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It's very close to Halloween 2025, and Plan9Crunch offers three somewhat offbeat choices for a Halloween-night flick to lend mood to the sinister season.
We only provide capsule reviews to these films. Perhaps we will explore them in greater detail one day. But we invite our readers to watch these gems.
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First is The Ape, 1940 (above), starring Boris Karloff. This is a Monogram poverty-row film and frankly, Karloff gives only about 50 percent in the film. However, Karloff at 50 percent is still pretty good. It's a kind of mad doctor role, with Boris as an aging doctor obsessed with curing the paralysis of a lovely polio victim. He'll stop at nothing, and, courtesy of those bizarre fever-dream Monogram plots, the good doctor decides to slip into the skin of a recently killed circus ape. He goes off as an "ape" and kills people for their spinal fluid. It's crazy but a fun hour or so to kill. This film is free on just about every stream or video service on the Internet.
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Next is The Ghost of Yotsuya, 1959 (above). This is a classic Japanese story about an amoral samurai who murders the father of the girl he lusts after. With his criminal friend they cover up the crime and the samurai marries the daughter. His friend marries her sister. A year or so later, impoverished and with a baby, the samurai, tired of povery, murders his wife and their baby. Again, his friend is a confederate in this. The samurai marries a rich heiress, but discovers that his betrayed first wife has become a ghost. She won't leave him alone in her quest for retribution. This film can be rented on various streaming sites.
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Finally, we have The Mystic, 1925 (above). This was one of Tod Browning more obscure silents until it was released as part of a three-film Browning Blu-Ray recently. It involves a group of Roma in Hungary. One is a fake mystic. A traveling con man catches their act and takes the group to the United States to bilk a heiress out of her fortune. But once there, the con man develops a conscience, and wants to call off the swindle. Naturally, his confederates are not pleased.
This film stars two now-obscure actors, Aileen Pringle as the fake mystic Zara, and Conway Tearle as Michael Nash, the con man. Browning always portrayed carnival life so well as he was once worked in carnivals. For those who have seen a very young Joan Crawford in Browning's The Unknown, Pringle is a more mature, cynical and sexual version. She's quite striking and compelling in the role. Tearle occupies a role that usually would go to Lon Chaney. He's no Lon Chaney, but he knows that and doesn't overact. He ultimately gives a solid performance. You can rent this film on streaming services and it can be found -- for now -- free on YouTube.
So enjoy these three films, and Happy Halloween
-- Doug Gibson
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