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| ANGUISH |
1987:
Interesting premise from director/co-writer Bigas Luna (The
Chambermaid on the Titanic), has a crazed mother (Zelda
Rubinstein from Poltergeist) sending her optometrist
son  (Michael
Lerner, Barton Fink) out into the city to collect the
eyeballs of unsuspecting citizens. But after twenty minutes
of this, we learn that this is only a movie called The Mommy,
being watched in a theatre by two teenage girls -- one of whom
is seriously disturbed by the picture. Life begins to imitate
art - well, begins to imitate The Mommy, anyway - when Lerner,
on screen, enters a theatre showing the 1925 version of The
Lost World. He begins to kill, and a man in the audience at
The Mommy mimics his actions, shooting a number of people in
the audience. Thus Anguish juxtaposes the over-the-top horrors
on screen with the very real horrors of a crazed gunman in real
life. It's a strangely contradictory premise, as Anguish shows
horror movies in a very negative way - The Mommy disturbs a
girl to the point of nuttiness and drives one man over the edge
- and yet Anguish is itself a guresome horror movie. So if you
can stand the amusingly gross eye-cutting scenes and questionable
taste, this is a decent, fairly creative horror. And it's got
Zelda Rubinstein! ZELDA RUBINSTEIN!!! Back |
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| THE
ASPHYX |
1972:
No, it's not a hemmhoroid operation, but the well-acted story
of a 19th-century doctor (Robert Stephens) who discovers  a
means of keeping any living thing alive indefinitely by capturing
its asphyx (sort of like a soul, but with more of a 'glowing
blue monster' vibe about it). He makes himself immortal, and
then proceeds to do the same with his family members, but of
course, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. The story is creative,
even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the asphyx
is neat. According to the video box, photographer Freddie Young
worked on Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia,
but the pan-and-scan video version really ruins his framing,
as it keeps cutting people down the middle or off the screen
entirely. Still, it's well worth seeing -- the mature treatment
of the characters and subject matter should help you ignore
the zany plot discrepancies.Back |
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| ATOMIC
SUBMARINE |
1959:
Ultra-cool, fairly creative Z-movie about a living underwater
flying saucer. A submarine crew pursues  it
and eventually makes their way inside, only to find a giant
one-eyed alien monster that looks like something out of one
of the campier Dr. Who episodes. The spaceship interiors
are done sparsely but effectively, given the budget -- they're
made up mostly of angular platforms suspended in darkness. A
guy gets cut in half by a spaceship door (it's not very graphic),
and the alien is really, really nifto for fans of good, weird
monsters. No classic, but entertaining of its type.Back |
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| AT
THE EARTH'S CORE |
1976:
Neat fantasy, one of a series of four based on Edgar Rice Burroughs
stories (the others were The Land that Time Forgot, The People
that Time Forgot, and Warlords of Atlantis), which
TBS used to run almost as often as The  Beastmaster.
Scientists Doug McClure and Peter Cushing burrow to the titular
underworld in a machine called the Iron Mole. Once there, they
find colourful jungles, ancient cities, people enslaved by mutant
dinosaurs, and loads and loads of big ol' rubber monsters. This
hits on pretty much every 'lost continent' cliche in the book,
but on a pulp level it works pretty well, with a fast-enough
pace that brings us one neat set or monster after another, and
there's none of that boring, heavy-handed sermonizing about
abuse of technology or whatever that's ruined so many a big
rubber monster movie. Back |
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Text
copyright 2000 by Conall Pendergast.
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