FRIDAY THE 13TH: JASON LIVES (1986)

A corking franchise rescuer.
Like a ball dropped into a discount bin, the FRIDAY THE 13TH series hit rock bottom with A NEW BEGINNING but then rebounded unexpectedly with style and energy under writer-director (and occasional actor) Tom McLoughlin. Seeing that the franchise had been reduced to grim and schlocky torture-porn, he spent a whole day at Paramount watching all the previous five entries to catch up. He concluded that the series could be refreshed if he was allowed to introduce a knowing amount of humour and a fan-boy sensibility - "...some bit of a wink at the whole series" - as he says in the documentary. Executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr agreed to this risky new direction as long as Jason was not mocked. McLoughlin assured him that Voorhees would be preserved, indeed amplified, as a villain; one who had been gradually reduced in stature and threat level to a weak, pedestrian slasher. McLoughlin was true to his word. Not only is the resulting film funny and well-paced with  decent acting performances, he simultenously creates a more terrifying Jason, staging dramatic set-pieces and using foley effects to enhance minor elements like the heavy weight of his footfalls. The actor inhabiting the role was stuntman and former Marine C.J. Graham who brought discipline and an imposing character to the part.
McLoughlin choose to shoot in the south, fifty miles outside Atlanta and assembled a likeable cast to carry out his vision. From the pacey opening, we feel we are in the hands of a director who loves horror film with a fan's respect for the genre's history. It's no accident that the scene-setting electrical storm recalls Universal's FRANKENSTEIN cycle. The return of Tommy, now played by Thom Matthews from the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD movies, links us to the earlier sequels and then hits us and Jason with a Gothic blast of lightning to bring audience and series back to surging life.
The rest of the cast features an early role for future GHOST breakout star Tony Goldwyn as one of two head counsellors who never make it to Crystal Lake - here renamed Camp Forest Green, but of course they're fooling no-one. The director's wife Nancy plays his colleague Lizbeth who signals the post-modern tone when Jason appears in front of their truck: "I've seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly". McLoughlin is careful not to let the soon to be fashionable meta aspect pull us out of the horror possibilities throughout the movie. Such is the commitment to terror in fact that Graham almost hit Nancy when he plunged the rail through the windscreen - (no-one could have predicted that the glass would deflect its intended path toward her rather than away).
Another nice macabre McLoughlin touch is enabling Jason to carry out supernaturally powerful kills impossible for a normal human being, thus reminding us of his awesome rebirth - imprinting victims' faces upon a tree trunk and the inner metal wall of an RV pushed outward like a death mask respectively. That scene also allows Graham a particularly memorable tableau when he stands atop the flaming RV like a monarch surveying his kingdom. Welcome back, sir...
The prosthetic FX courtesy of Gabe Bartalos and his team attempted not to stint on the gore, yet like his predecessors were often hamstrung by the similar looming presence of the MPAA: a lovingly staged triple decapitation of three corporate paintballers at once was entirely excised. At least his retooled Jason mask is always on display, created from vacu-formed plastic over a 'cement buck' for greater durability.
Daring to use sight gags in this FRIDAY THE 13TH movie was a bold decision, one that would have been tonally unimaginable (albeit welcome) to mitigate the others' weaknesses. They land well though, such as the weekend warrior klutz who painstakingly tries to put back a branch he's knocked off a tree. There are sly in-joke references like the convenience store named after Boris Karloff. My favourite though is the literary visual gag played as the camera pans across the innocent kiddie campers tucked up in their bunks - one little girl has fallen asleep under an open copy of Sartre's existentialist play No Exit.
The calculated choice of including children at all in JASON LIVES is worth mentioning. This device had never been used before due to understandable fears about the taboo nature of placing them in jeopardy in this type of horror movie. Rest assured that none are harmed (and that the MPAA would no doubt have erased any evidence if they were). The fact of their presence increases the perilous stakes and helps to drive the tension as the plot moves to ultimately send a chained Jason back down to the watery grave from whence he unfeasibly emerged at the end of the first film. McLoughlin teases us though as Jason confirms his unholy stamina by opening an eye to fiercely glare at us. You can't keep a supernatural killer down....
The Region 1 DVD edition contains an alternate ending, storyboarded and voiced, in which town drunk Martin (Bob Larkin) encounters Jason's father at his son's graveside. It's a tantalising idea, although on reflection there was enough milking of the existing mythology without adding formerly unmentioned family members, not to mention the trip-hazard of over-explanation of our enigmatic anti-hero.
JASON LIVES grossed $19.4m from a budget of $3m. By no means a big hit, it still profited well enough to earn a deserved continuation of the series, with Paramount making all the right noises about having learned their lesson and wanting to carry on with higher budgets and other talented creatives behind them. This was not to prove an untroubled path.
Aside from working on the console video game FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE GAME (2017), McLoughlin acted in a fan film sequel to JASON LIVES this year called FRIDAY THE 13TH: VENGEANCE alongside C.J. Graham. On the evidence of his 1986 take on the franchise, an official version would be welcome...

FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING (1985 - Region 1 DVD version)

When Paramount saw there were still dollars to be gained after the solid box office from the fourth in the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, they couldn't resist putting a fifth one into production. After all, they were still making a great profit from relatively low costs (budgets of less than $3m on each sequel earning over ten times that amount).
Frank Mancuso Jr had by now understandably decided he'd rather not be forever known as the series producer, so whilst still attached as Executive Producer overseeing them. he turned the main duties to Timothy Silver - a promotion for him from  Production Manager.
Continuation of quality was evidently a secondary consideration when assigning a director. The studio chose Danny Steinmann, who most recently helmed the Linda Blair vigilante exploiter SAVAGE STREETS (1984). He had also directed 1973 hardcore porn feature HIGH-RISE starring genre favourite Harry Reems. Whilst it's not totally fair to hold this background against a director since many started out moon-lighting in porn (or the quaint term 'nudie flicks'),  the difference is that you expect their mainstream work to look like a graduation beyond dumb prurient sleaze. A NEW BEGINNING isn't. The original and earlier casts were on the whole fairly innocent or at least healthy. Here, two of the couples are coke-heads amid a pervasive general air of tawdriness. There's no attempt at making them anything more than fodder you'd like Jason to dispatch, which robs the movie of some much-needed threat level.
To be fair to Steinmann, on the documentary he recalls that the producers made him include a kill every seven or eight minutes. That's an underestimation - there are actually twenty in this film (a record?). Possibly due to the censorious attention always paid by the MPAA, almost all the killings settle the camera on the brandished implement then a sound effect to denote the actual impact off-screen.
The premise of A NEW BEGINNING is that Tommy, the heroic tweener of THE FINAL CHAPTER has now grown into a post-traumatic, virtually monosyllabic late teenager, John Shepherd. We are shown a nightmare in which his younger self, a rain-soaked Corey Feldman (who gamely agreed to a night's filming in between better projects), watches Jason being exhumed by a couple of thrill-seeking chuckleheads who are promptly offed. As Jason rounds on his young nemesis, the terrified older Tommy awakes. He is about to become the latest resident at the Pinehurst Halfway House, a residential treatment clinic for bad actors.
Aside from a notably higher boob count than usual, what also betrays Steinmann's pedigree as a hackmeister is how he directs many of the cast to play gratingly broad stereotypes reminiscent of x-rated fare. The redneck Hubbard mother and son, Ethel and Junior (Carol Locatell and Ron Sloan) are respectively a forced pantomime dame and a sub-basement Randy Quaid devoid of any hoped-for intentional humour. To signpost that Dominic Brascia's portly Joey is a greedy teen, he enters his sole scene outside clutching a chocolate bar melting over his fist and smeared across his face like a comic strip school glutton. Perhaps it is a kindness that he is suddenly hacked to death by fellow resident wood-chopper Victor (Mark Venturini).
What follows in the tackily-dialogued script by Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen and Steinmann is a dull, systematic culling of the residents by a lackluster Jason, after which our endurance is rewarded by finding out we've been had. All along fans have been palmed off with a fake Jason! It was actually vengeful paramedic Roy Burns (Dick Wieand) who turned hockey-masked homicidalist after discovering his son Joey was the axed chocoholic. If it wasn't for you meddling kids... (Hey, at least Scooby Doo's unmasked villain bamboozled a bunch of teens you cared about.)
After Sheriff Exposition drops this steaming denouement bowel movement in the hospital on Melanie Kinnaman's facility director Pam, Tommy hallucinates a vision of Jason in his room. For him to then don the mask and finally threaten her signals that the mind-meld of plot stupidity with the rest of the franchise is once again established.
With a box office result of ten million dollars less than THE FINAL CHAPTER, Paramount now seemed to be losing their ailing franchise patient due to an overdose of poisonous decisions. However, an unlikely rejuvenating shot of humour and a fond embrace of the series' inherent absurdity would soon come to the rescue...

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FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984 - Region 1 DVD version)

FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984) was genuinely intended as the last film in the series. The title wasn't a cunning tease in the manner of a Motley Crue or Ozzie Osbourne 'farewell' tour. Tom Savini was enthusiastic about returning, after not being asked to do the second and third, partly because he thought it would be a neat way for him to both originate and kill off the creature he'd helped to conceive. Director Joseph Zito had worked with Savini on his 1981 slasher movie THE PROWLER.
This installment isn't a hasty knock-off as might be expected. It  features a couple of notable cast members, a little more care given to overall characterisation and slightly more stylish kills (censors allowing) set in a palpable air of unease. However, for those who crave the inexplicable final scenes of before, rest assured, that's still in place.
Credit should be given to Barney Cohen's script for at least opening with an attempt to redress PART 3's dumb ending of missing Jason's body clearly in the doorway of the barn. His corpse is shipped off to the morgue where he's put into a tray by horny jackass Dr Axel. If his face is maddeningly familiar,  it'sPOLICE ACADEMY's amusingly accident-prone cadet Doug Fackler. Zito adds a nice touch of showing a breath stream emanating upward from the body as the tray is closed. Needless to say, it's not long before Jason is back on the rampage in the imposing form of seasoned stuntman Ted White and lumbers home to Crystal Lake to see who's now been sleeping in his camp.
The interlopers Jason terrorises there for the remainder consist of six teens and a young mother with a daughter and a son, Tommy, a diminutive twelve year-old version of genre favourite Corey Feldman - between his blockbuster turns in GREMLINS (1984) and THE GOONIES (1985)  He's a resourceful squirt who's a dab hand with car mechanics and makes horror movie masks. He also becomes the focus by the climax in a fairly daring - and yes, bamboozling - plot twist, since young kids were rarely brought front and centre in the genre unless possession was fully nine-tenths of the idea. Feldman is a winning presence, precocious but not in the cloying sitcom way where you long for Jason to stuff him down a wood-chipper.
The other welcome camper is Crispin Glover as Jimmy who brings his mesmerising eccentricity the year before he shot to fame as BACK TO THE FUTURE's George McFly in a role that would simply be the usual humdrum teen in the hands of a prosaic actor. He's introduced as a hapless 'dead fuck' lover, a harping nickname by his friend Ted (Lawrence Monoson) that becomes as grating to the audience as to him. He later claims one of two nubile twins (Camilla More as Tina) but not before treating us to some entertainingly explosive dancing that's as bizarre as the jerky, hypnotic moves of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. (Glover's not so much dancing with her as at her). There's an extended take of more of it on the U.S. DVD extras!
Sadly, Glover gets a carving knife to the face in the kitchen, a queasily good gag filmed in reverse, that is so graphic that only a split-second was permitted by the MPAA. Again, a lengthy DVD bonus doc shows a number of takes for this acted the other way round in camera amongst other kills. Another well-staged death is Tina's window plunge onto the roof of a car. For good measure, Zito's FX team had the windows blow out on impact, a memorably visceral moment.

So we come to the climactic confusion. Poor Tommy is so flummoxed at how to prevent Jason killing his sister that he opts to cut all his hair off and distract Jason with, ideally, a retro boy vision of himself inspired by old newspaper cuttings. You could say it's an indirect nod to his character's maskwork talent, but the resulting bald, scarred pate makes him resemble a cross between a kiddie Charles Manson and a fledgling chick, but let's remember that Voorhees a jolly dim fellow who could be transfixed by the opening of an envelope. This means that opportunistic Tommy gets to carve him up with a machete.
Surely that makes a definitive end to the series? Not necessarily, as the epilogue shows Tommy hugging his sister in hospital and looking at us over her shoulder with a quiet, sinister intensity.
The spirit has passed on, thus alongside a $33m box office superannuating the sequels into A NEW BEGINNING...

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III - *3D VERSION* (1982)

For his return to directing Paramount's FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, Steve Miner and new producer Frank Mancuso Jr opted to refresh the franchise by re-introducing the 3D technique last used to re-energise the flagging medium back in the '50s.
Though it can't enhance the one-dimensionality of some of the actors, there is childlike fun to be had revelling in the crowd-pleasing gimmickry if you can see the film in 3D (The 2017 Region 1 U.S. box set I have features it in both 2D and this reviewed 3D version)
In CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES, the sequel's contributors recalled how painstaking it was to shoot scenes specifically for the 3D format. To work effectively, any time a prop is aimed at the audience it must be pointed precisely toward the camera and kept in sharp focus; this is not as easy as it sounds especially since you're constantly having to break the fourth wall of suspended disbelief as an actor to pull it off. Examples where both elements are lacking include the boys juggling balls (shot from overhead) and the hippy making popcorn, with the camera also aimed down at the popping kernels. In each case the projectiles fire to the sides of us and are too hazy to read effectively.
When the format works though, it pays off thrillingly. The opening's store owner plunging his laundry pole through the clothes lines right at us plays well, as does the roadside kook dangling a loose eyeball toward us like a sideshow barker. Each of Jason's kills also makes the most of the form but let's not get too far out in front, if you'll pardon the pun, just yet.
After a cheeky padded prologue featuring roughly the entire last seven minutes of PART 2, the usual motley assortment of Equity minimum teens show up. We can largely treat them with the same disrespect as Mrs Voorhees' pride and joy does. In particular there is Larry Zerner's Shelly who to be fair does well considering in real life he was a non-actor literally spotted on the street as a jewfro'd instant oddball type. He is cast however as the tiresome joker who whines about his loser self-image so much that you want him shish-kebabbed almost immediately. Worse is Dana Kimmell's final girl Chris who can't even be given depth by three dimensions.
 Brief amusement can be had by looking at the three gang members Ali, Fox and Loco whom Shelly and Vera (Catherine Parks) tangle with. They're dressed in that hilarious off-the-peg look of eighties gang-bangers - cut-off denim jackets, bandannas, detachable sneer - that belongs in an episode of THE A TEAM not an adult horror movie. Mercifully they don't last long.
On the plus side, we do get some threat level supplied by the corrective casting of a more intimidating Jason this time (Richard Brooker). He is taller, broader and attempts postures and gutteral sounds more befitting of an unstoppable, indeed supernatural, serial killer.
Equal kudos is due to Harry Manfredini's excellent soundtrack; the string cues are lush and more prominently placed than in PART 2. Play it loud through headphones for maximum effect.
The score coupled with Jason's well-targeted 3D kills do make this a sequel worth seeing. I defy anyone not to flinch when the speargun arrow fires straight at you, and I'm sure the popped eyeball  squeezed out of a later victim's crushed head delighted gorehounds in theatres on its release.
Nevertheless, despite these bids for entertainment value the ending once again sinks into the depths of previous illogicality. Chris dreams of escaping an unmasked Jason in a canoe, only to be grabbed from the lake by an uprising Mrs Voorhees - who somehow now has a re-attached head! (This lake needs serious investigation for its unearthly rejuvenation properties). The awoken Chris is led away by the Sheriff's men suffering what is meant to be PTSD but is played as woeful cackling am-dram. She's clearly convincing enough to distract the cops as the dim-bulbs have ignored the macheted body of Jason lying in the open doorway of the barn!
Miner's gamble worked though. Made for double the budget of the last one, this threequel grossed $36.7m, even dethroning E.T.  from the top spot to become 1982's second highest grossing film.
FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 was originally designed to finish the franchise as a trilogy, and would have finished on a high of sorts, yet the box office persuaded the makers into one more go at what would surely be the final chapter....?

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II (1981)

Such was the unexpected success of FRIDAY THE 13TH that Georgetown Productions began pre-production on a cash-in sequel for Paramount just four months later. And it shows: this is an artless rush job that really short changes the original's fans. Sean S. Cunningham's young production aide Steve Miner took over as both producer and director for the first time. He clearly learned a lot from his mistakes on this as PART 3, then the  later likes of  HALLOWEEN H20 (1998) and 1999's marvellous LAKE PLACID (see review) proved.
PART II runs at under ninety minutes padded out with at least three minutes intercut from the end of the first movie; final girl Alice (Adrienne King) still relives her battle with Betsy Palmer's Mrs Voorhees as a nightmare two months after fleeing Camp Crystal Lake. Her resulting death as first victim to Jason not only begs the question of how he tracked her to her home, (and why he bothered to place his mum's head in her fridge) but gives us a poor indication of what the movie has in store. Miner's workmanlike shooting of the stalking and stabbing is free of any tension or thrills. As we will see unfold, this first casting conception of Jason (Warrington Gillette sporting a John Merrick-style flour sack over his head) disastrously sees him as a regular joe height-wise and devoid of any physical threat level in his victim pursuit.
We then cut across to Crystal Lake where a whole new crop of counsellors are undergoing a training week led by Paul (John Furey). It's fascinating sociologically to look at the casting demographic of these eighties teen movies. The youngsters represented are almost always exclusively white-bread heterosexual, with enough blonde males and females to be mistaken for a Carpenters concert or an Aryan recruitment rally. The tokenism of ethnic diversity is indicative of its time. Nowadays, aside from having black, Chinese and Asian names, there would be a nod toward the LGBT+ movement,  albeit with the awkward shoehorning in that may one day have us judged as similarly backward. Oddly, there is one long shot in this film on the dock where you see both a black and a Chinese counsellor - but if I'm correct they're never seen again! If inclusivity was the notion, their later absense surely scuppers that box-ticking. What we do get however is a somewhat sitting duck of a wheelchair user (Tom McBride) to suggest disability's representation.
A spread of the usual stereotypes is the best this movie can do, covering the templates of the babe, the hunk, the joker, and the responsible big brother etc. Either way, they're all ultimately kill fodder in a game of musical chairs. Sadly, these are handled with the dullness of a butter knife. This may have been due to even greater censoring by the MPAA to get the vital 'R' rating, a continual bugbear over the series, and the loss of prosthetic FX whizz Tom Savini who was off doing THE BURNING for Miramax.
Gradually the teens are whittled down by Jason to a final duo of Paul and Ginny (Amy Steel). Miner can't resist taking a leaf from Cunningham's original by providing us with some equally inexplicable climax plotting. Stumbling across Mrs Voorhees's severed head ceremonially placed on an altar in the barn, the cornered Ginny tries to trick Jason by vocally impersonating his mother whilst wearing her jumper  (aided by new insert footage of Betsy Palmer). Jason stops and tips his head curiously at this, a' la Michael in HALLOWEEN. Why even Mr Sackhead would fall for this non-lookalike is bizarre enough; as it transpires, due to moving, Ginny sabotages the ruse anyway by revealing the head.
 She saves Paul from a pick-axe impaling after machete-ing  Jason in the shoulder. A misdirection gag sees Miner try a shock ending of Jason smashing through the cabin window to claim Ginny, but then we cut to her later being loaded alive into an ambulance. This sloppiness competes with the senselessness of part one's ending: why hadn't Jason finished her off? And what the hell happened to Paul? (Apparently these oversights were to be addressed with Steel brought back for PART 3, however the money didn't talk loud enough to tempt her).
A more important question to Paramount was how successful this sequel might be in determining a possible franchise future. They were answered with a box office take of $21.7m from a budget of only $1.2m.
Thus, Jason's future was assured, and with the benefit of an old gimmick of the 1950's was at least given a much-needed boost for its third installment...

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980 - Region 1 uncut DVD version)

Friday the 13th as a forbidding date for horror has always intrigued me as I myself was born on that date. It needn't imply anything unless there is an unused hockey mask lying around.
For his directorial debut, producer Sean S. Cunningham looked to the startling success of John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN (1978) as the template for how to create a low-budget horror movie that might similarly catch fire with young thrill-seeker audiences. He must have been as surprised as Carpenter to find that this date on which to hang his conceit had never been used in the genre before. 
According to Wikipedia, the fear of this date has multiple possible origins across differing cultures.13 was of course the total number of Christ's disciples plus himself at the Last Supper. To the Greeks, the fear of Friday the 13th is paraskevidekatriaphobia, derived from the Greek Paraskeví (Παρασκευή, meaning "Friday"), and dekatreís (δεκατρείς -  "thirteen").
Watching Paramount's first FRIDAY THE 13TH again after over thirty years, it holds up pretty well. The pace is tight and the performances from the mostly very young cast of Camp Crystal Lake's counsellors (including future star Kevin Bacon) are engaging. Their late '70s innocence is plausible without being too cute, aside from intended camp cook Annie (Robbi Morgan)who is so naive that she throws her rucksack into the back of a flagged-down jeep without even vetting the driver. This is a cleverly conceived scene as it disguises the driver's identity by being shot subjectively from 'their' point of view. (*SPOILER* Since the film has been out for forty years, maybe I can dispense with the non-binary gender as horror fans will almost all know the killer is ultimately female).
Another smart plot decision noticed from this viewing is that for the first two acts, no impending victim finds the dead body of a previous one, disabling them from knowing enough to simply flee the camp in terror. Not that this would really help mind you, since it's a staple commandment in the genre that 'Thou shalt disregard common sense and unwisely go toward whatever maketh dubious noises'.
The kills are well executed by much-loved FX gore supremo Tom Savini. Inevitably though time has taken the edge off their shock value even in this uncut U.S. version.
The casting of Betsy Palmer as Mrs Voorhees in the third act proved a bonus. She was a beguilingly wholesome actress whose career spanned over 50 years including twelve as a panellist on TV game show I'VE GOT A SECRET - an ironically prescient title since part of this film's fun hinges on her hidden identity as the real serial killer! She initially shows a disarming protective motherliness in front of final girl Alice (Adrienne King) before crumbling into a deliciously batshit insanity as the memory of how her son Jason was tragically neglected by counsellors back in 1958 overcomes her poise. The resulting catfight climax on the shore is shoddily staged - the two ladies wrestle like a couple of schoolkids squabbling in a sandpit - but Savini and Cunningham give us a lovingly slo-mo'ed machete decapitation by Alice.
The handsome string-centric music score by Harry Manfredini helps to differentiate the overall movie's production values from the slasher herd as being a major studio release, albeit with some emphatic nods toward Bernard Herrmann's PSYCHO score. His own compositions are attractive and the last one does much to augment the power of the contentious final horror set piece. Taking its cue, as it were, from the erupting hand closer of Brian de Palma's CARRIE (1976), we are sold an idyllic seeming end as a sleepy Alice drifts on the lake in a canoe. As the sheriff's men arrive at the lakeside, the camera slowly pushes in amid a Manfredini romantic swell. All is well at last - until a deformed Jason bursts up from the water and pulls Alice to a watery grave. 
It still hits the spot as a jump shock, and would have been all the more powerful if Cunningham cut to black and then the credits right there. But no; maddeningly, he sabotages its power by then cutting to Alice in a hospital bed epilogue quizzing the cops about the mysterious boy whom they never saw when retrieving her from the lake. What also doesn't help is that King's perplexity is her least convincing acting scene.
A bigger nitpicking issue however, the type that horror fans like myself love to debate, centres around Voorhees junior appearing at all. As someone points out in CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES, if that was Jason, where the hell has he been for twenty years and why hasn't anyone spotted him before now? I had questions of my own: why didn't he carry out his own vendetta the rest of the time instead of his mum? And what did he live on for two decades - plankton? - whilst swimming about undetected like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON?
These questions naturally were never answered as a FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise thus developed from this film's huge success to cover the next twenty-nine years. In fact, many more queries would replace them as the sequels continually tried to tinker with the source movie's playbook and timeline. What this original and intermittent sequels proved is that, like any movie property, it works only when treating the audience with a little respect in choosing screenwriters and directors.
All too often the producers behaved liked trustafarians who've inherited a sausage factory.

Join me as we horror health inspectors gradually peruse every squeezed link from 1980 to 2009....

CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES (3-disc DVD set)

After serving up the puerile pizza of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, Sean S. Cunningham found even more unlikely success but with a much higher calibre of exploitation when he directed the first of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series. This set in motion the most enduring of all post-war horror franchises. Before I delve into reviewing each movie over the next fortnight, I highly recommend fans of the series get this fantastic panoramic documentary, which examines the making of each film in geek-tastic detail across seven hours. It even includes the three season TV series. Unlike a lot of documentaries, the makers show the writers, directors and producer Frank Mancuso Jr voicing some criticism along with the inevitable group love-in. I don't look for dissent in these things, but it always comes across as more realistic when filmmakers are allowed this in the final edit. Occasional disappointment is expressed at how a planned vision was carried out, directors Danny Steinman and John Beuchler come under limited fire for their hack work or inexperience respectively.

One of the valuable aspects of an epic series overview like this is in mapping out the perils of how to keep a long-running franchise fresh. They usually follow a set course: the difficult 'second and third album' issues of trying to give fans reimaginings of the same template for a while, followed by an inevitable shark-jumping into understandable refreshment risks with a tired format, then culminating in poor box office results that inspire the concerned producers to then revert back to what they hope is a still lucrative source well to draw from.

On that note, I look forward to seeing and posting here NEVER SLEEP AGAIN which takes a similar in-depth look at the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series before getting my gloved claws into those offerings too...

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972 - 2-disc special edition)

Every once in a while, a film comes along that's so bad that it's more fun to write about than watch. This is the case with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972). In fact, it's so abysmal that I've reactivated my encyclopaedic two-years dormant History of Horror Cinema blog to celebrate it. Before Sean S. Cunningham's FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise joined forces (farces?) with Wes Craven's NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, they teamed up more directly as producer and writer/director respectively on this $90,000 rape exploitation horror thriller. To those who don't know its reputation, this may seem a mouth-watering prospect - until you see it. "To avoid fainting, keep repeating to yourself: it's only a movie!!!" shrieks the infamous poster tagline. Don't worry - it's arguably much less.

The plot can be boiled down to simply this: two young, healthy, personable women go out for the night and are tricked into being tortured to death by a gang of psychopaths. The group then target the parents of one of them which leads to their comeuppance. Very loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), the scene is set for eighty minutes of an atrociously executed feature film by people who should have known better in more ways than one.
Where do I start? Well, we are treated to handy thumbnail rap sheets of the escaped prisoners by a radio announcer who describes them as one who murdered a priest and two nuns, another who hooked his own son on heroin 'to keep him under control' and the third who was serving a life sentence for 'child molestation, Peeping Tomism, and assault with a deadly weapon'. Cuddly Godber and Fletcher on the run in PORRIDGE: THE MOVIE they are not. They are also accompanied by a sadistic young woman who is just as amoral as the men.
The capture, extended torture and murder of the two women manages to be badly acted, dull and offensive in equal measure. It's almost impossible to imagine how Cunningham and Craven justified this as entertainment or valuable post Vietnam angst transgressive cinema. Only David Hess, who doubled as both lead actor and composer/performer of the (ironically sweet?) country songs as the first of his oeuvre of horror movie psychos , gives a half-decent committed performance, wearing a chilling perpetual grin for most of the second half as he gleefully dominates the sordid mayhem. The rest of the cast act as if overdosed on cough mixture.
The instrumental music gives a whole new meaning to 'score' as it grates self-consciously on the viewer like the work of a rusty pen-knife. Often, the single finger Moog synth plinkings are comparable to letting a cat wander across a keyboard. And, for stupefying inappropriateness, listen to the comedy single notes timed with the knife stabbings to the chest of one of the women. Maybe they figure a clown's car horn would have enhanced the concentration camp scenes in SCHINDLER'S LIST.
I can reserve a morsel of charitable feeling for Martin Kove, later to rescue himself with THE KARATE KID and TV's CAGNEY AND LACEY amongst others, who plays a dim-bulb Sheriff's Deputy with excruciating unsubtlety. He and his boss spend most of the film ambling along on the outskirts of the plot as a slow-witted bumbling twosome as though their scenes were spliced in from a 70s porn film. Fortunately they arrive too late to stop the only highlight of the film, a climactic shotgun versus chainsaw fight between Hess and the main female victim's father whose home the gang charmed their way into. More could have been made of this final section as the father turns out to be a surgeon with the McGyver-esque resourcefulness to trap his invaders.
In case you feel the ending swerves off the road into respectful professionalism, never fear, since the end credits steer us back on the road to shame by displaying sunny clips of each named cast member underscored by more upbeat country music. After all, this is not the tasteless exploitation of female subjugation - it's an episode of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD. On the plus side, there's a great 40 minute documentary on the special edition featuring most of the main actors, Cunningham and Craven - and a second one where Gunnar Hansen and Hess credibly argue the merits of classification versus censorship after a British screening of LAST HOUSE and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. 

GODZILLA ON FILM: A PRE-HISTORY (1853 - 1954)

East meets West (1853 – 1945)

In his May 2005 UCLA lecture entitled ‘Godzilla and post-war Japan’, Professor William Tsutsui quoted a 1985 survey of Americans in which they were asked to name three famous Japanese people. The results revealed much about how this still-foreign country was perceived by its former enemy of forty years before. The most popular responses were Emperor Hirohito (so far so good), Bruce Lee (news to him and his fellow Chinese) and…Godzilla. While this last answer is somewhat confused as to what defines a person, it gave two valuable insights: that a far Eastern fictional dinosaur had now bestrode the Western world like a rampaging colossus, and that he was imbued with a recognisable personality  - arguably even humanity – that encouraged respect, awe and fanatical love across a truly global fan-base.

On one level, over time the Godzilla movies became increasingly madcap escapism, a ring-side seat for us to watch guys in rubber suits battering each other as well as realistic miniature Tokyo cityscapes.  The original inspiration for Godzilla’s creation however was a sombre and compelling mix of science-fiction and devastating real-world tragedy. He was to be a unique monster born during uniquely harrowing post-war circumstances for his homeland, and like many children bore a fascinating imprint of his creators, the sum of their fears.

The century in history of Japan’s relationship with the West had begun hesitantly. Until the 1850s, theirs had been an isolated society closed off to any influence from the outside world. Only repeated pressure from Russia and other nations forced the reluctant Tokugawa government to cautiously open up a few strictly controlled ports to international trade. While ultra-conservative samurai factions strongly opposed these external relationships, many saw the advantages to be gained from Western advances in science and the military. In fact it was the threat of the superior firepower technology of the United States Navy under Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853-1854 that ‘persuaded’ them to open up their borders.

After the fall of the ruling Tokugawa Shoganate, Emperor Meiji became imperial ruler of a country that now found itself signatories to unfair treaties favouring their western partners both economically and legally. The only way Meiji could restore his country to respect on the international stage was to undertake drastic reforms. Japanese society was levelled into a full democracy, wiping out the privileges that the samurai military class and daimyo (feudal lords) had previously enjoyed. The Emperor also insisted on a radical program of westernisation for his people. To develop from their agrarian into a modern industrial nation, many scholars were sent abroad, foreign teachers were invited to lecture in Japan, and compulsory education was decreed for all. The country’s armed forces were revolutionised by universal conscription and overhauling the navy and army along British and Prussian models respectively.

As part of its societal remodelling, Japan established its first parliament, the Diet, in 1889. Though Meiji was the sovereign, he was artful in negotiating with the elderly Genro oligarchy who controlled the real reins of power. (For the public’s view of their modern government, look no further than the first Godzilla film’s Japanese release in 1954 where the only time a city landmark’s destruction was cheered at was the Diet building.)

Japan began to flex their new military muscle, and incur the stirrings of future hostility with the West, with two wars over territory. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-94 against China won them Taiwan but due to the Triple Intervention (of Russia, France and Germany) they were forced to return others. The Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05 disputing Korean and Manchurian strategic land resulted in Russian army and navy defeats, which gave Japan a new respect in the world as valuable as their annexation of Korea in 1910.

It was in the era following Emperor Meiji’s death in 1912 (succeeded by the enfeebled Emperor Taisho) that relations between Japan and Western nations started to deteriorate into ultimate conflict. They had joined the Allies in a minor capacity during the First World War, but it was their membership of the League of Nations that became a flashpoint for mounting international mistrust. Japan’s hoped-for ‘racial equality clause’ amendment to its covenant was rejected by the USA, Australia and Britain. When the United States passed the Oriental Exclusion Act in 1924 blocking future immigration into America, Japanese people perceived themselves as the intended targets.

Mirroring the bully’s victim who becomes an aggressor himself, the Japanese subjected China to the same political and economic inequality that they had suffered earlier under the West. The 1930s saw them puff up their chests to a state of military hubris that would eventually be their undoing. Japanese forces occupied Manchuria in 1931, then virtually the whole Chinese coast in the Second Sino-Japanese War that ran from 1937 concurrently with the Second World War till both ended in 1945. In this period China endured monstrous atrocities under the occupying Japanese.

Meanwhile, Japan added French Indochina (Vietnam) to their territories, then sided with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy, a move that inexorably headed them toward full-scale war with the Allies. The Japanese capture of Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies then) and its vital oil reserves was followed a year later by their fateful sudden bombing of the U.S. naval base at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbour on December 7^th 1941. The element of surprise gave Japan six months of territorial advantage until the Battle of Midway in June 1942 signalled a gradual Allied claw-back of land.

By 1945, the Allies had made punishing air-strikes upon Japan and seized their island of Okinawa in a notorious battle. The Potsdam Declaration’s formal request for Japan’s unconditional surrender on July 27^th 1945 fell on deaf ears. Thus was triggered the most notorious military action in history: on August 6^th, the world’s first weaponised atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, obliterating 80,000 people and 90% of the city. Within three days, another was deployed over Nagasaki leaving a human death toll of 40,000.

Despite these unimaginable actions, and Russia’s entry into the war against Japan, Emperor Hirohito held out until August 14^th when his Jewel Radio Broadcast played to the Japanese nation accepting the terms for surrender. He had no choice but to realise the shattering power their enemy wielded – “a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable” - and that without their acceptance, more than just his people’s future was at stake – “it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

After paying tribute to those most devastated by the bombings, the Emperor urged his people to begin the hardly-conceivable task of rebuilding wrecked lives and cities. When he referred to “the hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter”, he could not have imagined that a nuclear shadow would once more be cast over his subjects, nor that, through the arts, they would find a truly remarkable way to come to terms with their legacy.

Shadow of the Bomb (1945-1954)

Any hope that the end of World War Two would also end use of the Allies’ new near-apocalyptic trump card was extinguished by U.S. President Truman’s decision in December 1945 to begin joint Army and Navy nuclear testing – as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not a horrific enough ‘proof of concept’. Once brought into play, such a hideously effective tool could not be de-invented; instead, it was to be refined: "to determine the effect of atomic bombs on American warships."

The chosen location was Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, north of the equator. This once-idyllic spot was considered remote enough for safety, though in a grotesque irony Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, the Marshalls’ military governor, convinced the Bikinians to leave temporarily on the pretext that (codename) Operation Crossroads was for "the good of mankind and to end all world wars."

Japan’s connection to the Marshalls dated back to their administration of them in the early 1900s. During the war, they maintained a strategic military outpost at Kwajalein Atoll. In February 1944, a brutal battle resulted in its capture by U.S. forces. Now its Bikinian neighbour was to play host to a far more destructive occupier whose influence was to involve the Japanese with equally terrible consequences.

Two early tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946 were filmed dropping nuclear payloads of a similar scale to Nagasaki. These were merely dry runs for a more potent project of a thousand times greater magnitude. In the early Fifties, the icy wind of the Cold War chilled the U.S. government with fears that Russia was secretly testing their own advancing nuclear capability. Plans were stepped up to unleash Operation Castle’s Bravo bomb on the northwest corner of the atoll - the most powerful hydrogen bomb the world had ever seen.

American Arms Race paranoia may explain, though never justify, why on March 1^st 1954 Joint Task Force 7 went ahead with the Bravo air detonation despite clear evidence that wind direction would irradiate the northern Marshall Islands and their inhabitants. The Defence Nuclear Agency reported "it was recognized that both Bikini and Eneman islands would probably be contaminated." Like some horrific sorcerer’s apprentice, the damage from the resulting 15-megaton blast exceeded its masters’ expectations by two and a half times, vaporising all island vegetation within a 66-mile radius, and injecting incalculable radiation into the surrounding atmosphere.

Amongst the spectators watching the awe-inspiring mushroom cloud were the 23-man crew of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon 5). Whilst every effort was seemingly made to notify all outlying vessels, this lone one was not so lucky. Tragically, the time it took the men to retrieve their nets before fleeing exposed them and their haul to several hours of radioactive fall-out. They were transfixed by the “gritty white ash” that rained down on them two hours later, not knowing the confetti’s deadly properties would soon induce radiation sickness in the form of itching, vomiting and nausea – after which one man died. There were even more sickening repercussions as much of the ship’s irradiated tuna cargo would find its way onto dinner tables back home.

Of course the fate of the Lucky Dragon 5 was a small example of the far wider effects of the Bravo bomb - residents of Rongelap Atoll, roughly 125 miles from Bikini, would see similarly awful side-effects in their people. It is a damning indictment of the U.S. government’s handling and irresponsibility that no inhabited islands were fore-warned about the inevitable falling debris and its toxicity, a poisonous snow under which children innocently played in wonder. But the shock-waves emanating from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and now Bikini Atoll were to reverberate long after their aerial bursts, echoing in the Japanese conscience. One of the first expressions of this hideous coming-to-terms would be rendered a mere six months later through the lens of the horror motion picture…

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY (1955)

The last of Bud and Lou’s riotous collisions with Universal’s vault of horror icons was in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). This seems to have been long overdue in that detours were made after tangling with the big three of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man by way of half-hearted tangling with Boris Karloff, a belated crossing of paths with the Invisible Man and then falling foul of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde before seemingly realising they still had one more of the studio’s Hall of Fame to encounter. Admittedly The Mummy as a franchise had dragged its weary soul through enough diminishing quality sequels to understandably seal its own sarcophagus from the inside. However, one last bid was made to create laughs in the midst of fear around Lou’s panicky coward persona and Bud’s overbearing know-it-all.

As we saw in Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there were definite signs of weariness in the duo after almost two decades together and 36 films. (This was to be their penultimate one together before finally calling it a day with Dance with Me, Henry the next year). Lou was still dogged by recurring rheumatic fever which caused him to noticeably lose weight, and Bud now looked heavier than he. Meet the Mummy appears to be the only one of their films where John Grant received sole screenplay credit after all his years of service. Sadly it is a poor showcase for him.

Bud and Lou ,under their stage names, are two pith-helmeted numbskull explorers seeking their fortune in Cairo who get wind of the need for a couple of guys to chaperone the body of Klaris, a mummy who in life guarded the tomb of Princess Ara. His corpse bears a sacred medallion said to point to the location of her fabled treasure. Inevitably the boys become a target for a cult led by a dark, satanic femme fatale (aren’t they all when it comes to our heroes?) Madame Rontru, played betwitchingly by Marie Windsor. In real life she was a protégé of Maria Ouspenskaya, famous for her Gypsy Maleva in The Wolf Man movies. Perhaps a little of the Polish grand dame’s occult flavour was handed down to her almond-eyed student, a character ruthlessly pursuing the medallion for her own gain.

The sinister group will stop at nothing, firstly killing Klaris’s finder Dr Gustav Zoomer (Kurt Katch). There is a smile-worthy moment when Lou listens to a tape Zoomer made before he death in which he decrees that deaths awaits the acquisitive. “Ohhh” Lou tails off, mournfully in response. Bud and Lou soon realise the deadly import of the trinket after they have the bright idea of trying to sell it in the marketplace to find out its true value. “It’s death to whoever find it!” shrieks one trader. On hearing this, the dunderhead duo feud between themselves in a restaurant set-piece in which they repeatedly conceal it in each other’s hamburgers until Lou eats it with the kind of lingering, to-camera resigned reactions reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy.

Madame Rontru’s single-mindedness is so extreme that, when seduction fails, she forces Lou to undertake an x-ray so she can prove the medallion is inside him and then forcibly remove it – to expectedly fatal results. An amusingly surreal gag is the crew’s shaking-up of him that results in the dislodged parts forming ‘HELP’ on the next scan.

The evil lady boss teams up with the balding, sinister Semu (Richard Deacon) who she will blithely double-cross on her way to the treasure. Genre fans may recognise Deacon from the original 1956 Invasion of the body Snatchers and The Birds (1963), but here he subtracts any lustre from his scenes by delivering his lines as though embalmed like his quarry. Also along for the wicked ride is Michael Ansara in one of the early roles that made use of his Syrian colouring to simulate different ethnicities – sometimes playing First Nation parts in Westerns. Later he would find sci-fi fantasy stature as Klingon commander Kang across Star Trek TV franchises: Star Trek (1966), Deep Space Nine (1993) and Voyager in 1995.

With banal villain lines like Semu’s “Two more mice come to nibble at the golden cheese” we can be grateful that the last act at least has some enlivenment and one or two chills in store within the tomb itself that Lou accidentally stumbles into via a secret passage. The set design with its central sarcophagus and wall hieroglyphics is impressively spacious, if uncannily clean and spartan like a modern ballroom.

Lou is terrorised by a flying bat, a mischievous skeleton and a giant process-shot lizard. Eddie Parker, an in-demand stuntman who doubled for Lon Chaney in his earlier Mummy sequels, embodies Klaris and adds more substance to the threat level after he is awakened from slumber. On the rampage he’s fairly convincing - which is more than can be said for his bandaging which is evidently a one-piece suit instead of bound wrapping. Following a lame three-way farce set-up involving a trio of mummies (Klaris, one of the henchman and Bud), Parker may well raise a goosebump or two in the faint-of-heart as he goes after the treacherous Rontru. Bullets are no match for him; ultimately it takes a sizeable wedge of dynamite to blow him up in a death more excitingly rendered than some of the genuine horror endings of the original film series.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a weak ending to their experiments in horror-comedy hybrids. All too often the movies were cut-and-shut vehicles fused together from disparate elements without due care for roadworthiness. Only Meet the Invisible Man found an artful way to mix genres. There is a sense as well with this last one of the boys’ ongoing struggle with the watering-down of their plots. They had often complained about the preponderance of song and dance ‘interruptions’ insisted upon by Universal; Meet the Mummy shoe-horns in a song by Peggy King and no less than three sneaked-in choreographed dance numbers.

Despite tax problems that later bedevilled them, Abbott and Costello could look back on a monumental run of over twenty years together that conquered every medium they worked in – from theatre to radio, film to television – and at one point made them the most popular and highest paid entertainers in the world...

ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1953)

For their fourth jaunt into horror-comedy mash-ups involving infamous monsters, Bud and Lou’s producers still kept The Mummy on the back incense-burner while they took on another unholy double-act in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953). Although versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lurid 1886 tale had unleashed man’s inner primitive self on screen since 1908, surprisingly this was only the second time it had been exploited for humour – the first being Stan Laurel’s excellent pre-Hardy solo short from 1925, Dr Pickle and Mr Pryde (see my earlier review). The other more pleasant surprise is the degree of integrity that the Abbott and Costello brand applies to their remake. Theirs is less of a comedy (mainly bereft of laughs, which is a weakness) and more like a straight horror homage with added comedy support – in some ways to its benefit – in a script by Sid Fields partnered with Lee Loeb and the usually dependable John Grant. Fans may be disappointed that one-liner gags are unusually sparse in the resulting script, sacrificed for kinetic physical energy.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was the second time the boys were pitted against Universal’s master of velvety menace, Boris Karloff. Intriguingly, the studio’s original choice was Basil Rathbone. Due to his unavailability, house director Charles Lamont suggested Karloff again for a role that would be his first return to full-on monstrosity since working with Rathbone on Son of Frankenstein (1939).  

Such is the film’s keenness to respect Stevenson’s story that Bud and Lou are only in one scene in the first twenty minutes. Instead we are given time to be gradually absorbed into the Hollywood idea of Victorian London with its pea-souper fog, ever-present police ‘bobbies’ and a commendably serious bid to establish the key relationships. The opening in fact goes straight for horror frissons by showing Mr Hyde beating to death eminent surgeon Dr Poole (named after Jekyll’s butler in the novel) with his cane in Hyde Park.

We are then introduced to the romantic lead, reporter Bruce Adams played by an assured Craig Stevens four years before becoming TV’s equally dogged private eye Peter Gunn. He becomes enamoured of suffragette music-hall chanteuse Vicky Edwards (Helen Westcott) which is more than modern feminists will after seeing how they are portrayed here. How are they shown drumming up support for their cause to be taken seriously? Why, by a Folies Bergère cabaret song and dance complete with high-kicking leg show of course!

The meeting soon descends into lowbrow rough-and-tumble when Abbott and Costello arrive as two American cops, Tubby and Slim, learning on the job about British policing. They soon learn they are not cut out to handle excitable public disorder in a riotous set-piece of Keystone Kops-style acrobatic stunt-work matching the unsubtlety of their character names. (This vibe carried over into their next film where they indeed meet Mack Sennett’s force of farce). Meanwhile, Karloff’s highbrow Dr Jekyll, very distingué in grey hair and moustache, whisks away Bruce and Vicky (his ward) in a carriage ride that allows him time to set out his experimental agenda in a speech delivered in a single close-up: “It is the less fortunate that I want to help. If I can find some way to tame that instinct so that it is always under control -then perhaps we can eliminate bloodshed, violence…” This allowance for detailed exposition is rare in this type of comedy and the substance must have been heartening for Karloff even though it is rather plainly written - and there are clunkier dialogue points to come.

Jekyll’s depth of pondering on man’s duality is a dead giveaway that he is more than just idly theorising. His home features a huge underground laboratory complete with John Dierkes’s hulking mute assistant Batley. Privately Jekyll wrestles with his conscience, tipping off the audience as to his alter-ego - “the embodiment of all that’s evil” - but one whose raw power wins out as being the only way to eliminate the snooping Bruce. The first of Karloff’s two transformations uses conventional dissolve photography by David S. Horsley to morph his face into one of the new technology fitted rubber masks rather than the time-consuming facial prosthetics painstakingly built up when Jack Pierce was in charge. This would have suited the aging Karloff who had endured more than his fair share of make-up chair hardships in the past. Bud Westmore and Jack Kevan augment the bestial element with a porcine snout and fangs to make Hyde resemble a primitive hog. The heavy disguising by the mask-work also pays off during the demanding physicality of Hyde’s rampages, replacing both Karloff (and later Costello) undetectably with stuntmen.

Where the lack of good comic byplay for the boys becomes glaringly evident is in the scenes following this where they pursue Karloff’s Hyde into the music-hall backstage area in a vain attempt to regain their jobs. What was once a frantic trading of Lou’s ‘fraidy-cat badinage with Bud’s frustrated naysaying in their heyday is now reduced to underpowered and thin reactions. Both men seem tired and a little disengaged now after all these years. Even a wax museum sequence only reminds us of their better days: we see effigies of Dracula and an electrically-animated Frankenstein Monster coming to life as briefly as comic interest in the film.

Having said that, as I’ve already intimated, what is comedy’s loss is arguably horror’s gain as the plot is streamlined by the narrative drive of pursuing Hyde and poor Lou’s status as a two-time victim of transformational serums. While the boys investigate Jekyll’s ongoing animal experimentation, including a savagely barking rabbit-dog hybrid, he drinks a potion that turns his head and hands into those of a mouse. To save time (and regrettably laughter potential) he simply sports a costume fur head reminiscent of the Mouse King from The Nutcracker Suite whilst nibbling at lame cheese-related wisecracks.

It’s a good thing the action scenes are well-handled as the verbal connective tissue sometimes hits the floor with a resounding thud. A classic example is Vicky’s confrontation with her shape-changing guardian (who secretly covets her for himself): “Henry, is it true you’ve been experimenting with weird drugs that turn humans into animals?”

Beleaguered Costello barely has time for pest control before his sits on a hypodermic and turns himself into a marauding Hyde doppelganger, thus causing confusion to the cops and, as they say, frightening the horses. At least the fast and furious climax shows off elaborate set designs from Bernard Herzbrun and Eric Orbom on the ground and above the rooftops. All is rendered more or less right with the world once Karloff plunges to his death and a restored Lou reverts back to his innocent self – though like Meet the Invisible Man it is capped with a perplexing gag as for some reason the apprehending officers now chase him off as multiple Hydes!

Overall, Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde struggles as schizophrenically as its eponymous horror villain between being a cultivated horror picture and an unsavoury beast of base comedy.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN (1951)

Almost two years after all-too-briefly meeting Boris Karloff on screen in 1949, Bud and Lou’s creative team opted to do another comedy film plundering Universal’s horror back catalogue for inspiration. The Mummy was yet to be excavated, but instead a story was developed by Hugh Wedlock Jr and Howard Snyder centred around The Invisible Man whom you’ll recall made a cheeky, hat-tipping audio cameo via Vincent Price’s voice at the end of Meet Frankenstein (1948). The resulting script welcomed back the team of Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and invaluable house gag-smith John Grant; their first film with the boys since that classic horror-comedy melange three years before, and the more assured tone given to this new one is as transparent as H.G. Wells’ anti-hero. Russian-born veteran comedy director Charles Lamont cut his teeth in churning out silent comedy shorts for the likes of Mack Sennett before later graduating to Universal features. This would be his second for Bud and Lou, going on to helm all their last three horror-tinged ones we will explore.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) benefits from using the most compelling aspect of the sublime 1933 Claude Rains original: his eroding humanity into serum-inspired megalomania. Fans will recall its sly black humour even so, courtesy of masterful director James Whale. As a vehicle for this loud comedy duo though, a less subtle approach was needed to play to their strengths. The clever stroke was splicing the plot to a vigorous genre whose literally knockabout energy suited Bud and Lou’s style: the sports movie. To be specific, the writers used the popular sub-genre of corruption in the boxing world, one they would have seen notably exploited in the recent Body and Soul (1947), The Set-up and Champion (both 1949).

Abbott and Costello – actually named Bud and Lou here - make the acquaintance of a boxer when he is their first client as new graduates of the Dugan Detective School  - The acronym D.D.T. a deliberate reference to the controversial pesticide on sale in the U.S. from 1945. Tommy Nelson has broken out of jail and is on the run from the cops as chief suspect in his manager’s murder following a middleweight bout. Arthur Franz is fittingly raw as Nelson, combining the decency of the lead’s pal he played in Invaders From Mars (1953) with the gritty edge of his most famous role, the unhinged homicidal ex-soldier in The Sniper (1952).

Tommy is desperate to prove his innocence, so the boys agree to take him to see his fiancée Helen Gray, the lovely Nancy Guild, and her uncle Dr Philip Gray, a scientist who just happens to be experimenting with a revolutionary invisibility serum. (Though American-born, Gavin Muir’s English education equipped him with a handy British accent for a career of upmarket Hollywood villains.) He supplies a nice name-check and a wall photo harking back to Claude Rains’ John Griffin from The Invisible Man (rather than the gradually weaker sequels) to warn Tommy of the mental instability the serum still causes until a reagent can be created. The frantic Nelson cannot wait that long, and as the police arrive he sends the Grays out to run interference while he self-injects the drug. A further nod to the superior originating film is the sight of Tommy resembling Rains’ iconic bandaged head complete with goggles.

From here on, this spin-off of two worlds is well mined for the visual gag potential of invisibility and the co-opting of boxing physicality for laughs. Verbal gags are thinner on the ground, despite an occasional pleasing turn of phrase such as Lou’s eye-witness account to the cops that Tommy disappeared “in instalments”.

There are some boisterous burlesque-style routines, such as Lou’s subsequent visit to a city psychiatrist (Paul Maxey, better suited to portraying a burly butcher perhaps) who, along with an office full of others, falls under Lou’s reverse hypnosis. There’s a slick sleight of hand sequence where Lou continually pockets their new client’s retainer despite Bud’s best efforts to keep hold of it.

We also see the advancement of special optical effects since the early Thirties by David S. Horsley. He had worked on the last three sequels: The Invisible Man Returns and its jokier follow-up The Invisible Woman (both 1940) plus the espionage war iteration The Invisible Agent (1942). He creates marvellous moments of floating objects, especially some seamless card manipulation by the unseen Tommy during a game. 

The transparent fugitive is a great lynchpin for drawing together the funny and the serious elements on offer. On the one hand, Tommy partners Lou in a show-off exhibition at the gym to convince murder-guilty gangster Morgan (Sheldon Leonard, continuing his crime-wave after Zombies on Broadway’s Ace Miller) to pit him in a bout against John Daheim’s Rocky Hanlon. This then sets up Lou’s unlikely porky pugilist in the extended end fight for maximum sight-gags. To the movie’s credit, it meanwhile honours the horror franchise in never forgetting the vital escalating monstrosity building inside Tommy. “I don’t want friends. I want followers” he drunkenly declaims in a club.

The fight clock is ticking. Can Bud and Lou expose Morgan as the one who framed Tommy before their client is KO’d by his inner megalomania? It’s hard to believe that Morgan as written is trusted with anything more demanding than the mob’s laundry, such is his stupidity. Not only does he send ‘Louie the Looper’ a note spelling out a death threat if he doesn’t take a dive (handy evidence for the cops), he even accompanies it with the boys’ $15,000 bribe in advance. His moll Boots Marsden (Adele Jergens), unable to win over Lou either with her siren seductiveness, is understandably deadpan when he tells her he has the syndicate’s entire holdings riding on the match.

We are then given a ring-side seat for an extended climactic bout between the two totally mismatched opponents - sight-gags aplenty capitalising on a comedy scenario dating as far back as silent maestros Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. Plot-wise, the hapless Lou simultaneously aims for authenticity, avoids a beating by Hanlon and gets a two-fisted unseen assist by Tommy to actually win, much to Morgan’s eventual self-incriminating rage.

It only remains for Tommy to receive the re-agent in a blood transfusion with Costello that somehow backs up into bestowing invisibility upon the donor. Lou blithely rolls with the punch as gifting him future detective stealth, albeit with an inexplicable back-to-front torso!

Like Brando’s doomed ex-boxer Terry “I coulda been a contender” Molloy in On the Waterfront (1954),  Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man ultimately had no chance of an awards title-shot - but it comes out swinging, and sometimes with this pair that bruiser spirit goes the distance...