Saturday Matinee

A couple of classic zombie posters. The bottom one is a Spanish poster for Night of the Living Dead, a much more traditional old-school design than the usual black and white photo montage version you see. The top one is for a 1977 Italian film with the English title The Child. It sounds a hoot, judging from the IMDB plot summary: 'A newly-hired housekeeper in a remote area is alarmed to discover that her boss's eleven-year-old daughter is using her supernatural powers to take revenge on the people she holds responsible for her mother's death, with the aid of her flesh-eating zombie 'friends'...'

Saturday Matinee

What a great title - just imagine the moan-and-dance sequences. But of course it's shit and apparently none of the 'action' takes place on Broadway anyway, just on old tropical island sets from I Walked With A Zombie. It's 1945 and this is all Lugosi is being offered by now. He doesn't even get to act alongside Abbott & Costello (bad enough) but with a poor imitation of them - although how much poorer can that be, I daren't imagine. According to the reviewer on IMDB: 'Toward the end, a monkey is able to steal the show, indicating the level of talent in the cast.'

A few years later Lugosi would be making Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire which, even allowing for Ed Wood, was probably his nadir. Rarely essaying a really good performance (but certainly capable of it), Lugosi rather asked for his slide into the Z-list. As his arch-rival Boris Karloff said: 'The poor man didn't bother to learn the language. And when your livelihood depends upon your knowing the language, what could he expect?' Mind you, Karloff rarely gave a bad performance, even in the rubbish he was being given in the late 40s and 50s.