The Turkey Bowl

The Bat (1959)

Maybe I should have called this the "Toilet Bowl" instead. Two or three barnyard atrocities have plagued my viewing pleasure lately. The first to come under my undeniably masterful cinematic scrutiny is the wretched 1959 Vincent Price film The Bat, which is in the public domain so would get me a copyright strike if I tried to upload it to YouTube. I guess you can call it a Vincent Price film as he's the most famous cat in it besides Agnes Moorehead (who twitch-nosed her way as Elizabeth Montgomery's cantankerous old broomstick-riding momma in the television chestnut "Bewitched"), who spends a lot of her time here with her arm extended behind her and pointing at staircases. The film is based on a play that was based on a novel and all of them were by Mary Roberts Rinehart and it all started with 1908's The Circular Staircase and then the play The Bat (1920), and then a 1926 silent adaptation by Roland West, the husband of Thelma Todd. (Todd, by the way, ended up dead in an automobile after Groucho Marx famously told her she'd have to "sleep in the garage all night" in the movie Monkey Business (1931), which is undoubtedly far superior to this movie.)

Agnes Moorehead and her MILF gal pal live in a mansion owned by Fleming who is a bank president or owner or something who still has to embezzle money, and then has to tell Vincent Price for some reason who promptly shoots him. And then there's a forest fire.

Agnes, a mystery writer renting the mansion built by Fleming is terrorized by a weird dude called the "Bat" who skulks around in a black face mask ("Eeek! He has NO FACE!") and a dark sweater and jacket complete with fedora, and is slightly reminiscent of Frank Booth's well-dressed man disguise. But Frank didn't have leather gloves with curling sort-of talon-like steel claws.

Some more MILFS and some cops and Vincent Price (up to no good, as usual) come over, and everyone has a sleepover while cops and the Bat are skulking around all night, and one guy gets clawed by the Bat, and everyone is looking for the hidden money Fleming hid either before he began his career as an embezzler, or after (but, either way, the plot is convoluted and confusing and a bore).

There are secret passages and the Bat is like something from a cliffhanger serial from 1932. It's Spooks on the Loose, Cat and the Canary, Old Dark House kitsch from a century or more back, and to quote Stephen King, it "sucks like an Electrolux." Yawn.

The Bat (1959)

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

Next, we have Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972), a film made fifty years ago which seems, curiously, as if it was made maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago. I should preface this review by saying that I first heard the name "Alan Ormsby" as a child, having acquired his children's book Monster Makeup at the library in Kileen Texas. The children's reading room was a curiously dim, but large room adjoining the ADULT reading room, and it's where I checked out a book to do a report on Malcolm X for Martin Luther King Jr.Day. (Decades later, I did a paper on the Marquis de Sade, who was French, for my college ENGLISH LIT class. And the professor, who probably thought me quite mad, accepted it gracefully. It all just proves what an utter shit I am.)

Anyway, there's a certain magic to those memories and the book, and the name "Alan Ormsby" (who also directed the Ed Gein-inspired Deranged with Roberts Blossom, a subject guaranteed to send shivers of malankey pleasure all over my plot, oh my brothers), who I always thought must look like Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon, but instead had a goatee and sort of shaggy hair and looks like the sort of dude I use to drink coffee with at the Mt Cup on the Ball State Campus back in 2003 or so.

Here he's "Alan," the guy leading an acting troupe out to an island which is a burial ground, where the caretaker or undertaker spends the movie tied up to a tree, AND NO ONE NOTICES. The actors and Alan the Director all hate each other, and the dialog tries too hard to be witty, snarky repartee, and thus seems phony (people don't talk like that in real life).

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

"From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1

By

Tom Baker

Everyone continues snarkily badmouthing Alan, and he snarks them right back, but they are there to dig up a corpse, right? And reanimate it for some reason, and some actor is BURIED ALIVE but is dug up in time so don't mind! (He and another are very effeminate and by implication gay, playing stereotypes that wouldn't cut it today).

So they dig up the corpse and this woman (I'm not sure who the characters all are, having missed their names), does a Satanic invocation and does a mildly-offensive impersonation of an old Jewish lady. And I'm confused.

(Did I mention Alan is wearing swinging Seventies duds that would put Mr. Furley to shame?)

They dig up a guy named Orville and take him back to a cabin and he's supposed to be dead but doesn't look it, and we discover Alan is a necrophile and everyone has fun with a rotting corpse and that seems likely. Then as the two by-inference gay guys are outside digging a grave to put Orville back in, the dead break free from the ground in which they were buried (a physical impossibility and one that makes me laugh whenever I see it in such movies, such as the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller), and charge the cabin. Then it becomes a Night of the Living Dead rip-off, with the actors and Alana hammering boards and a phony prop door against the window as the rotting dead try to break in. There's one good shot of a zombie girl eating some bloody guts, but it is still undeniably kinda fake and lame. There may be two or three good scenes here. However, that doesn't make up for the fact that, during most of the nearly excruciating ONE AND A HALF HOURS of this gobble-gobble, virtually NOTHING HAPPENS. I found myself nodding off, praying for the thing to end. They should have titled this zombie snooze-a-rama Children Shouldn't Suffer Insomnia, because this movie could put an end to it, for all time.

Nice try Alan, but no cigar. Anyway, thanks for the memories, as Bob Hope used to say.

Now get the hell OFF my island! This ain't the Island of Misfit Toys, moronic movies, or a free breadline for celluloid cheese. (A side of turkey notwithstanding.)

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)