Gamera: Super Monster

 

Gamera: Super Monster
1980
Noriaki Yuasa

Look, as kaiju fan, you learn to deal with low budgets, cheap sets, and incredible levels of silliness. None of that will prepare you for how bottom of the barrel Gamera: Super Monster is in terms of well… everything. By 1980 Gamera’s home studio, Daiei, was in deep financial trouble so they decided to throw whatever they could into a film with minimal cost to try and generate some profit. It worked for a little while as Daiei limped along until finally closing for good in 2002. We did get three excellent
Gamera movies in the 1990s out of this, so in that respect we should thank Gamera: Super Monster.
 

 This may be the only reason we should thank it.

Some aliens show up to cause trouble like always do in Gamera movies. The earth is protected by three women, creatively called the Space Women, who are not very good at their jobs. The Space Women get help from a kid who can call Gamera to fight back against the onslaught of familiar monsters that the aliens are unleashing on Earth. Can even Gamera face all his fast foes at once and save the day? That is a much more exciting description of what amounts to 80% stock footage, shot on video sequences, and a final ignoble end for our hero.

The majority of this film is complied out of reused footage from the previous Gamera films. We get a parade of fights with Gyaos, Barugon, etc. To sit through recycled fight after recycled fight is agony. These fights have no connection to the story, there are no stakes, nothing to push the plot along. I can compare it to the inserted wrestling matches in luchador films, they exist to take up time and nothing else.

"A tiny space ship!"

Somehow the scenes with the Space Women are even worse if not as boring. They feel slight and silly, which could be fine, Gamera movies are no strangers to being silly. Even at their silliest, they at least made some attempt to show characters in danger. The Space Women are presented as just embarrassingly bad at their jobs. They aren’t particularly fun to watch.

The film looks like it shot on video and converted over to film. This not only makes the movie look incredibly cheap, but it makes the reused footage stand out even worse than it would normally. The effects are mostly video based and look terrible for even a late stage Gamera film.

 

"Good-bye everyone! I hope someone makes
a kick-ass reboot in the 1990s!"

 

The awful cherry on top of this movie is the half-assed way it kills off Gamera, lazily crashing him into a spaceship and then having someone tell us he’s dead. I understand that this was a minimal effort cash grab for a series that had been dead and gone for some time, but it is still a sad send off for a character with plenty of fans.

I consider myself a big of Gamera (I even recently an essay about it), but this not a film that I revisit often. It’s pure pain and not the fun kind you can get from a bad movie.

Alien Vows

Alien Vows
1996
Michael Ricks

Alien Vows is basically I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) albeit with a layer of sleaze and gore that to make it more palatable for the direct to video market of the 1990s. It is also far more uncharitable to its women characters than its 1950s counterpart. Sadly, that cruelty ramps up to the point where Alien Vows burns through its cheap charm and becomes something unpleasant, which is too bad, since it could have been a (very) minor cult gem.

 
The completely unoriginal plot follows a group of turtleneck wearing aliens as they land on Earth and prepare to find a suitable woman to impregnate with their DNA. What seems like a simple plan becomes over complicated as they a) have one of their own disguise themselves as a human and b) kill all women who can’t have children. The b part of the plan is mysterious because I don’t how this this helps them in any way and only serves to draw attention to their whole operation. An alien hunter (William Cook) gets involved in the whole and mess eventually.

"No, this is really my hair. What are you talking about?"

 

This movie primarily exists to serve up tits and blood, in this respect it is successful as there plenty of both on display. The gore effects are simple, relegated to copious amounts of the blood splashed on actors. The aliens use a simple and cost effective telekinesis to kill their targets. The alien costumes themselves look surprisingly good when lit correctly but fail to impress when shot in bright light. The less said about the miniature work and the Super Soakers disguised as ray guns the better.

Alien Vows attempts to bring some romantic tension between the alien hunter and Cindy (Charleen McCrory) the woman being chased down by the aliens for her fertility. There is no chemistry and it’s just a lot of watching two people sitting on a blanket in the desert while trying not to laugh at the alien hunter’s unfortunate extensions.

The perfect pick-up line.

 

The movie falls into a rhythm of the aliens killing random people with telekinesis, some sex scenes and flat dialog. Nothing particularly great going on here other than taking joy in some low rent exploitation. Near the end of the film, things take an ugly twist when a character is raped and pointlessly murdered for no other reason than to give the male character some righteous anger when going into the final showdown. This whole sequence drains the film of any fun it might have been having prior. Sure, they walk back a lot of it by the end the movie but the damage is done.

Alien Vows is a disaster that could have at least been a fun disaster but make some very unfortunate story choices late in the third act in an attempt to up the tension. I can’t recommend sitting through this entire film. Find some clips, check out the aliens murdering people in the streets and then go watch I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It’s a much better film.

Man Beast

 

Man Beast
1956
Jerry Warren

"I'd shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together...I was in the business to make money. I never, ever tried in any way to compete, or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I'd get a few dollars. It's not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude...You didn't have to go all out and make a really good picture." – Jerry Warren

Let’s talk about Jerry Warren. I hate every one of his films. They are boring. They are shot poorly. They are acted poorly. Half the time, he takes a perfectly serviceable film from another country and makes it far worse by chopping it up and editing in his own dull scenes like some kind of coma inducing Godfrey Ho. If Jerry Warren had been born a few decades later he would have been pumping out artless crap for the Syfy Channel. His movies don’t bore me to sleep they bore me to rage. A unique skill granted, but ‘pissing off some trans girl sixty-five years into the future’ isn’t the most useful ability. Still, Mr. Warren is an auteur in that respect.  

 

"Oh, you're eating this fucking churro, pal."

 

That said, Man Beast is the Jerry Warren movie I hate the least (insofar as such things can be measured). It’s his first film, so there at least appears to some effort put into the story. Connie Hayward (Virgina Manyor) mounts an expedition to try and find her brother who vanished on an earlier trip to the Himalayas to discover the Yeti. Along the way, the group meets a very strange person by the name of Varga (George Skaff) who offers to help, but is obviously up to no good. 

(One plot element that seems to come up more often than not in Yeti films is the Yeti stealing human women to mate with. It’s weird and gross. Stop it. )

Look it’s not much, but we have definable goals for the protagonists, a mysterious threat, and even a plot complication with a traitor in midst of the heroes. These are all things that will vanish from Warren’s oeuvre soon enough so enjoy them while you can. I can even appreciate the guerilla tactics Warren used to get this film made, from making up fake names to fill out the cast to climbing fences to film on other studios' sets, that is the kind of fun passion that makes filmmaking interesting. In the end Warren was in it for the money and not in the Roger Corman way where he fostered dozens of artists in the process.

"I'm just saying it would be better if you got
swell hat like the rest of us."

I guess if you’re the kind of person who thinks voluntarily watching anything Jerry Warren made is a good idea, then I would watch Man Beast. It is a step above something like The Creeping Terror (1964), but only just so. Man Beast is the only Jerry Warren film I will damn with faint praise rather than loud anger.
 

It’s an Xmas miracle.

The Snow Creature

 

The Snow Creature
1954
W. Lee Wilder

The Snow Creature takes its cues from King Kong (1933) in several ways, starting with the plot structure. The first half of the film we have explorers in dangerous territory, instead of the jungles of Skull Island, we are faced with the inhospitable mountains of the Himalayas. We get a taste of some good old fashioned Hollywood racism with some evil Sherpas (who speak Japanese for some reason) instead of Skull Island natives. Both sets of adventurers end up catching their respective legendary monsters and bringing them back to civilization where they escape and cause mayhem in the streets. The main difference is that King Kong is exciting and holds a legendary place in cinema, and The Snow Creature is a cheap b-movie, albeit one of the first times the Yeti was brought to American cinemas.

 

The Yeti has great posture.

 

The Yeti presented here isn’t a great example, looking more like a tall man wearing an ushanka, perhaps this was some attempt at cold war subtext but it doesn’t seem to play into anything. The Yeti is relegated to only a few scenes including an endlessly repeated sequence of it walking out of the shadows or back into the shadows accomplished by simply reversing the same few frames. The creature lacks any personality being neither bestial enough to frighten or sympathetic enough to make the viewer feel anything when it finds itself trapped in an alien environment. The humans on the other hand are pretty awful, vengeful, greedy, and violent. The Snow Creature exists in a miserable world with no levity or humanity.

While much of the production is shoddy and the direction uninspired (I would expect no less from the person who brought us Killers from Space (1954)), there is a dark undertone to the story that I found interesting. During the film we have a continuing reference to families. Surba (Teru Shimada), the lead Sherpa takes over the expedition in order to kill the Yeti and rescue his wife who was taken by the beast. It turns out the Yeti not only has Surba’s wife but also a family of its own who are killed in a cave-in. At the climax of the film, Peter Wells (Leslie Denison), an L.A. detective and expectant father kills the Yeti and is shortly after notified that his wife has given birth. There is this cycle of families being preyed on and destroyed that doesn’t bode well for the his family’s future.

 

I widowed a yeti and you murdered him. Let's grab a drink.

  

The Snow Creature might be one of the first Yeti movies but it’s far from a good movie in and of itself. It has some value as a curio but little beyond that. The ingredients are here to make something interesting but the direction and script fail that core material at all every turn. I can only recommend The Snow Creature for you Yeti completists and even then I’d save it for an afternoon where can fold your laundry while it plays.

The Majorettes

The Majorettes
Bill Hinzman
1987

The Majorettes opening credits are a prime example of the 1980s aesthetic that a lot of modern films try to capture. It features heavy buzzing synths and imagery of the flickering title including a skeleton that occupies the space between cool and hopelessly silly. The film itself never achieves this balance but it does a have few surprises along the way. Are they enough to save the film from itself? That depends on the reason you are watching.

The Majorettes starts out like of the other dozens of slasher movies from the era. There are some horny majorettes and a goof in all camouflage is sneaking around and slitting their throats. Since The Majorettes emerged just as the slasher heyday was crumbling under an onslaught of film censorship, the kills are largely bloodless and that definitely lessens the impact of the horror. There is also the strange choice to have layers of voices making dinosaur roaring sounds while the killer does his thing. A slasher in just a camouflage outfit isn’t an interesting choice, especially by 1987 when we had the likes of Freddy Krueger on the slasher scene.

"No, don't flush the toilet, AAARRRGH!"

Then things take a bit of twist. The killer is revealed well before the end of the film and pressed into service by an evil couple. From this point on The Majorettes becomes an action revenge film complete with a shirtless hero machine gunning his way through bad guys. It’s a weird twist but it does liven up proceedings just a little. The Majorettes performs another genre trick by ending on a final moment that is legitimately disturbing, probably the only real moment of horror in the whole film and they do it through implication rather than yet another poorly edited throat slitting.

Where the film really falls down is in its characterization. I realize this is a low rent slasher film and odds are it never was going to have strong characters, but most of the characters in this film don’t rise above odious. I expect that from the killer and the gang, but the majorettes themselves barely rise above helpless targets. 

This is happens to people who repeatedly pee in the pool.

The soundtrack is a delight, a throwback to earlier 1980s slashers with harsh analog synthesizers. It is far and away the most successful element of the entire film. This feels like the gritty kind of score that a lot of modern synthwave music tries to recapture, but this is real thing. A cheap yet effective soundtrack to a cheap ineffective movie. 

In the end The Majorettes has a lot of elements that just don’t plain work mixed with some novel ideas. Nothing here blends together well enough to elevate the material beyond being a quirky slasher. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining at times, but there is lost potential to be something so much more than it is.  The whole plot is confusing mishmash of slasher movie, biker film, murder mystery, and T&A exploitation but it never finds its voice.

Unseen Evil

Unseen Evil (aka The Unbelievable)
1999
Jay Woelfel

A college professor and small group hire a native guide to help locate an ancient burial ground. It turns out they have actually come to rob the place blind of its extraordinary treasures. Something monstrous and unseen awakens when they do.

Unseen Evil is the kind of shelf filler that you might expect to have found at your local rental place. It contains that most of cost saving of monsters, the invisible kind. Since this was 1999, Unseen Evil features some very primitive (and also cost saving) CGI. So, right at the start Unseen Evil looks like it is going to be another dated and dull bit of rental fodder. It turns out it is very dated looking, but it also manages to be entertaining despite itself. Go into it with some lowered expectations and you might be pleasantly surprised.

"Ooh a wheat penny!"

Unseen Evil pulls in a surprisingly strong cast and the uses them in unusual ways. It has b-move stalwarts Tim Thomerson as a horny park ranger and Richard Hatch as the head of the nefarious expedition to steal native artifacts. We also get Cindy Pena as the native and local guide, Dana, along with Mike (Frank Ruotolo), and Williams (Jere Jon).  Everyone does a decent job with what they are given, and in what I feel like is influenced by the popularity of Tarantino films around this time, our gang of would-be tomb raiders are more than happy to pull pistols on each other in a constantly twisting series of allegiances.

If Unseen Evil has one thing going for it, is a level of unpredictability in who is going to get killed and when. The standard format for most monster films is to have the cast picked off one at a time and it usually is not so difficult to figure out who is going to die and in what order. Unseen Evil manages to buck this order just a little, but it is enough to give the story a little more spark than it would have otherwise. It isn’t much but by the standards of VHS fare from this era, I will take what I can get.

"Ooh a wheat penny!"

The mostly invisible monster of Unseen Evil is exactly what you’re going to expect. It is a stiffly animated CGI creature. You never really get a clear sense of what it looks like or how big it is. Most of the time it is invisible and when it does make an appearance it is a transparent mess of textures. If you’re here for any kind of satisfying creature action, I would definitely look somewhere else. The creature does come with a mildly interesting background involving a Native American tribe and flying saucers. 

Unseen Evil isn’t a great film by any standards, but it does manage to rise (very) slightly above the rest. If you have a taste for ephemeral movies that will relegated to the dark corners where obsessives lurk (Hi, there.) maybe give it at try.

 

Flyin' Ryan

Flyin’ Ryan
2003
Linda Shayne

Ryan Maguire (Andy Weiss) is a twelve-year-old kid. He and his mom move in with Aunt Rita (Connor Snyder), an odd woman with some sinister habits. The local skateboard gang starts picking on Ryan because he is new in town, or has red hair, the movie is unclear on this aspect. Soon, Ryan comes into possession of some shoes with magical reflectors on them that allow him to fly. This helps him save a dog or something… I don’t know...

"I don't know what's going either."

The plot of Flyin' Ryan is all over the place. It begins as a fish out of water story as we have a dorky kid forced into awkward situations, in this case, a new home, and local bullies. We are also introduced to some supernatural undertones as his house may be haunted. This goes a step further when a cowboy ghost shows in the wild west town on the outskirts of the city that is totally real and not some tourist trap place that sells you t-shirts. It is from this unholy specter that Ryan receives the magical reflectors that make his shoes fly.

Why would reflectors make shoes fly? Why would an old-timey ghost have reflectors? With all this investment into the flying shoes as a plot device, they are all but forgotten during the middle of the film. Instead we deal with a local skateboard gang and a dog that is introduced very late into the movie. The whole thing turns into a 'rescue the stolen dog story' that is completely bereft of anything supernatural.

Visual masterpiece.

There are many disjointed story elements that never amount to anything, a random karate stunt, a belly dancing scene that comes out of nowhere, a bit of drama as Aunt Rita is hospitalized. This disjointedness is really the most notable thing about what is an otherwise formulaic kid’s movie. Ryan’s shoes help do things he can’t normally do and they always work. I defy you to come up with a message behind this film other than, “We got some money to promote Heelys and made a movie around it.”

Ryan’s magical shoes are Heelys, the shoes with wheels that kids used to love, Here they are provided by the company for some free product placement. I don’t understand the connection with flying, it seems like a better promotion for your wheeled shoes would be, well, skating. There is even a natural set-up here as Ryan runs afoul of the local skateboard gang. This could have been the Gleaming the Cube (1989) of wheeled shoe movies, but instead, it’s a worse Skateboard Kid (1993).

Does his shirt say TERRACE BOOB?

Flyin’ Ryan is shot on digital video and every interior looks cheap and flat while the exterior shots look rather nice with their natural lighting. Knowing that this was a low budget kids movie, I figured that the flying effects would be unimpressive, they are not good but also not remarkably terrible.

This seems to be a good summation of the Flyin' Ryan itself: Not good, but not remarkably terrible.

The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus

The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus
1962
Roul Haig

Dr. Momus Alexander Morgus aka Morgus the Magnificent (Sidney Noel Rideau) was a television horror host from the 1950s to the 1980s originating from New Orleans, Louisiana. Horror hosts have a long and storied history popping up in regional television all over the world, beginning with Vampira in 1954 the tradition carries on to today.

"This presidential portrait is coming along splendidly!"

In general horror hosts existed to add a little flair to prepackaged or public domain films that television stations could air for cheap while still pulling in that sweet sweet ad revenue from the commercial breaks. A horror host will usually introduce the film and offer commentary or skits interspersed at the breaks. This means that audiences see a host in action for only a few minutes at a time and that these characters are usually very broad in order to maximize their impact in such a short period of time. What happens when that same character has to carry an 83-minute film with no opportunity to take a break with either a rubber monster movie or an ad for used cars?

In the case of The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus, nothing good.

There is a plot in The Wacky World of Doctor Morgus, but the movie takes its own sweet time getting around to a kooky and extremely 1960s affair involving Morgus making a machine that can turn people into sand and back again. A tiny nation catches wind of this invention and creates a plan to sneak spies into the governments of major countries all over the world. There are a lot of tiring hijinks with spies wielding terrible phony Eastern Bloc accents doing stuff and Morgus being grotesque and oblivious to all. All this supposed comedy is smashed into your ears as well as your eyes thanks to an overbearingly zany score full of wah-wah trumpets and other comedy sounds that were already worn out by 1962.

It's still better than House of 1000 Corpses.

The scenes with Morgus and his weird inventions or him dealing with normal people just seem to go on with no end. These scenes might work fine as short skits, Dr. Morgus himself is a fun character, perfectly embodying the whole ‘monster kid’ culture that arose in the 1950s with the advent of E.C. Comics and American International Pictures, but he has very little to play against. Later Elvira would star in her own movie and the lesson seems to be learned there, a horror host centered movie not only needs a plot it also needs other decent characters to interact with.

If you’re a horror history completist or even a horror history fan, you might have some interest in The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus, just be warned it is neither scary nor funny. It might even work better to occasionally pause the film and watch 5-10 minutes of another low budget horror movie to simulate the horror host experience. It certainly can’t be worse than sitting through this film from beginning to end uninterrupted.

It's Alive!

It’s Alive!
1969
Larry Buchanan

Larry Buchanan was given a tiny amount of money to crank out a batch of TV movies that mostly drew from the American International Pictures (AIP) library as sources for the remakes. This series includes such luminaries as the remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) titled, The Eye Creatures (1965), and a redo of It Conquered the World (1956), which was called Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1966).  Not all of these films were remakes though, It’s Alive* is an original story albeit from a script that was kicked around AIP and never actually made into a film. After watching It’s Alive, some might suggest it still hasn’t been.

Norman (Corveth Ouserhouse) and Leela (Shirley Bonne) are newlyweds driving across the country when they manage to run out of gas and attract the attention of Wayne (Tommy Kirk), a paleontologist. They all decide to wander over to a nearby farm looking for gas. The farm is owned by a guy named Greely (Bill Thurman) and not only does he not have gas but he manages to lock everyone in the caves by his house. In the cave is Greely’s favorite pet, a giant dinosaur-man.

"Alright folks, let's get to Kirk..."

Out of all Buchanan’s TV movie output, It’s Alive is probably the best one. It has a compelling set-up and a decent proto Texas Chain-Saw Massacre (1974) vibe with unsuspecting travelers wandering into the backwoods den of a madman. The overgrown swaps and caves contribute to the oppressive atmosphere. Things keep up a steady pace until a lengthy flashback drags everything to a complete stop. The movie struggles to get back up to speed with a big finale, and it’s a credit to the script that it almost succeeds.

I tend to give older films some leeway when it comes to special effects, especially something as impoverished as this production, but the dinosaur-man that Greely is keeping captive is especially embarrassing.  Not only is it reused from an earlier Buchanan film, Creature of Destruction (1967), it is a decidedly non-scary ping pong balled eyed goof. It looks nothing like a dinosaur, and it’s never in the same frame as any of the actors. It is a complete failure… or perhaps an absurd success depending on the reason you are watching.

Are you scared yet?

If for some reason you find yourself on the wrong end of a bet or perhaps a gun and you are forced to select a Larry Buchanan movie to watch, you could do a lot worse than It’s Alive. You’re probably still going to have a bad time, but there is some modicum of entertainment to find here and depending on your love for terrible rubber-suited monsters you might even grow to like it a little. Just prepare for a momentum-killing and nearly silent flashback to ruin your fun before getting back to the monster action.

*This is the first film to be called It’s Alive directed by a guy named Larry. Larry Cohen would later make a completely different film about mutant babies. 

Extra Terrestrial Visitors

Extra Terrestrial Visitors (aka Los Nuevos Extraterrestres aka The Pod People)
1983
Juan Piquer Simón

Tommy (Óscar Martín) is a young boy who lives out in a cabin with his mom Molly (Concha Cuetos) and the garbage human he calls his uncle. Tommy finds a cave filled with pink light and steals a giant egg from it. The egg hatches and a little tube-nosed monster is born. Tommy names the thing Trumpy and tries to make friends with it. Meanwhile, Trumpy’s parent is none too happy about some poachers smashing up all the other eggs and decides to starts busting some heads. There is also a really terrible band on vacation that gets caught up in this mess, but the less said about them the better.

Extra Terrestrial Visitors rose to infamy due to its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000 under the title Pod People, that’s is how I came to know about it and I’m certain that holds true for about 99% of people who have encountered this weird E.T. (1982) rip-off. Extra Terrestrial Visitors was originally intended to be a straightforward horror film, but with E.T.’s astounding success, the creators retrofitted it with cute aliens (not unlike E.T. which was originally intended to be much more of a horror film as well.)

"Got any Plutonian Nyborg, man?"

It should be no surprise that the man who gave us Pieces (1982) directs this film, it certainly shares that film’s complete disregard for tone, placing horror next to whimsical moments. While Pieces is a freewheeling gorefest, Extra Terrestrial Visitors is much more restrained. I can understand the producers wanting to cash-in on E.T. by cutesifying their own aliens, but I can't figure out why they still made them murder machines. Why the Little Dipper, easily the least scary constellation of all time, appears on the victims' foreheads is anyone's guess.

The aliens look supremely goofy and out of place in the moody damp woods where most of the movie is set. Everyone in this film deserves accolades for managing to not only keep a straight face every time one of the creatures is on screen but actually act as if it were a horrifying threat. Remove the aliens from this movie and you actually have something that feels like it had the potential to be decent if overdone stalk and slash horror film, but with the creatures included, you have something that is memorably absurd.

"So you're the reason the shower drain is clogged so badly."

I have a difficult time judging the actors in a film that is dubbed. I will say this much, most of the acting seems passable, but the dubbed voice of Tommy is one of the most irritating sounds imaginable. Viewing can be sheer agony since Tommy has so much screen time with the mute Trumpy.

One of my early theories about this movie was that not only was it drawing from E.T., but there was a healthy attempt to cash in on the television show ALF. Trumpy and its parent have the same basic color, furry body, and a long snout. The difference is one eats cats and the other kills crappy band members. So, I was a little surprised to find that Extra Terrestrial Visitors pre-dates ALF by three years. Extra Terrestrial Visitors does feature a kitten in a few scenes, but the cat goes mostly unmolested. Is it possible that the creators of ALF caught a screening of Extra Terrestrial Visitors somewhere and were inspired? A true mystery from the stars.

31 Monsters Day #30 - Ro-Man

Aside from his irritating boss, Ro-Man is the lone figure in the criminally understaffed invasion plans of his race during the events of Robot Monster (1953). It's pretty obvious his heart isn't in it, he can't even get around to wiping out the last few humans on Earth. He'd much rather (literally) pursue his romantic interests even though it could mean a terrible job review.

HQ: A bubble filled cave
Likes: Unattainable women, dinosaurs
Dislikes: Being called a "Pooped-out pinwheel."

The Eye Creatures

The Eye Creatures (aka Attack of the Eye Creatures aka Attack of the the Eye Creatures )

1965
Larry Buchanan

After the long introduction in which the military explains that they have been tracking a UFO that will land in the central United States, we meet some local teens who have a habit of trespassing on an old man’s land to go make out in the woods. A flying saucer lands nearby, disgusting green humanoid lumps spill out of it and wander around the place. A couple of drifters looking to score some women or some money (preferably both) get caught up in the whole mess. Eye Creatures stumble around. People stumble around. There is death and eventually it ends. Thank goodness.

Like Zontar, Thing from Venus (1966), The Eye Creatures is a Larry Buchanan helmed color remake of an earlier SF film for American International Pictures. In this case, the victim is Invasion of the Saucer Men (1958). The Eye Creatures is a remake of a film that is an out-and-out comedy, but renders it into a tonal mess. There are moments that are supposed to resemble actual humor, but they fall flat, if they manage to make any sense at all. The military is portrayed as bungling perverts, which is fine, except that at no point does that subplot intersect or affect the main story in any fashion. It is merely the place to dump obvious jokes.

I feel like they escaped from the set of Eegah!

To be fair, a scene of soldiers accidentally blowing up the alien ship and congratulating themselves on defending the Earth is probably the best moment in the whole film. I understand that the story had to stick somewhat to the plot of Invasion of the Saucer People, but it is too bad that it couldn’t strive for a more arch satire of the military and SF films of the 1950s. There’s also a very casual Vietnam draft joke in the early section of the movie that comes across as awkward in the wake of that war.

The cast is thoroughly unappealing; from yet another bland leading man (John Ashley), a female lead who is supposed to be ditzy, but just ends up being aggravating (Cynthia Hull), to the whole remaining cast of characters who are supposed to be irreverent, but just come across of smug. Once you are into the film you will be begging to spend screen time with the blissfully silent Eye Creatures.

"Oh, eye don't know..."

How does it look? Well, it’s a low budget made for TV movie, so pretty terrible. Everything is flat and murky. There are nighttime scenes so under lit, that it is almost impossible to see what is happening. The Eye Creatures lack any of the charm of the big headed aliens of Invasion of the Saucer People, instead looking like lumpy green walking turd-men. For things called Eye Creatures, their eyes are little more than a few black glassy dots scattered around their bodies. They stumble around with no personality, no purpose, and exist only to lazily menace horny teenagers.

The Eye Creatures exists as a document to just how thoroughly a movie can fail even when set against the lowest of expectations, such as being a cheap television remake of relatively obscure low-budget science-fiction comedy made eight years prior. 

(Also, don't steal your poster from better movies)

31 Days of Halloween 2016 - Day 13

The Beast of Yucca Flats
1961
Coleman Francis

After a seemingly random strangulation, a defective defecting Soviet scientist by the name of Joseph Javorsky (Tor Johnson) is on his way to deliver military secrets, including a secret moon landing. Javorsky is attacked by KGB agents, but escapes into the desert. He somehow wanders too close to a nuclear bomb test and becomes a drooling inarticulate monster. He kills a young couple and kidnaps a woman. A family is vacationing in the area and their two dimwit sons wander off into the desert, only to be threatened by the deranged scientist. Hank (Doulas Mellor), their dad, goes looking for them, only to be mistaken for the monster by some cops who are terrible at their jobs.

The Best of Yucca Flats is proof that you can’t just film a bunch of random moments, and try and string it all together with an incessant voice-over. The narration tries to convince the viewer this whole movie is about amazing Soviet secrets, when really it’s just people stumbling around the desert. The film has no dialog spoken on screen, any talking is done with the characters conveniently having their back turned or their mouth off camera. There is a pointless nude strangulation scene at the beginning that has no connection to the rest of the movie. There is also a  shot stolen straight out of North by Northwest (1959). Tor Johnson is really the only reason to put up with any of this, but the movie can’t even give us the satisfaction of seeing him smush up a couple of irritating children. On the plus side, it’s less than an hour long.

Today's Really Quite Tasty History Lesson:
The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946

31 Days of Halloween 2016 - Day 11

Track of the Moon Beast
1976
Richard Ashe

Paul Carson (Chase Cordell) is a mineralogist, who gets a moon fragment lodged in his skull during a meteor shower. As you would expect, this makes him turn into a lizard monster during each full moon. Paul has no real memory of these incidents, but his friends, Kathy (Donne Leigh Drake) and Johnny Longbow (Gregorio Sala) become concerned about the increasing pile of bodies. Paul tries to have the meteorite removed, but things just aren’t going his way and he finds out that sooner or later he’s going to immolate. Paul tries to get away from everyone so that he doesn’t cause any more harm, but his inner lizard-man has other ideas about that.

The best thing about Track of the Moon Beast is the poster. Take a long look at it, it’s really cool. OK, done? Now settle in for an awkward slog of a movie, where the only enjoyable thing is just how stilted and bad the dialog can be. From the cheap monster, that you never get a good look at any way, to the silly made-up Navajo legends, Track of Moon Beast is one long goofy story told through the patented look of terrible 1970s film stock. It’s an agonizing horrible mess, and it’s my deep shame to admit I’ve seen this movie, sans-MST3K riffing, more than once. I have to give kudos to a movie that goes out of its way to have a character explode an already going to explode monster. I think I'm just going to look at the poster some more.

Today's Really Quite Tasty Meal:
Stew of the Moon Beast

VHS Summer Week #6

Rock-A-Die Baby
1989
Bob Cook

I like anthology movies, they usually offer enough variety that even if a current story isn’t working for you, the next one is just minutes away. Since the format is essentially a series of short films, it can allow for some experimentation with image and structure. A strong wrap-around or closing story can go a long way towards salvaging a struggling collection. An anthology movie has a lot of things it can draw from to make it a worthwhile venture. Rock-A-Die Baby fails at every single turn.

How many wrap-around segments does one movie require? Rock-A-Die Baby opens with a band manager grousing at his band about making a music video. Alright, you think to yourself, this band is going to somehow introduce or have some element that weaves through the stories.

Nope.

Instead we then introduced to a mom (Marilyn Hasset) and her annoying child (Lauren Woodland). The kid insists on being told stories before she will go to bed. The mom proceeds to tell some tales that are, at best, wildly inappropriate for a child:

Jazz hands!

Story 1) A bunch of army guys during the Vietnam War wander around someone’s backyard in Florida a jungle shooting people. They capture a woman and debate what to do with her (none of it pleasant). Wouldn’t you know it, she’s probably not human at all.

It’s a simple story, and it feels the most coherent out of the three. The humor falls flat, and the talk of rape sours what is otherwise a pretty silly story. Still it has one funny gore gag and that puts it above the other two in terms of quality.

Story 2) A bunch of drunk college students play strip poker and decide to put on a fake séance to trick another girl in taking her clothes off. Which is I guess a thing that could happen.

You can probably guess exactly where this one is going, but the movie strings along the story for an interminable amount time. Only the occasional bout of nudity keeps things alive and even that isn’t enough stop this story from limping to its conclusion.

"I tore Endora's throat out and I'm not ashamed."

Story 3) In a shocking turn of events, one of these stories has something to with anything else that has happened prior in the movie. The mom/storyteller explains how she met her husband. It’s sort of a meet-cute with classic monsters. In theory it could be charming. In execution, it is excruciating.

The punchline is obvious once everything is in motion, and honestly there is something unsettling about seeing Dick Sargent aka Darren from Bewitched on the make. While waiting around for the story to get around to the joke, the viewer is blindsided by the single worst werewolf in cinematic history (and yes, I’m counting the one from Silver Bullet (1985)). If there is no other reason to sit through this movie, it is to see this astoundingly bad creation in all its glory.

Rock-A-Die Baby is tough movie to come by, as far as I can tell there are no legitimate US releases in any format. There are some grey market and foreign VHS versions. Is it worth all that work to see? Depends on your addiction to anthologies, and awful werewolves.

Also: