Matthew Vaughan is really a director on the rise and a name to watch and he’s proving himself to be quite flexible. Consider this: He has directed three films so far: The crime thriller Layer Cake (2004), the fantasy Stardust (2007) and superhero film Kick-Ass (2010) (and he was the producer of Snatch. and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Today we’re looking at Layer Cake, his directorial debut.
Story
So we’re in London and have Mr. XXXX (Daniel Craig) as our anti-hero and narrator. He sees himself as a professional businessman who’s business is cocaine (and other drugs). Now, he’s got a system worked out that has so far let him make a lot of money and stay under the radar, and he plans on getting out of the game. Unfortunately, one of his biggest customers, the mobster Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) has two last jobs for him. The first involves finding the coked out daughter of Jimmy’s crime boss friend Eddie Temple (longtime veteran Michael Gambon who’s been Dumbledore in the more recent Harry Potter films). The second involves finding a buyer for a large number of pills smuggled into England by a scummy drug dealer called the Duke (Jamie Foreman). Of course neither of these jobs go as planned and things just spiral out of control for Mr. XXXX and his associates.
The cast in this is incredible. Craig is a charismatic and dominant central figure, but the secondary characters really help flesh out the seedy underbelly of London here. XXXX’s associates, in particular Morty (George Harris) and Gene (Colm “Engineer O’Brien” Meaney), are quite badass, but there’s a hell of a lot of characters and they’ve all got something about them that makes them stand out. Oh, and there’s also Sienna Miller as XXXX’s love interest Tammy, but despite having secondary billing on the DVD case, is only in the film for all of four scenes. But she does look fine in those scenes.
Visuals/Effects
Director: Matthew Vaughan. Director of Photography: Ben Davis. Visually the movie is great. Scenes are great, there’s great use of color and the film has a lot of energy and tension that carry you through. Action scenes aren’t common, so when violence actually does occur it’s often quick and incredibly brutal, like the beating in the diner shot from the victim’s point of view. Powerful stuff. The movie also handles transitions incredibly well too.
Writing
Screenplay by J.J. Connolly and based on his own novel of the same name. The script is incredibly impressive. Characters are well defined, have arcs, frequently likable (or at least interesting) and the pacing is spot on. Twists come out of nowhere but they all make sense in retrospect and by the end of the movie, all loose ends are accounted for.
Sound
Original music by Ilan Eshkeri and Lisa Gerrard, which is good, and it’s also got a very good soundtrack featuring stuff from the likes of Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, The Cult and even Duran Duran.
Conclusion
I was thoroughly impressed. I mean, really, really impressed. Every fault I had with Snatch. (and I had quite a few) is absent in Layer Cake. In fact, that’s kind of how I want to describe this movie to people who’ve never heard of it. “It’s like Snatch, only with character development and substance.” Extremely recommended and a contender for my “Best Surprises” list.
Well here we are, sitting on the cusp of a new dawn here at Castle RMWC. New format, new ‘tude and, uh, a new review. Not having seen 1981’s Stripes was another disconnect between me and the 80s comedy gestalt that I’m slowly patching gaps for, and really, it’s quite strange that it took so long for me to finally watch it. After all, it’s got Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in. That’s half of the Ghostbusters right there! Well, a few months ago I sat down with the Extended cut DVD to see what the fuss was about.
Story
Well, John Winger (Bill Murray), a slacker cab driver in New York gets fired, dumped and evicted on the same day. He decides to join the army to solve all three of these problems and talks his best friend, Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) into joining too. Amazingly they get accepted and shipped off to boot camp and join a ragtag bunch of misfits that also include Ox (John Candy) and some other guys with quirky personalities. Winger constantly pisses off their hardass drill sergeant, Hulk (Warren Oates). Hulka gets put in the hospital during an accident in a live fire test, the squad manages to pass and get assigned to a mission in Europe to protect a top secret EM50 Urban Fighting Vehicle under the command of the incredibly incompetent Captain Stillman (John Larroquette).
It’s an RV.
Winger & Ziskey of course steal the RV to hang out with their MP girlfriends Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young from Blade Runner). Through a complex series of misfortunes the rest of the platoon gets captured in Czechoslovakia (back when it was Czechoslovakia) and it’s up to the gang in the RV (and a recovered Hulka running around behind enemy lines by himself) to rescue the squad, which is really one of those plots that sneaks up on you when you actually sit down and think about it.
The cast is solid across the board with Murray & Ramis bouncing off each other excellently. Ramis playing the straight man and Murray playing the funny man. Oates’ Sgt. Hulka is another standout character for the hamminess being thrown out there.
Visuals
Ivan Reitman (both Ghostbusters films) directed and Director of Photography Bill Butler. The movie looks fine, no problems. The extended cut definitely feels overly long in a few places (like the entire first AWOL sequence that has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the movie), but it makes up for it with an incredibly amusing climax with the EM50 storming the Iron Curtain and cutting loose. There’s also boobies. Mud Wrestling boobies.
Writing
Script by Len Blum, Daniel Goldberg & Harold Ramis. The story isn’t deep, but it does allow Bill Murray to cut loose and do his thing, which is exactly the point of a Bill Murray film.
Sound
Original music by Elmer Bernstein, which is always a good and welcome thing in a movie.
Conclusion Stripes is good. I liked it. Maybe not going to rise to the top of my list of 80s comedies, but it’s definitely a solid and satisfying effort. Recommended.
1976's Murder By Death is a goofy, straightforward farce of some of the more notable detective characters from the 30s & 40s. Hardboiled private eye Sam Diamond (Peter Falk) and his assistant (Eileen Brennan), boozy socialites Dick & Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie smith), Chinese sleuth Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), gluttonous Belgian Milo Perrier (James Coco) and his assistant Marcel (a young James Cromwell), and English governess Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester from RMWC favorite The Bride Of Frankenstein) are all invited to a remote mansion for a dinner party hosted by blind butler Bensonmum (masterfully played by Alec Guinness) and hosted by the always eccentric Lionel Twain/Truman Capote (yes, THAT Truman Capote). Twain's challenge to them is to solve a dastardly murder mystery that he has come up with and he'll reward them with a hefty sum.
Beyond that, the plot just spirals further and further into absurdity and rapid fire dialogue that works well. Not all the jokes work (some end up being pretty juvenile considering the source material) but the cast is great and the jokes that DO work outnumber the duds considerably.
Directed by Robert Moore, there isn't a whole lot of fancy camera work, byt it serves the story well and allows the actors to run with their material. The script by Neil Simon is sharp, but by the end does get a little too bitter in its invective towards the characters being mocked. Additionally, you kind of have to know about (at least in broad strokes) who characters like Sam Spade, Nick & Nora Charles, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Charlie Chan are for all of the jokes to work.
Still, the movie is a breezy, easygoing affair with a great cast and a lot of witty banter, which are all good things. Recommended.
This next piece of schlock is truly something else. A German film made in 1960 and released in the States in ‘62, it’s called Ein Toter hing im Netz (A Corpse Hangs in the Web) AKA Body in the Web, AKA Girls of Spider Island, AKA Horrors of Spider Island. With that many titles, you know it has to be good!
Plot
So there’s this “nightclub” owner is flying out to Singapore with a bunch of female dancers for a gig when suddenly their plane goes down in the South Pacific and the survivors (the guy and his nubile dancers) manage to make it to a remote island. There they find a cabin and the corpse of a scientist who was looking for uranium on the isle dead in a giant fake web. Then the guy wanders off one night and gets bit by a spider puppet, kills it but is then transformed into a man-spider-monster that kills one girl then just kind of wanders around the island for a month while the girls go skinny dipping and have catfights and occasionally try to signal a ship. So I guess it’s kind of like Gilligan's Island, only sexy.
Then a small boat with two guys who work for the dead guy from the cabin arrive and discover the jackpot. And then the monster guy comes back.
Characters Gary Webster: Alexander D’Arcy plays the club owner and defacto leader of the castaways and then he gets turned into a monster. With two monster hands and a really vaguely spider-like face that looks more like the Wolf Man. And he’s shirtless. He’s not a very good monster, since in the span of a month he only succeeds in killing three people. But since this is an awful monster movie, then our awful monster is the badass.
Georgia: Helga Franck plays Gary’s assistant & the defacto leader when he goes missing. She’s is actually not useless throughout the movie.
Babs: Barbara Valentin plays the blonde who’s more or less the “face” of the girls, being front & center for most group scenes.
Ann: Helga Neuner plays the shy girl of the group who falls for one of the new guys that show up.
Joe & Bobby: Harald Maresch & Rainer Brandt (credited as “Temple Foster” & “Allen Turner” in the dubbed Americanized version) are the professor’s assistants who finally return to the island. Bobby’s the promiscuous one who goes through the girls like tissues. Joe is the more sensitive one who forges a reasonably chaste connection with Ann and has a strange fondness for wearing neckerchiefs without a shirt. Guess which one gets killed?
And there’s a whole bunch of other women, but aside from the loose-moraled former stripper, don’t get much characterization. And there’s a guy in the office who looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Fritz Böttger (or “Jamie Nolan” in the US version), the movie knows exactly the demographic it’s catering to. Young males. We get plenty of shots of the ladies dressing down to their skivvies for any reason at all. Now, since this was the 60s, you don’t actually see anything, er, obviously titillating, but this film is also quite shameless about showing off the talent. And there’s an extended catfight sequence that serves no ulterior purpose other than to have two women wrestling with each other and grunting. Clearly there’s no subtext there.
The spider puppet is awful (a spider with finger-like claws?) but is kind of endearing. Man-Spider Gary is considerably less endearing.
Writing
Written by Fritz Böttger, Eldon Howard & Albert G. Miller, the story is absolutely ridiculous in that special way that truly terrible movies are. But if you’ve read any of the above, you’ve clearly picked up on that.
Sound
Original music by Karl Bette & Willy Mattes and the soundtrack is a light, jazzy, easy listening kind of sound that is not at all conducive to creating any kind of mood that doesn’t have “softcore” in it’s description.
Conclusion Horrors of Spider Island is one for the books. Essentialy a nudie flick without any recognizable nudity and a monster flick with a monster that kills people offscreen and wears a terrible “costume.” This movie has everything a B movie connoisseur could possibly want. So bad it’s good.
This next one’s bad. Real bad. So bad I don’t even really want to do a full review, but I’ll try. Here’s 1961’s Cold War “thriller” Rocket Attack U.S.A. an incredibly uninteresting piece of scare propaganda.
Plot
So the Soviets launched Sputnik and America fears it may be a spy satellite sent up to gather rocket data in preparation for nuclear war or something. A spy is sent to Moscow to rendezvous with a deep cover agent and they try to sabotage the Russian missile program, fail horribly, get killed and apparently provoke the Commie bastards into launching missiles at New York.
And it ends with a message saying ALL OF THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IF AMERICA HAD INVESTED IN A MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM!
Seriously, that’s pretty much it.
Characters John Manston: John McKay plays our CIA agent sent to Moscow. He ends up staying in the deep cover agent’s closet for a while and sets out to sabotage the missile silos.
Tannah: Monica Davis plays the deep cover agent who’s literally in bed with a Soviet general and getting all sorts of good…intel. Sadly, not a very good actress.
And that’s about it for main characters. These two get introduced a quarter of the way into the film and get killed off with a quarter of the film left to go. Then there’s some newscaster guy in New York and a whole bunch of incidental people around for only one scene here or there. Since selecting a badass is traditional at this point, I guess I’ll pick the blind guy nonchalantly walking down a New York street with air-raid sirens blaring who unconvincingly reaches out and says “help me” to some random guy who runs past him.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Barry Mahon, the movie is a visual mess with sloppy editing and the rushed, low budget nature really shows (the missile silo is guarded by one easily dispatched guard).
Writing
There is no actual writing credit for the film, but IMDB lists Barry Mahon as the most likely candidate. Probably just as well the writer is anonymous since the story is a complete mess of scenes that just sort of happen and we get characters and plots introduced out of thin air that disappear just as quickly. It is quite bad.
Sound
No score or anything, though there is one scene in a Moscow restaurant/nightclub that has a band & dancer.
Conclusion Rocket Attack U.S.A. is bad. Very bad. Not even entertaining bad. It’s boring and the lesson I learned is that better trained spies could prevent a need for a missile defense system. Ugh, though what do you expect from something made by “Exploit Films”? Dreadfully bad and to be avoided. Even the MST3K version is barely watchable.
Movie trends are an interesting thing to consider. (For about five minutes. Once every twelve years) You’ll have a period of time where a genre will be incredibly popular for a span of time, then fade. Science Fiction & Fantasy bounce back quickly from slumps, but other genres just shrivel up. If they’re lucky like film noir, they’ll spawn periodic revivals and remixes (like Chinatown and Blade Runner) or like westerns there’ll be a trickle of them as various bankable directors give it a shot. The unlucky ones dry up and blow away like tumbleweeds. Like the Teen Beach Movie genre!
Which segues into today’s little exercise in badness, 1967’s Catalina Caper, one of the last Beach Movies made.
Goddamnit.
Plot
Well, we’re on/around Santa Catalina Island in sunny Southern California, and some fat guy sneaks into an art gallery and with ridiculous ease steals an ancient scroll. The next morning, two teenage students (our heroes) arrive on the island with the stated goal of finding chicks. Looks like the two plots are setting a collision course for 84 minutes of wackiness in this Catalina caper (DUN DUN DUN)!
Characters Don Pringle: Tommy Kirk (who starred in several beach movies and was also, get this, the kid Travis in Old Yeller) plays our hero. Not much to the character aside from he’s from someplace like Arizona and this is the first time he’s seen a body of water as big as the Pacific.
Charlie Moss: Brian Cutler plays Don’s blonde buddy. He’s a native of Catalina Island and pretty much has three girls surrounding him at all times.
Katrina Corelli: Ulla Strömstedt plays Don’s love interest. An attractive girl traveling to the Island to see her jerk boyfriend Angelo (Lyle Waggoner) who is of course working for the bad guys. She’s a hottie, but has a kind of creepy monologue when first introduced. On the island, she seems to have the uncanny ability to turn every guy’s head when she walks by, which I guess makes her the film’s badass.
Tina Moss: Venita Wolf plays a friend of Charlie’s that also takes a liking to Don.
Arthur & Anne Duval: Del Moore & Sue Casey play a couple of “gentleman thieves” (well, more or less). They arranged for the theft of the Magoffin, but then decide they don’t want to hand it over to their client for…some reason.
Larry: Jim Begg plays the chubby henchmen of the Duvals. He actually does the stealing in the beginning and aside from wearing a stupid hat loves him some baseball.
Tad Duval: Peter Duryea plays the Duvals teenage son who is curiously oblivious to their shady careers.
Lakopolous: Lee Deane plays our, for lack of a better term, Villain. He’s bald and has henchmen in scuba gear.
Fingers O’Toole: Robert Donner plays a tall, gangly Monsieur Hulot-like character spying on the Duvals. (see, this project taught me useful film connections!). Turns out he’s an undercover investigator trying to find the missing Magoffin, but is so ridiculously clumsy that he takes a pratfall in every scene he’s in.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Lee Sholem, there’s really no substance to this movie. It’s competently shot and aside from a few physical gags and an underwater fight scene, pretty much all that the movie has going for it are bikini clad women, which all things considered, isn’t so bad.
Writing
Original story by Sam Pierce and screenplay by Clyde Ware. The initial idea of the heist plot on a warm, touristy island isn’t a bad one, but it gets relegated to sublot status hard and we get Don & Charlie hanging around with chicks for the most part.
Sound
Original music by Jerry Long which is a standard 60s kind of soundtrack. There’s also a number of on-screen musical numbers from The Cascades performing “There‘s A New World” Carol Connors singing “Book of Love” and Little Richard (who looks a little…“medicated”) singing the “timeless” classic “Scuba Party.” Then there’s the movie’s theme song “Never Steal Anything Wet” sung by Mary Wells over the beginning and end credits.
Conclusion
There’s no real substance to Catalina Caper. None. It’s light and fluffy and pretty much mindless. Not unwatchable but certainly not a good bad movie either.
So, who’s up for a little “white man’s burden”? Well, too bad, because you’re going to get some anyway. Today’s low budget entry from 1948, Jungle Goddess stars future Superman George Reeves and is chock full of racism and offensiveness both intentional AND unintentional.
Plot
So we’ve got two ex-army air force pilots chillin’ in Africa after WWII. One is the womanizing, hard-drinking captain (like a good many actual pilots) and the other is a clean-cut, not-drunk, polite co-pilot (and very unlike the pilots I’ve drunk with). They run a small passenger plane but get word that some rich girl got lost somewhere in Africa when her plane went down right before the War. Hoping to cash in on the reward for finding out what happened to her, they go into the jungle, cause an incident when one of them shoots an African tribesman and are taken before their “goddess” who is, not surprisingly in the least, the missing woman. And there’s some bullshit about how she’s worshipped by the tribe and how if they found out she wasn’t actually a real deity they’d be (understandably) royally pissed. Can they make it back to their plane in time??? Yeah, this one’s…not at all deep.
Characters Mike Patton: George Reeves plays our hero, the second banana of the duo. Nice enough guy, just quite patronizing. Finds Uranium near the village and wants to come back with an expedition which I’m sure wouldn’t piss off the natives one bit.
Bob Simpson: Ralph Byrd (who played Dick Tracy a bunch of times) plays the mustachioed pilot. Certainly drinks like a pilot. When they land in the jungle he shoots a native who happens to stumble upon them. Generally a sleazy, paranoid jerk.
Greta Vanderhorn: Wanda McKay plays the missing daughter of a South African rich guy. Called “Mata Greta” by the tribe because she’s blonde and white and bowed down to worship her immediately upon seeing her, which sounds farfetched to say the least.
Wanama: Armida plays Greta’s servant who is learning English from her. A nice enough girl that Bob shamelessly tries to seduce but not too bright. Nor is she African by any stretch of the imagination, with the actress being born in Mexico. (there’s also a villager played by a Filipino actor)
Oolonga the Witch Doctor: Smoki Whitfeld plays the tribe’s witch doctor who, oddly enough doesn’t think the white woman in their midst actually IS a goddess. And he’s somehow the antagonist. He’s the badass of the film out of sheer spite.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Lewis D. Collins (who had a long directing career), this movie would wear it’s budget on it’s sleeves, if it could afford them. The sets are obviously fake, there’s a lot of stock footage used, and the models for the airplanes don’t synch up with each other from scene to scene. There are animals on set, but a good number of them are not native to jungle areas and the whole thing just looks and feels cheap. This was definitely one of the many, many low budget b films cranked out by the studios in the 40s regardless of quality, only this one feels like it was much lower quality than most.
Writing
“Idea” by William Stevens (who was also the producer) and written by Jo Pagano. The story is virtually non-existent. Characters are ill-developed, Bob turns into a backstabbing villain for no reason whatsoever and you can tell that the script was pounded out as soon as possible without any care going into it. The plot itself feels like it might factor in as a subplot to some Adventure Serial, but to carry a whole movie by itself? It doesn’t work.
Sound
Original Music by Irving Getz and an original song, “There’s No One In My Heart But You” by Irving Bibo. That song gets used in the very first scene in a cantina/nightclub, which seems like an odd place to put the one and only musical number.
Conclusion Jungle Goddess is the kind of movie that was cranked out as a means to keep the actors and crew employed until the next film came along through the studio pipeline. This looks like it was cranked out as soon as possible and nearly as quickly forgotten. It’s boring, it’s quite racist, and everyone looks like they’re phoning it in. However, considering it was 1948, it does feature a large cast of black actors, which, considering the general “whiteness” of movies at that time, at least provided them with a paying gig. An offensive, degrading gig, but a gig nonetheless. Not at all recommended.
Shockingly, there are not a lot of clips for this movie online. Suffice it to say that this is little clip is more than enough.
Sports Films! Yeah, that’s a genre that isn’t overwhelmed by clichés. But today’s entry in the bad movie canon avoids a lot of sports clichés in favor of crime and biker movie clichés.So…I guess this is Sportsploitation then. Here’s 1969’s Five The Hard Way, AKA The Sidehackers. A movie so bad they named it twice.
Goddamnit.
Plot
So apparently side-hacking is/was a real thing, as the opening credits hammers home. Apparently you take a motorcycle and add a little sidecar platform with a few handrails to hold onto and then drive around a dirt track at high with a guy dangling on the side for dear life.
Anyway, after winning such a race, our hero and his fiancée spend five minutes or so frolicking through an idyllic hillscape in the most saccharine way imaginable. Sort of like the meadow scene in Attack of the Clones only more convincing. The Villain shows up, gets some maintenance on his bikes, asks the hero to ride with him and gets turned down. The villain’s girl hits on our hero, then gets rejected and falsely accuses Hero of doing naughty things, which then prompts the villain and his crew to beat the shit out of our hero and rape and murder his fiancée.
…Um. Remember when this was about the sport of side hacking?
Anyway, our hero decides to go on a murderous revenge spree to avenge his dead lover which culminates in a big shootout with the villain’s gang.
Spoiler….And then everybody dies. No, really.
You know, maybe this isn’t the best way to advertise a new sport.
Characters Rommel: Ross Hagen plays a gravely voiced anti-hero with a shady past. Now he runs a small bike repair shop and side hacks on the weekends. Then he gets really mad (for good reason) and decides to kill the bad guy, but he tells the gang “no guns” which…well…I guess this Rommel isn’t a magnificent son of a bitch who’s book I should read.
Rita: Diane McBain plays Rommel’s ill-fated girl. Nice enough for a two-dimensional love interest.
Luke: Dick Merrifeld plays Rommel’s buddy/teammate. Luke’s a happily married family man and tries to dissuade Rommel from his murderous course of action. Being the only sensible character in the movie makes him the film’s badass.
J.C.: Michael Pataki plays the Villain with a great deal of scene chewing. He comes to Rommel’s shop to get his bikes maintained and then takes an interest in side hacking. Wears ugly medallions has tremendous mood swings and beats his girlfriend. He’s a complete ASSHOLE.
Paisley: Claire Polan plays JC’s abused and not very smart girlfriend that falls for Rommel, gets rejected and accuses Rommel of assaulting her, which causes the whole ugly snowball of the plot to roll down the hill. Kind of hard to feel sympathy for her.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Gus Trikonis. We get some scenes of side hacking that aren’t very interesting and this happens twice during the film. And only twice. They side hack twice in the entire movie. Which is about side hacking. And one is the opening credits. Then there’s the infamous “meadow scene” that is nothing but padding. It’s a fairly ugly film.
Writing
Larry Billman on story and Tony Huston as writer and I can say very little in their defense. Let’s see. There’s, uhhhh, tertiary characters with memorable nicknames like Nero, Crapout and Cooch/Gooch (varies depending on who’s talking). Yeah. I’ll settle with that.
Sound
Original music by Mike Curb, Guy Hemric & Jerry Styner. The song, “Five the Hard Way” plays over the credits. I have no idea what is the “five” in question or why it can’t take “the easy way.”
Conclusion The Sidehackers/Five The Hard Way is pretty damn awful. It’s a bleak downer of a film where nothing good happens to anybody, and there isn’t a whole lot for the audience to do for the running time. Not exactly the most thrilling endorsement for the obscure motorsport of side hacking.
No trailer, just a clip of really, really bad dialogue to give you a taste of the hurting.
Dateline 1950. The Space Race was in its infancy and rocket-propelled B Movies were getting their start. Rocketship X-M was rushed through production to beat Destination Moon as the “FIRST!” of a new breed of space-based ADVENTURE! films. If this sounds like a bad movie, you’re right.
Plot
So we’ve got a crew of five scientists preparing for the launch of the Rocketship Expedition Moon, or RXM (DUN DUN DUN!) for short. They hold a press conference, then board the rocket with the Moon as their destination and then things go horribly wrong. Through a rather complicated mishap with the fuel, they go way, WAY off course and end up in orbit around Mars. Deciding to land on Mars since they were in the neighborhood (because clearly they have enough fuel for THAT), they encounter the ruins of a civilization, get attacked by primitive locals before returning to the ship.
Then the survivors get back to Earth but they all die because somebody screwed up the math for the fuel supplies and they crash and die. No. Really.
Characters Colonel Floyd Graham: Lloyd Bridges is the ship’s pilot and not really a scientist at all. He tells lots of very boring stories that are only tangentially related to what’s happening and hits on the one female member of the crew constantly.
Dr. Lisa Van Horn: Danish actress Osa Massen plays the lone female on the crew, and she’s described as a kind of “ice queen” that turns down paramours left and right. Obviously, she and Graham get together at some point.
Dr. Karl Eckstrom: John Emery plays the mission commander and most of what goes wrong is his fault. He’s arbitrary about imposing his will, completely browbeats Dr. Van Horn’s calculations (while his own turn out to be fatally wrong) and he’s pretty condescending about his own figures. Kind of an ass.
Major William Corrigan: Noah Beery Jr. plays the ship’s engineer and he’s from Texas! He won’t hesitate to stress the fact that he’s from Texas and that Texas is wonderful, Texas is large and Texas is the greatest state there is. Look, I realize people like this exist, but this is the best they could do for comic relief. Texas-sized comic relief! From Texas!
Harry Chamberlain: Hugh O’Brian plays an astronomer who serves as the ship’s navigator. He’s my pick for the badass of the film since he doesn’t talk much aside from some fatalistic grumblings and largely keeps to himself.
Dr. Ralph Fleming: Morris Ankrum plays the guy in Mission Control. His job is to look concerned all the time and be worried when the Rocket goes off course.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Kurt Neumann, the visuals are…quite low budget. We get some meteor shower stuff, some sight gags with random objects floating in not-quite-zero-gravity. Visually, there’s not much going for this movie since the props, sets, locations and so on were all dictated by the low budget. The movie is also quite proud of its effects of having a coat and some other small items "floating in weightlessness."
Writing
Written by Kurt Neumann and (uncredited) Dalton Trumbo with “additional dialogue” by Orville Hampton. The writing is the real culprit for badness here. Dialogue isn’t good, characters are poorly developed, the science is atrocious (though space science was still pretty new) and the whole sequence of events is pretty damn contrived. I understand that they wanted to stress how dangerous space travel could be, but the rocket should’ve been named Murphy’s Law for the amount of things that went wrong on the journey. And then the movie has the neurotic stones to have Eckstrom, a man of science say that they were forced off course by supernatural intervention. Yes, supernatural intervention brought them to Mars so they could find the shattered remains of a once-great civilization brought low by nuclear war and then after reestablishing contact with Earth on the trip home, the rocket crashes into Nova Scotia and everybody dies. That’s not ADVENTURE! That’s just bad melodrama.
Sound
Original score by Ferde Grofé, the guy who composed “On The Trail” (which appears in a bunch of movies that aren't this one) among other orchestral pieces. He worked on a few movie scores and this was one of them. Well, can’t fault the score for not being quality.
Conclusion Rocketship X-M is one maudlin piece of cinema. Characters are badly realized and make insanely bad decisions to suit the plot, dialogue is bleh, and the whole plot is so grimly melodramatic about getting to the message that nukes are bad (because they wrecked Mars) that it sucks any possible fun out of the experience. Talk about schlock.
You know what we haven’t had in a while? A low budget B Movie filmed in Mexico! 1957’s The Black Scorpion (filmed in English) doesn’t have robots or mummies, but it does have stop motion effects by the guy that did King Kong.
Yay?
Plot
So seismic activity causes a volcano to sprout up overnight in Mexico and two geologists are sent to investigate. Why the rest of the scientific community doesn’t care, I don’t know. Anyway, they find some ruined buildings, a dead cop and an abandoned baby and take the kid to the nearby town of San Lorenzo. The villagers think some kind of demon is at work, but being men of Science, our heroes don’t believe it. Then the MUCH more plausible culprits are revealed: Giant, Prehistoric, Nigh-Invulnerable Scorpions awoken from their ancient, uh…slumber, I guess. Anyway, things go wonky and we get a giant scorpion tearing up Mexico City and knocking down helicopters by the end.
Characters Dr. Hank Scott: Richard Denning plays our American Scientist Hero (Ahh, the Fifties). For all intents and purposes, he is your standard 50s Scientist Hero, complete with a tacked on love interest.
Dr. Arturo Ramos: Carlos Rivas plays the Mexican scientist buddy of Hank’s. Despite being more familiar with local everything and also having a doctorate, he is relegated to sidekick duty. (Ahh, the Fifties).
Teresa Alvarez: Mara Corday plays a rancher in San Lorenzo that meets our Scientist heroes. She’s competent enough, but kind of gets shoe-horned in as Hank’s love interest and sticks around even when the movie leaves San Lorenzo.
Major Cosio: Arturo Martinez plays the military officer who tries to bring the scorpions down with no success.
Dr. Velasco: Carlos Muzquiz plays a renowned entomologist (not etymologist) that our heroes consult with at a few points. They talk about scorpions. And tequila. No joke.
Juanito: Mario Navarro plays the annoying kid who tags along and tries to help but only causes more unnecessary trouble. You know the kind: Where the kid has no real business being there but tags along for a bit, then gets told not to follow the heroes into the dangerous underground caverns but stows away anyway, then proceeds to wander off to be threatened by a monster causing the heroes to go and rescue him in a blatantly annoying attempt to stretch out the tension of the scene even though you know in practical terms the little rascal would’ve been compost a while ago and are kind of rooting for him to bite it? Yeah, that kid.
The Scorpions: Formed in 1965 in Hannover, Germany, they are probably best known for their hit “Rock You Like A Hurricane”--- Oh. Wrong scorpions. Um… These are giant and (presumably) black arthropods that like killing everything they come across and there is one in particular that is larger, stronger and more aggressive that is the “alpha.” The Alpha Scorpion is our badass for the film.
Top of the world, ma!
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Edward Ludwig and stop motion effects supervised by Willis O’Brien. The normal, non-effects shots are all standard B Movie fare with not a whole lot of interesting scenes. The stuff O’Brien pulled off, considering the low budget, is actually pretty good. Well, sort of. The close ups of the scorpions consist of just zooming in on a terrible model of a “scorpion’s” face with drool coming out that they use a bunch of times. However, the actual stop motion critters are actually pretty kickass and there are some cool set pieces, like two guys getting attacked in the desert, a Lionel train (no really) getting derailed by a mob of scorpions, and the fight in Mexico City. And it’s not just scorpions: there’s a spider and some worms too!
Writing
Story by Paul Yawitz and written by Robert Blees and David Duncan, and it is pretty damn bland. Nobody and nothing is memorable and the actors are completely outshined by low-budget effects.
Sound
Original music by Paul Sawtell which is your standard Monster Movie fare and it’s fine for the bombastic action sequences. Then there’s the sound effects that make the scorpions growl and chirp and make other sounds that I’m pretty sure actual scorpions are incapable of making.
Conclusion
Well, The Black Scorpion is a pretty bad movie across the board that manages to do one, and only one, thing right: Giant Stop Motion Scorpions from the guy who basically pioneered the craft. Even late in his career, Willis O’Brien pulled off some great effects scenes with a tiny budget. The rest of the movie is kind of crap, but those scorpions, man. Those scorpions.
Teensploitation. No, it’s not about working long hours for low pay on a golf range for the summer. It’s a film subgenre that tells scandalous stories about teens, starring teens in movies geared toward teens and inexplicable musical numbers. In Fifties terms I suppose that translates to being a bit like Blaxploitation only with white kids, less violence and less nudity. Anyway, I am not at all thrilled to review 1957’s Untamed Youth.
Goddamnit.
Plot
So we’ve got two sisters hitching toward LA that stop to skinny dip in a pond and get picked up by a local cop for indecency and vagrancy. They get taken before a judge who sentences them to 30 days either in prison or a community service-like work program. They opt for the labor and get taken to a cotton farm where they and other untamed youths (DUN DUN DUN!) begin to work off their sentences for long hours and low pay (no golf courses in sight though). Guess what? It’s bad there and the teens are forced to work under all sorts of unfair and unsanitary conditions. Can our lovely ladies survive long enough to get to LA?
Characters Penny Lowe: The lovely Mamie Van Doren is the elder of our hero sisters. She wants to get to LA to be a singer and performer. And she sings a lot during the movie and is the more impulsive of the two. There’s not a whole lot to the character, though she provides a bit of the comic relief here and there, but the real important thing here is that she looks good doing it.
Because I like you, audience.
Jane Lowe: Lori Nelson plays the younger Lowe sisters who is arguably the actual main character. She plays guitar, gets a love interest and has a bunch of scenes that are important to the progression of the plot. She also looks good, just not as…impressive.
Russ Tropp: John Russell (who made a bunch of Westerns) plays our Villain, and what a colossal douchebag Tropp is. Tropp worked out a deal with the judge (with his, er, little combine harvester, if you know what I mean) that gets him dirt cheap labor for his farm and he makes a giant profit off of it. It’s not a very ambitious scheme compared to a lot of the stuff that passes through Castle RMWC’s walls. Still, Tropp’s a big fish in a small pond, and is a total asshole about it.
Bob Steele: Don Burnett plays the square-jawed hero. He’s recently home from the military and happens to be the judge’s son. The judge uses her connections to get him a job with Tropp and Bob quickly realizes two things: The teens are suffering much more than their petty crimes warrant, and Jane is hot. For what it’s worth, he’s the badass of the film because he isn’t afraid to call people out on bullshit and is a friend of JUSTICE.
Jack Landis: Glenn Dixon plays one of Tropp’s main henchmen, though he’s a drunkard and a really ineffective foreman.
Judge Cecelia Steele: Lurene Tuttle plays the government employee who’s been seduced by Tropp. She’s instrumental in his big scheme but is really just being manipulated.
Lillibet: Jeanne Carmen plays one of the teens that’s been there for a while. She was working as a “housekeeper” for Tropp (if you know what I mean), but was booted back into the fields after she let someone else do the vacuuming (if you…okay fine. Of course you know what I mean).
Baby: Yvonne Lime plays a character who gets ill a couple of times in the field and then dies (because Pathos, that’s why). Honestly though, until she died the character was just there and little more than an extra.
Bong: Eddie Cochran (yes, the “ain’t no cure for the summertime blues” guy) in one of his only two acting roles. It’s not much of a part and he sings a song. Cochran didn’t get a chance to do more onscreen stuff because he died in a car crash in 1960 only three years later. Bummer.
Pinky the Cook: Wally Brown is really on in the movie for one scene, as a loquacious cook who jovially banters with the teens during a late night party. He just comes out of nowhere and starts laying out a Christmas Ham of a performance for the movie and then he’s gone, and would’ve been my pick for badass of the film, but then I realized that he’s working for Tropp and knows that he’s serving the kids slop made from dogfood and also recommends Penny go up and “personally audition” for Mr. Tropp, who also owns a local TV station. This guy’s actually rather creepy when you think about it…
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Howard W. Koch (who went on to become the producer of films like Dragonslayer and the two Airplane! movies, so…good career change) The visuals are. They just are. It’s difficult to make farming exciting and this movie is not exciting. Though Mamie Van Doren’s outfits often are, in a 50’s girl-next-door sort of way. Yowza!
Writing
Story by Stephen Longstreet and John C. Higgins. The script is quite mediocre. Dialogue isn’t great, the plot moves rather predictably and the whole thing is a kind of paint-by-numbers affair. Dull & Boring by modern standards.
Sound
Original music and songs written by Les Baxter with most songs performed by Mamie Van Doren and one by Eddie Cochran. The songs are somewhat subpar 50’s pop songs, but they’re inoffensive enough, though with names like “Cottonpicker” and “Oobala Baby” you really can’t expect much.
Conclusion Untamed Youth has very few bright spots, but it does have some high points (if you know what I--shit, sorry). It’s a low budget musical drama and nothing more. It’s not really memorable, certainly not good, and there’s no sea monsters or werewolves or space invaders to really justify watching it for crazy guilty pleasure fun.
So, 1969 was a pretty cool year. It had the Moon Landing, The Italian Job, the Cuyahoga River catching fire again, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Sesame Street began airing, Led Zeppelin releasing their first studio album and Judy Garland…oh. Well, it wasn’t a perfect year. But speaking of Moon Landings, 1969 also had Hammer Studios, famous for their cult classic B-grade horror films like the Christopher Lee Dracula movies, release Moon Zero Two, a B-grade sci-fi movie with no horror elements whatsoever.
Plot
So, after a rather likable animated credits sequence (and the shockingly catchy theme song) that effectively tells us the Moon was colonized sometime in the late 20th Century, we find our hero, formerly the first astronaut on Mars and now the pilot of an old salvage craft called Moon 02 (DUN DUN DUN!) making a living on the Moon. Then we also find a a young woman arriving on the moon to find her prospector brother and shady rich guy with henchmen that is plotting to crash an asteroid laden with sapphire into the Moon and claim it. You better believe these plots intersect and our hero ends up caught in the middle.
Characters Captain William H. Kemp: James Olson plays our receding-hairlined hero (and would later star in The Andromeda Strain). He’s cranky for the entire film, which I guess is understandable since he went from being the first man on Mars to a junk salvager on the Moon.
Clementine Taplin: Catherina von Schell (or Catherine Schell) plays an Earth girl who arrives on the Moon to find her brother and find a job. Unfortunately, she hasn’t heard from her bro in a while and nobody on the Moon seems to have seen him in a while either. She hires Kemp to go look for her him. Obviously the love interest. She also gets stuck wearing some pretty terrible headgear at times too.
Korminski: Ori Levy plays Kemp’s Russian engineer and sidekick. Quick with some deadpan delivery and a reasonably impressive moustache. He’s much less cranky and comes through in a pinch several times, which makes him the badass of the film.
Sheriff Elizabeth Murphy: Adrienne Corri (who was in A Clockwork Orange as the woman in the infamous “Singin’ In The Rain” scene.) plays a Moon cop who’s got a history with Kemp but doesn’t trust him when he starts taking jobs for a bad guy. She also gets saddled with a silly hat.
J.J. Hubbard: Warren Mitchell is our Villain, a goatee and monocle wearing crime boss who intends to crash an asteroid filed with valuable sapphire into a specific area on the Moon and claim the salvage rights on it and make a fortune. Wears a red spacesuit, since everybody who isn’t Kemp or Korminsky are color-coded for your convenience.
Harry: Bernard Bresslaw plays J.J.’s dimwitted henchman. Little more than dumb muscle, he’s a big guy who keeps getting yelled at to not fire his gun in pressurized domes. While he’s a bit slow on the take, he’s actually reasonably quick on the draw. Wears a green spacesuit.
Whitsun: Dudley Foster plays J.J.’s other, smaller henchman who ends up explaining a lot of stuff to Kemp about how they’re going to do stuff. Wears a yellow spacesuit.
Frequent Monty Python collaborator Carol Cleveland was also in the movie in a small role.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Roy Ward Baker, the movie is very clearly low budget, but does still manage to look presentable…in a Swingin’ Sixties sort of way. Spacesuits look like spacesuits, The Moon 02 craft is similar to the Apollo landers and while the effects are low budget there’s nothing like a critical effects failure though the moon bug rovers come close since they look like the Oscar Meyer Weeniemobile.
Writing
Michael Carreras as writer and Martin Davidson, Frank Hardman and Gavin Lyall on story. The script is essentially a Western with British actors with a Sixties aesthetic, only set…IN SPACE! Which really is as weird as it sounds. However, the story stays committed to that conceit and carries that frontier attitude throughout.
Sound
Original music by Don Ellis and the bulk of the soundtrack is taken up by a swingin’ jazz sound with some elements of bebop. The Main Theme, however, which plays over the main credits and crops up throughout the film, is a big, brassy number that will forcibly lodge itself in your ears and Never. Ever. Leave.
Here, listen for yourself.
Conclusion Moon Zero Two is not a good movie. However, for reasons that continue to baffle me, I kinda…liked…it. Quite a bit. Sure, my exposure to it was through MST3K, but I still kind of liked its goofy charm. Well played, Hammer Films; you’ve just convinced me to check out your B Horror films.
Can't find a trailer, but this is a decent taste of the film.
Once more it is time to delve into the realm of bad movies. Today’s nugget of fool’s gold is a 79 minute abomination from 1986 called Robot Holocaust.
Goddammit.
Plot
So we’re on a world/planet/general area called “New Terra.” Apparently it is the distant future and things are very different since the robotic uprising of ‘33. Finally, robotic beings rule the world. And by “rule” I mean, live in a big building with an even bigger basement called the “Power Station” and use humans (called “airslaves” because of their need to breathe air) to actually produce the power the robots need to exist.
Or, as the movie puts it in the title narration: The World had been brought to its knees by the
ROBOT HOLOCAUST (DUN DUN DUN!)
What follows is a plot that lifts heavily from Star Wars AND Conan, and we get some guy from the Wasteland leading a group of ragtag misfits (and a some expendable nameless redshirts) on a mission to find the Power Station and kill/destroy/deactivate the “Dark One.”
Whatever, it’s dumb.
Characters Neo: Norris Culf plays a wastelander who can breathe the poisoned air. Yes, he’s a character named “Neo,” but I’m certain that’s mere coincidence. Anyway, the character has no personality, is somehow able to telepathically communicate with a robot (only does this once, of course) and knows occasional survival tricks when they are beneficial to the plot.
Klyton: Joel Von Ornsteiner (who according to IMDB went on to get a PhD and is apparently a prominent forensic psychologist who’s been a guest expert on various news agencies) plays a robot pickpocket with shades of C-3PO. A “Freebot” (which apparently means “Expositionbot”), he becomes Neo’s sidekick, provides “comic relief” and explains plot points from time to time. Probably has the best robot costume out of the bunch, but that’s damning it with faint praise. All things considered, not THAT annoying, but that is also not saying much.
Jorn: Michael Downend plays a scientist who’s developed a way for humans to survive going into a choking fit when the robots unleash poison gas on the air slaves to keep them in line. He gives himself up to the robots in order to save a bunch of other humans and spends most of the movie in various states of interrogation.
Deeja: Nadine Hartstein plays the daughter of Jorn who is also immune to the gas. Determined and very easy on the eyes, she is also the first person to join up with Neo & Klyton, though she tends to get into peril quite a lot.
Nyla: Jennifer Delora plays the leader of an Amazonian tribe of man-haters that live in the, I shit you not, “She-Zone” which is marked off with something that looks like a “no men’s room” sign. Quite hot, she is a bloodthirsty action girl who goes on the front lines with the rest of the heroes and only joins when she is defeated in combat by one of the nameless redshirts and not the actual hero. That indignity aside, if anyone is the badass of the movie, it’s the lovely, antisocial Nyla.
Kai: Andrew Howarth plays a loin cloth garbed fellow who was the most recent male to trespass into the She-Zone. Apparently the punishment for that is to be stripped down, “forced” to mate with the women, have his tongue cut out and “destroyed.” Sure, the tongue cutting out part sounds rough, but on the bright side, he doesn’t have any dialogue. Doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, really. Actually, it sounds a lot like…
And speaking of Snoo Snoo… Valaria: Angelika Jager plays our main villain, the servant of the Dark One who spends most of the movie in tight fitting clothing getting chewed out by the Dark One and scheming. She’s really hot but has a fairly thick accent. And then there’s the “Pleasure Machine” which, well… It’s really weird and for the MST3K version, most of it was edited out for television. Because boobies.
Torque: Rick Gianasi plays an evil robot underling of the Dark One who looks a lot like a lobster-man-robot-thing in a cape. Not exactly threatening, but apparently he’s the Dark One’s hands-on guy for killing humans and stuff.
The Dark One: A disembodied voice (not listed in the credits) that is apparently the overseer of the evil robot society. He only shows up in the Power Station and only in one big room/level. We never see him, so we’ve no idea what he is. Mostly he just yells at his henchmen to do their jobs and then screws them over anyway because he’s a jackass.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Tim Kinkaid (who in addition to a few other low budget 80s movies has written and directed a staggering number of gay porn films under the pseudonym “Joe Gage,” which is another sentence I never thought I’d ever write)
Visually, the movie isn’t very good. The costumes are generally bad with the humans wearing somewhat tattered fur/faux fur (which tend to emphasize the cleavage of the buxom females) and the robots looking slightly better (all five of them). There are also some shitty mutants that attack the heroes in a random encounter. There are also the monsters, which aren’t very good either (there’s wall worms that are essentially sock puppets and a web beast that is one arm of a giant spider puppet).
Writing
Written by Tim Kincaid, the story follows an on-rails plotline with dialogue that often doesn’t work right. One character will ask a question and the reply will either cryptically avoid an answer or explain an unrelated plot point. Characters will wander off for no valid reason. One could spend hours picking apart the flaws with the story and I don’t really have the patience to do so right now. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll use this instead:
No, context wouldn’t help it make sense.
Sound
Synthesizers with occasional orchestral touches. None of it is very good or memorable and all of it apparently lifted from older B-movies. Which would explain the sudden shifts in score.
Conclusion Robot Holocaust itself is just plain bad, but actually looking it up after watching it led to a case of “too much information.” I know I’m a weirdness magnet, but I think something went *ping* in my head as I was writing this.
Goodness, is it time for more cinematic schlock? Why yes, I think it is. Today’s Cold War gem comes from 1953 and was something that science fiction legend Robert A. Heinlein effectively disowned, so you know it’s a winner. Here’s Project Moonbase.
Plot
In the distant future of 1970 the USSF (United States Space something-that-begins-with-F) (and their tight fitting skullcaps, t-shirts and bicycle shorts) will be sufficiently advanced enough to have orbiting space stations shaped like Frisbees from which a module will finally perform a survey mission to evaluate the possibility of putting a man on the Moon. However, the enemies of FREEDOM and AMERICA (who aren’t outright stated to be the Russians, but it’s a movie from 1953, so you do the math) will be plotting to destroy the space station and sneak a saboteur onto the project. Can the two legitimate astronauts on board the Magellan Space Module prevent that disaster while sorting out their own unresolved sexual tension?
Yeah, that’s it. That’s the plot. Apparently it was intended as the pilot of a TV series, but when it got expanded into a feature film, Heinlein didn’t take kindly to the changes and disowned it.
Characters “Dr. Werhner”: Larry Johns plays both the actual scientist and the damn dirty fifth columnist who impersonates him. There’s not a whole lot to the character other than he’s a spy who’s not exactly thrilled to be a bad guy who answers to a guy who looks like a cross between Bob Hope & Michael Ironside.
Major Bill Moore: Ross Ford plays our square-jawed hero who wants to be the pilot of the survey craft, but because of politics, he gets bumped to co-pilot in favor of his not-quite girlfriend, not-quite ex.
Colonel Briteis: Donna Martell is the pilot of the Magellan and while a capable astronaut, politics had a part to play in her swift promotion. Still, she’s the only character that has any real kind of backstory/motivation, and she also looks pretty good in those shorts, so what the hell, she’s our badass.
Visuals/Effects
Directed by Richard Talmadge, the film is about what you’d expect from something like this. The astronaut costumes aside from the space suits are ridiculous and the spacecraft are absurdly obvious low quality models. The USSF space station (SPACOM, apparently) looks too much like a Frisbee to be mere coincidence.
SPACOM!
Still, the rocket effects aren’t that bad, just obviously fake. There are also some gratuitous split-screen effects on the space station to represent the wacky gravity of the station. Think “Lionel Ritchie Dancing on the Ceiling” only with white people and no dancing.
Writing
Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Seaman on story/screenplay duty. There is actually nothing good I can say here. Dialogue is bland, characters are flat and the story is dull, dull, dull. It’s as though Heinlein wasn’t even trying. It is a long 63 minutes.
Sound
The original music by Herschel Burke Gilbert is about what you’d expect for a Sci-Fi B-Movie. Nothing more, nothing less.
Conclusion
Well, the Moon Landing (which is, of course, as phony as a heliocentric solar system) took place in 1969, so the movie was only off by 1 year. So…I guess that’s… good…? I don’t know, I’m fishing for compliments. Briteis is cute?
Look, this is just a really, really, really boring Sci-Fi movie. There’s no craziness, no memorable characters, not even laughably bad special effects failures. It’s just a big bag of boring. The only way this could possibly be enjoyable is if three people were watching it and making fun of it.
Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A city becomes enveloped by a thick fog out of which come strange monsters who kill people and the heroes are a small group of survivors from different walks of life who are desperately trying to keep on living.
No, it’s not The Mist! It’s a film made 44 years before that drab disappointment bored me to insane laughter. It’s 1963’s own boring wall of gray, The Slime People.
Plot
So our hero, a sports reporter, is flying his single prop plane into Los Angeles and almost crashes when he passes through a thick fog. Landing, he finds the airfield completely empty and wonders what the hell is going on when a station wagon pulls up. Inside are a scientist and his two nubile daughters (because scientists always have nubile daughters in these kinds of films). Mr. Scientist has been trying to figure out what’s been going on with the fog that pops up at night and through the miracle of an expository newsreel the heroes find, the audience learns with them as apparently some kind of seismic whatever has pissed off a race of subterranean Slime People (DUN DUN DUN!) who have invaded LA, slaughtered thousands and erected some kind of solid fog wall around the city that is keeping the US Military out. So now it’s up to our plucky survivors to figure out a way to tear down that wall before the Slime People somehow manage to lower the dew point in LA permanently so they can live on the surface in a foggy, slimy paradise. If any of this sounds exciting, get ready for disappointment.
Characters Tom Gregory: Robert Hutton is our Hero and a Sportscaster by trade. Now, to the movie’s credit, they actually kind of have him do something that ties in to his trade at one point. One night, the survivors are in a TV studio and he tries to broadcast a warning using a TV camera. Of course it doesn’t work, but at least they pretended to have his backstory be relevant in the main action. Other than that, he’s the main character and for some reason becomes the leader of the group.
Professor Galbraith: Robert Burton is the older man of Science who spends the movie trying to figure out a way to break down the wall (I’m only sparing you the trouble of watching this by telling you it’s table salt).
Lisa Galbraith: Susan Hart is the older, brunette daughter and aside from being the main driver of the crew, she and Tom Gregory develop a thing, because this is exactly the kind of movie to shoehorn in an obligatory romance subplot or two.
Bonnie Galbraith: Judee Morton plays the younger blonde sister and speaking of obligatory romance subplots: she and the young marine start up a thing too, though to be fair, that romance makes a little more sense since they’re both very young and hormonal. Late in the movie, Bonnie ends up getting kidnapped by the slime people, apparently as a lure to the other humans, but this makes no sense in the context of the rest of the story since our would-be Monster-Americans have been on a take no prisoners kick.
Cal Johnson: William Boyce plays a young Marine who is one of (if not only) the few military survivors in LA. He’s useful since he’s got some guns, but he’s also something of a habitual coward, so I guess that makes him a glass badass.
Norman Tolliver: Les Tremayne plays an eccentric, reclusive writer who is first seen carrying a goat around. ‘Cause he’s eccentric and wacky. He’s a latecomer to the group and adds absolutely NOTHING aside from a warm body for the slime people to kill to give the other characters the semblance of emotional response to it. Although, to his credit, he hams it up big for the brief time he’s around.
The Slime People: Apparently over half of the movie’s budget went toward the design and manufacture of the Slime People costumes, and you know what? For a 1960’s low budgeter, they’re pretty decent. Described as having scales and a covering of slime (hence the name) they are able to effectively conquer LA despite their primary weapons being spears. That makes them pretty badass relatively speaking. Unfortunately, the fog accompanies them whenever they’re on screen, so you will never, EVER get a good look at them.
Best picture I could find.
Visuals/Effects
Robert Hutton directed as well (and this was the actor’s only directorial effort). Now, the movie’s bad, no doubt about it, but let’s take a good look at why. The acting and writing are par for the course for B Movies, but the visuals, that’s where it really falls apart. We’ve got a fog. Not just any fog, but a thick, floor-to-ceiling blanket whenever the slime people are on screen. Yes, I get that it’s their shtick, but by the end of the movie, the fog gets so thick that it obscures EVERYTHING on screen in a sheet of gray so the big, climactic fight scene is nothing but a bunch of voices shouting and slime people gurgling.
It actually looks like this at points.
Now to go on a bit of a tangent, this is one of the major reasons I hated The Mist too (though admittedly, the talent involved in making that movie is much, much, much, much better). There are monsters hiding in the fog that want to kill you, that’s an old idea, but in both of these movies, said fog is a giant wall of obscuration that stretches on and on and on (worse in Slime People since it also obscures the foreground). It is completely uniform, not particularly dark and in no way is it menacing for a viewer. Imagination is a key component of something scary and filling the screen with one color works fine for brief moments, but as the foundation for the entire feel of the movie it gets boring fast. The eyes have nothing to do during lulls in the action (if they can even see the action) which is just boring and evaporates the tension. I’m not saying fog is a complete no-no in visual storytelling. I’m saying that wall-to-wall fog is. Case in point for good fog usage: the old Universal Horror movies. In those films, the quasi-gothic art style is enhanced by the occasional gloomy fog that oppressively hovers and swirls near the ground. It has depth. It has distance. It obfuscates without obscuring the scene, hiding sections of the locations but allowing the eye to soak in enough detail to piece together a place in the mind. It hides just enough to let the viewer fill in the hypothetical rest of the image.
Now I never want to write about the use of fog ever again.
Writing
Blair Robertson & Vance Skarstedt on script duties, and, well, it’s the standard platter of B Movie elements. The Slime People can be your standard metaphor for mankind’s hubris for tampering with the laws of nature or something since they are provoked into invading the surface. Or something. I don’t know, it reminds me a little of the many, many times the Fantastic Four fought the armies of the Mole Man. It’s not really worth looking too closely at since the story elements, while not exactly good, aren’t anything that hasn’t been seen before.
Sound
Lou Foman, Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter deliver a fairly standard, inoffensive score for this kind of film.
Conclusion
So yeah, The Slime People. It’s bad and you can’t really see anything for most of the movie. And it has the same basic plot as The Mist. And it has the same visual reason why I was bored by The Mist. So apparently today’s lesson is that horror movies that overdo it on the fog machines are bad. And it only took me 1300 words to get there!
Holy shit, the trailer actually shows more clear shots of the slime people than the actual movie.
Hooboy. There’s bad movies, and then there’s epically bad, head scratching, WTF inducing piles of offal that make you wonder how they ever got released. Years ago, I saw a pseudo-documentary compiling clips from old, bad movies called It Came From Hollywood, and the few seconds of screen time from our next feature were lodged in my brain. Thanks, brain. For that I’m going to increase my alcohol consumption to punish you. It’s time to take a look at one of the most infamously bad movies of all time, 1953’s Robot Monster IN 3-D!! Well, in 2-D at least.
Plot
So we’ve got a kid who’s big into science fiction playing around in a “space helmet” with his sister and they run into some archeologists looking around in a cave, then their mother and older sister find them and have a picnic. Riveting. Then the kid wanders off back to the cave and the lightweight falls down when there’s a flash of lightning (or something), then we cut to incredibly random shots of reptiles from other movies, both real and stop motion, fighting with each other. Then the kid wakes up and is almost spotted by the monster of the film, who emerges from the cave (which is his base apparently, since there’s a bubble making machine at the entrance) and has a conversation with his overlord, where the audience finds out that all but eight human beings have been wiped out by the Robot Monster (DUN DUN DUN). The kid runs back to his family, who are holed up in a ruined building and we learn that his older sister, his dad and his dad’s assistant are scientists trying to find a way to beat the monster. Oh, and since the dad & assistant were the archeologists from the beginning, it’s not really a spoiler to say that this entire movie is a dream sequence when the movie lays it out for you.
Characters Johnny: Gregory Moffett plays our young kid hero. In the beginning section, he’s just a sci-fi obsessed kid, but in the dream he’s a really dumb protagonist who keeps wandering off into danger and at one point, decides to confront the monster and ends up spilling all of the beans about how his family survived the death ray that killed 99% of the population. Way to hand the bad guy the nails for the coffin, kid.
The Professor: John Mylong is an archeologist in the framing sequence and the kid’s father in the dream, where he developed a serum that would’ve granted humanity immunity to pretty much all diseases but only had time to test it on 8 people. Hmmm… 8 test cases, 8 survivors… Also, he’s got a German accent for no story reason whatsoever (other than perhaps the actor himself being Austrian).
Mother: Selena Royle (misspelled Royale in the credits), is Johnny’s mother and…that’s about it.
Carla: Pamela Paulson plays Johnny’s annoying little sister. The best thing I can say about the character is that she gets strangled by the villain late in the picture.
Alice: Claudia Barrett plays the attractive older sister who’s also a scientist. She ends up being really important since she catches the villain’s eye, if you know what I mean (only if you’re also picturing a guy in a gorilla costume carrying her around the hills which YOU SHOULD).
Roy: George Nader plays the young male scientist assistant who, in the dream sequence, is Alice’s boyfriend/fiancée/only viable mate.
Ro-Man: Played by George Barrows and voiced by John Brown, this, I’m afraid, is our badass. A man in a gorilla costume with a plastic diving helmet & antennae. With the help of a bubble machine and some stock footage, this is the creature that wiped out humanity. And he gets to work on finishing the job until he discovers Alice, and his Ro-Man heart starts to question his mission to wipe out all the hu-mans. He takes orders from the Great Guidance, which is the same costume (and voice) with a slight variation.
Visuals/Effects
Man, low budget doesn’t even begin to describe this movie. Supposedly shot in a matter of days, they didn’t even have the money to afford a full space monster costume, so director Phil Tucker got his friend George Barrows to wear his gorilla costume with a different headpiece. Then there’s the sequences of dinosaurs and lizards fighting, which is just old footage from One Million B.C. and Flight To Mars and makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FILM. NONE!!!
Although apparently the 3-D effects were quite decent back in the day, so, uh, hooray?
Let's see Ro-Man again...
Writing
The screenplay by Wyott Ordung is pretty bad, but I can see what they were going for; a post apocalyptic tale of humanity’s struggle to survive against a race that unreasonably hates it (there’s probably a Cold War metaphor in there somewhere), and I have to give that plot some credit for guts. After all, it kills off a defenseless (and really stupid) girl and then kills the young hero type guy with the strong implication that the Ro-Man finally does wipe out humanity. But of course the framing device lets us know that it’s only a dream right from the start, so they kind of backpedal on that apocalypse pretty quick.
Or do they???
Well, yeah, they do. It’s the kind of story that would make sense as a short story, but not as a 66 minute piece of schlock.
Sound
Oh man, Elmer Bernstein, what were you doing slumming it here? Oh well, at least the music for this pile was good.
Conclusion
Well, it’s short, I’ll give it that, but honestly, Robot Monster is easily one of the worst movie’s I’ve ever seen. This is definitely Z grade cinema, right here. It just stumbles right into "so bad it's good" territory. This is one of the big ones, right up there with Ed Wood's stuff & Manos the Hands of Fate.
Boy, that trailer text sure does sell you a bill of fare.
