Well, now that Kino has released on Blu-Ray the most complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ever to be seen since its original screenings, can the book finally be closed on Rotwang and Robot Maria? Almost. There’s still the problematic case of the 1984 re-imagining of the film under the hand of Italian electronic music impresario Giorgio Moroder, who tinted, re-edited, and re-scored the film to his own compositions as well as the music of Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Billy Squier, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler, and Jon Anderson. Although this alternate, New Wave Metropolis was a fairly ubiquitous VHS staple of video stores in the 80’s, music rights issues – as well as a desire to prioritize, you know, the version Fritz Lang actually intended audiences to see – rendered this cut an obscurity in the age of DVD.
But break out your hairspray, because according to Ain’t It Cool News, Kino has cleared the music rights and will soon be announcing a Blu-Ray release of Moroder’s version of Metropolis. (No date given as of yet, but Harry Knowles states it will be “later this year.”) So you can judge for yourself whether this is a travesty to Lang’s art, or just, like, you know, totally awesome. (I haven’t seen it, so I can’t judge.) In anticipation of the release, theatrical screenings will be held at New York’s Landmark Sunshine Cinema on October 14th and 15th at midnight only.
The very first images in Demons of the Mind (1972) are of imprisonment. A slender female hand slips through the bars of a carriage window, groping toward the open air – and then is pulled back by a dark-gloved hand. Elizabeth Zorn (Gillian Hills) retreats into her seat beside stern Aunt Hilda (Yvonne Mitchell). She remembers her brief freedom – how she met a young student in the woods, Carl Richter (Paul Jones), and fell in love. But now she is carried back to the family estate, where her father, the Baron (Robert Hardy), ensures that she and her brother Emil (Shane Briant) are kept under lock and key, and subjected to cruel treatments for what the Baron insists is a disease of the blood, carried down through his own bloodline, which causes homicidal madness.
For a while, we see no evidence at all of this madness. It appears that the Baron is projecting his own neuroses onto his two children, and their sickly pallor is surely maintained by the bleeding each of them is forced to endure at the hands of Aunt Hilda. (The sadistic devices for this purpose, including a small mechanical box that slices efficiently through the skin, are actual medical instruments.) But soon enough we learn that young women are being killed in the small village outside the Zorn estate: strangled and decorated with rose petals. Are the murders being caused by the Zorn children? Or is it the Baron himself, who increasingly acts erratically, and submits to a psychoanalysis-via-hypnotism at the hands of Dr. Falkenberg (Patrick Magee, giving a nervous and twitchy performance)? Through this method we learn that years ago he married a peasant woman, who went mad and sliced open her wrist and throat before the children, effectively traumatizing them. There’s a lot of psychological baggage to unpack here, more so than the average Hammer film; but I haven’t even mentioned the ranting priest (Michael Hordern) who wanders into town one day in the middle of a downpour, and taps into the mob mentality that lies behind the town’s curious Wicker Man-style ritual called “Carrying Out Death,” which is considered harmless by the villagers, but has all the trappings of a lynching. (“We carry death to the fires of Hell! All is well! All is well!”)
Perhaps there are too many elements floating about; indeed, on a first viewing you’ll spend a great deal of time just trying to figure out what’s going on, but it all comes together, more or less, by the end. Demons of the Mind is most interesting for the modern viewer when seen in the context of late-period Hammer horror, when the studio was trying to figure out how it could adapt into the 1970’s – a struggle it ultimately lost. At Hammer, Michael Carreras was taking over as chief executive from his father, Sir James Carreras, but his role was sabotaged from the start, since Hammer no longer enjoyed long-term distribution deals with the major American movie studios. Budgets were slashed and an air of desperation hung over many of their films, as they upped the exploitation ante (i.e., nudity and gore), and made ill-advised decisions such as inserting instantly-dated pop songs into Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972). Hammer’s veneer of class began to fade, and one of their rare hits, On the Buses (1971), wasn’t even horror, but an adaptation of a British sitcom. It’s been stated many times that Hammer should have been making edgier and more sophisticated horror films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or The Exorcist (1973), but this ignores the fact that (a) their finances were severely limited, and (b) when they did take risks, few noticed. 1972 saw the release of two risky projects that barely resembled the Hammer horror of the past: Peter Collinson’s harrowing and disturbing Straight On Till Morning, and Demons of the Mind.
Shane Briant was in both, groomed to be one of the new Hammer stars. He had the right look: a pallid handsomeness, slightly tattered and weary; he looks a bit like Iain Quarrier’s vampire in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and, appropriately, Briant would go on to play a vampire himself in Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974). His multi-faceted performance in Straight on Till Morning is indelibly chilling, but he gets a meaty enough part here as Emil Zorn: bled almost dry by Aunt Hilda, he needs to be propped up, or to support himself against the wall, as he stumbles about the estate. He’s at once sympathetic and unnerving – he seems to have incestuous longings for his sister Elizabeth. We want him to be free of his domineering father, but at the same time we’re a bit hesitant as to what he might do if he were free.
This is one of the rare starring roles for Gillian Hills, whose unusual career straddled the worlds of pop music and film. Prior to Demons of the Mind she’d starred in the camp classic Beat Girl (1960) as a wild teenager who defies her parents and strays into the world of strip clubs and beat music; her roles in two seminal films, Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), were small but scandalous. She led a double life in France, where as a teenager she starred in Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959), and recorded pop singles which are so bright, so ecstatic, that they remain among the strongest products of France’s so-called yé-yé girls. Listening to those amazing recordings, it’s difficult to believe that this girl in Demons of the Mind is the same person. Her presence is largely restrained to an empty, haunted stare, her full lips – typically turned to a fierce pout in Beat Girl – lie still and expressionless, only occasionally parting as though about to voice a longing which is taboo in the grounds of the Zorn house. Neither she nor her brother are permitted any passions. They are kept to their beds as prisoners.
There’s a fairy tale quality to the film which can’t be understated. Elizabeth and Emil are Hansel and Gretel, with all the darker underpinnings of that tale brought gradually to the foreground. It’s telling that the film was originally going to be a werewolf story, but the werewolf was eventually excised, and the title Blood Will Have Blood gave way to the more overtly Freudian Demons of the Mind. Patrick Magee (who, like Hills, was in A Clockwork Orange) enters the story to split the psyche of the Zorn house wide open, like an exorcist taking on a haunted house, but he doesn’t resemble the Hammer characters typically played by Peter Cushing, Andrew Keir, or André Morell. He comes across as just as mentally unbalanced as his patients. This is a film about madness acting as a disease, and it spreads to nearly every character in the film, culminating in a crazed mob attack that is darker and more unsettling than those which would typically close a Frankenstein film. Hammer was experimenting here, and even though the experiment is not fully successful – for it lacks the compelling quality of, say, contemporary non-Hammer horrors like The Wicker Man (1973) or The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) – the fact that it chases its ideas so far out of Hammer’s comfort zone makes it worth a look.
Poor Dr. Von Altermann. He has at long last perfected a method for resurrecting the dead, setting him on the path to mustering an army of zombies for Hitler. Dreams of world domination by the Nazi walking dead seem irresistibly close to fulfillment. But surely he hadn’t counted on the zombies being slow, lumbering, ineffectual, laboriously comic, and not in the least bit lethal. Worse, after reviving the corpse of his wife, she refuses to obey any of his commands. It’s like she never changed. And Hitler checks up on him only by sending a Nazi flunky who can’t even handle a German accent. So you see, Von Altermann ought to elicit our pity, and yet, as played by John Carradine, he often just stands there proudly while his snooping guests sneak about the house, and flaunts his zombie servants as though confident his evil plot could never be discovered. So the eventual collapse of all his dreams is less inevitable than about sixty minutes overdue.
Revenge of the Zombies was released in 1943, the same year as I Walked with a Zombie, the Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton film which rose above its pulpy title to become an authentic classic. But although both zombie films take place in claustrophobic sets of mist-enshrouded swamps and plantations, they don’t occupy the same universe. Lewton strove to make his pictures literary, atmospheric, and suffused with dread. Revenge of the Zombies director Steve Sekely only hopes to fill out sixty minutes with enough generic incident that it can qualify as a motion picture. One gets the feeling that he thought it would be enough to just cast the skeletal, sonorous Carradine, as well as Mantan Moreland, the prolific African-American actor whose gift for comedy was forever hitched to demeaning roles. As Jeff, the driver, his job here is to look at zombies, bulge out his eyes, drop a one-liner, and run off the screen. His part is made slightly bearable by Sybil Lewis as a sexy and smart African-American maid, bearing a passing resemblance to a live-action Betty Boop. I wanted more of Lewis and less of Moreland, but it should be obvious to any modern viewer that the blame for their wasted talent lies with neither of them.
Our heroes, on the other hand, are the blandest slices of white bread the screenwriters could serve up. Scott Warrington (Mauritz Hugo) and Larry Adams (Robert Lowery) visit the estate of Dr. Von Altermann because his wife (Veda Ann Borg) – Warrington’s sister – has just passed away; but the two are convinced that the shady doctor had something to do with her death, so they decide to swap identities. What this should accomplish is deliriously unclear. Von Altermann has met neither one of them before, which allows them to pursue this ruse, but it gains them exactly nothing. The central purpose seems to be to help the plot keep up appearances. As though we have cornered the plot, and the plot defensively declared, “Look, I’m doing something, okay? Warrington is Adams and Adams is now Warrington. Stuff is happening – see?” Late in the film, over dinner, Warrington stands up and declares: “I’m Scott Warrington!” John Carradine seems unimpressed, Warrington sits down, and the movie continues.
In a desperate gamble for even more generic incident, Revenge of the Zombies serves up dialogue scene after dialogue scene, everyone breathlessly panting away as though the words spilling from their mouths advance some compelling agenda, which they do not. It has the feel of a filmed radio drama. On rare occasions we leave the confines of the mansion and step out into the swamps, where the zombies are summoned by calling, “Aaaaaah-ooooooooh.” Sort of like a Tarzan yell, if Tarzan were trying to be a bit quieter and less imposing. Then the zombies gather, shuffling about, eyes cast down. Near as I can figure, Dr. Von Altermann’s zombie army consists of four heavyset black men and two very underfed white guys. When the doctor announces, midway through the film, that his masters will be pleased, you have to wonder if he’s really thought this whole thing out. But he does helpfully explain the zombies’ invulnerability, impervious to poison gas and bullets. To demonstrate the latter, he quickly shoots his zombie wife. You see? They can stand up to anything, “so long as the brain cells which receive and execute commands still remain intact.” Even in 1943, zombie experts were suggesting you aim for the head.
For a while, only Mantan Moreland notices that there are zombies crawling everywhere. He notices because one of the zombies tells him: “I drove beautiful car for Master…when I was alive.” This is spoken by the one nicknamed “Lazarus,” and I would suggest that if you want to keep your zombies secret from the outside world, you (a) don’t have them greet guests as they arrive at your house, and (b) don’t give them names like “Lazarus.” Moreland reacts to the zombies with his characteristic aplomb: “My head keep tellin’ my feet that ain’t no zombie, but my feet ain’t convinced,” he says, before running away yet again. When Warrington and Adams (or is it…Adams and Warrington?) finally confront Carradine over the nature of his plot, he tells them he’s creating an invincible army for Hitler. “Sounds impossible,” one of our interchangeable heroes retorts. “An army of robots, or automatons?” I love this line; it’s spoken as though Bela Lugosi lives down the street, constantly making headlines for his race-of-atomic-supermen schemes – so it’s gotta be robots or automatons.
Over dinner, Carradine slips a mickey into a glass of wine which Adams drinks. A quick time transition is presented by a camera zoom on the table’s candle centerpiece as harp music plays. Larry, now succumbing to the mickey’s effect, puts his head on the table and says: “I feel druggy.” Triumphantly, Carradine drags the man off and ties him up in the closet, where (surprise!) a skeleton is hanging. He has to physically remove the skeleton in order to make room for Adams. A minute later, Adams frees himself from the ropes; they fall away pretty easily, so we can assume that Carradine is terrible with knots. (We learn that Adams was wise to Carradine’s plan and prepared to be drugged by taking the all-purpose antidote: coffee. Which, in retrospect, means that his “I feel druggy” line was just an acting flourish. Well played, sir.) When a sheriff is finally summoned to the Von Altermann estate, we see that he’s actually the Nazi flunky in disguise, and achieving a much better American accent than he’d managed with a German one. And that makes sense, because in a further twist, it’s revealed that he really is an American, an agent of the U.S. government who has been spying on Carradine. As they confront Carradine in his lab, the doctor commands his zombie army to attack. But his wife doesn’t listen and turns the other zombies against him. When last Dr. Von Altermann is seen, he’s deep in the swamp, and his wife is forcibly pushing him down into quicksand while he screams. Mantan Moreland departs with the ever-saucy Sybil Lewis, though she still puts him in his place with an emasculating one-liner. (A feminist paper could be written on Revenge of the Zombies, except that it would involve writing a paper on Revenge of the Zombies.) After the camera explores the set for a while, it finally discovers “The End” written on a closing door, followed by the familiar propaganda urging audiences to buy war bonds. Yes, in the war against the Axis powers, Poverty Row pictures were doing their part.
