Known internationally as Terror In the Midnight Sun and in its native Sweden as Space Invasion of Lapland, this movie was brought to the U.S. by Jerry Warren, who cut 25 minutes from its running time — including a nude shower scene with lead actress Barbara Wilson — as well as shooting a new beginning featuring narrator John Carradine. Of course, when he sold the film to syndication later, a whole bunch of new material had to be shot to pad out the film’s running time. That new footage features several doctors discussing the mental problems of the lead character. Warren also shot a new UFO abduction scene. Never let it be said that the maker of The Wild World of Batwoman didn’t keep up on trends.
However, in Fred Olen Ray’s book The New Poverty Row, he did reveal “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together…I was in the business to make money. I never, ever tried in any way to compete, or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude…You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”
Diane Wilson and scientist Erik Engstrom just want to fall in love, but all the mutilated reindeer keep getting in the way. That’s because three humanoid aliens have a gigantic and hairy fanged beast that they’re commanding to tear up houses and eat Santa’s steeds. Yes, this movie is years ahead of modern paranormal theories that place Bigfoot in the employ of grey extraterrestrials.
Virgil W. Vogel, the director of this movie, also was behind The Mole People. He was an editor on Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet the Invisible Man and Touch of Evil, too. Most of his career was spent directing for television, which he did all the way up to his death in 1996.
A boy is found in a coma deep in the woods several months after his kidnapping. His kidnapper is still on the loose and he’s the only person who has survived an encounter with this killer. To escape his coma and catch the man who committed these crimes, a doctor who specializes in PTSD is going to help him face his fears.
The 11th Patient was directed by Derek Cole, who has done effects work on Rampageand Aquaman. He also created the 2012 movie An American Ghost Story.
The film is similar to The Cell in that they have to go into someone’s mind to stop a criminal. While this film has a great look, keep in mind that its budget was nowhere near the amount of money that film had to work with.
The 11th Patient is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.
About the Author: Paul Andolina is braver than me. That’s right — he saw Cats and he did it for you, the B&S About Movies reader. You should thank him by visiting his sites Wrestling with Film and Is the Dad Alive?
I really thought I was going to make it through the year without having to see the newest film version of Cats. Well, I didn’t make it 7 days into the year and have already watched it. I originally declined to see it with my brother and father who saw it over the Christmas break but my fiancee really wanted to watch it so off we went on January 6 to see what I surely thought was going to be the thing that plummeted me into actual madness.
As a child I had a horrible nightmare about a seemingly normal black cat who blocked me from getting into my house by pacing around our flower garden. I just knew that cat was up to no good;it stopped me and we had a conversation. The years have made sure that I have all but forgotten what was actually said but what I do vividly remember is that after our talk it lunged for my neck aiming to kill me. So anthropomorphic cats have been somewhat of a bugaboo.
My first thoughts when the film started were, this is fucked up, which I found myself repeating in my head for a good 20 some minutes into the film. I gave up all hope of it not being super weird seeing these horrifying caricatures of cats slink around a mostly CGI city full of cat puns and giant ass buildings. Coming to terms with this was hard but I eventually settled into letting myself at least experience what was going on without being too critical. The movie is difficult in these regards, it seems like I shouldn’t even be able to see this film legally, like it should be hidden in a backroom of a video parlor where they sell tobacco pipes and that potpourri stuff that they toted as a legal high but was more of an overpowered hallucinogen than anything remotely resembling marijuana.
I am not a total stranger to the musical as I had seen the 1998 adaptation many years ago when I first began to be interested in musicals because of a high school friend’s deep affection for them. However, I didn’t really remember much about the musical. It wasn’t my favorite so it was quickly forgotten. The music in the movie is interesting, most of the lyrical content of the musical itself seems like nonsense but I did piece together what was going on plot-wise fairly easy. I should note that when I say the music was interesting I really mean that it sounded like some kind of techno jazz hellscape that I may drift into while having an exceptionally bad case of the man flu.
Despite all the horrid feelings and thoughts that dashed through my mind throughout the film, I actually enjoyed it. The music is catchy, the cast did about as well as I’d expect someone to do under what I believe the circumstances of filming were, random pieces of wardrobe over top green screen suits and sparse sound stages, and it was a theater experience I likely won’t forget anytime soon. I will probably never get over how the cats looked so very odd. All the other animals in the film were anthropomorphized as well, the cockroaches and mice being a whole different level of what the hell. You hear a dog but never see it but apparently, they are the only animal in this world that doesn’t sing or march around with a human face pasted onto their mug.
The celebrities on parade in cat form were numerous, of particular interest to me was Macavity, the evil sorcerer cat, who whispered his own name any time he did a spot of magic, was played by the great Idris Elba. One of his associates is played by Taylor Swift and for some odd reason is the only cat that I didn’t think looked freaky, almost as if she was made just for this role. Ian McKellen as Gus the theater cat was an odd casting choice but he did well, although seeing him lap water out of an oversize bowl is not something I’d ever thought I’d witness, and I certainly hope I don’t have to see it again. The bit where Jennyanydots played by Rebel Wilson unzips her fursuit to reveal a completely different outfit worn over top her fur was disturbing too.
This movie is sure to be talked about for many, many years to come for the sheer what-the-fuck-titude of it all but if you love Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and you’ve listened to it a thousand times before and will never get sick of it I hope you take the time to see this film and perhaps your thoughts will be different than mine. It was fun but certainly one I will not seek out again.
Where do movies take me? My lord, sometimes they take me to auteur projects like this one, by Paul Matthews, all about how a unicorn can fix up people’s lives. Oh David Warner, you deserve better. Joe Penny, too. And man, as much fun as I make of George Hamilton showing up in movies that are horrifyingly bad — Sexette, Evel Knievel and Madusa, I’m looking at you — even he deserves better than this. Man, even Christopher Atkins — The Blue Lagoon anyone? — deserves better!
Polly and her grandfather’s tranquil lives get nutty when her favorite mare dies. Yes, if you’re getting this movie for a kid that loves horses, please know that a horse dies giving birth right off the beginning.
That said, it gives birth to a unicorn that everyone wants to steal. The rest of the film concerns Polly and her friend Toby trying to save it. Want to know how bad this is? Rifftrax hasn’t just taken on one Paul Matthews film. They’ve also taken on The Fairy King of Ar and Berserker, so the guy definitely has an audience. Perhaps not the one he wants, but an audience nonetheless.
You brought us The Child. You brought us Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman! You brought us Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, The Sinful Dwarf and Toys Are Not for Children, not to mention Suburban Pagans, Please Don’t Eat My Mother! and Indiscreet Stairway.
The Sultan of Sexploitation! The King of Camp! And as H. Hershey, you directed early 80’s hardcore like Moments of Love. You were scum and I say that with the kind of infection I usually reserve for small animals. I wish you were alive so I could hug you.
How can you not love any movie that starts with two young boys getting repeatedly bitten and killed by an entire pit of angry rattlesnakes after their parents pretty much ignore them for cans of beer?
Soon, the local sheriff has to call on underpaid college professor and herpetologist Dr. Tom Parkinson to learn why the snakes are just so darn aggressive. Of course, Dr. Tom can barely keep his own cobras in their cages.
Parkinson and war photographer Ann Bradley soon learn that the military base has authorized the disposal of a nerve gas called CT3 and it’s causing all this commotion. Colonel Stroud, the guy behind it all, ends up killing the base’s medical officer before the cops close in and gun him down, too. The snakes, presumably, are still on the loose.
Director John McCauley waited nine years to make another movie, 1985’s Deadly Intruder. The movie also features Darwin Joston, who was Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13 and Dr. Phibes in The Fog.
You can watch the Cinematic Titanic riffed version of this movie on Tubi.
The list of talent involved in Monster Shark should get you pretty excited about the film. It took seven writers to get this movie made, including Lewis Coates, who you’d probably know better as Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash); Martin Dolman, who is really Sergio Martino (All the Colors of the Dark); Gianfranco Clerici (Cannibal Holocaust); Frank Walker, who is truly Vincenzo Mannino (The Last Shark); Hervé Piccini (Rats: Night of Terror); Dardano Sacchetti (who wrote pretty much every Italian horror and science fiction movie worth watching) and finally, John Old Jr.
Perhaps you know his infinitely more talented father, John M. Old. Yes, that’s just a pseudonym for Mario Bava, which means that the John Old Jr. who crafted this thing called Devil Fish, Monster from the Red Ocean, Devouring Waves or Shark: Red in the Ocean is truly Lamberto Bava. Whew. Sometimes watching Italian genre cinema means that you have to play investigatore.
Somewhere in Florida, the tourist trade is being attacked by a mysterious undersea beast. It’s not a shark. That’d be too easy. No, it’s a secret military operation that combines the worst parts of the octopus with the prehistoric Dunkleosteus.
While just a baby devil fish right now — an infant monster shark, a babina monster from red ocean, a toddler octopi — the beast has still broken loose to gnaw on swimmers, sailors and random females.
It’s up to Peter (Michael Sopkiw, Blastfighter), an electrician and TV repairman whose sole qualification seems to be the amount of beer he can drink; Dr. Bob Hogan, another rampant alcoholic; and dolphin trainer/marine biologist Dr. Stella Dickens (Valentine Monnier, who was also in 2019: After the Fall of New York with Sopkiw) to stop the beast. If you know anything about Luigi Cozzi, you probably realize that amongst his contributions to the script, one of them had to be the name of this character, as he names every female lead in his movies Stella.
Instead of Sheriff Brody, we get Sheriff Gordon, who is played by John Garko, who is better known as Gianni Garko, and who is better known as Sartana. Other Italian horror stars of note include Cinthia Stewart (actually Cinzia De Ponti, who is the bicyclist that gets eviscerated in the beginning of The New York Ripper as well as the ironically named babysitter Jamie Lee in Fulci’s Manhattan Baby); Iris Peynado from Warriors of the Wasteland and Iron Warrior; and Dagmar Lassander from Hatchet for the Honeymoon and The House by the Cemetery.
This is a movie that needs so much padding that it features not one, but two title sequences, yet features only three adult film-sounding Fabio Frizzi on a Casio created music cues.
By the end, when Professor Donald West (William Berger, Keoma) solemnly intones that the creature is “A marine monster, almost indestructible. And whose genetic characteristics are as fearsome as the white shark’s. A gigantic octopus with the intelligence of a dolphin, and as monstrous as a prehistoric creature,” you’ll think to yourself that in better hands, Monster Shark could have been a halfway decent affair.
There is a scene where a botched rescue leads to a man violently losing his legs. And that man was played by an actual amputee, which I guess we should applaud. And whoever decided to this needed spiced up with a subscene where a woman is attacked and electrocuted with a hairdryer? You may not know how to plot, but kudos for trying to keep this plodding affair from being a total snoozefest. And you know how you should never show the monster for the first half of the film? Bava goes one better than that, never clearly showing his titular undersea antagonist for the entire running time.
Lamberto’s Demons films are much better than this, but that’s the kind of bar that you don’t just stumble over, but one that you also stub your toe on. Sopkiw claims that he’s a great director, yet the budget here hampered his talents. I just don’t know how a movie about a giant eyed prehistoric octopus hybrid battling alcoholic flamethrower enthusiasts can be so sleep-inducing.
This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum Special Issue #4, which you can buy here.
Gene Corman broke into the film industry before his brother Roger, working as an agent before becoming vice president of MCA, representing such clients as Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray, Richard Conte, Harry Belafonte and Ray Milland.
By the late 50’s, he moved to produce his own films before starting his own producing unit at MGM. and then becoming vice-president of 20th Century Fox Television.
This film is directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, who also created Night of the Blood Beast and Sssssss. It was written by Leo Gordon, who had hundreds of roles as an actor, as well as being the author of movies like The Wasp Woman, The Cry Baby Killer and Hot Car Girl.
Did you know that there are larger than human intelligent leeches that live in the Florida Everglades? Yep. There sure are.
Those leeches love nothing more than dragging human beings down into their underwater caves and slowly feeding off their blood.
Liz Walker (Yvette Vickers, who was Playboy‘s July 1959 Playmate of the Month in a centerfold that was photographed by Russ Meyer; she’s also the girl who starts all the trouble by cheating with the husband of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) is the first victim. Again, she plays a loose woman who is cheating on her husband, so she and her new man must pay.
Game warden Steve Benton (Ken Clark, who was Dick Malloy in the Agent 077 series of films), his girlfriend Nan Grayson and her doctor father are the heroes here and they deal with the leeches in the way that we all knew they would: they use dynamite to blow them up real good.
So yeah. Giant leeches. Wanton women. Dynamite. Cheap film making.
How cheap? Corman didn’t want to pay the grips the extra money for pushing the camera raft in the water, so at first, the director did it, then his brother and finally Corman himself. The cold water led to Corman getting pneumonia and ending up in the hospital. And yes, that is the same music from Night of the Blood Beast. The exact same music is also in Beast from the Haunted Cave.
This movie had some legs. In 1959, it played a double bill with A Bucket of Blood. Then, a year later, it ran alongside Corman’s brother’s film House of Usher. It was also remade in 2008 by Brett Kelly and written by Jeff O’Brien in a film that starred no one you’ve ever heard of.
You can watch this on Tubi with and without commentary from Mystery Science Theater. It’s in the public domain, so you can also grab it from the Internet Archive and watch it on Amazon Prime.
When an alien contagion is released aboard a spaceship transforming its victims into demonic flesh-eaters, the crew must either destroy the infected or join them. Steve Railsback — yes, the dude from Turkey Shoot and Blue Monkey — stars as Tarver.
The Pandora is a freight transport carrier headed toward Earth with a desperately needed new energy supply called Thanatos, which many of the crew members are suspicious of. Then they get a distress call from another ship and no one on board has seen Alien.
Nurses from that ship end up being pirates and in the midst of a battle, one of them gets splashed with Thanatos, which turns her into a plaguer. Soon, there are so many of them that they take the ship straight for Earth.
Writer/director Brad Sykes was inspired by Alien — of course — but also the films Prince of Darkness, The Thing and Demons when making this.
Plaguers is now available for the first-time on blu ray and DVD from Wild Eye Releasing. You can learn more at the official homepage.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us via a digital screener by the Wild Eye Releasing PR team. Wild Eye Releasing since sent a Blu-ray. They also sent a whole bunch of stickers and yes, you can be jealous that I have an awesome Shark Exorcist sticker now in my home. This has no bearing on our review.
This debut entry in the Jaws rip-off sweepstakes was directed by Hungarian-born bad-ass Cornel Wilde, the star of one of my all-time favorite TV (horror) movies: 1972’s Gargoyles, a movie that scared the stuffing out me in the day—so please take that into consideration as I come to hail Cornel Wilde, not tear him down.
Shark’s Treasure, as with his previous directing effort from five years earlier, No Blade of Grass (that took fifteen years to get made), was a long-gestating passion project that Wilde wanted to make back in 1969 but was unable to secure financing. After not getting Sharks’ Treasure produced, in conjunction with the lukewarm response to his post-apoc romp, No Blade of Grass, Wilde retreated from theatre and film—both as an actor and director—into television, which led to his gig on Gargoyles.
Then some new kid on the block by the name of Steven Spielberg created “shark fever” with some movie called Jaws.
Financing secured.
But that “new kid” got $9 million to make his movie—then grossed under $500 million. United Artists’ placed a bet of $2 million on the green felt with Wilde—and broke even.
It was Cornel Wilde’s final film as a producer, writer and director. After that, he meandered in a few TV and film roles—one was the Lee Majors-starring Viking romp, The Norseman—up until his death to leukemia in 1989, three days after his 77th birthday.
Jim Carnahan (Cornel Wilde, then 60 and doing one-arm pushups in the film) is the obligatory, hard luck sea dog who finds his dreams of a big payday in a young buck’s (David Gilliam, 1972’s Frogs* and 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed) wild story about sunken treasure off the coast of Honduras.
Now if this all sounds a lot like Antonio Margheriti’s Piranha rip-off, Killer Fish (starring, say what (?), Lee Majors!), which itself was Joe Dante’s rip-off of Jaws—then it probably is. (And it also reminds of Steward Raffill’s later High Risk**, about a filmmaker and his down-on-their-luck buddies ripping off a Honduran drug lord.)
According to Wilde, in an October 1975 interview for The Christian Science Monitor, he classified the film as a down to earth treasure hunting story with a bunch of hard-luck hustlers and ex-cons (very familiar U.S TV actors Cliff Osmond and David Canary, along with the even more familiar Yaphet Kotto) who give up everything, even their jobs, to battle pirates, sharks, and their own greed to recover treasure. In addition to his claims that the characters and incidents were based on “true accounts,” another one of his marketing points for the film was that it was “the most dangerous picture he ever worked on.”
As you can see from the film’s one-sheet, Wilde decided to attack Spielberg’s much ballyhooed mechanical shark and made sure everyone knew the shark footage in Sharks’ Treasure was 100% real and that we “will see the total shock of the most sensational shark fight ever filmed.”
Wilde was obviously going for the John Huston-directed and Humphrey Bogart-starring 1948 adventure romp, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—only with sharks and water, instead of Mexican deserts. He ended up with an AIP or Crown International Pictures’ romp—and everyone stayed away in droves.
Inspired by B&S Movies’ formulating a revisit to last year’s “Shark Week” and my re-watching Wilde’s commendable effort all these years later, I have to admit his shark romp—the first film in the coveted “Bastard Sons of Jaws” sweepstakes—the film doesn’t have the same impact as I sat in the darken duplex all those years ago. It is, in fact, a sad end to the greatness Wilde achieved with his self-made classics Beach Red, The Naked Prey, and Storm Fear, along with his acting gig in High Sierra going toe-to-toe with Humphrey Bogart.
Yes, there’s no doubt all of the underwater photography is real—and it is spectacular (Wilde upped the Spielberg game: instead of one Great White, it’s a hoard of Tiger Sharks)—but the film wrapped around it is, well, it’s like Roger Corman secured all the sets from Jaws before Universal tore ‘em down and drained the water tanks, and pumped out a shark-clone quickie.
Yeah, there’s some nice character development (i.e., Cliff Osmond, and “The Kid” that got them into this mess, David Gilliam, are ex-prison lovers; Wilde is a virility-swaggering braggart) but, yeah, the drama is overwrought. It’s hokey. It’s all very “TV Movie,” but not as TV Movie-good as Wilde’s previous acting gig in Gargoyles.
So, while Sharks’ Treasure isn’t bad, it isn’t good. And while I have a nostalgic attachment to the film, you’d probably rather watch a trashier Italian shark flick, like Luigi Cozzi and Sergio Martino’s shark collaboration, Monster Shark (or Devil Fish, or Red Ocean, or whatever the hell the alternate title on the VHS cover says).
Sigh. Cornell Wilde deserved better. So did Michael Sopkiw.
Say what? You need more shark and “nature run amuck” films? Then check out our last December’s shark tribute week, “Bastard Pups of Jaws,” which features everything imaginable—from 1976’s Grizzly to 1977’s Orca, and 1979’s The Great Alligator all the way out to Renny Harlin’s 1999 shark romp, Deep Blue Sea. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of Drive-In Asylum’s “Summer Shark Special” issue from this past August.
*George McGowan, the director of Frogs, also directed the “Star Wars Dropping” that is The Shape of Things to Come.
**Stuart Raffill directed another “Star Wars Dropping”: The Ice Pirates.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
Made in 1981, this movie didn’t come out until 1986, when Troma would pick it up for distribution. Don’t worry — this odd little film has none of their horrific in a bad way hackwork infesting it.
Yvonne Decarlo plays Hester, a wealthy heiress who was jilted years ago when her boyfriend married her sister. Now, she’s out to not only get them, but their children too. And she has a 200 pound Rottweiler ready to make it happen.
Just imagine — Yvonne Decarlo electrocuting, stranging, crushing skulls and poisoning people when she’s not letting a dog bite and main everyone in its path. There’s also a scene where the detective on her trail gets drain cleaner dumped into his seltzer water. What a way to go!
Somehow, this came from the same director as 1984’s sex comedy Ellie, Peter Wittman. It has Stephanie Dunnam (Silent Rage) in it, in case you were all into that Chuck Norris vs. a slasher film and wanted to see more of her work. It’s also known as Satan’s Dog, which is not a better title.
Spoiler: I didn’t like how Hester gets rid of her dog. I mean, I’m totally into a movie that has dogs repeatedly killing humans, but leave the dog alone!
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