Put our service to the test

Though neither of these films is a Mill Creek joint, we initially took an interest in them because of their connection to the Horror Collection 250-pack. One features an actress we first met in the earliest days of our site, while the other is ostensibly a sequel to one of our favorite movies on the box.

However, we didn't foresee that they'd share something else: protagonists who find themselves in the crosshairs of that most terrifying of locations --

--that most bone-chilling of phrases --

-- that limitless vein of potential awkwardnesses and unwanted socializations:

"You can stay in our guest room."

---

The Three Weird Sisters (1948)

Grade: C+

Ah, Nova Pilbeam. Even if your name weren't so unusual, we'd certainly remember you from your star turn in Counterblast, not to mention your strong resemblance to a former colleague of ours (at least in that colleague's younger days: you wouldn't recognize 'em now).

And speaking of younger days, it's not clear whether this or Counterblast was Pilbeam's last film role -- though she did make one BBC appearance in 1951 before packing it in for good -- but after a successful career as a child actress, and a reasonable career as a young adult, that was that.

She lived to age 95 -- when we wrote our Counterblast review, she was still alive! -- but was, from all reports, not interested in discussing the past. (Makes sense when your name is "new".)

Anyway, Ms. Pilbeam is Claire (no relation to Emily) Prentiss, a secretary who accompanies her obstreperous boss Owen Morgan-Vaughan (Raymond Lovell) to a Welsh mining village, Cwmglas, where his (ahem) three weird sisters await his arrival at the family home.

(Technically they're his weird half-sisters, but that wouldn't have the same ring, now would it?)

One is blind, one deaf, and one has some combination of bad nerves and severe arthritis, resulting in a strange symbiotic interdependency between the three.

In the film's opening Cwmglas suffers a catastrophic collapse in which several residents die, and survivors opine on the will of God and the suffering of the proletariat.

While hard to follow on first viewing, a quick review of Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (which also told us how to spell "Cwmglas") makes the details clear. The Morgan-Vaughans are the local muckety-mucks who made their fortune via the mines, while their cheapskate refusal to fill up unused mineshafts beneath the village caused, or at least contributed to, the collapse.

For a while, The Three Weird Sisters is poised on a knife-edge of ambiguity: is Owen just a callous bastard who selfishly wants to wash his hands of all responsibility toward the village? (Given that Owen gets a rock flung at him upon arrival, some of the townspeople clearly hold the affirmative.)

Or is Cwmglas -- the name of which sounds like a "worst of Reddit" thread in the making -- just a decrepit symbol of the corrupt, hopeless old ways? A decaying relic that's undeserving of life support and overdue for destruction? Merely a vessel for a "spent force", one might say?

With Dylan Thomas on board, some sophistication (moral and otherwise) is to be expected. Ultimately, though, the lines are drawn by the participants' willingness to sacrifice innocent Claire in the crossfire -- and given that one of the sisters describes her as "that horrible painted young woman", one need not be exceedingly wise to infer who the baddies are.

So what does that leave us? Suspense, atmosphere, intrigue, and barbed dialogue, we suppose, none of which are extraordinary but all of which are at least serviceable. And we get faces, if one likes faces (as we do), ranging from Ms. Pilbeam's ever-popular visage --

-- to the sisters, especially Gertrude (Nancy Price), whose forbidding countenance somehow intrinsically evokes those stony, mirthless parts of Britain where God's name is perpetually on everyone's lips and yet the old pagan powers feel close at hand.

Or there's this preacher (Hugh Pryse) in his ridiculous middle-aged makeup:

And we get amusing vignettes, as when we find the thersitical Mabli (Hugh Griffith) reciting Marxist dogma to, well, dogs:

Structurally speaking, The Three Weird Sisters is a film-you've-seen-before -- if you understand what we mean -- and offers no great innovation or dramatic uncertainty. So your appreciation of it will likely depend on your affinity for the Welsh coat of paint it's received, and/or your fondness for Dylan Thomas, Welsh terriers, Nova Pilbeam, or handsome older women.

(No judgment, you do you.)

---

Devil Bat's Daughter (1946)

Grade: D+

When you expect a film to be a complete piece of crap, it sure is a pleasant surprise when it's not. That's not to say Devil Bat's Daughter even comes close to its predecessor, The Devil Bat, the consensus favorite among Béla Lugosi's Poverty Row efforts (and we agree that it holds up).

We can't help but be curious why Devil Bat's Daughter was even made. Was a five-year-old film really enough of a success to call for a sequel? That is: if this was a cynical cash-in, what exactly was there to cash in upon in the first place?

In any event, Devil Bat's Daughter has little to do with the earlier film, though we can't quite call it an "in-name-only" sequel. Instead it runs along similar lines to Shock, with a traumatized young woman, Nina (Rosemary La Planche), guided through recovery by the authoritarian Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), who may not have her best interests at heart.

We're not sure whether having a patient living in your home was considered a ridiculous violation of professional boundaries in 1946, though from our vantage point 75 years later, it seems absurd. But living in Dr. Morris's home brings Nina into contact with his saintly wife Ellen (Molly Lamont) and stepson Ted (John James), and guess which one of them falls in love with her?

...no, this is 1946, try again. Though we will say that Ms. Lamont, who hasn't necessarily lit up our screen in movies like Scared to Death and Jungle Girl, evinces a degree of angular classical beauty in this film --

-- while, by contrast, Ms. La Planche's past as a Miss America merely underscores how tastes have changed.

But better either of them than John James, who unfortunately evokes the irritating Jerry Lester -- plus a dash of Mickey Rooney, a sprinkling of Tim Allen, a dusting of John Heard. Those old-young faces are a tough sell.

If one acknowledges that the major plot points of Devil Bat's Daughter are foreseeable, there are a few things that deviate from the expected path. One of them is the body count, or more accurately, the body-count-to-emotional-consequence ratio, which is unexpectedly brutal. Not a film for dog lovers, this, though we're always glad to see a movie go for the jugular.

On the other hand, Devil Bat's Daughter commits an absolutely monstrous act of retconning that, under normal circumstances, should be unforgivable. So instead, we'll forgive it by allowing ourselves to pretend that the literal meaning of the revelation -- which would utterly destroy both this movie and the previous one -- is untrue, and that the character who announces it is mistaken. And frankly, the movie still works if you assume that.

Still, while our initial impulse was to give this one a C-minus, it really needs to be penalized for that misstep. Otherwise, we were shocked to find that we enjoyed Devil Bat's Daughter. It's a predictable and flawed film, but manages to entertain nonetheless -- if you have very low standards, as we seem to these days.

Bleached blondes and space sprays

Easy enough to find a theme for these next two, as they apparently shared a double bill back in 1961. That's not all they share, though, as both films have a bunch of other things weirdly in common:

• spaceships with supply lines that get cut or disconnected;
• astronauts endangered by fast-moving meteoroids while on a space walk;
• mutually-hostile male characters who find themselves on opposite sides of a love triangle, only to later join forces;
• and, above all, major characters with incongruously bleached hair.

---

Assignment: Outer Space (1960)
[aka Space Men]

Grade: C+

There are some things we expect in the opening moments of a science-fiction film from 1960. For instance, an assortment of goofy meters, as seen above. Or maybe, if the film gets to the action right away, you'll have people in spacesuits.

One thing we didn't expect, though, was this:

Unless you count some earlier shots of the back of a person's head, the first character onscreen in Assignment: Outer Space is ace pilot Al, played by Archie Savage. Now, between Savage's bizarre platinum dye job, the print's faded colors, and sheer disbelief, it took us a moment to process that a film of this vintage had a black man not just as a prominent character, but in the leadoff spot.

He's not the protagonist, mind you; that role falls to spunky reporter Ray Peterson (Rik Van Nutter), whom Ray wakes from hibernation in the opening sequence. But, still.

And do you know what the other characters say about Al's race? Absolutely nothing. It's literally never once remarked upon, or even alluded to in the vaguest way. He's just a crack pilot and an affable (but heroic) guy, and a key member of their team.

Of course, the folks aboard spaceship BZ-88 (and space station ZX-34) don't mince words, and even genial Al has no hesitation about referring to Peterson as a "parasite". Fair enough since, while Ray does supply the film's narration, he's not of much use otherwise. He even screws up an important refueling operation --

-- much to the displeasure of station commander George (David Montresor), a melancholy and put-upon soul who kinda looks like the drug dealer in Day of the Panther.

Otherwise Peterson has little to offer beyond the repeated, extreme close-ups we get of his star-struck gaze -- which we're guessing is actually the same shot recycled over and over again. Its first appearance is when Al unceremoniously kicks him out into the "terrifying void" of space, spawning this exchange:

Ray: "A chilly sense of...emptiness. D'you understand me, Al?"

Al: "Sure I understand. Every baptism has its mystery, even out here in space."

Ray: "I've never felt so lonely."

If you're familiar with 2001: A Space Odyssey, some bells might already be ringing. Crew members waking from hibernation? Close-ups of awestruck eyes? And what if we were to tell you that there's even a computer gone wrong that has to be deactivated, while the body of a crewman who died in hibernation lies silently nearby?

In fact it seems to be more or less established that Stanley Kubrick was well aware of Assignment: Outer Space, specifically took inspiration from it, and even tried to hire director Antonio Margheriti to handle the visual effects for 2001.

It's not difficult to see why, as Assignment: Outer Space captures the heaviness, isolation, and coldness of space travel, much as in Kubrick's opus. Characters move in a measured, self-conscious way, carefully proceeding through rooms (or the exteriors of spaceships) as though they really were navigating an altered environment, while high-G maneuvers in flight put visible strain on the actors.

And while others have poked fun at the special effects in Assignment, the film's ships and rockets at least have the solidity and weight of real objects, and there's something disarmingly ingenious about them. Someone who can do this kind of work with a budget of essentially nil? That's the kind of guy you want to hire, because he won't go overbudget when you give him more to play with.

There is one moment where any sense of disbelief comes to a bizarre, screeching halt, as a crew of redshirts meet their death in a fiery crash on Phobos. The pilot desperately tries to regain control, his voice echoes in terror, and then we get this:

That's...a street, and power lines, and a car (we're told it's a Chevy). Once we were done laughing, we had to wonder: what gives?

Well, apparently this shot wasn't in the original Italian film, nor is it to be found in the English dub seen here (with much better color quality than the Mill Creek print). In those prints, though we zoom in on the Martian moon's surface, the ship's impact isn't shown.

So we can only assume some American distributor felt the moment wasn't sufficiently "impactful" (ugh) and decided to add an explosion, any explosion that was available. And now poor Margheriti (whom we already knew from Battle of the Worlds and The Long Hair of Death) gets the rap for it! Does that seem fair to you, Ray?

Anyway, none of this is to say that Assignment: Outer Space is a masterful work of cinema, because it certainly isn't. It's talky, the plot is often too opaque for its own good, and the romantic subplot with navigator Lucy (Gaby Farinon) is hardly convincing -- even if it's amusing to watch the camera zoom closer and closer in on the duo, as the sexual tension mounts...

...until Ray suddenly brings up Christmas out of the blue and the score starts playing "Deck the Halls", to utterly bizarre effect. (At least it's not "Jingle Bells".)

Still, Assignment: Outer Space is a work of hard SF that never relies on woo-woo physics or deus ex machina to justify its plot points, and we have a lot of respect for that. The ships go a bit fast at times (though well under the speed of light), but otherwise everything that happens is entirely within the realm of practical human achievement, and is explained in those terms.

And it feels real, in a way that so many slicker productions don't -- but 2001 did. For those reasons, and for its remarkably forward-looking racial politics, Assignment: Outer Space deserves more credit than it's gotten in most quarters.

---

The Phantom Planet (1961)

Grade: D

The opening minutes of The Phantom Planet bear more than a slight resemblance to various elements from Assignment: Outer Space. For instance, we've got redshirts who are scarcely introduced before they promptly crash into a celestial object.

We've got valuable, pressurized fluid spurting into the void thanks to a cable issue -- and no, we're not talking about the scrambled Playboy Channel.

And of course, we've got a skilled pilot with weirdly tinted hair:

For his role as Capt. Frank Chapman, Dean Fredericks apparently decided to keep the bleached-blonde look he'd picked up when playing Steve Canyon for NBC, even though that TV series had ended a year or two before The Phantom Planet started filming. Though not nearly as disconcerting as Archie Savage's snow-white mane, it still doesn't look right on Fredericks.

Anyway, Capt. Chapman is sent out by the Air Force brass to check out what happened to those redshirts, and for a while it looks like we're going to get another hard SF tale with a plot heavily shaped by military hierarchy, orders that are followed or not followed, and so on.

Chapman and his philosophical co-pilot Lt. Makonnen (Richard Weber) have a refreshingly honest conversation about the stresses of taking off in a giant exploding space dildo:

"That does it, Captain. We can relax a bit now."

"Takeoff's always the same...my heart pounded like a sledgehammer."

"Yeah, mine too."

It's nice to see a film where space travel isn't treated as something absolutely routine.

Soon, in another echo of 2001, they're called to exit the craft to deal with a technical issue, whereupon things go very wrong.

Given that the film's title and MacGuffin are one and the same, it's no surprise that their rocket soon crash-lands onto the large asteroid seen in the first screenshot above -- a prop picked up on some holiday trip to the Great Barrier Reef, no doubt.

But then things take a turn for the weird:

Like, really weird:

From this point on, the touchstone that comes to mind for The Phantom Planet isn't 2001, but The Twilight Zone, as we leave hard SF behind and are instead handed a premise that'd be more at home in the presto-change-o, ain't-life-strange-o vistas of Rod Serling's brainchild.

At least they mumble some technobabble about the space between electrons being decreased on this asteroid -- known as Rheton -- and, unlike "Rascals" on Star Trek: TNG, Chapman's outfit doesn't change size too. Fortunately, the mysteriously humanoid, English-speaking inhabitants of Rheton have no trouble finding something for him to wear.

Actually, much as there is something Twilight Zone-ish about the direction, it's probably Star Trek -- the original, we mean -- that's the better touchstone. One example: when Chapman is immediately put on trial for roughing up a member of the welcoming committee, the jury for this dashing spaceman is made up entirely of nubile young women, including two real-life Playboy Playmates of the Month (!). 

Speaking of the Shat, one of those women is (blink and you'll miss her) Allyson Ames, aka Kia from Incubus. Bucking the trend she appears here as a brunette, i.e. without the bleach job she had in the Esperanto epic.

Other name actors include Richard Kiel (we'll get to him later) and Francis X. Bushman as Sessom, the kindly elder who runs Rheton. Hard to imagine what was going through his head when he was asked to play an imaginary theremin while delivering lines like "This planet is slowly using up the energy that holds the atomic particles together", but he never seems to think himself above the material.

The rest of The Phantom Planet plays out a bit like a mediocre episode of TOS, and is largely dedicated to Chapman's efforts to answer common Captain Kirk questions like:

"How can I escape this cult-like society, which has me imprisoned in subterranean caverns and unable to communicate with my allies?"

"How shall I use these women's obvious attraction to me to my advantage?"

"How should I handle this ritualized fight to the death against a hotheaded, competing male?"

"How might I best defeat this hilariously goofy-looking alien in physical combat?" (Enter Richard Kiel.)

"How should I handle my own star-crossed attraction for a woman who, now that I think of it, bears an odd resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor?"

"And how should I address the obvious sexual tension between that Japanese-American crew member and their commanding officer -- if at all?"

"Eh, never mind. I think we're done. How about some end credits?"

"...Let's get the hell out of here."