The crisis involving the washing machine doesn’t crop up until a little ways into things though. First of all, we need to set up our haunted house situation. An electronics outfit buys an old haunted country mansion, moves its research team into it, and discover that one room out of about one hundred and fifty is haunted by some gal who manifests herself in Princess Leia hologram style.

Since these blokes are men of science, they immediately see this haunting as a way to get a leg up on the Japanese in the technology race. If you had any questions as to why we’re all buying Japanese TVs, DVD players, and video games instead U.K. manufactured ones, I believe this film answers them.

Brock is the guy in charge of the project. As is the case with most really short men, he’s loud, abrasive, and generally a blustering boob, as if the sheer volume of his words will somehow make up for his genetically defective growth. He’s also prone to wearing some Earth toned slacks that are simply way too tight in the crotch area.

Since all ghost stories need a woman in them because of their valuable contributions such as their women’s intuition (it’s a bit like a dog being able to sense supernatural forces or barnyard animals spazzing out before a big storm hits), Jill is on the project.

Though many in the group can sense the ghost to varying degrees, Jill is the one most affected by it. However, Jill immediately brands herself as a bit of a flighty ditz when at the very beginning of the movie, she arrives at the mansion and somehow almost manages to get squished between two big trucks in the mansion parking lot!

So what exactly is the deal with this troublesome ghost anyway? Well, we all know that ghosts are merely the disembodied spirits of the dead who for some reason or other (usually an unsolved murder) missed the bus to the sweet hereafter and are bound and determined to make life a living hell for those of us who aren’t dead yet.

Best I could tell with this one was that she fell off some stairs and ended up being scraped off the stone floor a hundred years ago or so. Was she pushed? Did she jump? Did she fall when some guy was trying to pinch her bum? (That was Brock’s guess!)

Once Brock figures out he has a ghost in the room that was supposed to be used for data storage, he hauls a ton of scientific gear in there to take various measurements and readings. You can imagine what this entails – lots of people hunkered over teletype machines, looking at graphs, and talking about charting where “hotspots” are.

Finally, they convince themselves that they aren’t really dealing with a ghost, but an image that the room has somehow retained. Following that theory, they further assume that the image must be recorded in the stone of the room itself and the next thing you know everyone is jumping around and celebrating the fact that they have just discovered a cheap, recordable medium that could be used for storing all kinds of information!

In most movies, having your ghost be the basis for the discovery of some Flintstones version of videotape would be the lamest idea you encounter. The Stone Tape takes it to the next illogical step when Brock attempts to make the ghost appear when he wants to using a bunch of sound waves and ends up erasing it altogether! Whoops! Better hold off on that Nobel Prize!

In a plot twist that that makes everything else in the film seem perfectly logical, the room wasn’t just inhabited by one pissy spirit but by a whole succession of them. When Brock taped over the girl ghost, it acted to peel back a layer and reveal an earlier, and even scarier ghost! This was just a couple of red spots, but somehow it could drive an unbalanced woman to fall off stairs to her death!

None of what happens is very convincing, especially the part where Brock’s first thought is that he’s somehow going to market this stone as a way to store stuff. What would make you think that if a stone could somehow retain the residue of something as ethereal and unexplainable as a ghost or shade or whatever that you’ll be able to figure out how to let Aunt Blabbie store pictures of her family reunion on it?

And they mention that the stone in question is very common. Then why isn’t England overrun by these rock videotapes of spirits bitching and moaning at every opportunity?

The cast does do a nice job of trying to bring some believability to things, but can’t really compete with the lame story. Go ahead and run a magnet over this stone tape.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Tom is the leader of a biker gang called The Living Dead. We immediately recognize Tom as not just your regular run of the mill biker leader when he interrupts a make out session with his old lady (Abby) at the local cemetery so that he can catch this really big frog. Though you make think that Tom must have been about eight years old, I assure you that he wasn’t and that he actually had a very good reason to catch this big frog.

I never did catch on to what his good reason for catching that big frog was, but as soon as he brought it back to his mom’s house, his mom’s butler Shadwell (Sanders) seemed duly impressed. In fact, Shadwell really had a thing for frogs (or at least jewelry featuring them) and this big frog was kept under a glass container until the end of the movie when he ended up sitting on a chair, presumably mocking me for being dullwitted enough to have been taken in by all this frog-reincarnation-cult-biker nonsense.

Tom’s mother is something of a medium and is just wrapping up a séance when Tom comes motoring back home with his frog. Tom’s intentions that night are to get some answers to some of his longstanding questions.

Among these questions are what’s in the locked room in the house and what’s the secret to life after death. Even though the room has been locked up for 18 years (even since Tom’s dad died), Shadwell and Mom realize that Tom will not be denied, so Mom reaches into her blouse, pulls out the key to the room, and hands it to Tom. (If I was Tom, I would probably just have had her unlock it for me after that.)

What happens in that room can only be described as muddled. Tom finds his dad’s eyeglasses and has a vision of the past. He sees his mom out at the local strange rock formation known as the Seven Witches and she has this baby there (must be Tom) and she’s signing some contract with a mysterious guy with a frog ring (must be Shadwell).

Tom also sees a giant frog starring at him. Tom finally succumbs to these heinous apparitions and freaks out. Outside the room, he hears Shadwell and his mom babbling about how Tom’s dad died when he tried to cross over because he just didn’t believe in life after death hard enough. Tom instantly recognizes this as that vital bit of info he needed to carry out his plan and it isn’t long before he drives his bike off a bridge into the river below to his apparent death.

Tom’s death leads to a funeral highlighted by one of the Living Dead singing a protest rock song called “Riding Free” as well as Tom being buried upright and seated on his bike. It looked a little silly when they were doing it, but there was no way you could argue that it didn’t look super cool when he was busting out of his grave on his cycle, dirt flying in every direction!

Following the not unexpected bar fight his first night back, Tom spends the remainder of the film attempting to convince the rest of his crew to kill themselves so that they too can live forever without ever being hurt. This leads to one of the stranger montages you’re likely to see as gang members kill themselves in a variety of ways.

You’ve got a guy jumping out of a multi-story building. There’s guy who loads himself up with chains and flops into the river where he drowns. Another guy takes a swan dive off a highway overpass into the path of an oncoming truck. And then there’s the dude that sky dives out of an airplane without ever opening his parachute. The unimaginative Abby was just trying to overdose. Of course she fails because she wants to live. What kind of girlfriend is that?

With his mostly zombie team of biker pals, Tom begins to execute his master plan. So they all head to the local grocery store and drive around knocking over boxes of cereal, displays of canned goods and plowing into baby carriages!

Tom and the gang head back to his place where Tom tells Abby they should each drive through a brick wall. Tom does this, but Abby fails to do so and Tom realizes that their relationship is in trouble. She confesses that she is actually alive and Tom is understandably miffed at this complete lack of support of his undead lifestyle. It’s off to the Seven Witches where Tom tells her that she either kill herself or the gang will do it for her.

The fact that this is when the big wrap up to everything takes place kind of shows you how little went on in the movie. It’s basically the “boy meets girl, boy kills self, boy comes back from dead, boy wants girl to kill self” plot we’ve all seen before, but you know, with bikers. And frogs. And Oscar-winning film legend George Sanders.

The ending probably only made sense if the beginning made any sense to you. I never understood Shadwell, his frogs, his bargains, or how any of this related to coming back from the dead simply because you wished for it to happen.

But then again, I didn’t need to since I had a bunch of grubby bikers peeling around the English countryside crashing semis and outrunning the fuzz. I mean, these guys wore helmets with skulls painted on the front, complimented with big white goggles. So what if there were some amphibians and washed up actors milling around in the background?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The movie itself begins in Africa (after a credit sequence showcasing a lot of African wildlife, everything switches to a sound stage where you had left over sets from One Million Years B.C. laying around) with a British guide named David leading an old guy on a safari to hunt leopards.

After the old guy botches the hunt and merely wounds the leopard, David gets mad and sends the guy back to camp while he goes after the wounded animal because he doesn’t like to see the animals in his jungle abused. Shot full of lead until they’re dead? Acceptable. Simply winged by amateur? Morally reprehensible.

Despite being warned by some of his native pals that he’s entering forbidden territory where all the locals worship the white rhino and even though he sees a tree marked with the dreaded sign of the white rhino (it’s just a carving of a rhino, not a big white rhino dump or anything), he blunders on ahead, right into the white rhino obsessed tribe!

His torture is immediate and brutal as these guys start to dance around in their white rhino masks (characterized by enormous phallic-shaped noses) all the while singing one of their hit songs (probably about how they’ll meet some lady friend on the down low and let her ride their white rhino).

David is told by the tribal leader that there is no defense for defiling their land and that the penalty is death. The leader also babbles about how his tribe is enslaved to the white rhino god, but I imagine that David was pretty much concentrating on the whole death sentence aspect of things and wasn’t really in his right mind. How else to explain the fact that while everyone is about to stab him to death that he reaches out and touches the horn of the white rhino statue which instantly freezes everyone around him and simultaneously opens a portal to another time?

Actually, there isn’t any other way to explain it because it doesn’t make any sense. Along with an overabundance of dancing and laughably unconvincing cast, this is one of the movie’s big problems since none of the nonsense that occurs ever amounts to anything beyond a bunch of people milling around in caveman outfits in between dance numbers.

Just what sort of world did David find himself in after groping the white rhino horn? It’s a world unlike any other, except for the sound stage that he just left, only with a few different brightly colored plants. There’s also a prehistoric woman being chased by other prehistoric women and she bites David when he tries to help her.

Both David and the woman are captured by the evil prehistoric women and taken back to their village. There we are subjected to cruelties undreamt of since the last time we had to watch a bunch of people dancing around. This time though, it’s a bunch of blonde chicks instead of African natives. And their moves are even more annoyingly dull than what we had previously seen.

For those that lack even rudimentary powers of observation, it is pointed out that all the blonde girls are enslaved by the dark haired girls. The men are likewise enslaved and are all held in a prison where they are forced to do metal working.

Additionally, all the males are outfitted with these terrible looking fake beards and wigs, which lead me to believe that whomever was in charge of that sort of thing had a conversation with the director that included the phrase “you won’t believe how cheap all this was!”

The dark haired gal in charge is one of these ruthless barbarian queens who doesn’t mind if her slaves have to eat off the floor and who takes bubble baths. Personally, I don’t see why wanting to pamper yourself every now and again and maintain baby soft skin is such a crime, but I think it stretched credibility a bit that you would have a prehistoric woman so concerned with her personal hygiene.

Barbarian Queen has her eye on David and with his wussy demeanor, what Amazon-ish woman wouldn’t want to put him in a scissors hold?

But the blonde girl that bit him also likes him and David likes her. To really add to the drama, Blondie conceives a scheme to free her people. Her plan is for David to pretend that he likes Barbarian Queen and slip into her bubble bath and then do something that helps the blondies get free.

I don’t think David’s girlfriend thought it through beyond the whole “my boyfriend is going undercover as hooker” aspect and you can bet that even though Dave whined about doing it, he eventually sucked it up and agreed.

Things go slightly awry once the plan is put into action, mass stupidity ensues and David finally ends up back in the present day after an embarrassingly fake appearance by the white rhino himself!

One of Hammer Films’ worst efforts which was a bit of a surprise because even with some of Hammer’s lesser films, there’s some aspect that shows a little care went into things, whether it be set design, the acting, or a story that at least made sense.

There is nothing here to redeem this movie though and the fault has to lie with writer/director Michael Carreras. It’s a dumb story that feels like an unfinished jumble of ideas and clichés.

Carreras gets no help from his leading man either. Michael Latimer in the role of David is singularly underwhelming with his unenthusiastic and wimpy portrayal of a guy fighting to survive in a hostile world. He was completely miscast here. He wasn’t a brawny he-man, he wasn’t a rakish rogue, he just looked like an uptight nerd. It all left me feeling like I sat on a white rhino horn.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Just as scary though is that our hero is about a hundred years old! Don’t misunderstand me, André Morell is a comforting presence in any movie, but I’m not comforted when it’s up to my great grandpa to take on a bunch of zombies, even if they are just British ones.

The role requires him to dig up and rebury graves at regular intervals. I kept waiting for the old coot to stroke out or drop over from a heart attack. That isn’t the type of concern you’re supposed to have for your hero’s safety in these sorts of pictures.

Morell, who plays Sir James Forbes, eminent professor of medicine from London, also generates cheap suspense when he has to have a fight scene. How are we supposed to believe that this geezer is going to be able to control his bladder long enough to move out of the way of a dagger, let alone brawl with a guy, set him on fire, and stab him to death? I guess the filmmakers would have us chalk it up to all the special forces training he received in medical school.

Well, what the devil is a hoity-toity centenarian tough guy like Sir James doing in Cornwall hanging out in some hick village that’s gone and gotten themselves a bad case of the zombies?

It all begins with a mysterious letter from one of his former students. Sir James would later claim that the guy was his cleverest student, but I think he was just trying to pump the guy up a little since he let his entire village get taken over by a voodoo cult of all things.

His star student is Dr. Peter Johnson, a man characterized by his chronic whining and flop sweat reaction to any stressful situation. Sir James may have been classmates with Methuselah, but at least he had the guts to roll up his sleeves and do an autopsy on Dr. Peter’s wife right in front of him: “Well, don’t just stand there son! Lend me a hand and help me take out your old lady’s gizzard, for Pete’s sake!” (All quotes are made up for purposes of critical analysis.)

Dr. Peter writes complaining that a strange malady has overtaken many members of his village. It’s characterized by a loss of appetite, paleness of skin, and sudden death. Also, that old abandoned tin mine just outside of town is finally going to reopen again. It’s probably a foreign company using their own workers though because they’re all grey and lumber around and are a bit musty smelling.

Sir James isn’t too keen on having anything to do with any business up in Cornwall but he has his great granddaughter Sylvia living with him. Dr. Peter is married to Sylvia’s friend Alice and Sylvia thinks it would be a good chance to go and visit her.

At the village, Dr. Peter is facing a crisis of confidence with the villagers since they want to know what is causing all these deaths and why it just seemed to start when he came to town.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with all the strange goings on at the town squire’s residence. You know the chap. He traveled extensively abroad to places like Haiti, inherited everything once his dad croaked and came back home with a retinue of natives that pound their drums in an entrancing rhythm that was loud enough to wake the dead. Even more suspiciously, when we meet Clive Hamilton, his evil theme music plays and most damning of all, he has these odd sideburns that say “my barber is a zombie.”

Since this is one of those movies where the old guy investigating some supernatural problem is accompanied by his youngish female relative for no good reason (see also The Blood Beast Terror for example) she immediately gets herself mixed up in things, thus providing us with someone in jeopardy that our heroes can rush to save as the film draws to a close.

If you’re looking for zombies, you have definitely come to the wrong place. First of all, these are voodoo zombies, not George Romero zombies. This means that they’re easily kept in line by a gang of whip-wielding supervisors and though they can apparently kill you if they are told to, they aren’t about to go running amok and taking bites out of your arms or face. The fact of the matter is, they don’t do a whole lot, but that’s okay, because you don’t get to see them much.

Most of the action is centered around Sir James trying to figure all this business out. He has to do it all himself because the other two main nominal protagonists, Dr. Peter and Sylvia don’t do anything but stand around agog at everything transpiring or get themselves into danger.

Likewise, the villain is a uninteresting cipher. All we know about Clive Hamilton is that he knows how to do voodoo and uses zombies in the mine. Why? What’s he going to get by using zombies in the mine? If it was about power and money, couldn’t he raise the dead to do something, I don’t know, a little more ambitious perhaps?

Too much old guy, not enough zombies, and a villainous scheme that no one even considered explaining. Just like Sir James did to Alice when she turned into zombie, this one needs a good whacking across the head with a shovel.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Based on the comic strip no one has ever read, Modesty Blaise is a thief of exceptional talent who is recruited by the British government to find out who is trying to steal some diamonds that are being sent to some fictional Arabian nation.

Despite selecting Modesty for the job, the government has its reservations and so fails to tell her the real location of the diamonds, instead giving her some snow job about them being transported by plane when in fact they are going by boat. They do this in spite of the fact that she was a world class thief and has told them that they have to be straight up with her or she will steal the diamonds for herself.

But would she have really? In one of many scenes that goes on too long and isn’t remotely amusing, it turns out that she and the Sheik of the country the diamonds are going to are such old pals that he refers to her as his son. That’s freaking hilarious because she’s a woman! And sons are usually boys!

The film also show the Sheik’s relatives and compatriots in his London headquarters enamored with all the products of western culture, surrounding themselves with boxes of stuff including pinball machines, cameras, and scooters. That’s funny because Arabs are a primitive people that are easily impressed with white man’s shiny beads!

Modesty hits Amsterdam since the diamonds are supposed to be leaving by plane from there, but as she takes a scenic tour of the canals by water transport, she catches on that the diamonds will in fact be aboard the cargo ship, Tyboria.

Her friend Willie provides an assist with a mine and the rest of her time in Amsterdam passes like a bad case of the DTs, with various characters appearing and milling around at various apartments and bars. Willie in particular doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing as he’s hanging out at magic shows in an effort to collect information about something.

Somewhere during all this we are finally introduced to the only character who is even momentarily entertaining. He is as he refers to himself later in the film, “the villain of the piece” and his name is Gabriel. He appears to be another world class thief who inhabits an island hideaway and silly silver wig.

There are moments with Gabriel where he manages to be quite good at playing off the Bondian stereotype of the melodramatic villain and provides the movie’s only fleeting smiles, but so often they overdo it and we’re left with Gabriel merely looking like he’s straining to be weird.

Gabriel invites Modesty over for lunch which she accepts. He promptly takes her prisoner and also manages to get Willie as well. Gabriel explains his big plan to steal the diamonds. He is going to make Willie go on the mission and it will involve some underwater gizmo that will cut a hole in the bottom of the boat and Willie will slip into the ship’s cargo area, steal the diamonds and slip back out.

Why Gabriel needed either one of these two is never explained. The plan didn’t take any special skill, so what was the point of involving Modesty and Willie? Maybe the superfluous flourishes to his scheme were all a part of the mocking of the generic spy movie villain. Or maybe it makes perfect sense in a movie where the good guys are captured after having lunch with the bad guys.

Once the diamonds are stolen, Gabriel provides a key to aid Modesty’s escape. It comes on a key chain with the word “perhaps” written on it – a response to her earlier question to Gabriel after he says that because he’s the bad guy he has to condemn them to death and she asks something like,”but I’m the heroine so don’t I escape?” Just keep reminding yourself that it took two guys to come up with the story and an additional guy to write the screenplay.

The Sheik comes to Modesty’s aid and a long, drawn-out clash between the Sheik’s forces and Gabriel doesn’t even put an end to this fiasco, because once that’s done, we have to go back to the Sheik’s kingdom to see Willie and Modesty enjoying their victory and to see Gabriel getting rescued by his financial advisor.

Just an awful exercise in self-conscious excess, this bloated pile of failed jokes and concepts doesn’t even get the whole “it dates badly” pass that some movies of the period might rate, mainly because it’s hard to believe that audiences seeing it in 1966 actually found it entertaining.

Aside from the horrid story and the lazy way the film was put together, Monica Vitti isn’t particularly memorable as Modesty. Even more forgettable is the character of Modesty Blaise herself. Sure, she karate chops a few guys, but the character doesn’t do anything except get into trouble through her own stupidity and only gets out of it with help from all her male friends.

The fact we didn’t see another Modesty Blaise film until a failed pilot in 1982 goes to show that the old gal probably needs to stay a retired world class thief and quit stealing audiences’ time and money.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

That mysterious reason happens to be Dr. Leo Rook. Leo is a prisoner who escaped the ship before it sank, made it to shore, and killed the guys running the lighthouse and in all the ensuing action, the light gets shut off.

Night time on an isolated isle with a gang of desperate cons playing cat and mouse with one of their own? Shanks, shivs, and guys with nothing to lose up against the cunning of the mad doctor? All that was missing was the woman psychologist haunted by childhood memories of the doctor murdering her mother as she watched! Oh wait, she survived the sinking of the ship as well!

Putting aside the fact that this prison ship seems a tad half-assed since the most dangerous passenger could escape in a row boat without anyone noticing it until they started counting all the decapitated heads he was piling up on the island later on, things start off promisingly enough.

You’ve got the mystery of Dr. Rook, the mystery of the woman doctor (Dr. Kristy McCloud) and the mystery of the wrongly accused wife-murderer, Spader. (He was either framed up or he accidentally killed her during an epileptic seizure – I never could quite figure out what his story was. And as soon as I heard that he was epileptic, I was just watching the clock until the pivotal moment in the story when a blinking light would suddenly cause him to flop around instead of saving Dr. Kristy from Dr. Rook.)

There’s also the continuously claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat and then the lighthouse which keeps the tension ratcheted up more than this generic stalk and slash story deserved.

That director Simon Hunter uses adults instead of giggly, doubting teens in the movie, along with his obvious good command of the camera gave reason to hope that Lighthouse would be a rather smart, twisted ride.

Hunter’s big problem is that he just never follows through on any of this promise. None of the mysteries revolving around the three main characters are ever deepened, explained or resolved. All of them are as they were at the beginning of the film – potentially interesting characters.

It’s clear that with Dr. Rook and Dr. Kristy that Hunter is seeking to echo The Silence of the Lambs with the connection these two apparently share. I say apparently because we’re only let in on this in the course of a few unexplained flashbacks that Dr. Kristy has.

She doesn’t actually say anything to anyone about this (she’s supposedly studying Dr. Rook for a paper) and even more inexplicable, Dr. Rook and her never have any sort of confrontation where they hash any of this out. He just tries to choke her while she screams until Spader can swing through a window and punch him in the face five or six times.

And what’s up with Spader? We never did find out what happened with him and his wife. We never found anything else out about him beyond his handicap of going all epileptic at the most inopportune times.

We’re also supposed to believe that Dr. Rook is pure evil genius because he had a collection of ears and fingers and other parts in his lab that he liked to study and because of his devious escape from the prison transport ship.

So, what was the point of his grandstanding kill spree when he could have been slipping off into the anonymity of the night? If he just liked killing people, why not just kill everyone while you’re still on the ship? See what happens when we know exactly zilch about a character? You can’t even write their erratic behavior off on their personality defects!

As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that we aren’t going to be getting anything terribly original there either. After figuring out that Rook wiped out the lighthouse crew and is still on the island, the ship’s survivors still find idiotic reasons to split up so that Rook can stalk them and pick them off.

Keeping the surprises and plot twists to a minimum, Lighthouse is a seventy-five watt bulb in a hundred watt socket.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun tells the very familiar story of what happens when a mysterious planet is found orbiting on the other side of the sun. I say that it’s familiar because the whole parallel universe, mirror universe and alternate world gimmick has been used in about 15 episodes of Star Trek, 25 episodes of The Twilight Zone and thousands of issues of The Uncanny X-Men.

This planet has remained hidden all these years because it is exactly opposite us in its orbit and orbits at exactly the same speed as us, so it’s only natural that we missed the gravitational influence of a tenth planet in our solar system for hundreds of years.

Eurosec (an organization where people with funny accents and bad suits get together to try and trample our God-given rights as Americans) chief Jason Webb arranges it to look like the Commies are already trying to get there, so the Americans hurriedly sign up for a mission to send a spaceship to visit this planet.

The one thing us Americans can get out of this is that when you’re putting up a bazillion dollars for some cockamamie project, we get to have one of our own astronauts on board the flight. And not one of those idiot billionaires that buy their way onto a Russian space trip, but an honest to gosh rocket jockey with a name like Colonel Glenn Ross!

Col. Ross is the most experienced astronaut we’ve got and he has the slick hair do and sunglasses to prove it!

Col. Ross shows up at Eurosec HQ to go into training for the mission with his beautiful wife Sharon in tow. Sharon is obviously a shrew by her bad attitude and that she keeps telling Glenn that they can’t have children because he’s been in space too long and is sterile, when she’s actually just hiding her birth control pills!

Ross needs a another astronaut to go with him, so Webb decides an astrophysicist is the way to go and picks project leader John Kane. Kane brings a really unflattering short hairdo and sideburns to the table and we get to spend part of the movie watching him train.

The rocket ship finally launches and they fly off into space. Somehow or other, they crash the ship and it blows up a couple of times. Kane saves Ross, causing Kane to take the brunt of the explosion. Kane later dies and Ross is taken by a rescue team and wakes up at Eurosec.

Webb berates him about why he aborted the mission after only getting half way there. See, he returned after only three weeks, but wasn’t the trip supposed to take three weeks to get there? (Left unexplored is the idea that the reverse Earth happened to send its own mission to our Earth at the same time we sent ours.)

Ross notices other strange things are happening. Everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road. Things are messed up in his futuristic house. The light switches are on the wrong side of the wall. All the labels on his wife’s perfume and birth control are written in reverse.

Even his vital organs are reversed! I bet that made using a toilet there for the first time quite an experience!

Ross reaches the startling conclusion that he did make to the other planet and it is just like Earth only everything is reversed!

The filmmakers realize what a lame idea they’ve come up with and don’t even bother spending any more time with the implications of the mirror world gimmick.

The rest of the movie involves Ross attempting to return to his own Earth which was only marginally more interesting than him landing on the Reverse Earth in the first place.

This is another one of those late sixties sci-fi flicks that tries to be taken seriously with it’s pseudo-science and astronauts piloting bad models. The problem with this movie is that hardly anything happens and when it does (at the end) it doesn’t make much sense.

We spend half the movie getting ready for the space flight. The bogus politics, the spying, and the training sequences are bland and add little to a movie supposedly about a mysterious planet. Throw in the whole marital problem bit and you begin to wonder exactly what movie you’re watching.

The complete lack of payoff once on the other Earth really sinks things though. After the anticipation about what would be reversed, it’s just stupid, boring run of the mill things like writing and how homes are laid out.

The visual effects in this movie are strictly of the Thunderbirds variety which shouldn’t come as a big surprise since producer Gerry Anderson also worked on those puppet shows.

The effects are ancillary though when your story’s hook fails to land the viewer. This is simply another case where the promise of the film was not delivered. I bet on the far side of the sun though, this movie is awesome!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

It sounds like a fairly good premise for a Karloff movie, but somehow The Haunted Strangler manages to be little more than a less-than-memorable vehicle highlighted by Karloff’s efforts to do the Jekyll and Hyde gimmick and lowlighted by the film’s inability to really get going for the first half hour and the sudden dropping of The Judas Hole story line. Nothing is more irritating than when a movie abandons its strip club setting before it should.

Karloff is James Rankin, a man engaged in a rather drab investigative effort into the identity of the Haymarket Strangler. He’s convinced that a doctor named Tenant must have been involved in the killings somehow. Why does he think this? Because this doctor was the one that did the autopsies on all the dead girls and he kept really copious notes on the victims.

As his assistant/daughter’s love interest points out, this Tenant guy may have just really been wanting to do a good job. Rankin and I both give him this look that says, “you young whelp, don’t you recognize the diary of a madman when you see one?”

Rankin heads off to the last known place of the residence of Tenant: an asylum. No one knows what happened to Tenant after he ran off with a nurse, but they still have his personal effects. Since showing Rankin all these clues is strictly against rules and regulations, they go on down to the basement and show him all these clues.

Rankin latches onto the set of surgical tools that is missing a knife. Rankin tells his assistant that this means that Tenant must have buried the knife with the body of the person wrongfully hanged for the crimes so that he wouldn’t be tempted to slash exotic dancers with it. I think at this point, that it is understandable why the assistant’s interest wanes in the investigation and he spends more and more of his time investigating Rankin’s daughter’s bodice.

I would note for the record that this guy’s interest doesn’t wane until after the part of the investigation that requires him to go with Rankin to The Judas Hole is finished.

Rankin goes to Newgate Prison and digs up the grave of the man thought to be the Haymarket Strangler where he finds Tenant’s knife. As soon as he holds it, a startling transformation takes place!

His arm cripples up and his face contorts into this hilarious mess of grimacing puffy lips and bad dental work. His hair also gets mussed quite a bit. I always like an actor who can get his hair to carry the load in tight spots.

I have to say that when I saw this bit with the knife, I thought that this movie should have probably been called The Haunted Butterknife, because this dang knife was the least scary knife I’ve ever seen. It was good sized, silver, and in an ironic twist considering how the film turned out, it looked incredibly dull.

After a trip to The Judas Hole, he returns home and he and his wife have a pow wow where she reveals his secret origin.

To me, it was just another example of some broad trying to change a guy. Why couldn’t she just be satisfied with him being a serial killer? Why did she have to go and try to mold him into a genteel novelist/amateur sleuth? You didn’t see him trying to change her from an unethical nurse into something she wasn’t, did you?

A decidedly minor entry in the Karloff cannon. The movie attempts to give us some psycho babble about the Strangler’s motivations, but they’re half-hearted and brief bits of dialogue that have no bearing on anything.

The movie could have benefited from some type of exploration of the mental problems Boris was suffering from and his own attempts to reconcile what he was and what he was becoming again with the rather prosaic life he was currently leading.Instead, they wanted to get “Boris Karloff the Horror Icon” out there and have him running around like Mr. Hyde hacking up strippers and dumb wives.

Despite being known for horror films, Karloff was always able to bring a great deal of humanity to characters like the Mummy and Frankenstein’s Monster, and he does a good job with what he has here. There’s an earnest and gentlemanly quality (a bit like Peter Cushing) so you’re always rooting for his pictures to work, but the promising set-up is ruined by the “mad ghoul on the loose” final third of the film.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Immediately, it is evident that director Cy Roth had access to a single camera and one warehouse because the observatory scene in the beginning is shot with one camera simply following characters back and forth as they yammered and sexually harassed a secretary that had the unfortunate task of taking a letter for them.

The sound is abysmal and listening to the inane dialogue echo throughout the scene (and other places in the film) indicates that a very deserted warehouse was used for some of this production. Other parts of the film appeared as if they were shot at a state park or someone’s really big, bushy backyard.

Since this a movie involving a trip to another world, some scenes involving the launch of the rocket ship are required. If you had any doubts that Roth was funding this movie out the allowance his mommy gave him every Friday, these scenes would assuage them forever. Low rent can’t begin to describe the look and feeling of these scenes.

First of all you have mission control. It consists of one guy sitting at a desk with a telephone while five or six other people stand around to give the impression that there is more than one guy sitting at a desk with a telephone.

The spaceship doesn’t fare any better. It’s very spacious and everyone sits at some tables with some blinking lights and knobs, periodically saying stupid things about the completely bogus technology they’re using.

The astronauts do keep in constant contact with mission control just like in the real world. In this case it involves that single guy at the table making a telephone call to them on his rotary phone.

Once they land successfully on the moon everyone stretches, congratulates one another, and busts out the cigarettes just like they had gotten done with a marathon session of bumping space boots with one another! Ah, the good old days when astronauts’ survival equipment came courtesy of Philip Morris!

They make their way across the wooded countryside to a beacon theyv’e spotted and hear a girl screaming and see her struggling with a monster.

This monster is a real skinny dude dressed up in a black body stocking and wearing a mask that looks like he rubbed his head in feces. He also has these atrociously dubbed howls and growls. The guys shoot at it (after having a debate as to whether they should interfere) and they eventually lob a gas grenade at it. This is another one of those manly space missions where the guys all strap on their six shooters and load up on the incendiary devices before they go out to “explore” their surroundings.

A civilization comprised entirely of women and one really old dude that can’t hold his liquor is discovered inside a cave These women are dressed in these ugly ballet costumes (which is a clue that some dastardly ballet is in the offing!) and they live in a place that resembles a low budget filmmaker’s idea of ancient Greek set decoration. There’s columns, vases, torches and sacrificial altars – that sort of thing.

The old drunkard announces that they are the last descendants of the great civilization of Atlantis! He explains that Atlantis sunk into the ocean so everyone moved out to the thirteenth moon of Jupiter. Well, duh! That’s so obvious, you don’t need to explain it!

The girls show up and our two heroes really tie one on. This leads to the great scene where the girls repeatedly try to wake the navigator and he is so wasted he can barely be roused from his slumber. When he does wake up, he yells at the girls to get out! I hope New Atlantis has an AA chapter!

The movie’s pointlessness and stupidity shifts into hyperdrive from here on out. Somehow or other one of the astronauts has fallen in love with one of the women. That took all of about thirty seconds.

Also, the men are not being allowed to leave. I was never quite sure what the problem was, but it was around this time that Cy Roth decided that what his film needed to ensure it would be remembered as even more brain damaging than Cat-Women of the Moon was some ballet sequences. These are as sickening as any Italian cannibal movie and you silently curse whoever it was that came up with Cat-Women of the Moon for providing the spawning ground for such a display of amateurism.

Homely chicks in their ugly outfits and dirty slippers run and jump and their hands flail about like they had gotten ahold of some bread with some funny-looking mold on it. I was expecting the astronauts to plead with them to kill them, but they all sort of sat there watching it like they cared. That was perhaps the closest thing I saw to actual acting in the entire movie.

The old man dies leaving a really mean black-haired skank in charge and she decides that the chick that loves the astronaut should be sacrificed for her bad taste in men.. The two astronauts who’ve gotten themselves captured are forced to watch as this broad is dumped on an altar with flames billowing behind it.

Also on hand for the festivities is that monster in the black pantyhose. I don’t recall whether he was part of the whole sacrificing angle or whether he was simply crashing the party to justify his own existence in this movie.

The remaining astronauts appear and start shooting at the monster who also happens to be right next to the woman in peril. Luckily nobody hit her especially since these dummies should know from their last encounter with the monster that bullets don’t bother it. You know what that means! Another gas grenade! Problem solved and the astronauts leave, promising to return with other desperate, lonely men to help them build their race back up.

Huffing and puffing at an obese 80 minutes, this movie is clearly worse than Cat-Women of the Moon, but not in a good way. It is way less entertaining. (A guy in black pantyhose subbing for two giant rubber spiders on strings? Give me break!)

This movie actually made less sense then the swirl of bilge water that passed for a story in Cat-Women. What was this garbage about these people being the last remnants of Atlantis? How in the world did they end up on a Jovian moon? By all accounts, their civilization was still stuck in about 1000 B.C. and if they were so great, why didn’t they just row their boats over to Europe or North America when their stupid continent sank? It would have been a heck of a lot shorter trip and wouldn’t require any technology that they obviously didn’t possess.

The film does prove Albert Einstein’s little known theory that terrible ballet exists outside of normal space and time and is destined to consume the universe one day with its filthy-shoed suckiness.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Jekyll ponders this for about two seconds and comes up with his all-new, double-secret project. He will invent an elixir of life! This will allow him all the time in the world to beat back the embarrassment of athlete’s foot.

Now, just how is he going to go about inventing this elixir that sounds so far-fetched? Of course! Since women’s skin is always soft and silky smooth (not that Jekyll would know anything about the touch of a woman – at least not until he’s touching himself later on in the film) and since chicks don’t go bald while men do, there must be something in their hormones that prolong life or will at least help Jekyll get rid of that pasty complexion of his.

But where in the world is he going to get hormones from beautiful, young broads? Dead whores, silly!

Jekyll gets supplied by the local morgue attendant and things are going well at first until the young broads aren’t dying fast enough for the experiment. He then gets famous body snatchers Burke and Hare to do their thing and they rustle up bodies of wanton women by hook and by crook.

Jekyll tests out his potion on a fly and is surprised to see that it has turned a male fly into a female fly. Inexplicably, he thinks this is some type of success because it isn’t long before he’s drinking his jiggle juice and turning into Martine Beswick!

He reacts like any of us would and begins to fondle himself, but is interrupted by the brother (Howard) of a virgin (Susan) that was harassing Jekyll earlier. Howard has the hots for her and Susan is irritated for some reason. Jekyll tells everyone that this woman is actually his sister, a widow named Mrs. Hyde!

With Burke and Hare having been earlier disposed of and with Jekyll two-timing himself, Jekyll decides that if he’s ever going to wear the pants in the family again that he’ll need to start procuring chick hormones himself by slashing prostitutes.

This was, despite its gratuitous title, a pretty classy effort. There was none of the gore and/or sexy scenes that you would be hoping for, I mean, expecting. Instead, the focus is on Jekyll’s struggle with his own inner-babe.

Ralph Bates does a very good job portraying the slightly prissy scientist and he does comes off as a dude with a little woman inside of him. Because of the gender spin that is put on the Jekyll and Hyde story, the movie isn’t about the actual transformations as much as it is about the impact his interactions with other people has on himself.

The movie tries to show us right in the beginning that Jekyll may be more prone to alternative lifestyle choices and more than one character comments on Jekyll’s lack of woman action. (Howard actually almost comes out and says that Jekyll’s gay!)

When he does turn into Mrs. Hyde, you’re mentally trying to determine what it means for his sexuality when he starts making out with Howard. Is he gay? Is he bi? Is he a straight woman trapped inside a mad scientist’s skinny body?

I doubt that all transsexuals out there would embrace this as a movie celebrating their plight since it portrays Jekyll as being driven completely nuts by the whole mess, but we should probably chalk that up to the tight corsets and not to his she-male tendencies.

Things were a bit muddled as to the point of all the killings once he turned into Mrs. Hyde and the conclusion involving a blind organ-grinder wasn’t entirely believable, but it didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of this film.

My really big complaint was that they only scratched the surface of the problems and wacky situations that a geeky scientist would run into when he changed into a sultry vixen at unexpected intervals. Simply put, this movie was not sleazy enough for its provocative subject matter. You kept expecting more outrageous things to happen, but Jekyll never did more than break dates with the virgin and neck with Howard.

Pretty good for what it was, but probably should have been more. The puritanical woman inside of me liked it, but the dirty old man in me was disappointed.

© 2011 MonsterHunter