The Enemy Below

Well, except for the pie plates. While the Flying Saucers are as fake an effect as you can get (but at least you don’t see the stings like you do in A*P*E ) they are not pie plates – I don’t know what they are but they are not pie plates.

Everything else is true.

The fake grave stones and crosses that are about 1/2 a size too small.

The scene where the extra that knocks not one but two of them over in a shot. And when we cut back, they are still down.

The tall guy doubling for the late Bela Lugosi by holding a cape in front of his face. He’s easily a foot taller than Bea was.

The insane opening monologue from Criswell (the white haired guy). A Quote: “ The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?”

The Airplane ‘cockpit’ with the wooden flight controls and the shower curtain in the background.

The insane (yes I keep using that word) dialogue from the alien Eros: “You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”

We get to hear Tor Johnson actually talk like a normal person, that is a normal person with a very very heavy Norwegian accent.

The constant shifting from day to night back to day. One example: First a shot of Bela in Dracula cape in daytime, cut to woman running at night in graveyard set (we see the set a lot) cut to man in car in day time, cut to Vampira at night cut back to man in car, now giving aide to woman running in bright daylight. It can make your head hurt.

Police officers using their guns to point or push the brim of their hats up (happens twice).

Stock footage, lots and lots of stock footage.

A puzzling plot cul-de-sac about UFO’s over, I think, Washington featuring a lot of stock footage of guns and rockets going off, a weird discussion by a general and a radio man about UFO’s and the playing of a tape recording of lectures to the earth from the Eros guy.

The chief alien wearing what looks like sur-coat from a movie about Prince Valiant in the middle ages.

The round Flying Saucer with the square entrance.

Tor Johnson breathing heavily in a scene where he’s supposed to be one of the walking dead.

The flying saucer ‘controls’ sitting on top of library tables.

The uniformed policeman who whines all the time.

The clouds in the sky when we see the saucers that never move.

The aliens complaining that the earthlings refuse to admit their existence and yet killing or tying to kill anyone that sees them.

The film is dizzying display of something. I’m not sure what to call it but it’s something. For want of a better term call it the Theater of the Incoherent. During the film the basic narrative keeps waking face first into walls until it just keels over. Why are they raising the dead? What’s the point? Why do the aliens complain that the earth refuses to acknowledge their existence then try to kill anybody that sees them? You just keep asking what is going on but you never get an answer. And there is the day/night shifts and the weird dialogue and the fake sets and the stock footage use that doesn’t make sense either. All of it can’t be intentional, but it can’t all be unintentional either. To call it simply incompetence, you have to assume that Ed Wood gave a damn any of technical goofs or the incoherent moments in this film. It’s obvious he didn’t. I’m not sure it’s intentional or simply the product of a rushed schedule and no money. But it’s there. Truly Dali wished he could be this surreal.

Enjoy with any damn thing you like.

Well that’s it for the 31 days. Some of it’s been fun. But not all of it.

And tonight? I’m going to read a book.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 30 - Manos The Hands of Fate

2011-03-04T17:44:00.001-08:00

First a true story:

Some many years ago, back when cable TV showed movies late at night I caught about the last 2/3^rd’s of a film (I think it was on TBS but I can’t remember for sure). It was horrible, bad, ghastly, worse than anything I could imagine. It was such a train wreck I couldn’t look away. I just had to stay to the end (which was about 3 am if memory serves). Then I dragged myself to bed and when I woke up I discovered I had forgotten the name of the film – my brain was trying to defend itself I guess. The name was forgotten but the images stayed in my head.

The years pass. A show called Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes on the air and makes fun of bad films. I am captivated and a little scared as the first six times I see the show, I had already seen the film. I see more shows, and learn that they said worst film they ever did was something called Manos the hands of fate. I had not seen that episode but oh man I had too, like a junkie needs a fix. So when it came out on VHS, I dashed to the store, bought the tape, went home made myself a sandwich, popped the tape in, turned on the set and damn near did a spit take.

Manos, the Hands of Fate, the film MS3K said was the worst one they ever did…it was the same film that I had seen all those years ago.

And it is awful. The brain child of one Hal Warren in 1966 (he wrote, directed and starred in the film. Just so you know who’s to blame), and filmed near Houston over the course of several weekends, it is cosmically awful in all phases of moviedom reaching a near perfect black hole effect of ghastly hideous suck.

The camera was a hand held silent job that you wound up, so no shot was longer than 35 seconds (although some seem a lot longer) and the dialogue (which is bad) was dubbed in later in what sounds like someone’s echo filled basement. The music is either a weird lady lounge singer song or annoying sax solos or piano chords or almost new agey flute music none of which really fit the story.

Briefly, the story is that Mike (Hal) and his wife, child and daughter stumble onto the lair of the master, who serves Manos and wears a robe with big red hands on it (yes – Manos). He is dead but not so dead and there are women, his wives, who stand next poles while he’s dead. They wear flimsy gauzy garments and what looks like 1950’s style underwear. They fight later. For a long time they fight. I think the entire film was made to have women in their underwear wrestling. Before the internet people had to do things like that. The Master also has a dog and a servant Torgo who looks after the place.

Torgo’s a bit different. He’s got big knees and he walks funny. The idea was that he was supposed to be a satyr (man top half, goat legs and feet bottom half ) but the brace didn’t work well and caused the actor a lot of pain and they never got around to doing the money shot were we see the goat feet. The dubbed voice for Torgo is weirdly synched and matches the weird twitchiness of the actor. Sadly John Reynolds who played Torgo killed himself some time later. It had nothing to do with how bad this film was, despite rumors to that effect (the most recent body count was that three actors offed themselves over this film which seems a bit much to me. After all, really it’s just a movie).

Nobody can act for example Hal as Mike comes across as unlikeable, angry and useless – and nobody can set up a shot either. And nobody could keep the moths away from the lights when they were filming at night.

And then there is the big twist ending that made one woman at the premier slap Hal and has left a bad taste in everybody’s mouth since then. But the whole film has such a slimy sleazy undertone you want to take a shower after you’ve seen it.

This is not the bottom of the barrel. This is where stuff has seeped out of the bottom of the barrel and is soaking the ground below the barrel.

Manos by the way is Spanish for Hands so the title means: Hands, the Hands of Fate.

Enjoy with crackers and goat cheese.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 29 – APE

2011-03-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

A*P*E.

Ouch.

To put it bluntly APE (I refuse to keep typing A*P*E – well except for that last time).

To put in bluntly APE sucks. In every possible way it sucks. Acting, Story, special effects, ape suit, editing, sound, soundtrack, use of stock footage, it all sucks.

APE sucks so bad it almost pulled my brain out of my head through my eye sockets as I was watching.

This 1976 Korean/American Attempt was released in an attempt to cash in on the giant ape movie craze caused by the release of the 1976 remake of King Kong. Don’t remember a 1976 craze for Giant Ape films. Don’t worry. There wasn’t one. The Kong remake didn’t do so well and this one utterly bombed.

The story is kind of simple – folks capture a 36 foot tall ape (they keep saying that like it was important, I don’t know why) which escapes a toy freighter, wrestles a dead shark in a pool and then makes landfall in Korea. APE runs amok, then finds a blonde American actress who is in Korea to make a film – I think the title of the film is “Blonde woman gets raped” because the two times we see her making the movie she is being attacked and molested – APE garbs her and takes off with her Fay Wray style. An US Army officer chain smokes and curses a lot. The Blonde’s wooden boyfriend (as in acting not actually made of wood) rescues Blonde from APE, APE finds blonde again after trashing more of Korea (he keeps doing that in the film). He is then killed.

Roll Credits.

It is utterly impossible to convey without you actually seeing this film (and don’t) just how shoddy and cheap the effects are. The ape suit looks like it was made of wool and bought at a used costume store. You see the line for the headpiece a lot. The buildings are just generic white blocks or grey blocks. There is a scene where APE, apparently to show it’s not all bad, steps over a cow. But it’s so obviously a plastic cow that you can’t even believe the filmmakers had the nerve to keep the shot in the film.

The action sequences don’t make sense. You keep going wait, that’s not right and then something blows up. But not in a fun way.

This might have been intended to be in 3-D as boulders (on very visible wires) fly towards you, as do flaming arrows and extra’s dressed as soldiers point rifles at the camera and shoot. (By the way you have to work the bolt of a bolt action rifle each time you shoot. Just for future reference.).

The most famous scene is where the ape flips the bird to the army after destroying a helicopter. Your mind goes, ‘no they didn’t. Oh yes they did. Aren’t you sorry you quit drinking now?”

For me, seeing this a second time, what I took away from it – other than a visceral dislike of anyone involved in the making of this film – was a great appreciation for Toho’s maniacal attention to detail in their giant monster films, it’s the level of detail that helps makes the difference between an enjoying a film or wishing you had never been born while suffering through it.

Anyway at the end, as the APE is being gunned down and the Army officer is smoking and saying “let’s see him dance for his organ grinder now” (Huh? What? ) the Blonde weeps on the wooden boyfriend’s shirt (I don’t have time to go into the horror of the 70’s fashions in the film), and asks “Why”

And instead of saying “because he’s killed something like 100-300 people in less than two days and while granted he may have a soft spot for blonde women that still leaves the rest of us in trouble if he’s anywhere nearby. ” what He says is “He was too big for a small world like ours.”

And with that last what the’ hell are you talking about moment’. I leave this film.

Enjoy with Kimchee.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 28 - The Exorcist Two

2011-03-02T17:32:00.000-08:00

Oh my, what a mess. What an utter mess of a film. I mean how do you take the most successful Horror film of the era and mess it up this badly.

Well for one you have John Boorman, fresh off his epic disaster Zardoz direct.

Then add an obviously blotto Richard Burton, dress James Earl Jones up in a grasshopper suit and have a lot of scenes with blinking lights in people’s faces and behold! An utter mess from 1977 that ended up finishing second to Plan Nine From Outer Space in voting for the 1980 Golden Turkey Awards worst movie ever made (by only a few votes if memory serves).

Anyway the setting is that it’s a few years after the first film. Linda Blair, Regan has grown up a bit and is in New York. her mother – (the actor didn’t want to do the sequel) is away on location somewhere so she is being care for by Nurse Ratchet (well Louise Fletcher who needed to pay the bulls I guess) who is some kind of doctor for kids and some other woman who acts creepy and weird before she sets herself on fire at the end of the film (an idea that came to me once or twice while watching this mess).

Anyway enter Father Lamont (Richard Burton) who seems to be looking for scotch but actually is investigating Regan’s exorcism. There is some nonsense early on about feuding inside the Church but it’s very quickly dropped and we shall drop it too. Meantime Nurse Ratchet (I’m going to call her that, it’s fun) has invented or is using this machine where two people stare at blinking lights and synch their minds while hypnotized. It’s a massively stupid idea.

Really, watching lights flash on and off on the faces of Richard Burton and Linda Blair does not gripping cinema make.

And then as if the drugs have kicked in the film wanders over this rather pointless story about Kokumo who has power to calm locusts or something that the demon Pazuzu doesn’t like so it possesses him as it would Linda later on.

We then see the Father from the first film as young man climb up some cliff to church in Africa (several folks fall to their death as they climb the cliffs. Would it have killed them to set up a rope ladder? ) and he rids Kokumo of the demon.

Lamont convinced that the demon is still inside Linda somewhere goes to Africa where he meets James Earl Jones dressed as a locust. He then turns into a scientist who is an expert on locusts (and can I say that insects, even lots of them do not gripping cinema make either?). And the viewer’s brain turns to mush.

There is a final confrontation back in Georgetown where Linda is split into the good Linda and the bad Linda the bad Linda is supposed to kind of a hottie. It’s not well right, there really is an icky quality to it and there is an uncomfortable moment were Lamont starts snogging with the bad Linda. But then the room is full of bugs and explosions and Lamont rips the heart out of the bad Linda and the good Linda calms the bugs and I die inside a bit.

Then Nurse Ratchet realizes that only Father Lamont can protect Linda and as they walk away the house bursts into flames.

I’ve read that at the premier of the film people were throwing things at the screen as the film ended. I’m not surprised. I was throwing things at my own TV.

Enjoy with a cheese sandwich and a lot of scotch. I understand you can get grasshoppers as a food but really.

31 Days of Cheese: Day 27 - Battlefield Earth

2011-03-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

Well we finally emerge from the deep cavern that is Grade Z Movie hell blinking the sunlight and... Oh no. Not this. Anything but this.

Battlefield Earth.

Well at least this film had a budget. In fact I think the budget for John Tavolta’s coffee was larger than the total spent on the last 4 films.

Still. Oh my.

Let me confess. I have, up to now, watched or re-watched each and every film I’ve written about just before I wrote about it. That is, up until now. I watched this junk about a month and half ago for reasons that I won’t get into and I utterly refuse to be someone who has seen this film four times. (The other times were once after my brother bought me the VHS for my birthday, the second time was with my brother who did want to see just how bad it was and the last time was as I stated. Never again.).

It’s appallingly bad. You could go mad simply pointing out the damn plot holes. For example it’s a 1,000 years after the Psychos (whatever) have conquered the earth. The good guys (us) end up defeating them using 1,000 year old Hawker Harriers after learning to fly them using a 1,000 year old flight simulator (which like everything else works perfectly).

Then there is the matter of the alien’s home planet having an atmosphere that would blow up if exposed to “radiation”. This means that the planet’s atmosphere would have blown up about 3-8 minutes after their sun’s first solar flare.

Enough.

Never mind that the aliens all look like Alien Rasta’s on stilts (and they walk that way too.) the poor actors had to walk about on elevator shoes or something to give them their 7 ½ average height. Which leads to them walking very very carefully. Late in the film one of the human rebels tells another (over the perfectly functioning 1,000 year old walkie talkie by the way) that “three Guards are moving fast towards your position” (these may not be the exact words but like I said, I’m not watching this again.) The Guards are not moving fast. They are walking slowly as if they were wading through deep mud or didn’t want to fall off their shoes.

And there is the acting.

The less said about Tavolta’s over acting the better. Cause it’s grating and awful and just bad. The rest of the cast doesn’t do much better (Forest how could you?). And I did notice that the female lead (who doesn’t have much to do other than being in danger was able, like the female lead in Waterword, able to locate leg waxing and hairdressing services in the wasteland (but that’s a feature these kind of films).

When this film was being made there was some worry that this would be some sort of subliminal propaganda piece for L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology (Battlefield Earth was written by him – indeed the film covers only the first half of the book.) but judging from this film and the way Tom Cruise has been acting of late, I suspect that a provision of scientology is that you have to wreck your career at some point.

Enjoy with tongue. (It’s in the film. No, I won’t tell you about it.).

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

2011-02-28T16:05:00.001-08:00

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!

2011-02-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-25T15:04:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

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.

31 Days of Cheese - Day 21: Glen or Glenda

2011-02-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

Ed Wood.

Hoo boy, you knew that name had to surface at some point yes? While probably not the “Worst Director” ever the names Francis Coleman and William ‘one shot’ Baudine come to mind as well. Surely he was one of the strangest to labor in Hollywood’s poverty row grade z movie mills.

While his later films would attempt storyline and plot, 1953’s Glen or Glenda show’s Ed’s vision in its truest form- what reality looks like from the other side. Things happen, and then happen again and then there is stock footage.

Ed plays the title character of Glen ‘who is Glenda’ a man who wears women’s clothing and has an obsession with Angora sweaters. I think. Again it’s so hard to talk about this like it’s a film, it really just sort of wanders around and around and then ends.

And then there is Bela Lugosi as the Scientist. I’m fairly sure he didn’t really have the slightest idea what he was talking about because lord knows I don’t.

The plot such as it is involves the story of Glen who is engaged to be married and his struggle to decide if he tells his fiancé about his wearing women’s clothing or not. This is mentioned several times. Almost everything is mentioned more than once. There are also stock shots of everything including steel mills. Why? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

There is also a sidebar about a transsexual (which I think the film was intended to be about in the first place but Ed had other ideas) but the major focus is on Glen.

If your only contact with Ed Wood is the Tim Burton movie, I have to say that Johnny Depp was a lot better looking in a dress than the real Ed Wood, who was kind of built like a linebacker. He made a very boxy looking woman at best.

Anyway, I do rewatch these films before I do this. And I have to say watching Glen or Glenda was a real slog. I kept finding things to do, like put away everything I own, wash behind the refrigerator, sort my receipts and so on cause lord this hurt.

Two moments – one is the iconic moment where Glen’s fiancée hands him the angora sweater. It’s a mark of how weird this film is that it shambles on for another 20 minutes before ending, with any other director anywhere in the world you roll credits after that shot. But not Eddie.

And then there is the sequence where Glen is struggling with telling his secret, at which point his fiancé asks “Glen, is it another woman?” (It is, but not in the way she thinks). This is followed by a stock shot of a Bison stampede then Bela is superimposed and starts yelling “Pull the String! Pull the String!”. For the life of me I can’t figure out what any of this has to do with the other things. It’s just cosmic weird moment and you have to let go at that. To try to understand would be to hurt your head.

Enjoy with String Cheese.

31 Days of Cheese - Day 20: Goliath and the Dragon

2011-02-22T17:30:00.000-08:00

Before they started about making 1,245 westerns a week during the 60’s-70’s, the Italian film industry during the 50’s and early 60’s spent it’s time churning 1,245 films a week set in the ancient world .

These Sword and Sandal Epics (Peplum was the Italian term) ran pretty much the same, insert muscleman with waxed chest and armpits – Steve Reeves was the prototype but lord love a duck a lot of them came along after he did – call him Hercules or some other name Maciste, Samson, et al, have him fight people and monsters in a vaguely ancient Greek/Roman setting and then end the film.

Some were entertaining some were just weird and some were kind of weird and entertaining and some were like 1960’s Goliath and the Dragon just blah.

In the original Italian this was the story of Hercules who comes back home to Thebes after finishing his seven labors. Turns some other film company in the US owned rights using the name Hercules in a film so he became Goliath.

I’m going to call him Herc anyway. Just because.

Anyway Herc is played by Mark Forrest who does have the muscles to do the job if not quite the acting chops but Herc in this films just yells a lot and smashes thing so there isn’t a lot he needs to do. Per the IMDB.com he used the money he made from these films to study Opera.

So at first we see Herc fighting a very very fake 3 headed dog that breathes fire (you see the nozzles) then a guy in a bat suit. Both fights take about 13 seconds. He then sees a dragon (and we see a stop motion dragon) but doesn’t’ kill it because, well we have to wait for the end of the film for him to do that.

He then grabs some kind of red jewel and returns it to a god’s statue. Which god isn’t quite made plain but it’s a god and we accept that.

Then the rest of the film is confused mix of plots launched by several people including the Evil King with a name too long to type played by Broderick Crawford. As side note, when the time came to dub this puppy into English they had someone else do the voice for Broderick which is very disconcerting but I assume cheaper than paying Broderick any money.

The film sort of wanders around now, there is a scene were Herc fights an elephant, he also ties up his brother to a tree because he’s in love with the wrong woman (looking back on my own life, I wish someone had done that with me once or twice. Maybe I wouldn’t have made the complete ass of myself that I ended up doing. Well never mind), also he yells at the gods, a centaur attempts to kidnap his wife; he tears his house down in a fit of pique. Herc in this film is a bit of a jerk. In the old legends he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer either so this almost works. There are some children of his that vanish halfway through the film and a dwarf that shows up in a lot of these films. A very annoying dwarf I should mention.

And at the end Herc faces first the stop motion dragon and then the head of the dragon. The head looks like a very very large hand puppet and doesn’t put up much resistance to Herc. Then the bad guys are vanquished his wife is rescued and Herc starts rebuilding. No sign of the children however.

There is a lot of talk in this film, and you rarely seen the bad guys and Herc in the same shot. Also the Monsters are very fake looking (there’s guy in a bear suit that is just embarrassing to look at). It’s a rather disjointed and not quite there example of this kind of film.

Enjoy with a chicken parmesan hero.

31 Days of Cheese Day 19 - Astro Zombies

2011-02-21T08:52:00.001-08:00

People, from time to time, ask me ‘Bob why on earth do you watch these films?” and sometimes I answer “Because I am an emotionally stunted misfit with limited interpersonal skills and this substitutes for a personal life” . And then once the shock wears off, I’ll say “Actually because of films like Astro Zombies.”

This is a 1968 film written and directed by Ted Mikels who has spent a life time do stuff like this. You really think by now he’d be better at it but well no. This is a pretty bad film.

Make that really bad. But…

Well anyway after the opening sequence where a girl is killed by what we assume is one of the Astro Zombies we get the titles which are played over shots of toy robots and tanks. Yep we’re in for a ride here.

The film concerns John Carradine who as his appearance here proves, would do anything as long as he got paid for it (to be fair his family was large) who is a classic mad scientist intent on creating an Astro-man a re-animated corpse artificially enhanced and running on solar power.

That by the way is a bit more coherent than the actual film lays it out but never mind.

There is a lot of padding in this film – each step in the making of the new Astro Man takes forever. (There is an earlier version running about doing the killing – we learn later the only brain John could get was that of an insane killer. John reads the line like he was upset that he couldn’t get the name brand spark plugs he wanted at Pep Boys and had to make do – it’s another odd touch. )

Anyway each step in the making of the Astro man is explained at exhaustive detail – degaussing is mentioned, perhaps the first time in film history and then shown, again perhaps the first time in film history (it’s process that removes or weakens a magnetic field).

Meantime on the trail of the Doctor is a team of federal agents and a team of either Russian or Cuban spies – it’s hard to tell here. The head of the spy ring is played by Tura Satana (who is best known for playing the lead in Faster Pussycat Kill Kill). She wears slinky dresses and shoots people and depending on the scene has either a Spanish or Russian Accent or some kind of ménage of the two. It’s fairly confusing but since the movie doesn’t care, neither will you. Still she’s fun to watch. She knows she’s in a rotten film and she just rolls with it.

There are lot of scenes in bars and some of the actors sound like they weren’t drinking iced tea when they were doing the takes. There is a pointless go-go dancer sequence that makes you want to take a shower as well.

Well that’s the plot (more or less) and the padding What makes this film are two incidents. In the first the Doctor’s assistant (he’s not named Igor but the hell with it, I’ll call him Igor. ) has captured a young woman in a gold bikini and has her strapped to some kind of lab table. We don’t have the slightest idea who she is or what her story is. The film needed a babe in bikini I guess. As she struggles he sets up his equipment, knocks her out with a hypodermic and is then about to start whatever it was he was going to do when John tells him that he’ll have to finish his experiment later, right now he needs help with the Astro Man. Igor looks a bit annoyed, the puts down his equipment and goes to help the Doc. Leaving the babe in the bikini. We never see her again – even at the end. The whole pointless sequence comes to complete dead end and is then dropped like a bad habit. It’s just amazing.

In the other incident one night, the Astro Zombie with the killer’s Brain attacks the male lead’s Girl. In the struggle, his battery pack, which stores energy from the solar cells in his forehead (don’t ask really it’s not important) is knocked off. The male lead arrives in the nick of time and fights off the Astro Zombie. Because it is dark, the Astro Zombie begins to lose power. To keep himself going he grabs the Male lead’s flashlight and holds it to his forehead. Then there are several shots of walking the streets with the flashlight held to his head as he stumbles back to the doctor’s lab. Again it’s one of the bizarre sequences I’ve ever seen. Dali could only wish he was this surreal.

In the end. The doctor, the spies and the zombies are all killed. The male lead and the female lead hug and we fade out. No word on the girl in the bikini tied to the lab table.

Enjoy with a Cuban Sandwich and Borscht

31 Days of Cheese Day 18: The Brainiac (El Baron Del Terror)

2011-02-20T07:30:00.000-08:00

As part of my foreign movie survey sidebar (and probably the last film that is fun to watch alas) we have Mexico’s 1962 over the top cult classic The Brainiac.

The film opens in 1661 where we see one Baron Vitelius accused by the Inquisition of pretty much everything except poisoning the water supply and throwing the big game. He is the burnt at the stake. As the fires go up a comet appears over head, and he vows to return in 300 years when the comet returns and kill all of the inquisitors’ descendants.

We then go forward to 1961 where we meet the female and male leads who are looking for the comet as assistants to the head of the observatory. Later it turns out that the male lead is a descendant of the one man who defended the Baron against the charges and the female lead is a descendant of one of the inquisitors. It’s funny how things work out like that.

You know one of the things that bothered me about the plot is why did he have to wait 300 years? And I’d like to think that if a known wizard had told me that in 300 years he would come back to kill my descendants, I would have passed that information on to my descendants, simply along the lines of forewarned is forearmed “It’s probably just bullshit but just keep an eye out in 1961 or so just in case.”

Anyway they find the comet and then the Baron returns. He emerges from inside a big Styrofoam Meteor that lands in the middle of a set. His face (a mask let’s be real) is covered with hair has a long pointy nose devil horns and very long forked tongue for eating brains (of course what else?). His hands are two hairy claws that end with suckers. It’s another iconic look and another figure I want for my desk

His first act on earth is to eat the brains of an unfortunate passerby, then return to his original form and in the process take the man’s clothes leaving the dead body in his underwear. It’s just so strange.

And then the rest of the film consists of him setting himself up as a baron and then tracking down the descendants of the inquisitors, making friends with them and eating their brains after first giving them a “Hello my name in Ingo Montoya” type speech then transforming into the hairy guy with the tongue. Some bystanders also get killed a couple of shady ladies and the husband of one of the decedents who ends up dead hanging from a shower nozzle with his head under water.

He also keeps brains in what looks like a chafing dish of some kind which he snacks on a couple of times during the film.

Meantime an police inspector and his assistant (who is the comic relief) are on the trail of the bodies and eventually they work out what is going on, and at the end, as the baron is trying to kill the female lead, they break in with flamethrowers (and again you wonder just how often would the Mexican Police force need to use flamethrowers to the point where they have them on hand at the station? ) and roast the baron again. Who gives up the ghost, and the movie ends.

It’s a weird funny well shot (lovely use of shadows and light) and fast moving absurd fever dream of a movie. This one you should see. I really can’t say as much about the upcoming films however.

Enjoy with Nachos.

31 Days of Cheese Day 17 - Super Infra-Man

2011-02-19T15:13:00.000-08:00

You may have gathered that my taste in films does not tend towards introspective character studies, or a quiet indie films about domestic life in the suburbs. Hell I lived that. Watching that just does not appeal to me in the slightest. My taste is a just bit different.

I can’t give a better example of that than today’s slice of cheese – 1975’s Super Infra-Man.

This 1975 production by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers (makers of countless kung fu films during this era) was an attempt to do a super hero film in the style of Japan’s Super Ultraman, Starman and the Kamen Rider series.

And oh my do they ever. This film is gleefully over the top, featuring absurd looking monsters, elaborate but at the same time cheesy sets and manic fight scenes which are, after all, main order of business in a film like this.

The story has the suddenly attacked by one Demon Princess Elzebub. (called Princess Dragon Mom in the English dub. I’ll be talking about the original Chinese version mostly. I like my crazy straight up.) who is, and it’s not really clear here, a 20 million year old entity from the ice age, a space creature or some kind of demon/devil the film doesn’t really make it clear and obviously doesn’t care in the least. Suffice to say the at the start of the film the world is menaced by a Chinese woman with long blonde hair, a gold helmet with horns, insanely long fingernails, wearing what looks like an a bra made of metal carrying a whip. And when necessity arises she can turn into a rubber suited flying dragon that Breathes fire. Got that?

To aid her in her conquest of the earth are Witch Eye (a woman with eyes in her palms which is pretty disturbing to look at) and a number of monsters with names like Mutant Drill (he has a drill on one hand) The Plant Monster, Fire Monster (Breathes fire nach), the Spider Monster along with some guy that looks like the Addams family’s cousin It as imagined by someone on acid, and two robot looking things that shoot their heads and a mace like arm at their foes because they are connected to the robots by some sort of advanced slinky spring set up. In addition, she has scads of Skeleton Warriors who wear black with a sort white vest thing that looks like ribs, along with black motor cycle helmets with horns and a skull face. They are all armed with spears that have a globe just below the spear point. It turns out that the globe is explosive – we find that out mostly by their foes grabbing the spears and tossing them at the Skelton warriors and then they blow up. It’s kind of a stupid idea really.

Opposing them is a super science research institute run by one Professor Lui (the army which you think would be all over something like this is nowhere to be found the entire film). The staff all wear silver and blue jumpsuits and ride about on motor cycles and are, in general, utterly useless except at getting their ass kicked by the invaders. Realizing that the human race has less than a snowball’s chance in hell as things currently stand, Professor Lui asks one of the staff, Rayma, to undergo a complicated, if confusing, procedure to become Infra-man with powers and abilities and the rest. He does and well off we go.

The rest of the film consists of fights, kung fu yells and things blowing up, as events lead up to the final confrontation between the Infra-man and the forces of the evil princess on Mount Devil (you know just once I’d like to see the evil villain headquartered in fluffy bunny meadow or something like that, just for variety).

One of the conventions of kung fu films is that the hero yells out the name of the attack he is using, as he uses it and we have that here. The Infra-man goes about yelling things like “lethal kick!:” “Solar Ray!” “Lightning Fist” and so on as he does such things. It’s a hoot.

Also they use the same transformation sequence each time Rayma becomes Infra-man. While this does save filming costs and such, at about the 3^rd time it comes one you’re like “we GET IT, just get on with the kicking okay?”

One of the reasons I love this film, aside from its amazing silliness are the weird side touches, for example, as part of the plot twistings, the Professor is taken to Mount Devil, and part of this journey is by boat. The boat, a fairly large Cabin Cruiser is tricked out with demon horns, skulls, flags and other evil entity what not. When I see this in the film, I always wonder, did they bring that with them? Or did they get it as a special order after they started to conquer the world? “Why yes Princess, your boat will be ready Tuesday. Yes, I think you’ll be pleased, it looks just the way you ordered it.”

Don’t worry too much about details when watching this, cause this film doesn’t . Just sit back and experience the madness. A wonderful guilty pleasure.

Enjoy with your favorite Chinese takeout.

31 Days of Cheese Day 16: The Beginning of the End

2011-02-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

And one more “bug/insect/small thing made huge by radiation coming to eat us film” this is 1957’s Beginning of the End staring Peter Graves.

In 1954 the movie Them featuring Giant Ants was released and was a huge hit. There followed scads of bug movies of which this is one.

This is an almost paint by numbers reworking of Them done to the casting of Peter Graves who was James Arness’s brother (who was in Them) except with Grasshoppers. Yeah they are called locusts in the film but what we have here are grass hoppers.

And while Them went for mechanical effects to simulate the giant ants. The director of this film, Schlock mister supreme Bert I. Gordon used real grasshoppers using either rear projection, miniature sets or just having the bugs crawl on pictures to simulate giant bugs.

It’s a massively cheap effect to do and it shows. The grasshoppers, who after all don’t know they are in a movie just walk about and try to escape (as filming went on per IMDB.com they started eating each other as well). And in the final sequence there a few times were the grasshoppers who are supposed to be crawling up a building walk into midair. It’s very very very cheap and fake looking. Really.

Anyway the story concerns the handsome Peter Graves (and that’s the blub on the VHS version I have of this film) who is doing research on the effects of radiation on plants (they make them bigger). It seems some grasshoppers got in, got radiated and then got bigger and now threaten to eat Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. After a long long long battle with the bugs, which consists of lots of stock footage shots, superimposed grasshoppers, people yelling descriptions of things too expensive to film into walky talkies, reaction shots, then more stock footage and so on and so on; Peter and the female lead (who is a reporter but once Peter gets into the act doesn’t do much except look worried) discover a sound that will lure the giants into lake Michigan where they drown. Now this comes after a long sequence – Burt loved to pad his films with this kind of stuff – where Peter tweaks a knob there is a sound and both Peter and the female lead look at some kind of EKG readout that is linked to a captured Grasshopper. Gripping cinema this ain’t.

Rife with bad dialogue, long long sequences where nothing much happens, awash in stock footage and cheap effects this Burt I Gordon as we know him. A bad film maker. Cheap the stuff turned a profit but really just terrible stuff all around.

The highlights of the film are one where the grasshoppers are crawling one the pictures sorry crawling up the buildings in Chicago and earlier where Peter’s deaf mute assistant (Don’t ask – I think it was a way not to give the actor a speaking part. You have to pay more when the actors talk) is eaten by a grasshopper.

Enjoy with a Chicago Style Pizza.

31 Days of Cheese Day 15: The Monster That Challanged the World

2011-02-17T16:15:00.001-08:00

Continuing the “atomically enhanced invertebrates are coming to eat us” side bar, today’s slice of cheese is 1957’s The Monster That Challenged the World.

This film is set in the Salton Sea an accidentialy created (in 1905) salt water lake in California that at the time was a tourist attraction in the middle of the desert and a naval base as well. Since then the sea has changed and what is left is now extremely toxic (High salt levels and fertilizer and pesticide run off from farms nearby, it’s a mess) and the hotels and the naval base have been closed and the whole place has been simply abandoned except for a few hangers on.

Anyway back in the 50’s it was still riding high and the naval base was going great guns.

The film starts and we learn that the navy is using the base to test parachutes – which strikes me as high stress job.

“His last message was: ‘Ted, this design is a bust’ then there was a lot of yelling and the last thing we heard was this kind of meaty thud.”

Today there is a problem. The jumper has vanished and the boat that was going to pick him up has broken radio contact.

And thus we mean the male lead. He is an unlikeable dick with the personality of a block of wood

This isn’t the only 50’s sci fi film were this happens, you have to wonder what was about the 50’s that prompted films to put forth unlikeable dicks like this as the lead. You also have to wonder if there wasn’t anything people in the 50’s weren’t afraid of? The films simply reek of fear, repression and paranoia bugs, commies, rock n’ roll all these and more are viewed as things of terror in film after film. It’s rather unsettling to watch actually.

Getting back to the story at hand. Major Dick. I’m going to call him that because I’m too lazy to look the name up starts investigating. The first thing they find is slime, then one of the boats crew members dead of fright, then the guy testing the parachute and he’s been drained of all body fluids. (It’s a nicely done creepy moment when his body bobs to the surface.).

Trying to put the clues together Major Dick goes to the base lab where he meets the female lead (a widow of ten years) and her daughter. The daughter is annoying cute and is one of the idiot children in monster movies who leave nothing but death and destruction in their wake.

I’ve constantly found children are portrayed in movies, especially these kinds of movies to be really really annoying. It’s like everybody on the film forgot what it is like to be a kid and you get this weird stilted over sweet little adult version that acts weird because the script demands it.

In this case the girl loves the rabbits in the lab. We’ll get back to that later.

As it turns out, to nobody’s real big surprise, that the cause of these deaths are giant snails. The eggs were lurking under the lake for a long time then an earthquake and some radiation thing or other (the film kind of waves its arms about here and doesn’t explain really) released them. The navy and the local sheriff’s office deal with the mess, find the snails and their nest and kill them.

This is while several more cast members are sucked dry of fluids and the female lead and Major Dick get involved. (it’s mostly her idea. This makes me wonder about her. “A humorless jerk with barely controlled anger issues. That’s the man for me!”

This leads up to the last scene. Earlier they had recovered on egg which is being kept cold to keep it from hatching. Idiot child, who is allowed to be in the room alone, is worried that the bunnies cold, so she turns up the heat in the tank holding the egg. The snail hatches then eats the bunnies (which is touch I liked I have to add) and then tries to eat the female lead and the idiot child. At this point Major Dick wanders in and eventually kills the beast. Note fire extinguishers are not very good weapons against 10 foot snails.

Kind of creepy – the giant snail effect is good for the era; the major weakness of the film is the unlikeable plank of wood playing the male lead.

Enjoy with anything except escargot. Really that’s too obvious a joke by miles.

31 Days of Cheese Day 14 - Attack of the Crab Monsters

2011-02-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

Roger Corman

Well you knew his name was going to show up eventually. His fingerprints are all over B-movies for the last 50 years (including last year’s made for TV epic Sharktopus).

He pretty much had b-movie making down to an assembly line. He knew that if he made a film that cost X of a certain type he would make money. If he spent more he wouldn’t. Simple as that.

In some ways his greatest ability was to tell young talented and hungry actors directors and such that “I can’t pay you anything but you’ll get to make a movie.” A deal that they would jump at. Hell I’m middle aged and untalented and I’d jump at it that deal if he green lit Bikini Zombies but that’s for another time.

In addition to producing, he also directed some 50 films himself per the IMDB; sometimes I think he did it to save money.

By common consent Attack the Crab Monsters is one his better directing jobs. Now just to ground everybody, we’re not talking Hitchcock, Casablanca or Seven Samurai level good here. The truth be told, Corman’s not a very good director. His films tend to plod along, with shots that go on a bit too long, plot elements that get discarded later because of script changes but the film was already in the can and we can’t waste that and really cheap effects.

All of which comes into play here. We follow the adventures of team of researchers who land on a tropical island to find out what happened to the first team of researchers who seem to have vanished into thin air. (Hint, if the film has Crab Monsters in the title you should be able to guess what happened – they were eaten). Soon they find out what happened, and soon members of their party get eaten as well. Also the Crab Monsters, using a variety of skills, special powers, dynamite and stock footage are sinking parts of the island the better to stalk the survivors.

The Crab Monsters are of course mutants spawned by radiation. It’s the fifties what else was going to happen?

An interesting bit is that as the crabs eat the folks they absorb their memoires and such and thus the crabs can talk to the people using the voices of the folks they just ate. It’s an interesting idea but because the film is so short (63 minutes) and we have to get on to the next crab attack, it isn’t as well developed (are these the actual people in disembodied form or are the crab monsters just using these voices like a mask, you never learn). There is also a bit of a love triangle between an engaged scientist couple and the guy who played the professor on Gillian’s island but again because the film is in such a rush to get to the crab’s next meal it’s kind of just dropped.

And the crabs are nothing special. They are just there, pushed around by unseen stage hands – and even for crabs they are stiff and immobile.

All and all a standard B monster movie from the 50’s with some interesting ideas but they don’t give them time to develop.

Enjoy with canned lump crabmeat.

31 Days of Cheese Day 13 - Starcrash

2011-02-14T18:01:00.001-08:00

As palette cleanser after the last film, I give you something insane. Gleefully, utterly, completely insane.

Starcrash. It’s a massive awful, silly and yet wonderful example of Low Budget Italian Science Fiction movie Cheese. The plot makes no sense, the actors yell a lot, the special effects are just weird, and there is a persuasive sense of insanity about the whole affair. But it’s a cheerful madness and doesn’t leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

The film follows the adventures of Stella Star played by but not with the voice of the lovely Caroline Munro (someone else dubbed her voice in. Italian films always dubbed the dialogue in later after shooting was over and Caroline wasn’t in Italy then and they couldn’t afford to fly her in so that’s someone else’s voice). She spends a lot of the film wearing a sort of leather bikini outfit. It’s the stuff of adolescent dreams. Joining her is Marjo Gortner who yells and can make light with his hands and a robot with a southern/Texas accent called L who complains about being nervous a lot. Well okay, listen, just roll with it. It’s a crazy film.

They are charged by the emperor of the Galaxy, played by Christopher Plummer (who I hope took the role to pay for his aunt’s operation. Paying the rent just doesn’t cut it as an excuse) to find the hidden planetary base of the evil Count Zartharn. Zartharn yells a whole lot. Things like “Kill Kill!” and “I will be ruler of the universe!”. Even in film where everybody yells, you notice him yelling a lot. Earlier a ship commanded by the Emperor’s son went looking for the planet but they were lost. Then Christopher asks Stella, if she’s not too busy, that maybe they could find his son as well.

This of course ignores the opening sequence and the whole part where Stella is imprisoned on a planet and forced to feed Radium –which comes in big big balls, the size of beach balls, apparently, to the reactor. She escapes but everybody else is killed when the prison blows up. A lot of things blow up.

Anyway, as I was saying, Stella and her crew search the forbidden stars for the planet and the Emperor’s son. On the first world, they fight amazons who ride purple horses and a huge robot with breasts (go with it). On an ice world, Stella is betrayed, turned into a popsicle and then thawed out. On the third planet, L is seemingly destroyed by cave men. (I told you just roll with it. You try and make sense of this and you’ll hurt yourself) who then capture Stella. Stella is then rescued by the Emperor’s son who turns out to be David Hasseloff. The Hoff is wearing more mascara than Stella. Then Marjo and the Hoff have a light saber battle with two robots and the emperor shows up and stops time so they can escape before the planet blows up.

And then it gets weird.

No really.

There is a long long space battle between the forces of the emperor and the evil Count. The Count’s Space ship looks like a hand and when threatened it closes up into a fist (yes.) There are smaller space ships flying about, laser beams everywhere and then there are the space torpedoes. These are launched by the emperor. They smash thru the glass windows of the count’s space ship at which point soldiers pop out of them and they start shooting at the Count’s men. I’m not even going to list how many things are wrong with that. Suffice to say it’s one of my favorite weird moments in film. A WTF moment of cosmic awe that never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Well despite the gold torpedoes the Emperors’ attack is defeated and there is only once choice left. Stella, the Emperor’s son and the rebuilt L travel to the heretofore never even hinted at floating city, where Stella and L are going to fly it into the Count’s ship. (Starcrash). It’s like the story conference went “Okay does anybody have the slightest idea how to end all this?” and someone said “the hell with it, let’s blow more stuff up.” And thus the Starcrash sequence was decided on.

Just before the impact Stella and L leap out an open hatch into space. No they never bother to explain that either. It doesn’t matter. The evil Count is beaten and you have just seen one of the craziest films you’ll ever see.

This is not going into how all the space ships look like they were assembled by an obsessive compulsive who didn’t want to throw anything away, or that space looks like a black field with Christmas lights on it or the jerky stop motion work.

Yes it’s a bad film. But unlike say Bolero, it’s a bad film that is so cheerfully insane you can’t help loving it.

Enjoy with antipasto and nice Chianti.

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31 Days of Cheese: Day 31 - Plan Nine From Outer Space