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| DAY
THE WORLD ENDED |
1955:
Entertaining Roger Corman knockoff of Five and other
post-atomic fallout  dramas,
with Paul Birch as man who's stockpiled resources in his isolated
house in preparation for the apocalypse. A number of stock characters
drop by, including one who's been affected by radiation and
is gradually transforming into a monster. Hero Richard Denning
asks the him about what's going on in the world outside their
isolated valley. "Something wonderful," he creepily
replies. Seems that the radiation is transforming people into
multi-eyed, multi-armed critters, courtesy designer Paul Blaisdell.
As with almost all of Blaisdell's creations, the monster looks
like something off the cover of a sci-fi pulp magazine of the
time; it's not quite up to the monster from It Conquered
the World, but it's got its own unique charm. Jonathan Haze
(Little Shop of Horrors) and Lori Nelson (Revenge
of the Creature) also make appearances. This ain't exactly
On the Beach or anything, but it's a decent picture,
good for fans. Back |
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| DESTINATION
MOON |
1950:
Producer George Pal's attempt to make a serious picture about
how human beings could really get to the moon, a concept  that
was pure fantasy in the minds of most viewers at the time --
this was 19 years before the actual moon landing. Special makeup
was used to depict the effect of G-forces on the actors' faces,
and sequences outside the rocket were depicted through animation.
Interestingly, it's private industry, rather than the government,
that finances the moon misson; characters in the film don't
have much confidence in the government's ability to get the
job done. Well, whoop-de-doo for capitalism. Ultimately, though,
this is
more interesting for its historical context than as a film,
as it's pretty dry, with no sense of wonder about the journey.
Still, it's interesting as a somewhat mature look at a subject
that, at the time, was confined to sci-fi pulps and science
mags, and had yet to penetrate the elusive mainstream.
Back |
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| DESTROY
ALL MONSTERS |
| 1969:
It's the all-star Godzilla movie, with Rodan (red pterodactyl),
Anguiris (ankylosaurus), Manda (dragon-like snake from Atragon),
Varan (squirrel-thing from Varan the Unbelieveable),
Gorosaurus (dinosaur from King Kong Escapes), Barugon
(big-eared dino from Frankenstein Conquers the World),
a big spider from Son of Godzilla (they call the spider
Espiga in Son of Godzilla, but he's often referred to
as Kumonga elsewhere. hmm), Ghidrah, the three-headed monster
(from Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster, oddly enough),
Mothra (a big moth), and Godzilla and son themselves. It's 1999,
and somehow all the monsters in the world have been rounded
up and trapped on the appropriately named Monster Island. Despite
the fact that this takes place thirty years after the other
Godzilla moves, Son of Godzilla doesn't seem to have aged very
much. But anyway, in what is essentially the exact same plot
as Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, a bunch of aliens come
to Earth, take over the monsters, and use them for their own
evil ends. Ultimately, though, the monsters break free of the
evil alien control, fight Ghidra, aka King Ghidora (who works
for the aliens, as he did in Godzilla vs. Monster Zero),
and save the day for everyone. As
a movie, Destroy all Monsters doesn't bomb as hard and
fast as Hollywood all-star pics like Won Ton Ton, the Dog
who Saved Hollywood and Last Action Hero, but it
could have been better. It's very badly paced - almost all the
monster action takes place in two segments, one in the middle
and one at the end, while in between we're treated to loads
and loads of boring "Watch out! The reactor's going to
explode"-type stuff. The supporting monsters aren't given
enough to do - in the climax, Godzilla pretty much does everything,
hogging the action from the less big-name monstroids. Hey, Godzilly-baby,
we see you do this crap in every one of your movies!
Give Barugon or Gorosaurus a chance -- you know this
is going to be their last screen appearance! That big green
ham ... Varan only appears for about half a second at the very
end (I guess the suit wasn't in very good condition), and Barugon
doesn't do anything (at one point, a reporter says that
Barugon has just burrowed up under L'Arc de Triomphe, but it's
clearly Gorosaurus. Guess something got lost in the dubbing).
Manda the snake, who looks like something out of Japanese folklore,
has one of the film's best bits, in which he wraps himself around
a futuristic elevated train. Otherwise, Destroy all Monsters
is a bit of a let down, but it's still good to see all the Toho
monsters together.
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| DIE,
MONSTER, DIE! |
1965:
Boris Karloff and Nick (Frankenstein Conquers the
World) Adams star this passable horror, based on H.P. Lovecraft's
The Colour out of Space and made to cash in on Roger
Corman's profitable series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptaions. This
doesn't  measure
up to those, as the story is really muddled; many new elements
have been added, including a dungeon and a satanism/witchcraft
subplot (probably thrown in to make this more like the Poe-based
movies), while parts of the original story have been thrown
out entirely. The result is a movie that doesn't make any sense
at all. Still, there's some good imagery, the acting is fine
(the always nifty Patrick MacGee has a small role), and some
of the hilarous "monsters" (rubbery plant-men) are
funny to look at. Back |
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| DOCTOR
GORE |
1971:
J.G. "Pat" Patterson, a one-time collaborator with
acclaimed gore-master Herschell  Gordon
Lewis, wrote, directed, and starred in this bloody, amusingly
cheap gore-a-thon that should be seen by every devotee of really
low-budget filmmaking. He's a doctor pining for his dead wife
who, with hunchbacked assistant Gregory, procures female bodies
any way he can and uses them in his ghastly experiments. The
editing seems to have been done by a drunken one-armed chimp
on quaaludes -- at one point, Gregory rushes from the left to
right wall of the lab (a small room), then we cut to some 
machinery, then back to the exact same shot of him running,
starting and ending in the same places. Anyway, after the good
doc creates the perfect woman, he ends up - without any explanation
- in an insane asylum (we just suddenly cut to seeing him behind
bars, with no explanation whatsoever as to how he got there).
The asylum is clearly Gore's lab with a few new walls stuck
in - the tiling on the floor is exactly the same. And in at
least one very lengthy shot, the top of the set is clearly (and
I mean very clearly) visible. Hunchbacked assistant Gregory
has a second role as a singer in a nightclub (sans hump, of
course), who sings that country & western classic,  "A
Heart Dies Every Minute",
while some of the "musical score" consists of an excrutiangly
loud, grating whine that plays for long sections as the doc
operates. Patterson died before the film could be completed,
so perhaps this accounts for some of the plot's utter senselessness.
According to the box, it's been "Censored for your Sanity,"
but watching any part of this movie, censored or otherwise,
amounts to gambling with your mental health. Back |
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| DRACULA
VS. FRANKENSTEIN |
| 1971:
Al Adamson, director of Vampire Men of the Lost Planet
and subject of the book Shlock-O-Rama, initially put
together this ultracheap winner as a sequel to his hit biker
movie Satan's Sadists. Legend has it that he was midway
through filming when Adamson found out that Lon Chaney Jr. and
J. Carrol Naish (The Beast with Five Fingers, House
of Frankenstein) were available, so he added in Dracula
and Frankenstein and made the film to a horror picture. So what
we're left with is a few scenes at the beginning and the end
involving Dracula and Frankie, with a lot of biker stuff in
between. Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, whose makeup looks like what
you'd find in lower-rent stores on the day after Halloween)
digs up Frankenstein's monster (John Bloom), and goes to visit
the good doc, who's hiding under the name of Dr. Durea. Drac
clearly has trouble remembering his lines during a long monologue
in which he attempts to explain the senseless, needlessly complicated
storyline to the doc. Seems as though the doc has some enemies
he'd like rubbed out, there's a comet that will soon pass that
came by when the monster was originally brought to life,
and it'll bring him to life again, and - well, there's a lot
of stuff that's better left ignored. Dracula himself kills one
of Frankie's former associates (Forrest J. Ackerman), while
Regina Carroll (the director's wife), goes looking for her sister,
who Frankie killed. Wandering around the carnival are Angelo
Rossito, Anthony Eisley, Russ (West Side Story) Tamblyn,
and Jim (Dallas) Davis. Originally, the film ended when
the hero ran down Dracula with his car, but the filmmakers felt
it didn't make sense (if it was below their standards,
it must really have been confusing), so they shot a new ending
in which Dracula tears off the monster's head and arms (why
exactly was he trying to revive the monster in the first place,
anyway?). Then Drac gets caught in the sun and dies. As you've
probably gathered from that mess of a plot summary, this turkey
makes about as much sense as any of Al Adamson's movies, all
of which seem to have been made up as they went along. Plot
elements are picked up and forgotten about, characters who serve
no purpose at all show up and then dissapear -- it seems as
if Adamson just packed on one random event after another until
he had enough footage to reach feature length. That said, this
is easily the greatest movie ever made. Back
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Text
and Original Images copyright 2000 by Conall Pendergast.
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