Todd’s Movie Blog

I decided to switch things up this year, instead of highlighting films for the Halloween season, I am going to highlight books that have a tie in with films.  First up is Peter H Brothers’ modern novelization of Bela Lugosi’s low budget horror film The Devil Bat–Devil Bat Diary: The Journal of Johnny Layton.

To be honest I hemmed and hawed for quite a while over the summer about getting it on my Kindle.  The Devil Bat is one of my favorite Lugosi films and I  had to wonder why anyone would want to write a novelization of a seventy year old public domain film.  But being a fan of the film I plunked down $3.99 for it.

Told in the first person by journalist Johnny Layton, the book purports to be the real story of The Devil Bat incident from the late thirties that was made into a sanatized PRC Lugosi vehicle.  Unpublished for decades due to the violence and sex in the account, as well as the less than flattering portrayal of some of the people involved, it has now been made available to the public.

The book follows the movie fairly closely in terms of plot, though the opening with Lugosi explaining in voiceover why he has targeted two families for death is skipped and starts with Johnny being assigned to cover the story of the first murder and goes through his romancing one of the future victims and faking a devil bat for the purpose of getting a picture, killing the real bat and then having to deal with a second bat and the man who created them.

The Devil Bat Diary takes some liberties with the film, as with Johnny having to deal with a local sheriff who takes an out of the closet romantic interest in him, several bloody bat attacks, a couple of tame sex scenes, and an ending that is completely different from the movie, with the hero having a final confrontation with the mad scientist in his lab while the heroine is locked in a room being attacked by bats ala Hitchcock’s The Birds.

All in all it is a pretty good modern horror novel using the campy old movie as a skeleton for a good old fashion scary story.  Although be warned the first twenty pages that take place in the news room contains about twelve dick jokes as reporters banter with each other and half the characters talk in different dialects.

I  didn’t really get into The Marx Brothers until I was in college, growing up I was more into Abbott and Costello and The Bowery Boys, The Marxes were a little over my head in grade school.  Having discovered the uniqueness of the brothers, I began watching as many of their films as I could, and by far their best is Duck Soup, which was the inevitable end of the progression they went through at Paramount.  Having crashed high society and taken over a college university, where else to go but to take over a country.

The film is probably the greatest anti-war film ever made, instead of showing the horror of war in films like All Quiet on the Western Front, Duck Soup shows the absurdity of going to war.  Grouchy sums it all up with a single sentence, “But we must go to war, I’ve already put a down payment on the battlefield!”

What plot there is deals with a sneaky diplomat from Groucho’s neighboring country trying to take over Groucho’s by devious means and employs Chico and Harpo to help him, only to have Groucho push for war, which he wins when Chico and Harpo join his side and and pelt the diplomat with apples.  Around this bare bones plot is strung a series of skits that vary from slapstick to word play to musical comedy that runs rough shod over everything from government bureaucracy, legal trials,  diplomacy, espionage, patriotism and combat.

Highlights for me include Groucho’s inauguration, where he openly admits he will run the country into the ground, Chico’s trial for being a spy where Groucho defends him against himself, Chico and Harpo’s ongoing  war with Edgar Kennedy’s lemonade salesmen, Harpo’s Paul Revere inspired midnight ride, All God’s Children Got Guns dance number, and the climactic war where Groucho’s costume changes from scene to scene with different military uniforms.

But the true highlight is the Groucho/ Harpo mirror bit, a comedy routine that has been ripped off from sit-coms to cartoons.  A simple bit where Harpo is disguised as Groucho and Groucho sees him in a doorway which Harpo pretends is a mirror and for the next five minutes mimics every move Groucho makes in a hilarious escalation of absurd and at times surreal comedy as Groucho, who knows he is looking at a fake, tries to get Harpo to make a mistake.

What makes this so funny is that all Groucho has to do is reach out and touch Harpo, but that is somehow not playing the game by the rules so after each setback we see Groucho think and then decide with a small nod, that yes, this will get him.  The best moments are when Groucho does a spin and Harpo simply copies the finish of the spin since that is all Groucho will see, and the top hat.  Here Groucho enters, walking sideways with a top hat behind his back, he and Harpo circle each other moving out aand then back into the doorfram in their original positions,during which Groucho notices Harpo has a straw hat and smirks at him, knowing he has finally got him, only to lose when they put their hats on and now Harpo has a top hat.

Watching the film it is easy to see why it was considered their worst film during it’s initial release,and why over the years, it’s timeless biting satire, has brought a reevaluation to being one of their best.

I have never been a big fan of the biopic, prefering fiction to fact in my movie going experience.  But along comes a film so unique and entertaining that you can’t help but love it.  Leave it to Tm Burton to make a film about a man who made bargain basement budget films and give it the look of a gothic horror film.

The film plays fast and loose with the truth, Woods making of Plan 9 From Outer Space was not the artistic triumph the film makes it look like, and Wood never met his idol Orson Welles, much less got a pep talk from him during a low point during the making of Plan 9.  Plus Wood’s alcoholism is barely even hinted at.

But such complaints aside, Ed Wood is an enjoyable film about a true Holywood maverick and his friendship with a once Hollywood star, now out of work has been, Bela Lugosi.  Johnny Depp and Martin Landau imbue their characters with a deep felt humanity.

Depp’s Wood, despite his constant upbeat personality, shows at times that he isn’t impervious to the constant criticism of his work, and wonders if he really is as talentless as everyone says he is.

Landau, thankfully not doing a “I vant to suck your blood” cliched Lugosi impersonation, makes the actor a tragic, but dignified person.  There is sad scene where, half drunk and feeling sorry for himself, he talks about how turning down Frankenstein probably ruined his career, then gets himself together and finishes his scene fighting with a rubber octopus because the man is a professional and he will damn well give the best fighting with a rubber octopus scene he can, and it makes you love the man.  In the film, this leads to Wood writing Lugosi his famous “Home?  I have no home!” speech from Bride of the Monster.

Of course the film wouldn’t be half as enjoyable as it is if not for all the humor in it, none of it mean spirited, like when Wood refuses to do a retake of a scene where Tor Johnson bumped into the set wall trying to go through a door and Wood, instead of saying they can’t afford to do a retake, reasons that the trouble he had was something his character would have everytime he goes through a door and is brilliant acting on Johnson’s part. Even Wood’s showing up to direct a scene in drag because he is stressed out and angora sweaters and poodle skirts make him feel more comfortable elicits sympathy rather than giggles when the church elders financing the film have a fit, because we gotten to know and like Wood as a person and feel for what he is going through.

This is Burton’s best film and sadly it constantly has rights trouble with it’s releases.  Delayed on coming out on VHS, it only came out on DVD about eight years ago, almost ten years after it’s theatrical run, and who knows if it will ever get a Blu-Ray release.   Too bad, because I think everyone should see Landau as Lugosi refer to Boris Karloff as “That Limey cockksucker!” in high def.