Old legends – strange tales – never die in the lonely swamp land. Villages and hamlets lie remote and almost forgotten. Small ferryboats glide between the shores, and the ferryman is a very important person. Day and night he is at the command of his passengers. On his little barge ride the good and the evil; the friendly and the hostile; the superstitious and the enlightened; the living and – sometimes – the dead.
Directed by Frank Wisbar from his own story, also co-written for the screen by Leo J. McCarthy. Make-up by Bud Westmore. Also co-starring Effie Laird as Martina Sanders, Nolan Leary as Pete Jeffers, Frank Conlan as Joseph Hart, Therese Lyon and Virginia Farmer.
This is a hauntingly beautiful re-make of director Frank Wisbar’s own 1936 German film Faehrmann Maria a retelling of the legend of Death and The Maiden. Which started Sybille Schmitz, the memorable victim of Carl Dreyer’sVampyr (1931).
The enticing German film actress… Sybille SchmitzScene from Wisbar’s Fahrmann Maria 1936
Another scene from Fahrmann Maria 1936
It’s an effectively creepy story from the Poverty Row Film Company PRC who brought us The Devil Bat and The Flying Serpent. While this is a low budget B movie, it is quite effective to watch as the ghost of Douglas seems to dissolve in and out of the darkness.
There is an essence of the slow and dreamlike stylization that is similar to Dreyer’s work, at work here in Strangler of The Swamp. The setting is a lonely backwoods swamplands where the villagers live under a terrible curse left by a wrongly accused man hung for a crime he did not commit.
The Ghost of Ferryman Douglas and Maria Hart
Three women from the village including Martina Sanders glide down the bayou on the ferryboat with Joseph Hart, evoking a mythical quality as if used as augury like that of The Furies designating Joseph’s ill fated path for his sins of false witness and murder.
Three women of the village including Martina Sanders glide down the bayou on the ferry like The Furies.
(Anthony Perkins) plays Dennis Pitt, a mentally disturbed young man recently released from an institution, who tells a pretty All-American girl Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) that he’s a secret agent working for the CIA.
She’s thrilled to feed into Dennis’ fantasy world and that’s when all hell breaks loose and subterfuge Folie à deux and murder ensue, in this dark thriller from the 1960s. Co-starring Beverly Garlandas Mrs. Stepanek and John Randolph as Morton Azenauer
Directed by Noel Black and written by Stephen Geller based on his novel, and screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
“…Wait till you see what they did to his aunt – the night watchman – to her mother.”
Pete Morgan: “I picked up the whip and beat him till he wasn’t handsome anymore, till he was dead, finished.”
Written for the screen and directed by Delmer Daves(Dark Passage 1947) this is a tautly wound horror/thriller featuring one of my favorites, the gruff everyman Edgar G Robinson as Peter Morgan, a very ‘unbalanced’ guy.
Pete ( Edgar G Robinson) and sister Ellen Morgan ( Dame Judith Anderson) have raised pretty Meg ( Allene Roberts) as their own child after her parents ran off and abandon her as a baby.
Meg now a young woman gets her friend Nath (Lon McCallister) to come help out doing odd jobs on the farm because her father Pete has a wooden leg and is getting on in years.
One night, Nath decides to use a shortcut home through the woods, which enrages Pete who warns him to stay clear of the red house, for fear of the unspeakable horrors associated with the dilapidated old wreck.
But like all great horror thrillers, Meg and Nath ignore his warnings and start digging around anyway and of course, the two begin falling in love, which is not only a problem for Meg’s mysterious caretaker, but for Nath’s sexy girlfriend Tibby played by a very youngJulie London.
What is the dark secret of the red house, and what is deranged father Pete Morgan hiding after all these years?
Francois Truffaut named it as his favorite American film.
The film stars Tony Lo BiancoandShirley Stoleras Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck. Doris Roberts has a part playing Bunny. Also starring Mary Jane Higby as Janet Fay.
This is an intense, often grotesque film based on the true story of serial killers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who meet through a lonely-hearts correspondence club. Director Leonard Kastle creates a sickening atmosphere of acute sexual psychosis in The Honeymoon Killers , that forces you to feel repulsed by this pair’s Folie à deux.
Ray is a swarthy playboy, rough around the edges and a devious sociopath. Martha is ‘morbidly’ obese (and I use the term specifically tailored to her character), obsessive, paranoid and maniacally possessive of Ray.
The two concoct a dangerously horrific plot to lure lonely women into going out with Ray, until he proposes marriage. All the while pretending that Martha is his sister, a nurse. The plan is to con the women’s into turning over their entire savings, and then make them disappear. Neither Ray, nor Martha show any remorse of trace of humanity, within their claustrophobic narcissistic love affair. They are ruthless and brutal to no end.
The film is bleak, grimy and unashamed to show the ugliness of human nature. While it is unrelenting in it’s frankness, it’s oddly compelling to watch Lo Bianco and Stoler do their thing.
“One of the most bizarre episodes in the annals of American Crime.”
Directed by Will Cowen and Starring Carolyn Kearney (Molly Bancroft in Doktor Markeson episode of Thriller) as Jessica Burns, a young girl with psychic abilities who, like a dowser,
uncovers the ancient chest containing the severed head of Gideon Drew ( Robin Hughes), which has been buried for centuries on her aunt’s ranch. Once released from his entombment…
Gideon’s head wreaks havoc trying to be reunited with his evil body, as he used to be a 16th-century devil worshiper who Sir Francis Drake beheaded!
“Greed had made them unearth an evil that was centuries old!”
Like ‘Jan in the pan,’ it’s Gideon in the hatbox!
“The grave can’t hold it …nothing human can stop it!”
Charlton Heston plays Army doctor Robert Neville, a lone man living in post apocalyptic solitary urban confinement amidst a burned out Los Angeles, Foraging for supplies by day, and fending off a siege of mutated vampiric survivors by night.
Neville crusades to hold onto his humanity while struggling to create a cure for the plague that wiped out most of the human race.The film is pure 70s driven cautionary tale with a fantastic cast and some great nail biting scenes. One of my favorites from the decade!
Based on the novel ‘I Am Legend’ by Richard Matheson and directed by Boris Sagal (The man responsible for Rod Serling’s (TV series Pilot)"“ Night Gallery (1969) (segment “The Cemetery”) a favorite piece of television horror for me!
Anthony Zerbeplays Matthias the cult leader of the plague ridden remnants of civilization, who’s fanatical quest to conquer Neville and make him one of them is chilling.
The film also stars the wonderful Rosalind Cash as Lisa, Neville’s potential ‘Eve’ in the new garden of Eden he desperately tries to create, if he can perfect the anti-dote to the plague in time! Neville is framed as a Jesus figure at the end of the film.
Matheson’s story had been screened in the 1964 starring Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan. The Last Man on Earth is powerfully evocative and unnerving, and holds up as a great bit of visual story telling even today.
Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth based on Matheson’s I Am Legend
“Pray for the last man alive. Because he’s not alone.”
Released by A.I.P and directed by Gene Fowler Jr (I Married A Monster From Outer Space 1958), this fabulous bit of schlock brings you the ever tearful, keenly thoughtful, always Pa Ingalls in a very different light.
Michael Landon plays a rage filled, maladjusted teenager Tony Rivers, who is regressed back into an animalistic throwback, a drooling werewolf by Dr Alfred Brandon (Whit Bissell) who uses hypnotherapy for his evil experiment with this angry youth. ‘A scientist maddened by the mystery of the werewolf.’
The already volatile Tony starts attacking practicing gymnasts and classmates alike.
“a savage lust to kill”
When he’s not furry and foaming at the mouth he’s abusive to his girlfriend (Yvonne Lime),throws tantrums, is bitter, throws milk and beats up his friends.
Ida Lupino: Actress/Director – The Iron Maiden of Prison Noir
“State’s prison, all prisons look alike from outside, but inside each has a different character. In this one"¦ caged men"¦ separated only by a thick wall. From caged women"¦
The system is wrong but it goes on and on and on"¦”
Directed by Lewis Seller, and written Crane Wilbur, (He Walked By Night 1948, The Bat 1959, House of Wax 1953) with the screenplay and story by Jack DeWitt.
Ida Lupino plays Amelia van Zandt the sadistic borderline, psychotic Warden/Matron of a co-ed women’s prison. She is a total institutionalist, exerting strict regulations, with no gray area for sentimentalism. For van Zandt it’s about the cold hard road to rehabilitation… her way… the hard way.
Lupino has described herself as “the poor man’s Bette Davis.” Ida Lupino moved to Hollywood from England, after filming I Lived with You starring the beautiful Ivor Novello. (The Lodger 1927). She started to make some noise as the hard-edged dame in the 40s, starring in 2 powerful Noir films They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), both starring opposite one of my all-time favorites, Humphrey Bogart.
She starred in two other memorable films which are great contributions to classic Film Noir, Road House 1948 and On Dangerous Ground 1952. For more info about Ida Lupino, the actress, and how she got started as a prolific director of film and television you can read more about her here.
Lupino, while a uniquely beautiful woman, has a face that can convey heartlessness, a hollow shell of a woman, and a militant spinster. ‘The Iron Maiden’, is what I’ve dubbed Lupino for these two particular interchangeable roles.
Women’s Prison is swathed with an ensemble of various Noir Femmes as the rough and weathered inmates. Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, and Hugo Haas regular Cleo Moore.
There’s also the wonderful Juanita Moore,Vivian Marshall, Mae Clarke, Gertrude Micheal as Chief Matron Sturgess, and one of my favorites, Phyllis Thaxter as the ‘nice girl’ thrust into a ‘bad situation’ who almost loses her mind from the claustrophobic and oppressive iron grip van Zandt keeps on her and the rabid choke hold she keeps on the jugulars of the other female inmates.
And don’t let Thaxter’s role fool you, I’ve seen her play ruthless psychotics in her own right on Boris Karloff’s Thriller episode air date Nov. 6th, 1961Â The Last of The Sommervilles as the conniving sociopath Ursula Sommerville. Interesting connection…Ida Lupino not only wrote the script for the episode but directed it as well!
Thaxter is the cunning Ursula with Martita Hunt as the eccentric Celia Summerville.
Although a gritty Noir ‘women in prison film…Â could easily sway into the campy territory, Lewis Seller’sWomen’s Prison stays very steady on a course of lensing the social implications of a corrupt and brutal institution that extols credit for keeping the female riff-raff out of the community while perpetuating the hard line, and struggle that many of these women face on the outside. Beating them down, and objectifying them as sexless social misfits who need to be kept away from ‘men’ and out of a ‘decent’ society.
Amelia van Zandt is the hyper-exemplification of what can happen when too much power is given agency and allowed to culminate into a destructive force. van Zandt is the linchpin of brute force, and the submission required in order to control a group or perpetuate an ideal. The fact that she is female illustrates that it does not only have to be a patriarchal institution that can break a women’s spirit. It is here that elements of class and social capital come into focus and play a role in predetermining their fate.
Lupino’s character is similar to Hume Cronyn’s sadistic and unempathetic Capt. Munsey in Jule’s Dassin’s Brilliant Brute Force 1947:
Is that a lead pipe Captain Munsey or are you just REALLY happy to see me?
In a way, van Zandt is just another ‘Boogeyman‘ created by an institution that dehumanizes its individuals.
Women’s Prison illustrates what happens when absolute control is given to a person or persons and that control goes unchecked, allowing their private or misguided motivations, mental health, ability to lead, and quite simply the lack of understanding about the human equation to dictate the terms of the human condition in/of an isolated/insulated environment.
Mel Brooks‘ brilliant Gothic farce about the legend of Dr Frankenstein, with a humorous spin on it that only Brooks could do! I’m sure Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is smiling down upon Brooks and Wilder’s adaptation of her iconic contribution to literature, culture and film!
In the early 20th century, a Gorgon takes human form and terrorizes a small European village by turning its citizens to stone. This Gothic Hammer Horror of mythic proportions is directed by Terence Fisher and stars those British titans of terror Christopher Lee, as Prof. Karl Meister, Peter Cushingas Dr. Namaroff, and Barbara Shelley as Carla Hoffman.
