Top Ten for 1952

Overview coming soon.
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1952

Top 5

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1. Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer)

Finland / Erik Blomberg / ★★★1/2

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2. Sudden Fear

USA / David Miller / ★★★1/2

* * * * * * * * * *

3. The Stranger Left No Card

UK [short] / Wendy Toye / ★★★1/2

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4. The Black Castle

USA / Nathan Juran / ★★★

* * * * * * * * * *

5. Without Warning!

USA / Arnold Laven / ★★★

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Rounding Out the Top 10:

6. Alraune (Mandragore; Unnatural) / West Germany / Arthur Maria Rabenalt / ★★1/2
7. Noita palaa elämään (The Witch) / Finland / Roland af Hällström / ★★1/2
8. Roses Bloom on the Moor Grave (Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab) / West Germany / Hans H. König / ★★1/2

9. My Son, the Vampire (Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire) / UK / John Gilling / ★★
10. Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla / USA / William Beaudine / ★1/2

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Also seen:

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Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

... aka: Crimes in the Black Museum
... aka: Das schwarze Museum (The Black Museum)

... aka: Die Folterkammer des Teufels (The Devil's Torture Chamber)

Directed by:
Arthur Crabtree

During the memorably nasty opening sequence, a woman receives an anonymous package with a pair of binoculars inside, tries them out and then gets her eyeballs poked out by retractable blades hidden inside. It's the third brutal murder of a London female in just two weeks. Sensationalist writer Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough) finds it all "fiendishly clever." Bancroft, who "eats, drinks and sleeps crime," taunts the Scotland Yard detectives handling the case and hobbles around on a cane chain-smoking Tibetan cigars, seems eager to write it all up. While he makes a ton of money dishing out the sordid details to the public, the murders are oddly enough having a strange physical effect on him that even his physician Dr. Ballan (Gerald Andersen) doesn't quite understand. After each killing, Edmond goes into a deep, though temporary, state of shock. Because his patient "manifests a high state of unnatural excitement" discussing death, Dr. Ballan believes he should be committed to a nuthouse... and he is, of course, correct in his assumption.

In the cellar of Bancroft's home is a large museum dedicated to murder and the macabre; one so elaborate he thinks it even makes a mockery of Scotland Yard's famed "Black Museum." In Edmond's personal collection are mannequins acting out various bloody death and torture scenes, tons of antique murder weapons adorning the walls and even a huge computer system. Edmond wants to demonstrate to the world that his "weapons can be used again and again... and that the murderer will never be caught," so he's been sending out his young assistant Rick (Graham Curnow), who has what Edmond refers to as "the gift of obedience,"  to murder women.

In between orchestrating his killings, Edmond's been keeping a drunken blonde trollop, Joan (June Cunningham), cooped up in an apartment he pays for. When sugar daddy refuses to give her extra spending money, the two get into a hilarious fight where he comments on her lack of "service polish" and she calls him an "ugly cripple." After getting drunk and dancing to a Rockola jukebox for a bar full of leering men, Joan returns home and hops into bed, only to quickly a little too late that Rick has turned her headboard into a makeshift guillotine.

Right as Edmond is about to make another kind of killing with his new true crime book "Terror After Dark," an unhinged man attempts to steal his thunder by erroneously confessing to the crimes. To remedy the situation, Edmond kills an antique store owner (Beatrice Varley) who's trying to blackmail him with a giant pair of ice tongs (!) and then electrocutes his shrink and dissolves the body in a vat of acid. He usually leaves the dirty work up to poor Rick, who's certainly not the brightest bulb in the shed and sits back and allows Edmond to give him a "treatment" (injection of green gunk) that turns him into a lumpy face killer. Rick's secretly dating Angela (Shirley Ann Field) but when Edmond finds out about it, he tells Rick that women are "a vicious, unreliable breed" and then instructs him to kill her on the Tunnel of Love ride at the Funfair.

So this is not a good movie. Much of the dialogue is cringe-worthy, the story line is all over the place, several of the supporting performances are flagrantly awful and it was filmed in early Cinemascope color (by Desmond Dickinson), so the whole thing has this really ugly, murky, muted look. Thankfully, Gough (who headlined KONGA [1961] and BLACK ZOO [1963] for the same production company) is around and steers this dreary little number right into camp territory by going hilariously over-the-top throughout. I love this guy. He's always great playing heartless, hateful and extremely smug sociopaths and here he cranks his performance up to a 20 when it really requires about a 7. Sometimes chewing the scenery is the way to go, and Gough knew when and when not to do it. And boy was it needed here. He's about the only thing to breath any life into this one.

Geoffrey Keen and John Warwick co-star as the detectives, Herman Cohen co-wrote and was the executive producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff was an uncredited producer and future director Jim O'Connolly (who made the amusing Joan Crawford vehicle BERSERK! [1967]; which also featured Gough) was the production manager.

★★

Gingerdead Man, The (2005)

Directed by:
Charles Band

Millard Findlemeyer (Gary Busey) robs Cadillac Jack's Diner and decides to shoot and stab all of the customers while he's there. Among the victims are bakery owner James Leigh (Newell Alexander) and his two grown children. The daughter - Sarah (Robin Sydney) - was lucky enough to survive her gunshot wound that fateful day, and it was her testimony that eventually ended up putting Millard away and onto death row. After his date with the electric chair, Millard's body is cremated and his ashes are sent back to his mother. Two days after the execution, Sarah is at work at her family's bakery when someone wearing a black cloak leaves a box of "Grandma's Gingerbread Seasoning" at the back door. Sarah's highly annoying, profession wrestling obsessed co-worker Brick (Jonathan Chase) accidentally cuts himself while opening the box and drizzles some blood into the seasoning. Never mind that, it's mixed in with some flour anyway to make cookie dough. With that level of quality control, it's no wonder the place on the verge of closing down.

Across the street, a chain restaurant is about to open that threatens to put the Leigh's bakery out of business. Sarah's mother Betty (Margaret Blye), who's taken to the bottle since the murders of her husband and son, attempts to shoot their banner down with a shotgun. Jimmy Dean (Larry Cedar), the loud-mouth, cowboy-hat-wearing owner of the rival eatery who has a bitchy, wanna-be model daughter named Lorna (Alexia Aleman), offers to buy Sarah out for 50,000 thousand dollars but she refuses. Lorna sneaks in with a rat in an attempt to get them closed down by the health department, the ladies get into a cat fight, Lorna's punk-with-a-heart-of-gold boyfriend Amos (Ryan Locke) pops in to break them up, the oven goes haywire and a large gingerbread cookie baking in the oven comes to life. Yes, a walking, talking, killing gingerbread cookie voiced by Gary Busey. If that doesn't scream "Camp!" I don't know what does. The cookie gets to cut off a finger, jump in a car and smash a guy against the wall and knock a girl out with a skillet and then make an ice cream sundae out of her (complete with strategically placed cherries). It also gets to make terrible jokes about ladyfingers, drunks and reminds us that it "sure ain't the Pillsbury Fucking Doughboy."

Because of Busey's presence (he has about five minutes of actual screen time and the rest is just him voicing the cookie) and the ridiculous, outlandish premise, this ended up making money on DVD. Unfortunately, it's all rather terrible... and not in a very good or enjoyable way either. This is one of those movies that tries to defy being called idiotic by being intentionally idiotic: it wants so desperately to be camp. Therein lies the big problem; this is far too forced and obvious to be even remotely amusing if you're above the age of about 8. The combination of terrible acting, awful dialogue, corny one-liners, murky, flat-looking photography, poor lighting and, perhaps most especially, a roster of extremely annoying, toilet mouthed, over-the-top characters sink this in no time. There's not enough material here to even push this to a proper feature run-time. If you exclude the very-slow-moving opening and closing credits, this actually runs less than one hour.

John Carl Buechler and Magical Media Industries created the creature effects, though there's not much in the way of gore and the body count is surprisingly low. It was co-written by Silvia St. Croix (probably a pseudonym for William Butler), who went on to direct GINGERDEAD MAN 2: PASSION OF THE CRUST (2008). There was also GINGERDEAD MAN 3: SATURDAY NIGHT CLEAVER (2011).

★

Hellraiser (1987)

... aka: Clive Barker's Hellraiser
... aka: Hellbound Heart, The
... aka: Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave

Directed by:
Clive Barker

Highly dissatisfied with the previous adaptations of his work; the dreary subway-set mutant saga TRANSMUTATIONS (1985; originally titled Underworld) and the gory monster movie RAWHEAD REX (1986), which I somewhat enjoy but not always from the right reasons, Barker decided to finally take the helm himself and bring his novel "The Hellbound Heart" to the big screen. The end product was a more mature, serious horror film that became a hit (grossing over 14 million in the U.S. alone on a 1 million dollar budget). Critics and audiences both responded well to the grim, bloody, creative and unpredictable story and the film helped boost Barker's reputation as a darker, edgier figure to contrast the more mainstream appeal of the massively popular Stephen King. The film also introduced audiences to a brand new genre icon: Pinhead. Doug Bradley's mannered, S&M-clad, well-spoken, nail-faced centerpiece to the eventual long-running series (dubbed simply "Lead Cenobite" in this first film) represented a much more intellectual evil to contrast personality-free slasher maniacs like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, and juvenile one-liner-spouting fiends like Chucky and Freddy Krueger.

Unhappily married couple Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Julia (Clare Higgins) Cotton, along with their teenage daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), move into a new house in the UK that had previously been occupied by Larry's estranged (and criminal) brother Frank (Sean Chapman) whom Julia had a brief yet exciting and passionate affair with years earlier. Little does anyone know, but Frank's remains are actually underneath the floorboards in the attic. Larry cuts himself while moving furniture, bleeds onto the floor and manages to somehow revive the brother in the process. The problem Frank now faces is that he's in some sort of bloody skeletal state and needs more blood to gain back his entire body. After some coercion, Julia - who's still in love with her brother-in-law all these years later - starts seducing and then murdering men to provide the needed blood. Not too happy about losing a hell-bound soul are a group of fetishistic demons from hell who can be summoned using an ancient puzzle box.

After the film proved highly profitable, Barker was given several more opportunities to direct; though neither of his efforts would match the success of his first. NIGHTBREED (1990), based on Barker's novel Cabal, was a flawed, intricate production that involved both a masked serial killing psychiatrist (played by soft-spoken Canadian director David Cronenberg) and a bunch of mythical, individually unique, once-human mutant outcasts living in their own isolated world underneath a cemetery. The film was somewhat neutered by producers after they re-edited the film and removed many of the scenes. Barker's final stint in the director's chair to date - Lord of Illusions (1995) - fared even worse, financially and otherwise. The Bernard Rose-directed Candyman (1992), based on Barker's The Forbidden, was actually the big Barker hit of the decade.

Hellraiser's success also meant that mass sequelization was the order of the day. Bradley and the Pinhead character were the only real constants though Barker was himself directly involved with the series for awhile, producing the first three sequels before bowing out. HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1989), directed by Tony Randel, was an oppressive, murky follow-up set in a mental asylum with Higgins, Laurence and Bradley all reprising their roles. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), directed by Anthony Hickox and featuring a Laurence cameo, went a more mainstream horror sequel route complete with one-liners and more gimmicky Cenobites (including one that shoots CDs out of its mouth). Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), an ambitious, muddled, troubled production, had three distinct settings (past - present - future), including scenes aboard a spaceship. It turned out so well that its director - special effects master Kevin Yagher, opted to hide behind the notorious "Alan Smithee" pseudonym.

After Bloodline was slated by critics and sorely under-performed at the box office, the series then went direct-to-video, where it prospered. Scott Derrickson's Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) was the first of these releases. Rick Bota directed the next three entries: Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), which brought Laurence back again as Kirsty, Hellraiser: Deader (2005), which wasn't even conceived as a Hellraiser film until some slight alterations were made last minute, and Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), which again had little to do with Barker's original vision. The 9th and so far final entry was the Bradley-free Hellraiser: Revelations (2011), which was so terrible that it's been denounced by not only fans, but also by Barker and Bradley themselves.

★★★1/2