Whether it’s Yor Hunter from the Future, Death Rage, Castle of Blood, And God Said to Cain, Cannibal Apocalypse or the Rick Dalton-starring Operation Dyn-O-Mite, Antonio Margheriti never disappoints.
Originally known as Operation Goldman, this Eurospy feature was bought by the Wooler Brothers — they brought Blood and Black Lace and Hercules In the Haunted World to America — and double-billed with the West German/Italian spy film Red Dragon, which was shot in Hong Kong. Eurospy movies really do bring the world closer together.
Their tagline? This movie “strikes like a ball of thunder.”
Yes, this was released a year after Thunderball.
Harry Sennet, Agent of Department “S” of the Federal Security Investigation Commission, is known as Goldman because he has an unlimited expense account instead of a license to kill. He’s played by former Hawaiian Eye star Anthony Eisley, who also appears in The Witchmaker, The Doll Squad and Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Margheriti — billed here as Anthony Dawson — thought Eisley looked too Italian, so he dyed his hair blonde. It came out reddish. He no longer looked Italian.
Yes — I get the potential joke that Anthony Dawson was in Dr. No and played an early version of Blofeld.
He and his boss, Captain “Agent 36-22-36” Flanagan (Diana Lorys, who is pretty much a Eurospy queen what with appearances in this film, The Devil’s Man and Superargo and the Faceless Giants) are after Rehte. He’s a German beer magnate — Beerfinger, anyone? Dr. Reinheitsgebot? The Man with the Golden Lager? — who is destroying Cape Canaveral’s rockets with lasers on his beer trucks.
Miss Cinema of 1954 Wandisa Guida used the Americanized name Wandisa Leigh for this film. You may remember her from other Eurospy fare like Secret Agent Fireball and the amazingly named Bob Fleming… Mission Casablanca. And you can search for Barta Barri, the Hungarian-born Spanish actor here. You probably don’t remember him playing the crazy old man in Monster Dog, but I do. He was also in tons of Spaghetti Westerns.
You have to love any Italian movie that can’t afford to shoot in Florida, so they recreate the entire area in Rome. By the end of this, there’s an underwater empire, masked cronies, a submarine escape and so much more. It starts slow, but stay with it. And hey — it has a great Riz Ortolani soundtrack!
International Secret Police: Key of Keys is the fourth of five James Bond parody movies in Japan known as Kokusai Hhimitsu Keisatsu. Yet once Woody Allen got hold of it — it’s his directorial debut — the story turned into a battle for the world’s best egg salad recipe.
Originally intended to be just an hour-long made for TV movie, Henry G. Saperstein and American International Pictures took more footage from International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, an actor imitating Allen’s voice and music numbers from The Lovin’ Spoonful to pad the running time of the film and get it into theaters. Allen had no control over that, a mistake that he wouldn’t make in any of his future projects.
The voices in the film include Allen’s writing partner Mickey Rose (he’d go on to write and direct Student Bodies), Julie Bennett (Madame Piranha’s voice in King Kong Escapes), Frank Buxton (a story editor on Love, American Style), Len Maxwell (the voice of Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot) and Allen’s wife at the time, Louise Lasser.
After some nonsensical action about the mob and the secret agents vying for the egg salad recipe — intercut with Allen himself speaking about his work on the film — the credits include China Lee, Playboy Playmate of the month for August 1964 (and the then-wife of Allen’s comic idol Mort Sahl) stripping while Allen explains that he promised her a role in the film. She’d go on to appear in an episode of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and as one of the robot girls in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, while we’re on the subject of spy films.
Speaking of spy women, two of the secret agents in this movie — Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama — would also show up in You Only Live Twice.
I’m going to be real blunt: I love Derek Flint more than I will ever and could ever love James Bond.
When the army tries to arm Flint, they offer him a Walther PPK and an attache case with a concealed throwing knife. He replies that they are both crude. He even fights Agent 0008, who says that Flint is going up against people more evil than SPECTRE.
Everyone talks about how many women Bond has. Derek Flint has at least four girlfriends at all times. In this film, they’re Leslie (Shelby Grant, The Witchmaker), Anna (Sigrid Valdis, Hilda from Hogan’s Heroes and the second wife of Bob Crane), Gina (Gianna Serra, who was Miss Italy for 1963) and Sakito (Helen Funai, who had a twin sister named Keiko; they often appeared as The Ding-a-ling Sisters because the 1970’s were racist and were also members of Dean Martin’s Golddiggers dance troupe).
Nothing is ever all that serious in these films. And in a life that is gray and dark, they’re the perfect balm for what ails you.
Flint was once a member of Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage), but he retired so he could get more out of life. But Galaxy — a group of scientists led by Doctor Krupov (Rhys Williams, How Green Was My Valley), Doctor Wu (Peter Brocco, who was in Spartacus and went into ceramics for a living while he was blacklisted in the 50s) and Doctor Schneider (Benson Fong, who started the Ah Fong restaurant chain) — have taken the very scientific tact that governments are ill-fit to rule the world and only reason can lead. So they start controlling the climate and blowing up the world real good, all in the hopes of getting every nation to give up all their nukes.
Yeah — that’s not going to end well.
There’s a bad guy named Hans Gruber years before Die Hard, an explosive jar of cold cream, a search for bouillabaisse, Flint faking his death via a yogic suspended animation state, Edward Mulhare from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Knight Rider as a villain, Mr. Whipple, Lee J. Cobb as the put-upon leader of Z.O.W.I.E. named Cramden and The Green Hornet star Van Williams doing a voiceover impression of LBJ.
How much of an influence on Austin Powers is this movie? Well, Cramden’s presidential red phone has a ringtone that shows up in that film, as well as Hudson Hawk, which features Flint himself, James Coburn.
Coburn is the most perfect leading man ever in this film. He’s bemused — as if he’s in on a joke none of us get to hear. Not that he’s above being in this movie; he’s just on a plane beyond it. He trained with Bruce Lee — indeed, he was one of Lee’s pallbearers, saying that the karate star had brought his “physical, spiritual and psychological selves together” in his eulogy. He’s the coolest, smartest and best-looking person in every room; in effect, he is Derek Flint and wholely imbues the role in a way that no other actor could.
How good is he? The scene where Flint relaxes by suspending his body supported by only a chair under his head and another under his feet? That was really something Coburn could do.
The more astute of you — like my friend Mark Rosato — will be able to pick out the USOS Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in this movie. Plenty of the props and costumes from Land of the Giants are in this movie as well. But can you find James Brolin in an early role as a villainous technician? Or hear a young Randy Newman create the song “Galaxy a Go-Go?”
This is a perfect movie. If only all of life could be this good.
Known as War of the Monsters in the U.S. thanks to its English-language dubbing by American International Television, the second Gamera film has twice the budget of the first and realizes what they should have known all along: Gamera isn’t the villain. He’s the good guy and ready to defend children against more dangerous kaiju.
Those dumb scientists and their Z Plan rocket didn’t count on a meteorite letting Gamera escape and come back to Earth. Meanwhile, three ex-soldiers invade a cave — a scorpion kills one and treachery another — before bringing an opal to the surface. And that jewel? It’s an egg. And it’s hatching.
It becomes a lizard called Barugon, who can breathe freezing gas and launch rainbow rays from the seven spines on its back. These are all weapons that can do great damage to our turtle protector.
How do you defeat an undefeatable monster who freezes our hero again? Mirrors and drowning. Yes, Gamera straight up holds Barugon’s head under the waters of Lake Biwa.
In Germany, they screwed up the translation and call Gamera Barugon and Barugon Godzilla. Those versions are titled Godzilla, der Drache aus dem Dschungel (Godzilla, the Dragon from the Jungle), Godzilla, Monster des Grauens (Godzilla, the Monster of Horror) and Gamera vs. Godzilla.
In 1966, thanks to the TV show, Bat-Mania was sweeping the country. So Jerry Warren decided to make his own movie, ignorant of things like copyright law and good taste. Soon enough, he’d be sued for copyright infringement and this movie got an even better title: She Was a Hippy Vampire. The funny thing is, Warren won the case and still re-released this movie with a different name.
Jerry reached out to one of his favorite leading ladies for the film, Katherine Victor.
She turned him down.
Yes, even the star of Mesa of Lost Women, Teenage Zombies, Creature of the Walking Dead, House of the Black Death, Frankenstein Island and The Cape Canaveral Monsters knew a turd when she saw one.
In Fred Olen Ray’s book The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors, Victor said that Warren promised her “large production values, color photography and her own Bat Boat.”
Of course, none of that came true.
She still played Bat Woman in this, even if she had to make her own costume.
Our heroine has several young and lithe Batgirls helping her battle the forces of Rat Fink over an atomic hearing aid. The weapon of Rat Fink’s choice? Bowls of soup with drugs in them.
That’s it. That’s the movie.
For the monsters, Warren just ripped off footage from The Mole People and the 1959 Swedish film No Time to Kill. No, really.
Bruno Ve Sota, who directed FemaleJungle, The Brain Eaters and Invasion of the Star Creatures — he also shows up in around fifteen Roger Corman movies like Attack of the Giant Leeches — is in here. Plus, Bob Arbogast — who wrote the shortest-lived TV show ever, Turn-On, has a cameo.
You can watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this on Tubi. Trust me, you’re going to need the help.
I first encountered Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill — or Operazione Paura (Operation Fear) — as all great movies should be encountered: in the foggy evening at a drive-in after none too few beers and other intoxicants. The only downside of this movie is that I can’t get back the feeling I had when I saw it the first time.
This movie was Bava’s return to gothic horror, yet it had no budget to speak of, reusing music from other films and with the maestro probably not even being paid for his work. In fact, the entire cast and crew worked for free to finish the film. The budget was so tight that instead of using a crane for one shot, Bava had to make due with a seesaw.
In the U.S., it was released as Curse of the Living Dead, which isn’t anywhere near as great of a title.
Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Knives of the Avenger) has been sent to a small village to perform an autopsy on Irene Hollander, who has died of mysterious circumstances. Medical student Monica Schufftan (Erika Blanc, The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave) has been assigned as a witness; she soon sees something horrifying as a silver coin is inside the dead woman’s heart.
There’s also a ghostly little girl who either frightens people or convinces them to kill themselves. She’s Melissa Graps — actually played by the son of Bava’s concierge Valerio Valeri — the daughter of a baroness who is punishing the town. And Monica may be more involved in this strange town and these spectral doings than she can imagine.
As shocking as a child urging people to impale themselves and slash their own throats is today, I can only imagine how shocking it was in 1966. This movie has moments that feel like pieces of a dream, like when Eswai chases himself continually through the same endlessly repeating room.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John A. Frazier is absolutely crazy about the movies. In fact, he has been known to go crazy at the movies, too.
It’s New Year’s Eve and on the Gamma 1 space station the party is in full swing. There’s a “Space Spectacular” wherein Commander Michael Halstead’s crew take to the stars in space suits, link their bodies and spell out “Happy New Year.” It is a raucous affair going all night. At one point one officer is found buzzing around outside, drunk as a skunk. The officer who brings him inside says, “He’s drunker than a miner on Mars!”
As the revelers continue celebrating, the Delta 2 space station is attacked by strange lights. When Halstead sends men to investigate, the people they find are frozen stiff.
“Seems like they all died from fright,” reports back one rescue team member. They realize some of the frozen people are still alive.
The attack is the result of the Diaphanoids, malevolent creatures made of light.
“You can’t stop them. They’re lights but they have shape. They’re more than light! They’re things! They’re things!”
Then the Delta 2 space station completely disappears, followed by Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 space stations also disappearing.
Back on Gamma 1, when the Diaphanoids attack, Commander Halstead moves everyone into a room fortified with lead titanium walls. It is a move that saves their lives. “They can’t get through. That was my hunch.” A couple blasts of radiation send the Diaphanoids scurrying away.
Captain Dubois is commandeered by the aliens. His body is used as a vessel to communicate with the humans. He takes Michael Halstead and his crew to their planet. (Connie Gomez has also been taken to the alien’s planet. Connie and Michael constantly bicker like a couple of little kids, but they seem to like one another.)
General Halstead, Michael’s father, gives Michael and his men a small window of time to save as many abducted people from the alien planet before he blows it up.
Halstead and his troops locate Delta 2 personnel tossed away like garbage on the alien’s mining planet. Any living bodies are serving as hosts for the aliens.
Time is ticking away and General Halstead is hot to press the button that will blow the Diaphanoid’s planet out of the cosmos.
Will Michael Halstead save Connie Gomez and the others from the clutches of the Diaphanoids? Will he survive to live another outer space adventure? Will he keep bickering with Connie Gomez if he gets her to safety?
I won’t spoil the fun this science fiction comic adventure delivers. War of the Planets is a fun Italian space opera that is part of a four chapter series. The other movies in the series include Wild, Wild Planet (1966), War Between the Planets(1966) and The Snow Devils (1967). They are all pulp space tales of heroic men of action and women in peril, told just before man actually walked on the moon.
The miniature effects are pretty fun, the space fashions are shiny, and the interior sets are colorful and mod. Not the entire same cast is in all the movies of the series, as the Gamma 1 space station is the main continuity throughout the series. All of the films were directed by Antonio Margheriti, who used the name Anthony Dawson.
I encourage you to give these films a watch, especially if you are a fan of pulpy 60’s space adventures. War of the Planets, Wild, Wild Planet and The Snow Devils are all available on the Warner Brothers Archive Collection DVD-Rs. War Between the Planets is available on a double feature disc with Creation of the Humanoids by Dark Sky Films.
(I don’t know how familiar fans are with these movies. From what I could locate, these movies don’t seem to have had much of a Home Video presence. I could only dig up an old Midnight Madness VHS copy of War Between the Planets, which was released under the TV title Planet on the Prowl, from Montgomery Home Video, from the mid 80’s. Before these DVD/DVD-R releases, I could only find that Wild, Wild Planethad been released on Laserdisc by MGM.)
Bert I. Gordon was known as “Mister B.I.G.” which was a reference to both to his initials and to his preference for directing movies with giant-sized monsters and people like The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast and Attack of the Puppet People.
His daughter Susan Gordon appears in this movie as well. This was her last film role, as she also was in four of Gordon’s other films: the aforementioned Attack of the Puppet People, The Boy and the Pirates and Tormented.
In this film, which originally aired on December 3, 1969 on ABC, Susan plays Susan Shelley, who believes that her father Edward (Don Ameche!) killed her mother Jessica (Zsa Zsa Gabor!). After three years in a convent, she’s reunited with her father and his new wife, her former governess Francene (Martha Hyer, The House of 1,000 Dolls).
Soon, she’s being gaslit by visions of her mother set ablaze and pushed toward insanity, all so that the rest of the family can inherit mommy’s money.
Maxwell Reed is made up with scars to portray Anthony, the caretaker who tried to save Jessica. He was the first wife of Joan Collins in real life and she’d later accuse him of drugging her and taking advantage of it on their very first date.
Wendell Corey (The Astro-Zombies) also shows up as an attorney and Signe Hasso, who was once promoted as the next Garbo, plays a nun.
Hedy Lamarr was originally cast in ty Zsa Zsa Gabor’s role, but she was fired when she was arrested at a Los Angeles department store for shoplifting an $86 pair of slippers. Gene Tierney was originally going to play Francene Shelley but dropped out, as did Merle Oberon.
It was filmed in the legendary Greystone Mansion, which has been host to plenty of films, such as Batman and Robin, The Big Lebowski, Death Becomes Her, Flowers in the Attic, Phantom of the Paradise and The Witches of Eastwick. The home was unfurnished, but Gordon was able to get all of the furnishings from newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s New York City apartment to fill it.
This is an interesting little TV movie, with no real people to root for, but plenty of great fashions and colors. It’s almost like a little American giallo, except you know, Burt I. Gordon is no Mario Bava. That said, it’s a fun little escape.
Are you in the mood
for a hammy n’ macabre horror flick of the worst Ed Woodian proportions, rife
with bad puns and pratfalls (“Mort the Mortician” takes a Three Stooges-inspired
tumble on skateboard) punctuated by trombone “Wah-Wah-waaaahhhhhhs” that would
give Benny Hill or Paul Hogan pause? Do you have a hankering for a hokey
Sweeney Todd knockoff?
How about
graphic-rubbery violence via bloody store-mannequin legs—punctuated by
kidnapping, murder and cannibalism that makes the one-take scenes of Night of the Ghouls look like The Exorcist?
Well, how about a film
starring an ex-TV Batman (no, it’s not Adam West)?
Damn, this is hard sell.
“Can I interest you in a nice pine box, my sweet?”
How about a film
starring an ex-husband of Kim Darby (who our young hearts crushed on via the
1973 TV horror, Don’t
Be Afraid of the Dark) who got top billing in an ‘80s Halloween rip, Don’t Answer the Phone, co-starring with
the guy who forced Buttermaker to coach the Bad News Bears (Ben Frank)?
Yes, we have better things to do with 63-minutes of our lives. And it would be longer if not for the original cut of the film being banned and its graphic, sans one scene, stock-footage of real surgeries being removed, resulting in this shorter Mill Creek TV edit. (No print of the unedited version is known to exist . . . and not worth searching for, anyway.)
The Misfits from their 1988 single release, 4 Hits from Hell, which features “Brain Eaters” which we’ll guess is a homage to the 1958 Roger Corman goodie, The Brain Eaters.
The truth is: If The Undertaker and his Pals hadn’t lived far beyond its shelf-life, courtesy of early ‘70s Drive-In double bills with the somewhat similar The Corpse Grinders (people turned into cat food) and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which left youthful impressions on the future members of the Misfits and the Gravediggaz, as well as Rob Zombie, no one would have bothered to search out this cinematic tombstone. (For those of you who didn’t know: The Misfits used the movie’s posters in their promotional materials, while the Gravediggaz and Rob Zombie sampled lines from the movie into their songs “Rest in Peace” (6 Feet Deep) and “What Lurks on Channel X” (Hellbilly Duluxe), respectively.)
Ah, the rock ‘n’
roll connection of the film got your attention.
Let’s fire up The Undertaker and his Pals!
Costar-detective, Robert
Lowery, television’s second Batman, burned through a marriage with noted ‘40s
actress Jean Parker (she co-starred with Lon Chaney in the ‘40s film-noir
piece, Dead Man’s Eyes) and
co-starred with future Monkee Mickey Dolenz in the late-‘50s series, Circus Boy. But once the guest TV roles dried
up, and Lowery landed in “The Case of the Cannibal Restaurateur,” he saw the
writing on the wall. After starring in a forgettable western-comedy, 1967’s The Ballad of Josie—he retired from the
biz.
The heartthrob star
and ex of Kim Darby in this horror-parody, James Westmoreland (as Detective
Harry Glass) started out in the biz as “Rad Fulton”—his agent’s answer to Rock
Hudson. Outside of a short-lived ‘60s TV western, The Monroes (when he began using his birth name professionally),
his career never rose beyond bit parts in TV series and films. Don’t Answer the Phone was his biggest—and final movie; he retired
after one-off episodes on T.J Hooker
and The New Mike Hammer.
So who’s
responsible for paring the Batman and the star of Bonanza, I mean The Monroes,
in this Herschell Gordon Lewis laugh (not so funny) fest?
Writer-director T.L.P Swicegood started out promising enough. He adapted Robert Sheckley’s human-smuggling adventure, Escape from Hell Island; a film which everyone forgets in the Sheckley oeuvre. (Sheckley’s books: The Prize of Peril, Immortality, Inc., and The Game of X served as the framework for The Running Man, Freejack, and Condorman, respectively). Then Swicegood got the idea of doing a comedy rip on what’s considered as the first “splatter film”: Hershell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). It was Swicegood’s final film. Oh, and speaking of “final films,” the cinematographer on this one, Andrew Janzack, also never directed another movie . . . after the mess that was Terror in the Jungle (also on Mill Creek’s Pure Terror Box Set; be sure to check out our recap of all the films).
“Are you going to
get to the plot or am I going to have to hit the IMDb?” says the disgruntled
B&S Movies reader.
Okay, so there are
these, three they-aren’t-Alfred Hitchcock-Norman Bates psychos on Fonzi-cycles—courtesy
of, it seems, sepia-toned stock footage clipped from another movie. So The Dork
Angels speed around town for three minutes of padding, you know, so as to get
the film’s running time beyond one hour. What? They’re talking on phones in
wide angel shots? What are they saying? Who are they calling?
Finally! We’re in
color for the shot-footage and have our first kill! The “biker toughs” kill Sally
Lamb, a blonde Marilyn Monroe-clone kewpie doll during a home invasion—and
steal her legs. “Leg of Lamb” is tomorrow’s special. (You see the juvenile “jokes”
of this film?)
So in steps not-so-dirty Harry Glass to solve (Da-duh-Dun) “The Mystery of the Bargain Basement Lucio Fulci Gore Murders,” AKA “Who Keeps Killing My Secretaries and Is Setting Me Up?” And big surprise: Harry ain’t Jim Rockford, so the bodies are going under the cleaver, through the meat grinders, and taking acid baths with frequency.
In steps victim #2:
Harry’s replacement secretary: Ann Poultry. (Ugh.) Oops, Ann threatened Spike,
the cannibal diner’s owner, with the ‘ol “I’m calling the Health Department”
ruse.
“Oh, yeah, Sally
Fei. Well, I may have jerked off to you when you played a sexy robot in Dr. Goldfoot and the Binkini Bombs, but
this (CHOP!) is for taking my money
for Women of the Prehistoric Planet,”
says Spike. Yep, Sally Fei has become tomorrow’s “Fried Chicken Special.” (Insert
trombone, here.)
“Hey, how come you
guys never place any meat on your store order,” says the soon-to-be-meat-cleaved-to-the-head,
ethnic grocery delivery guy. “You’re just a greasy spoon fry cook. Why are you
reading medical text books?”
Thanks ethic grocery
delivery guy: patrons now have a choice between white and dark meat for their chicken
dinner. (The film’s dialog-joke, not mine; insert trombone.)
“Hey, wait a second,
you Jayne Mansfield clone,” says P.I Harry Glass. “You look like that actress
Warrene Ott who—not once, but three times—played Jethro Bodean’s love interest
on the Beverly Hillbillies during a three year period. Couldn’t you get any
other roles?”
“Hey! I did a Bewitched, too. By the way, my character’s
name is Friday. I guess they wanted Tuesday Weld for the role and couldn’t get
her,” says Warrene.
“Did you read the
script, Warrene? It’s a ‘joke,’ because you’ll be ‘Friday’s Special’ at the
cannibal diner down the street.”
“Oh, you’re making
me hungry, Mr. Glass,” Warrene flirts.
“Well, why don’t
you go down to the corner cannibal diner for a Hamburger?” the clueless Harry
Glass suggests.
One chloroform
whiff later: cue the “scary” surgery stock footage as Doc gets his jollies
fondling the internal organs of Jethro’s old squeeze and Spike caulks up “Hamburger
Special” on the menu.
So, besides ripping
off Hershell Gordon Lewis, what in the hell is going on here? Are they building
a Henenlotter-style Frankenhooker in
the kitchen? Reviving an Aztec God? Preparing for an Egyptian ritual? Is Mort
the Mortician a Nazi War Criminal with Hilter’s head in the freezer? (In this
lone paragraph, I just synop’d a better movie that the actual movie I’m
reviewing.)
Nope. It’s a
bilk-the-bereaved funeral scam. Yawn.
Turn out, business is slow and no one is “paying for the extras.” So Mort, the not-so-Tall Man of the Morningside of these proceedings, AKA The Shady Rest Funeral Home (“Free Trading Stamps with each burial,” proclaims the banner over the front door), is one of the motorcycle toughs. His “Burke and Hare” are Spike, who owns the local greasy spoon, AKA The Greasy Spoon Diner (ugh), and Spike’s Jethro “I’m gonna be a surgeon someday with my 6th grade education” dopey brother, Doc. Thus: Doc gets free surgery practice, Spike gets free meat, and Mort gets bodies to embalm—and “sticker shock” on the extras, because, well, you know, it’s harder to embalm someone without arms or legs and it costs more.
“What the hell? Why
did you guys tie me up over this vat with a fog machine inside?” says Spike.
“Didn’t you read
the script? That’s a vat of acid. Just scream as we lower you into it.”
“Oh, okay, and what
happens to you, Doc?”
“Oh, I do a head-on
with a truck on my motorcycle when I botch a kidnapping attempt on Warrene
Ott.”
“Wait,
arrrhgh-aah-ahhhahaha,” screams Spike entering the fog machine’s belch. “You
mean the chick that played Friday? I thought we turned her into Friday’s ‘Hamburger
Special,’ in the last scene.
“No, Warrene plays two
characters in the film,” says Mort the Dork.
And where’s “Clint”
in all this mayhem?
‘Ol Rad Fulton-Westmoreland manages to get himself killed via throwing-a-smoke-bomb-and-metal-crap-through-an-opened-door-crack-and-cue-the-bomb-explosion-sound-effect rigged by the bumbling Mort the Undertaker. Seriously, that’s what happens. Rad walks out the door . . . and he’s gone . . . and I seriously think he quit the film and Swicegood said, “Screw it, he’ll die in a paint can bomb explosion because I can’t afford the pipe to make a pipe bomb.”
And what happens to
that ‘ol horn dog, Mort?
Well, since he’s
the last man standing from the Morningside Marauders, he falls off a building rooftop
trying kidnap Warrene #2, again. But wait, he’s alive?
“Hey, are you going
to need me for anything else? I booked a Gunsmoke,” says Robert Lowery.
“Yeah, Robert. We
need to end this movie and R.D needs to go. So take this knife and stab this
curtained doorway.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t worry, Mort’s behind it, ready to kill you. It’s
called ‘irony,’ it’ll be funny.”
“Wow, I was in Circus Boy, and this fuck fest is all I
can get? I’m retiring,” says Robert Lowery vanishing behind the curtain.
“Wait, Robert,
don’t go. You get Warrene in the funny epilog. She even eats a hamburger as the
credits roll,” says T.L.P Swicegood.
And with that, I’m going to have a Big Ott and and Six Pack of Sally Fei-Nuggets.
Learn more about the music that influenced the Misfits’ catalog with our “Exploring” feature on the subject.
About the Author: You can read the music and film criticisms of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his rock ‘n’ roll biographies, along with horror and sci-fi novellas, on Facebook.
DAY 7. DAIKAIJU: The bigger the better. Who needs a city anyway?
Today’s theme is close to my heart. As a young kid in the 1970’s, WFMJ-TV 21 in Youngstown, Ohio played monster movies every night at 1 AM (or later, if Tom Snyder was on). They only had so many Godzilla films before they’d run out and have to run a secondary Toho franchise.
Yes, this movie is a franchise, the sequel to 1965’s Frankenstein Conquers the World. Instead of Nick Adams, this time we have Russ Tamblyn as the American star. This is the third and final film that Toho would collaborate with Henry G. Saperstein on (in addition to the Frankenstein, they also made Invasion of Astro-Monster together).
Saperstein was an interesting guy — he specialized in licensing, working with Col. Tom Parker as Elvis Presley’s licensing agent as well as creating and selling merchandise for Debbie Reynolds, Rosemary Clooney, Chubby Checker and the Three Stooges. He’d go on to syndicate golf and bowling shows in the infancy of TV, as well as buying UPA, the studio that made Mr.Magoo. He led them to syndicating the Dick Tracy TV show, another merchandising goldmine. He also purchased the rights to the Japanese spy spoof Kokusai Himitsu Keisatsu: Kagi noKagi (International Secret Police: Key of Keys), which became What’s Up, Tiger Lily? with help from Woody Allen.
At the end of 1965, Toho informed director Ishiro Honda that his director’s contract would not be renewed, despite successes like the original Godzilla, King Kong vs. Godzilla, the unstoppable Destroy All Monsters, Rodan, Mothra and many more. Of course, he kept directing for Toho, but now there was the stress of wondering if each job would be his last.
To add to that stress, it’s said that Russ Tamblyn and Honda were often at odds, with the American actor refusing to read his lines. Honda’s chief assistant, Seiji Tani (who would go on to be the second unit director for Destroy All Monsters) would tell the authors of Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa: “Honda-san had to hold back and bear so much during that one. Russ Tamblyn was such an asshole.”
I don’t know how much you know of Japanese culture, but for someone to go on record saying such a thing is a major deal. For what it’s worth, Saperstein would later say that Tamblyn was “a royal pain in the ass.” As all of his lines were dubbed in Japanese, the American actor had to go back and redub the US version. He forgot all of the words, so what’s in the film is completely improvised. If only Tab Hunter, the original actor picked for this movie, stuck around.
The film was originally announced as The Frankenstein Brothers, then The Two Frankensteins, Frankenstein vs. Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Decisive Battle and Frankenstein’s Fight. Regardless of the title, this is one of my favorite Toho films. I’m not the only one. Brad Pitt has gone on record saying it’s the reason why he wanted to become an actor. The battle between Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill: Volume 2 was called the “War of the Blonde Gargantuas,” with Tarantino screening the film for Hannah. And both Tim Burton, Nicholas Cage and Guillermo del Toro cite the film as one of their favorites.
Maybe it’s because of the scene where Kipp Hamilton sings “The Words Get Caught In My Throat,” which ends with one of the titular beasts grabbed her as she finishes her act. Has any monster movie been this gleefully crazy? I mean, would Devo cover any other monster movie song?
It all begins on a dark and stormy night, as a fishing boat is attacked by a giant octopus, which is then destroyed by a green giant who proceeds to decimate the boat. Only one survivor makes it, telling the authorities that it was Frankenstein.
The press picks up the story and interviews Dr. Paul Stewart (Tamblyn) and his assistant, Dr. Akemi Togawa (Kumi Mizuno, who starred in plenty of kaiju epics), who once had a baby Frankenstein in their possession.
Yes, in the original film, Frankenstein was born in a very strange way. German officers had taken the heart of the original Frankenstein’s monster from Dr. Riesendorf and sent it to Hiroshima for further experimentation. Of course, once the bomb dropped, the beast was irradiated and became a feral boy running loose through the streets, eating small animals and becoming immune to radiation. He eventually becomes a giant and battles Baragon, who would go onto appear in many Toho films (you can also see his skull in Pacific Rim Uprising).
There end up being two beasts in this one: Sanda, who is the original from the first film and Gaira, a piece of tissue that was torn off, made its way to the sea and fed off plankton until it grew into giant form. The new creature hates humans and is hurt by daylight, while Sanda attempts to save people.
The final battle, as the two monsters fight into Tokyo Bay, is amazing. Their skirmish is so violent, an underwater volcano ends up taking both of them out. Sadly, there would be no third film in the series, despite rumors that one of them would battle Godzilla in an upcoming film.
There are multiple American versions of this film, with the Saperstein cut removing all references to Frankenstein Conquers the World and the creatures called gargantuas instead of Frankensteins.
Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla in 11 of the original 15 movies, has claimed Gaira as his favorite role, as the costume was very easy to move in and his eyes were visible, allowing him to show more emotion.
I have a test as to whether or not I can be friends with someone. If they watch a kaiju movie and make fun of how cheap it is or how fake it looks, they have no imagination. In my mind, this movie looks incredible, with huge sets and intricate monster costumes. I’ve watched this hundreds of times and it gets better with every single viewing.
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