Mom, I want my own production!

Mention "director William Wilder", and people will think you're referencing the man behind Some Like It Hot, etc., while being weirdly formal about it for some reason. Right?

But no, Billy's real name was...Samuel! Meanwhile, his elder brother was also a director, whose first name was indeed William -- but he went by W. Lee Wilder.

To recap, then: Samuel is Billy, whereas William is W. Lee. And there's no Bimmy, but Mark Dacascos is lurking around here somewhere (holding up a sign saying "Will 'BE-E-E-ER!' for food").

So, it's a case like that of George Waters and Roger Barrett, wherein two closely related artists swap names for some reason (to annoy their biographers, probably).

That said, Roger and Syd have roughly equal claims to fame, while -- as we'll see in this next pair of films from spa-a-a-ace -- one of the Wilder brothers was the dramatically more accomplished of the two. Still, the "other brother" had his charms!

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Killers from Space (1954)

Grade: D

It became a dire cliché within a few years, but it's forgivable for a 1954 film to begin with stock footage of a nuclear test. Certainly it was timely, and how else to depict such a thing without CGI (or water tanks and upside-down cameras)?

Still, having your main title come out of the mushroom cloud is probably gilding the lily:

So we have Dr. Doug Martin (Peter Graves), a scientist aboard the unfortunately-named Tarbaby Two, whose job it is to take aerial radiation measurements near the test site. Things are going fine when suddenly, his plane loses control and plummets straight into the ground.

There's no way Dr. Martin could live through a crash like that. When his wife asks if there's any hope, Col. Banks (James Seay) has to tell Mrs. Martin (Barbara Bestar) -- and her unfortunate nose (also Barbara Bestar) -- that there isn't.

But his body is nowhere to be found in the wreckage: what gives? And wait, who's that stumbling up to the guard house?

Yes, it's the man who survives the unsurvivable, revives from the unrevivable, but (to paraphrase one of the greats) "comes back different". A bunch of movies in this box set have already used this trope -- Night of the Blood Beast and The Man with Two Lives come to mind -- but the approach in Killers from Space is a bit more Manchurian Candidate meets Freejack, if you catch our drift.

Either way, as his friend and doctor Major Clift (Shepard Menken) notes, "Your plane was completely demolished, the pilot burned to death -- and you show up, the picture of health!" In fact, the only outward evidence that anything at all has happened to Dr. Martin is a brand-new, yet well-healed surgical scar on his chest. 

One nice thing about Killers from Space is that the other characters aren't idiots. They haven't even seen The Twilight Zone, yet only 10 minutes into the film, they're already asking questions like "Did you ever stop to think that perhaps...this Dr. Martin isn't really the Dr. Martin?"

How many times have we seen movies -- or episodes of Star Trek -- where we tore our hair out at characters' contrived obliviousness to such things? Not so with Killers from Space.

Still, Doc Martin seems like himself, knows all the right things to say, and is one of the two key men on this nuclear test project. Couldn't we just reinstate him? What do you think, mysterious googly eyes that just materialized on Venetian blinds for some reason?

The best part of Killers from Space happens over the next 20 minutes or so, as Dr. Martin's behavior becomes more and more erratic, starting with night terrors...

...and ending in acts that could easily be prosecuted as treason, or at least espionage.

In another film, or a half-hour Twilight Zone episode, Dr. Martin's spiral of self-destruction would take up most of the running time. But we're not even halfway through Killers from Space when Dr. Martin is cornered, captured, given sodium amytal, and asked to recount the events before and after his plane crash.

Now, if you call your movie Killers from Space and don't want to get hunted down by angry filmgoers, sooner or later you're obligated to fulfill the equation. You could throw in meteors, alien microbes, UFOs, whatever you like, even total and obvious nonsense. But it has to be "from spa-a-a-ace".

So, what do F. Lee Wilder and his scriptwriter son Myles have in store for us? Check it:

It's the Marty Feldman family reunion...in spa-a-a-ace!

Well, no, it's actually underground, and (if you haven't guessed it already) this is where things get very silly. At first it's the good kind of silly, because you get things like the above, or this:

Or this:

And heck, if all this amounted to Googly Eyes: The Movie!, then fair enough. By this point the film's already put googlies on a car accident, so doubling down on the proposition would seem reasonable.

But instead, Killers from Space decides to throw its lot in with another, less noble trope of 1950s science-fiction movies...

...the "let's use close-up footage of a common animal or insect, and pretend it's a giant beast" one.

We've seen this sort of thing before, of course (sad little mushrooms that we are), but Killers from Space provides the most interminable example we've ever seen. It's hard to believe the core sequence only lasts about 5 minutes -- because those were some long, long minutes.

In many ways the second half of Killers from Space bears an odd resemblance to Teenagers from Outer Space. Just as in Tom Graeff's film, we've got hospitals, giant arthropods, and power stations as keystones in our plot.

But without charismatic leads or a sweet sensibility, there's nothing to sustain Killers from Space once its plot deflates. It's far from the worst, but just doesn't pay off on what could have been an intriguing premise.

By the way, anyone notice that W. Lee Wilder (or his cinematographer) really has a thing for Venetian blinds? They're literally in the last shot of the film, which makes for a nice symmetry with its beginning.

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Phantom from Space (1953)

Grade: C-

OK, we complained about the "giant" footage in Killers. But Phantom from Space begins with 20 of the most unpromising minutes we've ever encountered in a film, at least since our Umbrellahead journey began.

Once again, we start out with stock footage and voice-over narration -- the perennial sign of a director whose acquaintance with "show, don't tell" is limited to strip joints -- and then throw in some compasses pirouetting around maps, for kicks.

The MacGuffin, such as it is: an unidentified UFO has streaked across the Pacific Northwest, and is now interfering with radio and TV reception. Send out the mobile units with their detector dishes!

Show their parked cars at bizarre angles for absolutely no discernible reason!

One of the mobile units is flagged down by a distraught woman, Betty Evans, whose aging husband and (ahem) "friend" were just attacked by a mysterious, helmet-wearing man.

Mr. Evans dies, but the friend, Pete, pulls through with merely a bump on the head...and investigators suspect that sketchy extracurriculars are going on between him and Mrs. Evans.

And maybe they are! To the film's credit, it never does rule that one out -- and, if they hadn't been already, there's pretty much no chance they don't start banging after this.

The cops go after Pete aggressively, especially once he claims the occupant of the helmet appeared to have no head. Handed a fish story like that, they feel comfortable writing the whole affair off as "one of those things...pretty girl, older husband, young boarder."

But then new bodies turn up, and new testimonials confirm Pete and Betty's story. Hmmm, could all this have anything to do with the UFO? And what are "Ten-Ring Tips", anyway?

(Answer: it's a Smith & Wesson poster, apparently very collectible nowadays.)

What's the logical next step? Bring in the military and the scientists, so they can speculate at each other in claustrophobic rooms with (once again) lots of Venetian blinds, and offer up lines like "This guy's walking around in a monkey suit...killing people."

All this had us groaning in dismay, and bracing ourselves for yet another mind-numbing cheapo with tons of talky exposition and very little action -- you know, like The Snow Creature (also a W. Lee Wilder joint).

But then something happened that was totally unexpected: Phantom from Space became...engaging. Not good, exactly, but taut enough to hold our interest and keep us from guessing exactly where the narrative was going next.

And the dialogue had a few crisp moments, like the moment when scientist Dr. Wyatt (Rudolph Anders) introduces sexy scientist Barbara Randall (Noreen Nash) to Lt. Bowers (Harry Landers). Noting Bowers's Tex Avery-like response, Dr. Wyatt adds a quick and pointed addendum:

"I don't believe you have met my assistant, Barbara Randall...(pause)...it's Mrs. Randall, Lieutenant!"

And that's the end of that: no subplot, no sexual tension, no convenient killing of Mr. Randall by the monster. Who knows if Bowers had a chance if things were different, but they're not, and that's kind of refreshing.

On the other hand, Major Andrews (James Seay again!) certainly doesn't have a chance if -- as IMDb's "Goofs" page suspects -- he unleashed a silent tide of flatulence on-camera. That would explain why, in the middle of an innocuous scene, Noreen Nash suddenly shoots him a series of very dirty looks. James Seay, disappointer of women and their noses.

Unfortunately most of Phantom's intriguing threads turn out to be little more than shaggy-dog stories...

...like the rhythmic, coded tapping of a pair of scissors, which had us guessing: is it the atomic number of an element? A known mathematical series? A mangled version of the intro to "YYZ" by Rush?

Alas, the film never bothers to tell us -- which adds an element of realism, we suppose, but also makes for a less satisfying story.

Still, at least we get some more weird-ass camera angles.

Are we a pair?

We don't doubt that some of the themes we use for our posts seem a bit contrived. Truth is, with very rare exceptions, we try to review these movies in the order we watch them, so we'll seize upon anything -- no matter how slight -- to link a pair, trio, or quartet of films together for our purposes.

That said, these next two films have so much in common, you'd almost think you'd queued up the same movie twice in a row. It surely can't be a coincidence that Mill Creek paired them on one side of a disc, for both of them:

• have capital punishment as a central theme;
• open with an execution, including a radio broadcast that announces it;
• have a central character consumed by the injustice he believes he's suffered;
• have a sweet-natured dullard as a prominent secondary character;
• show a main character getting slashed by a broken bottle;
• and involve the framing of an innocent man who's ultimately slated for the electric chair unless something can be done.

We're sure there are more parallels to be had -- courtroom scenes! forbidden love! -- but we trust we've made our case.

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Anatomy of a Psycho (1961)

Grade: C-

Angry young man Chet (Darrell Howe) is convinced his brother was wrongfully executed (he wasn't), and seeks revenge on those responsible. But -- what a twist! -- his sister (Pamela Lincoln) is in love with the son of the man whose eyewitness testimony put their brother away. What to do?

Something about Anatomy of a Psycho reminded us of Ed Wood's The Violent Years, so we were pleasantly surprised to learn that Wood may have had a hand in the script of this one too (though the connection is speculative). Of course Anatomy of a Psycho is a better film, but it's also less fun, though at least it has a real edge to its social commentary (unlike Wood's laughable subplot in The Violent Years about communist subversion via schoolroom vandalism).

As Chet, Howe certainly paints a reasonable picture of a man so fulminating with rage as to endanger his sanity -- not to mention his chums.

And there's a cruel logic to Chet's random acts of senseless violence, all of which seem targeted at a world that views him with disdain; though Anatomy of a Psycho is ostensibly a film about an unjust execution and the ensuing paroxysms of revenge, there's clearly a class warfare element in the mix as well.

But something about Anatomy of a Psycho never really engaged us. Maybe the protagonist is too unsympathetic, or the supporting cast too interchangeable; maybe the plot is just too predictable, without enough commitment to see its premise through to a more disturbing end; or maybe we should just watch Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One again, for a reminder of what a good film about angst-filled hoods can be like.

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Buried Alive (1939)

Grade: C+

Another site refers to Buried Alive as a "prison melodrama", and that's about right. Unlike Anatomy of a Psycho -- in which characters living on the outside spend much of their time thinking about those inside -- Buried Alive is set behind bars. Though many of its setpieces happen elsewhere, the prison is the nexus of all the film's activity.

Most of the film's major characters aren't prisoners, however, but prison staff -- among them a kindly chaplain, a friendly doctor, a tormented executioner, and an enlightened warden. All are committed to the penal system and want to see it work as a means of rehabilitation, not merely punishment.

For most of the staff, only one thing occupies their mind more than the prison and its workings, and that's Nurse Joan (Beverly Roberts). Nearly every major character turns out to be in love with her, though we struggle to see the charm -- she has one of those "12-year-old boy boasting about his Pokémon" voices that suggest fried dough sold via an unpowered vehicle, if you catch our drift (and unless you're us or Andrew, you probably don't).

Of course, with all those plum specimens of upstanding bachelorhood drooling over her, Nurse Joan insists on falling for the local bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold, Johnny (Paul Wilcox), instead. Convicted of some unspecified crime, he's in for a couple years but is a model prisoner due for imminent release.

And does he like her too? Well, you be the judge:

To the film's credit, not one of the heartbroken also-rans try to undermine Joan and Johnny's love: each recognizes when he's been licked, or at least loves Joan too much to want to sabotage her happiness. 

Or maybe they're just offended seeing such a silly hat aboard a female who's only marginally spunky and certainly isn't a reporter -- who knows.

Instead, the drama in Buried Alive comes from a few unfortunate turns of events that -- coupled with the animus of an unscrupulous reporter and the jealous hatred of a sociopathic inmate -- threaten to ruin everything.

The anti-capital punishment, pro-prison reform message in Buried Alive is hard to miss. But as we've noticed in other films with a political subtext (Our Daily Bread comes to mind), it's otherwise quite optimistic about human nature. True, there will always be snakes in the grass --

-- but the film seems confident that, with the aid of courage and a little ingenuity, basic human decency will win out in the end. (Easy to do, and believe, when you're the one writing the script.)

Unfortunately the film's closing minutes are implausible enough (especially on second viewing) to risk squandering all the goodwill it's built up to that point. But Buried Alive is clearly a cut above the likes of Anatomy of a Psycho, and -- even if it takes a few missteps along the way -- its affirming vision of the world feels reasonably well-earned.