FLIGHT TO TANGIER

FLIGHT TO TANGIER (1953). Director: Charles Marquis Warren.

Susan Lane (Joan Fontaine), a reporter, arrives at the airport in Tangier only to see a small plane crash in flames. The pilot was supposed to be her boyfriend, Hank (John Picard), but there are no bodies on board the aircraft. Adventurer and war hero Gil Walker (Jack Palance) helps Susan find Hank and stay out of the clutches of sinister Danzer (Robert Douglas), whose girlfriend Nicki (Corinne Calvet) has a hankering for Gil and a few secrets of her own. Accused of murdering a policeman, Gil goes on the run with the two ladies as they all try to find Hank and whatever booty it is that Danzer is after. The first thing you have to wonder about Flight to Tangier is how on earth a classy actress like Fontaine wound up in this Grade C movie that pretty much utterly wastes her talents. Palance [Torture Garden] is fine, as weird as ever, Calvet [So This is Paris] is beautiful and not bad, although she's not quite up to her tougher scenes, and clean-shaven Douglas makes a fairly bland villain unlike his mustachioed bad guy of This Side of the Law. At least half the movie seems to consist of Fontaine and Palance -- an unlikely pairing -- running and running around occasionally scenic views of "Tangier." Murray Matheson has a small but pivotal role as a passenger on the plane who has something important to deliver. Warren also directed Unknown Terror, which is a lot more fun. If this was actually released in 3-D as the poster suggests, the movie apparently does little with the process.

Verdict: A couple of good scenes but this never amounts to much. **.

BACK FROM THE DEAD

Otto Reichow and Peggie Castle

BACK FROM THE DEAD (1957). Director: Charles Marquis Warren.

Dick Anthony (Arthur Franz of Monster on the Campus) stupidly decides to bring his new wife, Mandy (Peggie Castle of I, the Jury), to the home he once shared with his first wife, although he claims he was "compelled" to do so. Maybe that's the case, because it isn't long before both Arthur and his sister-in-law Kate (Marsha Hunt) are baffled by Mandy's insistence that she is really Arthur's drowned wife, Felicia. Has Mandy's mind and body been taken over by the consciousness of the dead Felicia, or is something else going on? Almost from the very first it seems clear that this is a genuine case of demonic possession, with Arthur and Kate hoping to free Mandy, and others -- such as Felicia's batty mother, Ada (Helen Wallace) and sinister spiritualist Renault (Otto Reichow) -- trying to keep Felicia on the more or less mortal plane. All of this sounds interesting, and the acting isn't bad, but Back From the Dead is only sporadically entertaining and has very little suspense. James Bell is especially good as Felicia's horrified father. The music by Raoul Kraushaar is (deliberately one hopes) atrocious. Warren also directed Unknown Terror, which was better than this.

Verdict: This one should have stayed dead. **.

UNKNOWN TERROR

UNKNOWN TERROR (1957). Director: Charles Marquis Warren.

When a young man disappears while searching for a mysterious cavern known as the “Cave of Death” in South America, his sister (Mala Powers), husband (John Howard) and friend (Paul Richards) decide to go look for him and come across a mad doctor (Gerald Milton) who is experimenting with fungi, allegedly for new antibiotics. Everyone in the small village, including the doctor and his beautiful Indian bride (May Wynn) are tight-lipped about the location of this cave and even deny that it exists, but eventually our intrepid trio make their way inside the place and discover exactly why the cave has such a sinister reputation, to put it mildly. This is a perfectly creditable, atmospheric and well-paced “comic book” movie that piles on one eerie incident after another and has a wild climax that seems derived from everything from H. G. Wells' novel “The Time Machine”with its morlocks to the bogey men/cavern finale of Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland. [Remember, The Time Machine wasn't filmed until seven years later.] It isn't for a moment very reasonable but it is consistently entertaining. In most films of this nature the characters seem to have no real life outside of the story (or any life at all for that matter) but Kenneth Higgins' script at least attempts to create characters who have a convincing back story, and the actors follow suit: for instance, when Paul Richards shows up at the home of Mala Powers, we don't need any dialogue to know that these two were once lovers. For the most part the actors, including May Wynn and Gerald Milton, play with conviction, although the latter does become a little hammy in the final sequences. Powers and Richards certainly deserved bigger parts in better movies, but their work here is nothing they should have been ashamed of. Much – too much – has been made of the fact that the special effects for the big finale are low-tech, to say the least, but the fact is that they are also perfectly effective for a black and white low-budget movie and it is also true that Unknown Terror is creepy and a lot of fun! [Available from Sinister Cinema.]

Verdict: Not great but great fun. **1/2.