FFWD Weekly
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Video Vulture by John Tebbutt "I am going to give them crime and blood and three murders to the chapter. Such is the insanity of the age that I do not doubt for one moment the success of my venture." So promised crime novelist Edgar Wallace (1875 - 1932) at the start of his career. In the years that followed his discovery of this winning formula, he published 173 books, and was briefly considered to be the most famous author of the 20th century. He wasn’t interested in making Great Art – his work merely strove to be popular entertainment, and is all the more successful for it. ("Three murders to the chapter" is a bit of an exaggeration of course, but it does give one an idea about the fast-paced brutality of Wallace’s novels.) You don’t go to Wallace for brilliant insights into the human condition – you go to him when you’re in the mood for a pulpy, lurid page-turner filled with suspense, danger, bumbling police detectives, corrupt insane asylums, secret tunnels, screaming heroines, and murderers who wear black capes and skull masks. Wallace’s bad guys probably inspired all of those James Bond villains who came later – they take inordinate pride in their own evilness, they never just shoot somebody if they can send a trained orangutan after them instead, and they tend to lock the heroes up in an easily escapable room full of spiders and cobras before walking away and assuming that the captives won’t get out. A great many films were made of Wallace’s novels. (In EW’s native Germany, these films are known as "Krimis," after taschenkrimis, or "pocket crime novels.") The films relied heavily on Wallace’s name, and were quite popular until the trend petered out in the late ’60s. · The Human Monster (a.k.a. The Dark Eyes of London) (1940): Bela Lugosi stars as Dr. Orloff, an evil physician who has taken to running an insurance company after losing his license to practise medicine. (He runs a home for the blind on the side, while disguised as a blind man. Weird.) Orloff has been murdering his own clients after naming himself beneficiary of their life insurance policies. (Wouldn’t he make more money from them by letting them live, so that they could pay the premiums??) He relies chiefly on two methods of execution. One of them is to simply drown his victims in a bathtub and drop them in the Thames river. Simple and effective. His second method is hilariously convoluted – he writes a message in braille, and throws it out of his second-storey window. The blind beggar outside picks up the message (after groping around for a few minutes) and delivers it to the home for the blind, thus dispatching huge, deformed hitman Blind Jake after the intended victim. The sightless assassin not only finds the target’s home, but heads straight for whatever room the victim happens to be in. That’s a little bit too impressive. This is London, after all. You’d think that once in a while he’d get lost, wander into a department store, and strangle a mannequin in the display window or something. · The Creature With The Blue Hand (1967): Klaus Kinski stars as twin brothers Dave and Richard. After being falsely accused of murder, Dave escapes from an insane asylum and hides out in his brother’s mansion disguised as Richard. Meanwhile, a crazed murderer is stalking the area, dressed in a black cape and hood, and wielding "the blue hand," a steel gauntlet with deadly spring-loaded finger blades. When the heroes aren’t running around through the secret passageways of the mansion pursued by the killer, they’re running around through the secret passageways of the corrupt asylum, pursued by the evil warden and his white-coated good squad. Great fun, even though the tape is slightly shortened and censored from the original version. (The asylum inmate who can’t stop taking off her clothes is shown in the opening credits, but not in the film itself.) The video box tries to pass the film off as a cheesy ’80s horror movie. This is unfortunate. If they marketed it more accurately as a cheesy ’60s horror movie, they’d have a better chance of attracting this film’s true audience.

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