31 Days of Cheese: Day 26 - Monster A-Go-Go

And we spend yet more time in grade-Z Movie hell. Oh god. Why? Why poverty? Why do innocents suffer? Why is man born to trouble? And really, why Monster A-go-go?

This is a confused, inept, cheap mess of a film. Really. Just awful. So bad your jaw keeps dropping and you end up with a strained jaw muscle from its dropping so much.

You know sometimes these kinds of films can have interesting or just odd back stories. For example the behind the scenes story of Troll 2 and The Creeping Terror are a heck of a lot more compelling than the actual film turned out to be.

Not so much here.

In 1961 Bill Rebane started making a film about how an astronaut comes back to earth and becomes a ten foot tall radioactive giant who walks about killing people. He ran out of money. Twice and was unable to actually finish making the picture.

Then in 1964 Herschell Gordon Lewis, aka the Wizard of Gore (story for another time) needed a film to be the second feature for his film Moonshine Mountain (if he gave the theaters a twofer package he’d get more money, well duh). He knew Bill had this footage hanging about so he paid bill, took the footage, added maybe a couple three scenes and a narrator and slapped a film together. The resulting horror was Monster A-Go-Go.

In the DVD commentary, yes there is a DVD with commentary and I have listened to it and have been punished for my sin as a result. Anyway in the DVD commentary Bill Rebane, well, the only real way to put it is that he complains about what Lewis did with the film. He constantly mentions unused footage and the like.

Still, it’s not like Lewis cut up a master piece here. Citizen Kane this ain’t.

Lewis didn’t over expose the film, Lewis didn’t put in static shot after static shot were people talk at each other and then kind of stop. Lewis didn’t keep filming after running out of money the first time and losing all the actors so that about ½ through the film we meet all new people.

None of that was Lewis.

What Lewis did was add the narration and not bother to fix any of the bad sound. You can barely hear the actors at times. Also he didn’t bother to add music to one scene where one actor says to another “remember that song?” it makes it very weird.

And then there is the infamous scene were the camera focuses in on a telephone and someone off camera (I’m guessing the actor himself) makes a bruppptttt noise and then the phone is answered. I can only guess that Bill intended to put an ring in there in post production but well Lewis didn’t because that would have cost money.

And what Lewis did, was, since the ending had not been shot, changed the ending to “and suddenly it all a dream.” Or such like. At any rate at the end the monster disappears like he had never existed. Then they roll credits and people I assume, would throw things at the screen.

Just a miserable soul sucking experience and some 70 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I’ve seen it 4 times now (for reasons I dare not tell) and so that’s 280 minutes I’m never getting back. That hurts to think about.

Enjoy with Martinis with Anchovy Olives. No I don’t have the foggiest idea what they are. It’s in the film.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 25 - Eegah!

Our slog though Z-movie hell continues….with the 1962 film Eegah.

Eegah. Oh God. Why. Why Eegah? Why did they make this? What the hell were they thinking?

Anyway the story is that somewhere near Palm Springs California a 7 foot, two inch tall cave man is living. A young girl, Roxy, almost runs into him one night, then her father pursues him into his desert home followed by Roxy and her boyfriend Tom. After some misadventures, the trio find and then escape from Eegah who then follows them back into Palm Springs, where after disrupting a buffet dinner, he finds Roxy and Tom and is shot dead.

The horror is in the details of course. Eegah is played by Richard Kiel in an early role. He’s very very skinny and has for about 2/3rds of the film wears a very very fake looking beard. He walks about muttering gibberish and with the word “Eegah” popping in from time to time.

The whole thing was masterminded by Arch Hall Sr. who apparently cast his secretary as his daughter Roxy and his son Arch Hall Jr. as Tom.

Tom, Arch Hall Jr., is well, let’s be blunt, is not easy on the eyes. Plop a lot of over greased blonde hair on the stop of a cabbage patch kid and subject it to radiation and you’ll get some idea of what Tom looks like. That he sings just makes it worse. He sings one song out in the desert playing on an acoustic guitar while we hear violins and a chorus of female voices. It’s funny and makes you want to hurt yourself at the same time.

Not that Arch Sr. is much better – he’s been dipped in skin bronzer and sports the kind of thin child molester mustache that people on the neighborhood watch list wear. To top it off there is a weird icky undercurrent between Roxy and Arch Sr. that makes their scenes hard to watch (not that the rest of the film is easy to watch we’re talking relative terms here).

The ickiness all comes together in the scene were Eegah gets shaved.

What happens, plot things that are too tedious to recount land Roxy and Arch Sr. in Eegah’s cave. There, Roxy, in an effort to distract Eegah from jumping her bones, shaves her dad (why he brought a shaving kit into the desert in the first place is not explained ). Eegah then indicates that he wants to a trim as well. As Roxy shaves him we then see so much more of Richard Kiel’s tongue than anybody could be comfortable with. And really what kind of director’s vision is it that insists on having two shaving scenes in one film? Never mind I don’t want to know.

Rife with bad songs, bad acting and muttered gibberish this is a long painful slog in the desert.

Enjoy with a buffet.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 24 - Mesa of Lost Women

Oh my. I really didn’t want to watch this one again. I saw it three years ago and it still haunts me.

The experience of watching this film is like being struck about the head and shoulders with sticks while being forced to watch random images while a chorus of lunatics chant poetry that has been translated from Welsh to Chinese and then back to Welsh again by babble fish, meantime a tape recording consisting of random sound effects, out of tune trumpet solos and bits of opera being played backwards supplies the sound track.

Yes this 1953 film is so bad that for a while rumors were that Ed Wood either wrote or had a hand in directing it. Turns out he didn’t but Lyle Talbot supplies the narration and Ed’ girlfriend at the time Delores Fuller was in the film so the speculation is not without some logic. Also George Barrow, who played the Ro-man in Robot Monster is in this film. Really all this film needs is Bela and the world would be sure Ed did it.

The film starts with a rambling narration that goes on and on and on while folks wander the desert. They are rescued from the desert by a passing jeep from an oil company. And as they recover they begin to tell the story. But the narrator won’t let them. He focuses in on this guy named Pepe with a sombrero who, in a fairly unique cinematic technique, has someone else’s flashback a Doctor Masterson to be exact. This doctor arrives at the Mesa to meet the scientist living there.

There we meet the sinister Dr. Arana (Spanish for spider I am told) played by Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester in the 1960’s Addams Family TV series) He had been one of the biggest child stars in the silent era (staring in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid among other things but his parents had spent all the money by the time he reached adulthood so he ended up, before the Addams Family, playing roles like this.

Dr. Arana is busy popping the pituitary gland in and out of people and putting in and out of Tarantulas. Why? Science that’s why. We briefly meet Tarantella a spider woman hybrid in a halter dress and a big fake spider with a bandage. We are told that the women will live for hundreds of years and the men are, like spider males puny and insignificant. In other words dwarfs. Of which this film is full of. In fact, this film seems to follow the rule, when in doubt, cut to a close up of a dwarf.

Arana has a big mole and an eye that is either missing or sort of damaged. Depends on the shot.

Anyway what Masterson sees drives him mad. Much like I felt watching this film.

We flash forward and then pick up the story of the folks we saw at the beginning of the films. Dr. Masterson breaks out of the asylum and after we watch a long dance from Tarantella after which they end up back at the mesa then several folks are killed by spiders and the women and the dwarves shadow the other survivors and then after the Doctor regains his sanity and he causes the lab to blow up. Much like we would want to do to this film.

Aside from the bad acting, the fake giant spider, the random close ups of dwarves and the fake cave were spider/woman hybrids labor over microscopes (?) what really makes this film special is the sound track. Most of the music for this film consists of someone playing some flamenco style guitar strums over and over and over again while an orangutan on cough syrup bangs on a piano while wearing mittens. This is repeated over and over and over and over again until you beg for mercy but realize the film isn’t over yet. Then you give up hope. It’s easier to watch then. Yes you die inside, but it limits the damage somehow.

Never Watch this film. Not even Mystery Science Theater 3000 would touch this one.

Enjoy, if you must, with massive doses of your favorite sedative.

31 days of Cheese - Day 23: The Creeping Terror

The descent into Z-movie hell continues with 1964’s The Creeping Terror. 77 minutes of tedium and badly shot awfulness. Watch this and you can feel the will to live start to drift away.

The plot of this film is fairly simple. A space ship crashes down near an isolated California town and from it emerges a monster. It starts eating people. Local law enforcement and some government types stop it but not after a lot of folks done been et. Whole rooms full of folks; the middle third of the film is the monster eating folks. Plot twists such as they are, are one there are two monsters on the loose and one in the spaceship (this one busts loose after the first one has been killed) and the second twist is that they are artificial constructs designed to analyze human beings. After they have been et one assumes.

What makes this film this film is the monster.

The Creeping Terror is hard to describe. It’s in two parts, the front part looks to me like a big chess piece (a king or a queen) covered with stuff that looks taped one. The top of the beast is covered with eyes attached by springs so they wave about as the thing moves (very slowly, hence the Creeping in the title). It has short stubby arms and its mouth is at the base between what looks like feet or just the actor’s feet in boots sticking out. (The people getting et typically crawl in then a stage hand pulls them in and they wave their legs about a bit before being completely devoured.)

Behind this front bit is a sort of Bridal looking trail made of well It’s been described as looking like it was sew together out of carpet remnants and I can’t think of a better way to describe it- under which several extras huddle and follow along as the front bit moves.

It’s even more absurd than the Ro-Man from Robot Monster.

In addition to that, the film is horrible even lacking even simple technical competence. A lot of the film is over exposed; the sound was dubbed in after. Most of the sound is narration where the actor’s words are paraphrased or we are told what we are seeing. When they do have dialogue, the poor sound synch makes it look like it dubbed from a Swedish film.

Nobody can act of course. It seems most of the people were locals who actually paid money to be in the film. They were robbed.

The guy who did it was male leads Vic Savage who also co-wrote, produced and directed (under another name) and is the one who, well not to put it to finely, bilked the towns folks. There are a lot of weird stories about this film. (I understand a documentary is being made.) One is that Vic had no real intent to finish the film, it was a con really, but when he was threatened by a law suit cobbled the film together added the narration, the annoying sound track (a organ that wouldn’t sound wrong at a roller rink is featured) and some stock footage (including a shot of an Atlas rocket taking off played backwards as the alien ship landing – not even Ed Wood would do that) and then took for parts unknown.

There is even some question as to whether this film had a real release in theaters. Some brave souls have found some evidence that it was part of a triple feature in the Cleveland area but that has not been confirmed. (It would have been played as the middle film so people not willing to leave before the main picture came on would go out and get popcorn or something. Hey theaters got to make their money too.).

Just awful in every way and shape you can imagine this is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

Enjoy, if you must, with low calorie snacks.

31 Days of Cheese Day 22: The Beast of Yucca Flats

Coleman Francis. Bad Movie maker. Made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000. First film. Beast of Yucca Flats. Awful. Bleak. Inept. Awful. Bleak. Awful. Inept. (did I say that?)

The 1961 Beast of Yucca Flats is Coleman Francis’s first film and in its 54 minutes it manages to pack in as much tedium as movies two or three times as long.

The story , such as it is, has Tor Johnson (very very large professional wrestler more famous for his work with Ed Wood and other filmmakers of the same ilk.) as a Russian scientist who has defected to the US and ends up being exposed to an atomic bomb. He then becomes the Beast who wanders about the bleak desert countryside killing people. Other people wander about the same bleak countryside. The two troopers looking for him. Two boys wander about they are part of a family on vacation (why they came here is beyond my ability to even ponder. You’d have to lose a bet to vacation here. Or you lived in hell, so this would be a step up). The father looks for them and is shot by one of the troopers while he’s riding in a light plane before he parachutes. Then the Beast chases the boys but doesn’t catch them. Then he is shot by the troopers. A rabbit comes up to the beast as he lays dying and he tries to strangle it but dies. No I don’t get it. It’s long and depressing doesn’t make any sense and pondering this film too long could cause clinical depression.

The film was shot without sound so later in the editing dialogue and narration were added. The dialogue is either spoken by someone off camera or the scene is shot so you can’t see the person’s mouth. It’s horrible inept looking and annoying but cheaper than using sound film I guess.

Coleman Francis provides the narration which wanders about aimlessly like Tor Johnson does:

“Touch a Button, things Happen.”

“Flag on the Moon, How did it get there.”

“Nothing bothers some people, not even flying saucers.”

“Twenty hours without rest and still no enemy. In the blistering desert heat, Jim and Joe plan their next attack. Find the Beast and kill him. Kill, or be killed. Man's inhumanity to man.”

“A man runs, someone shoots at him.”

And so on. It’s hard to actually convey the off kilterness of the narration. Or the sense of waiting for Godot with monsters that the film conveys without seeing it. Which I don’t recommend. Really this one hurts.

Enjoy with comfort food and Prozac.