(The Criterion Collection)
MONSTERS AND MADMEN: Four Thrilling Tales of Inner Torments and Outer Space
Featuring: THE HAUNTED STRANGLER, CORRIDORS OF BLOOD, FIRST MAN INTO SPACE and THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE.
Supplements include interviews with Richard and Alex Gordon, conducted by Tom Weaver.

Criterion has eventually followed up what must have been a lucrative decision on its part – the 2000 release of Richard Gordon’s revered ‘B’ sci-fi/horror flick FIEND WITHOUT A FACE – with this package of four films created by either Richard Gordon or his brother Alex. It’s a unique piece of merchandising, from the utterly uncharacteristic box cover art (which has the feel of a graphic novel), to the wonderful feature-length commentaries which are captivating and re-listenable, moreso, perhaps, than a few of the films are re-watchable…

The two best films are presented in one of the two boxes, on separate discs. THE HAUNTED STRANGLER was the best work Boris Karloff had done in many years, a Jekyll-Hyde story in which the nearly-70-year-old actor, believing strongly in the project, undertook some physically challenging scenes. He also showed off his chest, something usually reserved for Steve Reeves or Clint Walker, and revealed himself to be in nearly as good condition as he was in THE BLACK CAT, where he was skinned alive by Bela Lugosi some twenty+ years earlier.

I like this film a lot; quality-wise, it’s right behind FIEND in Richard Gordon’s extensive catalogue. The commentary track features both brothers: Hollywood-situated Alex, in an interview conducted in 2002, the year before he died, and Richard, in a separate interview, recorded a year later in his New York City stomping grounds. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Richard Gordon for a number of years, but I’d never met Alex. I confess I wasn’t fond of Alex’s Hollywood productions, but from the interview, I’m sure I would have very much liked the man. Like Richard, he was a film lover from childhood, who saw his passion for the movies turn into a profession. I was laughing out loud as he ripped into Tim Burton’s ED WOOD, labeling the film’s two writers ‘charlatans’ (both Gordons knew Bela Lugosi well, and both have testified to the fact that he was a gentleman, and never bad-mouthed Boris Karloff in all their years of dealing with him).

Alex names his three favorite Karloff films (having seen 90 of the actor’s 137 films by the time they met): THE RAVEN…THE INVISIBLE RAY…and THE OLD DARK HOUSE , with SON OF FRANKENSTEIN a close fourth. Tom Weaver later presses Richard to name his three Karloff faves, and they are: FRANKENSTEIN, THE BLACK CAT, and THE WALKING DEAD. Weaver then lists his: THE BLACK CAT, THE BLACK ROOM, and THE BODY SNATCHER. And I may as well add mine: THE BLACK CAT, THE BODY SNATCHER, and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

The Brothers Gordon display remarkable recall, and we are treated to pretty much all we could ever hope to know about producing low budget films in the 50s and 60s, about independent producers dealing with the major studios, about working with all the actors involved (the leads being usually American ‘B’ names like Marshall Thompson). And whereas Alex tried to give aging Western genre stars bit roles in his productions (which is the best thing about THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE), Richard was doing a similar thing with old British character actors.

CORRIDORS OF BLOOD took a troubled and circuitous path to release, and its narrative is meandering as well. Over at Hammer Studios, where CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN had just been completed, James Carreras advised Richard Gordon to pair Christopher Lee with Boris Karloff. His sense was that Lee was going to break out with CURSE. Gordon listened to him, and it’s a treat to see these two horror legends from different generations in the same project. While the script is loosely based on early factual experiments with anesthesia, for me it’s more a narrative retread of Val Lewton’s 1943 THE BODY SNATCHER, with its distillation of Burke and Hare into a single person. In CORRIDORS that person is Lee, playing “Resurrection Joe”, and in SNATCHER it was Karloff, as the multi-layered grave-robber Gray, so there’s another nice link between the two actors beyond just their reputations. Also, in CORRIDORS, Karloff is playing the Henry Daniell part from THE BODY SNATCHER, a well-meaning doctor who, eager to help his suffering patients, starts dealing with the wrong kind of people.

FIRST MAN INTO SPACE came out within a year of the first manned space flights. There were a spate of films about that theme – ON THE THRESHOLD OF SPACE, TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN and I AIM AT THE STARS are three invoked by commentary track host Tom Weaver – but they tended not to have monsters in them, whereas this one did. It’s a decent little sci-fi-horror thriller, and it’s rather mournful, too.

Weaver, perhaps anticipating a lull in commentary strength over four discs, has done copious amounts of homework, such as in FIRST MAN where he keeps presenting a space travel time-line. In CORRIDORS OF BLOOD he reads from literature on the history of anesthesia, and he does a similar thing about atomic submarines in THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE, which is the only film in the collection produced by Alex Gordon, though he appears on more than one commentary track. The problem with SUBMARINE is paradoxical, in that these are near-pristine masterings, and in the case of well-shot films like the Karloff titles, that’s a plus, but with SUBMARINE, a cheap film with a painful TV look, the visual flaws are only intensified by the transfer.

There are rewarding extras beyond the commentaries on all four discs. A videotaped interview with Yvonne Romain is nicely chapter-listed by film appearances (including CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF), and in the one labeled “Elvis” she discusses her co-starring role in DOUBLE TROUBLE. Director Robert Day (STRANGLER, CORRIDORS, and FIRST MAN) shares his memories with us on video as well. And the censorship bureau’s letter to Gordon listing demands for cuts in CORRIDORS is highlighted by cut, followed by the deleted footage. There are also thick little insert booklets within the two disc boxes. It’s a classy release.

My first exposure to “science-fiction”, although we did not call it that when I was growing up in England, was reading the works of such noted authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (when he was not writing about Sherlock Holmes), H. Rider Haggard (when he was not being historical), Edgar Rice Burroughs (inbetween his Tarzan stories) and Jules Verne (who probably started it all).

There were movies like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” from Germany, and Fox’s “Just Imagine” from Hollywood, but I did not become addicted to it on the screen until I was exposed to the adventures of Flash Gordon (followed by Buck Rogers) through which Buster Crabbe became my boyhood hero and I began to seek out “the cinema of the fantastic”. I even started a Buster Crabbe Fan Club which I ran for some years until I joined the British Navy in World War II.

A decade later, when I began my career as a producer in 1957 with the Boris Karloff picture “Grip of the Strangler” (re-titled “The Haunted Strangler” by MGM for its American release), my urge to revert to science-fiction was fulfilled by the need to make a co-feature in order to provide a double bill.

My brother Alex had by then become a successful producer of youth-oriented exploitation films at American-International Pictures in Hollywood. They ranged from science-fiction and horror, such as “The Day the World Ended” and “The She-Creature”, to biker pictures like “Motorcycle Gang” and musicals like “Shake, Rattle and Rock”. He received a steady stream of material from writers and their agents, and when he came across something that was not accepted by Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson, which he thought could interest me in England, he would send it on with his suggestions on how it could be made suitable.

Thus, one day, there arrived a copy of a pulp-fiction magazine called “Weird Tales” which contained a truly fantastic short story entitled “The Thought Monster” that was the brain-child (sic!) of an amiable lady named Amelia Reynolds Long. It was represented by Forrest Ackerman who, in addition to being the inventor of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine, also acted as an agent for writers that were published in the pulps. It was not hard to visualize it as a terrific science-fiction horror film if one could overcome the combined obstacles of a low budget and the need for mind-boggling special effects. When Alex had the brilliant inspiration to re-title it “Fiend Without a Face”, it became irresistible.

John Croydon, a veteran English film producer who had made everything from super spectacles to quoto quickies, became a partner in the production company called Producers Associates Limited that I formed. One of John’s best-known credits was the omnibus thriller “Dead of Night” which combined horror with science-fiction and remains a classic to this day. Herbert J. Leder, an American writer to whom I was introduced, developed a screen story which we liked and turned it into a first-rate screenplay. Leder later became a producer himself and among his films, also made in England, were “The Frozen Dead” and “It”.

My deal with Boris Karloff was to make two horror pictures, the first of which was agreed to be “Grip of the Strangler” from a story that Boris himself brought to my attention. With my brother’s help, I signed Marshall Thompson to star in two science-fiction pictures that would become the co-features. As British filmmakers were not yet specializing in science-fiction monsters in the late 1950′s, John Croydon suggested that we look beyond England for the right technicians to bring our thought monsters to life. He knew of two men in Munich who, as a team, had done some extraordinary special effects for major British productions. Florenz Von Nordhoff was a surrealist artist and experimental filmmaker. His partner, K.L. Ruppel, was a specialist in animation and in the technique of combining it with blue backing and rear screen projection. A quick visit to their studio in Munich convinced me that they could provide just what we wanted, especially when Nordhoff imagined the creatures on a sketch pad at a lunch meeting during which he was given the plot outline.

Thus were born the Fiends that threatened to take over the World, created in the original story through thought projection by a scientist experimenting with new forms of life. Leder successfully updated the material, setting it not only against the background of a military installation on the border between the United States and Canada (although the production was filmed entirely in England) but adding atomic power as the source of energy that enabled the creatures to gain enough strength to make themselves visible, and to multiply. Arthur Crabtree, who had made some notable films for J. Arthur Rank (such as “Man in Grey”, “Fanny By Gaslight”, “Madonna of the Seven Moons” and “Quartet”) was sufficiently intrigued by the project to sign on as director and most of the crew came directly from “Grip of the Strangler” as both films were shot back-to-back at Walton Studios and on locations in the vicinity of London.

Originally designed as the support to “Grip of the Strangler”, “Fiend Without a Face” finally cost more to make and took longer to complete but our UK distributors, Eros Films, were so pleased with them that each picture opened separately as a “stand alone” in London’s West End before the programme played the circuits on general release.

“Fiend Without a Face” created a public uproar after its premiere at the Ritz Theater in Leicester Square. The British Board of Film Censors had already demanded a number of cuts before granting it the “X” Certificate, but the newspaper critics were still aghast at its horrifying effects, and questions were actually asked in Parliament as to why the censors had allowed the film at all and what was the British film industry thinking in trying to beat Hollywood at its own game of overdosing on blood and gore.

MGM took on both films for world distribution outside the United Kingdom but in that era, their American sales force had no idea of how to handle such a programme. I was asked to go on the road to promote initial playdates and arrived in Detroit to find that MGM had an output deal with a high-class cinema called the Adams in a refined area of the city. When I suggested to the manager that we place a coffin in the lobby to promote the forthcoming programme, he was horrified and refused because “Gigi” was to be the next attraction.

Back in New York, I met with the head of distribution and complained that we should have opened in downtown Detroit at the Broadway Capitol Theater where American-International’s double bills regularly broke the house records. With a portrait of Louis B. Mayer facing me from the wall behind his desk, he said to me “Mr. Gordon, you must remember that you are now at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer”. I retreated like the villagers who saw the Frankenstein monster coming down the high street.

Nevertheless, when the double bill opened at the Rialto Theatre on Times Square, we arranged a front-of-house display with a living and breathing Fiend in a glass case that periodically moved its tail and made menacing sounds with the help of a concealed electrical apparatus. The crowd that gathered on the sidewalk to watch grew to such proportions that the police ordered it removed because we were creating a public disturbance.

MGM’s license to distribute the film expired after 12 years and the copyrights reverted to me. Since then – with its theatrical reissues, television exposure, home video release on cassettes and laserdiscs, “Fiend Without a Face” has become a cult classic that has been acclaimed and reviled, admired and condemned, sent up in books and magazines while at the same time being seriously analyzed for its sociological implications in such works as Patrick Lucanio’s “Them Or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films” which was published in 1987 by the Indiana University Press. An obvious contender for a large-scale color remake, it remains a favorite of film fans worldwide, many of whom remember it as the first film that scared them out of their wits!

My second Boris Karloff film, after an abortive attempt sponsored by MGM to obtain the remake rights to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’ and do it in CinemaScope and color, became “Corridors of Blood” which, thanks to my friend Jimmy Carreras at Hammer Films, who was then in Post-production on “Curse of Frankenstein”, teamed Christopher Lee with Boris Karloff for the first time. This time, the co-feature was to be “First Man Into Space”, again starring Marshall Thompson, based on an screenplay called “Satellite of Blood” written in Hollywood by Wyatt Ordung, which Alex also found for me. Robert Day, director of the two Karloff films, agreed to do it as his third and last film for Producers Associates Limited. He went on to direct such films as “She” for Hammer and “Tarzan the Magnificent” before going to America for a long career in Hollywood features and television series.

When space travel became a reality at just about the same time that we were finishing the two new films, MGM decided to release “First Man Into Space” as a single feature. The story took place in New Mexico, around the University of Albuquerque, although once again it was filmed entirely in England except for a few establishing shots that Alex made for me in the desert. Someone in MGM’s publicity department, not knowing the circumstances but having seen the synopsis, decided that it would be a great idea to have the world premiere in the city where the film was shot! Predictably, the audience attending this event in Albuquerque laughed uproariously at some of the scenes. Nevertheless, the American release was a great financial success.

A new management team had meanwhile been installed at MGM and decided not to continue releasing horror double bills, with the result that “Corridors of Blood” remained on their shelf for three years before finally being released in the USA through a newly-formed subsidiary company on a programme with a dubbed Italian exploitation picture that they called “Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory” to which they added a specially-composed song “The Ghoul in School” that didn’t help at the box office. During the lengthy post-production schedule of “Fiend Without a Face”, I made a third picture with Marshall Thompson which was a low-budget spy thriller shot entirely on locations in and around London that was directed by Ronald Kinnoch (who produced MGM’s “Village of the Damned”), and co-starred John Loder, called “The Secret Man”. It went directly to television in the United States.

In the Sixties and Seventies, I alternated science-fiction with horror in my productions. A double-bill of “Island of Terror” (directed by Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing) and “The Projected Man” was released by Universal. One critic thoughtfully described “Island of Terror” as being “Like ‘Fiend Without a Face’ on a bigger budget in color”. By 1980, I found that it was no longer feasible to produce films independently without the participation of a major company. Production costs went through the roof and marketing costs threatened to double the investment. Without the guarantee of a studio release, one could be left without theatrical distribution in the United States which became necessary to generate world-wide interest. My last science-fiction picture “Inseminoid”, which was largely financed by the Shaw Brothers Organization in Hong Kong, barely managed a proper American release through an independent distributor who re-titled it “Horror Planet”.

Today, science-fiction is big business for companies ready to spend fifty to a hundred million dollars or more, fuelled by extravagant special effects employing techniques which never existed before and demanding the ultimate in star power. Horror films have gone in the opposite direction, requiring such explicit blood and gore, with each film trying to outdo its predecessor, that the fun has gone out of them.

I detoured back into production only once in 1992 when I rediscovered and restored a short film based on an Irish ghost story that Orson Welles made in Ireland in the early 1950′s. Adding a prologue in which Peter Bogdanovich graciously consented to appear, I presented it at various Film Festivals under the title “A Tribute to Orson Welles” and then released it on television and home video as “Orson Welles’ Ghost Story”. It was paired on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc with Welles’ own production of “Othello”, and will be out on a Criterion DVD, probably before the end of this year.

In the future, I hope that an authorized big-budget color remake of “Fiend Without A Face” may soon become a reality.

DVDs are proliferating more quickly then the cane toads of Australia, and that, judging from the First Run Features DVD release (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History; 65 mins, color), is a pretty frightening phenomenon. I don’t know if it qualifies as Halloween screening material…but for a documentary it comes close. Very tongue-in-cheek, rather enlightening, and a bit too long for its own good.

In this country, when you’re making a film near an hour in length, they suggest tightening it to 55-57 minutes so that it can be shown on tv with room for commercials. What kind of a running time is 65? Besides, with seven or eight minutes less, or even five, its seams wouldn’t have shown.

From Universal we have perhaps fifteen recent spooky titles on DVD, and what’s mindboggling is that I believe the studio actually planned their release for the Holiday season. I’ll mention two here.

The remastered, more elaborate Collector’s Edition release of their previously distributed An American Werewolf in London, finds director John Landis in great form dolloping out devilish doses of black humor, and counterpointing the rock standard ‘Blue Moon’ with Rick Baker’s daringly overlit lycanthropic transformation, the absolute state of the art in Special Makeup until CGI stepped in several years later and complicated the issue. Landis isn’t on the commentary track, though he is present in an interview. Instead, the commentary features cast members David (the pathotic werewolf) Naughton, and Griffin (his unlucky friend and victim) Dunne. Rick Baker also discusses his work in a separate supplementary piece.

As a double bill with the above, also from Universal, check out the original 1935 Werewolf of London, featuring Henry Hull and Warner Oland as two lost souls out for blood. This one may creek a bit, but there are some clever effects, and what could be more satisfying than experiencing the history of it all? Since the orig lacks the humor of the remake, make it the first screening of the evening.

Universal has also chosen at this time to release Son of Frankenstein & Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman & House of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter & Son of Dracula, The She-Wolf of London & Werewolf Of London, The Mummy’s Tomb & The Mummy’s Hand, and The Mummy’s Curse & The Mummy’s Ghost. Hopefully, from the way I used my ampersands, you deduced that these are double-bills. Gone are the extraordinary productions that we saw over the previous two years, spearheaded by David Skal and featuring remarkable documentaries and commentary tracks, but…I guess the trade-off is that we are being delivered so incredibly many of them. The transfers are excellent, the films are great fun, with a few less fun than others, and I bet there are collectors out there grousing about the omission of House of Dracula, or the Invisible Man sequels. But I think that’s really looking a gift horse in the mouth. (Although, come to think of it, I wish the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi-Ulmer The Black Cat would still be given the royal treatment.)

And though David Skal is nowhere to be found on these new releases, he is lurking at your neighborhood Barnes and Nobles, just in time for Halloween, with a revised edition of his comprehensive insight into the genre, ‘The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.’ Watch the films in the evening, then read the book before you go to bed, and guarantee yourselves a nightmare or two.

MGM has given us a slew of goodies, mainly exploiters, for the holiday, and that’s fine, is it not? Several are Roger Corman concoctions, but I’d go with two of their ‘Midnight Movies’, It! The Terror From Beyond Space (69 minutes, 1958), and The Monster That Challenged the World (84 minutes, 1957), B’s, but damn good ones. You can sit there amused at the low budgets and B-film thinking and still revel at the tight stories and moderate amount of satisfying thrills.

I’m sure I’m the last one to inform you that It! is the indisputable source material for Ridley Scott’s Alien. Director Edward L.Cahn (1899-1963) spent his celluloid life toiling in second feature bins. He surfaced in ‘A’ territory briefly, in ’32, with the Walter Huston (as Wyatt Earp) starrer, Law and Order. However, later it was titles such as The Creature With the Atom Brain all the way. Clearly he had no pretentions in regards to his career. Which is alright; he made a nice little programmer anyway. The screenplay is by ‘Twilight Zone’ scribe Jerome Bixby. One thing to be aware of: on the back jacket cover the MGM home video people got a little carried away and identified the film as being in color. There was no color when I saw the film back in the theaters, still no color when I cherished my bootleg 16mm print, and there’s no color on the DVD either.

The Monster That Challenged the World, following in the podprints of such giant bug/mollusk delights as Them! and The Black Scorpion, has a serviceable performance from a somewhat bloated Tim Holt, whose career didn’t go forward in stellar fashion after either The Magnificent Ambersons or, somewhat later, The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s nice to see him again, even fighting giant sea snails. Director Arnold Laven, stuck in the exploiter swamps, rose above it by becoming a producer on Sidney Pollack’s The Scalphunters in 1968, which starred Burt Lancaster. Again, if you’re a lover of these little thrillers, you’ll feel, as I do, that the man had nothing to be ashamed of.

Double Bill these two, for a nostalgic return to the wonderful, terrible world of the 50s, when the fear was that science would go awry, and nature would strike back.