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Next week at Tfh we're featuring a modest tribute to Bela! ... Lugosi, of course. The films include Invisible Ghost (helmed by Gun Crazy's Joseph H. Lewis), 1947's Scared To Death, and the subject of today's Saturday Matinee, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. The sole reason for the existence of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. If anything, that considerably narrows down the blame for this 74 minute pleasure-killer from 1952. It was at the height of Martin and Lewis' extraordinary success in the early fifties (each appearance was a near riot, on stage and off, a bobbysoxer's version of Beatlemania) that a motley collection of crooners and comics rushed in to steal some of the limelight. None were so brazen (or motley) than the team of Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. Mitchell was an erstwhile lounge singer with a predilection for imitating smooth...

Chicago – One of director Tim Burton’s great actor collaborators is the veteran performer Martin Landau. Landau voices Mr. Rsykruski, a science teacher who inspires young Victor Frankenstein in “Frankenweenie,” released on Blu-Ray on January 8th. This is part of Laudau’s magnificent 60 year career in film, television, stage and acting instruction.

It’s difficult to sum up Landau’s career because of it’s depth and breadth. The 84 year old actor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had an early interest in cartooning for newspapers. He worked as an illustrator for the New York Daily News for five years, before the acting bug bit him. He was in an exceptional era and place for the craft, as Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio was being formulated, and out of the 2000 applicants for 1955 only two were selected – Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. From there he began a stage career in Manhattan,...

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp make the world's worst director look charming, despite some historical fact-bending

Director: Tim Burton

Entertainment grade: A–

History grade: B+

Edward D Wood Jr made low-budget Hollywood films in the 1950s, including Jail Bait, Night of the Ghouls and Plan 9 From Outer Space. In 1980, Plan 9 was voted the worst film of all time in the Golden Turkey awards. Wood was posthumously voted worst director.

Talent

It's 1953, and aspiring film-maker Eddie Wood (Johnny Depp) is thrilled to hear that a producer is filming the story of a famous transsexual. The reason? Wood himself loves wearing women's clothes, particularly angora sweaters. He pitches himself as writing, directing and starring – "just like Orson Welles did in Citizen Kane". The result – Glen or Glenda? – fell slightly short of the critical acclaim bestowed upon Welles's movie. The New York Times said "It isn't quite a camp classic, although...

All you need to know about Duke Mitchell's Gone With The Pope is contained in the poster image to the left.

The job: Kidnap the holiest man in the world.

The ransom: A dollar from every Catholic in the world.

Soon to screen as part of Danger After Dark, Gone With The Pope looks to do the whole grindhouse revival thing right. It's cheap, trashy, openly exploitative, and funny in all the right ways without any of the smugly superior, "Aren't I clever?"  winking at the audience that kills most of these projects. And you know why? Because, by all appearances, this isn't a deliberate throwback but an actual lost film, Mitchell's only other credit being 1978's The Executioner. Thank Sage Stallone for helping pull this one out of obscurity.

Duke Mitchell was an Italian Rudy Ray Moore, a popular nightclub performer, singer, actor, and self-proclaimed "Mr. Palm Springs...

The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I'd suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn't help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell's first film as writer-director was 1974's Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn't make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope.