5/7/2023 0 Comments Movie zotz![]() At the end, the coin is dropped and balanced over a sewer only for big lug Mazurki to sneeze … The premise, like A Jolly Bad Fellow, suggests protagonist will be tempted by the opportunity to murder people who get in the way – like his bullying faculty rival Professor Kellgore (Jim Backus) – without a trace … but he never uses the coin to kill, even in self-defence when dimwitted red spies (Carl Don, Mike Mazurki) try to get the secret weapon away from him. Jones decodes the writing on the coin, accidentally bleeds on it, and discovers it has magic properties – if he points at someone while it’s in his pocket, they double over with chest pains … if he says zotz! while pointing at something, it dies or explodes … and if he does something else complicated, time is slowed down. A specialist in ancient languages, Professor Jonathan Jones (wobble-chinned Tom Poston) comes into possession of a coin from ‘Ukranistan’ which a former student who is sweet on his niece Cynthia (Zeme North) has found on a dig and decided to send to his girlfriend on a charm bracelet rather than turn over to the proper authorities. Case in point: Zotz!īased on a novel by Walter Karig (a naval hero whose film credits are mostly as an advisor to documentaries of the Victory at Sea vaety) and scripted by Ray Russell (author of the source story for Castle’s Mr Sardonicus and screenwriter of Corman’s The Premature Burial), Zotz! has a ruthless premise but lacks the heart to do anything with it, falling somewhere between Disney’s ‘flying rubber professor’ movies (the script even tags its hero as ‘an absent-minded professor’) and the ruthless British comedy of campus murders A Jolly Bad Fellow (aka They All Died Laughing). But trying to be funny led Castle to fall flat on his face. Oddly, when Robb White or Robert Bloch was scripting and the knowing likes of Vincent Price or Joan Crawford or Nigel Green (in the underrated Let’s Kill Uncle) were cast, Castle’s horrors could be witty: House on Haunted Hill is as much acidic farce as acid bath. He even dares impinge on that most sacred of Hollywood spaces, the studio logo: this opens with a tiny Castle in his director’s chair pointing his finger (and trademark cigar) at the torch-holding Columbia lady and shouting ‘zotz!’ whereupon the studio figurehead asks (pertinently) ‘what’s zotz?’ It must have come to Castle’s attention that Hitchcock wasn’t just a Master of Suspense but a genius at black humour (he subversively, but aptly described Psycho as a comedy), which meant he felt obliged to turn out a run of frankly dispiriting macabre comedies (the Hammer Films remake of The Old Dark House is probably pick of the litter: it’s at least better than this, 13 Ghosts and The Busy Body) between his more gruesome (if scarcely ‘straight’) horrors. Castle plainly wanted to be as famous as Alfred Hitchcock became in the 1950s (thanks to his TV show) and stamps himself all over his movies. ![]() The career of producer-director William Castle is too often evaluated purely on the barmy gimmicks (Emergo, Percepto) he used to ballyhoo horror-exploitation pictures (The Tingler, Homicidal) into boffo boxo. NB: these are my notes on the film, not a review – so you might not want to read them if you’ve not seen it yet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |