MonsterHunter

Were this any other horror movie where the characters stood around and unconvincingly spewed forth lines and plot points while periodically swiping haplessly at oversized rubber bats suspended on wires as visible as in any Godzilla movie, I would complain about problems involving bad acting, unimaginative direction, a barely explained villain, and an actor playing the villain with such laughably exaggerated gestures and mannerisms that you wonder if he thought this was a Mel Brooks comedy and file it away as just another low budget terror flick that had neither the talent nor the inclination to be anything else. Read More »

This is the third and final movie in the Creature series of films that populated the mid 1950s. This one came out in 1956, Revenge Of The Creature came out in 1955, and Creature From The Black Lagoon came out in 1954, so you can see that Universal didn’t exactly let the ideas for sequels gestate any longer than it took to get the rubber Gill Man suit back from the dry cleaners. Read More »

One year after his first butt kicking, the Creature returned to the big screen in 1955 in Universal’s first sequel to Creature From The Black Lagoon. The Creature tries hard in this one, but he’s given such weak material to work with that even he can’t save this lackluster effort. Read More »

Just to clear up something from the get go, no, this movie is not based on the hit pinball game. It’s the other way around. The Creature is the most famous “biped from the deep” and if he didn’t invent the genre, then he certainly defined it. The movie was so popular that it spawned two sequels in short order (1955 and 1956) as well as countless imitators such as The Monster of Piedras Blancas and The Horror of Party Beach. Even decades later in films such as Humanoids From The Deep, you can still the Creature’s influence. Read More »

Back in the mid forties, the only thing required to find fame in the movies was nothing more than some horribly disfiguring disease. How else to explain Rondo Hatton’s brief and unremarkable run as a screen heavy in a couple of low budget horror flicks released during the period? While Rondo’s off-screen life may be entertaining fodder for a feature film (think Ed Wood, but focused on Tor Johnson instead of Eddie), the man’s “talents” didn’t extend much beyond the bulbous and elongated face they used to sell him as a bad guy. Read More »

Widely considered as superior to its predecessor, The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those movies that is probably as great as many will tell you and is not nearly the dreary, serious meditation on the folly of playing God you may have been lead to believe nor is it an old and creaky monster movie that modern audiences will yawn during. In fact, watching this, I was reminded a tad of the Re-animator movies, what with the off-hand treatment of the Monster and the various shenanigans he gets into along the way. Read More »

The least believable thing in this movie is that Scotland Yard would ever hire Abbott and Costello to be bobbies in some kind of pilot program testing out how well Americans do in British law enforcement. I’m not sure what the point of this program was or even how Bud and Lou got selected for this gig, but this dopey project is just the excuse we need to get our boys overseas so that they can mix it up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This time around Bud and Lou go by the names of Slim and Tubby (I’ll leave it to you to puzzle out who’s who) and they do about as well policing the mean streets of London as you expect them to. Just what sort of heinous crimes are they trying to halt while on duty? Read More »

By 1955 Abbott and Costello had met just about every monster Universal had to offer. The only one that had escaped their withering satire was the Mummy. Of course by the end of the Kharis films in 1944, many probably already believed that the Mummy was a joke. No matter though as Universal cranked out one last gasp in the Abbott and Costello meet the Monster of the Week oeuvre. This one looked chintzy and the gags were more rickety than ever, though the film was not without its amusing moments (almost exclusively provided by Costello). Read More »

I’m sure all of you remember the very first Invisible Man sequel, The Invisible Man Returns . That movie starred the voice of Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Price portrayed a slightly prissy owner of a mine who is wrongly accused of murdering his brother. Price has a doctor at the mine shoot himself up with some invisible juice so that he can be free to roam around looking for the “real killers.” While he does this, he also has to hurry up and get it done before the drug makes him crazy. As you might expect, he succeeds in finding the real killers and gets a blood transfusion that turns him back visible. Read More »

Having ridden the success of their monster films for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years, by 1948 Universal had gone through about all the permutations of monsters battling one another they could think of. In an effort to suck even more money out of these played out ideas, they decided to insert their monsters into a comedy starring Bud and Lou. The first of what turned out to be an ongoing series of these horrorific comedies is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and it is by far and away the best of the series and probably about the funniest horror spoof out there. Read More »