They'll Rue the Morgue that Brought the Ape Man

It may sound like a good idea to find the Missing Link, but what if it comes for our women? That's not exactly part of Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it is part of the 1932 adaptation of that story. Attempts to combine scenes from the original with a new tale about a mad scientist and a dashing hero never really mesh but the film is sometimes delightfully weird and ghastly.

Bela Lugosi plays Doctor Mirakle (pronounce with emphasis on the A) with a big, bushy unibrow. He invites attendees of a carnival to view a fantastic ape man he has locked in a cage.

A live chimpanzee is used for closeups while long shots are clearly a man in a suit. Later in the film, that man will carry the lovely young damsel in distress (Sidney Fox) to the top of a building, making me wonder if this was an influence on King Kong.

Her boyfriend and would be saviour is dashing young Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) seemingly a distant cousin of Poe's Auguste Dupin. He's just a medical student here but the screenwriters (one of whom was a young John Huston, contributing additional dialogue) attempted to throw in a few things to make him seem to have sleuthing instincts. It seems a missed opportunity considering Poe's Dupin was the primary model for Sherlock Holmes.

Lugosi is great in the film and Sidney Fox is so wonderfully shocked when he has the audacity to visit her home uninvited, at an hour late enough for her mother to already be in bed. She doesn't know what horrors await.

Murders in the Rue Morgue is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1782

A spud balloon deceived the hungry maid.
Delivered pearls adorn the lazy lords.
With dowdy dreams, the lucky landed paid.
Awash with sauce, the bowls consumed the boards.
Collecting sharpened sticks, the man prepares.
An army gathers mud to wall the fort.
External guys were donning woes and cares.
A while later, facts were cut in court.
Before the court, the morgue presents an age.
Were man a beast, the crimes at hand were dreams.
Corruption fouled the volume's final page.
Employ your ghosts to mend the crooked seams.
Reprieve arrived to gut the hallowed bank.
A dozen robbers took the ship that sank.

Don't Relinquish Your Crazy

Here's a rarity for you: a gaslight movie with a male victim. 1962's The Premature Burial is a Roger Corman movie very loosely based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. At first I thought it was no more than pretty, ridiculous schlock but I started to like the movie more as it went on.

Ray Milland plays Guy Carrell, a wealthy gentlemen residing in a massive manor located on a perpetually mist shrouded moor.

I mean, the fog machine must have been running every single day of shooting. Whether it's a desperate chase, a pleasant afternoon stroll, or, of course, a funeral, it always looks exactly the same outside, which helps give the whole film a dreamlike quality.

The house is beautiful, too, with lincoln green walls, brown wainscoting. and cherry Red Vine candles. But note the fellow's brown tweed tailcoat. I think the costume designer never heard of a frock coat.

Emily (Hazel Court) pleads with Guy to marry her, promising eternal, unfaltering devotion. Of course, once they're married, she starts trying to change him, like insisting he give up his silly, morbid obsession with premature burial.

She has him destroy the elaborate tomb he's set up with a casket that breaks apart when the occupant pulls a cord. But, naturally, given the title of the film, we all know what's coming.

The movie is ridiculous but in such a dreamlike way it kind of works. Apparently Francis Ford Coppola was assistant director on this one. Some of the production design kind of recalls Coppola's Dracula.

The Premature Burial is available now on The Criterion Channel as part of "Grindhouse Gothic", a collection of Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe.

Waiting on Mars

Ray Bradbury obviously found Edgar Allan Poe's forehead rather striking. In his short story "Exiles", included in The Illustrated Man, Bradbury more than once returns to the forehead as a point for vividly describing the 19th century poet.

Mr. Poe’s black eyes brooded under his round and luminant brow.

. . . They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing. “Don’t worry,” said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking.

It is an impressive brow, at least in every picture I've seen, and invoking it does help create the mental image. "Exiles" is a story in which many of Earth's great writers live in some strange form on Mars alongside hordes of their creations. The story actually begins with the witches from Macbeth, just a few of the many assembled to defend the planet from an approaching human rocket. On Earth, the great works of fiction have been routinely burned, a detail foreshadowing Bradbury's own Fahrenheit 451. In "Exiles", the book burning causes the spirits of the authors and their creations to fade and finally vanish entirely. It's a more fantastic tale than Fahrenheit 451 and bittersweetly effective.

An odd man among the denizens Bradbury places on Mars is Charles Dickens, who parties at Fezziwig's and refuses to join Poe and Ambrose Bierce in defending against the Earthlings, insisting he's above the stories about ghosts and witches and their authors. He even seems to kind of like the humans who only burned his books, he feels, by mistake. I wonder if this is due to the underlying leftwing nature of Dickens' basic arguments in his work. At the time Bradbury published "Exiles" he was a Democrat but in 1952 he took out an ad in Variety in which he wrote; "Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’ party, I will attack with all my heart and soul." Which goes to show how differently Democrats regarded themselves at one time.

Bradbury's Poe points out to Dickens that he did indulge in writing ghost stories, with A Christmas Carol and The Christmas Goblins. Of course, Dickens' writing also has much that could appeal to conservatives--I've heard Uriah Heep, the villain of David Copperfield, referred to as a perfect parody of a leftwing ideologue. The humans of "Exiles" have also banned Halloween and Christmas which reminds me of Oliver Cromwell's England in which Christmas was also banned. And plays, for that matter. Like the humans of "Exiles", the English Puritans believed in total commitment to reason and abhorred superstition. "Superstition" is a word that Bradbury uses twice in "Exiles" by Poe but I wasn't clear on whether or not this Poe approved of superstition or deplored it.

One of the men on the rocket has nightmares. I really liked the idea that humans without fantastic horror fiction would naturally have strange nightmares as though some natural feeling is being repressed and is finding other means of expression.

Twitter Sonnet #1318

A little thing disturbs the rubber tread.
A metal river shifts the plastic boat.
A diamond bee divides the footed bed.
A lamp appeared between the sheep and goat.
Decisive shorts define Colossus legs.
A second bun creates the burger plate.
Between the flour fold the thinking eggs.
A waiting knight observed a narrow mate.
Awaited plays deliver forest dreams.
Repeated songs appease a sleepy heart.
A newer sun was born of extra beams.
The sandwich mustard makes the yellow part.
The brilliant head was camped before the sea.
The crimson pot produced a cherry tea.

The Lingering Blood Sucker

A young woman dies suddenly but then keeps turning up, seemingly alive. One possible reason is suggested in the English title of 1970's The Vampire Doll, though its original title, 幽霊屋敷の恐怖 血を吸う人形, doesn't so clearly categorise the phenomena, translating to something like "The Horror of a Haunted House with a Blood Sucking Doll". The ambiguity is more sensible but this is really a pretty simple horror film mainly worth viewing for its stylish visuals.

Kazuhiko (Atsuo Nakamura) travels to the resort hotel run by his dead fiancee's mother to learn more about her death. The mother, Shidu (Yoko Minazake), drifts about, speaking almost mechanically, perhaps a sign of grief, or perhaps something else. Then Kazuhiko is sure he spots the dead woman, Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi), outside.

Then Kazuhiko disappears and his sister, Keiko (Kayo Matsuo), and her fiance, Hiroshi (Akira Nakao), travel to the hotel to see if they can learn anything. Their investigation gets further than Kazuhiko's--after Keiko survives an encounter with Yuko, they meet Yuko's doctor, Yamaguchi (Jun Usami), and ask him questions about Yuko. If she's dead, why does she seem to be roaming about, disappearing and reappearing, her eyes glowing?

Yamaguchi doesn't give a very straight forward reply, instead delivering an intriguingly, disturbingly ecstatic speech about ghosts, telling them almost feverishly about how he saw a ghost once. This is one of the most impressively weird moments in the story.

The movie's based very loosely on an Edgar Allan Poe story--telling you which one would be a spoiler but it's not "Fall of the House of Usher". Vampire Doll does, though, have a lot to do with eerie, unstated passions in a family. It's a good story but even better is the lovely hotel. I certainly wouldn't mind haunting it. The Vampire Doll is available to stream for free for those who have Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1195

The extra metal teeth could play a song.
For added strength a bar contained a neck.
The muscles lift a paddle playing Pong.
An analogue could put a watch in check.
A path of clouds above the road was dark.
A heavy colour, quiet, cold, and slow.
Unnoticed drops of rain deluge the park.
A crafty cricket quickly starts to row.
Withdrawing clouds expressed their good intents.
The sky adopted stripes to make a hue.
A tightly knitted azure thread condensed.
The av'rage person called the colour "blue".
Acrylic halls absorb the shadow rads.
A freight of goods were shipped to packaged bads.