Based on “The Gold-Bug” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, this at least has a great title. In the U.S., at least, as it was sold as Calypso in Great Britain.
Directed by W. Lee Wilder (Billy’s brother) and written by his brother Myles and Joel Murcott, this begins with Inspector Warren (Jack Lewis) coming to Jamaica to arrest a criminal known only as the Professor (Victor Jory). There’s also a captain named Brannigan (John Bromfield) who has won a ship called Manfish and the service of its first mate, Swede (Lon Chaney Jr.). Brannigan notices the ring the Professor wears and links it to a treasure map he finds, sending everyone to an island in search of the booty of pirate Jean Lafitte. Also: Brannigan wants the Professor’s woman, Alita (Tessa Prendergast, who would go on to design Ursula Andress’ bikini in Dr. No). Plus, you get another good-looking lady, Mimi (Barbara Nichols, The Human Duplicators).
A lot of this movie finds the crew of the Manfish — “Big Boy” (Theodore Purcell) and Domingo (Vincent Chang) — turtle hunting. There’s also music by Clyde Hoyte and the Calypsos, and you’ll wonder, how do they get Poe into this? At least Chaney is good, all sweaty and drunk, but still wonderful.
Pete Dumond (Robert H. Harris), the monster maker at American International Studios, has lost his job because monsters are out and rock and roll movies are in. To get revenge, he transforms young actors Tony Mantell (Gary Conway) into Teenage Frankenstein and Larry Drake (Gary Clarke) into the Teenage Werewolf, while becoming a caveman, all using special makeup that controls minds.
At the end of the movie, the monster museum is burnhed down. Many of Pete’s “children” were props originally created by Paul Blaisdell for The Cat Girl, It Conquered the World, Invasion of the Saucer Men and Attack of the Puppet People, all special effects that he allowed to be destroyed. The She-Creature mask was almost burned but survived the scene! Not so lucky was the cat mask, as Blaisdell had specifically asked AIP not to set it on fire. They didn’t listen and didn’t even film it being burned.
Ed Wood’s widow Kathy that this idea was stolen from him by AIP producer Sam Arkoff. In Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., she said, “Eddie condemned Arkoff, he really hated him. Eddie gave them a script for approval, and they changed the characters a little bit around. Eddie had written it for Lugosi. It was about this old horror actor who couldn’t get work any more, so he took his vengeance out on the studio.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mole People was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 24, 1973 at 11;30 p.m.; Saturday, December 1, 1974 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, August 2, 1975; Saturday, March 26, 1977 and Saturday, November 5, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.
A hollow earth movie that posits an underground civilization created by Sumerian descendants who worship Ishtar. Never mind that Sumerians and Ishtar have no connection and the true symbol of Ishtar is an eight-pointed star, not to mention that all of the gods in this movie are really Egyptian. But hey — it does have the great flood symbolizing the journey to the underworld and was probably influenced somewhat by the Shaver Mysteries that dominated Amazing Stories from 1945 to 1948 (see Beyond Lemuria and Encounters with the Unknown for more film evidence of the Shavers, the hole to hell and Lemuria itself).
I absolutely love that this movie starts with an introduction from University of Southern California English professor Dr. Frank Baxter, who explains the premise of the film and how it may have some basis in reality. How many movies take the time to discusses the hollow earth theories of John Symmes — whose Hollow Earth theory taught that our world is mae up of five concentric spheres, with the outer earth and its atmosphere as the largest — and Cyrus Teed — a physician and alchemist who became a self-proclaimed messiah, taking on the name Koresh and proposing a new set of scientific and religious ideas he called Koreshanity, which taught that our planet and sky exist inside the surface of a larger sphere.
Archaeologists Dr. Roger Bentley (John Agar) and Dr. Jud Bellamin (Hugh Beaumont, Beaver’s dad) have found the hollow earth and meet the Sumerian albinos and their mutant mole man slaves*, who all eat mushrooms because why not? Whenever they start having too many people, they stop overcrowding by sacrificing women to the Eye of Ishtar. But everyone — other than a girl named Adad — is so sensitive to light that the fact that the scientists have a flashlight must mean that they are gods. Oh yeah — Ellnu, the High Priest, is played by Alan Napier, who would soon enough be Batman’s faithful butler Alfred.
This was Virgil Vogel’s first film, which he would follow up with The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm and Invasion of the Animal People before a career mostly spent in television.
For some reason, Adad is unceremoniously crushed before the end of the movie, just when she gets near the surface and nearly escapes. Supposedly, Universal thought that Bentley’s romance with Adad would promote interracial relationships. Never mind that John Agar and Cynthia Patrick were both white. They reshot the new ending where she gets smashed and that was that.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Body Snatchers was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 13, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, October 22, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, March 22, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 30, 1972 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, April 27, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 18, 1975 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, January 21, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.
The extraterrestrial invasion of Santa Mira is more than just the event that this film chronicles. No, Invasion of the BodySnatchers has transcended its simple science fiction roots to become a cultural touchstone. We often refer to people acting differently as pod people; those who may have never seen this film or its many sequels intimately know its plot and what it means.
Thanks to this new Olive Films Signature reissue, I’ve had the opportunity to watch this film again and my goal was to evaluate it as if I were watching it when it was first released.
The conceit is simple: Alien plant spores have shown up in a small California town and reproduce exact copies of human beings, taking on the exact physical characteristics, personalities and even memories of those that sleep near them. Within a month, they’ve completely taken over the town and created an untroubled world, a place of no emotion or worry, a place where everyone is one of us.
Near the end of the film, one of the pod people tells our hero, Dr. Miles J. Bennel (Kevin McCarthy) that their way is so much better. “Love, desire, ambition, faith – without them, life’s so simple, believe me.” When he exclaims that he wants no part of this new world, he’s told that he has no choice.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is bold in its depiction of love in 1956. Both Miles and his former flame Becky (Dana Wynter, Airport) are suffering through divorces and unlike many films of the era, they are not represented as bad people for their actions. Instead, their romance is championed. It may mean nothing to us watching the film 62 years after its release, but the fact that they stay in the same room and have a romance at all was groundbreaking.
Miles and Becky manage to escape the entire town being taken over until a dog is nearly run over. Becky’s emotional outburst alerts the pod people, who blast sirens as our heroic couple races against an army chasing them, up steps, through city streets, across mountains, even with Miles carrying her (there’s a charming moment in the bonus footage on this disk where Wynter says that McCarthy never complained or even got out of breath because he’s a gentleman) in a fruitless attempt to escape. They separate and when they finally find one another, Miles can’t wait to kiss his lover. In horror, he learns that she is now one of them too.
That’s when the most arresting images of this movie appear. Miles runs into the night, a non-stop chase that brings him onto a crowded highway filled with transport trucks loaded with pods bound for the major cities. He screams in vain at passing cars as they narrowly avoid hitting them, his panicked face streaked with sweat and rain and car lights in the deep dark night, bellowing, “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”
This was to be the original ending of the movie, but focus groups — yes they had them back then, too — wanted a happy ending. The promise at the end, where the FBI is alerted and the pods will obviously be stopped, rings hollow. That final image of Miles on the highway in abject panic as the camera pans up and away is just too powerful.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is filled with talent, with everyone giving their best performance, from the future Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones, to character actor par excellence King Donovan and even future Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah, who has a minor role as a gas meter reader.
Some see a story within a story in this film, a meta-commentary on the dangers facing America such as McCarthyism while others see it as an allegory for the loss of personal rights in the wake of Communism. Several connected with the film state that it had no such aim, but you can graft any story onto any movie if you want.
This was remade in 1978, which is a really great version that goes even deeper (and gorier) into the storyline of this film, as well as Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers and the 2007 film The Invasion. And Santa Mira is, of course, the setting for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. Obviously, the film is a big influence on John Carpenter, as you can see hints of it in his film They Live.
McCarthy would later reprise his role of Dr. Miles in the 1978 remake, as well as Looney Tunes: Back in Action. He’s also Fred Francis, named for that noted director, in Joe Dante’s The Howling. The interview segments with him on this disk make him seem like quite the likable fellow. Actually, all of the extras are heartwarming, making one feel that they’re sitting around with some movie-loving friends and discussing this together.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film that speaks to audiences with the same confident power that it did in the mid 1950’s. It has lessons within it that should never be lost and I feel that it should be required viewing for all film lovers, even if you dislike science fiction (that said, it’s closer to a horror movie than pure SF).
EDITOR’S NOTE: Indestructible Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, August 1, 1964 at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, July 30, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 12, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.
Charles “Butcher” Benton (Lon Chaney Jr.) is dead. He lived a life of crime and now, after being blasted by the electric chair, he’s ready for the ground. That’s when his body is sold to Dr. Bradshaw (Robert Shayne), who thinks that he can cure cancer by injecting chemicals and shocking dead bodies. It works, as Benton gets up and starts walking. It works too well, as now the felon can shrug off scalpels, bullets and even larger weapons.
His henchman and lawyer (Ross Elliot) got him killed so they could get his money and his dancer girl (Peggy Maley) is now dating the cop, Lt. Richard Chasen (Max Showalter), who caught her man. Benton uses the sewers to escape and keep killing, but the cops decide to shoot him with both a bazooka and a flamethrower, but it doesn’t stop him. What does is nearly the entire power grid of Los Angeles being applied directly to his body.
Directed by Jack Pollexfen (The Man from Planet X, Captive Women) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Dwiggins, the rare for the time female team of writers who also scripted Monstrosity. Lon Chaney Jr. plays most of his role with no dialogue, instead all through acting. Then again, he asked for no changes in the dialogue or script after lunch, because that’s when he started to drink.
This movie is also a travelogue of old Los Angeles with so many incredible locations. As for the sewer scenes, many of them come from He Walked By Night.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, April 5, 1964 at 11:10 p.m.
“Many times in the history of our civilization the introduction of a new thought has brought skepticism, even ridicule. Despite this, there always has remained the duty and inalienable right to tell the people the truth. The Motion Picture you are about to see is true. It is not fiction. Much of the information in it has never been told. You will see it here for the first time.”
Man, with a title like that, you’d expect Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers to be exciting. During this, my wife said, “Is this the business side of flying saucers?”
Producer Clarence Greene (the writer of D.O.A. and Pillow Talk, as well as the producer of The Oscar) saw a U.F.O. and contacted the Air Force. He met public information officer Albert M. Chop, who answered all of the public’s questions on this matter. Chop told him that there was filmed footage of these ships, so he bought them and started making this movie.
This starts with the 1947 events that kicked off the last century’s UFO phenomena, like the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, the Mantell incident, the Gorman Dogfight and the formation of the government’s Project Sign, which was created to monitor UAPs. Tom Towers plays Chop and he was a former captain in Army Air Force intelligence during World War II that knew Chop and was working as an aviation reporter.
Chop doesn’t believe in flying saucers and doesn’t even allow his wife (Marie Kenna) to say those words in his house. Then he meets a former Third Reich scientist (William Solomon) who tells him that they had UFOs back in Germany and are we just going to ignore the Project Paperclip stuff in this? Yes we are. Or the filmmakers are.
Want to see some real or fake UFOs? Then get ready for the Mariana UFO Incident of 1950. Yes, Nick Mariana, the general manager of the Great Falls Electrics minor league baseball team and his nineteen-year-old secretary Virginia Raunig were in Legion Stadium baseball field before a game and saw a flash. He ran to the car, got his camera and filmed two silver discs. Project Grudge wrote it off as reflections of jets but even today, this footage hasn’t been debunked fully. he film also shows U.S. Navy footage of a UFO over the Great Salt Lake.
Albert Chop has a son named Chip in this. His son’s name is Chip Chop. This is the man we trusted with our country’s UFO defense.
That said, this movie is this may be the dryest movie I have ever watched. When Harry Morgan’s voice comes in, it makes it exciting. That’s how slow it is. No one was a trained actor and I believe this was a government sponsored film that would make flying saucers so boring that no one would care about them.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It Conquered the World! was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 27, 1965 at 11:15 p.m.
It Conquered the World was released by American-International Pictures as a double feature with The She-Creatureand has perhaps the goofiest monster ever, The Venusian. It was originally written by Lou Rusoff, who had to leave for Canada when he learned that his brother was dying. Charles Griffith did a rewrite two days before filming started and told Fangoria that the script “was incomprehensible which was strange because he was quite meticulous. Lou’s brother was dying at the time which most likely had something to do with it.” He also admitted that the final movie was terrible.
Paul Blaisdell created The Venusian and figured that is Venus was a big planet, it had heavy gravity so it needed to be bottom heavy and low to the ground. Beverly Garland, who plays Claire Anderson in the film, said that when she first saw it, she said knocked it over, telling Fangoria, “I could bop that monster over the head with my handbag! This thing was no monster, it was a table ornament!”
Her husband in the movie, Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef!) has brought the creature to Earth to help humanity deal with its problems, except that it does what aliens in Roger Corman movies do and that’s enslave humanity. Anderson deals with that by using a blowtorch to the face of the monster, which temporarily earned it an X rating in the UK as they deemed it cruelty to animals until AIP producer Samuel Z. Arkoff explained that, well, it’s not an animal. It was an alien.
This was an early heroic role for Peter Graves and I’d like to think this comes from the same cinematic universe where his brother James Arness was The Thing from Another World.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Godzilla King of the Monsters was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 9, 1965 at 11:15 p.m., Saturday, October 31, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 9, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, February 15, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, April 4, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, September 4, 1971 at 1:00 a.m.
“We weren’t interested in politics, believe me. We only wanted to make a movie we could sell. At that time, the American public wouldn’t have gone for a movie with an all-Japanese cast. That’s why we did what we did. We didn’t really change the story. We just gave it an American point of view.” – Richard Kay
Godzilla came to America as a result of several business deals. The first was between Edmund Goldman and Toho. For $25,000, Goldman bought the rights to create a movie “narrated, dubbed in English and completed in accordance with the revisions, additions, and deletions,” with final approval by Toho.
He would sell his interest in the movie to Harold Ross and Richard Kay of Jewell Enterprises — who had the idea to dub the movie and hire Raymond Burr — and then Joseph E. Levine, the man who would bring Hercules and Sophia Loren to America — came on board to make the movie a blockbuster.
Director Terry Morse was paid $10,000 for re-writing and directing any scenes that would be made for the remixed version of Godzilla, the same fee that Burr would get for a day’s work (and lending his box office clout to the film).
This was a movie made under duress, mostly due to the budget. The new footage was filmed in just three days, with Burr working a 24-hour straight day — living up to his day of work, I guess — to shoot all of his scenes.
The rough edges — references to atomic bombs, nuclear tests and radioactive contamination — were cut. This was a movie about a giant monster now, not a nation using said big monster to deal with grief, fear and loss national identity.
Speaking of beating up actors, James Hong — Lo Pan! — and Sammee Tong (Bachelor Father) were locked in a room for five hours and recorded every single Japanese voice in this movie. They never saw the footage, only sitting with Morse at a table with a microphone.
For what it’s worth, original director Ishirō Honda found the changes pretty funny, saying that he was “trying to imitate American monster movies” in the first place.
Burr plays Steve Martin, an American reporter injured in the wake of Godzilla’s attacks on Japan. For all the bad things you can say about editing this movie, his narration makes some scenes even stronger: “This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man’s imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could’ve told of what they saw… now there are only a few. My name is Steve Martin. I’m a foreign correspondent for United World News. I was headed for an assignment in Cairo, when I stopped off in Tokyo for a social call, but it turned out to be a visit to the living hell of another world.”
It’s pretty astounding that this movie basically samples the entire original movie and inserts Burr into so many scenes, using newly lensed scenes with Asian-American actors and editing tricks to make it seem as if he was always there.
Until 2004, this was the version of the movie that was seen worldwide. In Italy, however, Luigi Cozzi made a remix of the remix called Cozilla. Needing more footage to pad its running time, he added in real footage of chaotic death from newsreals to put the dark edge back into the film or give it an “up-to-date and more violent look” in his own words. Whatever the intention, the original art was cut up and made to be something more palatable to American audiences at one point and now was made to fit the need for Italian audiences to always see something shocking.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Originally called Teenage Girl Gang or Teenage Killers, this movie is everything I want out of film. If you’ve ever heard the Ministry song “So What,” you’ve heard pretty much the best lines in the movie, most importantly “I shot a cop — SO WHAT!”
This was anonymously written by Ed Wood and was the most financial successful film that he was ever associated with. It was directed by William Morgan, who mainly worked as an editor.
Paula Parkins (Jean Moorhead, Playboy Playmate of the Month for October 1955) might be the rich daughter of a newspaper editor and a socialite, but she gets her kicks by getting her galpals together and dressing like men to rob gas stations and terrorize lover’s lanes. In fact, they go so far as to assault a young man after tying up his girl Shirley. Yes, that was also Ed Wood’s cross-dressing alter ego name, which features prominently in many of his films. And yes, that woman side is being tied up so that the male side can be abused.
These girl gangsters, however, are beyond forward-thinking. You could consider them actual riot-causing girls. In another Wood-written trick, they all have names that can easily be switched from female to male: Paula could be Paul, Geraldine is Gerald, Phyllis or Phil and Georgia can easily change her name to George.
After a makeout party with some male gangsters, the girls decimate a school and even desecrate the flag, totally anarchic behavior for 1956. The cops get called in and two of the girl gang are shot and killed before Paula kills a cop in cold blood.
Finally, after a car chase, Paula crashes through a window, killing the last member of her crew and winding up in the hospital herself, where she dies giving birth to her bastard child. Her parents are denied custody because they’re unfit parents and that child goes into the system, where probably she will turn out just as bad as her mother. So what!
I watched this movie for the first time when I was a teenager and it made me murderously happy and wished that Paula and her gang were real, in my school setting things on fire and ready to slap me around.
Curt Siodmak wrote The Wolf Man and for that, we should always thank him. He also directed and wrote this film, which was shot in Eastmancolor on location on the Amazon River. There was 10,000 feet of color film left over that Siodmark couldn’t export. so the same cast and crew made Love Slaves of the Amazons.
Rock Dean (John Bromfield, whose wife Larri Thomas plays the nightclub dancer) wonders why the workers on his plantation have left. Dr. Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland) wants to find the drug that witch doctors use to shrink heads. That’s how they got on the Amazon. Their guide, Tupanico (Tom Payne) is really trying to lead his people back to the old ways and using the monster Curucu — or at least the legend — to drive them from the plantations.
At least there’s a scene where a piranha eats an arm. and wow, the ending, the gift of a shrunken head is always something.
B&S About Movies 