Also known as Hell Fire and They — the title Mill Creek used for the box set — this Bill Rebane film was written by his wife Barbara and reminds me of another of his movies, The Alpha Incident, as while it’s supposedly about an alien invasion, most of it takes place in one room.
An epidemic is striking the biggest cities in the world, a fact that Nick and his sister Sarah have no clue about. They’re too busy hosting some scientists on a hunt. Along with Eric, Andy and Stan — the scientists — they live off the land and communicate with an alien voice who is trying to find them while trying to stop them from making it to the destroyed cities.
I kind of adore that Rebane made movies like this, trapped in their Wisconsin settings, and ones that have total hippy space endings because, well, why not? I’m sure that there had to be people who were confronted by this movie and were pretty upset that it has nothing to do with the poster whatsoever.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 17, 2020.
Eddie Romero directing and John Ashley starring? That was all I really needed to know. Man, anything remotely connected with these two — like the Blood Island films — and I’m ready to go.
This was also the first release for Roger Corman’s distribution company New World Pictures. After successfully distributing Beast of Blood in 1970, Kane W. Lynn’s Hemisphere Pictures tried to get the distribution rights to this, but got cut out of the deal.
Ashley’s new company, Four Associates Ltd. went on to produce The Twilight People, The Woman Hunt and Ebony, Ivory & Jade. As for Lynn, he worked with Sam Sherman to make Brain of Blood. Me? I’m happy all around at whatever these maniacs decided to make.
While Ashley would say that this was the most cerebral of the Philippines-based horror movies he made — and its success led to Corman making more movies there like The Big Doll House — Eddie Romero would say, “We really tried for quality. I don’t think it did very well. They prefer out and out gore.”
As World War II ends, Satan himself — Vic Diaz from Night of the Cobra Woman — spares Joseph Landgon’s (Ashley) life if he becomes his disciple. So over the next 25 years, Langdon possessed people and forces them to do the bidding of his dark master.
However, he wants to free himself from the Lord of the Flies, but instead becomes a hairy monster who could pretty much be a werewolf. He’s in the body of Phillip Rogers now and that man’s wife tries to save him. An old blind bandit named Sabasas finally saves him, asking him to pray for his soul just as an inspector catches up to him and shoots our — well, I guess he isn’t the hero — turning him into an ancient corpse.
Mary Charlotte Wilcox, who plays the wife, is also in the absolutely bonkers film, Love Me Deadly, which I love me dearly. She also shows up in Psychic Killer, Black Oak Conspiracy, Strange Brew and was a cast member of SCTV and Maniac Mansion.
Once he moved back to America, Ashley produced The A-Team. In one episode, he plays a movie producer trying to get a movie made. That movie? Beast of the Yellow Night.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime or with Rifftrax making fun of it on Tubi.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on May 14, 2021.
There are nine Super Giant films and all of them were brought to the U.S. by Medallion Films, who turned them into four movies. This story would be The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanity and The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite combined to make one longer film. So basically, this would be the fifth and sixth parts of the story. If you want to get caught up, you’ll need to check out Atomic Rulers of the World and Invaders from Space. When you finish this one, you can get the rest of the story in Evil Brain from Outer Space.
Starman is a human-like being created from the strongest steel by the Peace Council of the Emerald Planet. He’s been sent to our planet to protect us from the Sapphire Galaxy, who are blowing up the Himalayans. To make their plan move quicker, they kidnap Dr. Yamanaka and his family and force him to use his spaceship — yes, he just so happens to have a spaceship — to decimate the Earth.
Strangely enough, this movie has a death star and a weapon that destroys planets. I mean, Star Wars would never steal anything from a Japanese movie, right?
The first Bill Rebane movie I saw was the berserk Tiny Tim vehicle Blood Harvest. Once I realized that The Alpha Incident— one of his older efforts — is on so many Mill Creek box sets — I jumped on it.
Much like Night of the Living Dead, a space probe has returned, this time from Mars. It’s brought back an organism that can kill all life on Earth. As it’s being transported by train, an employee accidentally releases it and the entire station is quarantined and must wait endless hours for the government to find the cure. There’s only one problem — if they fall asleep, the organism will kill them.
Basically, this is a movie about a bunch of people drinking coffee. doing amphetamines and making horrible decisions. Ralph Meeker (Without Warning) stars here, bringing along several unknowns and George “Buck” Flower (who shows up in nearly every John Carpenter film). It’s basically a movie where people stand around, upset one another and stand around some more.
With a better team of actors, this could be a much better film. That said, it’s enough to keep me interested. My disclaimer is that I’m exactly the kind of person who loves watching horrible movies with bad transfers from a $9 box set with fifty movies on it.
“What year is this from? Is this foreign?” asked Becca. No, this movie is magically made in this country, unless Wisconsin is really a foreign country. “Is this the end of the movie?” she also asked. Yep, that’s the kind of film this is.
There are nine Sūpā Jaiantsu (Super Giant) movies that were first shown in Japan. Takeo Nagamatsu’s 1930 kamishibai The Golden Bat (Ōgon Batto) may have been Japan’s first modern superhero and Gekkō Kamen (Moonlight Mask) the first hero to be on TV, but the first actual super hero movie in Japan was this one.
It was bought for distribution to U.S. television and edited into four films by Walter Manley Enterprises and Medallion Films. The first two original Japanese films, Super Giant and Super Giant Continues, have been cut, edited and have library music instead of the original soundtrack. Also, Super Giant became Starman.
The Mysterious Spacemen’s Demonic Castleand Earth on the Verge of Destruction were turned into Invaders from Space, while The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanity and The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite was released in the U.S. as Attack from Space. The last film, Evil Brain from Outer Space, is edited together from three movies, The Space Mutant Appears, The Devil’s Incarnation and Kingdom of the Poison Moth.
The films were also sold to France and Italy, where Super Giant is known as Spaceman.
Ken Utsui plays the hero and he always downplayed this movie when interviewed. Some say he was upset about the costume, which had a stuffed crotch. In the first installment, he fights to save the Earth from the country of Metropol and their nuclear arsenal. You’ll notice the connection to sentai shows like Power Rangers with this, but it’s also very similar to the American TV version of Superman. I loved it when I was a kid and still do.
Max Pointdexter, I shit you not, has hacked into a NASA probe and is watching images from space, which is totally what most guys use the internet for and also, this was 1996, so imagine how slow the load time was. He also somehow has an attractive woman in his room and just keeps worrying about UFOs, which I guess is what you do if you’re in MUFON, right?
Look, were I making a UFO movie, I may cast Charles Napier as a sheriff, but I would not make the movie about him on the trail of several criminals. I would concentrate on, you know, the aliens. And the UFOs. And the invasion.
Obviously, everyone involved with this saw Independence Day or at least saw the script because a good chunk of this has Max on a laptop — the smallest laptop you’ve ever seen — typing against reptilians. Somehow, he also has someone who can get him high end military weapons because he pulls a bazooka out of the trunk of his car which seems like a decent enough weapon against little green men.
Oh yeah — the hot scientist’s name is Holly Capers.
Holly Capers!
You get cows getting kidnapped by UFOs before blowing up a farmer and his farm real good, just after we watch his daughter sneaking some loving from her boyfriend. There’s also a long scene where Holly saves her cat just as her house explodes and you know, I’m totally on board with that. Cats over aliens forever.
Someone literally says, “Why do I suddenly feel like I’m in a bad episode of The X-Files?”
Director Peter Maris also made 1979’s Delirium, as well as Land of Doom and Terror Squad. Writer Nancy Newbauer also worked with Maris on the movie The Killer Inside. Maris seemed to bring back several of the same actors for his films, as David Homb, who plays one of the convicts, was in his video game Phantasmagoria and The Survivor. Also in this: Hoke Howell, who was one of those “I know that guy” guys, as well as the writer of movies like Click: The Calendar Girl Killer, One Block Away and B.O.R.N.
Unknown World was made by two Hollywood special effects men, Jack Rabin and Irving Block, who are two of the film’s three producers. It was directed by Terry O. Morse, who shot the American scene in Godzilla, and written by Millard Kaufman, who also wrote Bad Day at Black Rock and The Klansman.
Victor Kilian, who plays Dr. Jeremiah Morley, lost an eye in a fight scene with John Wayne and was blacklisted for decades due to his political views, which is why he is uncredited in this. He’s invented a big tank that can drill into the center of the world, the Cyclotram, and has taken a crew of scientists through Carlsbad Caverns, Bronson Caves, Nichols Canyon and finally Pismo Beach to find a place where the human race can survive a nuclear war. Sadly, that unknown world makes everyone sterile.
Let me tell you, people were obsessed by the center of the Earth in 1951. The Shaver Mystery was maybe not in Amazing Stories any longer — editor Ray Palmer claimed a conspiracy got them forced out of the pulp magazine — yet still found an audience in Palmer’s newsletter called… The Hidden World.
I kind of love that this movie starts with accurate eyewitnesses before telling the tale of Alan Grimes (Nick Plakias), an electronics expert who is trying to figure out where strange signals are coming from, along with a psychic named Vivian (Cynthia Cline) and two experts from the college named Dan Rivers (Tom Arcuragi) and Dr. Mansfield (LaVerne Light). There’s been a formless alien waiting inside a lake for a thousand years, afraid of assuming the shapes that humans force it into. He claims that only three other humans have embraced alien nature and ascended, which Alan embraces, getting rapidly aged and walking into a lake. Oh man, the sheer smell of dank 70s grass is all over this movie, which ends with a quote from Revelations and ties in UFOs to New Age religion and old-fashioned Biblical prophecy.
Despite being shot in Atlanta with minimal resources, director and writer Alessandro De Gaetano managed to create a series of films, including Haunted, Scoring, Bloodbath In Psycho Town, Project: Metalbeast, and Butch Camp, which featured Judy Tenuda.
The end of this movie is filled with words, ideas, video effects and, quite literally, lo-fi magic. It’s the most BS of all non-Hollywood UFO cash-in mania, and I loved it. It reminded me of the days when I’d eat those UFO candies that had info from Project Blue Book inside them, as well as watch Battlestar Galactica with its wild square-up reel at the end about how aliens might be real and then stay awake all night, hoping that tonight would finally be the one where I got abducted.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the first of this month’s Mill Creek box set articles. Up first — Luigi Cozzi’s Alien Contamination! This was first on the site on August 27, 2018.
As a large ship drifts into New York City, you may wonder, “Am I watching Zombi?” No, you’re watching Contamination or Alien Contamination, but the similarities may be international. Both films shared the same production offices and director Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Hercules) was so impressed that he wanted to hire the same cast, but only ended up with Ian McCulloch.
The ship is packed with large containers of coffee, which really hide green eggs that pulsate and make droning sounds. The crew of the ship is more than just dead. They’re in pieces and the rescue team soon discovers why. The eggs tend to explode, spraying acid all over the place that’s toxic to anything human. As soon as it touches them, they explode in glorious slow motion bursts of red food color and Karo syrup.
The military soon links the green eggs with a recent mission to Mars that caused one astronaut to disappear and the other, Commander Hubbard (there’s Ian McCulloch!) to become a drunk. He joins Colonel Stella Holmes and New York cop Tony Aris (Marino Masé, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) on the case, which takes them all the way to a Columbian coffee plantation (well, the movie was funded by Columbia cocaine dealers) and Hubbard’s old partner, who is now in the thrall of a gigantic alien cyclops (!).
Originally intended as a straight sequel to Alien, this movie enters James Bond territory at times and is not afraid — at all — to wipe out characters left and right. It also has a scene where a green egg menaces a girl in the shower, which should be frightening yet comes off as hilarious. That said, this has a loud Goblin soundtrack that makes this seem like a much better movie than it is.
But hey — who can hate a movie with dialogue like this?
NYPD Lt. Tony Aris: Jesus Christ, the whole world is going to be wiped out and all this broad’s worried about is getting changed!
Colonel Stella Holmes: Listen, Aris, if I have to die with the rest of the world then I want to have a proper dress on and clean underwear.
That’s better than the first few minutes of the film, where almost the entire dialogue is muffled. But hey — you can either choose great dialogue or awesome gore. Guess which one you get here?
Want to see it for yourself? Shudder and Amazon Prime both have this streaming and you can get the Arrow blu ray at Diabolik DVD. You can also watch Contamination with commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder.
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