The Mad Monster, 1942

This was a bit more enjoyable than the previous George Zucco Poverty Row picture, Dead Men Walk. Where the previous film was a shabby vampire movie, The Mad Monster is a reasonably non-awful mad scientist flick.

What Mad Scientist Dr. Cameron (who does, indeed, have a beautiful daughter) has done is theorized that animal blood can be transfused into humans, and thus give them the animal’s characteristics. For this he was mocked and scorned by all his scientific colleagues — and this backstory is handled in a very cool way, a way I had not expected from a Poverty Row picture at all. Cameron, in his lab and during the experiment, goes to the head of a large table and begins talking to nobody, proclaiming what a genius he is, and deriding those who scoffed at him.

And as he does, their ghostly images fade in at the seats around the table, and he begins conversing directly with them. As presented, what they say comes straight from memory, and Cameron knows it — he’s not so nuts that he’s actually hallucinating. But it’s a creepy and effective way of getting across both the backstory and the character of Cameron before the first ten minutes of the picture have passed. What was interesting about this is that some money and time was spent to achieve the effect. It’s clearly an optical, so the production company had or had access to an optical printer, but more than that, it’s a carefully done optical — each of the ghostly figures fits into the room perfect, each is sitting in his chair, one leaning on the table, and nothing is misaligned or overlapping in a distracting way. It’s a more than competent effect that is there to serve the story, and does. How often do you see that in one of these pictures?

Anyhow, in the experiment, he turns Glenn Strange (most famous for playing Frankenstein’s monster three times, post-Karloff, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Lon Chaney, Jr.) into a werewolf by injecting him with wolf’s blood. ((Nobody, however, trips into anybody else, and no trading of essences occurs. )) He can change him back into a human again with an “antidote” (???). And, of course, each injection causes a rapid lap-dissolve transformation a la Lon Chaney, Jr.’s The Wolfman. ((Although they only really show it once or twice — this is a Poverty Row cheapie, after all. ))

Having perfected his technique and proven his theory, Dr. Cameron does what any self-respecting Mad Scientist would do next: he uses his creation to rain vengeance upon those who laughed at him and hounded him out of the scientific world!

Glenn Strange’s character is Petro (yes, “Pedro” but with a t), a low-IQ gardener who, in character and performance, increases the feeling that Strange is Lon Chaney, Jr.’s lost twin, since he’s basically George from Of Mice And Men. He’s a gentle soul, simple but kind. But he remembers his time as a werewolf as if it were a dream, and the number of murders he commits in his dreams begins to frighten him.

It’s been some while since I actually watched this one (something over a week, I’m trying to stay ahead of the month for once), so not all the details are coming back to me, but, by the end, the Mad Doctor gets his comeuppance, at least one of the Scoffing Fools survives (this is a requirement in the Mad Scientist Film Playbook), the beautiful daughter and her beau live happily ever after, and the monster meets his end.

As I indicated above, this was a very satisfying film, given the context that it was a Poverty Row cheapie. It hangs together pretty well, so long as you overlook the idiocy of the plot-motor ((If I injected myself with rabbit blood, would I get insufferably cute and binky every time I was happy? )). And the beginning, especially, was done especially well.

Mesa of Lost Women, 1953

Oy. Wow. Yarg.

Or, in somewhat more enlightening terms: Mesa of Lost Women is disjointed, silly, and plodding.

Any comparisons to Ed Wood movies are apt and begged for, given that there’s patch-up narration ((The kind of narration that fills in holes in the actual story. )) by one of Ed Wood’s stock company, and annoying soundtrack music straight out of Jail Bait.

There is an insanely hot woman in the cast. But that’s really the only reason at all to watch it, and it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Especially since she’s only really in a few scenes. ((She does, however, do a very memorable dance in one scene, for no good reason. ))

In a nutshell, a mad scientist (played by Uncle Fester himself, Jackie Coogan) has a lab on a mesa in Mexico and has made immense progress in two areas: bringing out human characteristics in spiders and insects, and bringing out spider and insect characteristics in humans. The former area has given the mesa (and soon — the world!) a gigantic tarantula. The latter has given the mesa a large supply of weak midget men and smokin’ hot women, all of whom are more than happy to indulge in homicidal behavior.

This is discovered — in tortured, extended flashback — by a doctor whom Fester wants to join in on the world-dominating fun. The good doc refuses, goes mad, escapes, is returned with a crew of innocents, and is killed. The Good Innocent Pilot and his lady love, the Good Innocent Wife (soon to be Widow, sorry, spoiler) Of A Bad Rich Man, both manage to escape with their lives. The flashback is the pilot’s. The opening and closing narration, however, are the film’s alone, trying to cover for a terrible script and a botched production.

Is it the worst movie ever made? Hardly. It’s simply incompetent, with little joy, and some watchable women who don’t make up for the time and brain cells lost.

Maniac, 1934

Wow. This is one hell of a movie. It’s positively loony.

Plus it has 1934-era women getting disrobed to various degrees. 🙂

I am tempted to just link to Dr. Freex’s memorable review of this flick and leave it at that, but no, I can’t.

Maniac was written and directed by Dwain Esper. If he’s known for anything, it’s for the cult classic Reefer Madness. Even from everything I’ve heard (and no, I have not actually seen it, though I will soon), Maniac blows that one out of the water on any level you care to take it at.

Maxwell ((Who has no silver hammer, at least not that we ever learn of. )) is an actor who works for a mad scientist, Dr. Meirschultz. ((See? I told you this was awesome! The first sentence, just giving the background, and it’s already nutty! )) The very first line of dialogue, delivered in a wretched German accent, is “Tonight, my dear Maxwell, I am ready to try my experiment on a hyoo-min.”

Dr. Meirschultz thinks he can revive dead bodies, you see. And he’s harboring Maxwell from the police. Dr. Kraut bullies Max into impersonating the coroner, so that they can get their hands on a stiff from the morgue. The get into the morgue, find the hot young stiff (Maria Altura, age 24, we’re told), make sure she’s dead ((You just can’t trust those morgues, you know! )), and inject her with something. Why they do it in the morgue instead of trying to get the body out to their lab where they can work at their leisure is anybody’s guess, but they do it in the morgue.

While waiting for the serum to take effect, two other morgue workers go to work in a completely different room. This little sequence gives much evidence for Dwain Esper’s incompetence as a director. The two workers are, you realize after the scene has played out, supposed to be able to see Dr. Kraut and Maxwell (disguised as the coroner) in the distance, and unclearly. The way that it’s shot and edited together, the sight lines not only don’t match, it’s like they’re on disconnected planes. The camera angles don’t help any, and the two bits, the workers in one room and Dr. Kraut and Max in the other seem, very probably, to have been filmed weeks apart by two entirely different crews who had no communication between them about how to make shots match together. It’s so bad that Dr. Kraut looks up, apparently right at the two workers, and fails to notice anything.

The young stiff licks her lips, and the two morgue robbers then decide to take her out, because “she needs oxygen”.

The police are alerted to the existence of two corpse snatchers, while Dr. Kraut implores Maxwell to go out and get another corpse, one with a “shattered heart”, so that he can transplant a heart he has somehow brought back to life into it, and achieve his supreme accomplishment. (Reviving the dead apparently is small potatoes to this guy.) So Maxwell goes sneaking into the undertaker’s place, conveniently just around the corner, this time via a tunnel. He decides to go there because a gangster just got shot today. But when he gets there, there are two cats fighting in the same room as the body, and Maxwell bolts, apparently afraid that someone will hear the catfight.

Outside, he runs past a cat and a dog fighting. Why? No reason.

He reports his failure to Dr. Kraut, who immediately shouts “Coward!” and decides to plug Max through the pump and use his body for the experiment. But he makes a minor tactical blunder. He hands Max the gun and tells him to kill himself(!). Max, being not a total fool, kacks the doctor.

At this point, we get the first educational bit. The screen fades to black, and the following text enlightens us poor plebeians:

DEMENTIA PRAECOX

This is the most important of the psychoses, both because it constitutes the highest percentage of mental diseases and because recovery is so extremely rare.

Dementia praecox patients show blunting of the emotions, serious defects of judgment, development of fantastic ideas, belief that they are being forced to do things or are being interfered with.

Under this, a small orchestra plays oddly inappropriate sleepy-time music. ((You can always tell a low-budget movie from the early 1930s — there’s never any music in dialogue scenes. It’s true here, and was also the case in the two John Wayne Lone Star Productions films earlier this week. ))

Then, back to the film, where Maxwell realizes he is now a murderer — “and of my benefactor!” But he begins raving (or rationalizing, take your pick) about how the spark that moves the maggot is the same as the spark that moves the man, and that the individual spark is not important. While he raves, footage from two different silent films gets superimposed over him ((Siegfried and . )) to symbolize his madness. He regains his calm and, as the door buzzer buzzes, realizes he has to hide the body.

One of Dr. Kraut’s patient’s wives insists that the doc has to see her husband, and goes to get him. Maxwell sees his makeup kit and says “Meirschultz will be missed. Maxwell, never would.” He decides to impersonate and take the place of Dr. Kraut, and claim that Maxwell ran off.

The patient goes nuts, the wife sees the body Maxwell still hasn’t hidden, and more nutty stuff happens. The patient runs off into the night with the revived girl (and out in the night, gropes a mostly-nude, completely different girl), as an example. And Maxwell is now, for the rest of the movie, imitating Dr. Kraut.

And it carries on like this, for 51 glorious minutes. Maxwell’s estranged wife shows up, because she learns that he’s come into an inheritance ((Surely this was a groaner of a cliché even in 1934! )), the real Dr. Kraut gets put behind a brick wall in the cellar along with a cat ((E.A. Poe is given story credit, too. )), and each time Maxwell starts behaving in a different way, the movie pauses to give us a lecture on a different form of madness, most of which have only glancing relation to the story at hand.

Oh, and there’s boobs. Not many, and very briefly, but pretty darn daring for a 1934 independent feature, anyhow.

The film as absolutely nuts, and quite entertaining. But good it is not.

You can download it free from Archive.org. Or you can buy it on any of these collections:

Below, a few 1934 NSFW shots: