Oops, You’re a Vampire, The House that Jack Built, Jacob’s Ladder, The Seventh Victim, Coming Home in the Dark, and Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía
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Oops, You’re a Vampire, The House that Jack Built, Jacob’s Ladder, The Seventh Victim, Coming Home in the Dark, and Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía
Weekly Horror Bulletin Newsletter 232
We’ve got more movies and a short film for you again:
We’ll start with the wild, indie film “Oops! You’re a Vampire” and then go insane with “Jacob’s Ladder” and “The House that Jack Built.” Then we’ll watch a literal “cult classic” with “The Seventh Victim” from way back in 1943!
For our bonus films, we have:
“Coming Home in the Dark” (2021) a revenge thriller
“Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía” (1962) AKA “Frankenstein, The Vampire, and Company”
Book News
We’ve got two announcements this week pertaining to our books:
FREE! Horror Bulletin Monthly Issue 20 is now out. This, as always, has all our previous month’s reviews inside, but this month, we’re offering the ebook version (in PDF and ePub) absolutely free! Check out https://brianschell.com/collection/free-books for this one and more!
FREE! The Horror Guys Guide To The Halloween Films is available now, exclusively at our web store, https://brianschell.com/collection/free-books. The eBook version is completely free. Enjoy! Note that it’s also available as a paperback, but that one’s obviously not free. Also note, that there are a couple of other free books on the site as well!
Check out all our books!
The Horror Guys Guide to:
Creepy Fiction:
Here. We. Go!
Oops! You're a Vampire (2022)
Directed by Phil Messerer
Written by Phil Messerer
Stars Ellis Cahill, Devon Dionne, Chase Gilbertson
Run Time: 1 Hour 26 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It doesn’t look big-budget, and the resolution seems to be on the low side, but don’t let that turn you off. It’s a creative and very funny movie while still keeping it fully in the horror genre. The effects and acting get the job done. We recommend it.
Synopsis
We’re told that back in the days of the Mayans, who worshiped the sun, a deity with an appetite for blood. They needed a human sacrifice every week. Helen comes into Lara’s goth shrine and teases her. “Mom! Lara’s trying to pray to Anne Rice again!” Credits roll as awful goth-rock plays (As Brian commented negatively on this, Kevin was thinking he liked the song).
Lara introduces us all to her very strange family, Helen, Raymond, Dad, and Mom, who used to be a Bulgarian figure-skater. It all goes reasonably well until Mom and Dad announce that they’re separating.
Lara walks to town and stops in the “Freakatorium,” a curiosity shop full of weird things. The owner shows her a new book, the Illustrated Biography of the Vampire Oya. He’s a creepy old guy with a story to tell. He claims that the Freemasons once had as many as twenty vampires in captivity.
It’s Lara and Helen’s sixteenth birthday (they’re twins). Lara’s clearly jealous of Helen, who gets all the boys. Lara does a spell to put an “ancient anal acne” curse on Helen.
Helen comes downstairs with an incredibly bloody nose and passes out. The doctor says all she needs is a good meal and leaves. Two minutes later, Helen apologizes for being such a jerk to Lara and dies (that’s a great doctor!).
There’s a funeral. Everybody cries, even Lara. Raymond, who is a home scientist, has done tests on Helen’s blood, and he says that she died from a loss of blood. Blood just disappeared inside her body. He found a virus that can only be killed with ultraviolet light. He can’t tell how long Helen had the virus; it could have been years. Mom says this is all God’s will, but Lara is less charitable about it.
There’s banging at the door. It’s Helen; she’s covered in someone else’s blood. She woke up and killed the mortician very messily. She looks at Lara and shouts, “You did this to me, didn’t you?”
Lara denies knowing anything about how Helen became a vampire. Raymond looks at her dying blood and says she’ll need more blood within 72 hours or so. He decides that this is a good time to admit that he’s gay. Raymond has made a list of local people that would make good victims, but Lara says they should target tourists.
As they talk, a pair of door-to-door religious guys knock. They come in to talk about Mormon stuff. Lara mentions that she’s a Satanist while Mom spikes their tea. Lara raises some interesting points that make the Mormons look up answers. They finally shut up and drink the tea, which ends badly for both of them.
Helen screams and puts up a fight, but she eventually drinks the Mormons. They’re just the first as Raymond starts bringing home new victims. Best of all, he gets to experiment on the leftovers. We get a mad science montage. He also starts picking up guys at the gay bar to bring home. Mom, the religious nut, isn’t doing so well with all of this.
The reality of being a vampire hits Helen. She could live a really long time, and maybe other vampires could come for her.
They have the strangest Christmas dinner ever. Patrice Duchamp III comes to the door, dressed like someone from “Interview with the Vampire.” They all know what he is, but he wants to talk to Helen for ten minutes. He sees how Lara is dressed and assumes she’s the vampire.
Raymond charges in and beheads the vampire before peeling off his face, but then Mom gets upset with Lara’s family. Her real family that Patrice alluded to. We flashback to Mom picking up a baby that was left on her doorstep. Helen’s not really Lara’s twin. She may have been born a vampire, but it didn’t show up until she turned sixteen.
Throughout the film, we get narration and old-timey drawings explaining history, but now it discusses Duchamp’s children, of whom Helen is probably one.
Mom tells Raymond to take Lara outside, as she wants to end their troubles. She stabs herself to feed Helen.
Commentary
The movie is somewhat blurry. I noticed this in the trailer but thought it was a YouTube glitch. We watched the real movie on Tubi, and it was there too. Maybe it was filmed in low resolution or something; it wasn’t terribly distracting, but it was noticeable. That’s a shame because there are a lot of interesting little video tricks here and there. This has been floating around the festival circuit since 2006-ish and has only recently been released for distribution, so the cameras of that time period may have something to do with it.
There are some neat little Easter eggs. Watch for the Mormons’ losing their clothes (“Free Moustache Rides”) and their song because they don’t know the lyrics (It’s not “Bringing in the Sheep”). The visual effects, such as Helen’s fangs and Patrice’s death, are limited in number but effective. And Raymond does some awesome lab work.
It starts off looking low-budget and questionable, but bear with it. It’s actually well-written, funny, and worth the watch. Lots of laughs!
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin
Stars Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello, Matt Craven
Run Time: 1 Hour, 53 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
They do a lot with practical effects, lighting, atmosphere, and strong acting. It builds nicely, getting stranger and worse for Jacob as it goes on. And what is going on? Gotta keep watching to find out. Horror Guy Kevin enjoyed it even more in this, his second viewing.
Synopsis
We begin in Vietnam, In 1971, during the war, and nobody looks happy to be there. A helicopter unloads some soldiers. They get warning of an impending attack, but several men go into painful convulsions before they can respond. When the attack comes, none of them is ready for it. Jacob searches the woods and gets bayoneted.
He wakes up in a New York subway in 1975; it was just a flashback-nightmare. A homeless guy is sleeping on the train, and before Jacob gets off, he sees a tentacle come out of the man. He’s gotten off on the wrong side of the tracks, so he gets down onto the rails to get to the other side and almost gets run over. As it passes, he sees a strange man on the back of the train.
He gets home and talks to Jezzie, his wife. They look at old pictures and talk about Sarah, Jake’s ex. He sees a picture of Gabe, his son who died while he was in Vietnam. Later, she burns all his old photos because she’s mad that they make him sad.
Jake is a mailman, and he goes to see Louis, a chiropractor, for his back. They talk about Sarah. Meanwhile, Jake flashes back to his rescue in Nam. He goes to the VA, but they have no record of him ever having been there before. He runs to his doctor’s office, but there’s no one there who recognizes him or the name of his doctor. He’s told Dr. Carlson died about a month ago.
Jake thinks he’s seeing demons, and he tells Jezzie about them. They go to a party, and a woman there reads his palms. She knows a lot about him. She says his life-line is very strange; “according to this, you’re already dead.” It’s a loud, obnoxious party, and he soon starts seeing things— birds, tentacles, and men without faces.
When they get home, Jezzie yells at him about going crazy. When she finds out that he’s got a temperature of 106, she changes her tune and calls a doctor. She and the neighbors put him in an icy bath and he thinks they’re trying to kill him.
He wakes up in bed with Sarah, his ex-wife, and complains about how cold it is in the room. He tells her that he dreamed that he was living with Jezzie, that woman from work, and there were demons all around him. Little Gabe comes in and complains about it being cold as well. Jed, his other son, asks for his allowance. He then goes back to bed with Sarah. He wakes up with the doctor, Jezzie, and their dog.
All through this, we see flashes of Jake’s helicopter extraction after being stabbed. Jake wakes up and tells Jezzie, “I’m not dead.”
As he recovers, Jake starts reading books on witchcraft and demonology. Jezzie wants him to get out of the house and do something. She’s… not very supportive.
Jake gets a call from Paul, who needs to see him. Paul says something is wrong but can’t talk to anyone else about it. “I’m going to Hell. They’re coming after me. They’ve been following me.” Jake answers, “I’ve seen them too. Everywhere, like a plague.” He watches Paul die in a car explosion.
Paul has a funeral, and lots of people go to the party afterward. Several of Paul’s friends from the war think it was a car bomb, but the police say it was an electrical problem. Several of the men get really upset when Jake mentions that Paul had seen “demons.” The whole group goes to a lawyer’s office to see what happened that night so long ago. The lawyer Geary takes their depositions and promises to see what he can get from the Army.
Geary soon calls back and says they don’t have any case. He talks to Frank, who says none of the guys want to push this any further. Geary says that Jake needs a psychiatrist, not a lawyer. Geary says Jake never even went to Vietnam, they were discharged after some war games in Thailand. On his way out of the courthouse, two men grab him and force him into a car. They’re with the army, and they insist that he let it lie. He jumps from the car and then gets robbed by Santa Claus.
When they take Jake to the hospital, he rants about being robbed by Santa, and they think he’s crazy. It’s not a normal hospital; it’s a dungeon full of monsters, gore, and bloody parts on the floor. They strap his head into a vise and then Jezzie comes in to do the surgery. “I want to go home.” “You are home; you’re dead. There is no getting out of here; you’ve been killed, remember?”
Sarah and the two still-surviving sons come to visit Jake in the hospital. He tells her, “I’m not dead; I’m alive.” The doctors have said Jake may be in the hospital for months.
Louis forcefully comes in and unhooks Jake from the traction equipment. Louis puts Jake into a wheelchair and wheels him out amid medical protests. At Louis’s place, he works on Jake’s back and gives him a bunch of philosophical advice about making his peace. Afterward, Jake can walk.
Jake goes home and looks at his honorable discharge papers as well as photos of the guys in Vietnam. He flashes back to Gabe’s death.
He gets a call from a guy on the phone who wants to talk about chemical warfare and wants to meet him. Jezzie warns Jake not to go, but he has to. The man’s name is Michael, and Jake’s seen him around before.
Mike was arrested for making LSD, but they offered to release him if he went to Vietnam, working on mind-altering drugs. They wanted one that would increase aggressive tendencies, something to tap into anger. They called it “The Ladder.” They decided to use The Ladder on Jake’s battalion to see if it was effective. It was, but not in the way they expected. “You killed each other. Brother against brother. You tore each other to pieces.”
Jake takes a taxi home. The doorman calls him “Dr. Singer” and says it’s been a long time. It’s where Sarah, Jed, and Eli live. He sees Gabe, who leads him upstairs, into the light….
Back in Vietnam, the doctor calls it: Jake’s dead.
Commentary
If you pass out at a chiropractor’s, someone’s doing it wrong.
It’s just one long string of one nasty thing happening to Jake after another. It’s got some awesome visuals once it finally gets going, but by that point, you have no idea what’s really going on. I have to say, I had a pretty good suspicion after the first time Jake said, “I’m alive, I’m not dead,” that he was dead wrong.
The special effects are minimal; the gore bits are well done, but not excessive. There’s lots that doesn’t make sense on a first viewing, but it’s all very tense and horrific.
Short Film: The Dead Collectors (2023)
Directed by Brendan Cleaves
Written by Craig Gilmore, Craig Tuohy
Stars Ivan Kaye, Connie Jenkins-Greig, Elliot James Langridge
Run Time: 11:56
Trailer:
Synopsis
Grandma is on her deathbed, surrounded by family. Downstairs, the Dead Collectors whine, “How much longer are they gonna take!” The two men talk about their job, collecting dead bodies. Upstairs, Grandma has words of wisdom for all her relatives.
How long is this gonna take?
Commentary
Remember those “Bring out yer dead” guys from Monty Python? Remember those “Covid is a government conspiracy” nuts? What if they put the two together?
This one is really well-made and exceptionally funny; possibly my favorite short of the year so far.
The House That Jack Built (2018)
Directed by Lars Von Trier
Written by Lars Von Trier, Jenle Hallund
Stars Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman
Run Time: 2 Hours, 32 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This one was strange, with Matt Dillon giving a stellar performance. We find out almost immediately that he’s a serial killer, and we get to relive some of his highlights with him in five acts and an epilogue. It’s long, but only seemed that way for one stretch that dragged a bit, and the ending wraps things up very nicely.
Synopsis
We get some strange voices talking before the credits roll. We are told that the narrator will relate five incidents that occurred over twelve years. He’s talking to Mr. Verge.
1st Incident
A woman flags Jack down on the road and asks for help, but he’s not super helpful. He offers to call the local blacksmith. She’s annoyed at his not having a Jack, but he offers to drive her there. She says he “might as well be a serial killer.” She tells him exactly what he’d do to her if he were a serial killer.
They get to the repair place, and Sonny fixes her Jack. On the way back to the car, she keeps going on about him being a serial killer, even when he offers to change her flat tire. He eventually has enough of her crap and threatens to leave her with her car. The Jack still isn’t right, so he drives her back to Sonny’s again, and she insults him all the way there. He kills her with the Jack, just like she said he would.
We then cut to a lesson on architecture and gothic church arches. Jack is an engineer, but he always wanted to be an architect. He’s recently bought land and started building a house of his own design.
We cut back to Jack taking the woman’s body into a big walk-in freezer in the city. He then cleaned up his van to remove all the evidence.
2nd Incident
Jack spots a woman walking down the road and follows her home. He pretends to be the police and asks her about Carlson’s Supermarket. She asks to see his badge, but he says he doesn’t have it on him. He says his badge is at the silversmith’s place getting shined up. He’s weird, and she’s not really buying it.
He sees a photo of her husband on the wall and says he might be able to get her pension doubled. He then admits he was lying about being a policeman; he’s really an insurance agent. She drools at the double-pension thing and lets him right in. He soon strangles her. That doesn’t really work, so he force-feeds her a donut until she chokes on it. That doesn’t work, so he strangles her again. And then finally stabs her. It’s a lot of work!
Jack then wraps her body in plastic, drags her out to the van, and cleans up inside. He describes himself as a murderer with OCD– cleaning compulsions. He goes back inside and cleans some more. Twice. No, once more makes three times.
A policeman drives by, so Jack pulls the body out and puts it in the nearby trees. The policeman asks him to get out of his car and questions him about a break-in down the street. Jack says that Claire has gone missing. He looks inside the van, and then inside the house. The cop throws him out, so Jack gets back in the van and drives away with the body tied to his bumper. There’s not much of Claire left by the time he gets to his meat locker.
We get a flashback to young Jack as a child, snipping the legs off ducklings.
Time passes, and we see that Jack eventually learns how to strangle women properly. After several more murders, Jack says that his OCD started diminishing, and he took bigger and bigger chances. We learn about Jack’s obsession with photography, especially the negatives.
3rd Incident
Jack takes a woman and her kids out shooting. He talks to them about hunting, which he finds distasteful. He goes on and on about how awful hunting and hunters are. He brags about how he applies “ethical hunting rules” when he hunts the family down. He tries to do taxidermy on the children.
We see that Jack isn’t happy with the cinderblocks he started building his house with, so he has all that torn down and starts again.
4th Incident
Jack talks about his romantic interest in this one woman. This one has a name, Jacqueline, but he calls her “Simple.” He clearly thinks she’s stupid, and she doesn’t do much to prove otherwise. He tells her that he’s killed 60 people and that he’s a serial killer. She calls him weird.
He gets a magic marker and draws “butcher’s meat cutting lines” on her body as she sits there and takes it. She runs outside to tell a cop, and then Jack runs out and says it’s all true. The cop thinks they’re both drunk and drives away.
He makes her scream repeatedly to show her the neighbors won’t get involved. He’s getting more and more reckless.
Mr. Verge asks if Jack hates women. He says no, he’s killed men as well. He’s torn down his house and started rebuilding several times now. They talk about art, icons, the Holocaust, and many other things.
5th Incident
Jack kidnaps a man and takes him to the meat locker full of bodies. There are several other men there chained together and freezing. He wants to experiment with killing multiple people with a single bullet. One prisoner tells Jack he’s using the wrong kind of ammunition.
Jack returns to Al’s place and angrily complains about the mislabeled ammunition. Al wants to see a receipt. He gets really nervous about the whole transaction, and Al knows something is wrong. Jack goes to see S.P., an old man, who says the police visited both Al and Jack about what he’s done. S.P. holds Jack at gunpoint as he calls Rob to come over.
They’ve known each other for years. They sit and have drinks, and then Jack sticks a knife in the old man’s head. Jack leaves with one full metal jacket cartridge. Rob the policeman shows up, and Jack kills him and steals the police car. He drives it back to the meat locker place and asks the man inside as to the quality of his ammo now. He leaves the police car outside, with the lights still on.
He loads the gun on a special tripod with the men all bound up in a row. As he messes around with measurements and getting more room for his shot, more police show up to investigate the car outside. As Jack gets ready to pull the trigger, he finds Mr. Verge in the back room of the meat locker.
Verge asks Jack about building his house. Whatever happened to that? Verge suggests that Jack can find the material to build his house right there in the meat locker.
Jack builds his house… out of the many frozen bodies he has there. The police cut their way through the barricaded door, but Jack goes into his meat house and crawls into a hole beneath the floor.
Epilogue
Jack and Verge are in a dark place. They travel in tunnels down, down, down into another world. As they travel, they hear a humming buzz getting loud, and Verge says that it’s the sound of the millions of souls in Hell suffering all at once. They proceed on and on, with wilder and wilder imagery, down into Hell.
Jack asks about a stairway out of Hell that’s across a broken bridge. Jack thinks it’s possible to climb around the pit of lava. He starts climbing…
Commentary
The first killing is pretty routine as far as these things go, but with the second one, Jack’s OCD pumps up the ridiculousness factor.
Matt Dillon does really well here; his weird manner of speech really shows us that he’s a psychopath.
It was really starting to drag during the speechifying after the 4th incident. The Faustian ending makes up for the slow bit in the middle. It’s just plain bizarre.
Neither of us had seen this one before, and we both really liked it!
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Charles O’Neal, DeWitt Bodeen
Stars Kim Hunter, Tom Conway, Jean Brooks
Run Time: 1 Hour, 11 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is well-made, looks sharp in black and white, and is so very tame. And things change toward the end that slow things down even more. There is the horror element of devil worshippers, but they aren’t scary. The entertainment value is limited for a modern viewer.
Synopsis
We open at a private all-girls school. The headmistress calls Mary in and tells her that her sister Jacqueline has gone missing. No one has paid Mary’s tuition for six months. They offer her a job if she wants to stay, but Mary wants to go home and find out what happened to her sister. Her friend warns her that if she leaves, she should never come back—if she does, she’ll never get out. She leaves.
Mrs. Reddy says Jacqueline sold the business to her eight months ago, and she’s done really well with it. She runs into Frances, who didn’t realize Jacqueline was missing; Frances says she saw her at a restaurant just last week. The lady who runs the restaurant says Jacqueline rented a room from them, but she’s never come back.
They open the door and look inside. There’s a chair with a noose above it. There’s no body, but it’s weird. As she talks to the police, Jason Hoag, a poet, is there hitting on her. Mary goes to the Missing Persons department and talks to them about her sister. We see that there are some shady characters who want to keep Jacqueline’s disappearance quiet.
She goes to see Gregory Ward, Jacqueline’s boyfriend, and he wants to do anything to find her. Mr. August, a detective, says he wants to help. He says Jacqueline deeded Mrs. Reddy the business as a gift, she didn’t sell the place. Why? August soon winds up very dead. She sees a couple of men carrying out his dead body later.
Gregory Ward gets Mary a job as a kindergarten teacher. Dr. Judd comes to see Gregory, and he says Jacqueline came to him for money. She can’t come see Gregory because it’s dangerous; she’s in danger of losing her sanity. The doctor offers to take Mary to Jacqueline. When they get back to his place, Mary’s sister has gone.
Jacqueline finally shows up but vanishes almost immediately. Paul Radeaux says he’s a private investigator hired by Gregory Ward to find his wife. When confronted, Gregory admits that he and Jacqueline are married.
Jason the poet invites Mary and Greg to a party at Natalie’s house. Dr. Judd is there. Judd and Jacqueline have been getting suspiciously close recently. Jason finds out that both Mrs. Reddy and Dr. Judd have been reading books on the Palladists, a society of devil worshippers. There’s a related symbol that Mrs. Reddy has begun using as her trademark.
Mary asks Frances a bunch of questions about Mrs. Reddy, and the older woman gets really upset. Reddy then warns Mary to give up looking for her sister. “Your sister is a murderess—she killed Mr. August. You don’t know what dreadful things you might bring about by looking for your sister.”
A group of people get together to discuss the situation. They have a rule of nonviolence, but whoever betrays them must die. Reddy and Frances are there. They’re all sworn to secrecy. Since their order was founded, there have been six betrayals, all of whom were killed to ensure their silence. Jacqueline may be… the seventh victim. Frances swears that Jacqueline didn’t betray anyone by going to Dr. Judd.
Mary goes to say goodbye to Jason; she’s returning to school. Jason figures out that Reddy has intimidated Mary, so he calls Gregory, who’s a lawyer. The three of them debate taking Judd into their confidence but decide to risk it. Judd is creepy, but he finally does take them to see Jacqueline.
Jacqueline admits that she was one of the Palladists; it sounded exciting and fun, but they wouldn’t let her quit. They wanted her to kill herself and kept her prisoner for months. Jason points out that Gregory’s in love with Mary, but he doesn’t want her to know that.
Two strange men come for Jacqueline the next day. The Palladists have captured her in order to execute her. There’s a cup of poison in front of her as the others egg her on. They won’t kill her, but they insist she kill herself with the poison. They get tired of waiting and release her, but they warn that they’ll be after her again soon.
Jacqueline runs into Mimi in the hallway of her building. Mimi says she’s dying, but Jacqueline says she’s always wanted to die. She goes back to her room with the noose. Jason and Judd go to talk to the devil-worshippers, and they mock them as losers. Mary says she’s willing to get together with Gregory, but Jacqueline is his wife…
In the next room, Jacqueline hangs herself.
Commentary
This was Kim Hunter’s first role; she got an “Introducing…” credit.
Dr. Judd, played by Tom Conway, reprises his role from “Cat People (1942),” so this is unofficially in the same universe, but since he dies in the other film, this would be considered a prequel.
The Palladists must be the tamest group of devil worshippers ever put on film. They won’t hurt anyone; they just want to glare at you until you drink poison. This was a pretty good mystery until they actually found Jacqueline, and then it slowed down to become a real slog. And that ending was not what we expected. Still, it was one of the very first films to deal with cults in a serious manner, and the people who were members were civilized, not raving lunatics.
It was awfully tame though; tame past the point of being boring.
Coming Home in the Dark (2021)
Directed by James Ashcroft
Written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, Owen Marshall
Stars Daniel Gillies, Erik Thomson, Miriama McDowell
Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It was horrifying, but not so much horror. Definitely a drama and tense thriller. An interesting study of how twisted and damaged people can become. It was well done with strong acting, good effects, and some real brutality.
Synopsis
We open on a car that appears to be abandoned at the side of the road. We cut to a family, and the two sons annoy the parents. The husband annoys the wife. They park the car and go hiking out in what looks like the Grand Canyon of New Zealand. Allan and Jill talk about how sons Maika and Jordan are so very different from each other.
Two scruffy-looking men approach; Mandrake and Tubs. The family is immediately terrified when Mandrake pulls out a gun. They take the family’s car keys, phones, and money. When one of the kids calls their dad, “Hoaggie,” Mandrake starts laughing. He shoots both of the boys and then pins Hoaggie to the ground. Jill is clobbered. Night falls, and the two murderers dispose of the boys’ bodies.
They load Hoaggie and the still-unconscious Jill into the car. “Where are you taking us?” “Home,” Mandfrake answers.
Jill wakes up and wonders where the boys are. That doesn’t go well. As the conversation progresses, Mandrake keeps digging into Hoaggie’s past, and it’s obvious that Hoaggie is hiding something. They start talking about Hakawai Point, a boys’ school. Tubs looks really angry when he hears this. Mandrake and Tubs think Hoaggie was one of those men who abused the kids in the school.
They stop at a gas station, and Hoaggie leaves a message written on the toilet seat. It doesn’t matter because Mandrake kills the attendant. Jill uses the opportunity to get out of the car and run away as Hoaggie tries to call the police on one of the boys’ phones. The bad guys get things back under control very quickly.
Hoaggie begs the men to let Jill go, as she has nothing to do with his history. They pull over, and Hoaggie admits he saw things at that school. He saw something called “locker treatments,” fighting, and rape. Hoaggie swears that he never put the kids “On-line,” but Mandrake knows that he did. Hoaggie admits that he watched a man scrub a tattoo off a kid with a wire brush. Mandrake knows the story a little too well, saying it was actually a nylon brush, so it took even longer.
We start to get flashbacks of life at the boys’ school thirty years ago. A boy scratches a message that we can’t see into a stone monument.
Jill jumps out of the car at high speed. She then jumps off a bridge into the river to escape Mandrake. The three men end up driving off without her, assuming she’s dead.
The car gets a flat tire, and Tubs and Mandrake hurry to change it. Hoaggie uses the opportunity to run off into the woods, but Mandrake chases him with his gun.
Hoaggie flags down four teenagers in a car playing around on an empty racetrack. They take him into their car, but Mandrake catches up to them. Another car of teens parks nearby. Mandrake tells the teens, “All you gotta do is walk away.” It’s all very tense, but the teenagers eventually give Hoaggie to Mandrake, who proceeds to kill them all but one that he lets run away.
Tubs puts on a classical music CD, and they drive on toward Hakawai Point, where the old school was. Tubs doesn’t want to go inside, but Mandrake drags Hoaggie in.
Hoaggie admits that he was a coward in those days, but he figured the kids deserved punishment and abuse. He thought Mandrake was the kid with the wire brush, but it wasn’t. “We’re all the same to you.” Then Hoaggie beats Mandrake’s head with a rock. Mandrake is badly messed up, but still alive.
Tubs comes in and takes the gun from Mandrake and finishes him off with it. “I hate this place,” he says as he walks away. He leaves Hoaggie next to the stone monument, whose text we still never see.
Commentary
We didn’t see the writing. But it is said in trivia that the stone says, “I hate this place,” just like Tubs says out loud.
It’s kidnapping and torture, with a lot of violence and suspense thrown in. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it horror, but the situation would definitely be terrifying if it happened to you. The two “villains” had legitimate motivations for doing what they did but were unnecessarily brutal in getting there.
Overall, it was good.
Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía (1962)
AKA “Frankenstein, The Vampire, and Company”
Directed by Benito Alazraki
Written by Alfredo Salazar
Stars Manuel ‘Loco’ Valdes, Martha Elena Cervantes, Nora Veryan
Run Time: 1 Hour, 16 Minutes
Watch it:
Synopsis
Senor La Valle, the man who runs the wax museum, complains to his secretary that he doesn’t have a Frankenstein figure, but he’s just bought some figures that arrived in coffins. When she leaves, he calls someone on the phone and boasts that he’s deceived her– the coffins contain the actual bodies of Frankenstein and a vampire.
Elsewhere, Agapito has been fired from his job and goes to see his cousin Paco for help.
We cut to an old castle and a scientist. Detective Hercules comes and flirts with the doctor’s assistant. He then talks to his own assistant, a silly little man dressed like a caricature of a detective. They are going to find those coffins, which contain Frankenstein and the vampire. Hercules phones Agapito, who now works in the shipping office– did he deliver those boxes?
The full moon comes out, and Hercules gets a headache and puts down the phone. He turns into a werewolf, still on the phone with Agapito. The werewolf is stuck in the phone booth, which causes some noise with the other patrons.
Agapito drops a goldfish down the back of a woman’s dress and dances with her as she jumps around. His cousin sends him on a delivery to get him out of the office, but Dr. Sophia intervenes, and she thinks Agapito is funny. La Valle’s secretary comes in for the two large crates containing wax figures from Rome. Agapito agrees to take the crates to the museum.
Agapito and Paco carry the crates into the dark building and admire the other wax figures there. The power goes out, so they light a candle. Some guys come in behind him and knock out Agapito. The men open the crates and remove Frankenstein and Dracula, carrying them outside. La Valle comes in and wants to see his figures, but they’re empty when Agapito and Paco open the crates. The old man offers them a reward to return the figures.
Later, Agapito tells Paco about getting knocked out– those men must have stolen the figures. They tell Hercules what happened, but he looks out the window and sees the full moon. He cuts their meeting short, asking them to lock him in his hotel room. Alone, he undresses and becomes a werewolf again.
Dr. Sofia and Dr. Chon Chon have the two monsters on operating tables. Dracula wakes up and hypnotizes them both. He wants the two doctors to put a more docile brain inside Frankenstein, so he’ll be more useful to Dracula as he tries to conquer America. Where will they find such a brain?
Sophia comes to Agapito, and she thinks he’s plenty docile, and he does have a brain, however stupid it is. La Valle’s secretary comes in, and she’s got the hots for his body. Paco doesn’t get the attraction. They go to Hercules’s room and admit the mess. He tells what happens when the moon is full, and that he wants to die, but not before he rids the world of Frankenstein. He also offers to pay for the men’s assistance, which perks them both right up.
Paco, Agapito, and the secretary go to Dr. Sofia’s creepy castle. Agapito explains to Sofia that he invited his two friends, and she says she's glad to have young blood there tonight.
Agapito and Paco soon break away from the group and go exploring in the dungeons beneath the castle. There are hijinks with a secret door, and Agapito accidentally sits on Frankenstein’s lap. He screams and backs into Dracula– there is much screaming and running around in circles. Paco doesn’t believe any of it when he escapes– until he sees them too.
They all attend a costume party at the castle, and the little detective arrives. He wears various disguises to avoid the butler but finally gets in. Dracula calls Sofia with his mind, and she quickly comes to him. He wants to be introduced to the guests so he can choose one to drink their blood. Hercules arrives at the party as well. She introduces Dracula to Agapito.
“Count Lorenzini” offers eternal life to the secretary. Agapito and Sofia get romantic outside. The full moon comes out, and Hercules changes again. Agapito runs into him, and there’s quite a chase. Dracula catches up with him instead, and there’s more running. Dracula eventually catches and hypnotizes him and the secretary and takes them to the dungeon. He orders Sofia to get ready for brain surgery.
Agapito argues that his brain is useless, but that’s exactly what Dracula wants inside Frankenstein’s monstrous body. She knocks him out with a hammer and says everything is ready. Paco and Hercules break in and free Agapito. Frankenstein gets up and chases the doctor– no, wait– they’ve exchanged minds. Agapito is in the monster, and the monster is in Agapito now.
Mr. La Valle arrives at the castle and meets up with the little detective. The mind transfer wears off after a bit. Hercules chases Dracula, but stops when he changes into a werewolf again. Dracula and the werewolf fight as everyone else suddenly convenes in the same room. All three of the monsters end up killing themselves in the resulting fire.
Agapito, Sofia, Paco, and the secretary all laugh.
Commentary
This is really obviously a remake of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” but it’s not as good. And it’s in Spanish, which was probably the main selling point at the time. There are some different jokes, but all the best bits of A&C are copied here almost verbatim.
Dracula has an interesting look, Frankenstein isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but the wolfman is basically a rubber mask. The little detective is nothing more than comic relief in what’s already a full-on comedy.
It’s really pretty bad– stick with Abbott & Costello.
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