The 1957 chiller Back from the Dead didn't get too many good reviews when it came out. Fast forward 67 years and look at the B-movie bloggers and unpaid review sites and...people still don't seem to like it much. This is frustrating, because the movie actually does achieve something. But it's perhaps understandable that its virtues would be missed.
The basic plot is as follows: A married pregnant woman is spending time by the seaside with her husband and older sister. While her husband plays a record of avant-garde electronic music for her she suffers both an epileptic seizure and a miscarriage. When she comes to she is no longer herself, but the reembodied spirit of her husband's first wife. He'd never told the second wife about his first marriage, and there are likely Freudian concepts about repression at play in the script. The first wife was involved in a crypto-Satanic cult that practiced human sacrifice. She gets in touch with the cult leader, as well as her parents. Mom is totally on board with the whole evil thing. The husband, sister, and an architect friend have to try and frustrate her plans and, if possible, bring back the innocent second wife.
Most of the cast was not particularly familiar to me. The possessed wife is played by Peggie Castle, who was something of a sex symbol and looks like one. Marsha Hunt, who plays the older sister, would appear on The Outer Limits a few years later as a woman unfortunate enough to have a queen bee in human form put the moves on her husband. Here she initially seems like a stereotypical fifties fifth wheel, passive and helpless. But she shows surprising amounts of toughness and savvy as the film goes on.
That's the thing. It defies expectations. Back from the Dead has the makings of a bad movie, and a dull bad movie where nothing happens at that. But things do happen, and they happen in slightly offbeat ways that reward attention if you pay it. Also in rather striking California Modern settings. But it might be too subtle for B movie fans. There's very little cheese here, and more of it might have drawn more attention.
ENDNOTE: If there is anything cheesy it's Otto Reichow's performance as cult leader Maitre Renault. Despite the name he doesn't sound like he's trying to be French. He does sound like he's doing a bad Schwarzenegger in all of his scenes. This would be uncanny since Ahnold was still a child, but stranger things...might have happened.
2 comments:
We saw some bits from this one followed by the last five minutes or so when Maitre Renault got his just desserts served up by his spurned servant/procurer. Then Mandy came back. Maybe it wasn't fair to skip around in the movie but you know we have our limits. It didn't look like a really bad film - a very early return from the dead plot that kept you wondering (but not really) if they'd be successful in rescuing the new wife.
Otto Reichow doing an imitation of Bela Lugosi was entertaining in its own weird way and Marsha Hunt held up pretty well considering how little she had to work with other than her determination to save her little sister. Were you aware that Peggy Castle was Miss Cheesecake of 1949? (I wonder who won that award in 2024?)
As soon as I began reading your review I remembered one of the scariest movies I've ever seen - Carnival of Souls. I'm sure you must have talked with Jer about this one but the interesting thing I saw when I looked at IMDB was that George Romero mentioned in an interview that the movie was the inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (the other scariest film I've seen).
You've seen enough to know the basics of the plot and how it plays out. It's pretty well-developed. I think it works better with an overall happy ending than it would have otherwise. That's something I take on a case-by-case basis.
The real Bela Lugosi passed away a little before this was made. I think he might have been taken aback to see a German guy doing his act but maybe he would have taken it as a compliment. Hunt turned out to be good at rolling with the punches. Peggie Castle was named Miss Cheesecake by the Southern California Restaurant Association. I want to know who was named Miss Tiramisu.
Carnival of Souls was a very memorable movie made with no budget to speak of. Night of the Living Dead had a slightly bigger budget but still speaks to George Romero's resourcefulness. It is quite scary, showing how a profound disaster might play out on the small, neighborhood scale.
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