b-movies

William Castle was one of the great B-movie showmen. His movies often came with gimmicks. For The Tingler, he set up certain seats with a vibrating device that was set to go off at certain times in the movie, giving the audience a real jolt.

The movie itself is goofy and wild and wonderfully fun.

Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, because of course he’s played by Vincent Price) is a pathologist who has become obsessed with fear. He’s been autopsying the corpses of folks executed by the state, and he believes that the tingling in your spine when you are afraid is caused by some kind of creature – a parasite living in your spine. He calls this thing the tingler.

Chapin believes that the only way to stop this parasite from paralyzing and even killing you from fear is to scream.

One day he meets Ollie (Philip Coolidge), a nice man who runs a silent movie house with his deaf and mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn). Chapin is fascinated by Martha, for she cannot scream, and thus she cannot tame her tingler.

Meanwhile, Chapin has a wife named Isabelle (Patricia Cutts). Theres is an unhappy marriage, to put it mildly. She openly cheats on him. She has dates every night. She brings men home when she thinks he is working, and makes out with them in the driveway when she thinks he’s home.

But she’s not really portrayed as a homewrecker or shrew. She’s just tired of being alone. He is obsessed with his work. He never wants to go out. He doesn’t like socializing. He falls asleep at the opera. When her sister falls in love with Chapin’s assistant, she refuses to let them marry. Her reasons are that she doesn’t want her to have the same fate with a husband who is never around.

None of this is all that interesting. In some ways, it seems like just something to wrap around the whole tingler concept. The story needed some padding. But it is also kind of thematically interesting. We’ve seen lots of movies where the husband is too busy with his job to pay attention to his wife, but this is so open about it. Her infidelities are spelled out, which seems strange in a movie from 1959.

Chapin never seems all that bothered by it. He truly is too obsessed with his work to care about anything else. At one point, he does seem to break. Not over her cheating on him, but over her not wanting the sister to get married. He threatens Isabelle and even brandishes a weapon, but once again all of this is actually in service to his work. He wants to see what the fear of being murdered will do to her.

His obsessions seem to be taking him over the edge. He seems more willing to do anything to actually discover the tingler. At one point, he drops some acid to fool his body into absolute terror so he can measure the feelings for himself.

He visits Matha again, ostensibly out of concern for her health. You see she fainted the first time he visited her because he cut his finger and the sight of blood terrifies her. Or rather, she didn’t faint, but because she cannot scream and thus exorcise her tingler, her body just completely shut down. He wonders that there could be such an extreme circumstance that she would literally be frightened to death.

Then that’s exactly what happens. On his second visit, he gives her some sort of shot to calm her nerves. Then he leaves. But sometime later, someone wearing a creepy mask comes in and threatens her with a knife. Doors slam shut. A bathtub is filled with blood (and Castle makes great use of color in this scene – the movie is in black and white, but the blood is bright red)

She literally dies of fright.

Not knowing what to do, her husband takes the corpse to Chapin, who begins an autopsy of her and discovers the tingler! It is a magnificent, creepy-crawly rubber thing pulled around by strings and wires.

Eventually it will escape and find its way into Ollie’s silent theater. And here we get back to William Castle being a great showman. At one point, the screen fades to black, and Vincent Price tells the audience about the monster and that they must scream to kill it. No doubt the real audience was feeling those vibrations at the time.

Castle actually introduces the film, warning the audience that we might feel a tingling sensation while watching the movie. He gives us permission to scream with abandon.

This isn’t by any means a great film, but it is a wonderful B-movie.

I’m fascinated by the careers of classic film stars late in their lives. Every now and again an aging star will land a wonderfully juicy film role, but mostly they found themselves in cheesy television shows as guest stars, or in low-budget horror films, slumming.

Julie Newmar, Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, John Carradine, and Tina Louise weren’t exactly the biggest stars of their day, but they made some good movies and starred in some enjoyable TV shows in their prime. They deserve better than this.

I watched Evils of the Night primarily based on that cast list and the basic plot description that involves vampire aliens kidnapping attractive young people for their blood.

I should have just gone to bed early.

I’m a fan of bad movies. I love the so-bad-its-good genre of cinema. This film doesn’t deserve to be called bad. It’s terrible.

The first twenty minutes find a bunch of sexy teens frolicking at a lake and sexing on the beach. Some dudes in ski masks (Neville Brand and Also Ray) snatch some of them and take them back to a hospital where Tina Louise, John Carradine, and Julie Newmar attempt to extract their blood, but not actually kill them.

It is never quite clear what they need the blood for, only that it has to come from healthy young people (but not too young) and that they can’t have any bruising (which is a problem for them because the guys is ski masks keep beating the kids up before they bring them in.) There is some business about the bosses screwing up by landing them in this small town where there aren’t enough healthy youngsters or intelligent minions to make their plan work. But nothing is really explained.

It is a weird mix of ’80s boner comedy and slasher horror with a bit of sci-fi alien story mixed in. But it feels completely thrown together with very little thought or effort put into it. For example during the numerous sex scenes, everybody keeps their shoes on and the guys never even unbutton their pants (the girls, including porn stars Crystal Breeze and Amber Lynn, naturally, get completely naked). The masked dudes wear masks to conceal their identities, but also overalls with their names on them. The spaceships come from clips stolen from the original Battlestar Galactica series (the poster includes a slightly modified Millenium Falcon).

One imagines they blew their entire budget on the stars and then just slapped something together fast and cheap hoping to recoup their money based on name recognition alone.

Please, do everyone a favor and don’t watch this film. It is bad enough that I had to.