Sarah Hates Your Movie

A mostly formulaic ghost story, Kill, Baby… Kill! looks awesome, because it’s Bava, and the last twenty minutes are pretty great. It’s just a shame that it’s such a straightforward and, whisper it, kind of boring story.

It’s a little too long and a little too illogical in places, but Bette Davis’s performance is amazing.

Everyone says this movie is brilliant. I expected to love it.

I thought it was crap.

Rubbish.

Still love this movie, no matter how many times I watch it.

Isle of the Dead is a crazed mashup of every other Val Lewton movie: there’s an aging authoritarian who’s slowly losing his grip on reality; a cataleptic terrified of being buried alive; a young woman plagued by the fear that she’s secretly an evil supernatural monster; a naive young man and a creepy old woman… and a set of circumstances which may or may not be supernatural that bring them all together and cause half a dozen deaths.

It’s nice to look at, and Karloff is great, but there’s a little too much going on for its meagre 72 minute runtime so it ends up feeling a little rushed and garbled.

A scheming wannabe-starlet worms herself into the life of a fading star and steals her limelight… only for the pattern to begin all over again once she’s made it. It’s overlong but ace.

Following the events of Cat People, Oliver and Alice get married and have a child. But Amy is a weird kid: a dreamer who can’t make real friends and has to make do with an aging theatre actress and an imaginary woman who may or may not be Irena’s ghost.

Throw in the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, a troubled mother-daughter relationship (where the daughter is the anonymous cat woman from the first film), a wishing ring, and an unhelpful servant (Sir Lancelot, who doesn’t sing anywhere near enough in this movie) and you’ve got… a total mess.

It feels like there are at least two different films jumbled up in here. And there are no cats. It makes no sense. Disappointing.

Donald Fettes is a talented young medical student under the tutelage of Dr MacFarlane. When a mother brings her disabled young daughter to MacFarlane in hope of a cure, Fettes wants to help, but in the course of trying to persuade the great doctor to do the operation, he gets drawn into MacFarlane’s body snatching scheme. And when security at the graveyards gets beefed up, they need to resort to more drastic measures to obtain the bodies they need…

The Body Snatcher is the last film to star both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and really, it’s Karloff’s film. As the rat-like Cabman Grey, he gets to be truly evil, blackmailing and murdering and singing as he goes. It’s a great performance, and a truly creepy film.

Tom Merriam is about to embark on his first voyage as a ship’s third officer when a blind beggar warns him off. The Altair is cursed, he says. Nothing but bad luck awaits. Tom shrugs it off and boards the ship and at first, everything seems great: the captain welcomes him warmly, and tells him they’re going to be great friends. But soon Tom notices that something odd is going on. People are dying, and the captain is a little too obsessed with the idea of authority…

It’s not really a horror film, and it’s a little clunky with its metaphors, but The Ghost Ship is atmospheric and, like every other Val Lewton-produced film, gorgeously shot with wonderful shadows everywhere.