The Clock Family — Pod (Eddie Albert), Homily (Tammy Grimes) and Arriety (Karen Pearson) — are Borrowers, small people who live in the houses of human beans, as they call big people, and stay out of view. Arriety, unlike any Borrowers before, becomes friends with the eight-year-old (Dennis Larson) who lives in the house they have turned into their world.
Based on the book by Mary Norton, this was directed by Walter C. Miller (who mainly worked on the Grammy, CMA and Tony award show broadcast, as well as directing several Rodney Dangerfield specials) and written by Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the screenplays for Marnie, Funny Lady, Cabaret and Death Trap. She was a screenwriter when few women were.
The Borrowers was also made into two BBC TV series, a 1997 and 2011 movie and an anime in Japan called Karigurashi no Ariettii that was produced by Studio Ghibli.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
Cooper has to balance doing his duty and empathizing with the illegal Mexican border jumpers. He also has to deal with his corrupt boss Moffat (Eddie Albert), who deals with coyote Suarez (Michael V. Gazzo), as well as protect a young Mexican man by the name of Benito Romero (De La Paz), who is on the other side of the border working in a slaughterhouse.
It’s not the quickest movie but as always, Telly Savalas makes any movie that much better by being in it. There’s nothing like hearing him say a line like, “Compassion? If I had compassion I’d stick a .357 up your ass and blow your brains out!”
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
Directed by Earl Bellamy (Munster, Go Home!) and written by Eleanor Lamb and Douglas Stewart, Against a Crooked Sky has Sam Sutter (Stewart Petersen, who quit acting in the late 70s and formed an outfitting business with his uncle called Magic Mountains Outfitters that eventually became Crooked Sky Outfitters) losing his sister Charlotte (Australian country singer Jewel Blanch) to some Native Americans. Sam goes to rescue her and meets a prospector named Russian (Richard Boone) who helps him to find her which means going through the Crooked Sky.
This is a G-rated movie with Christian values, Native Americans being killed and a supposed young girl flashing her breasts and butt. The 1970s, people. They were wild.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
Zontar, the Thing from Venus is one of the many remakes of Roger Corman movies — this one is It Conquered the World — directed by Larry Buchanan.
This starts at a dinner party. That’s where NASA scientist Dr. Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) reveals to Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) that he’s been secretly meeting with an alien from Venus named Zontar who is coming to solve all of Earth’s issues. A dinner party would not seem to be the time to do this.
Zontar ends up being a three-eyed, bat-winged, skeletal black creature and I don’t want to be one of those people that judges people by their outside appearances, but I don’t think Zontar has any intention of making the world a better place.
Not even when Zontar starts possessing people with lobster injecto-pods does Ritchie think this friend is a horrific alien monster. No, it takes his wife Martha (Patricia De Laney) dying before he does something about it. Scientists are really smart and also so dumb.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
One of only two movies that James L. Wolcott would direct — the other is a compilation film called The Best of Laurel and Hardy — this is one odd duck. It also features scenes that were, believe it or not, directed by his friend Tennessee Williams, who was on set and thought it’d be fun to try.
It’s shot inside Coral Castle, an oolite limestone structure that was built by one man, Edward Leedskalnin, who either used ley lines or reverse magnetism to move and carve numerous stones — all by himself — with several weighing multiple tons. Other movies shot there include Nude on the Moon and La Furia de Los Karatecas.
Mother Nature herself explains to us an experiment that she created with Father Time. On the island of Wongo, they made two tribes, the ugly and violent men and the gorgeous women. On the island of Goona, they did the exact opposite.
Now, the four tribes have come into contact with one another, as the brutish apes of Wongo have attacked the attractive men of Goona. That tribe sends their king’s son to seek help and he discovers the attractive women, who suddenly realize that they no longer have to settle for the grotesque men that their mothers and grandmothers once did.
Going against tradition has its downside, as the crocodile god of the people — played by stock footage — grows angry and demands their deaths. They rebel, defeat their oppressors and make their way to Goona, just as the good looking men of the tribe are engaging in the ritual where they must survive weaponless in the jungle. The women easily defeat them and take them for husbands while the less good looking races find one another too.
The women of Wongo are played by Marie Goodhart, Michelle Lamarck, Val Phillips, Jo Elaine Wagner, Adrienne Bourbeau (not Adrienne Barbeau, who would have been 12 when this was filmed), Joyce Nizzari (Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 1958, who was photographed by Bunny Yeager and would serve as one of Hugh Hefner’s personal assistants in the 1990’s), Jean Hawkshaw, Mary Ane Webb and Candé Gerrard.
The women of Goona were played by Barbara Lee Babbitt, Bernadette, Elaine Krasher, Lillian Melek (Pagan Island), Iris Rautenberg and Roberta Wagner.
If you want to learn more about them — and this slice of strangeness — I recommend the Women of Wongo page.
I’m trying to think of what message this is all trying to send and how it ties into female-based societies when it really seems that this movie is all about outward appearance. It does have a talking parrot and lots of alligator wrestling, so it has that going for it.
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, this movie was originally a double feature with Beast from Haunted Cave. When it was released to TV two years later, a new prologue was added by director Jack Hill to add to its running time.
The musical score from this film may seem familiar because it’s the same music from Corman’s A Bucket of Blood. It was written by Fred Katz, who sold Corman the same score for a total of seven films, including The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea.
Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) is the founder and owner of a large cosmetics company. She starts losing money when the public begins to see that she is aging, so her scientists reverse the aging process by using the royal jelly of the queen wasp. It doesn’t work fast enough, so she breaks into her own company’s lab and injects herself multiple times.
So she gets twenty years younger over the weekend but occasionally transforms into a wasp woman who kills people. At the end, when acid is thrown in her face, that scene was more real than it should have been. Someone had filled the breakaway bottle with water and it was so heavy that when hit her, she thought that her teeth had been knocked out. To make matters worse, the fake smoke used to simulate the acid also choked her. So after she fell through the window, she found herself unable to breathe. To save herself, she tore off her makeup as well as a good chunk of skin around her neck.
Things didn’t get much better in life for Susan Cabot. This was her last film and at the end of her life, she suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts. The psychologist that she was seeing felt that she was so troubled that he could no longer see her and her home was filled with trash and rotting food.
After her mental health continued to worsen, Cabot’s 25-year-old son, Timothy Scott Roman, beat her to death with a weightlifting bar. While he would initially claim that a man in a ninja mask was the killer — thinking that no one would believe her struggles with mental illness — the truth was that she woke him screaming and attacked him with both a scalpel and the barbell. His defense attorneys claimed his aggressive reaction to his mother’s attack was due to the drugs he took to counteract his dwarfism and pituitary gland problems.
Prosecutors changed the charge to voluntary manslaughter at the end of the trial, as no evidence had been presented to support the premeditation required for a murder conviction. Roman, who had already spent two-and-a-half years in jail, was sentenced to three years’ probation.
Corman remade this with director Jim Wynorski for his Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi. You can also watch it with the Cinematic Titanic crew riffing on it on Tubi.
Made by Daei, the same people who would gift us with Gamera, and released in the U.S. eleven years after it came out in Japan, this movie has been pointed to as one that Kubrick watched as he grew fascinated with science fiction.
The Pairan aliens of the film are perhaps the best reason to watch this. They’ve never looked better than now, with the gorgeous remastered transfer that’s on Arrow’s new disk. Designed by avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, they’re unlike any aliens we’d imagine in the West. Instead of humanoid creatures, they’re stars that dance their strange ballet toward camera as they wonder how to reach Earth’s scientists.
One of those aliens decides to take the form of entertainer Hikari Aozora and reach out to our scientists and World Congress to borrow our nuclear weapons to obliterate another planet in the path of our world called Planet R. As no one decides to listen to her, we’re forced to deal with all the impact of having a rogue planet come closer and closer to us. The whole “listen to science’ mantra that our world is ignoring happens here as well, but sadly, we don’t have human-sized star aliens with one giant eye to right our course.
When Roger Corman bought the Russian movie Planet of Storms (Planeta Bur), he used that footage to make Peter Bogdanovich’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and this film, which had to confuse filmgoers. And me, as you can tell, even today.
Corman doubled down on that mind-altering sensation that audiences who thought that they had seen this a;; before by shooting new scenes at the same time that Harrington was making Queen of Blood, as Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue shot their scenes in half a day using the same costumes from that movie.
While Harrington considered Queen of Blood good enough to keep his name on, he used the name John Sebastian, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, from this remix. He told Psychotronic Video that the movie “was not even a film.”
Rathbone plays Professor Hartman and Domergue is Dr. Marsha Evans. They’re the only English speaking actors that show up, as everything else is dubbed from the Russian movie. Even the soundtrack is recycled from Dinosaurus! Even crazier, most of the credits were fake so that no one would realize this was made in Russia as it was released during the Cold War.
Roger Corman knows how to get the most out of a movie. He turned the Russian Planeta Bur into both Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and this movie. The former* has new scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, but the latter has one major reason to watch: Mamie Van Doren.
The pedigree of this movie is pretty wild, because it was adapted by Peter Bogdanovich, who chose not to have his name credited on the final film. And let’s not forget that this all ties back — since Corman loved to recycle what he recycled — into the early Francis Ford Coppola cheapy and Mill Creek box set favorite, Battle Beyond the Sun.
Five male astronauts and their robot John land on Venus and are attacked by a pterodactyl and then an entire culture of women, including Van Doren. Amongst their number are Verba (Mary Marr, who would go on to edit Rolfe Kanefsky’s softcore movies), Twyla (Paige Lee), Meriama (Irene Orton), Wearie (Pam Helton) and Mayaway (Margot Hartman, who in addition to being in this movie, would go on to be the chairman of the board of the First Stamford Corporation, one of the largest privately held commercial real estate companies in the State of Connecticut; she also wrote and starred in Violent Midnight, Descendant and The Curse of the Living Corpse).
Bogdonovich was asked by Corman to work on the film, as American-International Pictures wanted some girls in it, so he hired Mamie Van Doren and an entire cast of blondes, then went and filmed them for five days and did the narration.
Despite the fact that this had to be remixed together, you have to love the ending, where the robot left behind becomes the new god of Venus. Spoiler warning for a 52-year-old film…
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