Etiquette dictates that you don’t mess with someone else’s “old lady” and that you take turns with the “mama.” Also it appeared that once an old lady’s man croaked, she was then eligible for the position of “mama” and by “eligible,” I mean, all the biker dudes raped her until she attained the coveted “mama” status. None of this really matters to the main story in this film, but the story is so thin, you have to really latch on to everything that goes on to get any mileage out of it.

The movie is about some Hell’s Angels and how their buddy gets killed and they have a big party at his funeral and bust up the church, then brawl in the graveyard with townies until the cops show up and crash the festivities.

The rest of the movie is mainly filler with biker parties, scenes of bikers riding, and Heavenly Blues posing and being a lot more angst-ridden than any real Hell’s Angel ever was. Also, would the president of a Hell’s Angel chapter really be called Heavenly Blues? Yes, he would – if he was really Peter Fonda.

Blues discovers that his buddy Loser’s stolen chopper is being held in Mecca out in the desert by some Mexicans. Blues, Loser (Bruce Dern), and the rest of the gang drive out there to see if they can convince these dudes to give Loser’s motorcycle back.

After they rumble with the Mexicans, a couple of motorcycle cops show up on the scene and Loser steals one of the motorcycle cop’s bikes and drives off with the other cop in hot pursuit. I’m not real sure what Loser’s plan was, but Blues assures everyone that Loser can outride the heat anytime.

Unfortunately, he may be able to outride the heat, but he isn’t as swift outriding the heat’s bullets. The cop shoots him and Loser eventually crashes his bike and gets caught by the police.

Blues and the rest of the gang find out that Loser is being held in the hospital and so a summit at their local pool hall is called. To me, it didn’t look like they were all there having a meeting on Loser’s behalf so much as they were all there playing pool, getting soused, and tiring out mamas and the whole Loser aspect only came up because Loser’s old lady Gaysh appeared and bothered Blues about it.

Finally, Blues gets done running the table and everyone starts talking about what they should do. Blues says that they could bust him out of the hospital if they were smart about it. Everyone agrees, but this is a biker gang that has guys with names like Ugly, Frankenstein, and um Heavenly Blues, so you just know that when they bust him out of the hospital, they’ll be everything, but smart about it.

A fairly silly effort that merits watching due to the absurd miscasting of Fonda and Dern. Director Roger Corman paints a fairly prettied up picture of the Hell’s Angels, especially the fact that someone like Heavenly would ever be in charge of a biker gang.

As portrayed in this film, the Hell’s Angels are really nothing more than rowdy frat boys, who get wasted, break stuff, and assault the occasional woman. Despite the fact that members of the Venice Chapter of the Hell’s Angels were in the film, none of it rings true.

The dialogue is a laughable catalog of slang from the era, that doesn’t lend the proceedings a sense of authenticity so much as makes you think you’re watching a late night parody of a biker gang.

Aside from the casting missteps the other big problem is that this movie is built on such a nothing story. Nothing seemed to be happening and the movie felt like it had long stretches where time was just being filled with scenes of riding and partying that went on way longer than necessary because the script had nothing for anyone to do.

Once Loser died, the movie’s momentum went with it since there wasn’t really anything left to do except bury him. Accordingly, Heavenly didn’t do much but brood and make his speech that unconvincingly tried to justify his pointless existence.

You probably won’t feel cheated though if you went into this expecting nothing more than a few good laughs at the attempt to clean up the Hell’s Angels enough to feature them in a movie without any explicit scenes of violence, drug use, sexuality, swearing, and every other thing a biker gang in real life is involved in.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In spite of Verden being one of those horror movie guys who lives in the same creepy house as his deceased wife, he kind of has the hots for this broad he meets at a fox hunt. They even take some halting steps toward a relationship in spite of his pet black cat attacking her whenever it gets the chance.

At this point, I was hoping the movie’s main terror vehicle would be more than just some jealous feline, but as it turns out not only would that be the chief form of scares in this one (there was also a dead fox, but I think that would be more smelly than scary) but that it would actually be the centerpiece of the finale when it has a death match with Vincent Price, as if the audience needed some catharsis by seeing a grown man fight it out with a house pet.

We also find out that Verden has a strange hobby of making historical treasures out of wax. This is only brought out to explain how he made a wax dummy to put in his wife’s casket, since she was still sort of dead, but not quite and wanted to live in the house with Verden.

In spite of Verden's obvious serial killer leanings, his new girlfriend immediately marries him and they have a nice honeymoon at a beach and at Stonehenge.

Before you go chiding this woman as another one of those dull-witted babes whose corset is cutting off the blood to her brain, when they come back home Verden is in the process of trying to sell the abbey. This isn’t one of those movies where there’s some spooky stuff going at the house and people just stay there for no good reason. They’re leaving as soon as their realtor can dump the thing.

Verden’s lawyer tells him that there is a bit of a snag though. It seems that no one ever bothered to file a death certificate on Ligeia when she croaked and the abbey and most of the estate is in her name, so they’ll have to dig her up, have an inquest, and determine that the cause of her death is because she was really a wax dummy.

It is at this point that you can start chiding this woman, because she stays in this stupid run down abbey even as she starts getting haunted by the wife and that darn cat!

Verden has his big showdown with the cat and there’s a laughable sequence where he’s chasing it around the room with a whip (What was that doing in the bedroom, you kinky bastard?) and culminates when he strangles the cat, revealing a supposedly shocking secret. Along the way, Verden also manages to accidentally set his haunted abbey on fire!

The movie strains itself to make it past a wafer thin eighty minutes and resorts to some lengthy opening and closing credits to pad its running time.

Nothing much in the way of explanation or motivation for anyone involved was offered up here either. What was Ligeia’s problem? Why was Verden under her spell, but no one else was? Why did the new chick marry him? Why did she put up with all the haunting? Why didn’t they take that cat to the pound?

The scares and horror in this one were non-existent unless you have a mortal fear of guys in creepy sunglasses and cats that need to be declawed. You’ll wish you had your own wax figure made up to sit through this one.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

To give Cry Of The Banshee credit where credit is due, it didn’t completely steal everything from its superior forerunner. Whereas in The Conqueror Worm, there was an Edgar Allan Poe verse read by Price at the end of the film, Cry Of The Banshee had some verse by Poe up on the screen at the beginning of the movie.

Cry Of The Banshee also decides to go all the way and dump real witches and werewolf guys into this movie instead of “keeping it real” like The Conqueror Worm did. You might think that that was a good idea, but it made me wonder what the whole point of the movie was.

First of all, you had Vincent Price playing the local magistrate who gets his kicks torturing the locals and getting them to admit that they’re witches. This surely makes him the bad guy, since I doubt that it can be argued that a guy who disfigures and murders people while cloaked in his religion isn’t the lowest form of scumbag out there.

Surely though some young buck in the village would rise up against his evil ways and liberate everyone from his reign of terror. This guy probably will even have a personal motive, like his girlfriend got accused or captured by the magistrate or his henchmen. Price’s character would then be revealed to be a demented fraud and would end up on the receiving end of the torments he had gleefully dished out in the past. Something like what played out in The Conqueror Worm.

The problem with Cry Of The Banshee though is that while Price is railing against the local threat of witches, it turns out there really are a bunch of witches cavorting around the countryside!

Knowing this, why should I be terribly outraged by Price’s campaign against them? Truth be told, once I realized there really was a witch threat, I was irked that he wasn’t coming down harder on these heathens!

As the local magistrate, his duty is to protect the citizens from being turned into frogs and stuff like that. As it all played out though, he seemed more interested in holding nice dinners for his friends and he had no control over his sons or henchmen who always seemed to be looking for witches in the blouses of the local serving wench.

Then, in one of the pivotal moments in the movie, he lets the leader of the witches go so that she would always remember how he killed most of her followers. Such a moronic course of action seems to merely exist to allow the plot move forward with its “witch revenge” angle. Wouldn’t any witch hunter with any brains kill the head witch?

Since there really are witches hanging around, the question arises as to whom it is that I’m supposed to be rooting for. Let’s assume that I’m a strong Christian. Wouldn’t I be rooting for Price’s character?

Sure, he’s a bit on the smarmy side and prone to being a bit overzealous in search for these diabolical spellcasters and you could argue that sometimes some innocent people got all caught up in his witch trials, but these witches are tricky devils. Who knows whether these people were really telling the truth when they were denying their witchery even as they were being branded and burned alive? It’s not like he’s deluded or just doing it for kicks because these witches are really out there!

But let’s imagine that I’m not such a strong Christian and that I’m prone to using a little voodoo on some folks I don’t particularly care for every now and again. I’d have to be rooting for the witches then since they’re being persecuted by some religious tyrant.

Maybe the witches are the good guys and are just the 16th century version of the counterculture fighting the Man. (Remember, this was made in 1970 and the end credits refer to all the characters played by Price and his gang as “The Establishment.”)

Or maybe I don’t really care if two groups of superstitious boobs battle it out over some squalid bit of muddy English countryside?

And what’s with all this babble about the “old religion” the witches practice, but then they turn around and call on Satan to help them out? If you’re calling on Satan, then maybe the magistrate was right about you all along. The movie can’t even keep straight whether these witches are pagans or not.

Ill-conceived from the very beginning, the movie is unable to ever deliver either a clear protagonist and/or and antagonist and only leaves you wishing that someone would have tapped American International Pictures on the shoulder and let them know that the whole Price-Poe stuff was finally played out.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Oh Gorgo, if only you were here to lumber through town and trample the decorative fountains and palace of the Danish king! If only there was some unscrupulous circus promoter that chained you up, so that you could break free and take a big dump on their art museums. If only this movie was about a guy in a bad rubber suit, instead of an amateurishly made and animated model terrorizing all the opium dens and porn producers that make up most of downtown Copenhagen!

A copper drilling operation in Lapland discovers a chunk of prehistoric tail in the ice. Since it was frozen for seventy million years, this tail is perfectly preserved. Not only that, but it is the tail of a reptile and not a mammal!

This for some reason was a big deal, but I was never impressed by that. To me, I would’ve have been just as impressed if it had been a giant mammal or giant fish or one of those really big bugs that always try to take over desert towns. These giant reptiles already had their chance to rule the Earth millions of years ago and we all know how that turned out!

They keep it in this cooler at their lab and set about studying. They also hire a guy named Petersen to keep an eye on things. I guess he’s the Danish equivalent of a security guard because he’s got an I.Q. of 70 and wears brand new bib overalls, giving him that “lumbering molester” look so many aspire to.

He walks around checking gauges with a flashlight even though every light in the lab is on, makes wild facial gesticulations, and does stupid stuff like sticking his hand into the electric eel tank.

One of the old coots tells Petersen that he’ll be working all night, so not to bother checking on that tail because Old Coot will keep an eye on that tail. Petersen leaves and Old Coot promptly dozes off for the next 45 hours, accidentally not closing the door all the way.

When Old Coot’s boss arrives, he finds out that Old Coot let the dang tail thaw out and now it’s all ruined. Except for the fact that it’s regenerating itself.

I don’t know if they ever bothered to try and explain this, though I do recall someone babbling about how starfish can regenerate themselves as well as flatworms as if that somehow explains how a chunk of tail frozen in the ice for millions of years can be thawed out and grow into a giant green-gunk spewing monster.

If this Reptilicus guy was so awesome, how come he didn’t survive, except all frozen in the ice? Where have your regeneration powers been for the last seventy million years, big guy?

As this thing was regenerating, I was thinking that maybe they should be taking precautions against what would happen once this thing gets full grown. I had my doubts that the thing would be housebroken or anything once it finally woke up.

To their credit, someone at the lab suggested that maybe they should build a bigger tank, but the next thing you know Reptilicus is on the loose and the absolute worst special effects you have ever seen are unleashed on Copenhagen.

Just how bad are the effects in this one? Well, there’s one scene where Reptilicus is eating someone and what we see is a paper cut-out of a person going into this thing’s mouth. It was like something out of Monty Python. But funny.

I also couldn’t understand how the military geniuses could lose track of Reptilicus periodically. Uh, he’s a ninety-foot long sea serpent that is stomping a mudhole in your town and walking it dry. I don’t think he’s engaging in any deep cover operations here.

The remainder of the film involves chintzy models getting damaged by an even chintzier monster until someone fires a bazooka with some sleeping drug in the rocket into Reptilicus’ mouth causing him to take a nap in the middle of the street.

Truly a horrifying experience in every sense of the word. I’m not sure what these Danish dopes were up to when they decided to shoot this thing, but if it was to get some free publicity for their only city, mission accomplished!

Thanks for warning me off of visiting your city full of dimwitted scientists, sweaty generals, and pathetically half-hearted monsters. They even stop the movie for about two minutes in the middle so that the general and one of the broads can drive around Copenhagen pointing out all the sights to him, like this was some kind of Chamber of Commerce travel video. I used it to build up a wish list of places I wish that Reptilicus would barf his green goo all over.

Even if you like your monster booty calls to involve the destruction of famous (or in this case famous to Danes only) landmarks, I would advise in the strongest terms to stay away from this piece of tail.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Living in a futuristic society as we do now, we don’t have to worry about such primitive situations and instead have to contend with money-grubbing doctors leaving their cell phones in our guts during operations because they’re too busy discussing their golf game with the stacked nurse and foreign anesthesiologist. Thank God for progress.

The Premature Burial unsurprisingly plays on this fear of being buried alive prematurely, but more importantly than that, it plays on the fear of a Roger Corman film based on a Edgar Allan Poe work without Vincent Price.

Do to some dastardly business dealings, Corman went to a company other than American International Pictures to make this movie, but Price was under contract to AIP so Corman had to settle for Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland (Frogs) instead. Due to some further dastardly business dealings and in one of those ironic twists usually reserved for movies like this, the movie ended up at AIP anyway!

Don’t worry about Corman and Price’s relationship though – they would team up for four more pictures the following year alone! And poor Ray Milland? He would work again with Corman as well in X – The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, though I’m pretty sure he wished it had been The Man With Plugged Up Ears since one of his co-stars was that annoying hockey puck, Don Rickles.

The Premature Burial is an okay movie that doesn’t suffer from Price’s absence and probably is a little more memorable than it would have been otherwise since it doesn’t have that overpowering sameness that so many of these Poe-Corman-Price pictures had. (Which one was it that had Price playing that strange guy in that old creepy house with that bizarre obsession? Exactly.)

Everything else about the movie is pretty standard issue for these sorts of things. Big ancestral home located on the fog shrouded moors, hot young wife that can’t understand why hubby’s nuts, stud doctor who hangs around hoping to nail hot young wife once hubby goes completely bonkers, pets that get themselves into jams that foretell our hero’s own fate – all the good stuff is here.

Milland is a guy by the name of Guy and he finally consents to marry his sweetheart Emily after being very reluctant due to his fear of being buried alive. Guy developed this obsession because he’s convinced that his own father was buried before his time due to his catalepsy.

I looked up catalepsy since there was no way I could figure out how a guy could be buried alive just because he had fits where he flopped around on the floor meowing, but it turns out that catalepsy is a condition where a dude goes into a trance-like state with no reaction to outside stimuli. That was my second guess.

Guy’s obsession really kicks into high gear when he attends a grave-robbing his father-in-law is holding to get bodies for his medical research and it appears that the guy in the coffin had tried to get out after being buried!

Guy knows there’s only one way to avoid a similar fate and that’s to build the most advanced mausoleum the world has ever known! This is the best part of the movie and veers into parody as Guy gives his wife and Dr. Stud a tour of all his failsafes and backup systems he’s built into it.

Collapsible coffin? Check. Loud bell? Check. Secret door? Check. Rope ladder to roof? Check. Food and reading material until someone comes and lets him out? Check. Wet bar? Check. Dynamite to blow the whole business if all the secret and trap doors stick? Check. Poison just in case everything else fails? Check. Obsessive compulsive dude who needs a day job? Double check!

With all that in place, what could possibly go wrong? A nagging wife of course!

Emily threatens to leave him unless he gets rid of his pet mausoleum. Guy reluctantly complies and is seemingly cured of his affliction, at least until his pet cat is discovered trapped in the walls of his house!

A lot of things you would expect follow as well as a double cross that felt a little more than tacked on. (If you have a character breathlessly explaining everything thirty seconds before the end of the movie after almost nothing in the preceding 80 minutes lead up to that, you’re in trouble.)

Strictly average in scope and execution, The Premature Burial feels like it was made to play on a double bill at the drive-in, so you’re lucky that you also get the Corman-Poe-Price The Masque Of The Red Death on the same MGM Midnite Movies DVD as well.

The only impression this movie really left with me one way or the other was that all of this would have been avoided if Guy just convinced his relatives to leave him lying off in some room for about a week after his apparent death and checked him every so often to see if he re-animated himself. This film should induce only mild catalepsy in modern viewers.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Two spaceships, the Galliot and the Argus use their space TVs to contact one another regarding their mission. There has been a radio signal emanating from Aura. This means either one of two things – that there is intelligent life there or more probably, that there is intelligent life there that is laying a dastardly and nefarious trap to enslave the human race!

About this time the various crew members start blabbering about their supercool gizmo that protects them against meteors by detecting them and deflecting them. They have given this piece of hardware the scientific name of “the meteor rejector.” To further illustrate how important this is, one crew member states that if it wasn’t for the meteor rejector, they’d all be “Swiss cheese.” (As opposed to the Italian cheese they already are.)

I must note at this point that this life saving device when unhooked from its stand resembles a pair of very large binoculars. As you might guess, this meteor rejector is going to play a big part at the end of the movie.

Suddenly contact with the Galliot is lost! Then the problems aboard the Argus starts. The gravity on the ship increases dramatically. This forces the actors to make pained expressions with their faces and move with great difficulty. You can almost hear Bava saying, “okay, you’re really heavy! I mean really heavy! That’s it! Make love to the camera with your heavy and stretched out face!”

Now since the gravity has been drastically increased, some superduper button needs to be pushed to save everyone. I think I also heard the captain say that he needed to switch the ship to manual so that he could get all the credit if they somehow managed to survive this crisis.

The captain of the Argus makes a heroic effort to stretch his arm (and face) toward the control panel (I assumed it was a control panel because it had a bunch of blinking lights and switches) and punches a button and then the ship seems to be okay and they land, but the trouble is just beginning because the crew decides that now would be an excellent time to mutiny.

The captain’s name is Mark and he looks and sounds like the K-Mart version of Lloyd Bridges. The crew starts beating each other up and tries to ruin the ship’s equipment before everyone settles down and wonders why they were just trying mutiny on poor old Captain Mark. God only knows what that did to the Depends he wears under his space suit!

Once on the planet, Captain Mark sees the wreck of the Galliot and decides that something isn’t quite right about it, so he takes a squad of cannon fodder crew members and investigates, finding that everyone is dead.

Captain Mark’s crew members begin disappearing and there are weird sounds and lights all over the planet. Also some of the dead crew members have gotten up out of their graves, ripped their body bags off, and started to wander around to intimidate the crew members that are still alive.

Captain Mark knows his crew is looking to him for answers so when he spots another wrecked ship, he figures the heroic thing to do is head over there, check it out, and see if he can’t rustle himself up some more mysterious planet trouble.

Once inside the ship, Captain Mark manages to touch a glowing object that shocks him, accidentally hits some switches that gets he and his lady friend trapped (the doors close and the oxygen gets sucked out!) and then tries to escape using a tuning fork! (It didn’t work.) So he throws the tuning fork down and it hits something that eventually gets the door open and they escape. That’s the kind of leadership you can’t teach at Starfleet Academy.

Eventually things get really out of control as dead crew members keep showing up trying to lay the smack down of the living crew members and some of the live crew members try to sabotage the meteor rejector. Finally, one of the living dead crew members explains everything. More fighting follows, folks get themselves possessed, and a shock ending is unveiled.

This is a micro-budgeted affair that manages to generate a fair amount of chills and eerie alien atmosphere in spite of that fact. Bava does a good job with lighting as is usually the case and the film’s sets and costumes (which includes black leather space suits!) give it an odd sort of look. He uses the equipment in the space ship to good effect, adding in colored globes and various shaped equipment that emitted different colored lights along with the standard control panels of switches and dials.

The emphasis here isn’t on a ton of action (there’s a lot of Captain Mark babbling about what to do next), but there is a mounting sense of dread as the surviving crew members try to figure out what’s going on.

Yes, it can be argued that the sets are straight out of the original Star Trek TV show and the space ships aren’t too convincing when they fly around or land, but scenes like the one where the dead break out of their graves in slow motion are particularly effective and show Bava’s ability to wring as much as possible out of what he was given. It’s really a very effective and creepy film, with a memorable look that’s perfect for late night viewing and good warm up for some of its later (and more violent) imitators.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

In fact, at the very beginning, Vincent Price’s character Nicholas is down there making sure that the giant swinging ax is all oiled up and ready to go should he suddenly go crazy and feel like strapping some dude down and ruining a perfectly good dress shirt.

Besides benefiting from a more suitable hair color this time around (I don’t think you have to be an English major to guess that Poe never mentioned in his Usher story that Vincent Price had peroxided his hair and if by some freak chance he did, that was probably a lot more chilling on the page than it was in the movie), Price actually has something to do instead of just moping around about how cruddy his family is and how he’s really sensitive to rough clothing, bad food, and poor lighting.

Don’t misunderstand, Nicholas’ family is still pretty crappy as far as sixteenth century Spanish families go, it’s just that Nicholas is able to channel all his hangups into an entertaining package of denial, creepy obsession, and eventually murder!

Francis Barnard arrives at the Medina castle in search of news regarding his sister. He received word in London that she had died, but had not been given too many details regarding the cause of death.

Francis shows up a lot more steamed than you would expect from a guy named Francis and spends the entire movie with a perpetual scowl affixed to his face. This was nicely complimented by a generally crabby disposition and a bowl haircut.

Besides Nicholas, his sister Catherine lives at the castle. She doesn’t really serve much purpose in all this other than to tell Francis the secret origin of her demented brother.

Also hanging around is the doctor who pronounced Francis’ sister dead. He’s a young stud which immediately raises a red flag because the only time the doctor isn’t an old timer in these types of movies is when the doctor is either the hero or the guy that stole Vincent Price’s wife, faked her death, and is trying to drive him insane so they can be together. With Francis running around all high and mighty and outraged, you don’t need contacts to see the scarlet letter tattooed on the good doctor’s head.

The stud doctor is no brain surgeon though because his little scheme is screwed up when Elizabeth (the supposedly dead wife) decides to start haunting Nicholas while Francis is still hanging around.

But why are they trying to drive Nicholas insane in the first place? He thinks she’s dead. If she and the doctor want to be together, can’t they just run off to somewhere where no one knows who they are and start over?

But let’s say they want to drive him insane so that they can be together without moving. How do they explain to everyone that she is suddenly alive again and why did Nicholas go insane thinking that she was haunting him? What’s the point of everything once the death had been successfully faked?

Not being one to let a little logic get in the way of some cheap thrills, this didn’t bother me as much as it might have since once Elizabeth returns and sends Nicholas over the edge, things picked up in a hurry.

The best scene in the movie was when Nicholas went into this catatonic state after witnessing Elizabeth rising from her tomb and then getting taunted by her about how everyone in his life is a no good adulterer (mom, uncle, wife, best friend) and she’s cackling in his face about it and we’re just waiting for Nicholas to flip the switch on her cheating ass.

When Nicholas finally starts laughing back in her nasty face, it’s one of those crowd-pleasing moments when you stand up and cheer and start chanting “adulterer” over and over as Nicholas makes his comeback, rising to his feet and chucking the faithless Elizabeth into the iron maiden while Dr. Stud takes a header down into the pit the pendulum is suspended above!

The pendulum doesn’t get hardly any play in this movie, not actually even appearing until less than ten minutes from the end. It’s not a fatal flaw though since Corman delivers a nice looking film as well as villains that are easy to hate in Dr. Stud and Elizabeth. Price is also very good, managing to generate enough sympathy with what he’s been through that once he snaps, you aren’t rooting against him, so much as rooting for him to get on some meds and into some counseling.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The prologue goes on way too long as you would anticipate in a movie about really boring monsters, so you get to see a sailor test out a parachute for the Navy by jumping out of a plane over the Salton Sea. He and another sailor are killed by the monster while a third no doubt becomes the base joke when he dies of fright.

Middle-aged go-getter Lieutenant Commander Twillinger is on the case, barking out orders and being snotty to scientists that he’s delivered a white gooey sample to that he recovered from the boat that was attacked. The scientists determine that the mysterious stuff is a common marine secretion, which sounds a lot like what happens when you let some little kid into the pool without his Pampers on.

Along with the scientists at the lab, there is also the hot widowed mother named Gail. Her husband Tom was killed in a flying accident and now she spends her days making eyes at all the crabby old Navy guys in charge of catching monsters.

Twillinger organizes a bunch of sailor types to go out and check this dang monster out. A couple of guys dive down and there are some really tense moments where tense stuff happens like the divers reading the depth they’re swimming at.

They find lots of nifty stuff down in the depths. You’ve got your big, white, egg-sac type thing that turns out to be some type of egg, you’ve got dead sailors down there that have the tell-tale marks of a snail attack all over them, and you have a big monster lurking around, eating sailors and guarding eggs.

The sailors get attacked by the thing and once you see the monster, you realize how difficult it must be to build a really big snail that doesn’t look like a lump of crap. This thing, like all snails, has big, nasty pincers and two big eyes that aren’t on stalks.

Back on shore, Gail uses her friend’s grief over the loss of her husband as an excuse to open up to Twill about her own cruddy life. Twill is middle-aged and recognizes that even though he’s battling the most horrific sea monster ever seen in a California lake, this is a prime opportunity to look sensitive and get all over some of that widowed behind!

Next is the portion of the movie where they show educational films about snails and how vicious they really are because they eat worms. The theory is that there was probably an earthquake that opened up a really big hole into somewhere where there were some big snails from olden times when animals where a lot more monstrous (the Monsterozoic Era) and were prone to seek out and attack humans.

It may sound crazy, but the scientist that advances this theory points out that he got the idea from an article in Life magazine where there were some really old shrimp that woke up when there was a flood!

The rest of the movie was a rather boring attempt to stop the snails from escaping from the lake and getting into some irrigation canals. This involved consulting old maps for the location of an unknown underground river and watching a lot of people hustle and bustle in the office keeping track of which part of the canal system had checked in with their monster updates.

Twill leads a team of two to the underwater lair of these snails and blows them all up, but the movie doesn’t end there, because there’s a situation back at the lab involving the egg they’ve kept in case they kill all the monsters before the end of the movie and need to pad things out a little more.

Gail’s little brat thaws the thing out somehow (nice security Twill) and it attacks them before Twill returns to save them by throwing beakers at it, spraying a fire extinguisher at it, and getting some MPs to shoot it.

Bland and forgettable, the film wasn’t able to keep up much in the way of suspense, what with everyone running back and forth to the lab, headquarters, and a cozy little eatery in Mexicali. If you have time for a dinner date in the middle of giant monster crisis, then there ain’t no crisis. At the very most, you should be eating sandwiches and drinking stale coffee while on a stake out.

The major problem though is that the monster I’m supposed to be sweating my balls off over is an overgrown snail! Even worse, all I have to do is poke it in the eye and it goes crying back to its secret hideout underwater!

They should have just called this movie, The Monster That Challenged The World And Got Its Ass Whupped By A Middle-Aged Guy With A Pointy Stick.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Prince Prospero is one of those royal pieces of trash who gets off on torturing and humiliating not only the dirty villagers who don’t help their cause any by being so dang lippy to him, but also his own friends. He’s the sort of guy who is always looking to have his annual feast and masquerade ball be the talk of the countryside and thus is in a continuous quest to get the most cutting edge entertainment he can find.

This guy is so dedicated to providing his guests something new and exciting that he even goes out into the dirty towns with all his dirty subjects and conducts the auditions himself! This time around he settles on two guys who get particularly smart mouthed with him. One is Gino, the young stud who is Francesca’s boyfriend and the other is Ludovico, Francesca’s dad. Prospero immediately sees the possibilities of the good times his party would have if he could get these two to fight to the death in front of Francesca and hauls all three back to his castle.

However, just because you booked the hottest act in all of Wherevershire, doesn’t mean that your big party is going to go off without a hitch. Somewhere out in the surrounding countryside Death is relaxing and playing with his Tarot cards under a shade tree!

And not just any run of the mill Death mind you. This one’s all decked out in red and announces to some scuzzy villager that happens by that their deliverance is at hand!

When she gets back to the village and spreads the word, it doesn’t take long for her to croak from the Red Death. Uh, thanks for that, Red Death. I was sort of hoping that when you said my deliverance was at hand that you meant I was going to be getting a raise or that Prospero was going to slip in the bathtub and break his neck, but dying of the plague, that’s okay, too I guess.

Prospero is determined not to let a little pesky Red Death get in the way of his annual blow out though. Ordering the village to be burned to the ground, he returns to his castle and settles in with all his guests for the impending shindig.

He’s got problems on the home front though. His old lady Juliana (Hazel Court from The Premature Burial and Devil Girl From Mars) doesn’t appreciate him making eyes at Francesca and suddenly decides that she will become Satan’s bride after all!

Huh? Yep, it seems that Prospero has been nagging her to join up with his Satanic church, but she’s been a bit reluctant until now. Prospero sees through this and tells her that she’s just doing it to secure her spot as his hoochie mama! Well, sheesh! If you can’t trust the word of a gal who says she wants to be a Satanist, who can you trust?

The movie maintains a nice balance between Prospero’s obsession with having a really nice party and with Gino’s efforts to rescue Francesca while peppering things with interesting subplots such as Juliana’s efforts at keeping her man and the midget named Hop Toad’s efforts to mete out a little justice of his own.

It was nice to see the midget in this one get involved in some small schemes of his own instead of being relegated to the role of creepy assistant to the chief bad guy. Like I said earlier, it didn’t hurt that he was burning up guys in gorilla suits.

Vincent Price really delivers in his role as the matter-of-factly evil Prospero. There’s none of this wimpy or wispy crap from him in this one that so many of these movies seemed to require he do. He has no problem explaining his alternative religious beliefs to Francesca who is always trying to shove her Christianity in his face by bad mouthing Satan.

I mean, it’s like Prospero says: she has her god of love and he has his god of reality. The world is pain and suffering and it just takes a few guys to keep it running. Guys like Satan! Take that, Jesus! In your God of Love face!

Putting aside the fact that the movie is practically a Satanic recruitment video, director Corman really shows that he isn’t the quick and dirty hack that his resume of 863 films would have you believe. Using fluid camera shots as well as inventive angles and interesting shot composition over all these high class sets, he’s able to make it look like a first rate picture that surprises you after seeing some of his earlier efforts such as She Gods Of Shark Reef and Last Woman On Earth.

Throw in the full-bodied script (except for the midgets of course) and the fine performances of all involved and you end up with not only with a great Corman Poe adaptation, but a great horror movie period. (I just hope this isn’t Satan talking!)

© 2010 MonsterHunter

This is another silly Martian invasion movie. You know how those Martians are. They’re always giving our planet the bugged-eyed once over because of its really sweet location in the universe.

In this case, the usual invasion plan has been modified a bit to try and trick teenyboppers into watching the movie. See, Mars has gone into some kind genetic free fall (probably because they kept sending their best and brightest to Earth in past invasion attempts) and the result is that for every 100 male Martians there is only one female Martian. I think you know what happens when you have a planet load of horny Martians: road trip to Earth!

Just how exactly is this devious plot going to unfold? What sort of demented scheme have the Martians come up with this time to steal our nation’s most precious (and crabby) natural resource? Well, they kind of just send a coded message to our military with this cryptic statement: Mars needs women. Egads! What could it all mean?

Later we get some communications from the Martian leader about how they don’t have enough hot babes on the red planet and just need to score about five slutty girls and they’ll be peacefully on their way. You can imagine that we aren’t too thrilled with the prospect of some of our finer slices of grade A hooch being beamed out to some loser planet that sends its invaders out in ugly gold saucers.

Our military takes a break from the Cold War to deal with this threat and the result is the liberal use of stock footage of lots of different types of airplanes flying around. Just so you don’t get too bored and think that MGM somehow accidentally mastered eighty minutes of the Discovery Wings digital cable channel onto your DVD, they also intersperse these dull, grainy shots with dull, static shots of a loud speaker that constantly gives us updates on the progress of the stock footage!

Finally, Tommy Kirk materializes into the secret military room with the loud speaker. He’s dressed in one of those sissy shiny skin tight get ups that Martians without women seem to favor and he was trying to reset his big Dating Game plan to the top brass. They didn’t like what they heard, so Tommy disappeared and he and his crew land in Houston, Texas!

Tommy leads this pack of geeks in a fairly unconvincing manner (he tries so hard to be an emotionless Martian, but then has a crying scene with Yvonne Craig at the end of the movie) as they land at the old abandoned ice factory in the northeast part of town.

Why have they chosen to land at the old abandoned ice factory? Because even though it has been condemned and shut down by the city for years, it still has a valuable supply of chemicals that they can mix up and make some crap that will freeze people so they can be sent back to Mars.

After stealing some earth clothes, they head out to their assigned spots to go pick up broads! The first guy shows us that he’s got his head screwed on right, when he immediately hits the strip club down the street. There he ogles a stripper strutting her stuff, though since this was a made-for-TV movie, she just dances in a dress most of the time and doesn’t really sport the moves you would expect from an exotic dancer that has been targeted by interplanetary studs bent on making her their love slave.

The next guy also shows us that all Martians aren’t stupid because he ends up at a college football game! When you only have $25,000 to shoot your flick and about 50 bucks went to tickets for a football game, it’s understandable that you’d want to milk that location for all it was worth. And milk it they did. We must have seen the entire first quarter, before we finally see the Martian going after Baylor’s homely homecoming queen!

Tommy and his buddy are busy hanging out at hotel bars and pretending to be reporters for some reason so they haven’t scrounged themselves up a prom date yet.

Finally Tommy hypnotizes a real reporter into leaving his hotel room and steals his press credentials so that he can go visit the lecture that famed space geneticist, Dr. Marjorie Bolen (Craig) is putting on. She’s a nerd that none of the reporters take seriously except for Tommy.

Tommy asks her some really good question about chromosomes and the next thing you know, they’re going out on a date to the planetarium. Never mind that these Martians are on a tight schedule and must leave Earth in 24 hours for no good reason.

They hang out some more doing stuff like taking walks, visiting the wing of the museum devoted to Marge’s dead dad, and Marge leaking the army’s secret plan to secretly raid the Martian’s secret lair at the old abandoned ice factory!

Without reservation, I can say that this movie trawls new depths in its jejune exploration of the idiotic conceit that aliens from another world would actually want our women. (Haven’t they seen Earth’s divorce rate?)

Worse than the lame concept of the film though is the utter lack of anything remotely resembling competence by all involved. The film is a collection of snooze-inducing scenes with people doing little of interest except listening to loudspeakers, walking around staring at women and going to college football games. The whole “filmed on location in Texas” look gives the movie a feeling that we’re watching an H.G. Lewis movie with no gore or even his trademark memorably bad style. Without a doubt, the worst movie about Martians stealing our broads ever committed to film.

© 2010 MonsterHunter