The Glass Cage (1955)

aka The Glass Tomb

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is a carnival barker as well as a family man. He genuinely loves his job. Well, mostly, it appears, he loves the feeling of divorcing sucker from money in as flamboyant a fashion as he can come up with. Right now, he’s planning on introducing London to the special talents of starvation artist/starving man Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) and his attempt to break his own record by going seventy days without food while on public display in the titular glass cage.

Pel still needs a bit of capital for this, though, so it’s a lucky break when old showbiz pal turned successful business man Tony Lewis (Sidney James) asks Pel for a favour worth 250 pound. Tony, you see, is about to be married to a nice young upper class lady, but an old lady friend is blackmailing him for money. Pel might just be the right guy to talk said lady friend out of it. As it turns out, the business is money easily earned, for the blackmailer is Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), an old friend of Pel’s. Even better, she has changed her mind about the blackmail anyway and won’t do anything that could embarrass Tony. She was clearly talked into the attempt by someone, but doesn’t tell Pel who.

We learn soon enough that the blackmail instigator is the carny biz world’s favourite agent, Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), and Harry’s so unhappy about Rena’s change of heart, he murders her while Pel and his carny pals are having a party just a flight of steps down. This is just the start of an affair that’ll cost a good handful of people their lives. Fortunately, once under pressure, Pel turns out to be quite a good hobby detective, particularly paired with one Inspector Lindley (Liam Redmond), a man who clearly has a heart for the less upper-crust inhabitants of the world.

This sixty minute cheapie directed by Montgomery Tully is one of the quota quickies Hammer produced with Robert Lippert, and it is certainly one of the better examples of its kind. Tully’s filmmaking is straightforward and effective, with some moments of very clever staging and a couple of scenes that reach for the intensity of US noirs, though the film never attempts the expressionist visuals of those films.

In tone, however, The Glass Cage is certainly close to what one would call a noir, not quite as cynical as its American brethren could get, perhaps simply because its extra short running time doesn’t leave quite enough space to really dig into the messed-up minds of its villains, nor into the complicated personality of its protagonist Pel. What’s there of these depths is, however, well-realized, and works well with the film’s stranger plot details. And they do get strange, particular in a finale that’s slightly more bizarre and macabre than one would expect, and so far-fetched, Cornel Woolrich would have been proud to be associated with the film, if only he had been involved.

Despite the film’s briefness, it at least manages to draw its characters well enough to suggest actual personality and depth to them. In part, that’s thanks to the script’s effective use of shorthand characters tropes, in part because of a cast that fits into these tropes so nicely, they provide them with actual life (and liveliness) and make them memorable. I was particularly impressed by Ireland’s ability to draw Pel as a guy who is at once shifty and trustworthy; a man working a semi-crooked business and loving it without being crooked where it matters.

The film clearly has a lot of fun with showing as much of the carnival business as its budget provided, at the outset using it as a companionable counterpoint to the darker business of the main plot until both eventually intersect more directly. One can’t help but notice that it’s the – by 50s standards – morally dubious carnival people who do most of the killer catching work here, and that the film’s protagonist is even a bit of a conman who wouldn’t go unpunished in more typical 50s fare, and nod approvingly.

The Graveyard Story (1991)

Warning: I’m going to spoil most of the film’s plot twists, but believe me, it is better that way!

Rich, retired psychiatrist Dr McGregor (John Ireland) has developed a very special relationship to a dead little girl that starts out with him visiting her grave for vague reasons and her reciprocating with – harmless and friendly – visits of her own after a while. Clearly, something is keeping the kid tied to our world, so McGregor hires policeman turned private eye Ron Hunt (Adrian Paul, but not that Adrian Paul) – a man whose newspaper ad promises he will “consider anything” – to find out what. Ron’s just too happy to do the old man the favour for two hundred bucks a day.

During his investigation, Ron stumbles upon various curious things, like a disturbingly horny journalist (Christine Cattell), or the fact that there’s no information about the little girl’s death in the newspaper archives of said horny journalist. He will find other traces, though, and stumble through a pretty darn dumb mystery plot.

Oh boy, Bozidar D. Benedikt’s The Graveyard Story is not at all a good film. In fact, it is so bad a film I can finally cart out my old chestnut about a film feeling as if it was made by people from a dimension about one step removed from ours again. Parts of the film’s general wonkiness are easily explained by the vagaries of shooting something on a low budget, like the bland direction, the often painfully awkward staging of dialogue scenes (and it’s nearly all dialogue scenes in this one), or the way certain scenes are completely superfluous.

The stiff dialogue, often reminiscent of the English dubs of Italian movies from the 70s and 80s, is clearly rooted in the director/writer not being an English native speaker. Why none of the actors except for Ireland were apparently helping out with that is a different question, but then, calling most of the on-screen talent “actor” is a bit much. Take Adrian Paul, carrying himself with all the vigour and verve of a walking corpse, usually showing no expression whatsoever and going through his lines giving the impression he’s got no idea what he’s talking about (and he certainly is a native speaker). And he’s basically in all of the film’s scenes.

The acting level as a whole is rather dreadful. Most of the cast is, alas, not terribly good in a rather boring way – there’s little of the true weirdness nor the histrionics of the entertaining and enthusiastic bad actor on display – only Cattell and the guy playing Angry Mafia Dude (you’ll recognize him if you inflict this thing upon yourself) are any kind of fun to watch. Ireland is an experienced professional and acts the part, but of course he doesn’t have too many scenes.


But let’s not carry on making fun of acting and dialogue, there’s a whole plot to gawk at, too. Going by the film’s start, one would have expected this to be a ghost story at least on some level, but as a matter of fact, this is a mystery without any supernatural elements; unless you take the increasing stupidity of the plot to be supernatural. It’s not just the little things that make the film quite as dumb as it is, like the question why McGregor makes up the whole ghost story to tell to the detective when he actually wants Hunt to look for his long-lost daughter, or who’d hire Hunt for anything but getting bored to death. To wit, the film’s biggest plot twist is based on the following line of thought: that a woman whose daughter has been kidnapped would, when the kidnappers send her – rather thoughtfully – a child sized coffin (please don’t ask where the kidnappers got it, or I’ll have to make something appropriately dumb up) with a piece of coat sticking out, not look inside of the coffin to find out if her child is actually inside, and if she is alive or dead. Now imagine that, furthermore, the mother and her female boss (basically the kid’s fairy godmother), would decide not to go to the police or any kind of authority at any point in time and would just bury the coffin with the help of a friendly priest (who is also not looking into the coffin, of course). If that makes any kind of sense to you, you’re the writer of this film.

Past Misdeeds: Miami Golem (1985)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls - smiling as if it were the best of jokes - "that filthy Nazi". Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker's goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig's highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn't understand.

Our hero's not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he's gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), who also steal the cells while they’re at it. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that particular goal, but then I'm not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig - and not sanity - is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he's heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig's not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of which protect her from a gratuitous shower scene). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It's all in a day's work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem's bizarre and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (and all that in the mid 80s to boot) isn't as drugged up as that of De Martino's Pumaman was - but what is? - yet it's still pretty darn weird.

The film's first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There's bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing watching Ed Wood movies. It's enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience's brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film's greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig's role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig's appearance to talk to him, making the film's main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I'm sure he's completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other - leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus's dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.


Miami Golem's air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn't let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there's an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man's gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

On WTF: Miami Golem (1985)

If you thought Pumaman was the be all and end all of Alberto De Martino's late career phase, you just haven't encountered Miami Golem, a movie that is nearly as weird but not as boring.

If you jump over to my column on WTF-Film, I'm going to tell you all about it.

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