THE VAMPIRA SHOW (1954-1955) TOP MOVIES SHOWN

Vampira

Vampira and her Movie Host show are still remembered fondly here in the present day. For something a little different in a Bad Movie Host item this time around, I’ll follow up my original post about her from long ago with a look at my favorites from the films shown on The Vampira Show.

Like almost all hosts and hostesses, Vampira (Maila Nurmi) had no control over the movies shown and the station saddled her with a bunch of lame detective and mystery films mixed in with the old horror flicks that the program is remembered for.

Here are what I consider to be the most fitting films from the short run of The Vampira Show.

PREVIEW: DIG ME LATER, VAMPIRA (Apr 30th, 1954) – A special devoted to hyping Vampira’s movie show which would start the next night.

THE FACE OF MARBLE (1946) – John “He’s probably even in the Zapruder Film if you look hard enough” Carradine stars as a mad scientist who is trying to use electrical and chemical treatments to revive the recently deceased. Human and animal test subjects come back to life able to walk through solid objects and are controlled by John’s voodoo-practicing maid. William “One-Shot” Beaudine directed and Willie Best was on hand as the butler.

REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES (1943) – John Carradine is back as a different mad scientist this time around. In this flick he’s Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann, a mad scientist in Louisiana experimenting with science and voodoo combined in hopes of providing Hitler with an army of walking dead soldiers. He zombifies his wife, brother and others while opposed by private detective Robert Lowery and his sidekick, played by the always over-the-top Mantan Moreland himself.     

FOG ISLAND (1945) – George Zucco plays a tycoon who is fresh out of prison. He tricks the well-to-do villains who framed him and murdered his wife into visiting his remote island. Zucco has rigged the mansion he keeps on the island with all manner of death traps as he works to avenge himself by killing off those who wronged him. Veda Ann Borg co-stars in this movie based on the play Angel Island. 

CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS (1948) – British suspense thriller. The movie is more of a murder mystery than a horror story but because it contains Christopher Lee’s first film role and a Lois Maxwell appearance I’m including it. An artist obsessively thinks his new lady also loved him in a previous life. Murder and a wax museum also figure into the proceedings.

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) – Often considered the first full-length zombie movie. Bela Lugosi, riding high off his success in the movie Dracula the previous year, starred as French Haitian plantation owner “Murder” Legendre. This intriguing villain has mastered voodoo magic to the degree that he transforms his personal and business enemies into walking dead slaves to work on his plantation for him. Another plantation owner hires him to use his magic to make a newlywed bride become his love slave.

DEVIL BAT’S DAUGHTER (1946) – Though technically a sequel to the 1940 Bela Lugosi film The Devil Bat, this movie features none of the original cast members AND it retcons the earlier flick’s ending by now saying Lugosi’s character wasn’t really a villain after all. Miss America Rosemary La Planche stars as Nina, the daughter of Lugosi’s mad scientist who used trained bats to murder his enemies. A psychiatrist is framing her for a series of murders which he intends to conclude with the killing of his wife so he and his mistress can be together.

THE FLYING SERPENT (1946) – And speaking of The Devil Bat, this movie – also by PRC – is basically a reworking of that film’s storyline. George Zucco is back as a mad archeologist who has secretly found the Mexican tomb which houses Montezuma’s lost treasure. He also discovered that it is guarded by a Great Dane sized winged serpent whose species inspired Quetzalcoatl myths. Zucco uses the flying creature to kill off rivals so he can have the treasure to himself. 

THE MASK OF DIIJON (1946) – Silent cinema’s “man you love to hate” – Erich von Stroheim – stars as stage magician Diijon, who has retired from his lucrative career to study mind powers. His wife is fed up with their current financial state and wants him to go back to magic. Instead, he tries a mind control act, but winds up humiliated. He uses his powers to knock off the people he feels set him up for failure.

THE STRANGE MR. GREGORY (1945) – The title character, played by Edmund Lowe, is a man who possesses actual occult powers. He gets the hots for the wife (Jean Rogers) of one of his admirers (Don Douglas) and fakes his own death, framing the admirer for murdering him. He then attempts to make the wife his own.   

MAN WITH TWO LIVES (1942) – This is basically a rehashing of the 1933 movie Supernatural, which starred Carol Lombard and Randolph Scott. In this case, a male criminal who gets executed winds up with his soul transplanted in another man’s body. The villain uses his new host body to kill people he wants revenge on. 

THE ROGUES’ TAVERN (1936) – An eloping couple wait for the Justice of the Peace at a tavern and inn called the Rogues’ Tavern. Guests begin getting killed by a seeming mad dog at large but stolen jewels, cut phone wires and an enigmatic man in a wheelchair hint at a human killer spending the night at the inn. 

MIDNIGHT LIMITED (1940) – Another mystery movie that I’m including because of its use of quasi-horror elements. A figure called the Phantom Robber keeps preying on the Midnight Limited train, committing murder and assorted robberies of valuables and secret papers. Detective Valentine Lennon (John “Dusty” King) and his assistant Joan Marshall (Marjorie Reynolds) go undercover on the Midnight Limited’s next run to try flushing out the mysterious figure.

BLUEBEARD (1944) – Edgar Ulmer directs and John Carradine stars in this version of the Bluebeard story. In France, Gaston Morrell (Carradine) is a brilliant portrait painter who also stages puppet shows (?). He kills off every woman who models for the portraits he paints over the way he once fell in love with a prostitute who laughed at him when he told her how he felt about her. The Surete eventually ends this “modern Bluebeard’s” reign of terror. 

KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) – On an uncharted island between Cuba and Puerto Rico, Axis Nations agent Dr. Miklos Sangre (Henry Victor in a role intended for Bela Lugosi) has used his voodoo skills to make an army of living zombies who obey his every command. A transport aircraft crash lands on the island, and the American survivors end up foiling Sangre’s attempt to turn a U.S. Admiral he captured into an obedient zombie who will tell him military secrets. 

THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1934) – Partially paralyzed, wealthy philanthropist John Pren is really the evil archeologist John Prendergast, who looted a sacred temple in India years ago. A Hindu priest mystically resurrected a gorilla that Prendergast killed and commanded it to kill Prendergast and anyone else who got a share of the loot. As bodies pile up, it looks like a man in a gorilla suit is the real killer, but in truth Prendergast enthralled the real undead gorilla sent to kill him and has been using it to whack people for him. 

CASTLE OF DOOM (1932) – This French-German coproduction was also titled Vampyr and was directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer. Allan Gray, a student of the occult, arrives in a French village being terrorized by a female vampire and her thralls. Shadows that disconnect themselves from their owners and move about killing people are also featured along with a ghost or two. Gray saves Giselle, a woman he falls in love with, from the female vampire by throwing open her coffin at dawn and impaling her heart with a metal bar.

RETURN OF THE APE MAN (1944) – Bela Lugosi and John Carradine play professors Dexter and Gilmore, who discover a preserved but frozen caveman in the Arctic. The caveman is played by George Zucco for about a minute before Frank Moran takes over. Our two leads thaw out the caveman, but he escapes and kills a cop. Bela wants to transplant part of a modern human’s brain to replace half the caveman’s brain in hopes of making it intelligent enough to control. He double-crosses Carradine to use him as his half-brain donor but the resulting beast goes on a killing spree. 

STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946) – Frank Wisbar’s deeply flawed horror movie is just good enough that you root for it to be better. The ghost of a Deep South ferry operator begins killing off the people who framed him for murder and also those people’s relatives. Rosemary LaPlanche, Charles Middleton and future director BLAKE EDWARDS (really) co-star. I reviewed this film in depth HERE.

WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945) – This was the 50th and final episode of The Vampira Show, sad to say. Lorna Webster (Nancy Kelly) returns to her home town of Ebon Rock, MA. She meets Jezebel Trister, an elderly woman with a dog. Jezebel uses Colonial-era money and claims to be the 300-year-old ghost of a witch killed by Lorna’s witch-hunting ancestor Judge Elijah Webster. She wants revenge on Lorna for being his last living descendant. Dead bodies and more follow.   

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