. Unsurprisingly, his commercially exploitative dark side wins out, despite Casey’s quietly effective playing: “This is real – and it’s too late to change”. Even Billie’s threat to turn him in can’t stop his confused vendetta borne of a haunted childhood. He has always been mother’s Pride.

The climax where Pride captures Billie and is corned by the police at Watts Towers is well-staged and makes good use of aerial footage as he scales the tower solo. The deliberate homage to King Kong is an uncomfortable racial issue, especially if too close a comparison is made between Kong and the doctor’s ape-like transformation. Regardless, Pride comes before a fall, and fall he does – in an impressive stunt dive off the tower.

Released in 1976, Dr Black, Mr Hyde was the last gasp for Blaxploitation as a viable economic movement for black advancement in the entertainment industry. There was never a question of film-makers lacking the talent so much as judgement.  Whenever valiant bids were made in the genre to sew in subtle references to the modern black experience, all too often they were lost in favour of appealing to the lowest and widest denominator of audience. (Did anyone really register Pride’s experiments as a metaphor for the U.S. government’s notorious covert syphilis testing on black college students in Tuskegee?).

Dr Black, Mr Hyde hints at what could have been possible, but in solely celebrating primitive fun ends up failing to do either very well. The terrific artwork of the poster campaign shows where the energy went instead.

THE OMEGA MAN (1971)

Charlton Heston drives a convertible contentedly down a deserted city street in the day-time. He sees a flash of movement from a building, stops the car and opens fire at the upper window with a machine-gun. And so begins the nightmare tale of the future: The Omega Man.

Directed by Boris Sagal for Warner Brothers, the film was based on the novella ‘I Am Legend’ by Richard Matheson. In the story, the world is ravaged by a plague spread by vampirism, but as the co-adapter Joyce Corrington (with partner John William) had a scientist’s background, she elected to have disease be disseminated by the more chillingly possible germ warfare following war between Russia and China.

Heston is Colonel Robert Neville, a military scientist, with slightly more improbably lantern-jawed heroic capabilities using weapons and his fists. This is no nerdy lab guy. He makes a likeable hero though, which is vital as for the entire first act he is pretty much the last healthy human alive and must plough a lonely furrow in his daily life of driving around, looting the stores of supplies and going to the cinema to screen himself Woodstock for the umpteenth time. He recites dialogue along with the band members interviewed on screen and mutters “They sure don’t make pictures like that any more”. He realises on leaving that it is nearly dark and races back home to his secure bolt-hole just as he faces attack from fire-bombs and physical violence from a curious collection of foes.

The world’s predilection for conflict left an infected population that has mutated through three stages, the worst symptoms of which are albinism and a form of blindness in the eyes. The victim develops cataracts, an awful grey pallor to the skin and over-sensitivity to the light, which is why Neville’s plague-ridden enemies come out at night. They dress in monks’ ceremonial robes, wear shades and call themselves the Family, a sect lead by the urbane Anthony Zerbe as Matthias. Intriguingly, the film gives them a positive spin on their condition. They have turned their curse into a radical luddite philosophy, shunning all who serve ‘the Wheel’ of contemporary science and technology, the elements that created this post-apocalyptic living hell with “The tools that destroyed the world”. They taunt Neville nightly outside his apartment, determined to eliminate the last symbol of the old world in human form with torches of fire. “Nothing cleanses quite like fire”, declares Matthias with messianic fervour.

I’m pretty sure in the late 70s the comic 2000 AD ‘paid homage’ to the Family in one of its Judge Dredd stories - (the Brotherhood of the Light maybe?)

Anyway, fortunately for Neville, his dull solitary existence of soliloquising and playing chess against an inanimate bust of Caesar is soon enlivened by the discovery of other humans in the area, unknown to him and the Family.  This comes after a flashback where we see him survive an impossibly fatal helicopter explosion that he walks away from – the indestructibility of El Cid almost knows no bounds.

The band of other healthy survivors are led by the personable Rosalind Cash as Lisa, her friend Dutch (Paul Koslo) and a band of children in their care. Cash was a very conscious timely choice by Joyce Corrington, an element of ‘racial pizzazz’ as she called it. In an era that saw the rise of the Black Power movement they wanted a bold black heroine who embodied resourceful qualities and made an attractive developing love interest for Heston’s character.

Since Neville knows he is immune to the plague bacilli he is able to concoct an antidote using his own blood, which he firstly uses successfully on Lisa’s brother Richie (Eric Laneuville). However, he cannot save everyone and in a shocking twist Lisa becomes infected and one of the Family. She subsequently sells Neville out and joins them. In a climactic battle, Neville is symbolically speared crucifixion-style outside by Matthias as he tries to take Lisa away. His final act as he dies is to give the bottle of the remaining serum to Dutch.

The Omega Man is entertaining and imaginative. The terrorist germ warfare threat hasn’t dated in the intervening decades; In fact the anxiety has increased if one recalls not only the global threat of WMDs but more isolated cases such as Japan’s Aum cult and their Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. It also posits a credible thoughtful possibility of how parts of a society adapt to necessary re-birth. Equally, the movie has a flavour of the 1970s present, reflecting the emerging Blaxploitation genre in its casting of Cash, Laneuville, and the albino black Family actors as well as Ron Grainer’s lush score which combines romantic yearnings with a hip funk edge, very much an early 70s soul vibe in places. The Omega Man is regarded by some as part of the Black Cinema trend of that time.

Heston’s old-school Hollywood leading-man appeal is neatly reminiscent of the values of the pre-ravaged world but still with an impressive energy and vitality. In the vintage featurette made by Warner Brothers, Heston brought Dr Ashley Montague, a famous anthropologist, to the set and discussed the film’s themes of individual and tribal survival with him. At one point, Heston picks up a machine-gun and offers his own take on man’s methods of achieving/re-establishing this dominance. Fittingly for someone who would become so identified with the pro-gun NRA movement, he describes the modern weapon of his character as “The ultimate extension of man as a killer ape”, a knowing reference to his recent famous central role in the similar future-shock Planet of the Apes .

It’s interesting to note that within a period of just a few years (all within my writing’s focus), Heston appeared in three different dystopian science-fiction future movies. As well as the aforementioned two, there was the frightening Soylent Green with its moving scene of him and Edward G Robinson being shown a film montage of the natural beauty of old-world Earth. For an actor who espoused controversial traditional ‘frontier’ values, he was also very willing to be involved with pacifist projects that warned of the consequences of our increasingly warmongering ways. (He marched alongside Martin Luther King on the day Dr King made his immortal ‘I have a dream speech’). Being allied to the unforced peace message of THE OMEGA MAN is to his credit.

(ZOMBIES OF) SUGAR HILL (1974)

In 1974, AIP released a Blaxploitation film that cashed in on the voodoo horror theme that made the Bond film Live and Let Die such fun (itself capitalising on Blaxploitation’s popularity). This synchronicity of influences benefitted Sugar Hill as it’s well-made, great fun and directed by Paul Maslansky, later the producer of the Police Academy series. The plot is simple enough and wastes no time in setting up a premise that invites you to sit back and vicariously enjoy the pay-off. Tim Kelly’s script is functional but contains some humdinger attitudinal trailer lines that this kind of film thrives on.

Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill (lusciously vampish genre star Marki Bey) has a club-owning boyfriend who is being leaned on to sell his place to thugs employed by gang boss Morgan (Robert Quarry, a star of horror films of the period such as The Abominable Dr Phibes). Inevitably since he won’t sell, his integrity gets him beaten to death outside the club. Sugar vows unholy revenge. Her ex-boyfriend, torch-carrying Lt Valentine, the debonair Richard Lawson (Scream Blacula Scream) wants to help but Sugar is impatient: “ If I knew who they were, I would fix it so I could see them die…slowly”.

This might just give her away as more than the routine prime suspect later on, but Sugar cares not - this is one bitter-sweet widow. She goes to ask for the supernatural help of a Voodoo priestess, the white-haired Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who prefaces the ritual by warning Sugar of the consequences of invoking the greatest of her Voodoo gods, Baron Samedi. Her client understands that whatever bargain is extracted, it will be worth it. Strangely, like TV evangelists, Samedi is seemingly not immune to, or any good with, earthly materialism: “He is a greedy god. Have you any money?”

Samedi is summoned – and what a character he is. Live and Let Die fans will be familiar with this spectral imp’s macabre elegance and here Don Pedro Colley is a wonderfully flamboyant incarnation, with an infectious, wide-eyed glee in his top-hat and tails. He brings forth a strikingly effective army of zombies, silver-eyed and cobwebbed - more old Universal than Lucio Fulci, but highly memorable all the same.

Immediately, Sugar and Samedi go to work and the real fun begins. As we witness each of the gang members being dispatched in increasingly spooky ways, Bey is on hand every time to savour their demises in a stunning white one-piece suit with bouffant afro. Samedi disguises himself as a range of characters, such as a dodgy taxi driver, to facilitate the hoods’ entrapment - as if hosting the unfolding carnage. Morgan’s dock-land henchman, ‘Tank’ Watson, who demands kickbacks from his day workers in return for a shift, is the first to be killed by the zombies in a warehouse, Bey gloating: “I’m not accusing you. Honk. I’m passing sentence!” Since Sugar didn’t see her boyfriend’s murder, it’s never explained how she knows the gangsters’ separate identities, but no matter. The pace is quick enough for us to let logic gaps slide like chicken fat.

Over the course of the film, subsequent goons are bumped off using ravenous pigs, a possessed chicken’s foot, Voodoo dolls and even a particularly creepy massage with the most ‘unhappy’ of endings; “I don’t like it” says the soon-to-be victim as undead fingers trail up and down his back – all inventive and hugely entertaining.

Morgan has a caustic bitch of a girlfriend, Celeste, whose vicious racism earns us a ringside seat to a bit of girl-on-girl fighting between her and Sugar. Meanwhile, Valentine enquires about Voodoo mythology from an English professor of the occult.

As Sugar closes in to offer more than a spoonful of rough justice to Morgan, she goads him to meet her at the club. It is in her name now but she will not sell it after all. Morgan is not happy at this - “Your ass!!” he screams, highlighting just one of her many attributes. He can’t resist the trap laid out for him in his thwarted anger, one that includes the nice touch of a tableful of his now-zombified employees grinning at him. If you’re curious as to how he gets offed, well, what is that ain’t exactly mud and ain’t exactly water?

Samedi reminds Sugar that he is now owed a suitable fee for his living-dead services. As luck would have it, Celeste had accompanied Morgan to the venue. The Baron would have preferred the shapely Sugar, yet is content to settle for scooping up the shrieking mobster moll and take her with him to Hell…

Sugar Hill is a great example of what happens when Blaxploitation horror elements are put together with humour, a decent budget and talent. In fact, it’s such a promising piece that I’d even commit what would normally be sacrilege for me and suggest its’ ripeness for remake possibilities. Rather than the current vogue for re-doing what are perfectly realised horror movies already, I’d be intrigued to see what the result would be with modern FX, or even if the laughs were sacrificed for a pure horror tone. Regardless, this is stylish entertainment, topped off by great use of the Motown tune ‘Supernatural Voodoo woman’ by the Originals.

ABBY (1974)

It was inevitable that during the Blaxploitation cycle of the early 1970s, the Devil would try to possess some of the profits from 1973’s The Exorcist by association. American International Pictures rushed into production with Abby, the tale of a woman taken over by an evil spirit claiming to be Eshu of the Yoruba religion.

Whilst the subject matter and some plot threads have commonality with The Exorcist, William Girdler, a later accomplished exploitation director of such films as Grizzly , managed to inject enough original and amusing elements for this beast to work its demonic charms as a stand-alone. Most obviously, ABBY features an all-black cast. The spirit’s host, as aforementioned, is also not a child but an adult woman, Abby (Carol Speed), the wife of a Louisville pastor Rev, Emmet Williams (Terry Carter). She somehow becomes the possessee after her husband’s father Bishop Garnet Williams (William ‘BLACULA’ Marshall) releases it in in a cave in Nigeria. He opens the Pandora’s Box containing Eshu and the dust creates havoc, sending his assistants flying. Something evil has been freed.

The action inexplicably transfers to America, to Abby’s home in Louisville, Kentucky. We see the demon sneaks up on her as a sihouette in the shower and penetrate her almost literally in a scene of almost orgasmic union for her and ‘it’. As Abby/Eshu later declaims; “Now the fun starts”. Abby begins to manifest symptoms of take-over, beginning with a coughing fit in church and an attempted kitchen knife self-harming accompanied by some absurdly lascivious lip-licking. The dead give-away is the deep rasping EXORCIST-style demonic voice Abby channels during her marriage guidance counselling work. A recurring mischievous kink of Eshu’s is that he likes to make his presence felt when her husband is there. There’s clearly only tolerance for one old time religion in the house now. During the Rev’s interruption of one of her couples’ sessions, Eshu spits abrasive profanities at him, culminating in “I’m gonna take George upstairs and fuck the shit out of him!”.

Such unorthodox treament suggestions don’t go unnoticed, and after restraining his wife, Emmet surprises us all by contacting his father. Based on the last time we saw him, this should have been via a séance, but no, Bishop Garnet is alive and well and continuing his work as normal, utterly unharmed. The worsening situation with Abby eventually forces him to catch a plane to Louisville. Getting the evil wind of this, Eshu/Abby spitefully mocks her husband: “I wanna thank you for callin’ that motherfuckin’ father of yours. Tell him I’ll be waiting!”. The Bishop tells Emmet and his son, police Detective Potter (Austin Stoker) that he is sure Eshu is possessing Abby to terrorise him. Assuming the spirit can’t control a man of God, couldn’t it have tried to kill him in that cave in Nigeria? Or taken over someone else back there? We still don’t know why or how it bothered to come all the way to the USA. Maybe there’s a malevolent Fed-Ex service out there –or a jiffy bag for ju-ju.

Well, the devil works not only in mysterious ways but sporadic ones. This evil imp is only interested in part-time possession it seems. Abby/Eshu can switch to the appearance of sanity in front of hospital nurses (where she’s hopelessly treated for brain issues), and more worryingly with nightclub customers. Yes, she’s goes on the run and cruises for souls like a satanic bar-fly. Her first hapless conquest is a buttoned-up geek whose lover’s lane tryst with her ends in car-quaking doom and bursts of smoke out of the window. Serves him right for picking up (screw)-loose women.

Despite some sharp action editing and chilling sound design, the horror homicide sequences have two annoying style impositions; repeated freeze-frame scene endings as though Girdler doesn’t know how to finish, and an over-kill of incessant subliminal face-shots (another definite Exorcist rip-off) of various fleeting devil images who nevertheless all resemble Munsters.

Anyhow, hot on the demon’s trail are Emmet, the Bishop and Det. Potter. Now, if you thought Eshu’s transatlantic trip didn’t make sense, wait till you see Potter’s law-enforcement brain in action. When told that his possessed sister has been spotted in a bar, he is hilariously obtuse: “What is she doing in a bar? She doesn’t drink!” He shows similar density when they case all the local drinking joints; when he shows a photo of Abby to a bar-owner friend, notice the insert shot of the photo - it looks nothing like her.

Still, even with this haphazard sleuthery, the intrepid trio track Abby to a bar for a low-budget climax where the Bishop performs various incantations while the others pin her down. He urges the men to “Remain calm in your Christ centre”. She tries all the Exorcist tricks - appealing to each man with guilt-trip voices of their loved ones and even a spot of levitation. This culminates in the Bishop dealing mano-a-demon with the evil interloper, where he enrages it by insisting it’s an imposter: “You’re nothing but a minor spirit!” There is a speaking in tongues face-off and then eventually Abby foams at the mouth with supernatural toothpaste (no pea soup here) and the sinister squatter exits. Intriguingly, it’s left ambiguous as to who the demon was. Was it Eshu or a foul impersonator? We’ll never know. Abby and her husband leave for a plane at the airport in a rushed closing scene. What, no open ending?

Abby is an enjoyably silly film, which was doing very well at the box office to the tune of $4m in its first month till Warner Brothers slapped an injunction on it for alleged copyright violation, forcing it to be pulled from distribution and only re-surfacing in the last few years on DVD. The remaining prints are of low quality, supposedly due to Warner’s getting rid of all the decent prints they could find. I managed to get hold of one such DVD version, which has a couple of editing jumps and colour distorted moments but it’s still watchable.

Well-paced, illogical, batty and entertaining nonsense. Take possession of it for a few late-night laughs.

BLACKENSTEIN (1973)

In 1973, to cash in on the Blaxploitation horror success of Blacula, writer/producer Frank Saletri decided to do the same with the Frankenstein property. Unfortunately, whereas the former had class, humour, production values, style and money, this magnificently poor effort manages to get by on…none of them.Blackenstein aka Black Frankenstein) is irredeemably bad, made on an all-too evident disastrously low budget and fails on almost every level. No wonder the poster tries desperately to sell it on an incidental shot of an attractive and cynically exploited victim’s reaction before she thankfully is removed from the experience!

Dr Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone, a fitting Equity name for this inflexible actor) is a former student of Dr Stein (John Hart) and goes to see him to beg him to help her husband with possible pioneering limb replacement surgery after he is rendered paraplegic in Vietnam. We find all this out immediately as the abominable script has her pouring out a truck-load of exposition to him in one unsubtle and direly expressed chunk. Actually, if you think that’s unsubtle, listen to the resoundingly ominous music cue as she waits in the hall. It signals all manner of fateful possibilities but is completely out of any context with her waiting patiently for Stein’s appearance. The score does this more than once, managing to draw attention to itself in a gleefully clumsily manner later on for no plot reason.

Hart resembles a cross between Harold Gould’s Barney Miller and Dick Van Dyke in Diagnosis: Tedium but has none of their talent. He has however developed a technique of saying all his dialogue with a precisely-measured level of non-interest as though he’s running lines off-camera. Hart was a former Western actor; his lazy delivery may have been acceptable on the prairie but coupled with Stone, the oater and the non-emoter have clearly more in common than medical training. They are a symphony of somnambulance.

To enhance the shoddiness, director William A Levey obviously wanted to include as many reference points to the old Universal FRANKENSTEIN films as possible. The first is the lab assistant Malcolm (Roosevelt Jackson) whose monotone recalls Igor- unless I’m being too charitable and he’s simply crap. He conceals a burning desire (if you can tell) for Dr Winifred under that white-coated exterior, and when rejected by the good Doctor, hell hath no fury like a lab assistant scorned. Malcolm exits to secretly transfer what looks like hair dye from one bottle to another – the brute.

Come the operation, and we witness the entertainment factor of script, actors and near-zero production budget trying to conceal a total lack of any medical research. Stein talks about “My special DNA formula” (he supposedly won the Nobel Peace Prize for Genetic DNA code work). He tells his protégé: “The fusion looks excellent, Winifred” as he rummages, hidden, under Eddie’s sheet on the table - but they’re not fooling anyone. When they can’t figure out why initially results aren’t more forthcoming, they confer: “The cell-match tests look alright”. Stein ruminates on the matter, concurring: “All the blood tests seems alright”.

Fortunately this blinding medical jargon is helped by regular wide shots of the lab equipment, an homage credited to the original Universal effects designer Kenneth Strickfadden. Sadly, the gear in this tawdry tribute looks like a museum exhibit room with the various static-electricity gizmos, tubes etc sparsely laid out, less than the sum of its parts. During the procedure, as crackling bolts of energy fill the screen, we are treated to numerous pans across the technical banks, in particular ‘Memory Data Register’ which will soon become as fondly familiar as those papier-mache rocks in Star Trek.

Soon Eddie, played by non-actor Joe De Sue, (for those who might be impressed at how seamlessly he blends in with the rest of the talent) develops the classic hallmarks of the Frankenstein monster on the rampage: the flat head, the low groan and that outstretched arm sleepwalk. Why do human monsters bother doing that by the way?. He also inexplicably  had time to put on his own natty ‘70s clothes before causing havoc – the ensemble includes a suit, roll-neck jumper and shiny Chelsea boots rather than the asphalt-spreader boots worn by Karloff in the old movies.

Now that he is suitably attired for a night on the town, Eddie goes homicidal, starting with the male hospital orderly who abused him in his recuperation there. In silhouette, he tears the man’s arm off behind a ward curtain and storms off. In the neighbourhood he runs amok, gouging out a woman’s entrails in her garden, and in a secluded spot when a young woman refuses the advances of a creep even more sinister than our revived soldier, Eddie kills her as well. Here the director attempts a Hitchcockian style gesture, filming his dragging of her body with her fallen glasses artfully placed in the foreground.

Meanwhile, back in the lab Dr Walker has tried to figure out the medical reason for their experimental catastrophe. She’s not above fiddling with bottles herself, staring meaningfully at one labelled ‘EDDIE – DNA’. Stein is taking this all very seriously (I guess) as he politely requests: “Winifred, I’d like to see you in the laboratory please”. The music builds in a sudden misplaced sweep like an epic high-point from Gone With the Wind and…nothing happens.

In a nightclub, a band-leader tells an extended lame gag about a dog, presumably to help flog this poor almost-dead horse to beyond eighty minutes. Outside, a smoking customer gives an eye-popping reaction on seeing Eddie that has to be seen to be disbelieved. This is when the poster-lady is dismissed by having her own entrails torn out and fondled externally. (Is this some kind of fetish with Eddie?).

Two cops appear at Stein’s place on the hunt for information about three local murders. The white one looks like a dodgy, pencil-moustached mafioso. The black Lieutenant, Jackson, seems normal until you hear his bizarre witness interview technique later in the club:

“Settle down and tell me exactly what you saw”.

“I’ve told you once”.

“Well, give me a description of what you saw then”.

Perhaps this is his idea of a Popeye Doyle confusion technique. Either way, after Eddie lamely attacks Stein back in the lab, and Stein equally lamely fights him off, Eddie oddly takes a woman hostage instead of killing her, and then kills her for trying to escape.  The cops are in lukewarm pursuit but they needn’t worry. Our reactivated veteran is savaged to death by two security Dobermans. He is left with a pile of suspiciously butcher's sausage-like entrails carefully piled into his chest cavity - an ignominious death to end a similarly shameful movie.

Blackenstein is stupendously awful, its dial firmly set to Plan 9 levels of comic radiation.

I’ll leave it to Karloff’s infinitely superior monster to sum up this tacky rip-off’s value from the end of Bride of Frankenstein:

“We belong dead”. 

SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM (1973)

Following the success of the first Blacula film, AIP were confident in producing a sequel the next year and managed to inject some {ahem} fresh blood into the formula in a number of ways.

Keeping the continuity of the classy lead actor William Marshall as the urbane Mamuwalde, this time the same writing team of Koenig and Torres add something new to the plot and also greater humorous flavour (or flava?) to the dialogue. Firstly, the added exoticisim here of voodoo mythology became almost a sub-genre itself within Blaxploitation horror, used the same year in the Blax-inspired Bond film Live and Let Die and in 1974 with Abby and (Zombies of) Sugar Hill.

The vampire master is resurrected by Willis (Richard Lawson, having a whale of a time) who believes he can have Blacula serve him. The poor deluded cat is soon disabused via the medium of fangs and on being sucked into vampirism himself is depressed at his inability to preen at his now-absent reflection: “I don’t mind bein’ a vampire and all dat shit, but this ain’t hip!”

Later, as Blacula elegantly prowls the city, after a dodgy bat/human optical transmutation, there is more inventive fish-out-of-water cultural comedy mined when he is perplexed by the availability of a modern hooker offering her services on the street. His old-world breeding is lost for how to respond to such a direct offer of female sexuality.  When along roll her pimps teasing: “Don’t you dig our merchandise?” they attempt to mug him. He gracefully deflects their threats of violence with “As for ‘kicking my ass’ I strongly recommend you give it some consideration before trying” – and promptly makes nourishing use of them.

Another cast member who clearly has fun with his lines is the weary but heroic Michael Conrad as Lt Dunlop (later to find fame as Sgt ‘Hey, let’s be careful out there’ Esterhas in TV’s Hill Street Blues). He crosses wits with ex-cop Justin Carter (Don Mitchell) before helping him to raid the Mamuwalde house in the vampire battle.  Fans of the TV series Soap and Roots will also recognise the lovely Lynne Moody as Denny.

Pam Grier is another welcome sight in the movie, although as voodoo devotee Lisa Fortier she seems a little awkward, possibly finding it difficult to essay a more subservient type than the strong action heroine she plays in other Blaxploitation vehicles like Foxy Brown. Either way, she gets to perform the all-important dispatching of Blacula at the end, stabbing pins into a voodoo doll till he expires staring up at the heavens.

Overall, Scream Blacula Scream is a fun fresh sequel – however if the franchise continued one could imagine it suffering from the same flaw as the later Christopher Lee  Dracula instalments; namely that as the supporting parts grow in interest, William Marshall may well have become increasingly marginalised to virtual guest-star status. The studio closed the coffin lid before the entertainment turned to a bloodless husk...

BLACULA (1972)

As Blaxploitation proved itself a commercial field for box-office appeal, studios looked at expanding the urban crime stories by mixing in aspects of other trendy genres. Blacula, made by AIP, was the first of the horror cycle and despite its name is surprisingly good.

Part of Blacula's success is the casting of the debonair, urbane Shakespearian actor William Marshall, whose deep cultured tones lend a welcome gravitas to the central role of African Prince Mamuwalde. In a 1780 prologue at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, the Prince attempts to persuade the Count to release his people from slavery (a brief commendable nod to history). His insolence is rewarded by Dracula biting him into fanged immortality, cursing his people for ever and murdering his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee). These scenes are shot with the care and rich colours that would have fitted fit right into the Hammer style. Already we feel that this is not an absurd cash-in but actually a commendably straight-faced horror film.

From here we shift to the present day where a pair of cringe-inducing gay stereotyped decorators buy the property and ship Mamuwalde’s coffin to Los Angeles. The stage is set for Mamulwalde  (called ‘the black avenger’ in the trailer) to rise again, suck the blood from the modern urban world and seduce whom he believes is his lost love in the lookalike form of Tina (McGee again). These beats are well-played for their sincerity and also the romanticism of the noble reunited after centuries with his eternal love).  Along the way, he attracts a hunting nemesis in police pathologist Dr Gordon Thomas, a solidly Shaft-esque hero, Thalmus Rasalala and his partner Peters (Gordon Pinsent).  He is aided by a pleasing cameo from Elisha Cook as the morgue attendant.

After converting a bevy of victims to vampiric servitude, Mamuwalde is tracked down to a warehouse. Here the nest of vampires descend on the police in a satisfying Fulci-style zombie attack-wave. Tina is shot by the police in the melee and Mamuwalde has no choice but to tragically save her by turning her to a vampire. When she is staked by Peters, the Prince of Darkness is so consumed by loss that he commits suicide by fatally baring his body to the searing sunlight on the roof .  I can’t think of another vampire film where the central ‘Dracula’ figure takes his own life in the climax, so this ranks for me as another gratifying surprise to add to the movie being the first depiction of a black vampire on screen.

Blacula is played as a straight-forward horror movie avoiding almost all of the camp absurdity or spoofery you might expect from the premise and proved successful enough (grossing over $1m) for the sequel Scream, Blacula Scream the next year.  It’s lively, nicely paced and has the bonus of funky live club performances by The Hues Corporation amidst the refreshing soul score rather than traditional classical horror orchestration. 

Undead and uncommon fun...

THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972)

Back in 1983 I was first introduced to this film like many Brits by the Medved brothers’ TV series The Worst of Hollywood showcasing some of the celluloid stinkers of the past. However, they may have been unfair to this 1972 AIP release as it’s too consistently and inappropriately funny to be anything other than intentional spoofery! The dialogue alone is priceless and even when meant to be serious compounds the hilarity, so I’ll be joyously quoting it at length here (and giving them the benefit of the doubt intention-wise). Admittedly there are elements that are just plain wrong but we’ll get to those as well.

The Thing With Two Heads is a Blaxploitation companion piece to the seemingly more serious AIP horror exploiter The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) wherein Bruce Dern as the scientist grafts a murderer’s head onto a large, child-minded adult with predictably catastrophic results. 

Here, the tone initially appears straight. Re-invigorated horror genre star Ray Milland plays Dr Kershner, ‘one of the foremost transplant specialists in the world’, a paraplegic scientist with a bitter racist streak. This is clearly signposted early on as he tries to fire his new young black staff surgeon Dr Fred Williams (Don Marshall) under a pretence of budgetary cuts. His sneer of racist disgust is accentuated by condescending Fred with faint praise as a mere ‘lab man’.

Clandestinely, Dr Kershner is experimenting in the field of head transplants and has already grafted a second bonce onto an adult gorilla. The evident ‘guy in a monkey suit’ soon makes a break for it and in lieu of strangling his agent ransacks a mini-mart till he’s cornered, both heads enjoying a banana each.

Kershner’s colleague is Dr Desmond, amusingly portrayed here by Roger Perry, a man whose gift for science is rivalled only by his talent for understatement. On understanding the near immortality offered by such transplants on humans he mutters “This could revolutionise the whole profession”.

Of course the deranged Dr Kershner wants to use the technology for his own head to be given new life atop an uninjured body: “Perhaps someone with an inoperable brain condition”. In ‘70s exploitation cinema, that’s a broad field of opportunity. His inhuman selfishness extends to demanding the operation be carried out in secret to avoid public ‘scrutiny’. A prison is contacted and a hilarious speech by an officer over the tannoy invites a volunteer to come forward from Death Row - with the comforting thought that should the operation be fatal they would have “the personal satisfaction that your life has aided humanity and the scientific world”. (Maybe medical altruism is the last thing on a condemned man’s mind?)

A wrongly-convicted hulking black man Jack Moss (former pro football player Rosey Grier) is about to be given the electric chair. Another possibly unintended laugh is the officer who prefaces the juice with “More power to you, brother”’. Jack’s reaction is understandably non-plussed. He’s about to get a very unnatural dose of said power coursing through his body. With nothing to lose, he decides to go for the experiment and before long we cut to the operating theatre.

Leaving aside the queasy unintended(?) racism of going from a gorilla to a large black human subject, the operation is a success. Curiously, in the sequence where Kershner’s severed head is moved across, it looks more convincing in close-up than in a wide shot. The one fly in the ointment is that on waking, Dr Desmond has to break the news to Kershner that he’s now sharing a body with a member of his racial enemy.  On seeing his big meaty arm raise up, Milland comically responds: ‘‘Is this some kind of a joke?’

The premise is now set for Jack to go on the run to prove his innocence of the original crime attached to the unwilling and appalled (at times crap papier-mache) head of Kershner who continually schemes to hijack the whole body for himself. This conflict echoes the serious intent of the Curtis/Poitier film The Defiant Ones (1958) where a bigoted white and a black prisoner are grudgingly forced into racial harmony by being shackled together through a prison break and beyond. Here though it’s played for preposterous fun, including a wild cross-country car-chase on motorcycle (with Fred on the back) versus a redneck set of Keystone Kops police cars. Amongst the carnage, the police ham-string themselves. “What kind of assistance do you require?” asks the base of one of its’ vehicles after a crash.

“Well, a tow-truck would be nice”, groans the defeated driver.

Along the way, AIP also pulls off a well-used exploitation trick of theirs by inserting all-too-obvious stock footage from a desert scramble bike event into our unlikely heroes’ chase

Eventually, the three (ish) wind up using Jack’s girlfriend’s pad as a hideout. She could also use some acting classes as her underplaying is surely not meant to be so bad.  On seeing her escaped lover sharing his body with a white-man’s head for the first time: “You get into more shit…”, she dead-pans. Her mind swiftly computes side-benefits though. “Do you have two of anything else?” Later, in a private moment with Fred, she also demonstrates the same gift for understatement as Dr Desmond, defending Jack’s innocence: “He certainly doesn’t deserve what he’s getting”.

Kershner’s lack of principles as well as his bigotry knows no bounds. He secretly attempts to persuade Fred to help him amputate Jack’s head in return for claiming all the medical credit from Desmond as the original operating surgeon.  No dice.

At one point elsewhere, unbeknownst Desmond defends his unscrupulous boss with a hugely funny throwaway mumble of back-story: “He’s not had an easy life…Even his childhood”.

If the evidence so far isn’t enough to convince you of the film’s deliberate parodying, listen to the car radio newscastor who plays an interview with the failed police officer from the chase; “I’ll get ‘im. I’ll get the b-“ before being cut off.

Finally, Fred does the decent thing and removes Kershner’s head. It is left at his house awaiting Desmond plaintively: “Philip. Get me another body please.” We are left with the joyful trio of Fred, Jackie and his girlfriend driving off singing ‘Oh Happy Day’

The Thing With Two Heads is a two-headed, wrong-headed pleasure…