Tag: 1940s
Black Is Boo-Tiful
When Jordan Peeele’s Get Out became a breakout success in 2017, earning him the first Original Screenplay Oscar awarded to an African-American, "black horror movies" suddenly became the new hot property in Hollywood, with many people seeming to believe that this was an entirely new subset of...
The Vampire's Ghost is a vintage horror movie from Republic Pictures that, like most horror movies from Republic Pictures, has slipped through the cracks of public consciousness, overshadowed by Universal's classic monsters. That doesn't mean they aren't quality films, though. Take The Vampire's Ghost, for instance. Not only is it...
Mighty Joe Young is basically "King Kong lite", from its tone (decidedly lighter) to the size of its gorilla (decidedly smaller) to the role of its black cast (decidedly less important). Like King Kong, the role of the black people in Mighty Joe Young is peripheral -- natives sharing...
Zombies on Broadway is an effective spoof of I Walked with a Zombie (with many of the same black cast members) featuring a wannabe Abbot and Costello duo traveling to the same fictitious Caribbean island St. Sebastian as IWWAZ (part Hispanic, part black, all evil) to bring back a...
This is more of an adventure film than horror, but given the fine line in gorilla-centric fare back in the '40s, you can cut me some slack. The reason I'm including The White Gorilla on this site is that while watching it, I couldn't help but feel like Richard...
In the third and final film in the Topper series of supernatural misadventures featuring lovable ghosts, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson is featured as Topper’s chauffeur, with his raspy, yelling voice (much more animated than Willie Best/Stepin Fetchit, and perhaps even slightly more than Mantan Moreland). Bug-eyed double takes are the...
Son of Ingagi is a somewhat stuffy all-black horror flick featuring somewhat stuffy newlywed couple Bob and Eleanor Lindsay (Alfred Grant and Daisy Bufford), who, besides having corny names and sleeping in separate beds, befriend lonely scientist Helen Jackson (Laura Bowman). As scientists tended to do in the 1940s,...
Son of Dracula is notable in its unusually large number of black characters -- five speaking parts -- although all of them are marginal, not even important enough to be neck-bite victims. It's indicative of the time: all of the black people are servants, but at least they're not...
Like Meeting at Midnight, this is a Charlie Chan mystery that's marginally horrific, with its masked killer plot line (not to mention the Caucasian Asian speaking pidgin English and his bug-eyed, scaredy-cat black manservant). Somehow, I find Mantan's being scared of a tangible killer here more acceptable than his...
A semi-sequel to King of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies is more like King of the Zombies Redux, with Mantan Moreland reprising his role as bug-eyed servant Jeff, albeit in a different location (Louisiana instead of the Caribbean) and with a different (albeit equally rigid) cast of characters....
