… but I think those are words John Carradine must have muttered to himself on a regular basis. And this movie, Las Vampiras (“The Vampire Women”, 1965), probably had him saying it to himself even more than usual.

I’d planned on doing an Al Adamson movie for this Roundtable, but instead I ended up with something much worse. Las Vampiras is one of five — count ’em, five! — movies that Carradine made in Mexico in the late 1960’s. Excluding Carradine’s performance, it’s terrible. Factor in Carradine, and suddenly it becomes terrible in a whole new wonderful way. It wasn’t supposed to be a comedy, but John had other ideas…

John Carradine had a long career, and appeared in many great movies. He seldom starred in them, however. Twenty years after a few memorable turns as Count Dracula, he reprised the role. Even better, he was the film’s star. Sadly, though, it’s not a great movie. There are no winners after the title match of Billy the Kid vs Dracula.

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And yes, this should have been my first Roundtable entry, but technology intervened…

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CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN (1943)

…in which a mad scientist transforms a female gorilla into an attractive young woman, as the first step in his quest to create a race of supermen.

Though overall this exercise in extremely mad science is spoilt by too much stock footage of circus animals being “trained”, John Carradine is a delight in his first ever genre film—which, as in his second genre film, finds his schemes being thwarted chiefly because he underestimates the female sex.

Hmm…

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Albert Einstein as Cupid? That’s the premise for the romantic comedy I.Q., a thoroughly charming movie.

John Carradine lent his voice to several animated movies during his career, The Mouse And His Child being one of them. In this particular one, he’s given very little to do. Though considering the end results, he got off lucky.

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REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES (1943)

…in which a German scientist attempting to create an army of the living dead to serve the Third Reich uses his own wife as an experimental subject—and discovers that, dead or alive, she still has him whipped…

This Monogram anti-epic is an improvement over its predecessor thanks to a focus on John Carradine doing mad science rather than on the antics of Mantan Moreland—but it’s Veda Ann Borg who unexpectedly steals the show.

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KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941)

…in which agents of the US government searching for a missing admiral stumble across the operative of – *cough, cough* – an unidentified European nation, who uses a combination of voodoo and hypnotism to create zombies and exert mind control.

A horror-comedy in which “horror” takes a seat right up the back, this film is chiefly a vehicle for the, uh, idiosyncratic comedy stylings of Mantan Moreland.

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From New Zealand comes the horror comedy Last Of The Living. Unfortunately, writer/director Logan McMillan is no Peter Jackson.