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Re-Make of A Silent Movie; Cats Without End

KONGO-MGM-1932-Don’t miss this whacked, pre-code remake of the Chaney/Browning silent film WEST OF ZANZIBAR! Walter Huston is Deadlegs Flint, the ruthless crippled white “god” who uses superstition and violence to rule over his jungle domain. Flint lives for only one thing. The day he can have his revenge on the man (C. Henry Gordon) who stole his wife and maimed him. As part of his plan he degrades the girl (Virginia Gregg in a great performance) he believes is his enemy’s daughter. Her savior turns out to be a doctor turned drug addict (Conrad Nagel)! You can probably guess what happens. KONGO is full of racist dialogue, manic acting and strange situations that are alluded to more than shown. Lupe Velez, Forrester Harvey and Mitchell Lewis play the lost souls under Flint’s thrall. Look for Ming The Merciless himself Charles Middleton in a small un-billed role.

Director William Cowen creates some wild scenes involving jungle ritual burning. He directed a Hollywood version of Oliver Twist the next year! And believe it or not Huston is even more twisted than Chaney was! Screenwriter Leon Gordon worked on FREAKS for Tod Browning the same year!

CAT GIRL-Anglo Amalgamated-1957 -This is a pretty neglected CAT PEOPLE inspired English production featuring the underrated Barbara Shelley as a newly married woman who goes back to her childhood home to inherit her weird uncle’s estate. Unk has a pet leopard and a roomful of stuffed felines. However, he warns her that part of his inheritance is his curse. It’s never actually explained how the curse came about or why exactly her family is cursed but it seems that she kinda does a mind meld with the pet leopard and she can make it kill people. She starts with her philandering husband. A psychiatrist (who she’s in love with) tries to convince her it’s all in her mind. In one scene while she’s confined to a rubber room she imagines herself to be a cat that looks like a human size mouse from "Zoobilee Zoo" or something! She then goes after the shrink’s wife. Shelley is great in the title role but the rest of the cast is pretty bland.

Director Alfred Shaughnessy later wrote THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW. American screenwriter Lou Rusoff wrote THE SHE CREATURE, DAY THE WORLD ENDED, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD and other AIP movies.

Beaver's Dad Gets The Girl!

WORLD WITHOUT END-Allied Artists-1956 -Believe it or not, this was the first movie ever parodied by those nutty guys at MST3K in a live performance and it’s writer/director also made Three Stooges shorts! Plus it’s in color! Four astronauts (lead by Hugh Marlowe) on a rocket ship exploring the orbit of Mars have engine trouble but manage to get back to Earth. Unfortunately it’s a post nuclear war Earth of the future (like the much later PLANET OF THE APES) where two races of mankind occupy what’s left. The first group are radiation scarred cavemen like savages with deformed faces and huge hands. They look like the influence for the zombies in R. D. Steckler’s INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES! The second group are normal looking (if you forget the fact that the men act like old ladies and wear bathing caps on their heads), technically superior and live underground. The women are the usual voluptuous ‘50’s females. Trouble making abounds due to the sour faced Mories (“we are sick of weapons and war”). It’s pretty funny as the astronauts are dressed like campers carrying axes and pistols and somehow the middle aged Marlowe (who was in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS the same year) manages to woo the much younger Garnet (Nancy Gates) AND kill the savages leader AND save what’s left of mankind!!

Besides making Stooges’ shorts (and a couple of their later full length movies) and working on both the Bowery Boys and Blondie series director Edward L. Bernds went on to do the notorious QUEEN FROM OUTER SPACE (1958).

"She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon"-Groucho Marx

Posted by CavedogRob on 2007-08-25 21:54:39 | Rating: