The Umbrellahead Awards: Horror Collection 250-Pack 10-Year Mega-Retrospective

To our astonishment, we've now seen every film in Mill Creek's 250-movie Horror Collection mega-box set -- ten years after beginning this project.

(Technically it's a bit more than 10 years, since we started the site in November 2008, but we trust you'll forgive us if we round it down for rhetorical effect.)

Naturally, we feel compelled to look back at a decade's worth of film-watching and reviews. However, we've already done comprehensive, individual retrospectives for each of the five 50-movie box sets Mill Creek used to compile their 250-pack, which we'll link here:

Nightmare Worlds

50 Horror Classics

Tales of Terror

Night Screams

50 Sci-Fi Classics

Obviously it'd be absurd to duplicate these entries in a single, long, read-by-no-one post. Instead, we'll focus on those select few cinematic experiences that, even 250 movies later, have managed to stick with us.

And, appropriately enough for New Year's Rockin' Eve, we'll start with some Top 10 countdowns.

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Our Top 10 Favorite Films from the Horror Collection:

10. The Phantom Express

Sweet-natured morality play is in no way a horror film, but still won us over.

9. Carnival of Souls

We don't adore this moody take on "Appointment in Samarra" quite as much as some reviewers, but it's still a serious and skillful work of art that deserves recognition.

8. The Devil Bat

The best Béla Lugosi movie in the box, The Devil Bat is just plain fun, without the dull stretches or demeaning undertones that plague most of his other films. "Goodbye, Roy."

7. Teenagers from Outer Space

An unconventional pick, sure, and one we stand behind. See our review for justification.

6. Night of the Living Dead

And, by contrast, a very conventional pick. We two aren't equally enthusiastic about George Romero's masterwork -- one of us rates it very highly, the other less so -- but it remains an arresting film that's miles above its imitators.

5. The Sadist

In a box where actual suspense was in very short supply, The Sadist was a rare counterexample. It's a genuinely disturbing (and extremely well-made) film that's way ahead of its time -- and while we have no real desire to watch it ever again, we're still very glad it exists.

4. Terror at Red Wolf Inn

More black comedy than horror film, Terror at Red Wolf Inn used grim humor, sly social commentary, and a well-calibrated sense of the absurd ("Sha-a-ark!!") to filet its way into our hearts.

3. Crimes at the Dark House

Of all the actors we discovered on this set, Tod Slaughter is our favorite (sorry, Paul). And Crimes at the Dark House is his best vehicle, with a tight, unsparing plot that affords him the ideal opportunity to ply his delightful, scenery-chewing trade.

2. Maniac

A slow start notwithstanding, Maniac offers 51 minutes of the most concentrated insanity you'll ever see on the silver screen. It's mind-blowing to see a 1934 film with such over-the-top content, and Maniac remains at the top of our list of recommendations for friends.

1. Idaho Transfer

Back when we first watched Idaho Transfer, we wouldn't have predicted that it'd be our top pick from the 250 films in this box. Heck, we didn't even pick it as the top film from Nightmare Worlds, since we originally ranked Terror at Red Wolf Inn higher when we did our retrospective for that 50-movie set.

And yet, of all the films in the box, Idaho Transfer is the only one we've repeatedly watched for its own sake -- at least three times to date. It was the centerpiece of a mix tape we made for one of our roadtrips. It even inspired a roadtrip of its own, since it was thanks to Idaho Transfer that we had the idea to travel to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, where the film is set.

(In fact, that connection and inspiration are even more personal than we're letting on -- but we'll keep that one to ourselves.)

So, the winner has to be Peter Fonda's strange little tale of time-traveling teens in the Pacific Northwest. We have yet to tire of its gorgeous soundtrack, breathtaking landscapes, and haunting, moody atmosphere. And the film's alleged shortcomings -- like its glacial pace and amateur cast -- are some of our favorite things about it.

While the Mill Creek box presents the film in decent VHS quality, we hope that someday Fonda can arrange for Idaho Transfer to get a high-definition scan from original elements and a proper DVD or Blu-ray release. If there's ever a Kickstarter, we promise to kick in a C-note.

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Our 10 Most-Despised Films from the Horror Collection:

We won't do individual entries for these, since many of the films relegated to this list are here specifically because they were so unmemorable. (Or perhaps it's more accurate to say: the only thing memorable about them was how excruciating they were.)

10. The Day the Sky Exploded

9. The Crooked Circle

8. Midnight Shadow

7. End of the World

6. Atom Age Vampire

5. House of the Living Dead

4. The Ghost and the Guest

3. Colossus and the Amazon Queen

2. The White Gorilla

1. Prehistoric Women

Oh, we came so close to picking The White Gorilla, which has become a symbol for shitty, recycled filmmaking in our vocabulary.

But Prehistoric Women, a film wherein we literally didn't enjoy even a second of its running time, gets the nod. Maybe it's the recency effect, but we don't remember finding any other film to be quite so devoid of anything worth experiencing. Every scene in Prehistoric Women feels foreordained in its stupidity -- watching it was like being taken hostage by idiots.

Also, a side note that our #10 film, The Day the Sky Exploded, has the distinction of being the only film on the box that made P. fall asleep from sheer boredom. Perhaps it should rank higher, or perhaps it was just a bad day -- we don't know, because it was so boring that we don't remember!

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Our 10 Most Frequently-Quoted Lines from the Horror Collection:

10. "Do I look pale? I feel pale." (Clarence Muse, The Invisible Ghost)

9. "Zombies!?" (Mantan Moreland, King of the Zombies)

8. "Why, it's not unlike an oyster, or a grape." (Bill Woods, Maniac)

7. "All right! Skate on outta here!" (Jeff Greene, Idaho Transfer)

6. "Filet, dear. Filet." (Mary Jackson, Terror at Red Wolf Inn)

5. "Off with those pants!" (Lowell Thomas, Killers of the Sea)

4. "There was a mushroom, sad little mushroom." (Don Sullivan, The Giant Gila Monster)

3. "Hooray for Santy Claus!" (chorus, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)

2. "This is not the thing I want!" (Stephen Cheng, The Werewolf of Washington)

1. "As I watched..." (Crash Corrigan, The White Gorilla)

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Top 10 Earworms, Musical Moments, and Sonic Memories from the Horror Collection:

10. The giant wheel that sounds like a malfunctioning saxophone in White Zombie.

9. The relentless repetition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, at every conceivable speed, in Cosmos: War of the Planets.

8. The recurring song in Terror-Creatures from the Grave and its refrain, "Pure water will save you", which practically serves as a walkthrough for the film's protagonist.

7. Don Sullivan, bursting into his "Mushroom Song" in The Giant Gila Monster. Sweet, utterly incongruous, and unforgettable.

6. David Knopfler's scratchy voice, endlessly yammering on about "Mercenary man...he's a mercenary man" in Laser Mission.

5. The dank analog synths used to signify all things alien in films like First Spaceship on Venus.

4. The two movements of Schubert's "unfinished" Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, played on a loop. Are you a silent film in the Horror Collection? Then odds are, that's your score.

3. The speaker-melting blast of audio feedback that hits Bowery at Midnight at 55 minutes, 41 seconds. We knew it was coming, and still jumped 10 feet when it happened.

2. Eric Siday's "Night Tide" -- aka the haunting, otherworldly musical cue at the start of the Starman/Super Giant films.

1. No surprise here: it's Ted Lehrman and Leonard Whitcup's theme song for the series of the same name, "The Sons of Hercules".

How could it be anything else? We walked around singing it for weeks, and even started calling our beloved pooch "Dog-U-Leez". It's an earworm par excellence.

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Individual Awards:

Favorite Silent:

To our surprise, The Bat. The first time we watched it, we practically tuned it out, but on second viewing, it unexpectedly became good fun. Guess the spoiler wasn't such a big deal?

Least-objectionable Gorilla Film:

As K. said just now, "Gosh, nobody ever did anything good with a gorilla, did they?" We reread all our old reviews tagged "apes", and what a cluster of exploitation, racism and pseudo-science!

But we found one film that emerged from the pack, and that's The Monster Maker -- redeemed, at least in part, by an offbeat premise, a couple of tense scenes, and Tala Birell's character arc. It also helps that the gorilla is something of an aside: the real monster is acromegaly.

Hottest Actress:

Break out your Moosewood Cookbooks, because with Masha disqualified (Planet of Storms isn't on the Horror Collection box!), we suppose we have to give it to Isabelle de Funès in Kiss Me, Kill Me.

Honorable mention goes to this unknown actress in The Embalmer, who was only on the screen for a few minutes but exuded sexuality (and a whiff of mean-girl vibe, but as long as she's game to review your etchings a few times, who cares?).

Hottest Actor:

Dunno, maybe Mickey Hargitay in Bloody Pit of Horror?

Spunkiest Female Reporter:

We have no chance of offering anything resembling an answer to this question. They've all fused into one composite entity -- a 50-foot giant who wears absurd hats, talks like Judy Garland on speed (insert obvious joke here), and abandons her career to marry an assistant D.A. who's also a reporter, a detective, and God knows what else.

Most Memorable Villain:

It has to be Roy D'Arcy as Colonel Mazovia, aka the sole redeeming feature of Revolt of the Zombies. His fey screen presence is just breathtakingly, wonderfully incongruous.

P.'s favorite review by K.:

This Killers of the Sea/The Killer Shrews doubleheader will always make P. happy.

K.'s favorite review by P.:

Nightmare Castle and The Screaming Skull got one line each, and it gets a laugh out of K. every time.

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That's it -- 250 movies watched, re-watched, reviewed (mostly), and retrospected! Incredible though it feels to say it, the Horror Collection is done! Is this the end of The Umbrellahead Review?!

Heck, no. For starters, we've got tons more Mill Creek product to write about, including the Drive-In Movie Classics and Chilling Classics box sets.

Plus we still have plans to review movies that were cut from the constituent sets that make up the 250-pack, like Sweeney Todd (removed from Tales of Terror) and The War Game (deleted from Nightmare Worlds).

And then we have the likes of Grit 'N Perseverance, or our four volumes of Drive-In Cult Classics from BCI. We've been waiting to review the latter DVDs since we bought them in 2009 (!!), but in the intervening years, they were consolidated into one box and are now being sold by Mill Creek!

Ah, how all things return to the Creek. Long may it flow. On to 2019!

Remembering

In our last entry we made some noises about "unfinished business with a few films" in our mammoth Horror Collection box set from Mill Creek. A careful count of our viewing habits would reveal that, of the Horror Collection's 250 films, we'd only watched 247 from the actual box set (counting the two halves of the The Lost City separately).

Will we be reviewing Night of the Living Dead -- a film we skipped in our first pass through the Nightmare Worlds portion of the box set, since we watched it on public TV on (gulp) Halloween 2009?

No, we won't -- though at least we finally watched the version on the box,. Even in Mill Creek's middling transfer it remains a taut, effective film.

Its only major flaw is a bit too much of the "hysterical/helpless woman" act from Judith O'Dea -- the film's decoy protagonist, so to speak. (Duane Jones is the true protagonist, obvs.)

Or will we be covering Metropolis, the 1927 epic that launched a thousand film studies classes -- and which we also skipped over, since we figured Mill Creek's print was probably crap?

No, we won't, though we realized neither of us had ever actually seen the film (K. thought she had, but hadn't), and so here too we watched the Mill Creek product. And even in a cut-down, grainy version that can't bring itself to fit the film's title on screen --

-- we enjoyed Metropolis and would like to see the restored version sometime. That said, the cuts in the 118-minute version we watched weren't at all obvious to us: it's hardly a hack job like some we've seen. (Looking at you, Planet Outlaws.)

No, the real unfinished business we have is with a third movie -- one that, in at least two different senses, is the thing that started this whole project. Of all the films on the box, it's the first one we ever watched together; of all the films on the box, it's (almost certainly) the first one either of us ever saw.

So, without further ado (and just shy of 2019), here's #250 of 250:

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Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)
[aka The New Barbarians, I nuovi barbari]

Grade: C-

In retrospect, the 1980s seem like the transitional decade -- the period where we went from the way things were to, basically speaking, the way things are now.

For instance, take entertainment: in 1979 you probably had a rooftop antenna, and you watched what was on TV or in the theaters. You read what you owned, or what the library had, or what a buddy would lend you.

Come the early 1990s, we had cable TV, video rentals, and services like Prodigy that weren't so different from the modern Internet, where you could chat with other people interested in all the weird stuff you liked.

OK, it cost money (and charged per minute), and it was your friend's father that had it, not your family. But at least you got to try it once or twice for a few minutes, whereupon you saw the future. (And hopefully your friend's dad didn't flip his shit.)

Nowadays, almost nothing is out of reach. Nearly every childhood memory can be dialed up somewhere on YouTube; nearly every movie, song, video game, book you were ever curious about can be bought online, or even downloaded for free.

Heck, even people can be found, if you're resourceful enough. One classmate's dead from suicide or smack, another has detestable political views, and that little blonde you had a crush on in 5th grade? She's happily married with a couple kids. Good for her.

But back in the late 1980s, such things were still on the horizon (except video rentals, we had those). 

And so, enter a childhood friend of P.'s: let's call him Dog Pound, though that wasn't his real nickname. Dog Pound was at least 5 years older than P., probably more, but only a couple years ahead of him in school.

Picture greasy black hair, wide eyes enlarged by Coke-bottle glasses, thick lips, and a subtle limp. Now add to that shitkicker boots, a Canadian tuxedo, and a trucker hat.

If you're imagining this guy as a redneck with mild special needs, you're exactly right.

Dog Pound was awkward and a bit "off", but willing to be a friend when few others were. It was Dog Pound who stood with P. at the bus stop, and never once made a cutting or nasty remark about him, ever. It was at Dog Pound's house that P. first played Intellivision, and where he ate a dog biscuit on a dare from a mutual friend.

And the first pornographic movie he ever saw? That was Dog Pound's VHS tape, which featured the sordid tale of an android who learns about sex by watching...well, you know the rest.

And speaking of VHS, Dog Pound used to wax lyrical about a movie he called "The Templars". All these decades later it's impossible to recall exactly what he said, but it probably amounted to his version of "This movie is really bad-ass."

So sooner or later, we sat down and watched it together. And not too long after that, Dog Pound and his family decamped for parts unknown (the rumor was Alaska).

Even just a few years later, P.'s impressions of the movie would have been vague: something about a post-apocalyptic landscape akin to The Road Warrior, with a roving band of men determined to kill everyone, everyhere. And that was about it.

Yet it stuck, somehow -- maybe because it felt like some bit of underground knowledge, of a piece with the Intellivision and the porn tape and everything else. Something illicit, hidden, and at risk of being forgotten.

(He was interested in roots and beginnings..."There must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning.")

The impression remained long enough to prompt P. to look it up in the Leonard Maltin book years later, and learn that it was named Warriors of the Wasteland and/or The New Barbarians. Cool.

Then in 2008, in the course of chasing down a DVD of the haunting TV movie I, Desire (aka Desire: The Vampire), we start thinking about B-pictures, and Ed Wood, and Warriors of the Wasteland comes to mind again. (If you're keeping time, that's about 15 years later.)

So we do our research, and find out about the Mill Creek 250-pack. In the weeks before it arrives at our door -- or the months before we order it? -- we download a copy of Warriors of the Wasteland  from Archive.org, and watch it on an iBook sitting on our coffee table, in our little apartment.

For sound, we have the boombox P. salvaged from a dumpster, running off a car stereo adapter in one of the tape bays (which doesn't even spin), and which had the nasty habit of erupting into horrible static now and then.

The audio is about a second ahead of the image, so we route it through a program that adds delay. Later, the sync error gets worse and worse, and we add more and more artificial lag, until we're processing it with about 4 seconds of delay just to keep the dialogue in sync.

Maybe somewhere around that time, P. finds himself thinking about Dog Pound. So he looks him up and, sadly, finds out that someone with Dog Pound's (fairly common) name died about a decade ago. 

Not definitive evidence, to be sure...but on some level he wants to believe things ended there. It makes a better story than a sad existence in some group home, with little to show for the past decades but a history of custodial jobs -- or, all too plausibly, a permanent place on the sex offender registry, thanks to some clumsy and utterly inappropriate attempt at seduction.

(Sorry, Dog Pound, but that kind of thing does happen on the regular: just ask Brian Peppers.)

And now, ten years later, we have a big flat-screen TV and a whole house to ourselves. We're watching Warriors of the Wasteland, the very last film in this box set that we haven't actually cued up yet (Disc 46 notwithstanding, and that'll come in time). With the click of a button, we could watch a hi-res transfer on Amazon Prime, but somehow that would defeat the purpose.

You'll forgive us if we don't bother to opine on whether Warriors of the Wasteland is good, bad, or indifferent (it's all three), or talk about how it's really a Western in homoerotic Road Warrior clothing (which it is). Somehow, those things seem irrelevant right now.

("All the 'great secrets'...had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.")

Instead, we'll think about where we are: right on the cusp of a new year -- the very year in which Warriors of the Wasteland is set -- and at the end of a decade-long journey. And we'll think about Dog Pound, who turns out to be alive and well as far as we can tell, living just a handful of miles from where he and P. grew up.

(And, we're pleased to note, he's not on the registry.)

So here's to you, Dog Pound. You'll forgive us if we don't seek you out to reconnect, in what would almost certainly be a series of one-sided interactions made awkward by occasional flashes of bitterness -- or, worse, obvious signs of lust for some proximate woman whose kindness confuses you.

But you were there at the beginning of many things that still matter. And you, too, still matter -- especially from a comfortable distance.

The Umbrellahead Awards: 50 Sci-Fi Classics Division

With our most recent review completed, it's high time for our fifth retrospective, as we commemorate the highs and lows of the 50 Sci-Fi Classics box set -- or, at least, the version that's included with our 250-movie Horror Collection mega-box set.

As a reminder, the 250-pack is essentially a compilation of five pre-existing box sets, of which 50 Sci-Fi Classics is the fifth and final set. As they did with Nightmare Worlds and Tales of Terror, Mill Creek thoughtfully eliminated six films that would have duplicated movies seen elsewhere on the big box, specifically:

The Alpha Incident

The Amazing Transparent Man

The Atomic Brain

Menace from Outer Space

She Gods of Shark Reef

The Wasp Woman

These were replaced by five films, mostly peplum, with only one borderline science-fiction movie in the mix:

Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops

Goliath and the Dragon

Hercules and the Masked Rider

Lucifer Complex

Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules

So, if you have the standalone version of 50 Sci-Fi Classics, please don't be confused by all the muscular men in sandals. And if you have an even older version made by Treeline -- the original one that had Zontar, Robot Monster, and Battle of the Worlds, before those got pulled -- then hooray for you.

All told, the revisions made to 50 Sci-Fi Classics have resulted in a set that should really be called 49 Movies (50% Sci-Fi, 20% Peplum, 30% Other Stuff), but them's the breaks.

Now, 14 months since our last awards ceremony -- and ten years and change since we started this project (and this site!) -- here are our nominees:

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Actual Best Movie Award:

Assignment: Outer Space

Astral Factor

Giants of Rome

Snowbeast

Teenagers from Outer Space

Winner: Teenagers from Outer Space

We're tempted to hand this one to Snowbeast, which we fondly remember from a snowed-in afternoon of ages past, or to Assignment: Outer Space for its "hard" science fiction approach and post-racial outlook.

But it's not for nothing that we described Teenagers from Outer Space as "one of the most fun, endearing, sincere, and oddly memorable films we've seen in this box". It's everything a B-picture should be, and somehow manages to radiate warmth and joy while simultaneously maintaining a brisk pace and a high body count. Snarky critics be damned, Teenagers is a gem.

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Actual Worst Movie Award:

Colossus and the Amazon Queen

Kong Island

Mesa of Lost Women

Prehistoric Women

Snow Creature

Winner: Prehistoric Women

There's a lot of pain etched in this list, but the winner was clear: we just didn't enjoy a minute, or even a moment, of Prehistoric Women. It had us groaning and cringing from beginning to end, offering no delights or clever moments to compensate for its crushing obviousness, and leaving us embarrassed for everyone involved.

When you manage to make Wild Women of freakin' Wongo look good by comparison, you know you've seriously misfired.

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So-Bad-It's-Good Award:

Eegah

Galaxy Invader

Laser Mission

Lucifer Complex

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Winner: Laser Mission

After a long period without enough fitting nominees to muster a slate, it's nice to see this category come back. And the winner has to be Laser Mission, an absurd and self-aware action film that choogles its way through Namibia and South Africa, with Brandon Lee doing his best Bruce Campbell impersonation all the while. It's a near-ideal choice to watch with friends.

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Best Hercules Movie:

Big slate for this one:

Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops

Goliath and the Dragon

Hercules Against the Moon Men

Hercules and the Captive Women

Hercules and the Masked Rider

Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon

Hercules Unchained

Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules

Son of Hercules: The Land of Darkness

Winner: Hercules and the Captive Women

There was some serious competition from Mole Men, which benefits from that glorious "Mighty Sons of Hercules" earworm. But in the end we had to give it to Hercules and the Captive Women, which strikes just the right tone: not too heavy on the comic relief, not too serious. Some don't like Reg Park as Hercules, but we thought he was near-ideal.

Also note that we've disqualified Giants of Rome, which is probably the best peplum on the box, but doesn't have a Hercules, Maciste, Colossus, or Goliath character.

(The Worst Hercules Movie, by the way, is easily Colossus and the Amazon Queen. Just excruciating on every level, and probably our runner-up for the Actual Worst Movie Award.)

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Best Gamera Movie:

Attack of the Monsters

Destroy All Planets

Gammera the Invincible

Winner: The committee declines to name a winner in this category.

Having watched the first five Gamera movies, our position is that the two films not on this box -- #2 War of the Monsters and #3 Return of the Giant Monsters -- are so much better than the above three, it seems unjust to award anything to #1, #4, or #5.

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The Hack 'n Slash Award for Bad Re-editing:

Lost Jungle

Planet Outlaws

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

Winner: Planet Outlaws

No problems with Lost Jungle or Rocky Jones, and though it pains us to lose Masha, there's a kind of ingenuity to the two films that reworked Planet of Storms.

That leaves the editors who turned the Buck Rogers serial into a feature film. In their haste to trim four hours down to one, they managed to make a film whose narrative felt rushed and choppy, yet overlong and repetitive. It's not horrible, but it sure is a hack job -- and so Planet Outlaws gets the booby prize.

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The Peter Loew Award:

Bride of the Gorilla

Cosmos: War of the Planets

Horrors of Spider Island

Moon of the Wolf

Winner: Moon of the Wolf

In all these films, someone turns into something (quiet, ZaSu Pitts), and that something runs amok. But Moon of the Wolf offered the most engaging tale of the bunch, taking advantage of its sleepy bayou setting to spin its lougarou yarn.

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Subterranean Homesick Blues Award:

Incredible Petrified World

Killers from Space

Phantom Planet

Unknown World

Winner: Unknown World

Since none of these films were any great shakes, we'll give it to the one that went the deepest underground -- by far. And that's Unknown World, which would have turned into molten magma about 5% of the way into its journey, but otherwise did its thing resolutely.

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She's The Boss And A Tough One Award:

Hercules Against the Moon Men

Prehistoric Women

Queen of the Amazons

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons

They Came from Beyond Space

Winner: Suzerain Cleolanthe from Crash of the Moons

Queen Samara from Moon Men is willing to betray the entire human race to gain power. But heck, there weren't that many people back then to begin with: a few million, maybe?

Meanwhile, Cleolanthe doesn't even blink when ordering the destruction of an entire planet, so she gets the nod. She may not be Queen of Ophiuchius, but she's certainly the Queen of RBF.

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The Unexpectedly Color-Blind Award:

Assignment: Outer Space

Blood Tide

First Spaceship on Venus

Planet Outlaws

Winner: Assignment: Outer Space

First Spaceship on Venus shows people of different races working side by side, but does so for propaganda purposes. Blood Tide and Planet Outlaws have prominent minority characters whose race is never even mentioned -- no big deal for a 1980 film, but downright remarkable in the case of a serial from 1938.

That said, Assignment: Outer Space impressed us the most in this department. Archie Savage is the first person you see in the film, not a word is said about his race, and he's arguably the hero of the whole affair. The phrase "post-racial" seems silly now, but had things gone a bit differently, our future could have looked like Assignment: Outer Space.

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The You're-No-Horta-But-You'll-Do Award:

Attack of the Monsters

Killers from Space

Phantom from Space

They Came from Beyond Space

Warning from Space

Winner: Warning from Space

In this category for absurd aliens of roughly humanoid proportions, the easy winners are the starmen from Warning for Space. They remind us of the wonderful creatures from the intro to the Starman/Super Giant movies -- heck, it may even be the same set of costumes for all we know.

(Those googly-eyed fellows in Killers from Space definitely deserve an honorable mention, though.)

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Special Awards for Special Campers:

The "Let's Just Kill the Whole Cast" Award:

It's not literally true that (spoiler) every named character in The Brain Machine gets offed, but when you're dealing with a film this unrelentingly grim, it's no surprise that we come close. Certainly, everyone who has a trace of human kindness gets the axe -- as do several with little or none to spare.

The Ongo-ing Concern Award (tie):

So if White Pongo somehow got loose and made it over to where The Wild Women of Wongo live, and then he somehow imported a Sega arcade machine from 1983 that hadn't been translated from the original Japanese, you'd have Wongo Pongo's nihongo Congo Bongo.

And if you paired that up with a rhinoceros from The Legend of Zelda...

...or a drone by Charlemagne Palestine...

...or an Afro-Cuban percussionist...

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Does that mean we're done with the 250-pack? Well, not quite. For one, we'd like to do a retrospective overview of the whole pack -- and since we obviously can't address 250 films in one post, we'll be taking an approach that's slightly different from the retrospectives we've done thus far.

And before we can do that, we have some unfinished business with a few films...

The fourth estate

It's been over a decade since we started making our way through the 250 (ish) films in the Mill Creek Horror Collection. At long last, we've arrived at the tail end of the box, with just two movies left -- two! -- that neither of us have ever seen before.

And what do they have in common, besides aliens and space and other science fiction tropes? There are a few options, like blowing up heavenly bodies (happens in both), teleportation (ditto), or ripping off established science fiction classics (that's a hat trick).

But we'll choose this: in both films, press conferences are held in which the very fate of the earth is called into question.

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Warning from Space (1956)

Grade: D

These last two films in 50 Sci-Fi Classics really do bring us full circle, as Warning from Space amply demonstrates. Even if we didn't have the literal (and adorable) "star men" seen above, its Japanese origins and style would certainly remind us of the Super Giant films we watched near the very outset of our 250-pack quest.

Once again the Mill Creek compilers show discernment by pairing Warning from Space on the same disc with They Came from Beyond Space. Perhaps we should have reviewed them together, as they really do share a lot of themes -- like having scientists as protagonists, and showing them in the field.

Or aliens who, in need of a spokesperson, choose to inhabit a human female body.

Or societies that conceive of themselves in terms of politeness and fair play, and that are left curiously defenseless against those who transgress those norms.

Or weird stuff that pops up from a pond, while the soundtrack uses a grating electronic tone to make sure we catch on to its "alienness".

Anyway, Warning from Space is basically Japan's version of When Worlds Collide with a dash of The Day The Earth Stood Still. There's a whole lot of looking through telescopes and firing off rockets --

--  interspersed with philosophical arguments, cultural activities, and the occasional dance number.

By deciding to make Japan their point of contact, did the aliens inadvertently guarantee that the rest of the world would drag their feet? There's a whiff of that in the film -- an aggrieved undertone of "Why aren't they taking us seriously? Why are they refusing our requests for help?" --

-- to which the events of 1931-1945 might be a plausible answer. (Just saying.)

Warning from Space might rate a notch or two higher if it weren't for the cavalier way it handles a crucial plot thread near the end. It cheapens the narrative, and would have been so easy to fix! And we can't blame the dubbing, since it's apparently quite faithful.

The fun is also dampened by scenes near the end that show various animals in distress. The intention is to evoke our compassion by reminding us of how they too would suffer in the oppressive heat, but can we trust that none were harmed in the making of this film? Probably not.

On the other hand, that alien chick has one hell of a serve. Naomi Osaka, watch out!

---

Cosmos: War of the Planets (1977)
[aka War of the Planets, aka Anno zero - Guerra nello spazio]

Objective Grade: F

Plus WTF Withal: D

Cosmos: War of the Planets isn't quite the last film on the box set: that honor goes to Destroy All Planets, a Gamera film we already reviewed. But it's on the last side of the last disc, at least.

And boy, did Mill Creek pick a doozy to finish things up -- because War of the Planets is one bizarre, scattershot, fever dream of a movie.

There was always going to be some background weirdness since War of the Planets has the same director (Alfonso Brescia), and much of the same cast, as a film we've already seen, War of the Robots.

Heck, it's even got Aldo Canti as an unexpectedly friendly alien who joins the starship's crew late in the film -- playing almost the exact same role he did in Robots.

But War of the Planets is much, much weirder than either Robots or the other Brescia film we've seen, Star Odyssey. Those films at least made some attempt to present a coherent narrative (despite the swapped reel in Star Odyssey), but War of the Planets is just completely and utterly out-to-lunch from the start.

It's never a good sign when you can barely understand the film's opening scene, in which the crew seems to be on a collision course with debris from a stellar explosion. Their computer refuses to route around it, confounding the crew and leaving them headed for certain doom --

-- only to discover that the object hurtling toward them was, as the ship's computer tells us in an announcement whose beginning is obscured by the crew's cheers, merely "a refraction of a cosmic explosion occurring 10 million years ago."

And that's why it didn't steer clear: the object wasn't even there. Guess Compy knows best, eh, folks?

In the original Italian version of War of the Planets, the title sequence (which follows the scene above) had a song all its own. Its refrain:

We are not alone here in space

Because here in space we have brothers

It's as hilarious as it sounds, but given the singer's thick accent -- and habit of switching between English and Italian -- it's understandable that "We Are Not Alone Here In Space" was pulled for the foreign dub (though a fragment of it pops up at around 8:45, who knows why?).

Instead, we get an extended sequence of avant-garde electronic patter, which accompanies long shots of asteroids, starfields, spaceports, and some amazing attempts at Anglicizing the names of the Italian crew.

Next, the film's protagonist, Captain Fred Hamilton (John Richardson), walks up to one of his co-workers, greets him, and clocks him for no discernible reason.

When Captain Hamilton is called on the carpet for his fisticuffs, and arguments ensue about "a bunch of notes from an electronic hunk of metal" vs. "the greatest brain ever made by man", we know we're dealing with one of those man vs. machine movies. And contrary to some other reviewers, we wouldn't describe this as a hidden subtext of War of the Planets, because it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Does a guy nearly get himself killed while doing a space-walking operation? And does the Captain need to fly to his rescue, after the computer's automated assistance isn't nearly fast enough? It's all the fault of those damn machines, machines, we built them to serve us.

Or does a couple engage in some sort of strange, alienated cybersex through a glass ball that looks kind of like the Death Star?

"How long?"

"Whatever."

(flips switch)

"Violent, or gentle?"

"You decide."

(flips switch)

Yep, it's the machines, machines, they're gonna be our bed.

Don't worry, some of us still know how to get it on properly. We don't even have to go to Tangie Town.

And some of us are named "Oko" and have overdubbed Asian accents -- who knows if that was in the original -- despite strong evidence that we don't hail from that neck of the woods.

The person who put together the soundtrack for War of the Robots really likes the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Eventually he caves in and just uses a recording of the Bach directly -- an excerpt at 23 minutes, and a long chunk around 51 minutes -- but it's present from the very first shot of the film, when the oscillations of a star are accompanied by a rapid-fire version of the Toccata's opening riff.

At other times, it's sped up even further and used as a sound effect for computer alerts and big banks of blinkenlights. And when we're not hearing the Toccata, we're hearing Switched-On-style synth tunes inspired by Bach (but without any of his chops).

The captain may hate computers, but his superiors happily take their orders from the supercomputer Wiz. When a mysterious interstellar signal disrupts communications on Earth, Wiz somehow knows that "behind this strange signal there's an alien intelligence that knows all", and "orders [them] to find the emission source and destroy it".

(Perhaps the wise Wiz could also have noted that the signal is just the freakin' Toccata lick sped up by a factor of 20. Haven't you ever played Dark Castle, Wiz?)

And guess who gets the job? OK, a mysterious woman has to persuade the Captain, though we get no backstory or explanation of why this Dr. Jane Frazier has such a sway on his judgment. Her appearance is so brief as to almost be a cameo, while the actress is uncredited and unknown to us.

It's yet another example of the seat-of-your-pants style of scriptwriting -- and direction, and editing -- that War of the Robots seems to favor. No narrative conventions needed, just full speed ahead at all times.

Soon enough, the captain and his crew get to the mysterious planet from which the emissions are coming. From there, things play out like a cross between War of the Robots and pretty much any episode of Star Trek where Kirk et al. encounter a "primitive" people. There's always someone pulling the strings, and if it's not a disembodied intelligence with godlike powers, it's usually a computer.

Meanwhile his bosses back on Earth are being hounded by "newspapermen" (though they're certainly not all men).

This prompts one of the only intentionally funny exchanges in the entire film. After the brass offer a reassuring explanation for recent events -- "I'm sorry for the headlines you had in mind, but Earth is not in any danger!" -- 

-- the reporters scramble away to the nearest phones, with one man specifically shouting "Earth is in danger!" to his editor. The two military men look at each other and deadpan:

Miller: Didn't buy it.

Armstrong: Nope.

The occasional chuckle aside, War of the Planets is a gigantic mess. It manages to both drag and rush, with botched transitions and sequences that go on too long. Characters talk over each other for no reason; scenes are interrupted mid-sentence; the action shifts from place to place, seemingly at random, leaving us uncertain as to what's going on or what's happened to whom. Seldom have we ever spent as much time glancing at each other and silently mouthing "WTF?"

In other words, both the editing and direction are atrocious. (And the prop department kinda phoned it in too.)

How much of the incoherence comes from the dubbing process is unclear, though seeing the Italian original would be the gold standard here. On a technical level the English dub is mostly decent (especially since some of the actors were speaking English anyway!), though we do get one or two gloriously ridiculous moments when a character takes a long, unnatural pause mid-sentence.

And the cinematography is fine -- nice, even -- though maybe we're just responding to the pretty colors and flashing lights, since we haven't hit the Pink Floyd show at the planetarium and we're jonesing.

As a side note, what on earth is this crucifix doing in a random explosion sequence? If there's a hidden Christian message in this film, it's buried pretty deep.

War of the Planets completely loses its marbles toward the end, when it veers wildly from ripping off 2001: A Space Odyssey to ripping off who-knows-what-they-were-trying-for (Planet of the Vampires gets brought up a lot in other reviews, but we haven't seen it).

But at least War of the Planets sticks by its core message: that humans shouldn't allow themselves to be too dependent on computers, lest we become weak, vulnerable, and alienated from our own humanity. Or something like that.

Fortunately, there's absolutely nothing timely or relevant about that message, right? Sounds totally irrational to us.

Don't you agree, Aldo Canti? You're everyone's favorite alien.

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Next up, the Umbrellahead Awards for 50 Sci-Fi Classics!