Although today’s audiences know him for co-scripting 1933’s classic King Kong (if they know him at all), the prolific Edgar Wallace once held name recognition so powerhouse-high, he was his own brand, with hundreds of his novels and short stories adapted for the screen. Some of them, The Gorilla Gang included, even begin with an audio welcome from the man as his blood-spattered logo appears over the action.

So what if he had been dead for more than 30 years? The Wallace moniker made bank, baby! It’s easy to see why. His mysteries are simple, often deceptively so, as is the case of this Gang, alternately known as The Gorilla of Soho.

Represented by Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, in a role he reprised for the following year’s The Man with the Glass Eye) and his investigation partner, Sgt. Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen, No Survivors, Please), Scotland Yard is baffled by a string of slayings in which the victims — all males traveling from other countries, yet with no UK relatives — are killed only on misty nights and retrieved from the Thames. Our heroes also possess knowledge of a syndicate whose members work solely under the shroud of fog and dressed in gorilla costumes, but Perkins and Pepper fail to consider potential linkage, despite it being as obvious as a connect-the-dots page torn from a preschooler’s coloring book.

It takes the translation skills of former nurse and current African language specialist Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas of Wallace’s The College-Girl Murders, also directed by Alfred Vohrer) to realize that 1+2=homicide, after she is brought in to decipher semilegible hieroglyphics scrawled on a plastic baby doll discovered on the waterlogged corpse of a millionaire wool merchant from Canada. Bringing Ms. McPherson along for assistance, romantic possibilities (for Pepper) and eye candy (for you, dear viewer), the law enforcers track leads that take them to a Salvation Army-esque nonprofit, a nudie bar, a nunnery and — none too soon — the lair of the acrobatic “apes.”

Aided tremendously by a swingin’ Peter Thomas score as big and brassy as some of the ladies for hire in the aforementioned club, The Gorilla Gang is colorful with its criminals, both in characterization and eye-popping appeal. Going down smooth, just a tad naughty and (in case you weren’t paying attention the first time) involves murderers disguised as goddamn gorillas, this is one Bacardi-and-dice-game of a killer krimi. —Rod Lott

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While the exact year escapes me, I recall with fondness that time in grade school when one of Oklahoma City’s local UHF stations was televising a 3-D movie marathon. It took some heavy pleading on my part to convince my mom to drive the quarter-mile to the nearest 7-Eleven, where a pair of those cellophane-lensed cardboard specs — one red, one blue — could be yours for something like 50 cents.

She gave in, and I happily awaited the four nights of cominatcha cinema whose lineup remains burned in my brain: 1961’s The Mask, 1977’s kung-fu Dynasty and two flicks from 1954: Creature from the Black Lagoon and Gorilla at Large. Try as I might, I don’t think I made it past the first commercial break of the latter. I didn’t deserve Gorilla then, but I deserve it now.

And so do you. Directed by Harmon Jones (Don’t Worry, We’ll Think of a Title), the novel whodunit is as if King Kong were the idea of Agatha Christie. Despite its off-putting name, the Garden of Evil carnival boasts two star attractions: Goliath, hawked as the “world’s largest” gorilla, and Laverne (Anne Bancroft, The Graduate), the trapeze artist whose gimmick is to swing perilously over his caged habitat.

When a man is discovered murdered at said cage, suspicion falls upon Goliath … but wait, didn’t the carnival’s owner (Raymond Burr, Airplane II: The Sequel) just order a gorilla costume for the barker (Cameron Mitchell, Blood and Black Lace)? A police detective (Lee J. Cobb, preparing for his Exorcist role) noses around to find out; look for eventual Delta Force colonel Lee Marvin as a patrolman!

Although unapologetically a B picture, Gorilla at Large has more to offer than talentspotting future A-listers. Many of Jones’ shots possess a depth of field even projected flat, and his camera soaks up the color of the carnival backdrop. That’s not just there for show, either, as great pains are made to incorporate various attractions into the script, from the tilt-a-whirl and merry-go-round to the roller-coaster finale. The most memorable sequence finds The Bride and the Beast’s Charlotte Austin is pursued through the mirror maze by a gorilla — whether real or fake is immaterial at that moment of suspense. —Rod Lott

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Although an insomniac, Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) suffers from recurring, claustrophobic nightmares that conclude with her rolling around nude with her sexy, hard-partying neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail). One night, the dream’s bedroom romp even progresses to Carol stabbing Julia thrice in the chest with a letter opener.

So when, in the waking world, police find Julia bloodied and dead, having been stabbed thrice in the chest with a letter opener, guess upon whom suspicion falls? Certainly you answered “Carol,” but as we all know with mysteries, the solution is rarely so cut-and-dry. That goes double — perhaps triple — with the Italian giallo, which A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin most assuredly is. If the nonsensical, zoological title didn’t relay as much, the name of its director and co-writer would: Lucio Fulci.

Although known best for his string — barbed wire? — of horror bloodbaths in the late 1970s and early ’80s (Zombie, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, et al.), the prolific filmmaker earlier plied his trade with a few stylish, if sometimes incomprehensible whodunits. Lizard lounges about on its own groovy beat, immediately distinguishable by the opulent and erotic surrealism of Carol’s dangerous dreams — scored by Ennio Morricone, no less!

Fulci’s direction of these sequences is tops, outdone perhaps only by an extended set piece in which Carol is pursued through an abandoned church by an armed and helmeted assailant. So Hitchcockian is this near-silent chase — recalling everything from Vertigo to The Birds — that the suspense can’t help but grow mighty intense. That’s what will stick with you, rather than the tidy, unsatisfying denouement.

Okay, so the dog vivisection scene might stick with you, too; just do your best not to dwell. —Rod Lott

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While on a book tour in Great Britain, author Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz Jr., 1977’s Joyride) is challenged by his publisher, Sam (Richard Todd, Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright), to write something different from his string of bestselling political thrillers: something epic and all human conditiony, like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. No prob, says Magee, who bets the Englishman $20,000 that he can turn around a complete manuscript within 24 hours. Ever the gentleman, Sam even offers his client conducive solitude in the House of the Long Shadows, aka Baldpate Manor, a Welsh estate in which no one has resided for 40 years.

Magee arrives, predictably, on a dark and stormy night. But for an abode so empty, there sure are a lot of creepy old people lurking about its unlit hallways and stairwells. None should be there; all reek of sinister motives. With so much distraction and danger, the bad news is that Magee looks to lose that bet; the good news is he won’t notice the financial impact, because he’ll be dead.

More prestigious than the average Cannon Films release of the early 1980s, this House finds inspiration in the oft-adapted Broadway classic Seven Keys to Baldpate. It also represents the one and only big-screen meeting of fright-film titans Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and John Carradine — sort of like an Avengers for the Famous Monsters of Filmland generation. That alone makes Long Shadows worth a look, but don’t expect much to come of your stay.

The final bow for UK cult director Pete Walker (House of Whipcord), the PG-rated production means well in its old-fashioned adherence to the creaky Old Dark House subgenre and all the Gothic trappings that accompany it. Good intentions do not automatically translate into a good movie, and such is the case here, with a mystery that doesn’t try hard enough to pique audience interest and elements of horror defanged enough for telling ’round a Webelos campfire. It’s as if Walker, never one to shy away from sex or violence, was so out of his element with being inoffensive that he overdid the undercooking. Overall shoddy construction is to blame for the “twist” ending being obvious by the film’s second scene. —Rod Lott

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In West Hollywood, streetwalkers hit the asphalt as victims of a serial killer — one who may be copycatting the crimes of Jack the Ripper, if the theory of L.A. police detective Manning (Alfred Molina, Spider-Man 2) proves correct. Well, of course it does, and it doesn’t take the removal of one hooker’s reproductive organs to see that!

Meanwhile, across town, the mysterious Malcolm (Simon Baker, Land of the Dead) rents the backyard guest house of a clinically depressed and sexually frustrated housewife named Ellen (Hope Davis, Real Steel) and her loutish schlub of a hubby (Donal Logue, Shark Night 3D) for $1,000 a month — brekky included! Claiming to be a writer, Malcolm is comically suspect from the start, insisting he “must not be disturbed,” that he have not only “total privacy,” but possess “the only key.” Ellen’s reaction to this: Get all gussied up and pray for a pity hump.

If any of The Lodger’s premise sounds familiar, it should; this multiplex-skipping version by David Ondaatje (who wrote and produced in addition to directing) is the fifth of too many movies made from Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel, most famously in a 1927 production by Alfred Hitchcock, making his suspense-genre debut. Why Ondaatje even tried is a larger mystery than the one on which the venerable story is built; he brings nothing new to the material but cheap, flashy camera tricks and multiple scenes of internet searches, all of which serve to highlight his film’s immense deficiencies. It’s not that The Lodger is a hoary chestnut, but that Ondaatje has bitten off more than he can chew, even for an expectations-lowered DVD premiere. His first feature (which he has yet to follow up) is overwrought, overcooked and overgrazed with Mozart sauce in an attempt to at least sound dramatic.

Ondaatje’s adaptation holds more poor performances than his name does vowels. As Manning’s partner, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s Shane West is the worst offender, all squints and/or scowls, but that’s modus operandi; ditto Baker’s uncanny ability to be a near-cipher of a screen presence. For being terrific actors, Davis and Molina astonish — and not in the good way — in how astray they seem to be have led. At least Davis gets to go through many of her scenes saying little to nothing; foisted in Molina’s mouth are foolish speeches such as, “Jack the Ripper was the personification of evil … his fucking shadow lurking in the darkest corner of the human mind.”

Had those two amped up the camp elements — and I suspect they wanted to — we’d have a Lodger worth the stay. Oh, it still would be awful, but awful and watchable. As is, the only reward is skipping to the penultimate scene, just to hear RED’s Rebecca Pidgeon enunciate “autoerotic.” —Rod Lott

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