Herbert L. Strock 1918 — 2005

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Low budget science fiction and horror movies made in the 1950’s were once a staple on television (I remember them mostly on New York’s local stations, WPIX, WOR and WNEW) and theaters were still booking such inexpensive rentals as the genre perennials How to Make a Monster (1958) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) for their Saturday matinees well into the ‘60s. Those two were directed by Herbert L. Strock, who, with absolutely no fanfare or notice, died last week at the age of eighty-seven.
    He wasn’t a major player in the business, and his name never carried the clout of Roger Corman or William Castle in the exploitation market. Nor was he much of a craftsman: on the whole, his films are virtually interchangeable with nearly anything else you can think of that came out of American International Pictures at the time. It would take a sharp eye (or a delusional mind) to make a case for recurring leitmotifs or aesthetic trademarks.

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    But the few pictures of Strock’s that I’ve seen posses a creepy aura, a vaguely subliminal influence. Something that he may have considered vulgar or obscene is tucked away between the lines of paper-thin scripts about mad scientists and vampires. Not that that should invite claims to an auteur’s hand — the subconscious predilection for latent homosexual adult characters controlling drifting, unfocused and ripe teenagers were key elements likely prompted by his occasional writer and producer, Herman Cohen.
    Blood of Dracula (1957) finds a temperamental young woman manipulated by the butch headmistress of an all-girl’s school; I Was a Teenage Frankenstein has b-movie regular Whit Bissell constructing vacant-minded beefcake out of dead bodies; and in How to Make a Monster a Hollywood makeup artist forced into early retirement drugs young actors to kill the higher-ups putting him to pasture.

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    Although it sailed clear over the heads of kids like myself who watched it on “Chiller Theatre” or “Creature Features” forty years ago, the hint of an erotic relationship between the women in Blood of Dracula recalls the lesbian undertones of the creaky Universal chestnut, Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which had its ties to Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu’s nineteenth-century vampire story. The homosexual undercurrent motivating Bissell’s Dr. Frankenstein has him committed to a “straight” partnership with Phyllis Coates for appearances. But he spends most of his waking hours in the basement, obsessively piecing together gym hunk Gary Conway, ostensibly a fresh replacement for the aging toady lab assistant played by Robert Burton. Is it all a zany twist on Nabokov’s Lolita?
    Meanwhile, Robert H. Harris’s character in How to Make a Monster fawns over boytoys while plotting with his aging toady sidekick, ‘Rivero.’ The suffocating environment moves its crescendo to Harris’s seedy digs, a resting place for obsolete monster costumes and masks. That Strock and Cohen stretched the budget to film the last few minutes in color — if you’re drunk enough, it can play like a weird homage to Portrait of Jennie — may have been AIP’s sign-off to a profitable decade. (In a few months they’d be preoccupied with Edgar Allan Poe and Frankie Avalon.) How to Make a Monster should be required viewing for buffs, for it’s The Bad and the Beautiful warped and on a shoestring, relocated to Poverty Row and lacking every ounce of glamour that that implies.