The Mad Monster (Sam Newfield, 1942)

"It was more than a fever - his eyes were the eyes of a wild beast!  He was possessed by a demon!"

When in the early 1940s Universal Pictures added another star horror character to their unhallowed echelons with Lon Chaney essaying the lycanthropic Lawrence Talbot of Llanwelly aka The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) who would become a regular in the roster of monster mash team-ups over the ensuing decade, it was no surprise that other studios smelled the wolfsbane-scented buck and decided to get in on the act: Twentieth Century Fox came out with the John Brahms-helmed The Undying Monster in 1942, followed by Columbia Pictures with their unofficial 'Dracula meets the Wolf Man' offering of Lew Landers' Return of the Vampire in 1943.  So it was no surprise whatsoever that the lower end Poverty Row studios would also get bandwagonesque - Monogram would concoct their own 'man into semi-animal' effort in 1943 with Bela Lugosi seeming simian in William "One-Shot" Beaudine's so-awful-its-great The Ape Man, but their fellow low-rent outfit Producer's Releasing Corporation beat them to the punch a year earlier with their own tale of lupine lunacy: The Mad Monster.

Starring Mancunian-born B-movie veteran and rent-a-mad scientist George Zucco (for my money, by far the best of the three Professors Moriarty in the Basil Rathbone series of Sherlock Holmes films - being elegantly menacing as the Napoleon of crime in 1939's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Alfred L. Werker]) as the unhinged Dr Lorenzo Cameron - perhaps the second most evil person who ever concocted a bizarre plan that went awry and caused havoc to go by that surname ("Bit of politics there, ladies and gentlemen" - Ben Elton).  Seemingly being more interested in bondage than Brexit, though (and quite sensible too), this Cameron's "secret work" entails tying up a large muscular man with leather straps in his basement dungeon - sorry, laboratory - and he has a whip to hand.  I'm not saying that this lends itself quite easily to a Queer Theory reading, but come on.

The aforesaid object of his attentions is the slow-witted and lumbering gardener Petro, portrayed by future Western star and three-times Frankenstein's Monster Glenn Strange - making this role a sort-of pre-emptive Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man with both classic creatures incarnated in one body.  Cameron has cloistered himself in a remote mansion (complete with underground recreational facility, easily accessible via secret passage - reasonable rates) surrounded by swampland - akin to the "forsaken jungle hell" to which Bela Lugosi's Dr Eric Vornoff was exiled in Ed Wood's 1955 Bride of the Monster - in order to prove his theory that injecting a human with the blood of a wolf can transform the subject into a wolf-man.  Perhaps it was a radioactive wolf.

Anyway, the unhinged egghead has carried out his experiment using lupine life force combined with a unique catalytic agent of his own invention in order to create the first of his projected army of werewolves ("snarling, ferocious, lusting for the kill!") out of patriotic wartime duty - his aim is to combat the Nazis - " a savage horde who fight with fanatical fury" - by unloosing millions of "these animal men" (These Animal Men released Wheelers, Dealers and Christine Keelers in 1993, a split release along with S*M*A*S*H of the gloriously-titled single 'Lady Love Your Cunt' fame: pop factoid).  His dreams of conquest with an invincible animal army that could "sweep everything before it" have led to ridicule from his peers an exile from the hallowed groves of academe, but he has shown the will and fortitude to suck seed succeed, turning "harmless, good-natured" Petro into a ludicrous looking loup garou in optical effects by Gene Stone and make-up by Harry Ross that are hardly the equal of the efforts of John P Fulton and Jack Pierce at Universal.

Preparing to wreak his revenge by using his newborn lycan slave to destroy the trio of academics who had him thrown off the faculty, Cameron has a test run of sending Wolf!Petro out on a merciless mission dead set on destruction, wherein he sallies forth into the swampland - a moribund marsh in which the local yokels (including a cackling, pipe-smoking old woman reminiscent of Elspeth Dudgeon's "We got no pepper and salt!" turn as a gypsy hag in Bride of Frankenstein) as having a devil mist that smells of evil - to crawl through a log cabin's window into the bedroom of a small child and leave the torn corpse of this slaughtered lamb in his wake.

"Its dominant urge is to kill and destroy even when unprovoked - a human characteristic translated into animal instinct - animals only kill for food or in self-defence" philosophises crazy Cameron, clearly pleased with his work.

Also residing in the quagmire-bound not so des res is Cameron's daughter, the lovely Lenora (Anne Nagel, who had starred alongside the legit Lon Chaney in Man Made Monster [George Waggner, 1941]), who misses the bright lights of the big city and pines for her plucky investigative reporter boyfriend Tom (Johnny Downs) who has been drawn into this web of mayhem and intrigue by investigating first the death of the Cajun child (and i find it impossible after typing that not to hear it in the voice of Eric Roberts saying "the Asian child" in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie) and then Professor Blaine - the first of Cameron's academic enemies to face the fury of the wolfman.  Lonesome Lenora also has the added problem of the docile Petro following her around with puppy-dog (as opposed to his nocturnal alpha wolf) eyes, ensuring the Strange gives us a bargain two Lon Chaney performances for the price of one, so reminiscent is it of Chaney's celebrated performance as Lennie in Lewis Milestone's 1939 version of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Petro is also giving Dr Cameron and his plans some trouble, as he not only begins to go through the metamorphosis without being injected with the formula, Mr Hyde-style, but also fails in his mission to wipe out the second designated victim Dr Fitzgerald - leaving Cameron convinced that the merely wounded Fitzgerald will regain consciousness and tell all.  What with not only his inquisitive prospective son in law snooping around the place, but the stock mob of pitchfork-bearing townsfolk roaming the area and out for blood, the demented doc euthanises his enemy in a panic whilst the inquisitive Lenora accidentally unleashes the transformed Petro from the dungeon and the manse catches fire after being struck by a bolt of lightning (a very on the nose 1940s metaphor for Cameron's comeuppance after "meddling in the realm of Gaaahhhd").  As hammy Cam wrestles with his canid creation and the flaming rafters of the roof tumble down around them, Lenora and Tom escape the inferno into the mire to watch the fall of the house of Cameron.  And then possibly go on to start a Cam fam of their own.

Monster madness indeed.

Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, 1929)

So, is this a surrealist classic, or truly an Andalusian dog of a film?

This is yet another film that i became aware of at a young age, when it was obliquely referred to by Alan Frank in Horror Films (Hamlyn, 1977) - a tome that was bought for me second hand when i was bedridden with mumps - as the film that closed the first, silent, period of the genre and fantasy cinema but that it was "obscurity... taken by some critics to be the same as profundity".  Therefore, since the age of ten or so, i have always been in something of a dichotomous dilemma over whether or not i ever wanted to see it.  On the one hand, the brief synopses i'd read that went in any way to describing the content of the film - a short series of vignettes containing surrealistic, bizarre and horrific imagery - sounded great; on the other, Mr Frank's and others' opining that it was some kind of 'artsy-fartsy' experiment masquerading as a genre piece was always hovering like a sneering bit of reverse snobbery at the back of my cranium.

Of course, by the time i was a university student, the latter description would actually increase its appeal - me having grown into an artsy-fartsy type myself - and it was no coincidence (or perhaps it was, as it's a damn great record in its own right) that one of my favourite albums since secondary school was the Pixies' Doolittle containing the magnificent slab of noise 'Debaser' with its chorus quoting the title of Un Chien Andalou.  And it would be at a gig by the then newly-reformed Pixies (i can still remember my excitement: who thought that would ever happen?  I'd discovered them shortly after their implosion [my entry level 'album' was their post-mortem compilation Death to the Pixies] and so never dared to dream i'd ever see them live - but there we were in Glasgow's SECC on the 4th of October 2009, when before the band took to the stage the lights dimmed and the 16 monochrome minutes of Un Chien Andalou were projected upon the backdrop wall.  Along time after i'd first read about it, here it was unspooling before me when i was already in a state of anticipation and excitement, and having to shush and wave away the friends around me who were impatient for some rock action.

Written by Salvador Dali and directed by Luis Bunuel (of future Viridiana [1961], The Exterminating Angel [1962] and Belle de Jour [1967] fame), this dog certainly has a fine pedigree.  It opens boldly with one of its most infamous images: a man (a self-insertion cameo by Bunuel himself) calmly sharpening a straight razor before walking out onto a nighttime balcony to watch the full moon - then approaching a young woman (Simone Mareuil - who would later end her life by setting fire to herself in the middle of a town square ["Immolation's what you need, if you wanna be a Record Breaker", as Roy Castle certainly never sang]) before - as a thin wisp of cloud moves across the lunar eye in the sky - slicing her eyeball (actually the eye of a dead calf in extreme close-up, its fur bleached to register as human flesh tone in black and white); the bifurcated orb oozing it's horrid glue.  This scenario was culled fro a discussion between Bunuel and Dali that was the inspiration for the movie: Bunuel having had a dream in which he saw a cloud slicing the moon "like a razor blade slicing an eye".  This determination to chronicle personal nightmares and dreamscapes on film results in the entire piece's ambiguity and random jumps of dream logic akin to August Strindberg's reality-warping plays A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1908).

What follows is a series of vignettes connected by the strange flow and flux of REM sleep: a young woman (Mareuil) encountering a man (Pierre Batcheff - who would also go on to commit suicide subsequently: in his case a barbiturate overdose) dressed in a nun's habit who is run over whilst cycling in the street.  Taking the box that he is wearing around his neck, she returns home to her apartment and opens it to find his nun's wimple and habit enfolded inside before laying them out upon her bed.  Then the man appears in her room, staring at his own hand from which ants are erupting from a wound in his palm (a future suicide experiencing... formicide?).

Later, when the girl rejects his advances and backs into the corner of the room wielding a tennis racquet to keep him at bay, the man picks up a pair of ropes and proceeds across the room towards her dragging behind him two grand pianos, each containing the rotting corpse of a donkey.  This iconic image was a snook being cocked by Bunuel and Dali towards Spanish author Juan Ramon Jimenez, who had authored a children's book entitled Platero and I about a small boy's relationship with a donkey (no, not in a Clerks II "donkey show" kind of way), which they both apparetly had an enmity towards.  Though i don't think that the man who originated the quote "If they give you lined paper, write the other way" can be all bad.

After further digressions including dissolves from the reclining young woman's armpit hair to a sea anemone (oxters to oysters, perhaps?), murder by doppelganger, a smile quite literally being wiped from the man's face (to by replaced by armpit hair - how Freudian for a fetish to be revealed through filmmaking) and a mysterious and ominous death's head moth, we get the caption "Au Printemps..." to find that in the spring these scar-caused lovers have shed their skin and been blown away on the changing winds to wind up buried in the sand of the beach at Le Havre.  Which is a thing that can happen.

That is textbook enigmatic.

In summary: i agree with Black Francis rather than Alan Frank.  A surrealistic pillow indeed.

Unearthly Stranger (John Krish, 1963)

"I expect to die - to killed by... something you and I know is here.  Invisible... it moving, unseen, amongst us all each moment of the day and night.  There were times when you thought i was insane, but listen to this tape i beg you - so that you know what it is that you must fight."

Black and white Britain of late 1963 was a good place to find the alien.  Whilst the November of that year spawned a monster in the shape of 'An Unearthly Child', begetting the 55 years and still rising reign of BBC television's Doctor Who, two months earlier - on the big screen, but not in colour - the cinemas had bore witness to an Unearthly Stranger.

Also known as Beyond the Stars, and in Mexico under the title Mujeres de lo Desconocido (Strange Women or Women of the Unknown), the film was distributed by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy's Anglo-Amalgamated in the UK and James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures (home at the time to horror mavens Roger Corman and Herman Cohen) in the US.  Filmed at Buckinghamshire's Beaconsfield Film Studios by production company Independent Artists, the film was produced by Julian Wintle - who would go on within the next two years to take over from John Bryce (who had earlier inherited the mantle from Leonard White) as producer of ABC TV's spy-fi telefantasy classic The Avengers.  The cast list also includes Avengers alumni, including Philip Stone (Dr Richard Tredding, co-GP of original Avenger Dr David Keel in the show's earliest episodes, and who would also go on to portray the spectral Mr Grady in Stanley Kubrick's monumental 1980 horror The Shining), Patrick Newell (Mother in the sixth and final Tara King season, as well as Colonel Faraday in the 1976 Doctor Who story 'The Android Invasion') and Warren Mitchell (just about to make the first of his four Avengers appearances in 'The Golden Fleece', which would air in December of 1963), as well as featuring Jean Marsh (three-time Doctor Who guest star - including as doomed companion to the First Doctor Sara Kingdom - as well as memorable childhood-scarring turns as Mombi and Queen Bavmorda in Return to Oz [Walter Murch, 1985] and Willow [Ron Howard, 1988] respectively).

Filmed in atmospheric black and white, the movie begins in media res with the protagonist, Dr Mark Davidson (John Neville, who would go on to go head to head with Jack the Ripper as Sherlock Holmes in James Hill's 1965 A Study in Terror as well as starring as the eponymous Baron Munchausen for Terry Gilliam in 1988 and forming part of the vast conspiracy faced by The X-Files' Mulder and Scully as The Well-Manicured Man) running for his life through the darkened streets of London pursued by some unseen force.  His invisible pursuer effectively conveyed utilising only sound, Davidson holes up in his nighttime-deserted workplace - the Royal Institute for Space Research (doubtless an offshoot of Professor Bernard Quatermass' British Rocket Group) where you begins to record his testament of the things that he has seen (and the horrors unseen of which he has become aware) on his desktop dictaphone, taking us via his terrified reminiscences into the main body of the story.

In flashback we see how Davidson gained his position at the Space Institute after the sudden and mysterious death of his predecessor Professor Munro (Mitchell), whose inexplicable demise is simultaneously being investigated and covered up by Major Clarke (Newell, in a strangely mercurial performance) - to the extent of Munro's corpse being 'disappeared' before Davidson and his coworker Professor Lancaster (Stone) can take a look at it, his unoccupied coffin being weighted with bricks before the funeral.  The project being worked on by the late Munro, and now Davidson and his colleagues, is an audacious plan to circumvent the vast time scales involved in physically traversing the vast interstellar distances by devising a method for a human being to mentally project him or herself through space to another world (shades of Ian Curteis and John Croydon's 1966 The Projected Man, or the Guild Navigators' "travelling without moving" in Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune), and it begins to emerge that otherworldly interests are vested in killing this project at birth before mankind can spread out into the cosmos.

At the same time, Davidson has returned home from time away in Switzerland with a new bride, Julie (Gabriella Licudi, who would later play Beryl Stapleton in the BBC two-part adaptation of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' starring the inestimable Peter Cushing as Holmes), whom he met in strange circumstances.  Taking an interest in meeting his friend's new spouse, Lancaster at first puts her strange air down to her adjustment to life in Britain but notices some strange things about her.  Her lack of blinking extends to sleeping at night with her eyes wide open, which unnerves her husband, and Lancaster takes particular note when he walks into the Davidsons' kitchen to see her lifting a red-hot casserole out of the oven with her bare hands without registering the slightest pain or discomfort.  Julie is, of course, an alien in a very different sense from being Swiss and is the agent who has been assigned to Davidson with orders to prevent his work from proceeding up to and including killing him in the same way that Munro was dealt with (aneurysm via some kind of ray projection - literally exploding his brain).  The alien plan is somewhat complicated by the fact that even as her husband slowly begins to realise her unearthly origins, she has begun to have genuine feelings for him.  Going against her orders, Julie confesses both her true identity and her love for Mark shortly before she vanishes - leaving only her clothing behind like Nessarobe Thropp's shoes.

This is where we catch up with the opening events of the movie, as Davidson is pursued through the twilit avenues of Westminster by the unseen and malevolent alien force that took Julie, and dictates the preceding events in his office.  At this point he is surprised by his loyal secretary Miss Ballard (Marsh), who reveals that she is his pursuer ("We have been here for twenty years") and fully intends to carry out Julie's disobeyed orders be killing him.  Their subsequent life-or-death struggle results in Miss Ballard plummeting from a high window to the streets below, only to also vanish leaving only her apparel by the time Davidson descends to street level, where he is surrounded by the accusing glares of a crowd of eerie non-blinking women - the strange women from the unknown of the Mexican title.

An unusual and unique take on the well-worn theme of alien invasion so beloved of the b-cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, Unearthly Stranger benefits from effective direction and a steadily building atmosphere of paranoia seeping into the gentility of middle class '60s Britain, as well as strong performances from John Neville and Gabriella Licudi in particular.  A neat subversion the hackneyed pulp SF trope of astronauts landing on a "planet of the women": for they are the ones who have come here...