Time for my spa treatment!
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959) is a “curses! my ancestor sucked!” movie, as the male members of a family pay for the savagery of one of their ancestors. So, too, do the instruments of death menacing them, an Amazonian savage and a man out of time with a secret to hide – and an internal compulsion to obey.
Unfortunately, this mystery has little grounding in reality, even those ties which are important. Thus, men collapse in terror at the mere sight of the guy with curare, rather than fight-fight-fight, that bamboo knife so easily cuts off heads from bodies, and, quite frankly, the professor’s daughter can’t act her way out of a paper bag.
Which is all too bad, because there’s some elements to a really creepy movie present. Perhaps, with a little work, they could have gone somewhere with this.
For example, the Amazonian savage has been reconstituted with a body that is mostly curare. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? He is eventually destroyed by being pushed into a fire, where he explodes. Handy, dandy, not even a mess.
And no cost, either.
See, that’s a key missing part of this movie. He’s made of curare, but so what? But what if his destruction had required some sort of sacrifice, or even gambit, from the good guys? Perhaps the cop has to depend on the professor’s daughter to administer a curative potion to him after he wrestles the savage into the fire, and then maybe the other bad guy grabs her …
Move, counter-move, potential sacrifice. Not only does this increase the tension in the story, it also makes it more interesting in that we see how potential prices are part of the calculations as the demise of the enemy is calculated.
That would have been fun. But you won’t find it in this slacking movie.
