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“Is You In There, Zombie?”

By Raymond Benson

There are a handful of Hollywood movies out there that successfully combined comedy with the horror genre. Surprisingly, truly good ones are few and far between. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is perhaps the quintessential example of the genre mashup. It provided genuine thrills and some frights mixed in with hilarious comedic bits. A more recent one that comes to mind is of course the 1984 megahit, Ghostbusters. There is no question that this Bill Murray vehicle owes a great deal to the 1940 romp, The Ghost Breakers, considered one of Bob Hope’s most beloved early pictures.

Based on the 1909 stage play, The Ghost Breaker, by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard, the 1940 movie is actually a remake of previous adaptations. Both Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred E. Green made silent films of the play in 1914 and 1922, respectively,...

At a time when Black actors were forced into submissive or inarticulate roles, the actor showed strength moving through hostile white spaces with dignity

Upon the announcement of Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier’s death, I sent out a tweet that featured my favorite photo of him. The photo in question shows a shirtless Poitier, wearing dark sunglasses like Miles Davis on the cover of ’Round About Midnight, playing the saxophone alongside jazz man Sonny Stitt, while standing in the street, surrounded by a community of appreciative onlookers, otherwise known as “the people”. The reason I dig this photo so much is because it offers a more complex image of Poitier than the one that had come to define him at the height of his fame in Hollywood. I have never been able to confirm the context of this photo, but I have always assumed that it was taken while he...

We’ve got a big week of home media releases ahead of us, so I hope that your wallets are ready to suffer a whole lot of abuse this Tuesday, because there are a ton of must-own titles headed home that genre fans are definitely going to want to add to their collections. We have two new Vestron Video Collector’s Series releases to look forward to—David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Little Monsters (1989)—and for the first time ever, Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn is being released on Blu-ray.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, Paramount has assembled a 5-Movie Collection on Blu that includes both iterations of Pet Sematary, Silver Bullet, The Stand, and The Dead Zone. Kl Studio Classics is showing some love this Tuesday to the horror comedy The Ghost Breakers featuring Bob Hope, and Dark Sky Films is set to release Luz: The Flower of Evil this week,...

Legendary animator Floyd Norman talks about his all time favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Floyd Norman: An Animated Life (2016)

Vertigo (1958)

Citizen Kane (1941)

Rope (1948)

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Song of the South (1946)

The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

The Third Man (1950)

The Jungle Book (1967)

The Jungle Book (2016)

The Lion King (2019)

Pinocchio (1940)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

The Old Mill (1937)

Casablanca (1942)

Cinderella (1950)

Singin’ In The Rain (1953)

Paths of Glory (1957)

1917 (2019)

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

Star Wars (1977)

American Graffiti (1973)

Sorcerer (1977)

Other Notable Items

Michael Fiore

The Watts riots

The LAPD’s cruel mistreatment of Rodney King

The George Floyd protests

Move in Philadelphia

Walt Disney Pictures

Tfh Guru Roger Corman

Erik Sharkey

The Three Stooges

I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali TV series (1977)

Muhammad Ali

Fred Calvert

Alfred Hitchcock

Bernard Herrman’s Vertigo score

Robert Burks

The latest...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***"Would you recognize Milton Berle without his mother? No!" So says the man himself, Milton Berle, in Over My Dead Body (1942), a fairly shoddy reminder that Berle was, for now-inexplicable reasons, a movie star in the early forties. But while some talent from radio and vaudeville slid into cinema with the ease of the proverbial buttered eel, Berle somehow got lodged halfway down cinema's throat, for reasons which may tell us something about classical Hollywood filmmaking, and something about this particular clown.Fox tested Berle on...

Bela Lugosi fan alert! This Monogram horror opus is yet another narrative-challenged fumble of unmotivated, incomprehensible characters… but Bela’s great in it, in a central role. He’s a sympathetic, non- maniac this time, if you don’t count his tendency to go into trances and smother random houseguests. Savant’s review has the lowdown on the interesting cast; Tom Weaver’s commentary has the authoritative lowdown on whole show.

Invisible Ghost

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1941 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 64 min. / Street Date March 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Bela Lugosi, Polly Ann Young, Clarence Muse, John McGuire, Betty Compson, Ernie Adams, Terry Walker, George Pembroke .

Cinematography: Harvey Gould, Marcel Le Picard

Film Editor: Robert Golden

Original Music: hahahahah, good one.

Written by Helen Martin & Al Martin

Produced by Sam Katzman

Directed by Joseph H. Lewis

Horror movie fans come in two varieties, obsessive and dangerously obsessive. Back...

Filmed in 1940, director George Marshall’s elegantly eerie spook-fest looks better with each passing year. Bob Hope, in top form, plays a radio star who finds himself in the middle of a Havana-bound haunted-house mystery. Paulette Goddard is his luscious companion and as his valet the great Willie Best gives Bob as good as he gets in his definitive performance as a comic foil. Director Marshall went on to film the remake, Scared Stiff, starring Martin and Lewis (with a cameo from Hope and Crosby).

Rex Ingram in 'The Thief of Bagdad' 1940 with tiny Sabu. Actor Rex Ingram movies on TCM: Early black film performer in 'Cabin in the Sky,' 'Anna Lucasta' It's somewhat unusual for two well-known film celebrities, whether past or present, to share the same name.* One such rarity is – or rather, are – the two movie people known as Rex Ingram;† one an Irish-born white director, the other an Illinois-born black actor. Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” continues today, Aug. 11, '15, with a day dedicated to the latter. Right now, TCM is showing Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical adaptation of the Faust tale that is notable as the first full-fledged feature film directed by another Illinois-born movie person, Vincente Minnelli. Also worth mentioning, the movie marked Lena Horne's first important appearance in a mainstream motion picture.§ A financial disappointment on the...

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in ‘Gone with the Wind’: TCM schedule on August 20, 2013 (photo: Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in ‘Gone with the Wind’) See previous post: “Hattie McDaniel: Oscar Winner Makes History.” 3:00 Am Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943). Director: David Butler. Cast: Joan Leslie, Dennis Morgan, Eddie Cantor, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn, John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan, Dinah Shore, Alexis Smith, Jack Carson, Alan Hale, George Tobias, Edward Everett Horton, S.Z. Sakall, Hattie McDaniel, Ruth Donnelly, Don Wilson, Spike Jones, Henry Armetta, Leah Baird, Willie Best, Monte Blue, James Burke, David Butler, Stanley Clements, William Desmond, Ralph Dunn, Frank Faylen, James Flavin, Creighton Hale, Sam Harris, Paul Harvey, Mark Hellinger, Brandon Hurst, Charles Irwin, Noble Johnson, Mike Mazurki, Fred Kelsey, Frank Mayo, Joyce Reynolds, Mary Treen, Doodles Weaver. Bw-127 mins. 5:15 Am Janie (1944). Director: Michael Curtiz. Cast: Joyce Reynolds, Robert Hutton,...

Humphrey Bogart movies: ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘High Sierra’ (Image: Most famous Humphrey Bogart quote: ‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ from ‘The Maltese Falcon’) (See previous post: “Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Movies.”) Besides 1948, 1941 was another great year for Humphrey Bogart — one also featuring a movie with the word “Sierra” in the title. Indeed, that was when Bogart became a major star thanks to Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. In the former, Bogart plays an ex-con who falls in love with top-billed Ida Lupino — though both are outacted by ingénue-with-a-heart-of-tin Joan Leslie. In the latter, Bogart plays Dashiel Hammett’s private detective Sam Spade, trying to discover the fate of the titular object; along the way, he is outacted by just about every other cast member, from Mary Astor’s is-she-for-real dame-in-distress to Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominee Sydney Greenstreet. John Huston...

(thanks to William Best)...

After his electrifying performance as Blacula (1972), the great William Marshall was briefly considered a worthy successor to Christopher Lee's vampire king. A respected Shakespearean actor with an impressive theatre background, he was set to become a major horror star of the seventies, but like his fellow stage actor Robert Quarry, who achieved the same status as Count Yorga, his film career faded rapidly after the genre went through a radical re-think following the commercial success of The Exorcist (1973).

Marshall remained in New York to train in as an actor and director in Grand Opera and Shakespeare, although he had to support himself in a variety of jobs before making his professional stage debut. At 6ft 5inches, he was an impressively built, handsome, strong-featured actor with a booming bass baritone voice to match his towering presence. Not surprisingly, he quickly built up a formidable reputation as America's finest Shakespearean actor,...

director Wendell B. Harris Jr.

As most of you know, Tambay and I are curators of an independent Black film series that has recently expanded into a five-day festival as well – ActNow: New Voices in Black Cinema.

The festival itself starts next Friday, February 4th and runs until Wednesday February 9th, and while we’re showing mostly new cinema the closing film is what we’ve dubbed one of the ‘New Black Classics’, a film most of you are intimately familiar with, Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street (see Quadree’s ’09 fantastic writeup if you’re unfamiliar).

With most of our lineup, ActNow’s blogger Tanya St. Louis has interviewed the directors or producers of the films, and her first is with the esteemed Mr. Harris himself.

Please read it below and help spread the word about this important new film festival.

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Wendell B. Harris Jr. is the...

Charlie Chan definitely has a place among the pantheon of famous fictional detectives. He is certainly one of the more controversial ones. Although Chan is undoubtedly a hero, many Asians resent the character as an ethnic stereotype. Chan is polite and soft spoken, never lacking an appropriate old Chinese proverb to suit the occasion.

The character of Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1923 as a rebuttal to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes so common in literature of the day, such as Fu Manchu. Biggers lived in Hawaii and resented the unflattering Asian clichés so he invented a benign Chinese Investigator working for the Honolulu Police Force. He wrote several Chan novels. The honorable Chinese Detective became so popular that he was soon adapted into film. There were many Chan films, starting in the silent film era. Early films actually starred Chinese actors but the Audience didn’t respond to Asian Leading men.