Film
Monsters and Madmen box
This box set of two horror Sci-Fi double features (from the producers of Fiend Without a Face) allows genre fans to wax nostalgic not only for bygone matinee and drive-in fare, but also for the days when afternoon and late night television airtime was ruled by old B-movies. Don’t let the exquisitely illustrated packaging fool you, these are not animated features, they’re good old-fashioned exploitation pictures. The replications of the lurid press art in the info-packed booklets display graphics that scream: “SEE! BODY SNATCHERS! CRUEL BEAUTIES! BLOODCURDLING EXPERIMENTS!” And the two horror features, Corridors of Blood and The Haunted Strangler, both starring the magnetic Boris Karloff, totally revel in sordid elements. For all their comic book exposition, they both set a chilling tone and compelling pace through inspired mise en scene and interesting story ideas.

Corridors of Blood (1959) generates its horror not from the supernatural, but instead from medical history – exploitation movie medical history that is. Set in 1840’s London, Corridors tells the tale of Bolton (Karloff), a benevolent surgeon who tries to prove, much to the chagrin of his skeptical colleagues, ‘pain and the knife’ do not have to be inseparable. The horrors on display range from amputation without anesthesia (ARRGGH!), to murder for profit and drug addiction.
The high definition transfer reveals just how A level the cinematography on this B-picture was. Shadow and chiaroscuro are utilized to eerie effect. For all its artifice, the inspired production design convincingly recreates the period with a somber tone. In contrast with the doctor’s affluent surroundings, the scenes in the Seven Dials slum (based on a real London neighborhood) exude sleaze, filth and desperation. The core of the film’s aboutness – however drenched in gore and sleaze—is the dichotomy between rich and poor.
Made one year earlier by the same team, The Haunted Strangler (1958) is almost as good as Corridors and every bit as sordid. Karloff plays a seemingly benign writer trying to prove the innocence of a man hanged for strangling several young women. There are dancehall girls, grave robbing, women slain in cold blood, and a bit of Jeckyl and Hyde -inspired action. Haunted, like Corridors, has its share of social commentary and allusions to revolutionary societal changes (the protagonists of each respective film speaks about surgery without pain and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as novel concepts).
The two sci-fi pictures, The Atomic Submarine and First Man into Space, prove the campier films in the set, but still offer that vintage 50’s pulp fun. These two offer good old American machismo up against an unidentified floating object and hubris in space, respectively. Metaphoric possibilities are squandered, left and right. The arrogance with which the submariners face their adversary reflects their era, as does their own infighting with the one member of the crew who dares advocate peace.
The delightfully phony special effects reside a few notches above Ed Wood. The submarine is a nice model in a tank, and the sparse sets kinda resemble the inside of a marine vessel. These four films remind us how imagination was once much more conducive to escapist fantasy than slick CGI. A little imagination is convincing enough for these primitive modern myths with the gleeful tone of a boy’s adventure book.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Kyoung eun Kang: TRACES: 28 Days in Elizabeth Murray's Studio
By Robert R. ShaneAPRIL 2021 | ArtSeen
Each morning for 28 days, performance artist Kyoung eun Kang inhabited the late Elizabeth Murrays upstate New York studio. These sessions, recorded with a stationary camera, have been edited into a two-hour single-channel wall-sized video projection that makes Murrays studio seem like a continuation of the physical space of A.I.R.s darkened Gallery II.

François Halard’s 56 Days In Arles
By Sarah MorozMARCH 2021 | Art Books
This book is a tally of time in lockdown: a beautiful wordless diary in Polaroid glimpses by French photographer François Halard. The images feature corners of his abode, grand rooms, decorated with a bucolic-bourgeois sensibility and strewn with collections and curios, providing a kind of slanted self-portrait.

Simone Fattal: Works and Days
By Valentina Di LisciaJUL-AUG 2019 | ArtSeen
The sculptures in Simone Fattals exhibition Works and Days at MoMA PS1 appear freshly dusted off from an archaeological dig, artifacts or parts thereof wrested from history. The retrospective, curated by Ruba Katrib, is the artists first in the United States and presents more than 200 works including paintings, works on paper, and sculptures from the last five decades of Fattals production.
Days of the Week
By Sarah Anne WallenMARCH 2021 | Poetry
Sarah Anne Wallen lives in Brooklyn and is the poet behind the collection Dont Drink Poison (United Artists Books, 2015).