Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

We watched the Svengoolie show movie “Curse of the Demon” last night and I must say at the outset that I was very intrigued by the opening scene in which Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) and his lovely wife Mrs. Karswell (Athene Seyler) are playing a game of 6-card cribbage on a 61-hole board! The Svengoolie version (American 1958) cut most of the very short scene but in the longer Internet Archive version (1957 colorized), I could hear Mrs. Carswell scoring her hand, saying “Fifteen 2 and 3 make 5.” The turn-up card is visible on top of the deck but I can’t tell what it is. The pegs are difficult to see, but she then pegs her 5 points. She’s the dealer because the crib is next to her (which she has not yet scored) and it looks like Dr. Karswell (who is pone or non-dealer) has already scored. The scene ends when Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) arrives at the front door and, in a panic, knocks on the door.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie; it just interested us because we play cribbage.

Anyway, the movie was directed by Jacques Tourneur and starred Dana Andrews as John Holden the skeptical psychologist who’s out to debunk the diabolical, demon-worshiping, wildly satanic ravings of the cribbage-addicted Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Liam Redmond (Mark O’Brien) is the not-so-skeptical scientist, but we remembered him from the hilarious film “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” in which he played a creepy yet ultimately heroic janitor who could play the heck out of a spooky organ.

Something really bad happens to Professor Harrington after he loses a game of cribbage with Karswell although it’s not clear if he’s killed by a lightning bolt or a demon. Harrington’s daughter, Joanna, teams up with John to figure out just what the heck kind of black arts Karswell is fooling around with but they disagree about the main point—is Bigfoot real or not?

At first, John is sarcastic and says there are no monsters hiding under the bed, but Joanna refuses to jump into it with him. The action gets more complicated when John and Mark decide to hypnotize one of the victims of satanism who has become catatonic because of a close encounter of the demonic kind. Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde) became catatonic after some kind of spooky or totally natural and scientifically explainable encounter. This is where psychiatry might meet psychobabble. Mark mixes up some sodium pentothal and “methylamphetamine” (he pronounces it “methileamphetamine” and I couldn’t find either in the dictionary and they probably don’t mean methamphetamine) and injects this into Hobart which enables him to speak with Mark and John. The barbiturate part was a thing back in the day before other medications and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) became the intervention of choice for catatonia. Sodium pentothal or sodium amobarbital are barbiturates and were once more commonly used to break spells of catatonia. They were replaced by benzodiazepines and ECT. I did find on line articles published in the 1990s that mention combining methylphenidate (sold as Ritalin for ADHD) and dextroamphetamine (also used for ADHD) with barbiturates for catatonia. I also found a 1992 paper about combining intravenous caffeine (which rings a bell) with barbiturates, which did tend to simply put patients to sleep.

Well, where were we? Oh yes, Hobart goes wild under the hypnotic treatment, which makes him look like he’s on methamphetamine, but not before revealing to John and Mark that you have to play a sort of hot potato game with the devil in order to protect yourself from the curse. It’s all a game of who’s got the parchment. Hobart got a parchment and escaped death but did not escape madness. Karswell slipped a parchment to John without his knowledge. Parchment, parchment, who’s got the parchment? Tag, you’re it; no touchbacks!

And no spoilers. I thought this movie was OK although part of the last 10 minutes or so seemed a bit comical. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.