A Tigon horror-movie binge: notes from a Happy Halloween

Following in the wake of a Hammer binge I went on for a few months in 2022 and an Amicus one last year (my reviews of the films are here), this Halloween I watched all the British horror films produced and distributed by Tigon British Film Productions. For the record, a tigon is an animal that was sired by both (take a guess) a lion and a tiger.

The first two films I watched would make a neat double bill called “Boris’s waning years.” The Sorcerers (1967) was the beginning of the final, “sad” period in Boris’s career — Targets is the best of this bunch, but in every one of his eight last onscreen films (including a quartet of bizarre Mexican flicks), he’s present for a limited amount of screen time. Sorcerers was clearly scripted in a "cloistered" fashion because Boris wasn’t very mobile in his last years. (He suffered from very bad arthritis.)

Thus, he’s a bearded, low-rent hypnotist/scientist who decides to go for broke and recruit a “hip” young man (he goes to discotheques!) to be a subject for his hypnosis machine. Boris and his surprisingly malevolent old wife (Catherine Lacey) end up controlling the boy, with the wife making him commit bigger and bigger crimes. Thus, both Boris and Lacey are almost always in the dining room of their apartment (except for an early moment at a local store and the hypnotism-machine scene, in which a lotta psychedelic colors are seen playing across the young man’s face).

As always, Boris took his work very seriously, and so he gives more to the film than the scripters and director (who one year later made the sublime Witchfinder General) actually did.

Boris is more of a guest star in The Crimson Cult (1968, aka Curse of the Crimson Altar; Tigon films often had diff names for diff countries), which finds an antiques dealer searching for his missing brother, whom we see selling his soul to witch queen Barbara Steele in the opening “dream” sequence (but it’s not a dream!). That entertaining opening scene is shortly followed by an all-out “young person’s orgy,” in which lots of “wild” things are seen (but everyone remains clothed in one way or another). The rest of the film is the classic setup of the protagonist searching for a missing person in a “climate ruled by evil.” (Derived in this case from the Lovecraft story “Dreams in the Witch House.”)

In this case, that’s embodied by Christopher Lee (who, like Karloff, took his work very seriously and is seen giving a solid performance despite wearing an awful fake mustache). Boris appears in a wheelchair in all his scenes here, as an expert on witchcraft — the big twist is that he is *not* in league with the witchcraft brigade in town. The ending indicates that Lee was in fact operating pretty much on his own in terms of evil AND he may not just be a descendant of Steele’s character but might actually *be* her!

Barbara Steele, in all her elegant villainy.

The problem with Cult is, of course, that the two crazy sequences toward the beginning of the film “haunt” the rest of it and the return to a normal who-is-a-witch-and-who-isn’t plot isn’t at all as exciting as a Satanic ceremony attended by a woman wearing a cowl and pasties who’s whipping another babe, a man holding a goat by a leash, and a muscleman wielding a branding iron, presided over by Barbara Steele (speaking in an echoed voice and sporting green makeup and a horned headdress, above).

The measure of a great horror actor is how much he/she commits to the part. Peter Cushing was one of those who always took his work very seriously onscreen, no matter how ridiculous the film was. Case in point: The Blood Beast Terror (1968), a pic in which he plays a 19th-century police detective investigating a series of murders in which the victims were drained of their blood.

The moth monster in Blood Beast Terror.

The movie kinda plods along with all these discussions of certain insects (and birds — that was a dead end) and finally the "Terror" that has been murdering people is revealed to be... a woman who is actually a killer human-sized moth in "pretty daughter of scientist" drag! The monster is ridiculous looking (see pic above) and the film kinda plods along for much of its length (except for one oddball sequence where the scientist for some reason is entertained by his students putting on a Frankenstein play, which is more engaging than the film proper).

Cushing reportedly later cited it as his worst film (and that's going some -- he was a game old gent, but he made some real stinkers). This is reflected in the film's last lines when a bobby says to him, "They'll never believe this back at the Yard" and Peter responds, "They'll never believe it anywhere!" True, very true, Mr. C.

One of the two masterworks that Tigon made, The Witchfinder General (1968, aka The Conqueror Worm in the U.S, replete with Price reading the poem) finds Vincent Price giving one of his most impressive performances as an out-and-out villain, the real-life “witchfinder” Matthew Hopkins (who reportedly gave himself the “general” title). The film is an incredible work, because it was made on a schlock-level budget, with Tigon getting extra $ from American International Pictures (which initially considered it a tax write-off, but then was surprised to see how good it looked given the money spent).

Vincent Price at work in Witchfinder.

Price’s character goes around certain regions of England persecuting “witches” (read: anyone that anyone else has a problem with) by methods of interrogation, torture, and ultimately hanging. (He earned money for each person hanged.) The film does have its thoroughly good characters, namely a Roundhead soldier and his lady love, who is the niece of a priest that Price tortures and kills; the soldier’s pursuit of Price and his sidekick is the main thrust of the plot (because the girl slept with Price a few times to try to save her uncle and it did no good — but took away her maidenhead!)

The sleazy U.S.
poster for
Witchfinder General.

The reasons the film remains such a landmark in British film is because it not only showed what could be done with a lower budget but because it’s a “horror film” that has no hint of the supernatural in it. The horror is entirely man-made, constructed of the evil deeds that a preening, immoral man could commit under the label of “God’s work” (fully sanctioned by higher authorities). In this regard it is similar to Ken Russell’s The Devils, but reportedly Unkle Ken thought Witchfinder one of the worst films he’d ever seen “and the most nauseous.” (And that’s gotta be a recommendation!)

The film’s ultimate statement about the nature of man is found in the fact that the soldier’s comrades (the Roundheads serving under Cromwell, who is depicted here, warts and all) are also seen as brutal thugs. The lovers (and the victims of Hopkins’ tortures) are the only sympathetic characters in the film, and Price was only on a few occasions at this level of nastiness. Vinnie supposedly had major blow-ups with director Michael Reeves (who sadly died after this film at only 25, of a problem with a sleeping drug), but he later admitted that the film contained “one of the best performances I’ve ever given.”

The kind of deadpan fantasy that has been mocked mercilessly in things like “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” The Body Stealers (1969) is a tedious Tigon flick that has a nominally intriguing premise — parachuting paratroopers are disappearing in mid-air! — and then spins a dire tale about the aliens who have kidnapped Britain’s finest flyers (who have also been trained to go into outer space — a detail that is planted early on and which doesn’t get referenced again until the very end of the pic).

Poor George Sanders and Maurice Evans are the biggest names in this picture (Sean’s brother Neil Connery is the next-biggest, to give you an example), and boy, there are *reams* of dialogue that the performers have to recite before we even get the “thrill” of the end revelation about the aliens (who take the form of Maurice Evans and a beach-babe whom our hero falls for — perhaps a rip from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Tigon’s title clearly was making reference to).

You’ve got to take the bad with the good in a binge of the productions from a studio that was really cranking ’em out between 1967 and 1972. (Otherwise, Tigon distributed films from ’64 to ’83.) Certainly, The Haunted House of Horror (1969, aka Horror House) is a stinker from the studio, a fun time-capsule but a crappy horror flick. The plot finds a group of twentysomethings getting bored at a swinging party and so they decide to go to a haunted house and have a séance. (Sure, what else ya got?) The romantic entanglements of one trio in the group are insipid but worse are the terror scenes in the haunted house.

Frankie, fresh from
the land of beach blankets.

The big “name” in the cast is Frankie Avalon, who tries gamely to act like the “responsible one” in the group but it does seem like he beamed in from another planet (1963). One unpredictable thing takes place two minutes before the film ends, but that’s 88 minutes in, so on the whole, what one ends up checking out more than the plot and acting are the pop posters on the apartment walls: Zappa, Buster Keaton, Bardot, Bonnie Parker, the Stones, Che, and so forth.

Much more intriguing is The Beast in the Cellar (1971), which has a “monstrous” serial killing plot superimposed on a far more interesting, nearly theatrical in nature (all set within one house), tale of two senior citizen sisters (Dame Flora Robson and Beryl Reid) who have kept a secret for three decades walled inside their basement.

Beryl Reid threatened by the "Beast."

It’s intriguing to see a tale of two old sisters that is not riffing off of the much-copied Henry Farrell school of “hagsploitation” (Baby Jane being the premier example); it’s even better when the drama is acted out by Robson and Reid, who deliver the goods in terms of making the characters multi-dimensional (sad yet resolute, crazy yet perfectly sound in their own bizarre logic).

Reid particularly skillfully handles a long monologue that explains the story behind the titular “beast,” which is simply the story of a family that didn’t want its young man to go off to war. Here there are no big surprises in terms of the murder plotline, but one feels something very rare in terms of these horror quickies — the feeling of having seen a top-notch bit of acting.

The second of the two Tigon masterworks, Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971, aka Satan’s Skin) goes its predecessor (The Witchfinder General) one better by having no sympathetic leads. (Two young lovers appear at the beginning here, and the young woman is soon taken off to Bedlam, sporting a Satanic claw-hand!)

Blood on Satan's Claw.

The storyline follows an outbreak in witchcraft in an 18th-century small town, which seems to primarily affect the town’s children and teens. Like Witchfinder, it is a perfect lesson in how to make a period piece on a low budget — director Piers Haggard fashions some very memorable imagery (he cited Fifties-era Bergman as an influence), while offering a great sense of atmosphere to ratchet up the tension.

The film is considered a seminal work of folk horror, and that it is, in that it offers a city/country opposition. (The town doctor tells a visiting judge, “You come from the city. You cannot know the ways of the country.”) It also shows the brutality of both sides in this equation, much like The Wicker Man. It was badly reviewed and was a box-office dud on first release, but over the years it has become a cult classic and has been stolen from quite often. It has an often sublime nastiness.

Linda Hayden as the teenaged witch priestess.

The Fiend (1972, aka Beware My Brethren) begins with the inimitable Patrick Magee (who perfectly incarnated characters who trod the razor’s edge of sanity) playing an evangelical minister lecturing a chapel full of his followers. A pop-gospel musical number then follows (“Wash Me in His Blood”) — we see a boy being baptized in a wading pool in a chapel intercut with a woman being stalked, stripped, and drowned. It’s hard to follow an utterly crazy opening like that, but this film keeps up the luridness and the critique of the monetary side of Xtianity. 

The plot follows a Mama’s Boy and his Mama, both of whom are members of the minister’s cult (called “the Brethren” and run by a preacher in Arizona!); the chapel also happens to be in one room of their house. The son is a security guard who is the titular fiend who murders women and makes audio recording of the moments leading up to their deaths and then plays them downstairs when it looks like he’s readying for a bloody good wank (but British films of this period couldn’t go that far, so we just see him visibly excited listening to the tapes).

Patrick Magee in all his anguished glory.

The trio of leads carry the film on their back and do a great job: Tony Beckley is very creepy as the killer; Ann Todd is also very creepy as his mom (who is struggling with her love for her adult son but also for pretty ladies she sees in the chapel); and Magee, as always, is just terrific as the seething minister. [This film was distributed by Tigon but was independently made.]

As a production company, Tigon was best known for its horror movies, but as a distributor it handled a lot of sexploitation titles. Virgin Witch (1972) is a combination of both genres and has a surprising amount of horror plotting, thanks to its scripter (whose main career lay at the time in writing the prime time ITV soap that she cocreated, "Crossroads"). The initial plot is pure sex-pic, as two sisters who want to be models (played by real-life sisters Ann and Vicki Michelle) are preyed upon by the lesbian head of a modeling agency. (At one point the following is said about her by a gent: “She’s as les as they come!”)

The sisters go on a photo shoot at a country house and quickly find (in a rather blatant admission – no mysteries here!) that the people in the house and the nearby area are all in a coven of witches. The film ends up becoming a battle of wills between the more severe of the two sisters and the modeling agent, who is also the high priestess of the coven. The film is not exceptional in any way, but it does deliver on its nudity (and some simulated sex) and Satanic sabbath requirements (not just one, but two sabbath scenes).

A big name in low-budget British horror, Pete Walker made his full transition into horror from sexploitation with The Flesh and Blood Show (1972, distributed by Tigon; independently produced). Here the producer-director offers up a tale that sits as a kind of midpoint between Agatha Christie’s whodunits and the “young people are murdered one by one” trope that became standard stuff for the Friday the 13th series.

The plot involves a troupe of young performers who venture to a seaside town to rehearse an extremely dubious stage show to be called “The Flesh and Blood Show.” A few of them are killed in succession, and one of the seeming red herring characters is indeed revealed to be the killer.

The only “name” in the cast is Robin Askwith, the very busy actor who is best known for starring in the “Confession of a...” sex-comedy series. The film is neither great nor terrible, although it is about 15 minutes too long. The oddest element thrown in is that the flashback that explains the murderer’s motivation is in b&w and was shown in 3-D at the time of the film’s release.

One of the more curious hybrids among the Tigon productions is Doomwatch (1972), a film derived from a BBC series (1970-72) that had an environmental take on the sci-fi and thriller genres. The film definitely has a folk horror premise, in which a doctor from the “Doomwatch team” (a government org investigating environmental threats) played by Ian Bannen comes to a small island to investigate a weird outbreak among the villagers living there. Thus, the first half of the film operates on the level of folk horror, with Bannen being shunned by the villagers who have lived there for generations. Many of the villagers are suffering from various stages of acromegaly and violent tempers (that result in murders and suicides).

The acromegaly-afflicted villagers
in Doomwatch.

As the film proceeds Bannen’s character is informed by his superiors (who included poor old George Sanders again, playing an admiral) that the cause of the problem is radioactive waste poisoning the fish the villagers are catching and eating. The second half of the film consists of Bannen getting more and more outraged and a final storming of a house to get him ends with one of the stricken villagers whimpering — quite the reverse of Blood on Satan’s Claw and other folk horror classics.

Overall, the film has as many “tough cop crime show” moments as it does horror and thriller ones, including a bunch of tedious moments where Bannen comes back to London and stands in an office, learning about the cause of the problem. The appearance of the villagers is alarming, but that’s more about connecting to the viewer’s natural fear of decay (or more simply, aging) than anything truly horrific.

The last horror film produced by Tigon, The Exorcism of Hugh (1972, aka Neither the Sea nor the Sand), is a “love knows no boundaries” drama that only becomes horrific in the last 20 minutes (and even then is still more of a romance than a terror flick). The plot concerns a married woman who falls madly in love with a man who lives with his brother on the island of Jersey.

The couple fly to Scotland, where the man dies — but then reappears to the woman, unable to speak or stop staring at her. She is so thrilled to have her lover back that she stays with him on the trip back to Jersey. His brother tries to get him to an exorcist but is killed on the car ride there. The final scenes have the heroine recognizing that her beau truly is dead and at first staying away from him, until she decides that she wants to spend eternity with him, by walking into the sea.

The heroine feels her lover's
crumbling caress in Exorcism of Hugh.

Again, the film is structured more as an “eternal romance” than it is a horror thriller (despite its last segment). For those interested in this kind of plot, it was done to a finer turn on the second season episode of “Black Mirror” called “Be Right Back.”

There is no better way to end this survey of Tigon’s horror movies than to review the very last horror movie that Tigon distributed, especially since it featured the two greatest British horror stars of the period. Post-1973 the studio served as distributors primarily for sexploitation fare, with the exception of oddities like the Spike Milligan comedy The Great McGonagall (1974) and the Clash film Rude Boy (1980).

Cushing tries to sell
threadbare horror,
and succeeds.

The last Tigon horror title was The Creeping Flesh (1973) starring none other than Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. (With Lee receiving title billing, even though Cushing is in far more of the film.) The film is a lot of fun and is remarkably like various Hammer Amicus projects that Lee and Cushing worked on, right down to the fact that, when the film’s first director left the project, old Hammer/Amicus vet Freddie Francis took over.

The plot is utterly ridiculous but goes back to the many of the tropes of the great “mad scientist” monster pics of the Thirties and Forties, in which a doctor starts off with a humanitarian motive and then all goes awry when his creation threatens mankind. In this case, Cushing is the doctor who is telling the tale in front of a bright white wall in a room. (Those who watched the recent “Twin Peaks” reboot will remember this white-wall notion being present in Sherilyn Fenn’s closing scenes.)

Cushing tells us how he found an oversized skeleton in New Guinea that was a kind of deity to the people of that area, a monster whose skin would evolve during rainstorms and then introduce evil into the world. Cushing takes the blood from the skin that develops on the skeleton and then makes a serum including it. He decides for some unfathomable reason to inject the serum into his beloved daughter (who is having a freakout over finding out that he hid from her the fact that her mother was in asylum for decades — an asylum run by Lee!).

Thus, the film includes not one but two monsters (and a super-strong escaped mental patient who serves as a red herring): both Cushing’s daughter, who becomes both feverishly slutty and violent, and the skeleton, which by the end of the film (during a rain storm!) develops a full covering of skin (and then wears a cloak it found somewhere). The denouement can be figured out quite easily from the opening scene with its bright white backdrop, but there is still much fun to be had from the proceedings, especially when Cushing is being anguished (which is basically for the whole picture) or Lee is being mean (ditto).

Horror movies lost ground in the mid-Seventies, and so the British horror studios simply stopped producing them and started making and distributing other fare. Although Tigon’s filmography as a whole doesn’t hold a candle the productions of Hammer and Amicus, there are still the two folk horror masterworks and some pleasant surprises in other films, most especially some great bits of casting, from Karloff to Beryl Reid, Patrick Magee, and certainly Lee and Cushing.

Note: The above films can all be found on DVD/Blu-ray and in very watchable condition on the Ok.ru site.

The Insidious Doctor: Fu Manchu in the media (part two of 2)

Now onto the feature films and other media depictions of the Insidious One. Comic books will be left out (although you can read the Wally Wood-drawn “Mask of Fu Manchu” comic here), as well as live productions, and obscure variations and pastiches on the characters. The key to these films, simply put, is the amount of “Fu content” they contain.

As with Golden Age Hollywood movies featuring great comedians and — the most obvious — gangster and monster movies, these items rise and fall based on how much time that Fu is center stage. The longer he is offscreen, the more insufferable the film or show is.

The first films made from the Fu Manchu novels were two series of silent cliffhangers made in England. These films (as with the later U.S. radio series) were note-for-note adaptations of the books, which initially were compilations of stories Rohmer wrote for magazines. It should be noted that the Fu Manchu films basically reprise incidents and situations found in the first six or so novels; the U.S. radio series was one of the few instances where three more of the novels were adapted. While the Republic serial was named for one of the later novels, it reached back to situations found in earlier books.

The second serial, The Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1924), is not readily found on the Internet, but The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1923) is present in its entirety. Directed by A.E. Coleby, the serial moves much slower than the gold standard of silent serials, which are surely those directed by Louis Feuillade and German items like The Spiders by Fritz Lang.

Mystery established the pattern that one will encounter in all the subsequent Fu films, where one desperately wants to fast-forward through the scenes that don’t feature Fu or his colleagues in crime. Nayland Smith, Petrie, and the other good guys do chase after Fu, but they also spend an inordinate amount of time talking in rooms. These scenes are lethal, whether they’re in a 1920s serial or a 1960s adventure pic.

This series also starts the pattern that would continue through all the Fu movies and appearances in other media, in which a white actor plays the Insidious Doctor. Here it’s an Irishman named H. Agar Lyons, who curiously isn’t made up as an Asian. He is a thin, menacing-looking fellow with a hawk nose who occasionally is seen lounging around in a silk “Oriental” outfit but is most often seen in a suit with a cape, a hat, and spats. (He most definitely was the only spat-wearing Fu.)

Coleby also gave up on trying to make his Arabic and Eurasian female characters look Asian — they are simply white actresses dressed in flamboyant outfits with frizzy hair. (Did one assume a frizzy-haired woman looked “foreign” in 1920s England?)

The one redeeming aspect in Mystery is the recreation of the tortures described in the books, from whipping to “the Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom” (in which the victim is put in a wire cage with partitions, through which rats come and gnaw on different body parts). The most memorable scene for this viewer was a dream sequence in which Petrie dreams of being Fu’s slave. He and three other scientists mix strange potions in chains under the watchful eyes of Fu, while another slave-scientist is being flogged by a henchman.

Like the later TV series, Mystery has no cliffhangers — it is composed of 15 short, self-contained films that have conclusive finales. This robs the serial of a lot of its power and makes it best seen in doses of 2–3 episodes at a time and no more. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

Fu was next played by Warner Oland, the Swede who excelled in “yellow face” roles (including his signature character, Charlie Chan), in a trio of pre-code features. The first two of the films, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930), are flat-out dull, as the scripters crafted a prim and proper script, consisting of too much talking in rooms (making the pictures seems like poorly crafted stage plays); one of the incessant talkers is the later TV  “Commissioner Gordon,” Neil Hamilton. The torture aspect of Fu’s activities is downplayed, since it wouldn't involve talking.

And far, far worse was the fact that the scripters decided Fu needed a reason to be a world-conqueror. In this and the subsequent two films starring Oland, Fu carries out his dastardly plots because his wife and son had been killed in the Boxer Rebellion!

 

The only truly watchable entry in the Paramount pre-code trilogy is Daughter of the Dragon (1931). The film is quite unique, in that Fu Manchu dies onscreen (only to return for select moments as a specter) and then the leading criminal is his daughter, Ling Moy, played by Anna May Wong. She is a hesitant crime lord, who is very much in love with one of the tedious British characters. The script is as leaden as in the two preceding films, but the notion of a woman supervillain is enough to relieve some of the tedium. (And it was made three years before the Dragon Lady debuted in “Terry and the Pirates.”)

Wong later regretting taking the role, saying in 1933, “Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain — murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?”

The most interesting scenes find Ling Moy talking to a Chinese police detective, played by Sessue Hayakawa. Wong adopts a more formal way of speaking here, so her American accent sounds vaguely like the British accents heard in the other scenes. This clashes with Hayakawa’s thick Japanese accent, giving a particularly weird tone to the usual leaden dialogue found in these films.

 

While this piece was being assembled (read: yrs truly was in the midst of a Fu binge) it was announced that a box set of the five Fu films starring Christopher Lee was being released around Halloween. Those films are reviewed below — but suffice it to say that one would have to be a massive fan of Christopher Lee to see four of those films more than once. Not so with the next two entries, which are without question the best of all the FM features.

The first of those two is inarguably the best and most outlandish of the Fu movies, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), starring a post-Frankenstein (1931) Boris Karloff. Mask was made by the very classy MGM with an A-budget and eye-catching images by director Charles Brabin and cinematographer Tony Gaudio (The Adventures of Robin Hood).

The film captures the thrilling, pulpy, and deviant aspects of Rohmer’s work. And yes, it puts forth both the inherent racism in the Yellow Peril scenario and the fact that any viewer worth his/her salt will enjoy Fu’s violence and destruction and find the British colonialist intolerably smug and worthy of their eventual destruction. Cue the line restored to the film in recent decades: “Kill the white man and take his woman!”

Karloff’s reputation has meant that the film was categorized as horror — and it shares with the great Universal monster movies of the early ’30s a mad scientist motif, as here Fu has the same kind of sizzling, spark-flinging machinery as Dr. Frankenstein. (And created by the same man, Kenneth Strickfadden.)

A cut scene of a "snake man."

The basic parameters of the storyline qualify it as pulp action-adventure, but there is also the standard parlor-mystery level and a pre-noir look at an underworld. And as for Asian “exotica,” the director who set the standard was von Sternberg, and Mask is the closest approximation to a thriller directed by him.

Karloff was, hands down, the best actor to play Fu, and thus his performance here is exceptional. His FM isn't any old supervillain, he is the most malevolent and fearsome villain to ever be set loose on colonialist dullards. He emphasizes the sadistic nature of the character and exhibits glee when torturing the Brits. It’s hard to pick a favorite of these scenes, but one in which British Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant) is placed beneath a bell in order to be rendered both deaf and insane is a sure favorite.

The 1994 book Hollywood Cauldron by Gregory William Mank contains a chapter about Mask with intriguing quotes from Karloff, none of which are sourced. Mank apparently did a very sizeable amount of research for this tome, but several of the quotes in the book are unsourced; as he thinks Freaks and Mask are both rather wretched, laughable films, he’s therefore to be put in the “Caveat lector” category. Nevertheless, his unsourced quotes from Boris include the fact that there was no finished script when shooting began on the film.

Karloff also complained about the “bad makeup” and the fact that he would be given full script pages the day of shooting that contained long speeches written in “impeccable English,” then told that other speeches in pidgin English had been substituted: “They had five writers on it, and this was happening all through the film. Some scenes were written in beautiful Oxford English, others were written in —  God knows what!”

The other standout performance is Myrna Loy as Fu’s daughter Fah Lo See. As in every depiction of the characters, she suffers lovesickness over one of the British heroes, but the most surprising scene —  which makes the film a true pre-code work (and leagues livelier than the Warner Oland trilogy) — is the moment where she exhibits a kinky intensity as hero Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett) is being whipped in front of her.

Enter the Hollywood Cauldron book again. Here, Loy is quoted from her memoir Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming (1987) as saying that she disliked the script and told producer Hunt Stromberg that the character was “a sadistic sex maniac.” She declared that her complaints resulted in the “character’s worst excesses being toned down.”  She also stated that “Boris and I brought some feeling and humor to those comic book characters. Boris was a fine actor, a professional who never condescended to his often unworthy material.”

Mask was the only time the proper balance was struck between the utterly crazy and staid aspects of Rohmer’s writing in a movie. This is reflected in the torture scenes, which are paced wonderfully and shot like incidents in a cliffhanging serial.

One wishes there had been other Karloff Fu films (he made five Mr. Wong films, after all!), but the U.S. State Department stepped in and asked MGM not to revive the character, as American-Chinese relations would be damaged. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

The next incarnation of the Insidious One was the U.S. radio show The Shadows of Fu Manchu (1939). The show featured recreations of scenes from the first nine novels and was quite an odd item, since each episode is only 15 minutes long, and the opening and closing were to be announced live on whatever station aired the show. So, the copies that we have are “clean” versions that have long intro and outro bumpers of music.

The best-known performer was later Lucille Ball cohort Gale Gordon as Dr. Petrie. He and the other cast members recited bushels of dialogue that came straight from the novels, with expository dialogue added in. At least — unlike the silent serial and later, horrible TV series — the Shadow radio series (which clearly wanted to be mixed up title-wise with the actual Shadow program) had every episode end with a cliffhanger. [Note: Two earlier Fu radio shows — one American, one British — are lost to the ages.]

 

The year after the radio show, the serial Drums of Fu Manchu (1940) was released. Drums is right below Mask as one of the most entertaining Fu movies — it’s a great example of the top-notch serials made at Republic, and although scripted in the classic serial mode (in which every single action seems pointed toward that week’s cliffhanger), it’s one of the few consistently exciting recreations of Rohmer’s “race against time” writing.

Henry Brandon was no Karloff, but his portrayal of Fu is diabolical and threatening-yet-clever; thus he is the most interesting character in the serial. Although Rohmer made a point about noting that Fu’s fluent English was “both sibilant and guttural,” Brandon adopts the “sneering villain” voice that was often used on radio shows and was later immortalized by Richard O’Brien in his nasal performance as Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Physically, Riff may look like a mad scientist’s assistant, but he speaks like a consummate supervillain.)

Brandon is quoted from a 1986 interview with author Gregory William Mank in Hollywood Cauldron about the film: “… I’d go to a theater nearby here in Hollywood, where they showed it, and sit among the kids (they never recognized me) — and I loved their reactions. Within two or three episodes, they were on my side! It was because I was brighter than the others, and the kids went for intelligence, whether it was bad or good.”

“But the PTAs — they didn’t like it at all, because the kids would wet their beds after seeing it. And the Chinese government raised plenty of hell! And that’s childish, because I consider Fu Manchu a fairy tale character — it’s not to be taken seriously for God’s sake!” [Mank, p. 83]

Those viewers rooting against Nayland Smith will be happy to see him nearly turned into a lobotomized dacoit by Fu. “Dacoit” being the most-used phrase in Fu movies and novels — it refers to Indian and Burmese criminals, but in this usage simply means Fu’s henchmen. And the titular drums are a terrific gimmick — at the end of every chapter, the drumbeats come on the soundtrack, signaling doom for the heroes.

As happened with Mask, sequels to the serial were planned, but the U.S. government requested that no further Fu adventures be filmed, as the Chinese were our ally at this time in the fight against Japan.

 

The 1956 TV show The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu (1956) was made by Republic’s TV arm (Hollywood Television Service), but it’s the complete opposite of Drums — a dull, thrill-less “action” series. The show is dreary and — insult of insults — it’s the most easily found of the Fu movies, since it fell into the public domain. (An earlier TV pilot starring John Carradine as Fu (!) has survived but is under lock and key.)

Most inexcusable is Glen Gordon’s weirdly lazy turn as Fu. Speaking… slowly… to… approximate… an “honorable Chinese” accent, Gordon’s portrayal is the most racist (if such a thing is possible) of all portrayals of FM. His mustache looks pasted on, his intensity is nil, and the accent is just beyond shameful.

Two episodes rise above the rest — one where Fu allies with a gangster (the great character actor Ted de Corsia) and another that is a clear foreshadowing of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, in which Fu kidnaps a plastic surgeon to get an unnamed “dead” dictator a new identity. And then from an HQ on a remote island, Hitler (yes, it’s him) tries to take over the world, for good this time. But he’s defeated within the 26-minute running time (the closing credits for the whole series find Fu losing a metaphorical chess game with Nayland Smith), and a bizarre and amusing alliance is just tossed away in an episode of an otherwise forgettable TV series.

 

The star of the five 1960s Fu Manchu films produced by Harry Alan Towers, the great Christopher Lee, once said that only the first of his Fu features was worth making — he was quite right. Because if you thought the Lee/Dracula films got weaker and weaker as time went on, those pictures seem like cinematic landmarks compared to the second through fifth Lee/Fu movies.

The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) provides the best vision of Fu’s manic desire to conquer the world; it is the first time we see many dead bodies on display. In one scene, Fu poisons an entire town and the British lawmen see the results — streets with bodies strewn about. So this time out Fu really does seem like a violent threat, not just a transient madman who kills a few select victims.

Lee is indeed at his best here, since he took all his roles (no matter how thin or awful they could be) very seriously and he plays Fu with true conviction. The other cast member who impresses is Tsai Chin, who plays Fu’s daughter Lin Tang. She occupies a significant position in these films, because she was the first and only Asian woman to play that role and the only Asian besides Anna May Wong to play a starring role in a Fu film. She was also one of only two regulars in the Lee/Fu movies. (The other was Howard Marion-Crawford as Dr. Petrie.)

One of the odder developments, though, was that even as it became commonplace to see more sex and violence in British exploitation, there was still a limit in the Fu films. This is clear where when Lin Tang wants to whip a man (taking direct action, as opposed to Myrna Loy’s character, who just liked to watch) and is prevented by her spoilsport father.

Face is without question a very good Fu feature. All that followed was dross, and embarrassingly bad dross at that. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) show the James Bond influence. It’s a “slave chick” movie (paging Doctor Tongue and Hugo, from “SCTV”) and has some enjoyably lurid moments, but even with a large group of Fu’s female slaves on prominent display, it’s still a pale imitation of Face. Although the wonderful Burt Kwouk does show up as a henchman. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967) should work for a few reasons, including the fact that it was partially shot in Hong Kong and has a fairly decent (if familiar) plot twist, in which a Fu henchman is given plastic surgery to look like Nayland Smith (which none of his friends notices, naturally enough, although his skin is gray and his eyes are dead).

By this, the third Lee/Fu outing, there was no disguising that nearly everyone involved was going through the motions.  This would reach epic proportions in the last two Lee/Fu disasters. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

Shot in Spain and Brazil, The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) is a cut-and-paste creation by that most beloved yet least talented of cult favorite filmmakers, Jess Franco. Franco accomplished in film after film the trick of making utterly unsexy exploitation. (How do you fuck up a women’s prison picture? Watch Jess’s entries for the answer.) Here he made a film about Brazilian bandits that he seemingly was going to make anyway and just stuck Fu Manchu into it when he got the gig.

The plot revolves around the aforementioned bandits and a “kiss of death” that Fu’s slave women are ordered to give select victims. The film contains variations on scenes from Face and Brides, and, again, is a remarkably unsexy and un-thrilling specimen.

By this point, Lee was clearly doing his scenes in a very short span of time. (Perhaps a few days, if not a few hours.) Franco’s pacing will seem mercilessly slow to any viewer not in Franco’s cult (where an occasional psychedelic color scheme is greeted as a “style” of filmmaking). (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) was the last serious Fu movie, and it is perhaps the worst ever, plain and simple. This time out Franco created a film about Turkish intrigue that barely has Fu Manchu in it at all. And when Lee (whose shooting schedule seems to have been a scant few hours, if not a few minutes) is onscreen, he looks as bored as the viewer.

Moving at a glacial pace, Castle is a classic cut-and-paste Franco effort. (And, natch, “effort” is the perfect noun to go with Franco’s name.) Much fun has been poked at the fact that Franco needed footage of a ship sinking, so he simply used scenes from A Night to Remember (1958), but that is somewhat amusing. There are other scenes in Castle that are sheer torture – not in the violent FM sense, but as an example of a filmmaker who had no real idea of what would come next, nor did he care.

This is the film that did what Asian-Americans had wanted to do for decades — it killed off Fu Manchu. (A later 1986 film by Jess Franco called Esclavas del Crimen is an unauthorized adventure of the daughter of Fu Manchu, but when dealing with Jess Franco, enough is more than enough.) (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

A tangential oddity that (sorta) takes place in the ’70s but was made in 1990: Spanish horror star Paul Naschy starred as Fu in “La hija de Fu Manchú ’72,” a short film coproduced by Spanish television. The short was seemingly intended as both a spoof and a tribute to the Fu Manchu mythos, with Naschy appearing as Fu himself, wearing a patently phony mustache.

Nayland Smith and Fu’s daughter are center stage here as well, and a woman who is abducted by Fu’s daughter and whipped onscreen by a henchman. The visuals are tongue-in-cheek and evoke comic book panels and what appear to be much-beloved memories of Mask and the Lee/Fu movies (as well as Bruce Lee movies). The title sequence is a no-budget send-up of James Bond title sequences.

 

The very last Fu Manchu feature, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), was also Peter Sellers’ last film, and it seemed like an atrocity when it was released after Sellers’ death (and his superbly quiet turn in Being There). Viewed through a 2020 lens, it’s just a misconceived and badly paced comedy.

Looking very feeble and unhealthy, Sellers plays both Fu and Nayland Smith. He is surrounded by a very talented cast, including Sid Caesar (who gets nothing to do), Helen Mirren (in her sexpot guise), and the aforementioned Burt Kwouk (who does a cameo with Sellers asking if he’s seen him somewhere before).

There are quite a few Seventies and Eighties comedies that had the terrible pacing of Fiendish Plot (that type of misconceived, patently bad vehicle picture became the specialty of SNL alums). But one can see where Sellers tried his hand at adding to the proceedings, with odd surreal gags that his Goon partner and friend, the genius madman Spike Milligan, could have scripted to a fine turn (including a very Goon-like flying house).

As it stands, the picture was an odd and sad end to Sellers’ career and an equally odd finale to the Fu saga on film. (Further novels were written after Rohmer’s death in 1959, but never sold as well as his initial books in the series had.) (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)

 

A suggestion in closing, for those who are new to the character: watch Mask of Fu Manchu first and if you enjoy it, see Drums or Face. After that, you’re on your own, and probably best off reading the books.

And since I’d rather be washed ashore on a desert island with only Jess Franco movies to watch than close out this piece with Nicolas Cage playing Fu in a fake trailer that was part of the “Grindhouse” project, I will leave you with an odder and most definitely funnier vision of Fu, which spawned Sellers’ revelation in Fiendish Plot that Fu’s first name was Fred: the opening of the Goon Show episode that introduced the character “Fred Fu Manchu,” the best bamboo saxophonist in the world.

This is an unusual version of the episode that was part of the Telegoons TV show (1963-64), where old episodes were performed with puppets on television. The three principals returned to redo the episodes without a studio audience.

 

Sources: 

— The Page of Fu Manchu. Editors: Dr. Lawrence Knapp and Dr. R. E. Briney. 1997–2009.

— Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer, Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, 1972, Bowling Green University Popular Press. 

— Hollywood Cauldron, Gregory William Mank, McFarland and Company, 1994. 

— “The Word of Fu Manchu,” William Patrick Maynard, Blood ’n’ Thunder, Nos. 36-37, winter-spring 2013, pp. 102–113. 

— “Fu Manchu and China: Was the 'yellow peril incarnate' really appallingly racist?” Phil Baker, The Independent, Oct. 20, 2015.

— “Fantastic Elements in the Works of Sax Rohmer.” Colombo & Company website, Nov. 2010–Sep. 2012

Some Notes on Pre-code Horror (Part 1 of three)

Halloween is the single finest holiday in the calendar, mostly because it has no hard-and-fast rules. You can celebrate it any want you want. It’s a DIY holiday that encompasses any behavior that you like — what better time to binge on vintage horror movies, from the era when talkies were a new art form and basically anything could happen onscreen? Herewith, the results of a very, very entertaining binge.

The best-remembered, most-revived monster movies made during the pre-code era were made by Universal. Those titles appear in this piece — in fact, two of the best-ever titles I will list at the end of the second part of this piece were produced by Universal. But I wanted to also tout the horror movies made by other studios, from the prestigious (Paramount, MGM) to “poverty row” productions (Majestic, Halperin Productions).

The three best of the bunch will be preceded by an honor roll of the best from that short period of time when sound was new and sublimely talented craftspeople were working in front of and behind the camera. And the only way to begin is with:

Dracula, 1931, Universal, Tod Browning (released Feb '31) The film that jumpstarted the genre. The German Expressionist films are the undisputed masterpieces of the silent era, and the films starring Lon Chaney offered a portrait gallery of amazingly nasty-looking (yet often terribly misunderstood) monsters and villains. But it was Browning’s Dracula that began the horror craze in earnest and, as such, is the one of the most imitated pictures of all time.

Browning’s film is derided these days for alternating between scenes that are way too talky and way too silent. It has its slow moments, with the dialogue-heavy sequences being a reflection of the debt that early talking cinema had to the stage. The film did, however, introduce the idea of an aristocratic monster — a figure who moves freely in high society while he harbors a deadly secret….

Lugosi is magnetic onscreen, with Browning framing him in truly iconic images that were copied endlessly in later monster movies and dramas concerning human predators.

Frankenstein, 1931, Universal, James Whale (Nov '31) The other seminal horror film of the early Thirties introduced two staples of the genre: the mad scientist (yes, Dr. Caligari and Rotwang came first, but their adventures were, by turns, dreamlike and allegorical) and the misunderstood, misfit monster.

Whale’s monster movie was remade and reworked over the next four decades. Although the stagey, dialogue-heavy scenes here are clunky as hell, the scenes in the laboratory and the ones featuring Karloff’s monster are as exciting today as they were in ’31.

The two essential elements that distinguished the film have been written about endlessly, but they can’t go unmentioned here. First, the German Expressionist influence found in the lighting, set design (by Charles Hall), camera angles, and editing — outside the brightly lit drawing rooms, all is darkness and menace. The other element that still “sells” the film is the starmaking, mute performance by Boris Karloff, who played the monster as both a clueless child and a vengeful force of nature.

After the box-office success of Dracula and Frankenstein, every studio tried to develop horror/monster pictures. The results were often mixed (or just downright weird), but there were three things that were repeated over and over:

—moody lighting and striking imagery. A decade before film noir, the darkest films in American cinema were horror movies with plots that allowed for all sorts of bizarre and deviant behavior.

—old supernatural tales, alternating or infused with completely manufactured mythologies and science (often in the same package). Yes, Shelley, Stevenson, and Stoker’s novels were written in 1818, 1886, and 1898, and the figures of werewolves, zombies, and mummies had previously existed, but the masterstroke of the Thirties monster movie was to cherry-pick items from ancient myths while also making things up from whole cloth.

—“young lovers” storylines that were included to counteract the abnormality of the films as a whole. As was the case in Golden Age talkie comedies (think of the features starring Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers), the single most annoying thing about a lot of Hollywood horror movies were the scenes featuring happy young lovers. Even when the male in the couple was a mad scientist, these half-baked romantic scenes are a slog.

Below are capsules about the most notable pre-code horror pics. After a chronological listing of those titles, I will discuss the three best Golden Age horror films (by a wide margin).

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1932, Paramount, Rouben Mamoulian (Jan ’32). Jekyll is a prestige, A-budget production that has a lot of beautifully executed moving camera shots and tight closeups. Frederick March enacts great (much copied) transformations from the urbane and good-willed Dr. Jekyll to the savage and simian Mr. Hyde. March was so good he won the Best Actor Oscar, a feat not repeated for a performer in a horror movie until Kathy Bates won in 1991 for Misery and Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster won in ’92 for The Silence of the Lambs.

March’s performance is stylized and at first seems dated, but it is positively modernist when compared to Spencer Tracy’s “naturalistic” performance in the 1941 MGM remake of Jekyll — which finds him as a stray American identified as a British doctor. Ingrid Bergman is more memorable in the remake as the “flirtatious girl” — no longer a hooker — who is Hyde’s victim, beginning a long run of Bergman-as-victim performances. (And, as my father attested, the single meanest Hyde of all time was Jack Palance in the 1968 telefilm remake. Jack didn’t even need that much makeup!)

The plot element that most clearly reflects pre-code permissiveness here involved Miriam Hopkins’ hooker character. She is both the victim of a number of beatings from Hyde and also supplies a timeless piece of leg-art fixation, in which she lazily moves her leg back and forth to hypnotize the “innocent,” uptight Dr. Jekyll. Busby Berkeley was allowed to indulge in post-code gam-fetish imagery in later years (Busby got away with a lot), but it was deemed too “lewd” in other contexts.

1932 was the banner year for pre-code horror in Hollywood. Mad scientists, crazed killers (who may or may not have been motivated by supernatural urges) and, yes, smarmy young lovers appeared in profusion. When watched over a short period of time, one gets the impression that Hollywood was in the mood to shock and disturb the American public….

Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1932, Universal, Robert Florey (Feb '32) A schizophrenic piece that combines the “young lover” tedium with astonishingly dark (in tone and hue) scenes involving a mad scientist named “Doctor Mirakle” (played by the great Lugosi) who is looking to mate his gorilla with some lucky Parisian woman. Bela is wonderfully creepy playing the first of his portrait gallery of sadistic scientists. (The American public’s fear of science is clearly reflected in these villainous experimenters with deviant agendas.)

If the film’s surprisingly grim tone and theme of intended bestiality wasn’t enough to make Rue Morgue one of the most intriguing films from the banner year of ’32, then surely the appearance of a “mystery guest star” is. For one of Dr. Mirakle’s victims is a comely “woman of the streets” (that’s her i.d. in the credits), played by later “What’s My Line?” regular Arlene Francis! (above)

White Zombie, 1932, Halperin Productions, Victor Halperin (Aug ’32) Less than two years after his triumph in Dracula, Lugosi had declared bankruptcy (reportedly for overspending on clothing!) and was already starring in “poverty row” features made by smaller producers.

This is one of the most notable of those titles, because Lugosi is in high dudgeon as the voodoo master who holds a group of zombies in thrall, and the film is a decent potboiler, with director-producer Victor Halperin doing a fine job of using his limited budget to up the scare factor.

The zombie rule book (pre-Romero) was written here. This is a vision of shambling slave-creations that can be redeemed — but only if they are the kewpie-doll heroine (part of the picture’s pesky young lover combo).

Halperin used techniques from the preceding horror/monster pics, including mesmerizing close-ups of Lugosi staring straight into the camera, and even tighter close-ups of his eyes (borrowed from Browning’s Dracula). The most impressive steal was the split screen used by Mamoulian, in which a wipe effect stops midway and we see two different images in each half of the frame.

Doctor X, 1932, First National, Michael Curtiz (Aug '32) Lionel Atwill was an all-purpose authority figure in the later Universal monster movies, but first he was a star in his own horror features. The first of these is notable for its combination of mad scientist horror and the standard murder mystery. It also is one of the two earliest color films in the genre (the other one also starred Atwill and will be featured in the second part of this piece).

The two-strip Technicolor process in which the film was shot winds up making it look oddly menacing; it emphasizes the shadows in the street scenes and the electrical sparks in the laboratory scenes. It thus offers a look at what Frankenstein might’ve looked like, had it been shot in color (which it thankfully wasn’t).

The plot is pure pre-code sleaze: A killer who is cannibalizing his victims is sought by the police, who have narrowed down the list of suspects to a group of eccentric scientists, led by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Atwill). He in turn decides to reveal the killer by conducting a group experiment that will heighten the guilty man’s homicidal tendencies while the participants are handcuffed — the thought that the culprit is one of the few un-handcuffed people in the room occurs to the quirky eggheads a bit too late.

The Old Dark House, 1932, Universal, James Whale (Oct '32) Is one of the most curious and wonderfully deranged creations of the ’32 horror onslaught. James Whale gave us a glimpse of the over-the-top sensibility that permeated Bride of Frankenstein (see below) in this picture, which is both a legitimate horror movie and a bona fide spoof of the “dark and stormy night/old dark house” horror pics (which were affectionately spoofed in Curt McDowell’s amazing Thundercrack!, and the biggest cult movie of all time, The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

Whale had been a stage director, so he knew the importance of a great ensemble to sell the material. In this case he gave us two sets of young lovers (although Melvyn Douglas always seemed quite older than the average “boy lead”), but also a solid assortment of character people, including one of the greatest camp archetypes in movie history, Ernest Thesiger (here playing a character named “Femm”). Also a “monster” in the form of the family servant, a grunting gent with a misshapen face played by Karloff.

Even Whale couldn’t enliven the young lover sequences, but he included many inspired touches — a Manchester braggart, played by Charles Laughton (in his first American film), an old family patriarch played by an old woman (playing an old man), and the real homicidal menace in the house, a relative named “Saul” (Brember Wills), who is the oddest individual in the whole film.

The Mummy, 1932, Universal, Karl Freund (Dec '32) Like Dracula and Frankenstein, this is a beautifully crafted film that, unlike those films, shows the “monster” only briefly at the beginning. Karloff carries the entire enterprise as an ancient Egyptian variant on the Dracula character. He incarnates a wholly sympathetic monster, who has lived centuries simply to be reunited with his princess soulmate.

Screenwriters John Balderston (who wrote the play Dracula and worked on nearly all of the key Universal monster pics in the early Thirties), Nina Wilcox Putnam (who wrote children’s books and comics, and helped create the 1040 tax form when she was an accountant!) and veteran scripter Richard Schayer concocted a series of plot elements that became “mummy lore,” assembled out of bits of older tales.

Director Karl Freund, one of the greatest cameramen ever (from German Expressionist silents to the “I Love Lucy” three-camera shoot), did a superb job of mixing suspense and melodrama. It’s a shame Freund directed only two horror movies (this one and Mad Love), as both are testaments to his talent for the macabre and menacing. He preceded these two films with camerawork on Dracula and Rue Morgue, and then, after Mad Love in 1935, never worked on another horror film.

Island of Lost Souls, 1932, Paramount, Erle C. Kenton (Dec '32) Arguably the best, and definitely most disturbing, of the ’32 horrors was this adaptation of H.G. Welles, which is one of the most warped films to emerge from Golden Age Hollywood. The primitive nature of the makeup jobs done to create the film’s “manimals” and the sheer sadism contained in the plot put this on a par with the best of Universal’s monster movies.

First of all, there is the plot — Dr. Moreau (the wonderful Charles Laughton) is a scientist creating half-human, half-animal creatures in a remote jungle area on an uncharted island. His “experiments” become citizens of the island, or (if their “fusion” went awry) they are put to work doing manual slave labor. Actors of various ethnicities play some of these creatures, so an unspoken subtext about Anglo imperialism appears throughout.

Two of the manimals are unforgettable. The first is the “Sayer of the Law,” played by the very busy Lugosi. He delivers the “law” in the film and speaks the line that gave Devo their lyric and first album title, “Are we not men?”

The other creation is the only female in the bunch, the Panther Woman. She looks Asian but was played by an Irish-American actress, Kathleen Burke. Her small, thin body is an unusual sight in a Hollywood film (when glamour was all). Even more jarring is the fact that Dr. Moreau is trying to pimp her off on the film’s hero (Richard Arlen) to see if she can have sex and give birth.

Laughton’s sublimely wicked performance as Moreau combines two of the elements that appeared in most of the pre-code horror pictures. First, there is self-proclaimed godhood. From Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll onward, the mad scientists in horror movies proclaim their divinity and equal status to God himself. Lost Souls was banned in England until the late Fifties (when it had to edited to get a release certificate; the cut scenes were restored in this decade!). This was based on a few items in the film, not the least of which was Moreau’s line “Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

The other common element of the mad scientist characters was a sadism little seen in cinema outside of domestic abuse dramas, addiction sagas, and, yes, s&m movies. The sadists in monster movies express sheer delight when another character is in pain, presumably because it is within their purview as gods-on-Earth to deliver punishment.

The grimmest and most memorable aspect of Laughton’s performance is this delight, reflected in the broad smiles he sports when discussing  his “house of pain” (the laboratory where he creates his manimals) and his plans for breeding new races of creatures.

The films discussed above can be found on DVD/Blu-ray (the Universal "Legacy" series of collections is exemplary) and often for free on YouTube, Daily Motion, Archive, and Ok.ru. To be continued...