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| Images courtesy of Janus Films |
The Criterion Collection, since they began in 1984 with
Janus Films starting out with tape and laserdisc before moving onto DVD, Blu-ray
and now 4K UHD disc, represents the zenith of film curation, restoration and
publishing for home video consumption.
Considered to be the highest pedestal which other boutique labels still
try to cozy up to including but not limited to Eureka Entertainment, Arrow
Video and now Radiance Films, Criterion as a moniker and brand remains vital to
the global film community as far as releasing some of the greatest films from
around the world. But every now and
again, going back to when they released Irvin Yeaworth, Jr.’s 1958 regional
monster movie sensation The Blob on laserdisc or Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend
Without a Face on DVD, they like wading into plainly goofy sci-fi/horror
drive-in regional atomic age camp. Such
is the case with their four-DVD boxed set Monsters and Madmen consisting
of two double-features by producers Richard and Alex Gordon, a real impish hoot
whose lo-fi sci-fi/horror charms remain both dated and infectious.
With three of the B-films The Haunted Strangler, Corridors
of Blood and First Man into Space by British film director Robert
Day while the fourth The Atomic Submarine was done by American serial
filmmaker Spencer Gordon Bennett, the quartet of films represent a brief period
for both actor Boris Karloff and the producers trying to take advantage of
horrors of the past and then-present, often with an increasingly supernatural
leaning. In the first film The
Haunted Strangler (also known as Grip of the Strangler or The
Judas Hole), based on an original story by Jan Read written specifically
for Boris Karloff and adapted for the screen by John Croydon, we enter nineteenth-century
England with author James Rankin (Boris Karloff) trying to clear the name of Edward
Styles, a man hanged to death twenty years prior over a series of unproven
murders. Leading Mr. Rankin to the
gravesite of the man, it’s determined the murder weapon knife was never
recovered from the crime scene and upon exhuming the body for further analysis,
a demonic force tied to the weapon is unleashed which quickly takes violent
control of the unassuming author.
A late tier offering in Amalgamated Productions whose
purpose was to create British films with American stars, The Haunted
Strangler was one of two pictures Karloff was contracted for over four
weeks of filming on a sum of about $27,500.
Something of a supernatural Jack the Ripper tale with a demonically
possessed foreign object that can infect any and all who come into contact with
it, the film was shot back-to-back with the aforementioned Fiend Without a
Face and served as the secondary feature for MGM. Playing to Karloff’s strengths to contort his
face and pull off a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde facial physical transformation
and riffing on the Jack the Ripper mythos, it was another stark reminder of
Karloff’s talent for creating uncanny unnerving expressions sure to make anyone
standing before it cower away in fear. It
also functions as a serial-killer thriller with overtones of the unknown and
incredulous, something critics took umbrage with at the time but have now since
come around on.
The next film made in the same year Corridors of Blood,
this time featuring writing by Jean Scott Rogers, served as a higher-budgeted
period piece investigating the emergence of anesthesiology while also giving
Boris Karloff an even meatier and far more morally complex role than the
previous production afforded him. Set in
1940s London, Karloff plays the beleaguered Dr. Thomas Bolton who is tiring of
performing surgeries and operations on patients experiencing great agonizing
pain as a result and wants to find a way to continue surgery in a pain free
environment. However, standing in his
way is a ruthless killer nicknamed Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee) and a
gang of street rat criminals spearheaded by Black Ben (Francis de Wolff)
supplying the chemicals needed to fund the doctor’s experiments. It doesn’t help that in the process of trial
and error the poor doctor becomes addiction to the very gases he’s trying to
refine and develop for safe use on humans.
One of a handful of times Karloff and Lee appeared onscreen
together in a horror movie functioning somewhat as a period biographical
medical thriller, Corridors of Blood manages to be gruesome and grisly
for its medical sequences, frequent drug abuse and unsavory portrait of the
slums of London as an illicit empire unto itself. Featuring a far more nuanced and subtle
portrait by Karloff of a good man dealing with bad people for a noble cause,
Karloff this time around is on the receiving end of horror and we sympathize
with his endurance and ordeal to try and perfect the experimental process and
not lose his mind at the same time.
Despite good reviews, the film was initially poorly received and due to
a shakeup in management with MGM at the time, the 1958 production did not hit
American cinemas until 1962 effectively making it one of the last films from Amalgamated
Productions. Shameful as it is easily
the classiest and most down-to-earth of the quartet where in a way the original
Frankenstein monster becomes the doctor instead of the subject.
Third on the lineup and the last to be directed by Robert
Day is First Man into Space, jumping ship from Karloff and now focusing
on military nuclear age with a kind of follow-up to The Quatermass Xperiment
and perhaps early precursor to The Astronaut’s Wife. The last film of Amalgamated Productions and
based on a short story by Wyott Ordung based on a previously rejected pitch to
American International Pictures, the film follows cocky U.S. Navy test pilot
Dan Prescott (Bill Edwards) who seems to cut corners and not follow precise
military protocol. During a routine test
Dan is supposed to eject at 600,000 feet but continues to ascent to 250 miles
above the Earth’s surface and his aircraft runs into a nebulous cloud of cosmic
dust which begins to slowly infect and transform the man into a scale-covered
hulking blood-drinking monster which slaughters everything from animal to human
life in its wake. Only his brother U.S.
Navy Commander Chuck Prescott (Marshall Thompson) presents a chance of ending the
unearthly murder spree.
After being rejected by AIP, Wyott Ordung’s script
originally entitled Satellite of Blood was picked up by the Gordons and
reworked into First Man into Space, the film turned a much-needed profit
for MGM amassing some $310,000 in the US and another $325,000 elsewhere. Directly influenced by the aforementioned The
Quatermass Xperiment though with half of that film’s budget, this
guy-in-a-suit monster flick despite shoestring budgeted set pieces and lo-fi
visual effects nevertheless conjures up some gruesome imagery replete with a
droopy eye dangling out of the unearthly humanoid mass. Sympathetic for the monster and the man
trapped inside it, First Man into Space is a pretty good
science-gone-awry space-age thriller with loose elements of The Fly peppered
in. Hard to not have some fun with this
one.
Lastly in the lineup, The Atomic Submarine jettisons
British director Robert Day in favor of American serial filmmaker Spencer
Gordon Bennet aka King of Serial Directors in an underwater one-eyed
tentacled monster movie with physical characteristics many Star Wars
fans will associate with the dianoga or garbage monster in A New Hope. When the nuclear submarine Tiger Shark
sets out to investigate an unsolved series of naval disasters and
disappearances near the Arctic Circle, the crew begins experiencing everything
from underwater electrical storms, a UFO or in this instance unidentified
floating saucer and inevitable encounters with the aforementioned cyclops
tentacled beast. An underwater alien
invasion flick whose concepts somehow predate James Cameron’s The Abyss and
its armada of NTIs, The Atomic Submarine is at once an unusual riff on
the extraterrestrial spacecraft movie and unfortunately also the weakest of the
Monsters and Madmen box.
While competently made, acted and possibly even influencing
Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as well as the Japanese Atragon
as far as nuclear submarine films go, there’s a noticeable drop in filmmaking
quality compared to the first three Robert Day films. With cheesy looking miniatures and
superimposition effects, the movie does look more like a serial theatrical
installment than a fully furnished feature film. To augment some of the underwater scenes of
miniatures, the film intersperses real stock footage of submarines in between
the hokum. That said, the costumes and
some of the set pieces of the interior of the alien spacecraft do tickle the
imagination and Star Wars fans are likely to point to this as the origin
story of dianoga. Despite the visuals,
the film is far talkier than the previous films in the set though in fairness
it does a decent job of creating a sense of claustrophobia and enclosure you
can’t break free from.
Rounding out the four-disc DVD set are audio commentaries by
the surviving Richard and Alex Gordon producing brothers with writer Tom
Weaver. There are several new interviews
with the cast and crew members, a section on cuts by censors made to some of
the film’s grislier moments, original trailers and extensive booklets for all
four films. Fans of all things 1950s
monster movie related with a hint of Boris Karloff, modern medicine, Victorian
era slashings and newfound fears of the nuclear age should have a feast with
this enjoyably campy collection reminiscent of the Eclipse box When Horror
Came to Shochiku. The transfers on
all four films, even for DVD, look beautiful if not luminous and far better
than they probably originally looked. For
those who only know the high elite watermarks of pure artistic cinema that is
The Criterion Collection, allow sets like Monsters and Madmen to kick
the pedigree of the brand down a notch or two and just have some impish silly
fun here. I had a blast with these and
hopefully you will too!
--Andrew Kotwicki
