September 18th, 2015 - The Vampire's Coffin (1958)

The Vampire's Coffin is about a doctor who goes to great lengths to find the grave of a vampire... he justifies it by saying "it's all in the name of science." Check out how his cells have not deteriorated despite being dead for years! But of course, the vampire gets out. Havoc ensues.

As you may have guessed from the title screen, it's a Spanish film (made in Mexico), and apparently a sequel to the popular (and much better, judging from the reviews) El Vampiro. It's got the same cast, and I'm guessing they put a stake in the heart of the evil Count Karol de Lavud (German Robles) at the end of part one. But you can't keep a good vampire down, so he's back here for more. He gets out after the the shady grave robber the doctor hired gets greedy and tries to take a medallion from Lavud's corpse. Are there any upstanding folks in the grave-robbing community anymore? To get to the medallion, he must remove the stake, which I guess means Lavud comes back to life.

June 8th, 2015 - Fiend Without a Face (1958)

Abbreviated Entry...

May 24th, 2015 - The Devil's Partner (1958)

Devil's Partner had a little more teeth than I expected from a 1958 "pact with the devil" film. I mean, it's maybe a hard-PG by today's standards, but still - there's implied goat sacrifices and writing contracts in blood. So I was pleasantly surprised by that. Also a surprise? The movie being a notch or two above average. My last 50 Tales of Terror jam (Curse of the Headless Horseman) was effing terrible, so I was feeling a little down on the set. While Devil's Partner isn't a must see by any means, it's a decent enough watch if you're looking for some 50's style horror fun.

Our film starts with a guy named Pete Jensen - a Grizzly Adams-looking dude in an old, rundown shack. He's getting set for a little goat slaughter, which you see only in silhouette. He writes out a contract in blood, and draws a hexagon in blood on the floor. (A replacement for the pentagram, which either wasn't known or wasn't accepted by the public at the time. But the hexagon still must have been kind of exotic, as one character (the cop, even!) describes it as being "like a square, but with six sides." Ha!) Anyways, the cops find his body (we don't see this), bury him, and a few days later his "nephew" Nick shows up in town. Nick is "saddened" to learn that his uncle is not only dead, but was also particularly disliked in town for being a crotchety old man. But it's pretty obvious from the get go that Nick is just Pete reincarnated. They don't really even try to hide it.

May 20th, 2015 - Womaneater (1958)

aka The Woman Eater

The titular Womaneater is a plant from deep in the Amazonian jungle. A native tribe worships the huge plant as an idol, and regularly holds ceremonies where they beat some drums, chant a bit, and feed it a young woman. Somewhere in there is the secret to raising the dead. (Why wouldn't it be?) English (mad) scientist Dr. Moran has not only witnessed this ritual in person, he's also become obsessed with harboring the plant's regenerative powers. Since he's a typical mad scientist, he is hungry for the fame and fortune he'd get if he could, in fact, raise the dead. He somehow (it's not shown) managed to get the HUGE plant back to his secret laboratory in his estate, along with a native servant named Tanga (the probably not actually Amazonian Jimmy Vaughn) to help him figure out how it works.

The only problem for Dr. Moran? Being the Womaneater, it needs women to eat. It's a lot easier to come by women to feed it in the Amazon than it is in the big city. The doctor is a little apprehensive about killing random women, but he justifies that it's for the greater good. He manages to find the occasional victim here or there, but the police are getting suspicious. And just so we have a main character to care about, Dr. Moran hires a young woman by the name of Sally. Will she be safe from Dr. Moran and the nefarious womaneater? Tune in to find out!

April 17th, 2015 - Donovan's Brain (1953)

I've watched a head-in-a-pan movie for this project, but Donovan's Brain is my first brain-in-a-pan movie. And actually, it's in a tank, but whatever. I'm not sure if that would be an entirely different genre - they are both about mad scientists essentially playing god. But here, the brain itself is the big bad, which makes it a little less depressing than a head that is constantly asking people to kill it.

Donovan's Brain is a direct adaptation of the 1942 science fiction novel of the same name by Curt Siodmak. From what little research I've done, this seems to be the seminal "disembodied brain telepathically controls people to do its evil bidding" story - it's been directly adapted onto film two other times (1944's Lady and the Monster and 1962's The Brain). But it's been used as a concept in countless other sci-fi/horror films since. 

April 7th, 2015 - The Snow Creature (1954)

The Snow Creature is a pretty typical bad mid-50's monster movie. Not a great story, bad looking monster, and boring scenes of people walking around to pad the film (here, you get treks through the Himalayan mountains as well as the sewer system of a big U.S. city). There's just enough laughable weirdness to not make it a total waste of time, but it's still a pretty rough one to sit through.

It's about an American scientist named Dr. Frank Parrish who is in the Himalayas to do research on some recently discovered plant life. He has brought a photographer named Peter Wells with him; these two, along with the Sherpa guide Subra, are the only English speaking characters in the first half of the film. Dr. Parrish has hired a team of sherpas (sensitively referred to a being "much like mules under the weight of our heavy supplies") to assist them in their trek up the mountain. But several days into it, word reaches the camp that a Yeti has kidnapped Subra's lady from the lowland village. Parrish and Wells don't care, and they threaten to shoot Subra if he takes the men to search for her (it's mutiny, they say). Real nice. But Subra steals their guns, and like it or not, they are tagging along in a quest to find the mythical beast. And (no surprise) they find him. And since you'll come across it in just about every synopsis you can find, they do the King Kong thing, capturing the Yeti and bringing him back to the U.S. for further study. Predictably, he gets out and runs amok.

March 6th, 2015 - The Island Monster (1954)

Shame on you, The Island Monster. If you have "Monster" in the title, as well as Boris Karloff as the star, you should probably at least attempt to be a horror movie. I was fooled last year by the Karloff-less Devil Monster (also on the 50 Tales of Terror budget set), and now this. I'll still count it, since it's on the set, but man. If this I was watching a really boring movie a day, this would qualify for sure though. What an uninteresting drag of a film.

The Island Monster is about a family man/narcotics officer named Mario Andreani (Renato Vicario) who is assigned to stop a drug-running operation on an island off the coast of Italy. So at least the "Island" part is accurate. He goes kind of undercover, and gets involved with a beautiful local singer, who is in on the drug business. (But she has a heart of gold, you see, because she wants to get out. Of course she does.) Karloff appears as a local philanthropist early in the film, but things are not as they seem... Andreani's annoying wife and annoying kid show up to visit him (thanks for ruining his cover!), and the smugglers kidnap the annoying kid. At least the family has a dog, so they aren't entirely hateable. As you can probably tell, The Island Monster is really more of a crime film than anything, and not a very good one at that.

March 4th, 2015 - The Black Sleep (1956)

For the longest time I had been passing this by on my Netflix queue, for some reason swearing it was called the Black Sheep. I guess I was always distracted by the disfigured face on the box art and my mind just went to what I knew. (And this is no joke. I've scrolled past it hundreds of times, wondering why a mid-nineties Chris Farley movie would steal the title. I've yet to see the killer Sheep flick from New Zealand.) But finally I bit, looking for something a little older that wouldn't seem to terrible to my non-horror watching wife should she walk in the room. But when I saw the amazing cast (starring Basil Rathbone, and featuring Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Tor Johnson) I was pretty stoked. And it's solid - surprisingly scary/troubling for a mid-50s film, even to these jaded 2015 eyes. Almost certainly better than a "Black Sheep" would have been, at least.

It starts off in 1872 with Dr. (not chef) Gordon Ramsay (Herbert Rudley), on the eve of his hanging for a murder he did not commit. His old instructor in medical school, Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone), stops by and sneaks in a "sedative" for Ramsay to take before the execution. He takes it the next morning, and dies before he can be executed. Or does he? The drug is Cadman's "Black Sleep" - it gives the user all outward appearances of being dead, but they can be revived if an antidote is given in the next 12 hours. Cadman has arranged to take Ramsay's body for a proper burial, but in fact takes his "dead" body back to his lab where he brings him back to life. Ramsay is very grateful, but it turns out Cadman has ulterior motive - he wants Ramsay to assist him in his medical research on the brain. He warns Ramsay that his experiments are a bit unorthodox, but Ramsay obliges, thankful to be alive and working with a brilliant doctor. But the research may be a *bit* more unorthodox than Ramsay was expecting. And a bit more illegal - really, you should probably be wary of any research that requires you to go through a secret passageway to get started. I won't go into it anymore, but it gets a little nasty.

January 15th, 2015 - The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)

I didn't have much of a reaction to The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake either way. It's not a bad film... there's just nothing extraordinary (or really even terribly interesting) about it. It's got a decent atmosphere about it, and generates most of its chills from examining the concept of head-shrinking. So I might be able to shrink a head now, if I wanted to. But there isn't too much here to get excited about.

It starts off with the titular Jonathan Drake, waking from a nightmare with three skulls floating around... he's had feelings of doom his whole life, but that feeling is getting stronger by the day. Jonathan is an expert in the occult, and instinctively knows that his family is in some kind of trouble. He goes to visit his brother Kenneth after receiving a strange letter (I think?), but by the time he can get there, his brother is dead! The doctor says it's a heart attack (there is a history of it in the family), but we are hip to the true cause of death. A creepy dude with his lips sewn together snuck into the house and poked him in the neck with some poisonous thing. (This guy is even more creepy by virtue of being a white man painted brown, playing a Jivaro Indian.) He was getting ready to cut off Kenneth's head, when he was scared off by approaching footsteps.

December 17th, 2014 - The Head (1959)

The Head is probably the darkest "Head in a Pan" movie I've ever seen. I've always gotten the idea that these things are going to be campy (a la The Brain that Wouldn't Die). But here, the head of brilliant scientist Dr. Abel (I think that was his name?) just wants people to kill him, because he hates being alive as just a head. It's pretty depressing, and towards the end he proclaims "I'm just so tired" like some elderly person waiting to die. Happy Holidays!

But the medical acts against nature are two-fold in this film. Before any head in a pan business, the mad genius Dr. Brandt (I think - I need to start writing down names in my notes) has joined forces with Dr. Abel. They are looking into the science behind organ transplants (at the time this was made, a scientific reality for only 5 years - and only then with a kidney). Dr. Abel in particular has a lot on the line, for he has a heart condition that will surely be fatal if he does not get a transplant. And Dr. Abel has also invented a "z-serum" that will keep these organs living and viable - in fact, he was able to keep a dog's head alive for months! (We don't see this, thankfully.) He is also looking to help out his good friend Irene, and hunchbacked nurse who desperately wants her deformity fixed. Really, both the good Dr. Abel and the evil Dr. Brandt are the kind of doctors that just like to mess around surgically and see what they can do. The big difference? Dr. Abel only does this with consent and within the bounds of nature. Dr. Brandt? Not so much.

November 27th, 2014 - Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

This was a Thanksgiving weekend trip movie. Which meant I needed something I could download to the old tablet. I came across archive.org about a month ago - it's a pretty rad (and legal) site where you can download many different types of media for free. The people who own the rights on any sort of property in any sort of medium can upload it there - with movies you can either stream through the site or download them. So I perused the horror section and came up with Beast from Haunted Cave. I knew I probably wouldn't be up for anything crazy after a long day of driving and family, so I wanted something that would go down easy. I didn't end up taking any notes, but I'm afraid there just isn't all that much to say about it anyways. It's a pretty bland 50's monster flick with really nothing to get excited about.

You might think this would be about a beast, but really it's more about a gang of bandits at a ski resort (shot on location in "picturesque" South Dakota). They have a plan to rob a bank or some such place - whatever it is, there are gold bars there. They will steal the loot and cross-country ski to an isolated cabin where a helicopter will pick them up. Along for the ride is Gil (Michael Forest), a ski guide who will help them get to the cabin but is ignorant of their illegal shenanigans.

October 7th, 2014 - I Bury the Living (1957)

"Science has learned that man possesses powers which go beyond the boundaries of the natural.  This is the story of one confronted by such strange forces within himself."

I guess I hadn't learned that about science.  There is no citation - so I can't confirm nor deny it.  The "one" in question in I Bury the Living is Robert Kraft (played by Richard Boone), a business man who has recently been chosen by his peers to be the director of a local cemetery. In the main cemetery office there is a big map of all of the grave plots - white pins for those reserved for the living, and black pins for those that are already taken by the dead.  Robert accidentally learns that if he puts black pins in a living persons grave plot, the person will die shortly thereafter!

So don't do that!  That was my biggest issue with the movie.  Once he realizes he has this mysterious power, he continues to put in black pins, or continues to be talked into doing it.  He calls a reporter friend who says "there isn't a story here."  My, how things have changed - now the press would be all over this like Bird Flu, or another topical disease.   The cops can't find anything either.  I don't know, if this happened to me, just once, I would just be all "hey, I shouldn't do that again!" and probably not tell anyone.  But then there isn't a movie, I guess.