The last two nights, we searched for horror films we'd never seen, to get into the Halloween Spirit. The first one we found.......well, more on that later. We had marginally better luck last night, with a flick called "Son of Ingagi"(1940), a beauty and the beast tale with possibly the worst ape man costume in history. Notable for its all-black cast, the movie starts with newlyweds "Bob" and "Eleanor Lindsay" (Alfred Grant and Daisy Bufford) leaving the church after their wedding. Out front, they stop to talk to Eleanor's family lawyer, who reminds them to give him a call if they ever need him. "I specialise in divorce cases," he laughs, and they shoo him away, but soon they'll need him for another reason. They drive off, preparing to go to Honolulu the next day for their honeymoon, but that night at their house, when they want to be alone, a dozen of their goofy friends crash the pad and throw a raucous party, complete with band and farcical, pro-bachelorhood songs. Then the party is interrupted by an explosion: KA-BLAMMO! The steel foundry where Bob works is destroyed . "Oh no," he laments. "I've just lost my job and we're gonna lose the mortgage, too."
But not so fast, Bob. What he doesn't know (but we do), is that after he and Eleanor left the church, an old woman stopped to talk to the lawyer who was still on the sidewalk along with another wedding guest, one "Detective Nelson" (Spencer Williams, who also scripted). The woman is "Dr. Helen Jackson" (Laura Bowman), a local - and eccentric - zoologist. She scoffs at Nelson, telling him she doesn't like detectives, but to the lawyer she says, "I need you to make out my will." He doesn't wanna do it (we'll soon find out why) but "The Doctor" (as everyone calls her) is a formidable woman, dressed in Victorian clothes with an attitude to match. The lawyer goes to her creepy old mansion and writes up her will, the terms of which she dictates to him after consulting her Ouija board.
Well, Bob and Eleanor were worried about the mortgage after the foundry explosion (and about money in general), but now their worries are over because The Doctor is found dead in her mansion the next day and they've inherited everything she owns. It turns out that Eleanor was her niece. Neither she nor Bob want to live at mansion (it's way too spooky) but they have little choice. Then, things get worse when Detective Nelson investigates The Doctor's death and determines she was murdered. We already know who killed her - a giant half-ape, half-man that she kept locked up in her basement la-bor-a-tory. She'd already alluded, to the lawyer, about her "missionary work in Africa." "Some people called me evil," she told him, "but I also did a lot of good."
Hmmm, I'm not too sure about the "good" part, and the missing link in the basement might beg to differ, too. He's angry most of the time, and ends up killing a second man, The Doctor's criminal brother, who was blackmailing her and now has tried to booglarise her hidden stash of diamonds stolen from Africa. The ape man finds him in the basement and strangles him.
When Bob finds his body in the morning, the couple are now too terrified to stay there for even a minute longer, but the cops persuade them, on the off chance of catching the killer who they are sure is after The Doctor's money. They know nothing about the diamonds, or the ape-man, or the basement, which can only be accessed by rotating a painting on the wall, so they send over Detective Nelson to stay with Bob and Eleanor around the clock. In the middle of the night he gets hungry and goes to the fridge to make a triple-decker Club Sandwich. Man, it looks good! But he doesn't know that the ape man is lurking in the kitchen and is powerful hongry, too. When Detective Nelson sets his sandwich down on the table and turns away, the ape man takes it, hides, and eats it. Nelson, seeing it gone, scratches his head, makes another sandwich, sets it down, turns away, then the ape man takes that one too! You'd think two triple-deck Club Sammiches with everything on 'em would calm the big guy down, but nah. He's still pee-oed, and goes back down to his barred-in bunk and lights the basement on fire! And Eleanor is trapped down there, having gone in search of Bob.
The trouble with the whole doggone thing is that we never hear Word One about the ape man's history. Not even the title is explained: "The Son of Ingagi". The ape man's name is N'Gina. I guess we're supposed to understand that he's the Son in question, but who the hell was Ingagi? Was he an African chieftain? Did The Doctor conduct genetic experiments with men and beasts, like in "Island of Dr. Moreau"?
We must be chopped liver, because the filmmakers give us nothing. No explanations whatsoever. There is a lot of humor (the sammich scene and Detective Nelson's buffoonery), and The Doctor is a Creep-o Extraordinaire. Anyhow, Two Bigs. It's a must see, just because it's so different. The picture is soft but watchable. ////
Okay, now to the previous night's movie, the one I said we'd get back to. When I began my search for Halloween flicks, I found one I was sure we'd never seen, called "The Bride and the Beast"(1958), and I chose it because it was written by Ed Wood. Boy, was that a mistake! Note to self: "Plan 9" notwithstanding, and maybe (if we're being generous) "Bride of the Monster," there's legit reasons that Ed Wood sucks. Not everything he did was Bad/Good. Keep that in mind before risking another one of his movies. End of note. I mean, it's possible that if he'd directed this gem in addition to writing it, we might've had a better result, but I doubt it. As it opens, "Dan" and "Laura Fuller" (Lance Fuller, Charlotte Austin), another newlywed couple (I sense a theme here), are headed to his mansion off the beaten path. A road sign reading "Dan Fuller" points the way. He's rich from big game hunting, and his mansion has an animal lockup in the basement (hmm...see above), which is currently holding a gorilla he captured during his latest trip to Africa. When Laura asks to see the ape, Dan obliges but warns her not to get too close. "Even though he's behind bars he can still grab and kill you".
Well, so whataya think she does? Exactly. She gets too close, the ape grabs her, but she's able to talk him down, by calmly asking him to let go. We can already see he's attracted to her, and later that night, when she and Dan are asleep, the ape breaks out of his cage, comes into their bedroom and tries to carry Laura away. Dan pulls a pistol from his nightstand and kills the poor animal, and when the ordeal is over, Laura confesses something strange: "I had a feeling, while he was carrying me, that I'd experienced the whole thing before." This leads to a discussion of deja vu and past lives, and Dan offers to have his friend Dr. Carl Reiner (no joke) examine Laura the next day. She agrees, and when Dr. Carl hyp-no-tizes! her, and regresses her to her past life, she reveals that she was once a gorilla herself, living in Africa, and afraid of nothing except the sharp-horned water buffalo.
Okay. Weird, right? But good/weird. At this point, ten minutes in, I was still hoping for some classic Ed Wood. The gal was a gorilla in a past life, fine n' dandy, that's some weird/wild stuff, you are correct, Sir! And if they'd stayed with that angle, and cut the running time down to 20 minutes, they might have had something, because that's all you get of the Gorilla Reincarnation story. The rest of the movie - one full and very long, drawn-out hour in the middle - is a tiger hunting safari in Africa, filled up with stock footage of wild animals running around, which - while good for a Marlin Perkins special - has nothing to do with the gorrilla plot the filmmakers just suckered us in with. Then they tack on a beauty and the beast ending, to resurrect the past-life gorilla theme.
You have absolutely got to be joking. Take away the first ten minutes, and everything about this movie is a mess. Ed Wood was not a good filmmaker; we had him and Roger Corman mixed up. We used to think Corman was the guy who sucked, until we did a retrospective of his films. With the exception of "Little Shop of Horrors", we found out he was pretty doggone good. It turned out that Wood was the one who sucks, and no amount of references to angora sweaters (which he includes in this script) is gonna improve his rep.
I can't even remember the last time we said this, but Two Big Thumbs Down for "The Bride and the Beast," even with the beautiful Charlotte Austin on hand. It's literally a tiger hunt, and a slow one at that, filled with stock footage, and some gorilla past-life stuff attached to the beginning and the end. Phooey. The picture is razor sharp. ////
And that's all I've got for tonight. Something I can highly recommend is "Fairy Tale" by Stephen King. I already mentioned it's a page-turner, but he also throws maybe the biggest curveball of his career, something you'll never see coming. My blogging music tonight was "Atom Heart Mother" by Pink Floyd. You can tell they were still searching for their sound. My late night is the Ring Cycle by Wagner. We'll keep doing horror movies through Halloween. I send you Tons of Love, as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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