Horror Island (1941)

This movie is comfort food to me, and I'm so attached to it I probably can't see it objectively. It appears to be the consensus that it represents the low point in Universal horror of the '40's, but it's my hands down favourite. I first saw it as a child, when my father set the VCR to catch it on the late, late show, and I watched that tape repeatedly, until it either wore out or somehow got recorded over. It was many years before I was able see it again, and I purchased two gray market prints on DVD-R from sellers on Ebay before Universal finally saw fit to include it in their Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive, which as far as I'm concerned is worth the price of admission on this count alone. However, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if your mileage were to vary.

Horror Island is your basic old dark house movie, except this time it's an old dark castle on an island. Dick Foran (invariably summed up as affable by anyone who writes about him) is dodging creditors and hiding out on his sure-to-be-repossessed boat with his sidekick Fuzzy Knight, trying to cure their financial woes with yet another in a long line of failed get-rich-quick start-ups. Fuzzy suggests that maybe it's time they started thinking about getting real real jobs.

"Do you want to break a perfect record?" Foran replies. "Why, two thirds of my graduating class at Harvard have been out of work since graduation!"

"Can I get a job?" asks Knight. "I never went to university."

Happily, peg-legged sailor Leo Carillo shows up with a map to pirate treasure supposedly buried on an island Foran recently inherited. Foran doesn't consider himself chump enough to take the treasure seriously, but it occurs to him that the three of them might offer guided tour packages wherein they will take suckers to the island on his boat, put them up in his 'haunted castle' for a night of pre-arranged thrills (including plastic skulls in the bed and sinister laughing piped over a loud speaker), and let them occupy themselves the next day in searching for pirate gold. A fender bender with the lovely but mildly acerbic Peggy Moran and a lack of auto insurance compel him to offer her a free trip to the island and double or nothing on the cost of the repairs if she doesn't have the most thrilling time of her life. An appealing cast of character actors sign up for the cruise and they make it out of harbour just ahead of a process server (they think), but one of the guests is likely to be the cloaked 'Phantom' who's been lurking around the docks...

Dick Foran and Peggy Moran make a wonderful B-movie pairing. The previous year the two of them had made companion piece The Mummy's Hand for Universal, and apart from the presence of the mummy himself it's essentially the same winning formula: feckless but affable operator hero, pretty but cynical heroine, light banter, even lighter peril, utterly charming. I wish they had preserved this teaming for a whole series of identical programmers, perhaps direct sequels to Horror Island, and called them the  'Haunted Harbor' films, to steal back a great title from a serial that didn't deserve it. Sort of a horror analogue to Roy Roger and Dale Evans, or a low rent William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Is Horror Island scary? Not even a little. What it is is cosy, comfortable -- comforting, in fact -- and just, well, nice, which may not sound like a recommendation for a horror film, but you know what? It is. I picture comic book auteur Richard Sala watching Horror Island at about the age I was when first saw it and finding the nucleus of his entire career there. If you don't know Sala, you should: I'd been aware of his unmistakable style since his animated Invisible Hands shorts ran on MTV's Liquid Television in the 80's. Unfortunately, though as a long time comic collector I was used to seeing his work around, it took me a further few decades to realise that I was missing out on one of the great pleasures in life by not seeking out everything he'd ever done. Imagine a fetishistic, straight-faced ironic, hermetically sealed dreamworld of narrow, twisting alleyways and leaning buildings, populated exclusively by monsters, mad scientists, man-apes, lurking shadowy figures, secret agents, black gloved killers, turbaned psychic mediums, beautiful body-stockinged cat burglars, gingerbread house witches, wolves, wolf-men, trap doors, secret passages, murder victims, boy reporters and, most importantly, girl detectives, all drawn in a marvelous kind of cartoon Kafka Central European woodcut style, with bodies facing forward but heads in profile as in ancient Egyptian art.
This extreme stylisation of his earlier work (as seen on the cover of Hypnotic Tales, above) has relaxed recently (as in the absolutely wonderful Peculia, on the left), presumably because simplifying his approach allows him to create at a greater rate and spend more time in his wonderful world, exactly the way the move away from the aforementioned Egyptian style pictograms expedited the process of writing! It's all so obviously the product of quirky obsession that it almost amounts to a species of personal pornography (although there's no actual sex beyond the occasional bared breast), and as such takes some getting used to. It took me far too long to embrace it, but once you do it becomes as indispensably delightful as that of Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson or Henry Darger.

In conclusion, I love Horror Island. Love it.  It's the absolute nicest of safe horror films, which sounds useless, I know, but it has its place. When I'm near the end and in need of some warm nostalgia to distract me from my fate, put a TV at the end of my death bed and let the warm, knowing, yet innocent sexiness of Peggy Moran, and the benign pantomime spookiness of Horror Island usher me into oblivion.