Le poignard de bambou

I'm always nearly stupefied when browsing through the career overview of director Edward L. Cahn. This man directed low-budget horror treasures at an incredibly immense pace; - sometimes up to eight or nine movies per year. No wonder he dropped dead at the age of 64! But unlike other people who directed hundreds of films, like Jess Franco or Cirio H. Santiago, the efforts of the sadly unknown and underrated Cahn were always reliable and competent B-movies. Like "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake", for instance, which is a short and straightforward (barely 70 minutes) but grimly compelling tale about tribal voodoo, shrunken head routines, floating skulls and ancestral curses! When, after his grandfather and father, also his brother unexpectedly dies from a sudden heart condition at the age of sixty, Jonathan Drake is convinced that the curse placed upon his great-great-grandfather by a witchdoctor in the Amazon jungle is still active. The floating skulls of his ancestors keep appearing in his nightmares, and there truly is a native tribesman (with his lips sewn shut) strolling around to kill the masculine Drake family members and cut off their heads to perform a voodoo shrinking rite. There's absolutely nothing to dislike about "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake". The plot is simple but effective, with a proper explanation regarding the family curse's origin and a good mixture of believer & non-believer characters. Several of the ideas and sequences were quite gruesome and explicit for their time (like the headless corpse in the coffin or the uncanny resemblance between the victims' faces and their shrunken potato versions) and there are many more and even nastier little gimmicks coming to the surface as the story unfolds itself further. The acting performances are more than adequate for a late fifties' B-movie, with particularly Henry Daniell stealing the show as the mean & vicious Dr. Zurich. Recommended and fun, just like other Edward L. Cahn horror efforts such as "Invisible Invaders", "It: The Terror from Beyond Space" or "Invasion of the Saucer Men"