HOUSE OF HORRORS: if art critics ruled the world

The highpoint of this 1946 B-movie arrives about two thirds of the way through when a newspaper spins into focus, it's headline screaming ART CRITICS ASK POLICE PROTECTION!
Not the kind of phrase one reads everyday, or even once in a lifetime but it just about sums up the style and tone of HOUSE OF HORRORS.

New York's art critics are filling their lace embroidered panties with a warm smelly brown manifestation of uncontrollable fear on account of a serial killer known as The Creeper (Rondo Hatton). This hideously ugly monster of a man (who doesn't actually creep anywhere) is targeting these effete pen pushers at the behest of a mentally unbalanced sculptor named Marcel de Lange.
de Lange, played with hammy relish by Martin Kosleck, wants revenge on those who've savaged his work and talent in the columns of the city's newspapers, but he's too skinny and weak to do it himself. So he persuades The Creeper to do his dirty work for him by offering him friendship and a roof over his head.
There's several fascinating aspects to this storyline, chief among them the incredible and implausible importance that it places on the role of the art critic in society. In the New York of HOUSE OF HORRORS these foppish, self-professed charlatans write the most influential and widely-read columns in their respective newspapers, and wield their immense power to make and break young artists with nary a single consideration for ethics, honesty or journalistic integrity.
All that is, except one, who's neither foppish nor effete but female and incredibly annoying. The way Virginia Grey plays Joan Medford, she deserves to be The Creeper's first victim. She's a socialite with a line in fancy hats playing at being an art critic. She complains incessantly about not having a story for her Sunday column, and is endlessly bothering artists for stories she can write up but she never once produces a notepad and pen, not even when she insists de Lange recount his entire life story so she can fill that Sunday column.
Of course this being 1946 it's still a man's world (despite the millions of women who'd recently taken over men's jobs to aid the war effort) so Joan is not to be mistaken for a serious journalist. She's just playing at it, to get that tiny bit of ambition out of her system, before she succumbs to the inevitable marriage proposal from her artist boyfriend (which comes after she's helped clear him when he's falsely accused of The Creeper's murders) and retreats to the kitchen to prepare his meals and have his babies.
She's such an amateur she doesn't even realise she's found The Creeper when she finds him, and she's so not really an independent woman that she runs plumb out of ideas on how to escape The Creeper's grasp when she finds the door locked. It's clear after turning the handle twice that it's not going to open, but instead of searching for another exit she simply stands there rattling the knob over and over again as The Creeper advances on her, and it takes the deus ex machina appearance of genial Police Lieutenant Larry Brooks and his cheesy grin to save her.

Ironically it's Rondo Hatton who evokes the most sympathy despite The Creeper's penchant for snapping spines. Hatton reprises the role he'd first played 18 months earlier in the Sherlock Holmes thriller 'The Pearl of Death' and with the obvious exploitation of his deformed features (he suffered from acromegaly) for shock value it's difficult not to feel for him (although it's not known how Hatton felt about the kind of parts he was getting, so it's possible he didn't feel exploited in the slightest). The Creeper is so ugly just the sight of him paralyses his victims making it all the more easy for him to break their back, and the film encourages us to stare at his ugliness until we feel physically repulsed, and then stare some more.
Although billed as a horror movie there's precious few genuine chills and way too much chat to be had in HOUSE OF HORRORS. There isn't even a house that fits the titular bill unless it's referring to the studio adorned with de Lange's hideous sculptures. But the film only runs 65 minutes and on that basis I recommend it as a worthwhile investment of your time.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL: guests who won't leave but will check out

'Slumdog Millionaire' it ain't.
Although both films share the same star, Dev Patel, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL offers a very different view of India.
It's a view which barely even scratches the surface of this multi-faceted country. This surprisingly old-fashioned 2012 drama ignores the many complexities and contrasts in wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, in favour of a superficial tourist guide take which touches on all the appropriate stereotypes without exploring any of them in any depth.
And it does it all with such charm and good humour that I almost feel bad for criticising it.
TBEMH is a delightful viewing experience peopled by some of British cinema's finest actors and offering up a cast of characters that are so endearingly old school British they could almost have wandered in from the set of a Merchant-Ivory production.

Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Ronald Pickup are so damned good at what they do that you just want to ignore the one dimensional and stereotypical representation of their adopted homeland.
The chaos and the colour that is India - check.
The delights of spicy food - check.
Copious references to numerous crumbling temples and palaces - check.
Kids playing cricket on a patch of wasteland, using makeshift bat and wickets - check.
At least one Indian who adds humour with his use of flowery, old fashioned English - check.
True love versus arranged marriage - check.
The brief acknowledgment of a vast underclass of 'untouchables' who live in unimaginable poverty - check.
Humanise that underclass to give the impression they're ok with their lot in life - check.
and so it goes on.
It's difficult to avoid the impression that all India really needs to sort out the chaos is a bunch of elderly white westerners because no matter what the Indians have managed to achieve on their own there's nothing that can't be improved upon by the knowledge, experience and worldview of Maggie Smith or Judi Dench, or at least the characters they play.

TBEMH is not a film about India but about the country and its culture as filtered through the differing experiences of a group of elderly white British citizens who've been lured east by the alluring website for the titular residential hotel. It promises them the opportunity to see out their years in the comparatively low cost splendour of a luxury hotel catering to their every whim. The reality is rather different and it's the adjustments in expectations forced upon the guests that the story focuses on, plus their own relationships, or the lack of them. Some are lonely and looking for love, one couple struggle with the growing realisation that their 40 year marriage has reached the end of the road, while a retired high court judge returns to city of his childhood in search of a lost love.
To the extent that India has a culture which is different from the one they are used to back home in Blighty, it does have an impact on how their stories play out but it could just as easily have been Italy, Spain, Kenya or Thailand. The fact that everything happens in India is incidental to the main thrust of the narrative.
It's the top-notch cast that lifts this story to heights it doesn't really deserve to scale and make it possible to overlook the many shortcomings. They're a class act combo and give the lie to the oft-asserted claim that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI: a ghoulish delight

You may not believe me but it wasn't the titillating title that drew my attention to this 1966 Beach Party B-movie.
My prime interest lay not in the hordes of scantily clad young ladies cavorting around a supposedly haunted mansion, but in the opportunity to watch two great stars eeking out the very tail-end of their careers.

74 year old Basil Rathbone had been working in the movies since 1921 and was for many (including me) the definitive Sherlock Holmes, after playing the great detective in 14 films during the 1940s. 20 years after the last of those thrillers he still looked much like the suave Basil Rathbone I remembered but that beautiful voice, with its crisp authoritative diction, was no more. Each time he opened his mouth to speak it sounded like he had a handkerchief stuffed in it. His speech was muffled, verging on slurred on times and he was no longer able to use his voice to command the scene as he had done in the Holmes movies, and countless historical adventures.
It would be very interesting to know how he felt about this particular project which was so obviously way beneath his talents and stature as an actor. It's not just the inane script and nonsensical plot (both of which resemble a Scooby Doo storyline), but also the indignity of playing support to a bunch of top-billed vacuous non-entities (Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley and Aron Kincaid, anybody?) who between them struggle to muster the screen presence of a wet paper bag.
The film's other great star of Hollywood's Golden Age had appeared with Rathbone in several movies in the late 1930s, including 'Son of Frankenstein', and 'Tower of London' but sadly shared no scenes with him here. Boris Karloff's character spends the entire movie entombed in a crypt and commenting on the action which he observes via a crystal ball with televisual capabilities. He appeared in so many low budget flicks in the final decade of his life that it's less of a shock to see him sharing the screen with a bunch of overage professional teenagers acting out Hollywood's idea of 60s youth culture.

But more than that, Karloff never allowed inferior material to drag him down. No matter how schlocky the script or feeble the acting abilities of his co-stars, he always managed to rise above them and maintain his dignity. He's classy here in a way that Rathbone isn't, although in the latter's defence, Karloff is not required to fist fight a 22 year old or do a comedy concussion routine after running head first into a wall.
Sad though it is to see these two great actors reduced to such juvenile nonsense they do at least provide a reason for watching the film. Without them there is nothing to hold the attention. The titular invisible bikini is not at all titillating and neither are the numerous other bikinis sported by Nancy Sinatra and her youthful chums. Their swimwear succeeds in both revealing an impressive amount of bare skin and also rendering it completely sexless. The only youth revolution on show here is one in favour of a regression to pre-pubescent childishness and an uncontrollable passion for dancing round the swimming pool. Crazy man,,,,, crazy!

ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK: one two three o'clock schlock

If rock and roll had had to rely on Bill Haley and his Comets rather than Elvis Presley to become a cultural phenomenon we'd all be going crazy over Michael Buble today.

Despite pioneer DJ Alan Freed's enthusiastic introduction of Haley as "one of the most phenomenal acts in the history of showbusiness!" his music was actually simplistic, repetitive and, after two or three songs, pretty unlistenable, while Haley himself had the looks and build of a truck driver and the personality of a turnip. He really was a most unlikely character to usher in a revolutionary style of music.
All of which is made painfully obvious in ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK, a low values, B-movie production hastily thrown together in January 1956 to cash in on a shocking new musical sound that was threatening to end civilisation as square old middle America knew it.
Steve Hollis is Johnny Johnston, a big band manager who sees the writing on the wall and sets out to find the next big thing in popular music. He finds it in the shape of Bill Haley and his Comets, blowing the roof off the joint at a small town Saturday night dance. Johnston's traveling companion reckons they sound like they're "slaughtering cattle" but the kids just can't get enough of the crazy beat which causes them to dance like they've lost their mind.
Johnston signs them up on the spot, along with the brother and sister dance team of Lisa and Jimmy Johns (who demonstrate the correct way to dance to rock and roll music) and sets about trying to promote them to a wider audience. To do that he needs access to clubs and concert halls but that is controlled by Corinne Talbot's talent agency and she's determined to stifle Johnston's new discovery unless he agrees to marry her.
Will Corinne block the rock to bag her bloke or will she join the majority of America's impressionable youth in succumbing to the infectious beat of 'Razzle Dazzle', 'See You Later Alligator' and 'Rudy's Rock', not forgetting the title track?
The plot's little more than an excuse to showcase Haley, the even less inspiring Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys, and the completely misplaced mambo act of Tony Martinez and his Orchestra, in a series of unimaginatively staged and shot musical numbers. The only respite comes from The Platters who sound sublime but hadn't yet mastered the hang of moving while performing live.

The history books tell us this was subversive stuff, but at a remove of half century it all comes across as quaint and tamer than a toothless old tiger posing for photos with visitors to a small-town zoo. The rebellious teenagers with their 'far out' lingo and all consuming passion for rock and roll dress like insurance agents, and all of the musical acts perform in suits and ties. Everyone is unerringly polite to one another and would no doubt have been appalled to learn that their elders feared they were undermining the very basis of American society.
Producer Sam Katzman probably thought he was riding a cultural wave with ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK but the reality was that his film and the musical acts featured in it were all about to be washed away by a one man tsunami.  By the time the film was released in March 1956 Elvis Presley was on the brink of national stardom and a career which would eclipse that of all of his musical contemporaries. If you want to see a star - the man who scored rock and roll's first hit - about to become a footnote in musical history, this is the film to watch.