Coventry
I'm always nearly stupefied when browsing through the career overview of director Edward L. Cahn. This man directed low-budget horror treasures at an incredibly immense pace; - sometimes up to eight or nine movies per year. No wonder he dropped dead at the age of 64! But unlike other people who directed hundreds of films, like Jess Franco or Cirio H. Santiago, the efforts of the sadly unknown and underrated Cahn were always reliable and competent B-movies. Like "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake", for instance, which is a short and straightforward (barely 70 minutes) but grimly compelling tale about tribal voodoo, shrunken head routines, floating skulls and ancestral curses! When, after his grandfather and father, also his brother unexpectedly dies from a sudden heart condition at the age of sixty, Jonathan Drake is convinced that the curse placed upon his great-great-grandfather by a witchdoctor in the Amazon jungle is still active. The floating skulls of his ancestors keep appearing in his nightmares, and there truly is a native tribesman (with his lips sewn shut) strolling around to kill the masculine Drake family members and cut off their heads to perform a voodoo shrinking rite. There's absolutely nothing to dislike about "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake". The plot is simple but effective, with a proper explanation regarding the family curse's origin and a good mixture of believer & non-believer characters. Several of the ideas and sequences were quite gruesome and explicit for their time (like the headless corpse in the coffin or the uncanny resemblance between the victims' faces and their shrunken potato versions) and there are many more and even nastier little gimmicks coming to the surface as the story unfolds itself further. The acting performances are more than adequate for a late fifties' B-movie, with particularly Henry Daniell stealing the show as the mean & vicious Dr. Zurich. Recommended and fun, just like other Edward L. Cahn horror efforts such as "Invisible Invaders", "It: The Terror from Beyond Space" or "Invasion of the Saucer Men"
ferbs54
Back in the early 1960s, "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake" (1959) used to be aired quite often on NYC television. But somehow, I managed to miss all those many showings, although my young mind couldn't help feeling that the film boasted one of the coolest-sounding titles that I'd ever heard. And then, as happened with so many other cheaply made "B" films of the time, it seemed to disappear, and remained virtually impossible to see for many years to come. Flash forward 50 years, and "Four Skulls" is now a breeze to catch at any time on home video, thanks to MGM's Midnite Movies DVD series. Cohabiting a disc with the 1957 Boris Karloff picture "Voodoo Island," it reveals itself to be a genuinely grisly and highly satisfying entertainment. Although the Karloff film boasts beautiful Hawaiian scenery (in B&W) and several well-known stars, it is not the least bit scary or suspenseful, and its conclusion is dull and somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, although "Four Skulls" was completely shot (again, in B&W) in the studio and features only one (character) actor who may be familiar to viewers, it is very often frightening AND suspenseful, and its final 10 minutes are quite exciting and satisfying. To be succinct, it is the superior picture, as compared to its DVD neighbor, and one that I am very happy to have finally caught up with.In the film, Eduard Franz (who some viewers may recall from his role in 1951's "The Thing From Another World") stars as the eponymous Drake, an aging, gentle-mannered professor of the occult. Drake lives in perpetual fear of his family's curse, under which all the males die at age 60 of heart failure, and their corpses are later decapitated by some mysterious agency. When his brother Kenneth passes away in precise fulfillment of the curse, Jonathan and his pretty young daughter, Alison (played by Valerie French), travel to the family estate to investigate. They are aided by a local police officer, Lt. Rowan (Grant Richards), and--since a shrunken head, a so-called "tsantsas," has been found hanging in Kenneth's window--by a nearby expert on the Amazon and Indian customs, Dr. Emil Zurich (the always hissable Henry Daniell). As is soon revealed, the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, along with their "chingui" (witch doctor), have a long-standing, 200-year-old grudge against the Drake clan, and now Jonathan has been targeted as its last surviving male member....Clocking in at a mere 70 minutes, "Four Skulls" is certainly a compact affair, with little flab and nothing unnecessary to get in the way of the fun. Whereas the Karloff film is burdened down under the weight of a seemingly inevitable romantic subplot, the 1959 picture is not; the potential for such shenanigans between Alison and the lieutenant is, admirably and fortunately, never realized. The film is straightforward and absolutely serious, and indeed, I don't believe a single character so much as smiles once in it. The film looks just fine for a studio-bound "B," and director Edward L. Cahn and DOP Maury Gertsman manage to create an unsettling atmosphere with their limited budget. Among their film's numerous horrifying bits are a quartet of floating skulls, what amounts to a how-to lesson on the shrinking of human heads (we do get to see the process, and are later told that it involves "hot sand, smoke and heated pebbles"), that headless corpse, poisoning by curare, and a pair of sandals made of human skin. But perhaps the film's most lingering horrific image is the face of the character named Zutai (played by Paul Wexler), a Jivaro Indian whose mouth has been sewn tightly shut, the sutures dangling down to his chin. And as for the Daniell character, viewers who have seen this great character actor in such films as "The Great Dictator," " The Sea Hawk," "The Body Snatcher" and various Sherlock Holmes outings know what a marvelously malevolent presence he can be. The great English actor, 65 years old at this point and four years before his passing on Halloween Day '63, certainly does add a touch of nasty class to the proceedings here. How much more threatening he is than the voodoo chieftain in the 1957 Karloff film! The bottom line is that "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake" is a marvelous little chiller, and great fun for all ages. Trust me, after watching the film, you will NOT want to emulate Zutai, and keep your mouth shut about it!
MartinHafer
The film begins with a man being killed by a goofy looking South American Indian. And, after his death, the man's head disappears from the coffin! Well, it turns out that this sort of death and beheading is the norm for this family and when folks turn 60, they have this as their fate. How and why is this family cursed and who is behind all this? Okay...first you need to admit that this movie is NOT Shakespeare or a film you'll see in the Criterion Collection! No, it's a slightly cheesy horror film that is entertaining...and a tad silly. Now this is NOT a criticism--just a fact that the film is entertaining on a basic level. Sure, if you think about it, zombies and head shrinking are a bit silly--but this film manages to make it work. The writing, for what it is, is pretty good and the villain is quite nice. Overall, a good time to be had...provided you know what you are in for and aren't expecting more.By the way, as you watch the knife fights late in the film, watch the blade--it's obviously rubber and you can actually see it wiggling!
MARIO GAUCI
I was expecting to give THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959) a *** rating but I had to reduce it by 1/2 a notch because the performances of the two younger leads were pretty lifeless in my opinion: the girl did nothing but lounge around in furs all through the picture, even as her father was having his spells and assassination attempts and the detective was rather ineffectual, particularly in his first meeting with the assassin. But then, in the climax, after he is shown in one shot to be way behind Henry Daniell, in the next one he's on the roof of a cabin ready to jump on Daniell! That was rather silly, in my opinion, which is a pity because, on the whole, I found it to be quite good and enjoyable; the head-shrinking scenes were particularly effective.
