When is a horror movie not a horror movie?  Does the absence of most horror content make a difference?  This Regal Films ‘Regalscope’ production is handsomely filmed and shot on location, but it feels like a stack of disconnected ideas. Lovely Peggie Castle is possessed, and Arthur Franz and Marsha Hunt don’t know what to do about it. A Satanic Cult is involved, but it’s the most disorganized horror fantasy we’ve seen.

Back from the Dead
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1957 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 79 min. / Street Date May 21, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Peggie Castle, Arthur Franz, Marsha Hunt, Don Haggerty, Marianne Stewart, Otto Reichow, Helen Wallace, James Bell, Evelyn Scott, Jeanne Bates, Ned Glass.
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Visual Effects: Louis DeWitt, Jack Rabin
Film Editors: Fred W. Berger, Leslie Vidor
Original Music: Raoul Kraushaar
Written by Catherine Turney from her novel The Other One
Produced by Robert Stabler
Directed by Charles Marquis Warren

A ‘holdout’ ’50s horror film nobody could see in ‘Regalscope’ gets a fine Blu-ray edition today. Regal Films’ Back from the Dead has a lot going for it: an interesting cast, attractive scenery, a compelling title and hip poster art — we even love the title typeface. It’s from an occult mystery novel comprised of elements from  The Seventh Victim,  The Uninvited, and especially  Rebecca. Sunswept Laguna Beach provides a trendy location, standing in for Carmel. The cinematographer is Ernest Haller, a multiple Oscar winner whose post- Warners credits are wonderfully eclectic, especially for low-budget pix.

The big thing in the mid-’50s was not supernatural horror, but Sci-fi monsters. The horror drought set in when Val Lewton left RKO in ’46, and ended only with the smasheroo debut of  a certain Hammer attraction in ’57. Although the  Hardy Horror Encyclopedia missed a salient title or two, it covers the period in just 15 pages, and has to includes a goodly number of foreign films, psychological dramas and comedies.

The opening of Back from the Dead promises to reveal the workings of a Satanic Cult that performs blood sacrifices. But Production Code enforcement was especially hard on horror movies with occult themes. Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim had depicted a Manhattan devil cult as a kind of Greenwich Village coffee klatsch. A character ends one scene by reciting The Lord’s Prayer, a storyline non-sequitur that smells of a compromise with the Code Office. Back from the Dead makes an immediate pro-Church pitch, with an opening voiceover that begins includes the statement, “No matter what race or creed, we believe in God.”  We’re told that the frequent Christian messaging in ’50s movies was part of the same anti-Communist trend that caused the Pledge of Allegiance to be amended with the words ‘under God.’

Christian zealots claimed that Godless music was corrupting American youth, and in this movie a woman becomes a victim of spiritual possession while listening to a phonograph record.  Recent-marrieds Dick Anthony (Arthur Franz) and the pregnant Mandy (Peggie Castle) vacation in the seaside town he lived in with his notorious first wife, Felicia, who died several years before. Mandy hears Felicia’s voice, collapses in an epiliptic (?) swoon, has a miscarriage … and emerges insisting that she is not herself, but Felicia. And Felicia is in a bad mood.

Also along on the vacation is Mandy’s sensible sister Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt). She and Dick witness Mandy barging into the house of Felicia’s elderly parents, the Bradleys (Helen Wallace & James Bell). Knowing things only Felcia would know, Mandy convinces Mrs. Bradley that her daughter has indeed ‘returned.’  Kate questions various people, including neighbors Nancy Cordell and Molly Prentiss (Marianne Stewart & Evelyn Scott) … and the handsome bachelor John Mitchell (Don Haggerty), who was present the night Felicia died. The gossip leads to a spiritual cult run by a foreign-accented gentleman called Maitre Renall (Otto Reichow).

Mandy/Felicia rejects Dick and makes a play for Maitre Renall. A blood sacrifice is indicated — but who will be the victim?

A horror movie with no horror scenes.

Back from the Dead is as scattered as a horror thriller can be. There is no blood, little on-screen violence, and few scenes of suspense. The characters seem only mildly disconcerted when confronted by incontrovertible evidence of supernatural hoodoo-voodoo: the non-musical Mandy can suddenly play classical piano just as Felicia once did. With his bride behaving so unpredictably, hubby Dick Anthony just maintains his composure and continues mixing drinks for casual guests. Dick doesn’t even mind the sudden appearance of John Mitchell, a man possibly implicated in Felcia’s death. Three local women ‘have knowledge’ of Renall’s devil cult, but we never know what the cult does or what its aims are.

Awkward storytelling does the film in from the very start. Kate’s ethereal voiceover — set against ocean waves — mirrors that of Lewton’s  I Walked with a Zombie. We see a flashback to a pair of robed Satanists throwing a corpse from a sea cliff, an image promising content that never really returns. Kate engages in some mild Nancy Drew investigating, saying she wants to join the cult as well. Her chat with Maitre Renall suggests that he has some kind of sex club going — he expects women to surrender completely to his authority. But there’s no follow-up — Kate doesn’t return to enter Renall’s Inner Sanctum.

The pieces are there, but little connects.

The screenplay’s three female characters talk a bit about Maitre Renall, and that’s it. Instead, we see bits of a casual seaside lifestyle. Nobody is concerned about money. John Mitchell is rich enough to own a beach house and not live in it; it has a fantastic sea view (provided by the cliff garden in front of Laguna Beach’s  Las Brisas restaurant). The Bradleys have a housekeeper and Dick hires a nurse to look after Mandy. We learn next to nothing about them. The flashbacks describe Felicia as flirtatious, but we don’t learn much about her supposedly scandalous behavior. The unattached bachelor Mitchell is a complete gentleman.

Is everybody on tranquilizers?  Nobody in this seaside burg seems curious about the mysterious spiritual cult in their midst. Kate is almost murdered when a gas tap is left on in her room, but the subject is dropped. We continue watching relaxed, unstressed wide shots of people talking in handsome living room sets. In the film’s one competent sequence, Mandy’s dog is apparently killed by an assailant with a garden tool. The well-trained canine actor backs up against a wall, looking quite frightened. We can’t be sure the dog was killed — the scene cuts before the act, and nobody ever mentions the dog again, the same way nobody connects the dots with the gas leak in Kate’s room.

We’re so desperate, we want to rewrite the movie. The only way to explain the character and logic inconsistencies would be to reveal that Everyone Has Been Hypnotized. At one point Dick does say that he feels like he’s being forced to do some things, like buying the house, and tormenting Mandy with the phonograph record.  (Correction from Tom Weaver.)  Perhaps director Charles Marquis Warren should have inserted occasional cuts of Maitre Renall chanting incantations that cloud the minds of the local non-believers. Only that could motivate everyone’s failure to freak out at Mandy/Felicia’s weird behavior. The movie implies that Maitre Renall is a fraud, yet it wholly endorses the notion of spiritual possession. Mandy does become Felicia.

But nothing explains one weird scene.

The film’s most awkward non-sequitur moment occurs when Dick and Kate observe Mandy lying on her bed, half-unconscious. In alternate shots she’s herself, blonde and makeup-free; but two cuts show her with pasty white makeup, different hair, and very dark lipstick. Dick doesn’t notice this crazy switch-O change-O business with Mandy’s face. Neither does the fairly perceptive Kate see anything unusual.

What’s going on?  Did director Charles Marquis Warren and cameraman Ernest Haller intend some special effect to blend the shots together, maybe with dissolves?  Was a planned optical abandoned, and the filmmakers just decided to leave the shots in without explanation?

The continuity-challenged Mandy/Felicia jump-cuts may be explained by another Regal Films film made around the same time, Kurt Neumann’s  She Devil. Its cinematographer Karl Struss had used a special trick on the Oscar-winning 1931 version of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In B&W, the addition of a red filter erased red makeup, helping to make Jekyll turn into Hyde. Struss had used the same trick to transform actress Mari Blanchard from healthy to sick; the exact same thing is what we see with Peggie Castle in this movie.

Charles Marquis Warren’s feature work was mainly in westerns, and he created some big TV series, like Gunsmoke. For Regal Films he put together this film and the odd sci-fi horror adventure  The Unknown Terror. Is the dramatic disconnect in Back from the Dead Warren’s fault?  Character attitudes and reactions seldom seem in sync, and not just in the inexplicable ‘change-O’ scene. It’s up to Marsha Hunt and the peripheral players — housekeeper Jeanne Bates, Otto Reichow’s villain — to carry the story. In the final confrontation, the devil cult threatens not Mandy or Kate, but a neutral neighbor character we’ve barely met. She’s not even given a close-up.

→  Marsha Hunt’s focused performance is like a life preserver that keeps scene after scene afloat. Peggie Castle is a favorite but she simply needed better direction … she’s neither consistent nor very appealing as the harsh, cruel possessed heroine. Any particular charm the beefy Don Haggerty might have as a potential leading man, it’s lost on us. Arthur Franz remains one of the most ineffectual male leads we’ve seen. The way his husband takes Mandy for granted gives Franz the ‘insensitive dolt husband’ award previously held by  Kent Smith.

The final thematic note in Back from the Dead is that Mandy’s loved ones decide that she doesn’t need to know that she was ever possessed. That motif repeats in two more Lippert pictures. The male doctors in Regal Films’ She Devil treat Mari Blanchard as a dangerous science experiment, that they can euthanize when things go wrong. In  The Alligator People hypnosis subject Beverly Garland is patronized by two male doctors, who ‘for her own good’ also decide that she doesn’t need to know the truth.

What was Regalscope?

A sidebar topic: the company Regal Films was where Robert L. Lippert covertly produced +/- fifty films between 1956 and 1959. Lippert had famously backed Samuel Fuller’s first films, including the big 1950 hit  The Steel Helmet. As a co-producer with English companies, notably Hammer Films, he supplied American stars and a few scripts. But when Lippert sold his movies to TV and refused to pay residuals, he found himself blackballed by the Hollywood Guilds. When nobody would work with his Lippert Pictures, he made an under-the-table deal with 20th-Fox. His Regal Films produced B&W ‘scope movies to fill out Fox double bills. Lippert himself stayed in the background; either the director or the production manager took producing credit. ‘Regalscope’ received a screen credit, even though Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lenses were used. Lippert’s last film made in association with Hammer was  The Abominable Snowman (of the Himalayas). In England it was advertised as being filmed in ‘Hammerscope,’ and in the U.S., Regalscope.

Fox liked L. Lippert’s proposed project The Fly so much that it became an ‘A’ picture under the Fox banner, in color and stereophonic sound. Lippert finally moved to England, where he was able to continue producing using his own name.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Back from the Dead is exactly what horror fans have been hoping for, a picture-perfect HD encoding of the movie in all its Regalscope glory. Ernest Haller’s cinematography always looks good, yet goes for few expressive effects. The sets are large and handsome, even if a couple of views through windows show a motionless ocean. When Haller trucks in on characters, we can see the funky anamorphic optics kick in: as we get closer to Peggie Castle, her face becomes slightly wider.  Collector’s Note: this has for so long been such an unseeable title, we’re happy to have it even if it isn’t a classic. The encoding is nigh-perfect.

Raoul Kraushaar, or his contractees, provide a rather good music score. Tom Weaver is right, we do hear what sound like bits of  Invaders from Mars’s sand pit music, under the opening narration, and when Mandy walks to the door of the Bradley house. The eerie record that Dick plays on his stereo set is a repeat of the title theme. It sounds like generic mystery stuff that Les Baxter might come up with. Why it was Felicia’s favorite isn’t clear.

The editors goose the film’s pace with a good motif, using hard cuts to the ocean surf to transit to new scenes. Effective music stings help to emphasize the dramatic point being made.

Kino once again assigns dueling commentaries to a movie that might warrant one decent track. Tom Weaver claims no love for the show yet is a fountain of interesting information about it. He includes spoken excerpts from his interviews with Marsha Hunt. He explains the origin of ‘Emirau,’ Charles Marquis Warren’s production company. His analysis of the film’s faults has no malice — he simply tries to explain things in the movie that don’t add up.

Tom and his cohort Larry Blamire compare the story of Back from the Dead to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, noting the way Mandy visits the Bradley’s house, filmed similarly to Kim Novak’s visit of a rooming house. Peggie Castle’s outfit is also cut similarly to what Novak wears, as Madeline Ulster.

David Del Valle and Dana M. Reemes deliver a more conversational commentary, dishing about what works and what doesn’t. Dana Reemes points out the overall absence of meaningful art direction. The ‘Satanic idol’ over Renall’s unholy altar is a generic Japanese statue, likely available at an import shop. They clash with the Weaver track on one main issue … their descriptions and impressions of the source novel by Catherine Turney diverge. Better-informed people online are theorizing that Del Valle’s copy of The Other One is a later revision, with more salacious content added.

Catherine Turney adapted her book for the film’s screenplay. She was no amateur, having written numerous well-regarded pictures at Warners and Paramount. Is Back from the Dead such a jumble because of the script, or the direction, or what?  It’s really disorganized, for both story and character.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Back from the Dead
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Fair – Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
 New audio commentaries:
Tom Weaver, Gary D. Rhodes & Larry Blamire
David Del Valle & Dana M. Reemes
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 18, 2024
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