We've hit a milestone in our quest to watch every movie in our 250-movie box set from Mill Creek, as we recently finished off the Nightmare Worlds portion (which is also available as a standalone box set of the same name). Thus, we thought we ought to celebrate the occasion, and commemorate some of the wonderful, dire, memorable, and thoroughly forgettable moments we've enjoyed, thanks to our friends at Mill Creek.
Without further ado, our nominees!
Actual Best Movie Award:
Nominees:
Counterblast
Frozen Alive
Idaho Transfer
Prisoners of the Lost Universe
Terror at the Red Wolf Inn
Winner:
Terror at the Red Wolf Inn
Commentary:
There were several worthy candidates in this prestigious category, and were it not for the weak denouement, Idaho Transfer could easily have taken the honors. But of these five films, Terror at the Red Wolf Inn is the only one to maintain its tone, tension, and interest up until the very end. To quote a wise young woman, "All in all, I'd say it's...not bad." Or even, y'know, good.
Actual Worst Movie Award:
Nominees:
The Day the Sky Exploded
The Doomsday Machine
The End of the World
House of the Living Dead
UFO: Target Earth
Winner:
House of the Living Dead
Commentary:
Some very, very, VERY stiff competition in this category, but there was something just so uniquely offensive about the sheer laziness of House of the Living Dead. It proved to be a movie utterly without redeeming qualities, save perhaps for some nice location shooting in South Africa, and that just ain't enough. Our runner-up award would probably go to The End of the World, whose murky joylessness can scarcely be exaggerated.
So-Bad-It's-Good Award:
Nominees:
Alien Species
The Nightmare Never Ends
Panic
Star Odyssey
Warriors of the Wasteland
Winner:
The Nightmare Never Ends
Commentary:
Casual connoisseurs of bad cinema, or those with picky friends, might fare better with Alien Species or Warriors of the Wasteland. But for sheer unintentional laughs, you can't beat the one-two punch of Faith Clift's bad acting and Richard Moll's toupee. Appalling, astonishing stuff.
Ye Olde Filmes:
Nominees:
The Lost World
Maciste in Hell
The Mistress of Atlantis
Winner:
Maciste in Hell
Commentary:
Frolicking demons with pitchforks and sulfur
Sultry young succubi grooms would annul for
Overweight heroes fight devils with wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Most Watchable Serial Edited Down To Feature Length:
Nominees:
The Lost City
The Phantom Creeps
Purple Death from Outer Space
Radio Ranch
Shadow of Chinatown
Winner:
Radio Ranch
Commentary:
Hard not to root for The Lost City here, but its sheer length (very little has been removed) and thoroughgoing racism take it out of the running. Radio Ranch is great fun, suitable for all ages and ethnicities, and doesn't seem to lose much at all in the editing process.
The Third-Act Letdown Award:
Nominees:All the Kind Strangers
The Disappearance of Flight 412
The Manster
Piranha, Piranha
The Return of Dr. Mabuse
Winner:
The Manster
Commentary:
Unlike our other candidates, The Manster genuinely impressed us in the first two-thirds of the movie, particularly Peter Dyneley's performance as Drunky Washupovich. Its mediocre finale may not be the worst of all these nominees, but it certainly constitutes the biggest disappointment.
Special Awards For Special Campers:
Watch It With Grandma Award:
It's hardly a horror movie, but Robot Pilot supplies old-timey laughs for the false-teeth set. Heck, even if Grandma's a midget, I think it'll still fly.
Watch It With Your Born-Again Sister's Kids Award:
Afraid the wee ones will be corrupted by the panty shots in Idaho Transfer? Then dish up some gee-whiz fun for your homeschooled nieces and nephews with Menace From Outer Space. Watch them thrill to the spacefaring adventures of Rocky Jones! Keep them blissfully unaware of the tawdry fates of several castmembers!
The Poochie Died On The Way Back To His Home Planet Award:
So what the hell happened to that second segment in House of the Dead, anyway?
The Casual Cruelty To Fat People Award:
Need some motivation to stay on that diet? Give Ring of Terror a spin, and feel the shame come pouring in.
The Casual Cruelty To Animals Award:
Somewhere in Purgatory, a bevy of indignant chickens await the makers of This Is Not A Test. They're sharpening their beaks even now.
The Cinematic Blueballs Award:
I don't think it took us that long to figure out that Good Against Evil was a failed TV pilot, but we at least hoped for some sort of resolution. No dice.
The WTF-Is-Going-On Award:
We owe it to Paul Naschy to watch another one of his films. He's an acclaimed horror star, but an incomprehensible disaster like Fury of the Wolf Man can hardly do him justice.
The Paul Bentzen Fan Club 2-For-1 Special:
Think what you want of The Alpha Incident and They. But love 'em or hate 'em, whenever he's onscreen, Paul Bentzen is the force that through the Spring Green fuse drives. We look forward to watching the rest of his oeuvre.
The Overrated Soundtrack Award:
Many have raved about Goblin's score to Contamination aka Alien Contamination; it didn't rub us the wrong way, but neither were we impressed. I guess we just don't get it, if there's an "it" to get.
The Not All Nudity Is Sexy Award:
In the number and explicitness of its sex scenes, Werewolf Woman exceeds the competition by a wide margin...but the movie is permeated with a creepy, dead-eyed mania that eradicates any potential for eroticism. Even the horniest, most desperate teenage boy would find it hard to be titillated by this one.
The Hear That Plot Twist A-Comin' (Because We Sure Can't See It) Award:
Oh, How Awful About Allan, you gave up your secret too easily. Or maybe we reached for it too soon. Either way, you were eventually exposed to the light, but we were ten steps ahead of you, caught in the crossfire of yawning and boredom. Speaking of which:
The Wore Out Your Welcome Award:
We genuinely enjoyed the first Starman movie we watched, Atomic Rulers of the World. By the third, Evil Brain from Outer Space, we just wanted him and his big package to get lost. (In fairness, Ken Utsui felt much the same.)
The Plutonium Ruby Laser Research Scholarship Award:
Nice to see some familiar faces from Zontar in Night Fright.
The "We Should've Just Watched The Nightmare Never Ends Again" Award:
Once you've seen a movie featuring the reincarnation of Satan himself, Eternal Evil's tamer premise just can't pack the same punch.
The Murky On-Screen And In Our Memories Too Award:
We don't really remember Beast Of The Yellow Night, except as a miasma of foggy shots, cryptic plot elements, and Tagalog. Maybe that's for the best?
The "Prom Night Dumpster Baby" Neglected Film Award:
K. saw Embryo before we started this project, and so we skipped it. Its fanny needs a blanket, and somebody to spank it. (EDIT: And now it's got one!)
AWOL Award (tie):
On the Nightmare Worlds portion of our 250-movie box set, Death Warmed Up was replaced by Fire Monster Vs. The Son Of Hercules, and Unknown World by The Cold Room. (Fortunately, both of those movies show up elsewhere in the box.)
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Lost in the Woods: or, the peripatetic angora sweater
This afternoon we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day, and asked the question: does the world really need another blog entry about the films of Edward D. Wood Jr.?
Well, here at the Umbrellahead Review, our answer is a resounding "Maybe!" Especially since, with one exception, we're mostly covering his lesser-known films today. So if your mind's in a muddle -- like a thick fog -- then clarity awaits:
Crossroad Avenger: The Tuscon Kid (1953)
Grade: C-
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Grade: C- (C+ without the added exploitation footage)
Jail Bait (1954)
Grade: F
Night of the Ghouls (1959)
Grade: B-
Crossroads of Laredo (1948, completed 1996)
Grade: F
Most people know Ed for his horror films, but he started out in Westerns, most of which seem to have Crossroads in the title. Of the two mentioned here, Crossroads Avenger is by far the more watchable, and gets bonus points for its unusual premise: the hero is an insurance investigator! Gee, I wonder why that pilot failed, eh? Otherwise it's mostly by-the-numbers, neither egregiously bad nor particularly good throughout its 20-odd minutes. We enjoyed Harvey B. Dunn as Zeke, the wheezy old prospector (or whatever he was supposed to be).
Crossroads of Laredo, on the other hand, is pretty much unwatchable. Originally filmed in 1948, the soundtrack was either lost or never recorded, and so it gathered dust for almost 50 years. When Ed's movies came back into fashion, the producer (Crawford John Thomas) wisely saw an opportunity, and so we have this "restoration", with voice-over narration and music added by Dolores Fuller and company, which comes as a bonus on the Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. DVD.
It was a nice idea, but the problem is, there's just about nothing to the original footage, which just seems like a series of half-realized sketches that, as one IMDB reviewer put it, might have passed for a movie in 1918. There may be a way to wring a viable film out of it nevertheless, but Fuller's additions -- cheesy synthesized music, hopelessly banal commentary, and Elvis Presley Jr. -- don't exactly improve matters. The result is 23 minutes of sheer tedium, relieved only by our bittersweet reflections on canine longevity.
We don't really need to say anything about Glen or Glenda, do we? Except maybe that P. enjoyed it a lot more this time around...but it still drags like hell in the second half. Getting rid of the spliced-in exploitation footage would help (poor Béla!), but even without that, it's 10 minutes too long. Still, it's a hard movie not to like, and it's kind of sui generis anyway, or ne plus ultra, or some other expression in a foreign language that makes us sound pretentious.
Not so for Jail Bait, which is Ed's attempt at film noir (more or less), but fails disastrously in almost every respect: the thuddingly obvious plot, the threadbare acting, the obnoxious soundtrack...even the title (which refers to a gun, of all things) is a fraud! Pour a glass out for Herbert Rawlinson, who died the day after shooting was completed -- which is easy to believe: the poor guy sounds short of breath in every scene. He deserved a better end to his career than this piece of dreck.
By any objective standard, Night of the Ghouls is also dreck, but it's a million times more fun -- and since it doesn't feature Béla Lugosi at the end of his rope, it's the only "Kelton trilogy" movie whose bathos comes 100% guilt-free. Here, the fallen star is Kenne Duncan, who plays a mysterious psychic named...uh...Dr. Acula. Yeah. In his nefarious schemes, he's aided and abetted by a hideously disfigured Tor Johnson, among others.
As always in Ed's movies, the third act drags a bit, but the first 30 minutes or so offers the biggest laughs of any Wood film, hands-down: the séance sequence is downright mind-blowing. This is a must-see for anyone who likes to laugh at things. And you like to laugh at things, don't you?
Well, here at the Umbrellahead Review, our answer is a resounding "Maybe!" Especially since, with one exception, we're mostly covering his lesser-known films today. So if your mind's in a muddle -- like a thick fog -- then clarity awaits:
Crossroad Avenger: The Tuscon Kid (1953)
Grade: C-
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Grade: C- (C+ without the added exploitation footage)
Jail Bait (1954)
Grade: F
Night of the Ghouls (1959)
Grade: B-
Crossroads of Laredo (1948, completed 1996)
Grade: F
Most people know Ed for his horror films, but he started out in Westerns, most of which seem to have Crossroads in the title. Of the two mentioned here, Crossroads Avenger is by far the more watchable, and gets bonus points for its unusual premise: the hero is an insurance investigator! Gee, I wonder why that pilot failed, eh? Otherwise it's mostly by-the-numbers, neither egregiously bad nor particularly good throughout its 20-odd minutes. We enjoyed Harvey B. Dunn as Zeke, the wheezy old prospector (or whatever he was supposed to be).
Crossroads of Laredo, on the other hand, is pretty much unwatchable. Originally filmed in 1948, the soundtrack was either lost or never recorded, and so it gathered dust for almost 50 years. When Ed's movies came back into fashion, the producer (Crawford John Thomas) wisely saw an opportunity, and so we have this "restoration", with voice-over narration and music added by Dolores Fuller and company, which comes as a bonus on the Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. DVD.
It was a nice idea, but the problem is, there's just about nothing to the original footage, which just seems like a series of half-realized sketches that, as one IMDB reviewer put it, might have passed for a movie in 1918. There may be a way to wring a viable film out of it nevertheless, but Fuller's additions -- cheesy synthesized music, hopelessly banal commentary, and Elvis Presley Jr. -- don't exactly improve matters. The result is 23 minutes of sheer tedium, relieved only by our bittersweet reflections on canine longevity.
We don't really need to say anything about Glen or Glenda, do we? Except maybe that P. enjoyed it a lot more this time around...but it still drags like hell in the second half. Getting rid of the spliced-in exploitation footage would help (poor Béla!), but even without that, it's 10 minutes too long. Still, it's a hard movie not to like, and it's kind of sui generis anyway, or ne plus ultra, or some other expression in a foreign language that makes us sound pretentious.
Not so for Jail Bait, which is Ed's attempt at film noir (more or less), but fails disastrously in almost every respect: the thuddingly obvious plot, the threadbare acting, the obnoxious soundtrack...even the title (which refers to a gun, of all things) is a fraud! Pour a glass out for Herbert Rawlinson, who died the day after shooting was completed -- which is easy to believe: the poor guy sounds short of breath in every scene. He deserved a better end to his career than this piece of dreck.
By any objective standard, Night of the Ghouls is also dreck, but it's a million times more fun -- and since it doesn't feature Béla Lugosi at the end of his rope, it's the only "Kelton trilogy" movie whose bathos comes 100% guilt-free. Here, the fallen star is Kenne Duncan, who plays a mysterious psychic named...uh...Dr. Acula. Yeah. In his nefarious schemes, he's aided and abetted by a hideously disfigured Tor Johnson, among others.
As always in Ed's movies, the third act drags a bit, but the first 30 minutes or so offers the biggest laughs of any Wood film, hands-down: the séance sequence is downright mind-blowing. This is a must-see for anyone who likes to laugh at things. And you like to laugh at things, don't you?
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